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before a day of rain. I stood in the park, watching the canopy lit up with the promise of another summer. Old eyes dazzled by the light. Strands and cobwebs and specks of debris in the vitreous humour darting like birds, my own Plato shadows playing out on the skyscape. But I know the truth. There’s no way to clean the lights, this track only runs one way. And I remember the conversation with the gaffer at the start of the week, he can’t be far off retiring, the leaves all down in a carpet over his lawn after the blow this weekend he said, as though it was autumn already. He’s seen more seasons than me, he’s got the stare, each iris as faded and world-knowing as the rim of my ghost-summer sky. All the truths are in nature’s passing and returns, the river and season flow, my football practice glow.

but I enjoyed the walk down Gordon Street more than anything on the stage. I miss the squares, the quiet places away from the traffic and the thrumming, restless crowd.

are early risers, tagging the lanes with blooms. I could hear them quaffing, coughing and choiring from the Anchor tap room as I biked over the bridge. But I came too late for the dances. Fifth month into the year, so soon, a morning shadow still feeling my way.

a few hours at the desk, working on Drones and trying to make sense of AI. These methods and devices will knit into our lives, helping us to discover, see and do more. I don’t fear toasters taking over the planet, I’m sure we’ll get along fine. It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, like Melville said, we just need to learn how to share it. And when I tire of digital and yearn for the physical, there’s always the string and the soundboard. I’ve moved up to acacia from spruce. It’s a warmer sound, a whisper from the island dots in the wide splash of Pacific blue.

of my own rainy kingdom. I scrape and paint, teetering on the roof tiles, a weather eye to the clouds blowing in from the Ridgeway and daydreams of Baudelaire.

at the fire hotel and half a mile on they’re digging up the station square. Follow the inner ring and you’ll see the old lime-yellow car park levels broken and exposed, Auden’s wedding cake face left out in the rain, to be replaced by a glass mall nobody wanted. The city approaches are creaking, overwhelmed by job-rush fleets of Audis and Qashqais bought on the monthly, luxury flats at risk of flood, these roads intended for dog carts and dons on penny-farthings. Magdalen Bridge keeps its dignity eastwards, refusing to slip a notch for the Iffley massive. City under strain. We should take to the water on our paddleboards, pedestrianize the lot of it. We should build more schools and homes and concrete the hills to save the meadow.

from the top of St Giles, the grey-capped boulevard closed to cars and empty. I’d seen flames coming out of the roof on the tv news and known it must be bad, but it only looks wounded in the morning sunshine, not gone to rubble like a V-1 strike. I ride on, puzzled by the scent overhanging the town. Memories of planting silvered potatoes in the ashes of morning-after bonfires, kicking through the remnants at the edge of the burn and hunting for dud firework survivors while we waited for the crop to roast. The smell of the firepit in your clothes and hair on the ride back home.

the doors stand open. Stumble the back lanes to find your way to the story museum.

as I ride out into the cobbled nexus south of the station, with thoughts of the bewitched Anselmus and his whispering Serpentina so fresh in my mind. It’s early and the turns are quiet, only a few solitary laggards from the big night out thrashings timidly pacing home, or still-waking girls off to start their shifts at the counters and tills. Down the alleyways I ride, musing on the shapes stirring behind blinds and shutters, lives being lived out. It would only take a glance or tiny call for help from one of the rare passers-by – a Brief Encounter speck of dust in the eye – to start the story, but of course it doesn’t happen. That’s for the books. And the daydreams, of other lives and futures lived out on pages.

from his tale, The Golden Pot, lives in “an old house in a remote part of the town”. Why is it that on reading this I am immediately entranced, why do the lonely, hidden quarters of a town lure and fascinate? It’s down in the dark places and backstreets that the stories grow, where a footstep click or flash of a figure turning a corner jolts the imagination into life. It’s the secrets and hidden yearnings of the players in a city hinterland that spellbind.