for a week, with the silver pines and the marmots. Spain’s over the ridge but I lay my head in the French valleys, morning views of cloud in the hills, no hiss of cars only the church bell ringing the quarters. I like the price-set baguettes, the Irouleguy and the pace. But it takes me days to start shrugging off the UK squalls and stop fretting and I can never quite shake the feeling that all’s not well. There’s work to be found as winter steps out.
on the lonely roads. By 8pm this city is going to bed and the foxes start to whisper between gardens. I’m back at the same corner at 2am after a run to the airport, under the moon wrapped in butter-yellow chrome clouds. Heading out I found a dancehall station to shake the car and just for a moment I remembered that feeling of leaving for the gig, the night-worker life, playing in the band. Dispossessed misfit but happy in my bones. Now this is where I land, that path through the Taiga has led me here. But how? The fox gives no answer.
the wind is an unbroken sigh in the trees. There’s no word or phrase to mimic that sound, you have to be hearing it to know it. I’ve caught it a few times on my recent tramps, one season nudging another into the past. We climb out of the wood into a field of sunflowers, spot the Eyecatcher raised jagged on a slope, a tease of ruin for the longhorn cows down at Rousham.
as the early equinox weather rolls in. I’ve got the main doors to the house open and there are more beasties on the air this year, more butterflies to throw the lounger cat into a trance. Maybe there’s hope for nature yet. I go walking when I can, get out on the dirt paths and under the trees. I feel done with cars, rather have a horse – if the horse didn’t mind carrying me around now and again. But I’ve no country pad, no stable for my Jolly Jumper and no workable plan to fund one. I’m as windblown as the comma, sipping my afternoon coffee and cloudgazing.
and so is the wreck, part-raised from the sludge of the Thames by Fiddler’s Stream. I bike by here on my way to the Botley shops, watch for newcomer student joggers lost on the narrow paths and just-woken canal boaters fumbling for firewood and fodder on the bank. The wreck makes this stretch feel creepy and lonesome, with no wind in the trees, birdsong or traffic noise to cut the spell. Time is stuck around the dead hull, the waters don’t look to move. I pedal hard for the bridge over Castle Mill Stream, keep in motion, let it flash by.
tests, checking awareness and motor skills, running diagnostics over the chemical corpus. I’m still walking and talking. This last week I’ve been working on an apartment that was home once, fixing and servicing, expecting to remember how everything slots together. But poised by the mute intercom my mind drifts with news snippets and reimagined images, of Fellini and his Toby Dammit charging around the night streets in a bronze Ferrari. I have to down tools a moment, wondering where that came from, wondering does it means anything? So easily distracted, dreaming of pathways and runners in my waking hours, as in our sleep we sift through the debris of a day’s observations. And I make the connection with a headline glimpsed, the actor who has died. Lifelong I’ve mused on mavericks and runaways, can’t change that. Ghosts of memory still crackling in the wires. This weekend I’ll go out walking and then track down the film.
to suggest a dream. You can’t discount it, shuffing around the piled stones with the coach groups, looking for a clear spot further away in the trees. His hot breath catches you in the shade, coming down from the hills and the hidden sea. But there’s no trace of the undergound passages, the sea cliff, the frayed thread snagged on a marble step. Only the touch of some memory as a truth, that something important to my thinking happened here. It’s all so long ago, I don’t share Yourcenar’s take that those ancient times might be just a pace away. So much has changed with the materials, even the stars have shifted. But there’s that nagging sense of a memory just slipped from reach, yearned for. Memories as unreliable and unchartable as dreams. So I made it here. And now off to the hills and down to the Libyan Sea.
of this world has been dry for weeks, other than a couple of small-hour thunderstorms. The bike tracks along the river are all flint and baked earth. And I can watch white clumps of seeds and fluff drifting off the trees in the garden of the Medley bar, hazarding my beer. We’ve been walking out to the villages. Last week I forded the Cherwell, water and reeds high over my knees, feeling my way through the silt and stones with bare toes. Two swans watched me cross from a pool upriver. Life’s for living, and fording rivers.
as the trees, I’ve spent years mapping them in my head. But water maps are always changing shape. This last week I came down with a malady so brutal it was hard to stand, kept me three days on the slab. No warning, no idea where it came from, rougher and longer-lasting in its severity than any other flu or viral attack I’ve known. From day four I could stagger about and eat toast but now a week later I still feel it, the aftermath, far from well. Always back to Darwin, in constant struggle, other organisms fighting for their chance in the atom weave. I was just unlucky. And if that’s not the case, if it isn’t all a vast chain of random passings, encounters, chemical fusings that ended in this instance with me ambushed by a virus and fever-wracked…but by some design? That would be even more beguiling. And like Ahab, I’d want answers and accountability, some explanation and redress for my lost week. For though my wound is so slight in comparison there’s no more precious commodity than time. But who to ask? If only I could speak with the birds under the bridge near Kennington, decipher their tweets, I feel they’d have the answers.
a tale of the waterpaths and trails around this peninsular town, a race around the Plain. I find myself trying to think with my characters, wondering how they’d see and say things. And I make choices each time I ride out by the river and along the canal, take turns and tracks as though I’m out on the same errands and missions I’ve set them on in my study-drawn pages. If a book’s to be any good it has to breathe life into something that wasn’t already there. I must cast their lives in words and feel them flow back to craft my own.
