Coming to the end of a brief run, spying a fox looming large as a deer, poised moment, then bunged into the woods.

I could hardly make it out through the sweat and steam. Sweat and steam sounding like a form of Creation, not entirely holy, and my finishing time slower than I'd thought.

I struggle to judge pace. Galloping via a narrow rut in the field between planted rows, I thought I was galloping. The narrowness of the land before me acted like a pulley. I must have slugged my way under the pink evening sky for the first mile, then caught a surge of breath at some point in the orange suburbs.

I want to write about how the different districts of my home town carry tints of significance that bolden with the years.

I am becoming emotionally attached to every nuanced, gormless street, every window and quiet drive, the tilted structures at the edges of tilled land, every crunch under the East Anglian gulf, my cradle above.

I am half-in-love with every boring corner of the fields, the wild colours that grow there, the purpling gloom of an ancient woodland and the Roman ditches, ignored by everything but the gnats and voles and country ghosts. Patched greenhouses and packets of white doves occasionally resting on oversized lawns.