It’s starting to get dark earlier; 7:30, 7, 6:30 so that now it’s dark when I leave work, not just when I arrive. Sometimes I find cycling at night dull; there’s a flatness to the city, a literal lack of light and shade. But there are some good rides in the dark, when it’s not just the light which has receded, but life too. There are fewer cars and busses, more deserted corners and buildings empty despite having their lights blazing. Sometimes these moments of emptiness come in the strangest places: the Bloomsbury roads around the British Museum, or right outside Canon Street station in the city. If you come to these places late enough, you feel like you’ve come after humanity entirely.

From a cycling point of view, quietness means speed, and I log some fast rides home after working late, tearing home with the tyres lifting leaves in the air. One or two rides stand out in particular, when the traffic lights all line up and the smoothness of the tyres is matched by redone tarmac and the traffic is non existent, so I can really build up the momentum.

I’ve learned the word “souplesse“ from Bella Bathurst’s excellent Bicycle Book, and these late rides often embody its values: smoothness, fluidity, flow, the bike a thin slice of white metal cleaving the dark city in two. One evening in the middle of the month, I notice it’s cold for the first time, too. The chill of the air feels thrilling and new; it’s still like silk as I ride through it, and on the A2 the traffic is backed up, so there are huge stretches of quietness: empty spaces, free of obstacles, regrets, sadness, into which I flow, the tyres buzzing. This is progress.

One place that was quiet for the first part of the month was the front of St Paul’s: then the OccupyLSX protestors arrive. On the first day, there’s a huge police presence blocking off the actual London Stock Exchange’s offices, but the protestors are pretty mild mannered. As I walk past, one offers me a hug. The camp seems busy each time I cycle past, right up to the end of the month. It will be interesting to see how they cope as the weather gets colder.

I get a taste of winter with a week in Montreal at the end of the month (you can see it in the pictures). It’s a beautiful city in the Fall, popping with bright colours and I take endless photos of the leaves, much to the Canadienne’s amusement. There’s a definite difference between North American Fall and England’s Autumn. The former is all bold colours, bright sharp and cold. The latter soft, musty and faded; red and yellow versus umber and ochre.

We cycle around Montreal on the Bixi bikes (the original Boris bikes); particularly good fun on Halloween, when I cycle out dressed as Sherlock Holmes, complete with tweed cape, deerstalker and pipe. I attracted far fewer stranger looks than I expected. And I also learned tweed is extremely warm on a bike. The Bixis help contribute to a monthly total of 195 miles this month. Now, the end is sight: 332 miles away. It sounds like a big distance, when you think about November and December being cold and dreary, but break it down, think about it day-by-day and it’s perfectly achievable. Even the longest journey is just a million moments. Every life a billion heartbeats.

OCTOBER
Total miles: 195
Commutes: 13
Boris bikes: 17 miles
Total to cycle: 332 miles

July is supposed to be midsummer, but here in England it’s not so sure; the weather is sketchy, blowy and cool, the sun fleeting. Sasha has fixed the troubles with his road bike – fitting hand built wheels with strong spokes in place of the good-looking but fragile stock ones – so we tend to cycle back from work together. Frequent stops at The Greenwich Union break up the ride home. It’s very cycle friendly as well as having great beer.

In the middle of the month, I’m in Montreal for a week. Here, summer is sure of itself, the sun high and hot in a boundless blue sky. Parts of the city feel overgrown; the houses pull back behind porches and balconies, or retreat beneath trailing ivy and flowers. The sunlight falls gently through leaves and at night you see fireworks, or kids still in shorts and dresses, or Hassidic jews, dressed devoutly in black and deep in conversation. It is hard to believe this place spends so long under ice.

It’s a great city for cycling, crossed with cycle lanes that are often separated from the road by low concrete barriers, as opposed to just a paint line in London. It’s also the city where the Boris bikes began, only here there’s no need for a nickname to shy away from the corporate reality. The scheme is called Bixi (bicycle + taxi), and the bikes are a common sight. I tried the Boris bikes in London when they launched last summer, but in the West End found it nearly unusable, thanks to the tidal flows of commuters who made sure the flow of bikes leave the bays in a binary state: completely empty or totally full, as they move from station to office blocks and then back again.

In Montreal, it was easier: most of the time, a couple of bikes ready and waiting, and always a spot to park at the end of the journey. As well as the city, we cycled the F1 track, the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, on an island in the St Lawrence river. They put racetracks anywhere these days, dropping them onto flat and featureless land, like they’re just a black line, painted on to a few square miles of dust. They’re real estate destinations, not places. A real racetrack isn’t like that. It is a place, one that earns its name and its position on the map. It fits the land, reflects its concerns, respects its contours. Hence Monza, historic and grand folded into the gentle, regal trees of a park outside of Milan, or Spa and Hockenheim, the fast sweep through dark, whispering forests from some Mitteleurope fairy tale – and of course, Monaco, gaudy and brash, a heavy shape wrapped like a necklace around the throat of a laughing rich libertine.

There’s something egalitarian and accessible about Montreal’s circuit; there’s no entry fee, no entry gates when the race isn’t on. It’s just part of a park. It’s not a new circuit, either: the Armco has been painted and painted again, the pits seem small and there are few flashy buildings. Most of all though, it’s full of people. As we cycled round, there were others, like us, gently circulating. There were men on racing bikes wearing team Lycra matching the frame, lapping and lapping, the hard buzz of their thin tyres as they zip past, comparing their times to the cars. Couples walking in the park that surrounds the course, and in the middle of it, the noise of the Vans warped tour, surrounded by dazed rock kids in dusty black t-shirts, and on the start finish line, a greeting to the man who did it for real: salut Gilles, the man who drove a Ferrari like a snowmobile, hanging it round the corners and never wanting to give up.

Named in his honour, it is a real racetrack: an attempt to nail down the distance implict in any life, to make its journey circular, something you can practice, do over, learn the contours and of which you can say: this looks doable.

So speaking of all that, how goes the BHAG? Well, I managed to cycle 17 miles in Montreal on the Bixis, a useful contribution to the goal. Back in London, I give the Boris bikes another go: it’s still a frustrating system to use (the addition of lots of privacy and security notices to the terminals means it takes far longer to hire a bike than it should). Still, another 11 miles added, along with 10 commutes and a 40 mile loop out on Westerham hill as well. Less than 1,000 miles to go – which is great, but I’m running out of summer…

JULY
Total Miles: 188
Commutes: 10
Total to cycle: 956

You can donate here - I’m only a few quid short of the target after all…

At work at the moment, we’re contemplating the BHAG (pronounced ‘bee hag.’) The BHAG isn’t an old crone. It is, perhaps, slightly monstrous. Certainly, it should provoke a small amount of fear, a smidgen, a brief, cold press up against your heart.

Mainly though, it should be inspiring. The BHAG is the Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Don’t laugh. It is a real thing. It has a Wikipedia page. A true BHAG should be so ambitious as to be ridiculous – at least when you’re starting. Consider Microsoft’s: a personal computer on every desk and in every home. This, at a time when people still thought of computers as machines that occupied whole rooms, and not too many years after Apple made them out of wood. A true BHAG should, thanks to its audacious, ludicrous character, inspire you to great heights.

While we’re still working on Dennis Media Factory’s BHAG, I did have an idea for my own one. I really started getting into cycling after buying a decent road bike last spring, so I thought about a mileage target for this year. And it seems obvious: 2011 = 2,011 miles.

Sounds like a lot. Well it is – until you start to break it down. It’s just under 168 miles per month, or 42 per week. My commute ride is around 12 miles each way, so I’d cover the distance just by riding to work twice and home twice in a week. When you add in a few longer rides, the BHAG starts to look quite attractive. Positively comely, even.

Of course, this was all decided on the couch, in the beer warmth of an idle Christmas holiday when too much time away from home and in the car meant I was missing the bike. January, it must be said, was a bit of a grind. Inspired by a post on local SE London blog 853, I kicked the BHAG off with a 40 mile cycle out from home to Eynsford, a pretty village in Kent. It was a grey day and my route seemed to be almost entirely uphill, but after I’d got out of Dartford, the countryside was promising and it put a good dent in the monthly miles.

A cold, plenty of rain and a week in New York for work restricted me to just four commute cycles though – a lowly 48 miles – and I didn’t do another long cycle the whole month. This means the monthly total was just 88 miles, about half what I needed. Still, the weather can only get better (see the image above, taken in October for how I picture ideal cycling weather), and I can only get fitter… right?

JANUARY
Total miles: 88
Commutes: 4
Total to cycle: 1,923

In honour of them wining the Grammy, and because this is the first V. day I’ve spent on my own for eight years. Though that isn’t as entirely sad as that sounds; it’s both absence and space.

If I was scared
I would
And if I was bored
You know I would
And if I was yours
But I’m not

Instead the books I read were often frustrating, full of let downs and wrong turns, the promises made on the first page escaping, slipping away, as if through the holes in the letters. There were books written by people failing to get their great ideas onto the page — or read by a reader who failed to get them off the page, the ink too dry and brittle to make a mark. The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris certainly falls into this category, as does Tyler Cowen’s The Age of the Infovore. Both are intelligent, curious books which I just didn’t connect with.

There were books that just didn’t pan out in the way I wanted. It’s too easy for new novels to get to a certain status on little more than fumes. Have a link between author and topic that’s easy to summarise, strengthen with topicality and a certain obviousness and you’re away. That’s certainly how I felt about The Reluctant Fundamentalist, an easily blurbable book thanks to its concept and direct opening, which sees the fundamentalist of the title beginning an unctuous monologue with an impassive listener in a cafe in Lahore. Said listener is an American capitalist pigdog, easy in his skin, silent with his Amex and keys to the world. The narrator quickly becomes deeply irritating, the plot is full of soft contrivances. The result is a book which lacks the confidence to indict either the American or the Fundamentalist, never getting up the guts to really howl, or to get as dark and difficult as the subject demands.

Laura Cumming’s book on self-portraits, on the other hand – A Face To The World – absolutely has the courage of its convictions, and it’s impossible not to connect to them. It’s a series of luminous essays giving a close-reading to a wide range of images, its thematic chapters sweeping with an easy grace through over five hundred years of art history, but never forgetting to bring you up close to the pictures. You finish the book feeling as though you’ve not only seen the self-portraits, but are so convinced by the psychological insight of the writing, you’ve become the blank canvas sat before the painter, looking at him while he paints.

The Lost City of Z was terrific too, a book about a dangerous journey into the Amazon by the last of the lunatic Victorian gentleman explorers – the kind of gent who considered a well-waxed mustache and a sense of God-given grace was sufficient protection against one of the world’s most hostile environments. I bought myself a copy, and then one for a friend, and then one for my brother and I’ll keep on buying it.

I enjoyed The Leopard, particularly after watching a BBC 4 documentary about it. It’s one book where I think a good Google before, and during, reading, really helps. David Mitchell continued to be the contemporary author I find most in tune with what I want from literature; The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet was great. Colonialism. Capitalism. Japan. Lost love. Ninjas.

But the best thing I read this year was The Odyssey. Not much of a recommendation, really, because not a single person will likely read it as a result. I mean, it’s The Odyssey. No-one actually reads The Odyssey any more. There’s no link between the author and the text, no link between the story and the world now, no momentum at all. It’s like the giant stone fragments of the Pharoahs in the British Museum: it’s amazing that they’ve survived, but they’re not the kind of thing you want in your lounge. They’re just not relevant.

The problem with relevancy (in this context, and in some others) is that it’s predicated on judging what you have no experience of based on what you do. It can work well; you can go deeper and deeper into genres, find comfort in mapping the world in detail, make sound judgements in your area of expertise.

But it can also mean that you end up describing your world in ever smaller circles, that you define your world, fortify it and build high walls, and it becomes a Church for a congregation of one, singing the same hymns and praying the same prayers.

Of course, the great books – plays, pictures, pieces of music – don’t need you to confer relevancy on them. They reach out to you, making you believe they have lived your life already. Sometimes in the way their colours and choruses seem to give voice to your situations; sometimes with the strange joy of reading the words of an author a thousand years gone putting a character through a life which pushes up against yours so clearly it’s like a reflection, hand-to-hand on a mirror.

And so it was with The Odyssey.

There is an intensely moving part of the story where Odysseus, exiled from home, with his ships, his crew, his friends increasingly scattered, mad, torn to shreds by the journey – realises he must go down into the underworld to continue homeward bound. There, he meets his mother and they talk. What makes it so sad – one of the most moving scenes I’ve read – is that in the moment Odysseus learns the forces of his world will inexorably grant his wish to return to the home and the people that he loves, the things that his journey has torn him from – he also realises how much the place he has come from will have changed, and perhaps, most bitter of all, it no longer exists. How can he be talking to his mother in the underworld, when he left her at home? His mother has died: he has been away for so many years.

The encounter raises the tragic possibility that he will get what he wants – a return – but that because time stops for no man, what he is returning to is in part no longer there. Yet as close as the story takes him to this, the Odyssey isn’t a tragedy: Odysseus returns home, reclaims his house, his wife and his role as a King.

In reading the Odyssey, there was a small sense of peace for me, rooted strongly in the underworld scene. My father died when I was 21; absurdly young for us both, and when you have witnessed the death of your father, a strangeness overtakes you. Or it did me. I was incredibly aware that I had crossed a boundary, and a line now divided me from other people. For a time I was an exile, something slightly vampiric, deathly, inhuman: as if my skin was now a few degrees paler than other people. At its heart was a strange sense of pride, of toughness, as if I was steel, hardened in a fire, because really what I felt was this: my sadnesses are more than yours. I am alone because of this.

The things I really love – the people and the music, the books and the places and the jokes – are those that have the in them the power to pull me back, to return me. The Odyssey very much did that. Those pages did understand me, and I understood them. In that scene, I had the feeling of coming back across my dividing line, the sense that my life, different though it is from most, is not so different that I am irretrievably alone.

–

Previously:

2006 – 25 books, 28% non-fiction, and my book of the year was Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated.
2007 – 24 books, 33% non-fiction, far fewer contemporary novels, and my pick of the year was Crime and Punishment.
2008 – 22 books, 54% non-fiction, all but one of the novels were contemporary. Best book I read that year was Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.
2009 – 25 books, 24% non-fiction, most of the novels were contemporary, and my favourite reads were Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.

The massive disco ball which stands on the prom at Blackpool, just south of the Pleasure Beach. From last Autumn’s trip, but with the weather this week showing a few chinks in winter’s armour, it seems apt.

I went to New York last week, mostly for work, but I had two free days at the end to explore the city. I took, as always, a Lonely Planet guidebook, but most of the time I built a list of places to go from going online. It strikes me now how easy the world has become, and simultaneously, how difficult.

It’s easy to find places in a new city now. I wrote ‘in New York’ on Facebook and people sent me bits and pieces of information. I looked at I suppose what you would call conventional review sites, places like Tripadvisor and Chowhound. I had places bookmarked and saved in a list on Simplenote, restaurants and shops and bars that had been mentioned in RSS feeds the few months previous to the trip. There were some saved bookmarks (Pinboard now Delicious is dying), and I went for a coffee at La Colombe Torrefaction in Soho because Joanne McNeil posted a photo of a beautiful coffee on Instagram just the week before I was due to go, and of course, everything on Instagram is neatly geo-tagged.

It’s hard to work all this out. It’s hard if you’re someone who doesn’t live on the internet; conventional search is just so bad at getting to it. I’ve built this delicate web of connections and conduits over years. Ways of filing information, having it there and ready. Ways of trusting people, too – I’ve never actually met Joanne McNeil, just swapped a few tweets and read her blog for a long time and yet that picture was all I needed to know that La Colombe Torrefaction would be selling one fine cup of coffee. Typing “best places in NYC for x” into Google is weak compared to all this, but it’s all most people have.

And it’s hard to work out if you’re talking about advertising. One of the chimeras on the web is stats: you get some numbers and you think they describe the world perfectly, completely. Entry pages, exit pages. Conversion rates. Numbers leave no room for the messiness and the softness, the permeability of the real world. Advertising played a role in where I went: it was on the sites I visited, and to take the coffee place as an example, the look and feel of its own site was important to me. But accounting for that? When, as a commercial person, you’re doing your reports for the money you spent? That would be hard. So much of the research for that trip wasn’t caught in the numbers – or to give the Google argument maybe it was, it’s just buried very deeply.

Crucially, I think working with computers teaches you that they’re fun: it’s in those drifty moments at work when someone sends you a video of Dinner Time With The Dog-Man or that you spend time organising drinks for a friend’s birthday or marvelling at The Big Picture that you learn a sense of computers as enjoyable. Modern desk jobs force you to sit and stare at a computer for eight hours a day, so this hardly surprising: any time people are forced to do anything they find a way to have fun, whether it’s doodling in the margins of maths books or inventing games to pass the time at the checkout.

My life is changing, so I recently took a week off and went North to visit various members of my family. I took my bike so I could get out in the countryside, and I took the iPad so I could talk about some of the new things I’m doing at work. The people I visit do lots of different jobs – my Aunt’s a teacher, my cousins are retail managers, mechanics, academics and my Grandfather is rather actively retired. None of these are the 100% desk-and-data jobs my friends and I do, so it was fascinating to see how they got on with the iPad.

Everyone was interested in the iPad and wanted to see it. I didn’t want to walk in and immediately talk about it – there are more important things under the sun – but once I mentioned I had the iPad with me, everyone wanted to see it. This might sound anodyne, but it’s not always the case with technology. They wouldn’t care about a new laptop or camera or iPhone, unless I could explain why, show it doing something cool. People were genuinely interested in the iPad – in and of itself. This attraction is authentic, it’s not just media-created hype. (Although of course, hype could easily have helped stoke the fire).

*

When the iPad first came out, there were lots of lot of people saying “it’s great, it really simplifies computers.” At first, I felt this was somehow dishonest, because it’s not as if before the iPad people were blogging about how Mac OS X was too complex.

Regardless of how Damascene the conversions (theirs and mine), it’s true.

Everyone in my family has a computer – but they tend to need reasons to go on it: to fill in a job application, to send an email. Even doing something ‘fun’ – checking Facebook, personal email – is mentally constructed as a task, a to-do list item, the same as ‘call the council’ or ‘post letter.’ The computer takes time to turn on. It’s probably in a cold corner somewhere. If a few days have gone by since it was last used, people aren’t instantly sure what to do. If you don’t work with computers (and lots of people don’t), it’s work to use them.

If you don’t work at a computer all day long, and have it running all the time, taking centre space on your desk, you don’t have the always-on, latent, ambient sense of computing that geeky people, or those who spend their whole working day in front of a computer do.

There’s a huge divide between people who see computing as a noun and a verb, and the iPad has the potential to change this (throughout this post I say iPad, but I mean “iPad and other tablet/smartphone devices”).

Perhaps best way to look at it is that the iPad simplifies computers (in ways good and bad – no USB, no HDMI etc) in order to make it easier to get at what is on the computer. It turns on instantly. You can leave it on all day. It doesn’t get hot or make noise. Things load instantly. There’s no annoying hard disk light and very few crashes or pop-ups. The iPad is a self-negating computer in that it’s about making real the digital stuff that’s in the computer ecosystem. Digital music, digital photos, digital movies. These are virtually inaccessible to a huge number of people who see computers as difficult to work, mysterious, even unpleasant.

My cousin has just had her first baby, and she posted a video of Facebook of little Eva crawling – and my cousin’s Grandparents, who are old and infirm and who live a distance away could really easily get at that with something like an iPad. This is a cheesy advertising scenario, but it is also true. Geeks might say “well you can do that with a laptop,” and you can – but explaining stuff like programs, hard drives, double-clicking to people who have no background in computers, or who have no interest in spending any more time with a computer than is necessary is difficult. Not impossible, just difficult. And I’m not saying these people can’t learn this – just that people have other things to do in their lives, and time is limited, and not everyone is willing to put in hours and hours tinkering and messing with the settings on their computers. Because that’s work.

It’s easier and better to change the tool rather than changing the people.

On What the iPad Says About Us

There are two types of geeks: the first type are really excited by what technology can do, and put up with the difficulty of using it, even to the extent of enjoying figuring out what’s happening. The problem solving and the tinkering, fascinating though it may be, is a necessary part of trying to get at something which is really worthwhile. And so they become an evangelist for computers because they can see what good they can do and they really want people to get it in the way they get it.

The other type of geek is very much of the opinion: I get it, why can’t you? This stance is inherently confrontational, about asserting supremacy.

I like to think of myself of the former – I like saying ‘did you know you can do this with your computer?’ – I’ve set up blogs and Flickr for people, and iGoogle pages and showed them Twitter and Foursquare. I’m fortunate to have a family who are both curious and supportive. It’s a great mix.

In short: the more you’ve worked with computers, and the more time you’ve spent having fun with computers, learning about them, the harder it is to get the iPad.

*

Everyone who used the iPad enjoyed it. Some loved it so much that I felt bad that I’d introduced them to it and I was going to take it away from them. If I had the money I would definitely get them for my family. Well, maybe I’d wait for the next one with the Facetime camera in it. Everyone was convinced it was great – but not necessarily to the point they’d run out and get one themselves – the big thing Apple has to overcome is that unless you like the Internet, then the reasons to buy one are less. It’s quite clearly not a computer for working on, and so people tended to say it needed to be more educational, or more serious – the implication was that it needed to have more of a moral purpose to fit into their lives.

Apple stores will be key in selling it to people, as will seeing other people with it – unlike the iPhone, it doesn’t have the ‘what is it for’, practical nature to sell it. At the moment, the iPad lacks a killer app. Instapaper is really close, but it’s quite technical (something Marco Arment, the developer, is well aware of, as this blog post shows). I’m not necessarily convinced games are the killer app, either. There isn’t an iPad-only game that you’d buy the iPad for (though of course, there are great games for it). It’s great for browsing the web, for reading, but is that enough of a reason to buy it? I can certainly see parents buying it to use with their children – encourage them to learn about facts, numbers, to read. Alice for iPad really impressed people – stories are a great way to connect, and the iPad is a computer that’s good for telling stories on.

When we were using it, the fun stuff was what people responded to – the fun stuff and the stuff that was an interesting way of looking at things, of experiencing data (incidentally, this is why I think Gourmet Live and the Times’ Eureka are the two strongest non-Dennis editorial apps I’ve seen). Google Streetview wowed everyone who saw it, because it’s really clear how it speaks to your own experience, your world, the things you know. It’s the first computer that’s an enjoyable computer.

You can have it anywhere in the house, you can pass it around between people, it doesn’t have the keyboard and the fans a laptop does so it’s not as intrusive, and it doesn’t force the same seriousness of purpose. You can look at it for a little bit, and then drift off, have a conversation, a cup of tea, the screen will dim, and you don’t need to remember to turn it off or anything, or give it special treatment. In that respect, it really is very like TV and close to being ‘just another screen.’ And that’s great, because at heart what computers do – or what they can do – is deeply wonderful.

We’re moving towards a world where a computer is just a screen and a wireless network connection – and of course ‘just’ implies the huge cloud/websites/web services/app store architecture that lurks behind that. Add in RFID/NFC/Everyware and most things in our lives will be computers.

While computers have definitely played a role in changing modern life, they’ve clearly also changed things for the worse: the fact it’s all too easy to be constantly contactable by work, the fact they require people to adapt to them and frequently make people feel stupid, awkward, foolish and scared. And we have PowerPoint to sit through.

And yet I think they can make up for that. There are so many positives to what computers do: free, easy access to information and opinions. It’s such a prosaic phrase and yet it’s an impulse people have spent their lives dedicated too, have died for, have founded countries for. And now we have a tool which makes it so much easier. And it’s not just the big, high flown stuff: computers make it easier to find that phone number, figure out where you’re going, find a nice restaurant, learn what happened at the end of The Wire, get music instantly. And it’s now easier for more people to get at more of these positives with something like the iPad.

At the end of my trip, after I’d been playing Marble Madness Mixer on the iPad with my seven year old Goddaughter, she asked “is this a computer?” And I didn’t know how to answer.

Two weeks ago: This is last week of the holidays (passing two schools on my way to work, I’m still attuned to the calendar). The kids will be getting their new uniform, the nylon stiff and the shirt folds still sharp. I am getting my old jumpers out; I feel the cold first in my finger tips as if the season is withdrawing into my body, as if heat comes from the heart. Reminds me of my favourite Greek myth: Persephone and the underworld.

Earlier this week: Cycling home, and as the sun drifts away, St. Paul’s is pink, like the last moons of Tatooine, inside, an orchestra playing, Luke Skywalker’s yearning. On the bike, time feels more present. You ride between the cracks in the hours, down the gap between late afternoon and evening, like a fold in a sheet of paper, a gunnel in which the dusk collects like dust. Feel the heat in the air, or a cold draft coming off the common.

Today, it felt like the first day of Autumn today; grey and blowy.

And the photo? The Swedish coast, a million months ago, well before summer even thought of ending.