Storm-chased, we rattle through the Forest, pausing in barns turned breweries and tap rooms. Trestle tables creak in drizzled sun. Rain hammers on the tin roof as we wait it out on old armchairs with next-door beers and damp crosswords. A wild boar regards us plasticly from its incongruous perch on a piano. A totem.

At the campsite, we throw up the tent and fall back to the pub in the village. A tumult of community. Kids scramble and bridle at parental restraint. Chairs creak. Laughter rings. We drink Nightjar beers, then retire to the hillside. In that fired darkness, a rattling rasp breaks the silence – a nightjar. And another. And again. An ascending.

Staggering from the morning tent, I find we are above the clouds. On this dewy Olympus, I rake the shattered embers of my godhood and summon fire to brew up. Mug in hand, I gaze down upon the misty skies of men. In the crook of the valley hunkers a ruined abbey. Up here, then, is the lie and truth of that heaven of old fable.

We slosh, slack waterly, through floods and storms, to the guttering year’s end. The pilot light in our eyes sputtering. No tallow nor taper. No Argand lamp nor rush wick to hand. But what to do? What to do? I stomp and roll in embering gloom. The answer, of course, is in the trusty book. Chapter one. Paragraph one. To the sea!

To Brean Down, in fact. We billow blusterly down the motorway. In town, we slalom through shuttered holiday parks, wiggly-tin caravanserais, breeze block conveniences, unfired arcades, and dune-faced men in bus stops. Beyond this veil, just out of sight, breaks the broad unyielding sand. Crack the window and we can smell it.

The car rolls down onto the beach in thrilling transgression. Tyres raunch and scraunch over seaweed on trackless strand. Parked up, I sand-wedge the trangia to boil water. Hunched in that wind, a spark is relit. The flame roars. In minutes, I have a coffee in hand, salt spray in my hair, and all the wild, white-horsed sea is before us.

A decaf frappuccino from Costa is enough to sink my aged heart. But to show I am no curmudgeon, I accede to youthful demands. The barista’s granite face is illegible as he gestures mutely to the machine behind me. I jab and poke in irritation until the screen flickers. Extra’s, it announces, in greengrocerly insolence. How do I like them apple’s?

I further prove my uncurmudgeonliness by stumping along the pavement to the museum raging about The Collapse of Civilisation. What a piece of work is a man! Or was, when we could blasted spell. What feats we achieved! What was it all for? Were those soaring works of the poets, linguists, and grammarians but a passing fable?

Inside, through the Great Court, and to our first stop: the Rosetta Stone. Crowds jostle in low light, straining to see the spotlit spidery lines of Hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek. Over bobbed heads, I see children’s faces reflected in the glass, eyes alive, fingers pointing, ideas whispering. Parents explaining. Perhaps I should chill out.

There are moments when one must get to high ground. I dart, then, from the dogged homework of my attic eyrie to the high plateau of Cleeve Hill. Here, an unlikely spasm of antennas channel ethereal vibrations down to my feet. Beyond my boots, the pale of Gloucestershire spreads to the horizon. I hang between, abstracted. Liminal.

But not so much that I don’t want something from the Coffee Cube. Carrying a flat white, I loop round the back of the common, through gorse and hawthorn. Red Kites whirl silently overhead. From my perch on the edge of the old quarry, they pass below and above me, following invisible thermal contours, and scanning. Scanning.

Their shadows ripple over the grass. Bincocular lens flare. Perspective shift. What am I to draw from this lunchtime ornithomancy? What lessons? What tone? A kestrel flashes over my head, arcs low then rises and stops dead in the air, beating its wings. Frantic counterbalancing legs thrust back and forth, earning its old name: windfucker.

Paper cups from Corner Coffee in hand, charts and lines and sextants under lubbers’ arms, we bid solemn farewell to the baritone harbourmaster. Like swans to the sea, we are. New ports await us! We clank down the gangplank and are hallooed by our friend of the morning, old Captain Cat, there in his muffled midden, under broad frayed hat.

We set bold course for the Nash Passage and Cardiff Bay, six hours beyond. But forty minutes later, we can still see the car. Our wake bubbles greenly. The motor wheezes. We are not going to make it. Jibing at cruel fate, we haul round and head back. In the churning waters of the harbour gates, under holidaying ice-cream eyes, the motor dies.

All hands to action! Pull! Rrrack-a-dacka-dack. Again! A lifetime in two heartbeats. Fend off, there! A bump. A pitch, and the motor roars, to cheers from the crowd. Heedless, we pinball into the quay amid blue smoke, and tie up with grateful hands. Above, a heart-of-oak voice shivers our very timbers. “Back again are we, boys?”

The Weston Library café is booked out with a cacophonous hoard of tourists and other unshelved types, so we retreat to the hushed silence of the King’s Arms. In this calm before the lunchtime storm, we hunker studiously over laptops and whisper our plans among slanted winter sunlight, pine tables, and vases of Queen Anne’s Lace.

This is not, I reflect, like the sticky-floored pubs of my own islanded student days, hovering unchanged and inaccessible from today’s churning shore. I shake my head against distraction – back to spreadsheets and PowerPoints. Until two old men enter, all greatcoats and knitted ties. A rumpled blue hat crowns one white feathered head.

As they set down their pints, I hear a jabbed retort. “I seem to recall it actually happened in 1763.” I dart a look, and catch a flash of plain delight. I’ll take it, I think, if I’m in a pub like this in thirty years, with a hat like that, plucking facts out of the folds of my tweed like Werther’s Originals and popping them into my grinning mouth.

Steel skies squat on Leadenhall Market’s triumphal arches. Rain spatters and drums on the exposed hypocaust of the Lloyd’s building, its chrome pipework heating the hunched number crunchers of our most imperious capital. Over shop doors, barbarian brand names are forced into a neat red and gold conformity of style and typeface.

The uniform tramp of leather soles on cobbles drags me out of a reverie. A phalanx of bankers is bearing down on me, umbrellas aloft in a defensive tortuga around their leader in his Italian tailored pomp. I scatter in disarray. From all over the world they come, these financial foot soldiers, to adopt this dress and to be spoken through by the purpled language of money.

Just outside the leaden palisade, Curators Coffee Studio is a riot of multicoloured rebellion. Of tattoos and knitwear and mind-altering drinks. Smiling faces peer through a screen of densely potted vegetation. I want to cheer. To paint my face with woad. To run through the arches, out of the pale, and roar the name Caractacus.

I stop mid-stride. In my ears, the podcast airplods on but I am frozen in place, Wile E. Coyote style. Look to camera. Eyebrows aloft. What was that? €100 for £80? I’ve changed money in hotels, at windblown border posts, in sweltering markets where the rates flutter like the moneychanger’s hummingbird hands. I’ve done it in Terminal 5.

But nowhere like the bookshop, café, and bureau de change that is Foreign Exchange News. A rich glow bathes the small room as I sidle in. Intoxicating talk thrums, filled with exotic opinions and opportunities. A man proclaims the evils of capitalism. Over his shoulder, dollars and dirhams disport themselves. A property deal is in progress.

Heady aromas swirl. Golden letters shimmer above a bureaucrat de change under strip lighting, riffling notes. Heavy art books sit lightly. Canned drinks refrigerate gently. Croissants glisten. Coffee gurgles. All these humdrum things are here made strange in combination and shine anew, freshly minted, in luxuriant profusion.

The hurried bundling of bags and boxes into the boot. The hustle and bustle. The hurl and burl, heave and ho, duck and dive, squash and squeeze, twist and shout of loading families into cars. We creep myopically through a Google cloud down unfamiliar roads, and dart along moor-side lanes into the unknown wonders of Bovey Tracey.

Noisily, we unfurl into Café 3 Sixty, all coats and hats and overlapping chats. Find a table. Pull this, push that. Who needs the loo? There’s one seat too few. Coffee orders buzz on the WhatsApp chat, and I retreat to the counter queue. Immediately, in that Whitsun moment, all sense of being in a hurry is gone. I breathe, and smile.

And into this sudden calm, through unfocused eyes, shoot crystals of rapid spreading memory. I’ve been here before! I whirl around. We came through a different door, from another path – that’s all it took. We biked off the moor and arrived battered and splattered. I can almost see us there by the window, deep in coffee and paper maps.

After the storm, stilled, stick-strewn streets. Silhouetted sycamores against close grey skies. The scraunch and snap of branches under car tyres. In the park, an oak has fallen, outspread arms grasping in frozen vain. Iron railings buckle and warp under its knotted belly. People stand and stare, hands to mouths. My throat tightens.

And here I go, even as I curse the wind, to browse among a felled canopy of neatly stacked trees. Christmas hats and children swirl. Laughing, squelching. I pull a tree upright and rattle it, judging I know not what. ‘Six foot Nord?’ says a voice behind me. ‘Good choice. That or the 5 foot Scotch here. Lovely tree, though, the six foot Nord.’

By main force, I resist the urge to ask for a Norwegian Blue. While the Nord waits to be pushed off its perch and netted, the last storm gasps dodge and squall and tug at my hat. I tilt uphill into the lee of the On The Hoof horsebox and order. As I raise the open cup, a slap of wind throws black coffee in my face. A bitter, cowardly blow.

Cotswold Haze. Good name for a beer, I think, as the car slices clean through it. On tap in any one of the pubs I’ve passed this blue morning. The Black Horse. The Porch House. The Bell. The King’s Head. As I round a corner, my phone lights up. The train, it delights to tell me, is delayed by ten minutes. Under slouched hat, my eye twitches.

I pull off the road at Bledington Shop & Café. Workmen are in a high-vis huddle over steaming teas. A woman in tweed jacket and hat flutters and pecks at a croissant. Potatoes loll in baskets. Bread roosts over local eggs. I wander about, stamping pins and needles out of one leg while I wait for my coffee. A pocket buzz. Twenty minutes.

Pacing the platform, I slide down the asymptotic curve of projected arrival time towards madness. I can’t stand still. At the end of the station, I stick my nose out. Is that a glimmer on the horizon? I squint. I strain. The parallel tracks of my hope shoot through Euclidean space, unmet. I pivot and stomp. It must be near by now.

Rowlocks grind and squeal. Water hisses on strakes. Blades slap and skitter across the sea. Or mine does, at least, wedged as I am naively between two old hands. “If you don’t fall in someone’s lap at least once, you’re not pulling hard enough.” Cold air and warm sun rush through the sentinel Sutors of the Cromarty Firth.

The rhythm of reach and pull lulls silence into us and calms the highland sea. The hulk of a ship slips by. Mothballed oil rigs loom through whisps of haar. Rumours of a porpoise. On return, a glimpse of Slaughterhouse at the crest of the town. We run the boat onto the shingle and hop out, exhilarating in wet feet and stiff fingers. “Coffee?”

Coffee. Someone orders for us all as one. While tourists stare across the cold water, locals bathe in steaming familiarity. All the trivia of town is exchanged. A new car. A new job. A child’s success. This disparate crew is a community, here at the muffled end of the isle. Sea-struck and clinker-built, the cafe is heaving. Pulling together.

Alarm buzz. We heave and haul into the rigged car and head off, bed-headed and wedged between all the dreamt-of needs of summer. Tight-stowed paddles and bats and boots. The dark, pitching, motorway rumble. Too soon, I hear the mutinous cannonballs roll across the poop deck and the back seat waisters demand a stop.

A scramble for ideas. Perhaps a farm shop? A good café? Can someone search the word ‘artisanal’ on google maps? ‘Long black’? See if the pictures show a man in a hat. Can we get to Butterton? Beech? Baldwin’s Gate? A poke around Stoke? O, for a refined stop in the Potteries! Panic and hustle swell, rise, crest, and subside.

There is only one option, and we all know it. Keele Services 3 miles, boasts the board in blue insolence, and I sigh. Inside, I whirl between the Starbuckses: café, kiosk, and self-service. A green gleam round the corner hints at yet another. There’s no escape from this fixed purpose. But I know now I don’t want escape. I want a tall americano.

Boulevarding through the lattice grid of Dreta de l’Eixample, from Gran via de les Corts Catalanes and across Avinguda Diagonal, our rambles take us past Plaça de Mossèn Jacint de Verdaguer, the great Catalan poet, and through all the babel of Barcelona before the brute Anglo-Saxon of the Bristol Gastropub brings us to rest.

I read to my daughter from the guidebook about our destination, the extraordinary unfinished cathedral of La Sagrada Familia. Tell her some history. Ask her some questions. Translate the menu and encourage her to order. (How do you say matcha chai latte in Catalan?) Laugh at her jokes. See mine fall flat.

I look at her there, scaffolding braces still in place. Gaudí spent the span of her years raising just one facade of his temple, wrestling with foundations, head down in his cloistered dreams. It rises now by its own strengthening will, drawing on people and talents he never imagined, and soars above all fretted expectation.

Grey dawn sits heavily on me as I leave the house. With thermos and binoculars in my bag and a madman’s wild whitening hair on my head, I make for the hill. I hare down single tracks until I startle a rabbit into flight. The car growls at its heels. It runs straight ahead in panic, hemmed in by hedges and its own kerbed horizons.

Sunlight spills onto Cleeve Common just as I arrive. Sheep stretch and rattle their dags. Belted galloways stare at me with heavy-lidded disdain. A deer bursts out of gorse. Goldfinches skitter and chatter. Barn swallows dart and swirl past my ankles. From this spine of land falls away on both sides the thick rotundity of the world.

A short stroll brings me to the windswept beech and I open the flask. I would now, by habit, push headphones in or pull phone out. My hand twitches. Emails. News. Scroll some shit. Instead, right now, I sit. The wind, rushing in to fill an uplifted absence of hot air, cracks my cheeks and I blow on my coffee and think. It feels audacious.

With time to kill – but not enough to maraud – I look for a coffee right here in Barajas. Light floods down these industrial streets in the shadow of the airport. A chemical tang is in the air. Whiffs waft round wind-blown corners and drive me into Cafetería and Churrería Dandy. To my relief, there’s nothing fancy about it.

Inside, I sling my bag on the table and ask the whirling, unhesitating waiter for a café solo. His dervish arms and cries fill the clattering air and it arrives before I’ve sat down. Behind me, a trio of old friends are in garrulous conference, sharing refurbished triumphs to shared delight. You should have seen his face! What cheek! I told him so!

The humdrum raw materials of daily life are here processed, polished, pumped up, and pushed out as packaged narratives. Moments of a day and a life examined and assembled into story after story. Lubricated with coffee or carajillo, they tumble off the production line and out of all proportion. I smile. You won’t catch me doing that.

The train shuttles through patchwork countryside and tangled suburbs into looming, high-strung Paddington. I am caught at the frayed edge of sleep, half in the dreamstate of rail-rumble. Through crowds, I walk out of slumber into the stuccoed 19th Century street plan of Cockerell’s Tyburnia.

Markus Coffee catches my unfocused eye. A coffee roaster squats in the window like it just rolled in from the Great Age of Steam, all chimney, boiler and smokebox. Inside, the place looks unchanged since 1957. I blink. Have I fallen through time? The beans behind the counter are a whirlwind tour: Papua New Guinea, Guatemala, Kenya, Nicaragua Matagalpa.

My head spins as I step back into the great, daubed palimpsest of London. Before my coffee is cold, I face the dropped stitch of Marble Arch. A Buckingham Palace portico moved north, made a police station, and now a roundabout flourish, it stands by the site of London’s last gallows. Where I wait for the lights, crowds once jostled to see that thread pull tight.

Treadmill. Dumbell. Ergo. Squat. I went into the gym in darkness and low mood but leave with heart pumping and winter light brightening the cloud-slung trees. Blood quickens. Muscle fibres stretch and contract. A pale disc heaves above the roof line. My morning sweat sacrifice has raised the Aztec sun once more.

The car sweeps silently down sleeping sabbatical streets and I pull up across from The Artisan Baker. Wind baffles rain-streaked shop fronts, but inside clean lines of benches frame a welcome silent calm. I sit to wait for my coffee and feel tugs and twinges beginning somewhere deep within me. I can sense my Krebs cycling uphill.

Outside, the gusting wind blows spume from the cup as I try in vain to lift it to my lips. My arm shakes in unbending resistance. I lean forward, straining like an oarsman stretching for the catch, but it stays out of reach. I repeat a quiet but intrepid stream of exclamations under my breath and make for the car in unslaked gloom.

Thigh to thigh and knee to knee, we sit in rattled silence through the litany of station names. Epsom. Stoneleigh. Parks Worcester, Motspur, and Raynes. Vauxhall. Even as we meet our Waterloo, no word is exchanged. From unknown origins to our shared terminal moment, we co-mute.

De-training is a single fluid motion. We move in step down the platform and through the barriers to scatter in all directions, following the mathematical lay-lines of concourse and timetable. The Benugo Cafe looms over us from its rusted iron canopy, promising a breakfast of cappuccino and croissant.

Above the fray, I am deified. A half-caff Hermes looking down from Olympus on the murmuration of mortals below. Through some quirk of the crowd I am momentarily alone with my coffee. Perhaps I am in fact Prometheus and can proclaim the dread secret of this mezzanine apotheosis to mankind. I take a breath as if to speak it aloud, when someone sits down next to me. I shut my mouth and brush croissant crumbs from my trousers.

But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

Moby-Dick Chapter 87: The Grand Armada

First up. The silent weekend house sighs around me as I shuffle to the kitchen, trying not to break the spell of solitude. Nuclear blast of the lamp – a breakfast Bikini Atoll. Eyes half closed, I go about the pleasing business of making coffee slowly. Fill. Weigh. Grind. Tamp. Ignite.

My uncaffeinated hand shakes as I peer at the laptop on the kitchen table. But soft, what frights from browser window break? New mutinies from ancient grudges. I scroll from war to war. Missile strikes. Tube strikes. Price hikes.

I close the laptop, and my eyes. The mugged warmth of coffee passes through my palms and into my veins. Outside, somewhere overhead, I hear the muffled flap of wings. And beyond, inaudibly, are all the rousing sounds of town, stretching up out of care to the wilder hills. I hear movement upstairs. The day stirs.