John Greening

There are the fast people who check their emails hourly, engage with Twitter and multi- task their way through the day. And there are the slow ones who never reply even to your third request, and almost miss meetings and prefer pencil. The first — the fast — will be up to advise the worm, to value the cup, to out-tweet all competitors, whatever. The last (the least hurried), nevertheless, and surprisingly it has to be said, will, as in fact it turns out, succeed just as well, catching what the others were moving so quickly they missed: the prize deep-feeders.

To Occupation Road again, a whole year nearer my own retirement now. The track slopes down past the Record Office to the river. I am looking for any of the soft fruit canes my grandfather planted, but find instead a stag beetle upside down on the tarmac, struggling like a memory, the feelers at full stretch. Maybugs! she shudders. The pathway ends at the Thames, where I note flood defences, vaguely recall the waterworks, and suddenly they have found me as a train breaks through the overgrown embankment. I want to look up and see my father at the glass, returning, and wave to him.

Shops that only pop up in your dreams are not unlike the ones you visit awake, except that what you buy then vanishes in the blink of an eye. In my case, it’s never anything practical but always some obscure edition of verse or a record salvaged from the Soviet archives and much of the delight’s in finding the shop itself, a shop that appears to be managed by sleep, yet exists along an everyday labyrinth part-shopping mall, part-walk-in monkish illumination. It feels somewhere I’d like to be in the afterlife — an old, darkly-panelled, cigarette- haunted, quiet centre of browsing, whose stairs twist out of sight above shelves laden with poetry, some of which I feel sure I must have bought before.

One moment basking in the sun, the next knee-deep in snow astonished at the way these tracks must have filled to the top of their dry-stone walls during the April blizzards. To walk has been the idea since we were small, and so we go on along new paths and old, the way our parents led us, listening for a curlew, looking at a weird extended ash, checking our watches for the train, stopping for elevenses among the sheep-droppings. It is a rhythm that we require, that speaks of essences and immortality; not a pilgrimage because there is no aim, the route is circular, but a stay against age, climbing edge after edge, then out across the moor above Eyam, that hostel you think you stayed in once.

Invisible hand that jangles the lantern over the porch and tells the leaves on the pond to imagine they are clippers and wrenches the shed door , and makes leylandii lurch, unnerving the cat, wobbling the elderly; that viciously clobbers pedestrians at the corner, then snatches up bills and payslips put out for recycling and juggles with them; that gibbers and squeaks through gaps in your sealed units; that laughs as it swipes her portfolio of art, the pantechnicon of his life’s work, in fits when a cone skedaddles like a clown or turning Dalek wipes the smile off its fierceness and swivels a death-ray that hits your moped, your chimney, your safest nook, knocking over five centuries’ peaceful growth. It is its own blitz- krieg on the establishment. Respect it.

for Stuart Henson So Petrarch lived here? First saw Laura here, invented the sonnet and began a craze that turned to ‘tyranny’ (your word). These days they’re hardly de rigueur, but there’s the fear that if you can’t balance seven hundred years on fourteen lines and five rhymes, then the Muse will leave for Tony Harrison. There she goes. But you and I have learned by now to steer a steady course up Petrarch’s mountain track or — better metaphor — across the Rhône beside that Pont that keeps on reaching for a rhyme on its far bank. We know the knack of picking a wind, too: not one that’s blown infernos; one that gently tries the door.

The bus slows at the dancing blue and ignis fatuus of yellow vest and chequered bodywork. There’s one car in the ditch and one with an L slewed across the featureless straight run from Cambridge. Our driver rolls down the glass – five or six hours, it’s as bad as it gets – and lets the swish and flip and grim theatricality as emergency vehicles keep arriving (cutting tools, the doors of an ambulance swung back) enter the overheated bus alongside cold rumour. Caxton Gibbet watches. So do the chicken bones of that restaurant we had booked for the day of the fire.