and scuff but only humans feel the strange need to evolve and improve. I found myself plodding around the supermarket, shame-faced because I was there again, how many hundreds of times in this same store still picking up the veg and the crisps and the discounted kitchen towel, I haven’t evolved. But I know that’s bogus, would I really be happier and feel more noble paying a PA or staff to fetch my groceries, I guess it’s likely I’ll never find out. I used to think it would be good to find out. To move up a level. And I’d be putting in the essential hours at the novel or making grand discoveries instead of shopping and fixing skirting boards and rolling over the roads. But there’s time to write, even attending to the business of living as a non-evolved scribe. I can’t say I don’t get the time. Books worth reading come out of the secret hours, out of the planning, musings and mootings, the journey there and back and the idle driftings along the aisles of other imagined lives and pathways. And if it needs saying you can always find the time to put it into words. Getting rich would probably be just another distraction. But I don’t have to worry about that one.

he knows the heat’s coming. He’s been out chasing butterflies while I flail and fail over the lines. The words have been sticking lately, I waste hours daydreaming about boats and skimming the blue. I watch the old action flicks, Cold Sweat and The Last Ride, washed-up crims running yacht tours and caning it around the corniches. I wonder if I’d love it or hate it, fishing in the bays between the gaps of boat chores, repayments and routines. I think it’s because I’ve been landlocked so long, my sea fever, and the world feeling more bound up in rules and restrictions than I can ever remember, with the dread of another winter lockdown nagging at me. I could take the skimmer out to St Kilda, camp out for a few nights. Across to the pink granite isle. Or are we always worrying about one last job, the big payback, the easy money that never comes. The cat’s got the smarts, he knows not to waste his time future-gazing when he could curl up and snooze.

others handle fixers. I found it snapped last night, doing my rounds on my way to bed and coma. Maybe the cat was getting anxious and discovered a way to lever the catch. He’s a trickster. He wants to get out with the midnight prowlers and rough guys, the ones that screech and yowl in alleyway standoffs and azalea ambuscades. But he’s not beefy or scuffed-up with experience and I try to keep him in when Night comes walking by. Maybe he looped a paw around the catch and snapped it free, intent on busting out. But he’s got his alibi sorted when I pop down for a screwdriver and find him heavy-kipping on the sofa. Things just break. Things suffer unseen pressures. What looks solid can be just about to shear.

as I ponder my options, conscious that I’m not pulling the levers on global events, can’t march into the wood-panelled meeting rooms and demand action. I’m not rubbing shoulders with the suited leaders but I am in control of how I think and view things, I’ll take that as enough to be getting on with. If I can be fair and try not to moan about things that’s a start. I reward myself for my sageness with a bowl of ice cream. For a few sweet moments I fend off the heat and the hayfever scratch – it’s come on hard this week – before any more fretting about planetary driftings.

tarmac rolling and I’m out in the valleys, folded in the green fuzz bloom of a sodden May. I climb the chalk track to the nature reserve and gulp the air, taste the ticking heat that heralds summer. I’m open to everything except malice. Let the good work roll in.

is taking your shape, phase two having a good time, phase three starting a family. Phase four is where I am now, trying to hang on and rally, tattered but still standing, fretting still about the Library of the Dead and the next thing, always the next thing. Everyone mixes their phases around, skips some, has their own rare ones, wastes, profits and might even wise up from one. Phase five takes you to 75. And this is all assuming you’re lucky and the cosmic rays and terrifying acts of chance don’t knock you down at any step along the way. 75 to 90 is tricky, though thanks to the miracles of medical science it’s getting better, all the time, though it might not feel like it when you’re there doing the review. Six phases. Best case. And I’m tumbling through the fourth.

my teachers said ceramic engine blocks would transform auto design and make switching devices like tap valves last for decades. They said I’d have to adjust to the Age of Leisure before I hit thirty. They said lots of things. But foregone conclusions reef on unanticipated elements. My bib tap started juddering and spurting last week, the ceramic valve was failing. The maker sent me a new one and I fitted it. In the Leisure Age some robot would have done it for me but the robots are a long way off and I have a spanner and screwdriver. I autopsied the old valve and it looked to me that the base ring had come loose – metal fatigue? 7000 openings at a guess. My car’s just cleared 150.000 miles. How long do things last? Banks said he was unlucky, got hit by a rogue cosmic ray that started the cell mutation that killed him with inoperable cancer. It’s Lucretius and the falling atoms, there might be a ray zipping across the black gap of space right now that’s on course to pass through me and flip the cells into anarchy. Sentience is just along for the ride.

peering at the pixellated screen. Not shadows on the cave wall, more staring at clouds and not seeing the dust particles. Too much to process. An immense, depthless blizzard of data. Too much detail to withstand, we find ways to paint it simple. But it peeps out through the cracks of the paperboard masks we fix in place. Even this key baffles me. The original is lost, the replacement has a collar that’s too close to the turn so it sticks in the lock. I grind it away with my files. With no collar it slips through the casing so I clad it in tape. What an ungainly, hapless tool I’ve crafted. And already with its history, stretching back from the turner in Kidlington to the van from the depot, the metalworks, the smelt or vice, the casual weld, the lazy finishing, the foundry, the boat across the ocean. What before that? Dug out of the Earth somewhere, chipped and hacked, then the unimaginably long sleep before it swirled and pressed and coalesced out of the chaos gap. And all the human interactions, all the grazed and burned skin, the packing and passing, the cares and work loathings, the gauging and positioning on its journey to my jeans pocket for six pounds fifty. Six fifty I could have spent on a paperback. And now worked into words with their own rough edges.

are never far away in my thoughts. I rode out to the edge of the city, where the factory line stops and the fields and lanes start. The break is sudden. I was in the country – as wild as the English country gets – and riding through a village of brick and flint houses, a green, the memorial to those lost in the wars. Something clicked. Dead friends tapped me on the shoulder. I’m as close to them now as I was the day they left. Only some of the background changes, and the wear and tear of the miles and the years.

the paths aren’t busy. City or field there’s plenty of room to stamp about. I cross a field in this corner of the Chilterns and my toe taps a horseshoe, buried for a lifetime, ruby red with rust. Moments ago I was sitting under the trees in the wood behind me, nibbling on a slice of cheese. Moments to go and I’ll be in the Swan garden, supping my first pub ale in a year or more. But here I am under the dazzling sun, feet in the earth, turning the iron relic over in my fingers. Do I want to come out here, to a hideaway in the sticks and learn these paths and byways? Is that something to aim for in life? Either way I can always visit. I leave the iron on a footpath post to spare the detectorists and pace on for the pub.