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This morning, the viaduct cast a blaring light out. It's coming on for winter now. There's frost. It's not as early as you think when you look at this picture here. A lot of the time, when I'm walking, I'm half - more than half - keeping an eye on the dog. He's a puller, he wants to be let loose. I let him off the lead here, next to the viaduct and he's off, like an arrow, round that path there (he always follows the path) until he's out of sight, and then he bounds back to me, slightly slower. He does this every morning. The whole process takes less than two minutes after I've let him off the leash, much less. In dog-time, to him, it might be, I don't know, an hour. Then we have to go through the procedure of me throwing a ball, and him fetching it back, and this MUST be carried out in that patch of white there. In the picture, we haven't yet made our mark, it's still virgin frost. If I try to vary this, he looks at me, the dog does, like I'm trying to teach him a new trick instead of something he knows well. But there, in that patch, he waits, sits, lies down, fetches and gives back, and I'm convinced we could do that all day. ALL day. I say 'fetch', he fetches. I say 'sit' and 'wait' and he's on it. I say 'give' and he places the ball into my cupped hand, or at my feet, sits and looks at me like he's a sniper and I'm the target. On the lead, however, next to the road, he's often a puller. A bad puller. No amount of saying his name, or any code-word attracts his attention. He's pulled me to the floor twice. Sometimes he barks at bikes, cars, vans, people or other dogs, sometimes he does not. He's head-down, back arched, straining (actually) at the leash. It's like he's a different dog to the one next to the viaduct. Partly, this seems like routine, this whole morning outing, but partly, to him at least, it's like it's never happened before, none of it. Like it's all new territory. I read that Border Collies have particularly acute hearing, and it struck me that the general noise of the roadside, his paws on the tarmac and my own footsteps might sound, to him, maddening. It's much more complex than that, of course.

And this made me think about this novel I'm (re)writing, and my preoccupation with a central recurring trope of physical movement. It's a novel of ideas, effectively, I realise, of intuitions is probably the better way of putting it. Not exactly a cacophony of noise, but getting there. Certainly a cacophony of stories that were, in the planning, quite tightly connected but now, I realise, don't have to be. In fact, they oughtn't be. There is a sense (or ought to be) of meandering, of identities and of senses, but there is no particular routine. It's the gaps, I realise, the spaces in between, that are important. Here's a good quote: 'The time may soon come when planners, designers, developers and others will recognise and act on the simple notion that the spaces between buildings are as important to the life of urban man as the buildings themselves.' (Serge Cermayeff & Christopher Alexander, Community & Privacy). I'd add 'writers' to that list, actually.

Which brings me back to the dog. Same dog, different identities: his need to run out of sight, but only for a moment, and his need to come back, his bouts of barking and his occasional moments of obedience on the lead, and frequent ones off. See, what I realise I'm trying to do is to work out what he is. Is he a 'bad dog', a nutter, or is he just doing something far more complicated? Is he intuiting something way beyond mere me?