Traffic is moving freely along the M8, clotting up after the A720. There’s a capsized vehicle in a ditch following an incident with two contradictory bicycles. We’re hearing reports of a collision, some photographers, and prosthetics near the overpass. The cars hiss by my window; the highway’s jammed. We have the fast track on movement, circulation, and vectors. Tune in to Radiophrenia 87.9 FM, radiophrenia.scot, for the latest travel updates and motor news, for all that flow.

Three 15-minute broadcasts, on 28, 29, 30th August 2023:

Ep 1, on circulation.

There can be blockage. This is what the oeuvre of Samuel Beckett appears to fixate on: stuttering, jolting, an inability to proceed smoothly. He’s all about the glitching, repetition, clotting. Where was I in my composition, asks Mr Rooney, in the 1957 radio play All that Fall, asking where he’d got to in his account of a train journey. At a standstill, replies his wife, referring not just to the story but also to the train’s position, motionless in a siding. Ah yes, he says. They’re always at a standstill.

Ep 2, on the vehicle.

This Of Coaches is an essay in which Montaigne laments that the Spanish invasion of central and southern America was carried out badly; he doesn’t say, not exactly, that it shouldn’t have been done, but he laments that it showed the Europeans to be the savages they actually were, made it so embarrassingly obvious.

Also on the Pacific shoreline, but more recently, I’m a fan of the photographic work of another Michel, this one, Michael Light, a Californian artist born in 1963. For one of his projects, Full Moon of 1999, he reprints and repurposes NASA photographs from the space explorations of the sixties, explaining what the astronauts did on the strange, grey lunar surface. Light explicitly compares the Apollo moon buggies to wagons on the Oregon Trail, by which the Europeans seeped out westwards across the North American continent from the 1830s, following in the footsteps of the explorers Lewis and his friend Clarke. Images of the tiny tracks of wheels through the dust, of the traces of isolated, lonely travellers going through a place they had only imagined before. That they wouldn’t be back to.

Ep 3, on traffic.

What else are we doing each day, with the sextant, telescope and clock but trying to relate my real ship, the place I am actually standing, on the deck, with my wooden leg and monomania, trying to relate this to the drawn image, the virtual ocean that spreads out over my desk.

We’re travelling over water, sure, but we’re also navigating through waves of data, through a spume of previous information, through depictions of earlier voyages. Following and crossing the lines that are already there, the lines all over the ocean.