This afternoon whilst out riding in the sunshine one of my pannier bags fell off my motorcycle. I didn’t know until much later when I stopped at the pharmacie. I retraced my route twice, looking into ditches as I passed. I couldn’t find it. Particularly annoying because my Carte Gris and insurance documents were inside.

When I got home I found I had a missed call on the landline. I called and the phone was answered by a French man who spoke English. He had found my pannier bag, had called my insurance company which couldn’t help and then called Triumph in Limoges who gave him my number! Thanks Triumph. He’d also called the police in case I called them to report my loss.

He texted me his address and I went to collect the bag. He and his family farm bees and sell wonderful honey. I bought two jars!

What a fine and honourable man. He turned this into a wonderfully lucky day. Thank you Julien!

If I hadn’t walked out in the dusk this evening, I wouldn’t have seen the two deer across the field over at the edge of the wood.

I wouldn’t have heard – then seen – the lines of cranes flying north.

I wouldn’t have seen the outline of the bare trees against the deepening blue, the clouds that had just left the hail and the sun set.

I wouldn’t have watched the clouds gather at the top of the hill or the mist tumbling in at the crossroads.

I wouldn’t have seen our neighbour Mr Breton waving to me as he drove past in his battered white van with his dog at his side in the passenger seat.

Home now to the wood stove and to wonder why I feel the need to tell you all this.

Somewhere in demilitarised zone

Trudging somewhere in the demilitarised zone

I know this place of consequences

Familiar with the known known of quantified, passed time

Familiar with the known known of the brevity of existence

Familiar with the known known of the insignificance I share with you all

Familiar with the known known of my deepening irrelevance.

Familiar with the known unknowns of who what where how and when. The questions are unanswered until I trudge on into the quicksand or deep water.

Or fall asleep at the wheel.

Again

I am not speaking to everyone

There was

There is nothing left in my life

But you and I

Too much space

And so little time artificially divided by days

So it can be counted and costed

Need it be?

My nights pass in dreams of loss and searching

And wakeful shallows of back ache, damaged ribs, stiff legs and trips across the floor to urinate a little and often. Changing night clothes and rotating pillows soaked in sweat.

I see too much of the night

Sometimes too many shadows

I know it is just darkened day

The sun the other side of my earth

Time and opportunity don’t stop

To begin again at 6am

Good that you voyage with me.

You’ll have noticed

You gave me a book about trauma for my birthday

I am older now

Here on the edge of really old

Not just the old age ascribed to me by younger people of an age I once thought old when I was young

I am older now

My memory arcs back

An iron bridge over the raging waters

The last six minutes gone

Over sixty years between the steep banks

That carried so much down

To a dark ocean where stinging, tearing creatures of my own manufacture churn the surface.

Back across the rusting bridge THE DAY awaits

Snippets and visions have followed me forward; jig-saw pieces in my pocket fingered absentmindedly

And more often now intrude

Back across the rusting bridge THE DAY awaits

Any surrender to the temptation to focus

Will reassemble the picture

The events experienced

The events imagined

The circle of hurt

The unlooked for lives lived thereafter

There the snippets go again and I am stopped

I have no time for this

I must cook the pizzas

You set my life and the damage I have done in context for my birthday

His night had been disturbed by the aches from his healed ribs. He had not dreamt badly but his moments of wakefulness had been dominated by the word “atrophy” – increasing disorder in systems – and the concept of what humans have evolved to experience and rationalise as “time” being atrophy divided in consciousness by days and nights and measured by clocks.

His excitement had come at the realisation – in what’d been an earlier happy barely conscious state of wandering thoughts – that atrophy had profound implications not only for himself and the other everyday systems like his wife and his bedside table but for the universe itself.

The processes and forces of atrophy moved in only one direction. They might be slowed or resisted but not ultimately halted and certainly not reversed. There being no ‘things’ but only complex systems of atomic and molecular arrangement subject to atrophy meant that every “thing” would eventually and at different rates change in one direction: break down – die – and become disordered.

There had been discussion and argument about whether the expanding universe would expand to become a static void with its forces spent or whether it would cease expansion and contract again to its state before the big bang. The consensus among physicists – to the best of his knowledge – was now that the dark, spent, atrophied, void was the destiny of the universe. Atrophy – time – would not be turned back. There would be no time machines; no dodging the ultimate disorder.

Death was, then, simply a system breakdown, a transformation of matter, a dissipation of energy, a failure of resistance against atrophy. One might zig-zag and delay but it will come. There will be a final loss of consciousness, a final shut down of the system and then decay. The system would scream and rail against it but it would come.

Bhudda was right about at least one thing, that trying grasp – to hold on to – situations, relationships, objects, one’s consciousness – only brings suffering. The world as a system flows and won’t be stopped. It only flows in one direction. Change is a fact. Atrophy acts even if one sits still in the lotus position and concentrates on the feeling of air entering and leaving one’s nostrils. But..

We experience atrophy intensely but call it “time”. We are driven to measure it by the earth’s rotation around its axis and around the sun – in years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes. We discipline our lives around it – in order to live with others, share experience, meet each other and meet commitments. Time is thus a socialising concept. We set our clocks to match those of others. Clocks are a desperate attempt to bring order. We even try to sleep and dream our disordered dreams by them.

As a human system – even if intimately connected to all there is – he was very attached to conscious living. Conscious awareness had been incredibly vivid and emotional for this human system. Far more so than for a chair that didn’t live but might exist as a systematic arrangement of atoms for longer. Death would mean all his rich memory and limited knowledge would be lost, deleted, pointless. He was unhappy with that arrangement. He wanted to hang on. He suffered under the weight a profound and vivid sentimentality for his possibly illusory self.

He was quite attached to himself for those days.