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down where the sun is mute. I’ve only read broken cantos before, never worked my way through each circle in the descent. It’s a foundation of thinking text, I wish they’d made us read it in school. For it’s no narrow thing. Dante brings in everyone that’s had a spark of life, all of antiquity, all the mortals and supernaturals from the myths: Jason in his tearless shame tramps the same ditch as Florentine cads and conmen, while the Minotaur snarls from the rocks. Suggestion again that the bullman has a soul. And all the pagans – virtuous or not – wait there too, weightless forever in their high circle, Limbo. It’s an everyone Inferno. Feels a long way from my last, beguiling but dazzling read, In the Shadow of the Machine. Yet I know that author was thinking of Dante when he penned his paras. All texts worth reading connect somehow. This year canters away, I barely feel I’ve got going but there’s a book tower that logs my weeks. If nothing else, I’ve been mulling and paying my dues to the careful word. I’d write some of my own if I can. Been looking out for a space where I can stage a second play. If I can find the discipline and buckage to get there I’ll hear the words I’ve written come alive again, in another sunless place. Hear the watchers shuffle and cough, wonder what’s going through their minds. Two flights down.

you barter your time or use your wits to sell what you can create. It never feels as good as giving it away, passing something back to the Universe. But it’s hard to get by without a note in your pocket, you can’t buy a Red Falstaff sapling and watch it bud and blossom – there’s reward enough for the working hours. And you can’t pay the fang doctor to tap your teeth and help with the pain, or buy your tucker or make plans to wander on planes and trains. Then there are books to order, and bike parts and bills, cloth for your back and food for the puss. And all the other jabbings and bites of commerce. As a salve to all this you can try to grow some of your own food, go frugal, take less. And plant a few apple trees.

where ragged pagans lit their fires and danced, wide-eyed and hooting over a plain unsullied with the Didcot newbuilds, pylons, concrete roadways and Culham’s science sheds.

for I know I’ve squandered too much of my given time, been an empty pockets merry fool. I could have spent more time at the desk, been more dilligent and less starry-eyed about the ineffable. But no, I don’t regret one moment lost in the books or tramping under the open sky.

the sermon of the inanimate, the air in motion around the Dunsmore trees. It surges over the other sounds but I can’t say what it is, it’s of the world older and wider than words. My friends call back to me, to the upgazing laggard. And I keep falling behind as we tramp on. There’s some secret in that wind, both hidden and there to whisper to anyone who hangs back in the wood.

and the ice paths are clearing. Fixed the broken spoke on my bike and I’ve been riding out to all spokes of the city, trying to shed a few kilos, jolt the neural pathways back into life. Reading an hour a day the lines lead me to other writers, make me reassess old musings. I’m drawn to what’s local more than ever, to hopes and caring, the secret cache of dreams and memory we all mine. I’m drawn to what’s human, away from the binary drone. Unimpressed by the propaganda around machine intelligence I begin to see it as nothing more than intensive computing, a joyless and skewed simulacrum on the back of extraordinary funding that can never evolve to any human level smarts. Because human smarts is shaped and marshalled by all the immeasurable sensory touches and events that have to be lived, by time and all the tides of emotion and longing. And by sleep. In sleep we take Nyx’s hand and wander out into the lands of night, breathe deep on all that shared memory banked across the millennia. Machines are boxes of nuts and bolts – no matter how quickly they can compute – there’s no spark of life in them. They’ve no skin in the game. My tech fear abates a little, and the more I turn the pages.

after the solstice, in part because of the long nights and pre-twilight wakeups, in part thanks to the booktokens I’m lucky enough to receive as Noël gifts but in main to combat an unbearable sense of ignorance and that old friend, impending doom. Maybe by reading I can figure out a strategy for the year to come. So I read to get a glimpse of what other people are thinking and doing and how they face the struggle to find a path through the woods. Books are sparks in the gloom, beacon fires on the high hills, survival guides.

on the flood, water slops over the banks and into the fields. But I find a path into town, rain can’t keep me from my messages. I’ve been reading more – Klima, Turgenev, bits of Kafka – can find no more effective balm against the horror glare on the internet. The more I watch of that the more hopeless things seem, I don’t think the answers are there, only more Dieu Sait Pourquoi sound and fury. The answers are on the quiet pages and glimpsed in the inner theatre of thought, time you can spend with those that know you a little, time crafting and making. If it’s answers I’m needing.

might as well try holding back the sea. It’s hungrier and earlier every day now and the cold is back from exile to join the feast. Bike lock mechanism sheared yesterday out on my shop run, ice in the works, I heard the tumblers crack. Breakages and bleak news come from all fronts, you have to beat towards the glimmers – music in a college underground ampitheatre, Ivan Klima riffing on life’s threads, a ride with friends down the Thames path to Proof Social. Modest adventures prized.

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.