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and bags of gravel, rain constant and heavy. No glamour but it brings an honest appetite. I hope whosoever cut my slate was at peace cutting it, gentle toiler like myself, laying it in the old orchards.

on my birthday, staggered through to the wolf moon tonight and musing on the wondrous gift of another half-c of weeks to explore. I’ll bake some Madeleines and plot my antics. Not much down yet, a house to move into, rope ties for the hammock or first plant the trees for it, Cadiz waiting for me out there in the mist, another cape to bag at Trafalgar. I’d like to see another mountain. The St Kilda cliffs would be special. I’m out there now with Hammond Innes with the waves getting too high for the LCAs. I’ve always wanted to see Harris, I could jump off from there? I’m still yearning.

bar two panels where the geometry needs to be fixed. The room takes its shape. Freud’s Uncanny turned up today, I’ll fix my armchair on the floating screed, garden-stare and roll the pages.

all’s forgiven. A flurry backlit by the morning sun. A day standing open to lay stores in and write.

if you spend your whole life dreaming of making it, and when you do it leaves you more puzzled than ever? Things you long for take their own form and shape when real.

at the mouth of the alleyway, entranced by the streetlight upglow into the yellow leaf undercrown, bewitched by a roadwork stop/go light in the pounding rain. The pasteboard masks and backdrops pass behind the moving faces and chit-chat encounters of my everyday. If it’s worthless why am I drawn to hop off and snap it? I might be moth to candle and cat to string? But always that hidden sense that something’s coming, that you could find it around the next corner and let it change a living part of you.

of Boz about the town, street props, a bit of fog and whiskered cheeks. He’s further back than Holmes, before science and steel blew away all the cobwebs. But he’s lurking yet in our modern poverty.

out on the grey roads, fields only a few miles from town. It feels good to pick up speed, I might even break orbit from the ceaseless radio patter of the can’t stay/can’t leave commentariat, with their touted best outcomes of isolation oblivion or a return to what half the nation rejected. I’m not certain there’s any going back after 18 months of torment. We’ve chained the past and mastered the present, but that only serves to make the unshackled future more terrifying.

my Yucateco on scrambled eggs, Fred Wesley, on loud, black coffee with a cinnamon stick and a drop of vanilla, a bagel and honey for second breakfast, lines of text running away wild pony style across the page, sorry, Hank.

part hidden under the bridge, puffing on a roll-up. He doesn’t mind me nosing around, long as I don’t spook the fish. I’ve come to see how they size the water.