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you can’t swerve the hours at desk or table. Those hours are the price you pay for the lines. But there are benefits to being a scribbler anchorite. When the fifty-pence plastic part failed and the pipes started gushing in the top bathroom I heard the water streaming from the light fittings, stumbled out onto the landing and grabbed some towels. In four minutes, maybe three, we’d lost two carpets and all mains power, gained a few ceiling cracks. I’m rarely out – the bookshop, groceries, fleeting catch-ups – but if the copper had popped on one of those forays the whole house would have been under. All August I’ve been watching the grass turn yellow and the trees cracking up, been thinking on water. Been thinking on human nature and the modernity machine we’ve created. The plumber shook his head. It should have been soldered, that lasts. But the plastic’s cheap and fast and you don’t need to be skilled to clip it together. That’s the machine too, seeping into everything we do. Maybe I should learn how to solder, as an act of resistance.

on the island. Twenty miles long and only a few thousand coast-set souls, a clear spot to recover from the Dante electro-bolt. Just away from the harbour on the return boat and I’m trying to imagine how I might get back. But always other islands to see.

in my heat-swoon abulia, hard to bike the lanes this week, lift a shovel or marshal the words with the sun smiting. If I had a pool I’d be in it, or the sea shallows. Out there the rails are buckling and the cat has lost his zip. I flop at the study desk, not writing and musing on Dante and Lady Poverty in the age of data centres and biometric scans. One cup of water for every search, 17 seconds of lightbulb energy. How many searches do I tap out every day, flitting through the database? Knowledge comes at a cost to wonder and to the blue pearl’s resources but tech lashes us on with the promise that things can only get better, gently fingertip-turning our gaze from the vast sheds of lights and cables. It’s the belching smoke and grime of the Industrial Rev all over again, so many benefits, so much lost.

I turn a corner and I’m back on a street I remember, a house I knew as a child – the child the father of the man. I haven’t seen those steps for decades but they seem unchanged to me. Did some unbidden whisper of a memory lead me here, an old route resurfaced in the mind? Or was it rascal chance? All the child times when I knew this place come back to me. They feel no less real in review than they did when they were part of the unfurling present. The house was whole and smarter then, no weeds growing out of the brickwork, no off-cant host of bells and buzzers to a dozen divided rooms. But in my moment rolling by it all feels raw and recent, no distant yesterday. And self feels no different gazing out at the world, only a little scuffed and more cautious. I go softly from the encounter.

is precious, the space for a single sound to reach you. Be it birdsong or the bell.

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.