Geology time.

Down to earth from a different place. All culture shocked and awed. Trembling, buzzing still, a stomachfull of that other world's supper. Overhead reminders soar on, contrails and pirouettes. Down here, reality creeps in, the heavy cloak of familiar ruts, calendar items and expectations. And yet, an airy remembrance lingers, patient sheep, an infinite loop of craic, timeless stone and hedge, where kisses were stole by thorn and berry, when God was king. Geology time this is, where we're the blink in an ache slow world of change, a gracious degradation, a sloth history of harvest strife and spreadsheet errors. Waking up on the other side of the bed, on the other side of the world, the familiar feels foreign, feels weightless. Numb again, cloughering.

Unscrubbable.

A good man, out of Derry, a childhood roughshod and ransacked, searched and chased, now wine dining on a hill in the country. Two loops, two journeys converging, side by side, knife to fork, elbows creaking on a grandmother's table. It's moved 17 metres in 65 years, a nargun of the scullery. The texture of our lives, the ruts, the bumps, scars and tracings...these sediments are the story-strata that become our fossil record. A vellum overlay would reveal contours echoing, darker overlaps, the deviations fading. We're all the same at this scrubbed table, story-soaked and worry-worn. Underneath, my thumb runs silent over the familiar knots, tracing grain, remembering, not finding youth.

Contagion.

In the big room, an aga burned. The gravel scratch of heavy cast iron portholes, lifted and moved, revealing the furnace inside. Mystery doors, clanged open and shut, the sparkling hard black chalk of coal chunks, thrown in. Years later, a window in New York stopped me cold. There it was again, only this time a gleaming red beast, all polished up and ready for overnight delivery. All set to be wasted and unearned in the Hamptons, it'll never see a pot of spuds like ours, never be as vital, never be the only heat to raise eight in the winter's long dark. A coal dust square marks the footings now, a black bruise cornered off from scullery to sitting room, front steps to armchair. An air square rises, a fillintheblank ghost of days when everything was bigger and further away. The insides wrenched and scattered, the hard used spoils, to IKEA cupboards up and down the hill. Knives dulled on soda and rashers, gilt-edged china worn bare by a thousand lips. Busy, whisper, clink and sigh. Sip worry sip. Different devils, familiar fears. All met in the end, risen above, grandfather. In your place now, the seeds sprout. One becomes six on this fertile soil, shown how to follow, walking on your feet to be taller, starting down their own lanes. Blue eyes, milk skin, your fire carried on, a wonder virus, sparkling in the coal dust.

Cold comfort.

My first gun, waiting lean-to behind the scullery door. Or was it the pantry, that cold, quiet room of bright refrigerators and delights. Double barreled and worn, casual dangerous amid the soft cooling soda bread and Christmas cakes. "Just in case the fox comes again" you'd said. But I'd imagined more. Those were the days of sudden helicopters and dark night checkpoints. Snipers in the hedges, armour over the wheels, bad men whispering about empires.

Turf, drying slow.

Descending through clouds, into the rain, into the fog protecting the past. And there it is, a landing strip to ground something long aloft. Here's truth, unconditional, here's baggage claim, unguarded. A rainbow guided us through a patchwork of wee walls and overgrowth. Fresh, bright, unmistakable. Up the lane, hedge-bordered and rutted, past the whitewash, jagged gates and sheep dots...one-way, hammer-away before the tractor comes. Later, in the thick of it, a turf fire sizzled in the background, all embers and sass. Once moss cut, quartered and stacked low to dry, a field of these crumbling thatch pyramids stretched before me, an impossible sight, geometry meeting livelihood, some ancient brickworks cleaved and cleared. Through a hedgehole, we stole into someone's field, sidestepping paddies, looking for bulls. The potato trenches were newly filled and ploughed over, seed envelopes, waiting for the rain. We were waiting for the tea then, out there, mid-nowhere, a ploughman's lunch came swinging with floury baps soft folded in a towel. Never better, and I'm back.

Transatlantic.

I'm trans worlds, an inbetweener. Up here in the rareosphere I'm pressurized and decompressing. Swallow popping ears and breathing fake air. Just 4 millimetres from oblivion, a silver skin stretches and twists in the jet stream. We're ripping arcs in the sky, trailing heat over bored sailors and numbed baleen. I'm coming home after 20 years, sharing a hand rest with my Dad, all soft haired and tentative. Equipped to replace memories with instagrams, see the kids all grown up now, see the reality-extinguished fire they've raked over. There'll be a clearing in the sky where the old farmhouse stood, an invisible shock and echo to draw the eye back, seeking something missing, which it is. It's all there waiting, as we race to the sunrise, eastbound, homebound, unbound.

Parts, laboured.

In the dealership, where ignorance meets suspicion, frustration churns and bites. Nobody wins the arguments when there's nothing to win but pride. The walls, abused for years, brittle layers of despair, anger glued to helplessness, a bruise-grey veneer, listening, ignoring. This modern battle, once settled with outbursts of steel and weeping, now seethes silently. They stand, countered and unweaponed, squeezing ancient hilts like phantom limbs, a dark turbulence behind their eyes. There's no war here. There's no win to be scored. Just get out with your senses undulled, leave only ounces of flesh on the countertop. Escalation, escalation, the peak always a pit.