Monday: Through roundabouts and road works to the White Horse Book Shop in Bassett. There is a clarity about the air in this valiant Wiltshire town which you can see, lying along its low plateau ridge, from the M4 corridor. You don't bump into VS Naipul or even Roger Scruton, and you don't have dinner at Balliol. Heavy dark Hercules from Lynham drone over the High Street one by one. Something's going on. We are proud of our planes in North Wilts. We are used to their loudness close to us and seeing their propellers. Various dark planes are depicted on pastel lustre plates in the jeweller's.

Late lunch at Scoff's award-winning café in Wroughton: pie and Kitkat. Matt Holland's in the hardware shop (not my favourite one, see below). He runs the Swindon Festival of Literature, our best-kept secret, and is off to see to his skips: Holland Handling. Thumping and rumbles are coming from Salisbury Plain, but that's not out of the ordinary.

Tuesday: I don't go to the Ivy. I go to the Cyber. Previous to this it was DropIn Youth Centre that lasted only weeks, not even months; before that it was Free Spirit, aromatherapy; before that it was Shirley's; and before that it was a sparsely-stocked sports shop. Polly Bathe is drinking latte at the next table, with Packard Bell. She used to be floral dresses, but this week she's Retail Outlet Nike over all, dreaming of Nemesis by the look on her face. Admire her tan and leg muscles. Last week she got dumped by email by a professor of psychology: a Jungian. She can't talk because it's costing her, whatever it is she's doing. Admire the gorgeous new sickle at her feet half-wrapped in an Oakmans brown paper bag. Interesting that Bassett ladies will buy their sickles in the cool of Oakmans for £11.99 when there are blue Chinese ones just outside on the sunny market tables for only £3.99. They probably know something, these ladies who don't stop for lunch. Polly's got a personal trainer, Russell Plank, who I happen to know has left working for Honda in the pale chalky cornfields up by Highworth and set himself up in business down at Wroughton in the cheese. We all know that Honda serve five hundred people a good lunch with Japanese food in seven minutes flat every day. Certain things work well here.

One quick cappuccino over the Advertiser, and on to Oakmans myself, in fact. This is the cleanest and most awesome hardware shop in Britain. Three matured men in long red cotton coats stand waiting for my every need. Whenever I'm not looking they must be dusting and polishing the nails, screws, coal hods, lamb teats. Whenever I look up there they are. I estimate that if I go to B&Qs in Swindon (also very red, but corporate red) I will spend so much petrol, and so much of my time (which is worth £1.80 an hour) in the long queues at the checkout there, that I might as well come here, which is a treat and an aesthetic experience, to buy a wooden scythe handle and red onion autumn sets. Last time I was in B&Qs and asked why the queues were so long and why the nasty little girls at the till stomped off in a temper at every hitch, the large Wiltshire manager said mildly that there was no unemployment in Swindon. They couldn't get the staff. This is true. We are affluent here. B stands for brimming or barbarous; Q's stands for quotients or queues.

Outside in the sun the pavement slabs give off a perfect warmth. The beautiful bookstall is cool under its awning and the bookseller, Watty Sword in his apron, is spread-eagled in a chair, noble and generous with his great grey head, and having a chat in the sunshine in broad Wiltshire words with a mature lady. I ponder an old Golden Age (Golden Ages keep coming up here) for only three quid, lovely woodcuts, and can't decide if it's worth queuing at Post Office Counters for my Child Benefit to get it. Bassett Post Office Counters is in the back of a newsagent, not a bad one as Post Office Counters go, but my allegiance is to my own in Foliat, and don't want to waste one of my only two away-day stampings just for this, as all mothering readers of this organ will understand. I hear Watty saying to a lady that he won't be here next week, so I leave it to fate if it's still there in a fortnight and whether I'll have cash then. Eye caught by a huge pile of magazines about the Third Reich -- 1930s English fascist. Extraordinary, we both agree. Another Hercules goes over. Do I want them in my hall, which is where I would be keeping such stuff? Yes I intensely want to read them, but I also want to cut my clutter. This is because last week's book of the week was Cut Your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston, and, apart from Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, is my top book of 2001. I've read both of them four times. I buy Elizabeth West's Hovel in the Hills to go with her Garden in the Hills for bed after my projected afternoon's wrestling with pseudo Bonaventura and BTInternet, the worst server on this planet; yes, even worse than Freeserve. On the other hand, AOLsucks.com reminds me what a nightmare they are, too. I got Garden in the Hills at Foliat WI market, but that's another story.

I duck out into the warmth again. A big felt-tipped sign made by the greeting card lady, Flora Pegg, declares: "This stall will be absent for two weeks from 11th October due to maternity leave". Will she bring her little baby in its carry cot to lie under one of the tables: little Pegg? I buy a pink card for my god-daughter, Emily Bird, who doesn't know who Tom Paulin is. I have two god-daughters: Emily Bird and Emma Bessent. We have some lovely names in Wiltshire. The poem inside rhymes you and too, which, in the mood I'm in today, is fine by me, though normally I'm mainly for Derek Walcott ('cottage by the wall'). A whole range of mainly pink greeting cards seems to be custom made for market stalls. I know this because they have the same ones in Swindon indoor market. They are Simon Elvett cards. 'Elvett' comes from either a 'little elf' or an 'oil vat', but if you see this stall from a distance the overall impression is of pink. Despite the cards for dads and uncles and brothers and sons, with all the things they do, like fish and smoke pipes and watch trains and their globes, the overall impression of the stall is blossoming pink under its red and white striped awning.

Meanwhile the warm sun on the grey paving stones of Wootton Bassett market place is creating a moment of Wiltshire rapture. It's one of those days. A thin man who has a haberdashery stall, and also wears an apron like Watty, bends down in raptures to a tiny white bull terrier pup straining on a lead. She has a black patch on one eye and pink eyes and ears. "I'll eat you up," he says. "Not all at once, I hope", says his owner, a stick lady in one of those padded waistcoats that horsy people wear. I have my back to them, listening hard, while they go into deep conversation about bull terriers and their unfair reputation. I am superior because they are my second favourite dogs anyway, and I won't look. I am looking at the thin man's little basket of old knitting needles, beautifully paired up with rubber bands. Among the short ones at 20p there is an apricot plastic pair, size 5 (5.5 mm) and an emerald green pair, size 7 (4.5mm). Will I still be able to get them when I have a grandchild and want to teach it to knit? Shall I buy them now? They are so extremely nice. But I am cutting my clutter. There will be something for my grandchild, no doubt, perhaps, and will I ever knit again? Go back to my cottage by the scrapyard and read the London Review of Books and wonder why they don't review them, just tell you the stories.

Wednesday: To ladies' reading circle in Swindon West (Faulkes, turgid). Jeanette Winterbourne (true; believe me), who was married to my giant neighbour who owns the scrapyard, is not concentrating because she's worried about her little Joshua, for he hadn't settled in the crèche like he usually does. Old Cora Compton, who once went to a ladies' college comes in late. Jeanette asks her if Josh's settled yet. "Yes", says Cora, who has just settled her grandchild, "because Ryan arrives and you know 'ow Ryan always makes a beeline for that truck? So as soon as ' sees Ryan in the doorway 'e forgets about cryin' doesn' 'e? -- and goes chargin' over to get a'old of the truck first. So I shouldn' worry. That's 'im" (taken care of she means). Jeanette can relax for Sebastian Faulkes and some war or another now. The things that men do.

Thursday: Book signing by some man at the WI. Let's talk books. Books that won't lie flat. Paperbacks that fall apart. Cambridge and Vintage paperbacks with their narrow inside margin. Tea's at tables for four in North Wiltshire's best-kept village hall of 1994.

Friday: I don't go to the Groucho. I go to Compton Karate Club where Kieren is in great form. He tells a kid he'll hit him on the head if he doesn't get his knee up any higher for his mai geris, and the kid just does go and get his head right in the way of Kieren. Blood everywhere, rose red on the snow white ghi. This makes me think of that Jungian prof who said to Polly Bathe, not only that his exercise is sex, but also that only the oldies are up to snuff on their alchemy; modern post-Jungians really care about what's going on in the world of politics -- this last not only to Polly, but also to the world, so I heard on the radio just before he dumped her. Polly said she thought he had a very small organ.

"Jesus," says Kieren, thinking of the waiting mums outside in the muddy hall. It's disgustingly muddy because of hundreds of football boots, even in summer, and some of the kids will tramp it in in their trainers and then we have to lie down in it in our white washed and ironed ghis for our sit ups. The dojo that we bow to is also the school gym. I tell Kieren what to tell the mum about blood and Ariel, etcetera, and get on with practising boring old Bassai Dai on my own. I hate this gym because the coloured lines are actually just green and yellow plastic tape on the dirty old wooden floor, and they come off in little bits and really hurt your bare feet. But that's only Fridays. Sundays is the sports hall and the floor's just been redone. It's lovely: pale shiny birch. None of this is redolent of Martin Amis's The Information and his word on the open hand, for this isn't London W10, this is Bassett, and karate here is ardent and radiant, dazzling white, and what could be better for a line of clean eight-year-olds with wedgie haircuts and such beautiful manners and goodwill, their kind, loving, tattooed dads looking on? Decide I'm an athlete as well as a literary luminary.

In the school hall which is at right angles to the gym they are getting ready for line dancing. It's growing dark, and the whitebeam outside the dining hall is lovely ("isn't 'lovely' a lovely word?", said a lovely girl once), even if it does have crisp packets and dog wee under it. The dim outline of the downs is also lovely. Such sound checks, and such thumping. They do line dancing at Avebury village hall too; which reminds me that I saw Ludovick Kennedy putting a lot of bottles in the bottle bank in Avebury car park the other day. This does not mean that I think he is an alcoholic. Not at all. It means I think they have lovely literary dinner parties, lucky them. Once, at the Swindon Festival of Literature (Britain's best-kept secret, I have to reiterate) Ludovick Kennedy said he wrote every morning from 9.00 till 12.00. My lovely young mother, who's heard of the Groucho Club because she was affronted at Jeremy Paxman being offensive about who can join it now, thinks she was Moira Shearer's first and youngest fan in the 1940s: aged nineteen she saw The Red Shoes. Mother says, "She'll be thinking, 'Well that's him'". This is shorthand for, "He does his writing in the mornings so that's him. I don't have to think about him for three hours -- meaning, if I know Mother, that Moira Shearer's now free from 9.00 till 12.00 to put on a headscarf and go to the supermarket in Marlborough or whatever she wants to do. This is an interesting perspective on men for me, as I am still looking. The Swindon Festival of Literature makes me think of Beryl Bainbridge and Bernice Rubens, and how you no longer hear about people like them in the London Review of Books, only Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin, Paul Foot. Too many Pauls [ed.]? No, for then there's all the Ians. Ian McEwan, Ian Hamilton, Iain Banks. Is there an Iain Sinclair? Everyone was called Paul or Ian in our street in Bearsden when I was a child. Paul Hamilton swallowed a whistle. Paul McNair went to live in Slough. Ian Murdoch had his head split open with a golf ball. Ian Stobie made the best bogie. Lorna Sinclair had a real coronation crown. Lothian Dickie told the biggest lies. Ponder on hierarchies. I think I am going to cancel my subscription to the London Review of Books.

Hamilton: the swimming gala. Why did we have to go all the way to Hamilton from Bearsden for a swimming gala? Bearsden and Overdown. There's a crop circle at Overtown Hill, a yearly event. I have just learned that Over comes from Wulver and that anything with Over in it means there were once wolves there. Etymology is better in the country and I like to live and learn something every day. Croppies, now there's a grand word. They meet at The Barge at Pewsey. Sir Thomas Overbury wrote 'A Wife' (Bookes are a part of Mans prerogatiue); and I am about to write the biography of the exceptional person up at Overbury who started the century in black button boots and is seeing it out in grey Reebok trainers. She has had four names. Sally Pussey's Inn on the way to Bassett is a horrible name, we all think. The etymology is Pewsey ('Pefe's Island'), not pussy.

Saturday: Green funeral for Albert Parfitt; best I have ever been to. Sufi poems were read. All the benchmark men are dying. Well, there were only ever about three anyway.

Sunday: Mrs Pasco tells me the evil suit has gone to appeal down in Bristol and got permission to make a rat run through their cul-de-sac full of little kiddies safe on their bikes to the new houses he is building in the tiny field behind them and then onto the spine road. Swindon are paying him his costs. Honda are expanding, too, and unable to be as subtle as Burmah Castrol down there by Coate Water. There is a beautiful part of Swindon called the Front Garden. It is rough fields of gorse and rough horses. The poet Molly Holden wrote about it in 'Mill Lane'. They are going to build three thousand houses on it instead of in Wootton Bassett. "Yes, that land's been there a long time", said the council when I made some telephone enquiries. Prince Charles is unable to get involved, but Roger Scruton can, we think. Pick sprout tops in the near dark. Don't like all these helicopters about, not at this time of day or night. Notice the green verdigris of an ancient copper seat tag from the Great Western Railway poking out of my white chalky soil which goes black in the rain. A treasure for my museum which is a transparent Ferrero Rocher box. Give myself a fright when I hear my voice saying aloud, "All I really care about is poetry." I didn't know that at all. Subscribe to the Times Literary Supplement, even though their marketing makes me sick.