Nighttime starlights of boats constellate, strung festively along the invisible horizon. I’m in good company and a little drunk and these villages on the water appeal to the part of me that prefers everything at a distance, suspended in fantasy. Now we are on the move again, drawn like moths to the lights of a seafront pub. I savour, but ultimately finish too quickly, a rosehip negroni that pairs with the atmosphere developing nest-like in my mind. Autumn, leather, cut glass, pavement, sea salt, arsenic green, the red amber of the rosehips themselves.

The following day landscapes unfurl from the train window. A glacial mass of cloud, somehow more solid than the ethereal hills below, grinds across a ridge. I think of Avebury in April watching from the Ridgeway as beams of sunlight scythed the downs. Copse plops of beech trees, a slim palette of colour & a veil of chalky light over everything that is the milky substance of memory itself.

Summer is long past despite two swims in the sea in as many days, despite shorts and sandals. The seasons can be as ill-fitting as the seasons of our lives. The train is packed but everyone is in good spirits, even those without seats who loll in the aisles. To my right a man hoovers chocolate balls, leaving a leaf pile of silver wrappers on his tray table. Three women back from a jolly in London in pieces at the photos they took, the man next to me scrolling on his phone. Shallow farmland glints with recent rain water, trees glisten with wetness, mist ripens and blooms between limbs. Black tarmac roads turn to silver snakes.

In the studio I have been painting from a photo dad took. I don’t recognise the landscape but it’s a view I would have snapped myself. In dad’s collection it’s a person-less rarity. At the centre of the scene two beams of sunlight scan the ground from a white cloud. Eyes of heaven.

A small nighttime painting came to me last week of distant lights seen from a dark field framed by two silhouetted trees. It’s on my studio wall unsure of itself. Next to it is Dipper, recalling a festoon of sun-yellow gorse flowers I found along the Ridgeway. Lights of its own.