at the tower and spied the bible-black streak of the canal boat, wrapped in a copper-green winter shroud. Oxford’s oddballs don’t shout and boast, they hide away on Folly Island and the green tunnels of the river twists with their imported gondolas. I might have to buy a stand-up paddleboard and perfect the art of reading MacNeice, nonchalant, between elegant strokes. Oxford river cranks, I salute you.
I understand why some might posit a universal design. Why daffodils? Why sand patterns after the tide? Why dragonflies as blue as the June canopy, skimming the grass between my steps? But I’ve seen beauty staring back at me from broken-down bus windows and supermarket queues, scattered in slums and salons and fetid street corners, beauty beyond any guessing or rule. It’s an accident of alignments, angles and tones – and most striking when it appears with no warning or link to its surroundings. Beauty doesn’t feel part of any cosmos blueprint, it’s a supernal trespasser at the commoners’ ball.
with black cats, a city hush and the day’s detritus of thoughts and sights, soon to loom up as ghost ships in my dreams.
on the north coast of the island, pebble beaches where the German concrete ruins rise up from pink boulders and cliffs. And there is a glade, steep and shaded, with a memorial to a British Special Forces raid, lives wagered when the order was out to kill all commandos. I found a bullet still in its cartridge there, lobbed it far into the ferns. It can feel lonely in the North Coast ravines, away from the choked houses and clipped lawns of the main port town, and that must be a precious thing. There’s no yesterday, only the silent gathering of the past.
so much, but gives back little for the hours it steals. It’s too hard to ignore the commerce and schlock, the maneuvers and machinations of the merchants that fund it all. Cars and homes and holidays aren’t worth a lifetime’s questing, if even a moment. Browsing is time in coma, a dereliction of duty to self, picking crumbs from other men’s tables. None of it, not one page or post or line can match a few seconds walking around the island garden or daydream-wandering by a train window. Those journeys lead to insights and discoveries from your own thoughts, alone and untainted. Sweet physical world. And sweeter vistas of the unshackled mind.
from lonely forts and towers. A redcoat with an 18 pounder. A boy in feldgrau with an MG-42. And now me and the kids, climbing the stones and staring out at the chop, waving to the tourists on the Saint-Malo ferry.
at a letterbox strip of life, trying to make sense of the universe. There’s so much data on display, the vast library of a world with its words in motion. This house I visit on the granite island has a garden walled by trees and they make their own sway and whisper as the sea breezes rush through; I’ve heard that same air swell over twenty summers and heard it nowhere else. This heartbeat maze is well-supplied of variety and I’m mindful of the particles, the Lucretian molecules streaming down beyond counting, the call of the wind in one island corner where I’ve tilted my head to gaze at the trembling leaves. And all those other islands to explore. Fingers reaching out beyond the wire, stretching to feel a different air.
you moon-slave basin of blue. Wash away the cares, scour away the worries. I’ve missed your salt sting kisses.
the recovery’s ersatz, the political class is floundering and NASA says the icecaps are melting. We’ve got 200 years, max. But on my walk back from town in the constant rain, the gates stood open to hope. We’ll have clean fusion and new propulsion drives for the rockets in a decade or two and nascent planet homes to wander, pebbles on a black shore. I’ll see twin suns and phosphorescent birds and all the fantastic sights I dreamed of as a kid reading Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury and the others, huddled in front of the electric bar fire. And if I don’t make it, the nippers will, before the polar bear cubs are heard mewling on the high street. Books are all escapes. No wonder my visions of hope follow the same wooden horse tunnels, barbed wire squeeze-throughs and stop-or-I-fire bolts for the treeline.
but you have to host the scars. Out wandering on the vale of doom that’s my forties, I’ve learned that I no longer mend as I did as a kid. When I pick up some malady or clunk nowadays I don’t clear it completely, it’s as though the body knows it will have to carry some remnant ache or knobble from future blows and molecular assaults, can’t shrug them off as before. The bar’s dropped and I begin to understand how I might never clamber free from the elephant pit of a serious illness or smash, not get back all that was lost. And that makes me wish I’d burned brighter in footloose years, knowing the invincibility of youth was sand falling in a turned glass and the get out of jail card of shiny rejuvenation would be snatched away. That sand falls for every one of us. And the numbers are hidden, spinning, ungraspable until the moment they always foretold arrives.
