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on the islands in the sky. But will my ascent be thwarted? Do the whales also chart their passings by a breaching glimpse of its white cap.

when the towing paths get busy with joggers and tourists, takes the David Jones up to a quiet stretch in the Heyfords. He asks me to visit him at the Rock of Gibraltar, then after the jars he points to the tiller, take us out, Henry pal, find us the quiet.

and I tread water in D’s pool.

of island gather here, this house squared with high trees and the rim of the sea just proud above the fields. I read Frankenstein, the child rejected, and dream of the volcano hump of Pico, the climbs and breezes to come.

to the breakwater and back, scared the hell out of me, taste of the sea gives me renewed appetite for the land.

it’s crossed my mind a few times. But I can’t let myself go with it, I’m too stamped through like Ida Arnold. Doggedly me for better or worse. I had a friend who scoffed at the idea of seasonal reimaginings of self, he confessed he did it by the minute, by the second. For him a thousand layers of new paint and colour went on, but his old faults and habits would scrape and flake to surface show. Any heavy knock or upset would reveal the cast metal. He wrote poems that flashed the first colours too.

almost fills the empty chair. Almost.

as the day’s heat oozes skywards. The air’s sluggish over the Brize Norton to Chilterns plain, here the clouds hang and the asthma cases rocket. All Oxford veterans dream of end-game sea breezes and wave gazing, the littoral crinkles and dips in the Earth crust, the lapping blue lens. One day, if I ever reach Summertown escape velocity, I’ll drag this bucket to the beach, put the car on bricks and kick off my reality boots. But I’ve another decade ahead of Broad Street drop-offs, Moo-moo’s and Covered Market bangers, the Rose and Crown handle or straight glass dilemma, off to Parkway on that which rolls and trying not to fluff my lines at garden parties. And I’ll keep dreaming of two hundred perfect pages.

are my vistas, my horizon sweep. I flash fag-end kerbs and plated drinks cans, roll by the builder vans and dozing minicab drivers. Away from here at every point there’s mayhem and change but my corner of Blighty feels static in space, aspic-set. The road beyond whispers and coos over the sound of my tyres.

is reality, says Riverman, stopping to pat another cat. We’re walking back from the Anchor, I’ve bought him a couple of jars of IPA in the first sunshine day of July. He’s merry, crouching by the puss in his oily, ruined cord jacket and the jeans he’s worn through winter. Think of all the hours you’ve wasted checking the news this last week and two, he smiles, when you could have been dreaming up better stories. Current affairs is no more than fortune’s wheel, but people are scared of calling it that, they say it’s politick and important as though this world runs to a plan. There’s no plan.

I went on that march, I tell him.

Fat lot of good it did you, better off fishing. Nobody gets hurt fishing.

Bar the fish, I say. But he’s gone down the street chuckling, not listening, bow-legged shuffling to the next cat lying out in the late-afternoon sun.