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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.

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.