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they’ve chained a mug to a rad in Turing’s old hut as an anecdote prop. There’s no whiff or trace of the real about it, a simulacrum that’s seen no tide of tea or scrub-out with wartime Vim. Like much of the place, it feels new, untouched and fresh-painted. The best sights are the crumbling huts just out of view from the main drag, remnants of rusted wiring pipes and cracked paving runs, the feel of an old airbase with the last patrol long gone. I went to ask if the mug was authentic, received my shrug and nod, awkward bugger, be on your way. It was the same at Trotsky’s house in Mexico City, when I asked if the icepick pinned high on the wall over the cash desk was the murder weapon. Why ask, Gringo? Vamos. But there’s real and not real. And a great store of mystery between the two.

it blows, night wind fortunes, the sting of a secret kiss, a new valley over the hill, the low song of the traveller. All our fates on this wind keening for the sea.

I met a Swiss guy who said he’d seen enough of red sky sunsets. I’d been on the island a few weeks and I still stopped and stared in the sundowner bar with all the other gringoes but he’d come from six months living on the beaches in Thailand and I guess he was missing the mountains and the snow. Those tunnels that burrow through black rock for twenty miles or more. But I’ve seen a lot more sky since then and I’ll still pull the bike over for the evening redness in the West (apologies to Cormac).

things happen for a reason, in real life they don’t. In stories, the cavalry makes it over the hill in time, the lost letter is found, the villain is revealed as victim, things generally pay off. The pieces have to fit. When writers step close to real life, when Chandler has Marlowe alone at his desk, waiting, expecting nothing, it’s an unsettling glimpse at the truth off-page, but you always know there’ll be a doll or a moll or Moose Malloy along soon, looming up in the frosted glass of the office door. And if you read of the wind humming and sawing in the pollarded trees above the head of your protagonist, you know it heralds some dark act or thought, some next turn in their tale. But in life it doesn’t. In life, it’s just another frightening and unreckonable dissonance, a happening strange and out of your control or prediction, like all the important events in your life – childbirth, accident, disease, maybe even success. These happenings are countless and rushing away, out of your clutches or ken, they diminish you. To tame them, to catch up with them, you have stories and hopes and better than those, you have love.

in a December bleakness, seeing writing finished as a thriving, important force in our modern lives. More trouble than it’s worth. And then a few pages steal in front of my eyes and I’m smitten again, stopped in my tracks by the scenes and visions of another mind, empathy in ink. Books are subtle seducers, they undermine any world or word-weariness. But they disappoint too, you won’t find the answers there, just doorways to other mysteries, other books. Better never to have opened the covers, was Wolf Larsen’s lament, watching his more ferocious and untainted-by-literacy bro, Death Larsen, bearing down on his ship. Death was too busy living to be leafing. But when I do come across a page that’s tender and intelligent and true, I get that shot of life, the seconds of raw glee when the world seems right and spinning correctly and not cruel and futile. Books have lost the clamour and fanfare of the Press and what’s left of the arts establishment, writers aren’t admired and envied as rising stars and beat heroes the way they were when I was a kid. But there are fine voices making it to print, hidden away in quiet places, unpraised and unpaid. They flame to words because the voice comes out, not for money or a spread in a magazine. And if your heart needs the books, you’ll still find them, wandering pilgrims on the plain.

a parting in the leaf canopy, and the pearl to light me home.

about trains running late, nuisance parking and the failings of society and state. They carry their own cares, have an eclipsing confidence in their powers and rights to shape this life. As it should be. Leave the arcane laws and ties to the bumbling shufflers, the rheumy-eyed greybeard curators. Resist that urge to start seeing the world as a museum.

that would lay down their lives trying to help you in this life. And risk it all for those you love even more than self. And there are others that don’t value things the same way and would walk away unmoved. And it’s the difference between the beating heart and the lifeless husk. And most times, a meeting of the eyes will tell you all you need to know.

down Cuckoo Lane. There’s an arch bridge to scythe it off. A ghostly spot, it struck me, but that could be the Washington Irving I’m reading this week, storms trapping travellers in baronial halls, the branches of the garden oaks rapping on the casements. If you walk a lonely lane like this, you might hear a twig snap, footfall behind you in the leaf mulch. Or is it your imagined self, a glitch in your neuron folds trying to assert the spectral figure of your own placement in the universe, a flicker in the machine?

but still flashes of beauty in winter’s sunless press. The sports field floodlights gild the trees around the parking lot silver white and gold.