Snow

It's the quiet that alerts you, as you wake in the middle of the night. On everyday nights the road outside is never completely silent, no matter what time you wake. But there is an eerie hush as you lie, listening to the muffled air as no cars pass.

The sliver of light on the ceiling is more luminous, paler, hinting at the sudden change. Sliding out of warm sheets, feet feel around on the chilly carpet for slippers. Even the cold has a muffled edge this night.

The dining room window uncurtained reveals a glowing snow scene in the garden. The tiled floor radiates ice up through the soles of your feet, racing through the veins in your legs, placing you out in the whitened grass as you stare, entranced. The first snow of Winter always returns you to a childhood self, mouth watering at the prospect of a familiar world made strange. Adventures call through the glass, the darkness of night no longer frightening, lit up with white crystal illuminations.

Back in bed, you can't sleep, smiling. A cautious car slushes past the window slowly. Solitary explorer in the becalmed forest of a snow-bound city night.

The ghost of David Kelly

The sad, harmless, bearded face of David Kelly has been staring out of news reports again. Our national obsession with the death of this man follows us around, a lonely spectre dogging our social memory. I'm almost amazed that so many busy professionals and experts have taken up his hopeless case once more - reminding us of the sad, ambiguous story of his death which no amount of spin or apathy could neutralise into background noise.

It reminds me of a question posed by my English teacher when we studied Hamlet at 'A'level. The ghost of Hamlet's father follows him around, like a guilty conscience. Our teacher asked us whether we thought the ghost was real, or just a manifestation of Hamlet's tortured psyche. I didn't know the answer, but it feels as though David Kelly's ghost still haunts us for our collective weakness and reluctance to question the terrible, transparent story we were spun.

We killed him one way or another. Taunted, vilified and scape-goated by Downing Street bullies through the very media who exposed him to their gaze. And we, bystanders, hapless members of the public. We watched on like children in a playground. Now those scenes replay themselves in our collective mind, grown older but perhaps no wiser in the intervening years.

"Do not forget. This visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose...."

Empty

The city groans with unexpected lightness in the Summer months. Streets are quieter than usual and the parks empty of joggers in the morning, picnicking families in the afternoon. An unfamiliar population takes over, with matching backpacks and guides with clipboards flapping at their sides as their ranks pass by.

Trying to sell plants for charity in the park is a thankless task in the hot sun or drizzling rain. In an hour maybe six people pass by - tourists with no space for rosemary or mint in their picnic bags; grey, haunted faces walking alone, bereft of the crowds in which they would usually be lost; stressed parents, feeling the strain of the school holidays as their children crash into them on recumbent bicycles.

Who would have thought this season would be such a barren time? The city's population so unfamiliar, daily routines indiscernible in the chaos of lost feet on the pavement. Unnoticed by its inhabitants on beaches and in villas far away, Autumn's rustling steps can be heard in the distance. The brown edges of the trees, once signifying parched heat, grow slowly towards the centre. In the breaks in hot sunshine, the wind has a chilly edge. Neglected in this August month, I worry that the city will appear strangely changed to its returning inhabitants. But no, after a few short days surely,all will return to those instinctive rhythms that inspire the tunes of my writing?

Sun kissed

Later, waiting for the bus to take me home, I noticed a splash of brightness in the shadowed street. The golden dancer on top of the Victoria Apollo Theatre was lit up as if by a spotlight, centre stage. Black-winged birds circled around it, as if trying to draw the attention of heedless commuters and confused tourists to an unexpected moment of beauty in the city. It definitely worked for me.

Mirage

At a boring work event near Victoria I saw this beautiful image. Well it's not this image I first saw, it was the tiled floor so beautifully glossy it looked like a swimming pool. I wanted to open the glass windows separating us and dive straight in. Then I realised there was no water there, and the reflection emerged to replace the mirage. Like a gift presented only to those with the patience to look and notice.

Insomnia

Irritated, I cede to the persistent tug of night time humidity. Conserved heat from the day mixes with that radiating from my fitfully sleeping body reeling me back from my rest - too soon! Weary, weary feet touch the too warm carpet and flinch.

It's dark outside, but never really black. The streetlights are a sickly sulphur cloud in the sky. Opening the fridge provides some relief from the heat, but the flourescent light scars my retina, leaving glow worms in front of my eyes. An ice cube, sucked miserably, creates a small halo of cool in the back of my mouth, but never reaches the spaces between my toes.

Back to bed, the sheets feel like hot sand on the beach.

It breaks

Finally the relentless heat of the city is turned down, if only for a short while. Wilted window boxes momentarily recover. Drops fall heavily from above, making extravagant splashes on beer tables and window screens. The summer rain, somehow wetter than in other seasons (as if making up for the parching sun), wrings every drop of moisture from the atmosphere.

Pavements sizzle like hot frying pans under the cold tap. The smell of wet tarmac, blistered paint from windows and doors, of plants released and something muskier and even more primeval, is inhaled in deeply. Where before breaths were short and shallow, conserving energy, voices stifled by the billowing heatwave; now carefree voices carry over the water, like crowds of day trippers in rowing boats.

The break works it's short lived magic. Life is but a dream.

The urban play

Living in the city, everything is on show and we know it. The car you drive, the clothes you wear, even the book you're reading on your daily commute, are all likely to be scrutinised, noted and catalogued in the semi-conscious of the fellow crowd member. It's a strange incongruity that in a place so often lonely and alienating from fellow man, we are all participants in a pageant whose meaning can be understood but rarely articulated.

The couple having a loud argument in the street know they're watched, the woman's tears perhaps more extravagant because of it. The man on the bus talking loudly about the expensive holiday he's just come back from is well aware that everyone else can hear what he's saying. Street conversations are not overheard, they are broadcast to the passer by.

Even more curious is the habit, particularly marked in the wealthy houses of Chelsea, of opening the front bay window of an expensive house to the walker's view, seemingly insouciant of the danger that burglars will spot an expensive painting or piece of silverware. We are invited to look (not too long) and admire these empty stage-sets, to imagine their occupants, perhaps even glimpse a shaded hand or head in the dim interior. Perhaps people are truly unaware that they may be watched, their houses viewed as part of a slide show of bay windows and fan-lit black front doors, or perhaps they affect to be so. Perhaps they wish to show off their wealth and elegance to the world, as working class houses so carefully hide themselves behind net curtains and thick brocade. Or perhaps it's a truly magnanimous desire to share a moment of personal domesticity with the journeyer through this impersonal city.

The performance becomes more complex, however, when you notice the camera of their expensive security system in the doorway, following your movements. With the advent of CCTV we've all become unconsenting extras in an ever-rolling film of city life, which is only revealed in its strange unreality when a terrible crime is committed and blurry figures are shown on TV walking by, never noticing the camera, never noticing the crime which, it turns out, is the true plot of the play.

Between dreams and reality

There's a space in my day which is full of possibilities. It comes in the minutes between sleeping and properly waking, when my dreams fill the room and distort my real life like fairground mirrors.

Einstein is teaching me to play the penny whistle on the top of a scaffold. I'm baking not-gingerbread cookies for a not-Christmas fair which is really a car boot sale that will make my fortune. A good friend is secretly getting married in a wooden house in Bavaria.

These all seem completely plausible versions of reality as I lie, half aware that they are fading into nothing. But they leave an open space where they once were, of dreams as yet undreamt and unimagined possibilities that somehow now seem entirely possible too.

Dog days

After only a week, the heat is beginning to take its toll on the Londoners - famed for their tolerance of everything except the constant vagaries of the English weather.

The itinerant drunks who pepper the high street near my house look more jaded than usual, listlessly nursing extra large cans in paper bags on sun streaked benches. The seemingly hundreds of construction workers supposedly engaged in essential works on erupting pavements and roads laze together in groups of bare arms and high visibility jackets. They idly watch the guts of the city spew out of the holes they have made, perfecting their tans and trying their luck as young women in impossibly short skirts saunter by.

Taxis drive more slowly and traffic piles up on the escape roads from the baking city. Petrol fumed air filling the nostrils of tired mothers pushing limp children in buggies that have gained twenty kilos in the heat.

In the corner shop an old Irish lady, in for her twenty cigarettes and scratch card, laments the weather to the man serving her.
"It's lovely but it's too much", she says, shaking her head.
"It's alright if you're not doing anything" He agrees.
"It's alright if you're at the seaside. That's where I'm going come Thursday, thank goodness"
"Oh, there's rain coming Thursday."
"Oh well that's just typical isn't it. I'll have another scratch card, see if I can't win myself a place in the sun."

Between sleeping and waking

A thought I took from my dreams this morning:

Asleep, his breathing is the sound of brushes sweeping snow.

Castles in the sky

The scaffolding has reached the highest point of the bridge and workers walk along its many levels, like characters in an Escher drawing. I am reminded of old engravings of London Bridge before the fire, a city suspended above the water with houses, shops and workshops all piled on top of each other.

The imaginative possibilities of this temporary, towering structure are not lost to the construction workers either, who have fixed flags to the top of each turret. They seem proud as clever children as they look up at the England flag waving our team on in the World Cup. A gesture to put all the car pennants in the city in the shade.

Vauxhall bus station

A summer's morning. The scent of apricots and gardenias from women wafting by gives the illusion of Mediterranean warmth in the hot diesel fumed air. Pale light glances off brushed metal surfaces and shimmers on the station roof, a brief shoal of mackerel in a blue Mediterranean sea. And then the moment ends. Descending into the damp atmosphere of the undergound station you are back in Britain, a dull urban cityscape with a chill underneath the sun.

On the road

A stationary position with one foot on the accelerator seems like a modern meditation. But you're moving, vibrations on the steering wheel tell you so. Moving faster than you can really imagine - just a blurred drone if you saw yourself from the side of the road.

Watching the scenery close in and recede past the windscreen is a strangely calming experience. In the early summer all is lush, fresh and idyllic. Nothing is seen in close up, and from a distance no imperfections of daily life are visible.

Stopped, for a moment to pick up a punnet of strawberries in a layby on the road. The woman's arms are brown and ample, her fingernails brown also. Gorging on fruit with one hand not looking as you pop each gritty haired, knobbly ball into your mouth, the smell of childhood briefly fills the warm, plastic air.

Each journey on a well-travelled route is an echo of a previous trip, another motivation, summers long past but still alive in the picture book of your mind.The space in between leaving and arriving is filled with memories and future imaginings, place names pass quicker than time, a single stretched out moment on the road.

The school run

Walking down the nearly trafficless road to the bridge, school children cross into my path, like flocks of brightly coloured birds.

A mother hen nervously shepherds her four green and yellow charges, wobbling and racing on bicycles down the road. Her red skirt too long and tight for cycling really. The job is not made easier by having two toddlers under her own wing, one before and the other aft on her sensible bike. She shouts fruitlessly as the ducklings chatter along ahead.

Next: a navy uniform, with long bright red legs, like a wading bird. Heard before being seen, her huge backpack is adorned with dozens of ornaments and soft toys on chains that ring and jangle as she runs.

A brother and sister kick a hazelnut down the pavement, scuffing their school shoes. Their father walks ahead, ignoring the time wasting antics, is surprised as they rush him all at once, grabbing his arms and swinging them.

Finally, just before the bridge, the regular sight of a tandem bike, the back seat lower than the front. Parent and child in perfect, silent synergy with crash hats and high visibility jackets.

Sunset over water

The photograph can't capture it, I don't know why I put it up there really, except as a kind of visual signifier of what I mean. It's something you almost need to paint to truly experience again, once the moment has passed. But a still painting would miss the fact that a sunset isn't a snapshot, it's a movie, a rolling film of colour, expanding and contracting, intensifying and softening over the screen of the sky.

This one was a huge angora blanket. The clouds were the texture of raw lambswool that we plucked from the grass a few hours before. The redness was like the glistening heart of a pomegranate, leaking rich juices over fingers and sleeves, bleeding into the water below. Not the pale imitation from the camera, too sensitive to light, not able to relax its retina in the face of such glorious colour.

The grenadine blanket stretched over the sky, dripped a colour even more intense into the lake, and filled everything, - not just the eyes, but the mind, the mouth, the stomach. A rich meal, satisfying, but always consumed with a tugging fear, the aching knowledge that too soon it would be finished.

The colour finally faded, like a fruit ice sucked out, leaving behind an astringent sweetness and a chill on the arms.

A Lakeland post

They're an odd couple in the Landrover - bickering over everything in low, gruff voices. A father and son up on the fells moving sheep.
"Keep the gate open then!"
"It is open!"
"Hep, hep. Get out you lazy sods. They usually run."
"I know"
"What's wrong with them?"
Silence. The older man has clearly had enough of idle conversation. He stares out into the distance, where the mountains' outlines are grey and hazy even in this bright sunshine.

The Lakeland Fells feel like the back garden of these old guys - dressed in thick cotton trousers, collared shirts and caps, each clutching their own wooden walking stick. They roam the lower hills, imparting their wisdom to eager walkers, or conspicuously ignoring the steady traffic of holiday makers.

It's not really a wild landscape, parts of it could be mistaken for the work of Capability Brown, except that they were probably his inspiration. Perfect lakes, fringed with oak and beech trees and surrounded by mountains on all sides. At the edge of Grasmere lake two hills meet with a road running through, like the childhood landscapes I used to draw, only missing the sun peeking over the top.

Perhaps the best thing, and maybe what attracts the aged farmers to the fell walks again and again, is the feeling of sitting on top of the world, watching the toy sized trees and houses below. If only those damn sheep would run, you'd be master of all you survey.

Long shadows

In the early Summer the sun shines hotly and bright, even while most people are still in bed and asleep. Giant shadows of trees and buildings stalk the ground, more reminiscent of the evening light, but with a pure washed colour that only appears at the beginning of the day.

Signs of madness

It's hard sometimes to distinguish between the mad and the sane in a city environment. There is the man who sings loudly to himself as he walks down the street at six in the morning. If you're lucky enough to be awake at that time of day, you can hear the tunelsss no-word song echoing down the empty morning street.

Then there are the unkempt, seemingly unloved and defiant figures who wave, gesture and shout on corners and in doorways. A small twinge of, what? Guilt, pity or fear for one's own mind - is quickly overtaken by the preservation instinct that tells you to move away, but not so obviously that you draw attention to yourself. The currents and eddies of movement on a city street will often tell you where these unfortunates lie.

But there are some more difficult cases. Take, for example, the people who stand in the park and shout in the air, barking officiously at nothing in particular:

"Arthur, Arthur. No, Arthur no. No, no NO!!!"
"Berkeley... Berkeley..."
"OUT!"

I swerved in an unconscious reaction to one of these frenzied screams on my run this morning, only to realise that it was just another dog owner, trying to retrieve their pet from a rhododendron bush, the corpse of a bird or something even less appealing.

It made me think that if only the crazy people had a mobile phone, pet or child to shout at, they wouldn't seem mad at all. And if the dogs in the park all disappeared, it would just be full of sad, angry, mad people shouting at the air.

Miss Havisham's Ghost

When running in the park, I recently noticed a strange tree, half hidden on a minor path. It may have once been a hollyoak or maybe a very large lavatera, but it was almost unrecognisable as such. The bark and leaves were dry and dessicated, the colour of cold ashes in the grate. As if a terrible fire had spontaneously immolated this tree and this alone. A burning bush perhaps.

The swinging branches, skeletons of leaves still clinging, were laced with what looked like thick white cobwebs. I imagined a huge green-eyed spider coming out in the night to spin the dead tree's shroud. The tree wore its clinging apparel, fans, feathers and swathes of white, with a macabre majesty. Preserved in the act of dying it seemed to glory in its deathly glow, while all around signs of Spring burgeoned in leaf and bud. A thing apart from the normal cycle of birth, death and recomposition.

I named the tree Miss Havisham, and planned to take a photograph of her this morning for the blog. But when I reached the spot, something was wrong. Miss Havisham had disappeared. All that was left was an empty space in the border, a flattened patch of ground, and a few ash-white leaves strewn on the path, like dessicated butterflies.

Life outside the window

Sitting in a conference room, confined to an all day meeting on something I know little about and care even less, I stare at the patch of blue outside the window. To make matters worse, the air conditioning is on full blast and I have goose pimples, even though the bricks across the road are baking in the first really hot midday sun this year. Like a child who cannot leave the classroom, I stare wistfully now at the clock, now at the sky, praying for my release.

It's the thinnest of bonds that keeps me there - tying me in to duty and obedience. I feel that one slight tug with my shoulder to the left would free me, to get up, walk out and bathe my feet in the sunlight. The frustration I feel is more towards myself and my own inertia than my captors. A sense of self-thwarted ambition, stifled creativity, some wonderful possibility gnaws at me. I could unleash a chain of events that would lead to ultimate happiness and fulfilment this sunny day - if only I could move my chair back and take my dulled body out of that cold room and into the warmth the other side of the glass.

But still I sit and stare, stare as if staring would do the trick.

And then, miraculously (but no miracle worked by me) the meeting is over and I run from the room, like a schoolchild once the bell has rung.

Outside I feel the heat as a temporary relief. And then, the warmth, coupled with the hours of boredom that preceded it, makes me only want to curl up and sleep. No great conquests today - that window of opportunity has gone in the time I was staring out of it.

Mediterranean Courtyard Garden

Although the show is supposed to be all about plants and gardens, it mostly seems to me to consist of lorries parked all over my ever greening (except for this) park, and workmen in hard hats eating sausage rolls sitting on dumper trucks. Adding to the many construction projects currently surrounding my area (hey, it's Summer now, the perfect time for dust and drilling), the Chelsea Flower Show is much less glamorous when seen from the Site Entrance.

Having said that, the illusion is maintained once inside this horticultural theme park. The small gardens are always the most charming - more humble and somehow less pretentious than their full-sized brethren, they present an accessible face of green fingered excellence. The hollyhocks stand tall and symmetrical, even the bees are well behaved.

Only the British could turn gardening into a competitive sport, and Chelsea is the decorative but useless garden's Olympics.

But there's something almost eerie about the Provencal cottage garden, the Italian courtyard, the Melbourne hideaway. And then it strikes you - it's the lack of people on these perfect sets. It's not as though the owner could have just popped inside the charming rustic shack for a cup of tea - these are gardens that preclude the presence of human imperfection. A human shadow would be an unwanted prop, complicating the simple lines and spoiling the play of light and shade with their lumbering forms. These are perfect miniatures where only the Borrowers could be truly at ease.

Contrast this with the scene from a true courtyard garden near Gloucester Road. The front of this terraced house is, indeed, a courtyard - little of horticultural note or merit grows in the higgledy piggledy pots, the stone slabs a dull shade of grey and the whole thing protected from prying eyes by an ineffectual and flimsy hedge. But in this garden, since the weak dawning of Spring brought the West light, an elderly Middle Eastern couple sit every evening. They share a white cast iron table, often laid out with a Turkish coffee set, the tall, bulbous stove top coffee pan resting in between them, two small glass cups and a sugar bowl. She wears large black sunglasses and strokes her hennaed hair, while he is nut brown with silver strands atop. The world looks in on them and they look out, seemingly unseeing the passers by. Wrapped up in the moment of tranquillity, that surely has been given them in recompense for long years lived with this earth.

Now that's a courtyard garden I could aspire to have - but not just yet perhaps.

Cab Hut Cafe

One happy consequence of the closing of my bridge is that an arcane mystery of London life has been revealed to me. I have always been intriuged and frustrated by the green cab huts that nestle darkly on street corners, all wooden boards and closed doors, shut up to the public eye. Tardis-like, they are unremarkable from the outside, but who knows what complexities and delights may be hidden within. Only members of the black cab fraternity have access - they must know the secret combination, the well-concealed open hours. The refreshments allegedly provided within are more closely guarded than any speakeasy.

So it was with surprise, a couple of days after the men in hard hats arrived, that I saw the green hut on the Embankment side of the bridge opened up. Folding chairs and tables spread out and a sign advertising tea, coffee and bacon butties. The hut's windows are opened at a jaunty angle and it welcomes casual passersby in as never before.

But who am I kidding? These doors haven't opened for the curious eyes of the likes of me. The menu is incongruous with its chic location - solid, filling food and strong tea in mugs. It has revealed itself in recognition of a workforce close to its native cabbies in need of nourishment, not the commuters in their polished leather shoes, not the mothers with their brightly uniformed children or the idle ladies walking across the river to exercise their tiny dogs on the square of green on the other side. And therein lies the charm. It's a rebellious act, to sit with a white bread sandwich, dripping bacon fat on your chin and slurping dark, dark tea from a big white mug as the fashionable set clip clop past.

Intensive care

The lights have gone out over the river.

My bridge is poorly. A poster plastered on the outside of the hoardings, hiding its true state of disrepair, states that it must be closed and repaired or it may die. Ugly blue corrugated iron replaces the sugar candy colours along its span and men in hard hats suck their teeth as they peel back layer upon layer of my bridge's delicate skin, to see how far the infection has spread.

No cars can cross any more and pedestrians are forced to zig-zag hither and thither, channelled down high blue corridors. We peer through judiciously placed windows to see the mortality of that which we have always thought to be permanent, everlasting. Under the tarmac lie wooden planks, below that some steel girders and the open water. That's all that separates our (now less confident) feet from the deep.

The bridge seems to rock and sway under my feet more than before. I look suspiciously at the engineers - what qualifies them for this delicate surgery? How can I be sure that they won't sever an artery or cut off a limb inadvertently? I keep vigil and hope that all will be well.

Somewhere to sit

There's so much movement in the city - buses rattling down the road, cars accelerating round corners, people pounding with speed and purpose down flattened pavements. Slow down and you risk your life, or at least having your foot trodden on, your back jostled, a muttered curse - the only safe speed to travel in the city is fast.

There are times when you're still - the train held at a red signal, trying not to lean on the sweating person behind you in the tube. Waiting, waiting for that damn bus. It's an enforced immobility, a barrier in the way of the natural movement of urban life, a frustration likely to take you to boiling point.

So it was almost with surprise that I saw this empty bench on the road near my bus stop. I had never even noticed it before, and it clearly wasn't very well used. Passers by swerved to avoid it, so that it acted more as an obstacle than a refuge from the constant kinetic activity surrounding it. But as it sat there, elegant, scrolled, a relic from another age, it became ever more appealing. I wanted to take advantage of the generous curved seat, rest my back on the high wooden slats, allow my calf muscles to relax. It was almost alien - so unlike the narrow, uncomfortable perching posts installed in the modern bus stop where I waited.

I couldn't of course, take such a step out of the normal course of my homeward trail. Too strange, almost a defeat, to allow myself the moment of sweet stillness. A fear, perhaps, that if I allow myself somewhere to sit, I may never again get up.

The Enchanted Forest

This time of year brings the flowering of the Wisteria. Once the showy blooms impose themselves on buildings, walls and even in one case drowning and entire tree in purple pendants, it's impossible not to notice their ancient structures girding wood and timber. Yet just a few weeks earlier, the gnarly grey limbs were good as invisible to the careless eye of passers by.

I love the flowers- they are unapologetically abundant. Like sugar confections on wedding cakes they drip in sweet scented fronds over my path. But it's the creaking limbs on which they rest that really fascinate me. Like the forest surrounding Sleeping Beauty's castle, they encroach like witches fingers on doorways and windows, tap-tapping on the glass in the wind. Disguised by the beautiful decorations, they present Snow White with her fatal apple, steal away Cinderella's slipper and then retreat once more, lying unobserved over unsuspecting front doors.

The consolations of philosophy

Cafe Scenes

In Covent Garden, there's a pre-theatre rush at the French cafe. Tables of people shuffle in and out of the damp doorway with surprising rapidity. I sit drinking peppermint tea, listening, watching.

Next to me, two older women in fleeces and sensible shoes reminisce about the operas they've seen together over the years:
"That was the time I got us tickets for the Rosencavalier"
"Ah, yes. That was good..."
"I don't know what people see in Andrea Boccelli - I have to turn off the radio when I hear him."
"Oh I don't know. He's got a very good voice."
"But one shouldn't encourage that sort of thing."

They fuss over the bill, misunderstand the waitress and unintentionally leave without paying, counting out a handsome tip.

Like a page turning, as they stand up, two young women at the table behind them are revealed.

They share a slice of lemon tart, shaving off thin slivers of citrus cream and pastry as they chat. One - petite, pretty and heavily pregnant - rubs her bump thoughtfully as the other talks about her family:
"My parents can make me feel wonderful one minute and terrible the next. I can never shake off the feeling of being a little girl when I'm with them. I always feel so small."
"Yes, yes. I understand." Her hand soothes the unborn child inside her.

In the corner the waitresses argue over the unpaid bill. One holds her head in her hands while the other puts the tip in the till.

The May

The wind picked up as I walked towards the car, showering pale pink petals all over the pavement. They collected in drifts in the cracks in the paving stones and fell with the camber on grated drains. They piled up like the snow at sunset on windscreen wipers, sticking to hot metal bonnets.

The day was grey and unpromising, but the dropping cherry tree seemed not to realise. Or perhaps it knew that pink really looks most striking against grey: concrete, tarmac, bent metal street signs.

Later, walking to see a new born baby, again the frivolous flurry - seemingly for this tiny girl, all in pink herself.

My mother always calls this blossom The May, whatever its hue or provenance, giving it significance and portent beyond mere visual frivolity. It is as if the natural world were celebrating or heralding the arrival of the golden season with handfuls of confetti, falling all around. Reminding us that it may rain today, but we shall have sun tomorrow. Summer is on it's way.

The loneliness of the long distance runner

This photograph was taken on Primrose Hill as the sun was setting in an almost colourless sky.

At dawn and dusk the runners come out all over London. They swarm to the parks, riversides and green spaces with breathless, measured steps. Some hold their heads high, chest forward, while others slump on their hips, their legs dragging them unwillingly on. Sometimes pairs, groups or even fast-paced troupes pass you on the road, causing a breeze to ruffle on your skin. But more often it's single people, contained units of energy and effort, a loud breath in your ear.

This image made me wonder about the reasons why people run. What spurs us on to expend energy in a circular fashion, ending where we have begun, going nowhere except home by a longer route than necessary? Does no one ever just stop and wonder at the pure futility of it all?

To look at things this way is to miss the point entirely, of course. These part-time athletes are not running through space at all, they're running through their own minds - treading out the frustrations of a sedentary career, pushing through the pain barrier just to prove they're alive, burning off the chocolate cake they won't resist tonight, fleeing the mindless lure of the television, honing their bodies into the ideal they have in their own minds - or that of a significant other.

And that restless energy is the spirit of the city. It's as if all those feet pounding circular routes on pavements and path are what sets the gravitational core of our urban sphere spinning, a physical manifestation of the human effort required to keep up the pace, to go forward always, and every day begin again at the start.

New life

The leaves of the horse chestnut tree are a pale translucent green when they emerge from their sappy buds. It takes them a little while to achieve the density and dark presence of their adult form and in the mean time these adolescent leaves, uncertain and delicate, allow the sun to pierce them. For a brief moment - already passed at this time of writing - the luminous beauty of young life is revealed.

Landing lights

A few days ago, I was walking home late at night, noticing the starless night sky of the city. Suddenly a huge shape drifted across the milky blackness above. I was amazed to see the undercarriage of an aeroplane glide over the patch of sky above my head, slow moving and low, so that it seemed to barely scrape over the buildings. It's not an unusual sight normally, but six days of quiet clarity were enough to make the familiar strange again.

It made me wonder how people must have felt the first time they saw these sleek metal forms wheel above their heads, dominating the land, seeing more than those below could ever see. For many in London, the first sight of an aeroplane in the sky would have been wartime bombing raids, adding blind terror to the amazing sight of humans projected through the air in thin metal shells. Flying miraculously, not falling as expected - at least not unless they were caught in the net of anti-aircraft fire.

The red and green landing lights wink their acknowledgement of the ocean-going liners that these sky-ships replaced. Red for Port, green for Starboard. It must have been a surreal moment, the first time a plane sailed low above the heads of watching humans below. The world turned upside down: ships in the air, the sky became the sea.

Wedding dress blues

I pass a glitteringly expensive wedding dress shop almost every day on my way to work, idly noting the frothy confections in the window and wondering who, exactly, spends £5000 on a wedding dress. But the other day this window display actually made me laugh with - what? Anger? Frustration? Disbelief?

The simple image of a perfect, white wedding dress with a huge great clock right next to it is depressing enough for the average woman, no matter what their marital status. If you're married already, it reminds you that time has passed and you'll no longer fit into that 'perfect' dress. It's a recipe for hyperventilation for the nervous bride-to-be. But special pity, as always, will be reserved for the single woman, especially if she's in her thirties - or heaven forbid! - forties. The clock is ticking on her 'dream wedding' - leave it much longer and the white dress will be a sad pastiche.

Of course it's not the 1950's - no one need fear that they have been left 'on the shelf', in fact no one need marry at all. However, it's less the societal pressure to ensure that single women are safely contained that galls these days. It's more the consumerist impulse nudging us on - don't miss out on this one, unique opportunity to blow more cash on a dress than you've ever done before, or ever will again! Only a fool, or worse, a bad shopper, would let this baby slip through her fingers...

London, France

"Oh, pardon!"
"Avance, chérie"
"Ne t'inquiète pas"

The voices barely impinge on my consciousness, as a group of women move past me on the pavement. I don't even look up from my book, or notice the phrase is not in English, after all I'm in the minority here.

The part of London I spend a lot of time in (waiting for the bus, mostly) has been colonised by a large French community who have made it their own. If you want an authentic baguette, a café crème or a copy of Madame Bovary, it couldn't be simpler - and you can order them all in your own guttural, low-voiced mother tongue too.

In the space between my office and the sandwich shop I pass a French Lycée, a French Middle School, A French cinema, several French bookshops and at least three truly French bakeries and cafes (not the weak replicas that populate so many city high streets).

The older children around here slope to school in jeans and ballet pumps, checked scarves draped around their necks. The pavement outside the Lycee is spattered with countless flattened gobs of chewing gum and pupils stand around, at any time between 8 am and 4 pm, fearlessly smoking high tar cigarettes. There is a greater difference between them and their English counterparts than the simple lack of school uniform would suggest: something about the shoulder blades and thoughts read briefly in glancing eyes.

Even the younger children, unaware of their exile status, have a different air: hair cut into short, glossy bobs, mothers younger and more soignée than the typical English.

It's an unsettling and not unpleasant sensation, feeling out of place in a space you may like to think of as your own. A gentle kind of tourism, to move unnoticed among this alien tribe along Bute Street, to buy pungent Camembert on Thurloe Place and try to pass for French while ordering a baguette on Old Brompton Road.

The Tailor

It's the first warm Spring day. On a quiet side-street in Kensington, cafe dwellers sit at pavement-side tables basking in the gentle heat, making the most of their new sunglasses.

Further on down the road, a grey-haired man mends the lining of a jacket. He is sitting on a fold up chair in the doorway of his shop. Facing the sun, he bends his head down towards his work, smiling.

Secret Gardens

There are many gated gardens in the part of London I walk through every day. Each one announces its privacy in a peculiar show of insecurity - a truly private garden doesn't need to advertise itself to the world. Nor does it need rules of behaviour, except those that are privately understood.

The gates are never so high that they are unscalable, and it's a mark of English decorum that people are not seen routinely vaulting over the flimsy defences. Walking past these semi-private sanctuaries, I catch a glimpse of yellow flowers, like the flash of a petticoat.

Through gaps in the hedge perfect lawns, majestic trees, serene borders shyly reveal themselves in these almost always empty spaces. They are rarely used, even by those with the magic key - perhaps the absence of human figures populating the space is what creates the calm.

At times I wish I could enter these magical realms, but the wiser part of me fears that entering through the gate would break the spell. So I continue spying from the edges, watching the seasons unfold in these otherwise unchanging spaces.

Fulham road shop window (1)

These beautifully decorated Easter Eggs in a chic and very expensive homewares shop bring only one association to my mind - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Clearly, there is no hope for me.

Magnolia Alley

Magnolia Alley is a short stretch of road in an affluent stucco ghetto, where each house competes with the other for the showiest of Spring flower shows. The neighbours on each side of the street have all planted magnolia trees in their front gardens, each one streaked with the same paintbrush strokes of pink, all bursting into hundreds of candle flames on bare grey candelabras at the same time each year.

It’s one of the first markers of Spring on my pedestrian commute and each day in February and early March I stare at the buds, willing them to open. Those embryonic flowers, like baby mice, always remind me of childhood longing. Compellingly soft and delicate, they were my mother’s favourite children and small fingers were retracted quickly under her gaze.

But this year I am denied my annual wonder and nostalgia. A few weeks have passed without me here and the annual show is drawing to its straggly end. I am bereft. The blossoms falling away, camouflaged by young green leaves.

After the sunset

The commuter train pulls out of Waterloo station and begins chasing the fleeting sun westward. Dirty pink light shines dully through the windows of tall deserted buildings, hinting at the flamboyant show behind.

Then, Victoria Tower's turrets rise to the north, dark lacework on a coral relief, exotic and unfamiliar. Infuriating housing and office blocks do as their name suggests, while slivers of light flicker intermittently between them.

A huge banner proclaims The Big Issue, but before there is time to ponder the matter, fleets of red vans appear, stationary and toylike, waiting for their cargo of wrapped words. Still the evening's fiery display scampers behind and along, playing hide and seek with the train.

The sun is playful this evening, fighting off the blurring clouds advancing from the East; like Spring outrunning the Winter frost, converting white and blue to cherry, peach and violet blush.

Smaller stations lie ignored as the train picks up speed, rising to the sun's challenge (see if you can beat me, catch me if you can) and the reward is a beautiful vignette of blended orange, pink and grey - the city sunset behind Battersea Power Station.

But at the destination arrives the sad realisation that the sun has, once again, outrun the lives of men.

Another day is gone.

A pinkish warmth still tinges west-facing walls and windows.

The sky is a pale watered grey, as if purified by the incandescent flames of the passing sun.

A street light blinks on.

Writer's notes

To write with a writer's voice for once...

Thinking an unfamiliar city would provide endless words for the page (musings on the nature of human endeavour bounded by horizontal and vertical lines), I took off. But on arrival, the very strangeness was overwhelming. Repeated, delicious jolts to my senses made it impossible to notice the little details of life, to have any thought unthought by other visitors - how big, how fast, how busy...

Too occupied with being there, taken up with each new moment. It turns out there was nothing I needed to say.

No spark of mundane inspiration.

This provided me with a clue to the source of my own well of words - boredom, sameness, routine. Only when every detail of every day remains the same can I detect the jarring moment of incongruity. A young plane tree leaf, tossed like a translucent kite above my head, only appears in the corner of my eye when the rest of my mind is quiet.

Picking up the pace

Unfamiliar birdsong in the morning, the strange angle of the sun through the windows, remind you that it's a different place to the one you know. Like water trickling over stones, life slows down.

Sophorific air in the plane maintains the cocoon and then you arrive. Dappled light through indistinct shapes changes to hard lines, squares within squares. Birds and spring blossom replaced with raincoats and car horns. A shot of adrenalin in the arm, though jarring, invigorates.

Conflicting instincts - drawn towards light and noise but tempted back into the musky warmth of smaller things. Finally you step back onto the perpetually moving track.

Film Noir

The BFI on the South Bank was the location for a screening of fashion and film from the forties onwards. A plush, claret velvet private screening room showing cut off patterns of clothing through time in black and white and vivid colour. When the show was over, I was disgorged onto a streetlit walkway.

A man in a black suit leant against the glowing side of the film institute. His profile lit by a sulphur street lamp, one foot pressing on the wall, head thrown back, he exhaled cigarette smoke. New laws make any smoking an illicit act, but this was especially atmospheric - an unwitting homage, or perhaps something more aware.

At Waterloo station the clock face bore the words 'out of order', black on white, inside the ring of Roman numerals where the hands should have been.

Finally, a woman walked onto the bus on Battersea Park road wearing a red feathered fedora and black double-breasted trench, cinched in. Her hair was dark and neat, her lips were scarlet and her face pale, uncertain, haunted.

Is this all simple coincidence or a more complex plot?

(Image courtesy of Spoony Mushroom on flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/transcendent/)

Her special day

The flowers are beautiful, but mothering is such a drab word - it feels like wet cotton wool in the mouth. Add a letter and it's smothering. Take one away and it's othering.

Interesting that fathering only seems to apply to the act of making a baby, mothering to the prolonged effort of bringing one safely through the obstacle course of childhood and adolescence, into adulthood. Such a heavy burden for one person. Mothering - sounds like carrying lead weights in your pockets.

I probably wouldn't be so down on it, if on this day in 2010 I felt that society had adjusted its expectations of women in any real way following on from the androgynous outpourings of seventies feminists, the dirty, smelly days my aunt spent on Greenham Common. Instead of reinventing itself, this word has retained its milky sourness in the mouth, the moment of inevitable compromise and loss of self, overweening guilt.

You can play at equality in your twenties, drinking cocktails in chrome finished bars with your girlfriends, laughing at the dour suited men. But mothering lies in wait for you - and their dull smirks tell you they know it too. Patriarchy has the last laugh, and it laughs louder these days because it has managed to turn the creative energy of emancipation against us as only the status quo can. Now we have to race with the boys as well as tending the babies. Running with your legs tied, like those dreams where you need to get away but your legs are stuck in treacle.

Don't get me wrong, it's not the children I object to - they're an interesting addition to life. It's the weight of expectations that taking on the mantle involves. So I might just skip past that particular gerund and hope to god that even if a child comes along, I don't need a special day.

Thanks to Marlis1 for the photo (http://www.flickr.com/photos/marialuisa/)

Spring clean haiku

Sweeping the garden
Dead leaves fly up in the air
Like butterfly wings

Polaroid

Running in the park, my mind loosens and memories start to shuffle into the foreground. Perhaps a familiar movement from a small dog bounding beside me, or a shaft of light, penetrating through the bare branches at a specific angle, stirs something. For some reason recollections appear as photographic stills, not moving images, their colours enhanced and laced with the romance of discovery.

Once begun, polaroid bright memories flick through my mind - is it my mind, or something more instinctive? Like the scent of a baby's head - the slideshow set in train, running it's course. Experiences of movies long forgotten, so I thought, everyday images of life from their habitual angles, the strange deja vu experienced when you pass the same place everyday, and everyday it's the same and also slightly different. Memories lie on top of each other, a cross-section of the sedimentary layers of life as lived.

The trick is to recognise these unexpected moments when you plunge into the depths of everything you've ever seen, felt, thought or known. And realising, begin to wonder about how these moments make you. Each one is another layer of memories (or unmemories?) - even sleeping our dreams add to the mix.

How do these experiences contribute to who we are? Is anything, once it has passed through our minds (no matter how glancingly) ever truly discarded, or is it just filed away? And those moments, when you rediscover just a fraction of the experiences you don't even remember having, provide a tantalising glimpse of what lies beneath.

Forgetting about the cookies

Office rage is violent, irrational and overwhelming, and it can be set off by the smallest thing.

If someone just reached over and took a biscuit from your desk, that would be understandable, commonplace even, if a breach of the stricter rules of etiquette.

To go into your drawer and root around is less permissible, but hell, they are probably hungry right? So if there's an open packet they could take one, and maybe leave a note explaining how they fell prey to the basic level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and were therefore unable to adhere to social conventions, which come way higher up.

But to go into your drawer, open the packet, take three cookies and then just leave the box open so that all the other cookies go stale - well that really takes the biscuit.

The main thing is not to let it invade your inner tranquility, because this is not important. It really isn't anything that you need to worry about - you're bigger than that. Honestly, you are.

If they'd just asked, you would have been happy to share, because that's the kind of maganamous, empathetic and most of all - calm - person you are.

Forget about the cookies. Seriously.

(Image courtesy of Terry Bain www.flickr.com/photos/axis)

End of day

The return of the sun after drab Winter skies also brings back a new time of day - so rare in the shrouded months - sunset.

Gone and immediately forgotten are the countless cloud covered evenings of almost imperceptible dimming from grey to black. The sun, once appeared, cannot resist announcing its departure from the world in a flambouyant flick of its tail. Splattering the receding sky with dripping colour.

It's almost too much to bear, watching a luminous orange sky above silvered lilac water, with the glittering bridge in between. Staring, staring, not thinking, just bearing witness. It's like a small tear in my heart, but I can't turn my eyes away.

Then another evening, a more restrained display. The sky a watercolour wash of pink, gently fading to grey. I think it's over quietly, and then, in it's dying moments, the puffy cumulus clouds are flourescent edged - lipstick kisses on the sky.

Watching the sun set on the horizon reminds me of the physical presence of the world I'm standing on: how much farther it reaches than the end of my fingertips and its bounded edges. Slipping silently beyond, can-canning its farewell, the sun glows out.

(Thanks to AbroadJZ for the picture http://www.flickr.com/photos/abroadjz/)

The colour you’re not

An interesting thought from a nature programme on the BBC last night. The reason that plants appear green to us is because they absorb the red and blue photons in the light spectrum and reject/reflect the green ones. So basically, the colour they appear to be is the very colour in the light spectrum they haven’t absorbed – the colour they’re not.

Musing on this point raises questions about the nature of perception and whether we can trust our senses: potentially everything we see is actually the opposite of what it appears to be… or simply not what it appears to be.

The Ballad of Liberty Jones

The grass is covered in tears
but when you turn them in your hand
they glitter like diamonds

A red sky at night means
something - if you can remember...
a feeling like breathing

The stars are warming lights
a long way from where you are. Falling
asleep you can reach them

Lying down

There's an empty block of flats along the road, nudging up to the millionaires. The blank windows display signs of earlier life: a ripped curtain, a peeling poster. Newer occupants who spraypainted the walls in yellow, pink and black. But now it's completely empty, each room advertising a vacancy.

Underneath the homeless pair have made their nest. Sleeping bags, cardboard boxes, the usual mini-shanty. In the morning, while the builders across the road saw concrete - a sharp metallic whine - and people of purpose pass quickly, the homeless doze. A sleeping protest, a stark contrast.

This shocking scene becomes routine. A sign that everything is in its allotted estate on passing.

One afternoon on that very same road (sleeping bags abandoned for the day - it's good to live in such a safe area), strange symmetry. An old lady lies on her side on the pavement, just next door to the sleepers' den. Like a baby bird fallen too soon from its nest, fragile and bewildered. Someone has placed a white pillow under her head, a snowy duvet over her body.

Concerned passers-by wait for the ambulance's blue flashing light.

(Photo courtesy of Franco Folini - check out his great shots on Flickr)

Looking up

You know it’s Spring when you start to notice city life above pavement level. Something in the warming air and brightening sky stimulates the muscles at the top of your back and you find your neck unbending and elongating, your eyes widening. It’s at times like this that you see that your local pub has got a statue of a cow on its roof, that the park gate has a union jack flag hanging from a huge flag pole. A strange, circular window in a high up attic. The building on your road that has a tree-level garden, providing incongruously tropical vegetation for the pigeons to fly over.

It’s a moot point (or a ‘moo point – go ask the cows’ as Joey would say) whether this recognition is cyclical (the memory of higher things returning each year with the sherbet coloured crocuses in the park), or whether each of these surprising images truly reveal themselves only once to your blinking, light starved eyes, adding another unique and amazing snapshot to the picture book of wonder in your mind. If the latter is true, I just can’t wait for what will appear next year.

(Thanks to WolfieWolf on Flikr for the photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/herry/3341095928/sizes/l/)

An urban experiment

Isolation, that's one thing. Well, it's quite a big thing in a huge, anonymous city like London. So here, let's say, we have isolation: an enormous grey blob. A gloopy, depressed bag of gone-off tears. And on the other side, we have human connections: fizzing balls of electricity, sparking dangerously, like the circuits on a faulty switchboard.

Now for the experiment: let's put these two mutually antipathetic substances together. Watch out, you might need protective glasses for this bit. We find that, when placed side by side, the connections emit bright electric pulses, making the thick skin of the blob jiggle on one side, like a fat lady's thighs on a trampoline.

That's what happens each time two strangers on London streets (or in the tube or on buses) meet each others' eyes, share a grimace, a joke or even a few passing words. The bags of gelatinous goo quiver and ripple, feeling the vibrations of the spark for quite a few steps, or stops. Then slowly, the electric shock subsides and they return to sliding down the road, impassive molluscs once more.

Today I had a connection like that. Sitting on the top deck of the bus, in front of the steps, I was thinking of nothing much, or a lot of nothing. Whatever it was, I had retreated into my shell, antlers barely protruding. A man started walking down the steps in front of me. I registered his face and thought I recognised it. By the time I realised who he was, I wasn't looking at him anymore (he'd gone downstairs), I was staring at the face of the girl behind him. Of course! He was a daytime TV 'celebrity'. She saw the recognition dawn and smiled. We sparked, and then came the jelly-shaking reaction: we both nearly burst out laughing, and carried on our separate ways smiling - just a little - to ourselves. Not such a dangerous experiment after all then.

The broken umbrella

It looked alright when you strapped up the spokes with Sellotape on the kitchen table. The wet glass and sodden garden warning you that you wouldn’t get away with wrapping your scarf over your head that day. A gratifying sense of prescient efficiency constructed above your head as you stepped out: an organised person today. Like that smart lady with the briefcase across the road.

Your self-satisfaction began to sag with the dark material five minutes later. The once taut circle collapsed into an angry, jagged exclamation bubble: “AARRGH”.

Never mind, just turn it – like so – and no one would notice. Half-way across the bridge, the wind picked up and turned the lop-sided frame inside out. Gazes of envy from those unprotected heads turned to surprise and then pity.

Holding it tight with your hand, water dripping down your coat sleeve, the velcroed strap conducting a wet stream directly on to your new bag (a seemingly malicious act of vandalism), you and your protector were no longer friends. People with whole, unblemished umbrellas striding towards you and past. Making their point. No communion either with the other scuttling figures, whose contraptions were also deformed. Just simple misery.

The chemist, proudly displaying its sweet-wrappered waterproof wares, appeared like a mirage through the silver rods pounding the pavement. A few moments later, you re-emerged onto the street, proud owner of a new umbrella, galvanised, reinforced and guaranteed. The old one stubbed out, abandoned in a rubbish bin.

Euphoria

What is it that first alerts you to the change?

Is it the new soundscape, as you lie in bed, eyes still closed? Car tyres going mmrrrrmmmrrrr instead of shhhshhhshhh on the road outside. Feet going pit-pat instead of slip-slap past the window. No longer a constant glop, glop, glop, glop, on the windowsill, no brittle noise like sand being thrown on the glass. Instead, the sound of birdsong. The optimistic peep-a-reep of the bluetit, the anarchic robin.

Or is it the light, oblique and pale still but cautiously optimistic, that penetrates newly through the blinds?

You can’t quite believe it, as you rub your eyes and search around for your slippers. The week-long, heads-down, eye-stinging, bone-chilling, foot-soaking rain has ended. The skies have ripped open the dirty grey sheet that covered them, and so doing made the world below anew.

A glorious, forgetful, golden brightness drenches you on stepping out, chiding your doubt.

Brief Encounter (Valentines day post)

She is waiting at the bus stop in the dark. There isn't much space on the pavement, and her bus isn't coming any time soon. To avoid looking jostled and uncomfortable, she gets out a packet of cigarettes, lights one, brings her arm down by her side and looks up and around, in a broad motion, as she exhales.

He is walking down the street, not bad looking. She is used to catching fleeting glances and then pretending she hasn't felt a spark of attraction. He notices her - she's sure of it, and moves the trajectory of his walk almost imperceptibly closer.

Here he is, just two steps away, she doesn't move or look at him directly, but her cigarette holding hand flexes. His feet stop, a foot away from hers. Now he's talking:

"Do you have a light?"
"Oh yeah, of course. Hold on."

She fumbles with the lighter, the wind seems to have picked up and she can't make it strike. He bends his head inwards and down, until it's nearly touching her own. She can smell his leather jacket and something else, a musky cinnamon. The flame lights, briefly. It's long enough for the papery end of his cigarette to flare and glow.

He murmurs his thanks and moves away. Walking down the road he hunches his shoulders and picks up speed as he smokes.

She takes a drag of her own - half finished and tainted with cold, it's no longer satisfying. She looks to see if her bus is coming and then, drawn to the distanced figure, turns her head briefly the other way. Once, then twice, she looks. He does not turn back.

Oystercard

"Who are you?"
Who am I?
"Are you allowed to be here?"
Am I allowed to be here?

One of the biggest tests of sanity and strength of character in London is the lack of recognition on anyone's face, even in places you go to every day. The whole system is set up so you have to constantly remember who you are and why you are there - because no one else is going to help you.

On arriving at the train station the Oystercard reader doesn't recognise you, even though you pass through at least twice a day. Each day it interrogates you.

You have to be totally sure of yourself as you slap the card on the reader - I am me, I am going about my daily business, I am a fully paid up member of the oyster card fraternity and I am allowed to be here.

As you frantically scramble in your bag or pocket for the Oystercard, you can't for a moment lose your sense of purpose or direction. The people behind you would tut and shuffle you out of the way, and you'd be left, no longer the person you thought you were, along with all the other directionless wanderers who you step over or around in the queue for the barriers each day.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if, just once, there would be no need for the sweaty doubt - did I leave my Oystercard at home, on the train, in my other jacket pocket? If, just once, the barriers would sense your arrival, recognise you and open up before you, to welcome you in, or out? A modern day parting of the waves.

City cats

A black cat stalks its prey. Glossy fur pressed against rough brick walls, it watches as the pigeon pecks the road. Tinkling along on tippie toes, it spies me and dares me to tell the secret. Seconds later, a frantic flap of feathers and the hunter is foiled again. I look away innocently, not wanting a fight.

Walking down another road in a different part of town, I think I see the black tom again out of the corner of my eye. A dark shadow lurking behind a salt chest. On closer inspection, it is just a murky pool of stagnant water. Is this paranoia? My heart certainly skipped a beat.

Further on, an urban feline of a different kind: a Smart car purrs, resplendent in a leopard skin pelt.

The river this evening

The river this evening was an inky, iridescent blue on one side, an oil slick on the other.

The blue caught the last long note of the fading light, glowing with beauty. Like rumpled silk spread out on the dressmaker's table, ready to make a fantastical ballgown dotted with stars like rhinestones. The water seemed to swish and sway, aware of its decorative covering, in love with its own reflection.

The black glowered, thick and potent it lapped the bounding walls. 'Enjoy your beauty while it lasts. All good things come to an end.' It seemed to say.

Walking companions

Every Saturday two old men walk down the road outside my house, hand in hand. One has a wooden stick and the other has a captains hat. They sway from side to side, as they edge their way cautiously down the road. When others pass them on the pavement they cling to each other more closely and their eyes flicker up from the ground nervously. I often see them, making their painstaking pilgrimage to the park at the same time every week.

Another pair a few days earlier, walking towards Chelsea as I'm going the other way. They both wear smart long overcoats with velvet collars. Cashmere scarves crossed on their chests underneath, a small lip of colour just showing against their necks. Each has their right arm crooked at the elbow. In their right hands a cigarette, glowing tip facing down towards the pavement. Matching each other step for confident step, their hair smartly combed. They look almost identical, even though one is a generation older than the other. You sense they see the world the same way.

The smell of their cigarette smoke lingers on the air as they pass by.

Short back and sides

"Just a trim" I said. The hairdresser looked at me sceptically and raised his brow.
"How long since you got it cut?" Cringe.
"Four months, five at the most."
"I think we need to take a bit more off. Trust me. You'll look great."
I watched the curls fall to the floor, like superfluous commas edited.

Later, walking to work down a wide boulevard in South Kensington, I caught a glimmer of Spring to come. The rain had set off the scent of trimmed lavender hedges and the warming air wafted it across my path. Musing on the seasonal awakening of nature in the city, I was caught unawares by the whining roar of a chain saw, a creak and crash of branches.

The London Plane trees lined the road, their feathery twigs like dark capillary veins against the grey Winter sky. Trunks standing ancient against the white stucco buildings, like medieval candlesticks with layers and layers of dripping wax. The quirky pom-pom seeds had endeared them to me as I idly stared out during long hours of dull meetings.

A man was up there, a demented rodeo rider astride one of the furthest branches, waving a chainsaw with one arm. Half of the tree was shorn of its frizzy locks and the rest of the branches were crashing down, twigs and sawdust lining the pavement at the base of the trunk. I touched my own hair self-consciously as I passed.

On the way home, one side of the boulevard still gloried in last season's growth, while the other, framed against the purpling sky, presented waxy candlesticks topped with chicken bones, knobbly at the ends. The pruned trees looked dazed and vulnerable, coming to terms with their new silhouettes.

Passing over, passing through

There's something magical about living near the river in London. The air is cool and fresh, there's a sense of space that you don't find anywhere else, and in the middle, a great body of slow moving, impassive, grey water. Always there but always different. Even so, I don't think you really experience the river unless you're forced to travel across it. Standing in between, watching the water pass underneath, rocked in the cradle of the bridge, you start to really understand what Apollinaire was going on about.

Or maybe it's only if you're on my bridge. That really is the cat's pyjamas. Everyone in London adopts a bridge. Some like the brutalist simplicity of Waterloo Bridge, others prefer the restrained decor of the Chelsea Bridge, only the Americans really go for Tower Bridge in a big way. And mine is the Albert Bridge. It's an unashamed, disneyfied wedding cake of a bridge. A fairground gondola unfurled. A gossamer spun, radioactive spider's web of a bridge.

The best moment of my day, in the short light of Winter, is seeing my bridge, all dressed up with nowhere to go, waiting for me at the end of the road. Welcoming me back over the swelling division between home and the land of strangers.

On a calm night the lights are mirrored perfectly on the flat pan of water below. When the river is choppy, they bobble and tremble as if they were about to dissolve in tears. When the mist rises, they form a ghostly halo above the treacherous deep.

This evening the striated clouds beribboned an oyster-pink sky and landing planes winked their lights as I crossed. For as long as I was passing over, I was neither here nor there. Borne high above the world on a braceleted arm. Free as the water passing through.

(Thanks to Colin Gregory Palmer for the picture)

Home-comfort chicken and leek pie

Ingredients:
A little bit of oil
1 stick celery
1 small onion
1 carrot
chicken
salt and pepper
any other herbs you have loitering (thyme, sage, marjoram, whatever. Not rosemary as it's too strong)
a knob of butter
a spoonful or two of plain flour
milk or cream or creme fraiche - whatever you have lurking in the fridge.
Some leeks - say 2 or 3 depending on big they are
Some parsley if you have it - doesn't matter too much if not
Potatoes
Butter
Any left over cream or milk

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees or 160 if you've got a powerful fan oven.

Peel the potatoes and put in a pan of cold water with salt. Bring to the boil and cook them while you poach the chicken. Don't worry about over cooking as you're going to mash them anyway.

Chop up the celery, onion and carrot and sweat in oil on a low heat until soft. Don't take too much time about it.

Take some chicken - like a packet of legs or wings, or those bits which are bigger but still not very expensive. If feeling very fragile you can do with just breast. I'd get the ones with the skin on though, because I believe that gives the broth better flavour.

Once the vegetables are soft add the chicken and whatever herbs you've got and cover with water. Bring to the boil and then simmer on a low heat for about 15 mins, less if breast meat is used. You'll see the chicken poach quickly and just stop cooking when it's cooked through.

Take out the chicken (careful! Hot!), take off skin and chop into pie-size pieces. Keep the chicken stock for something else later.

Chop up the leeks crossways into little discs, as thinly as you like. Use as much of the leek as you can - I like the green flecks in the pie.

Next heat the butter in a pan and when melted add the flour, stir carefully, making sure it cooks nicely (smells like biscuits) but don't let it burn. Add the milk or cream or whatever and stir like crazy. Whisk if you need to get rid of lumps. Throw in the leeks and cook in the white sauce, adding more milk if you need to, for about 5 mins. They'll be cooked through I promise, but you have to stir them to stop the sauce burning. Add the chicken and some chopped up parsley if you have it, season with salt and pepper and put it in your pie dish.

The potatoes should be ready by now - if ready earlier, just drain and put back in the pan with the lid on to keep them hot. Mash them up with whatever you've got - butter, cream, a touch of milk (not too much) or my fave, creme fraiche. Add lots of pepper and some salt if needed.

Spread the mashed potatoes over the pie filling, spiking it up with a fork so that it catches and toasts nicely when cooking.

Cook it in the oven for about 45 mins.

Breathing clouds

According to the people who know, clouds are not fluffy duvets in the sky that you could roll around on for hours, if only you could get up there. They are just swirling patterns of condensed water vapour.

So they say, when warm, moist air rises into the atmosphere, it hits currents of cooler air. This causes the water droplets to condense and create white puffy shapes that look like cats' faces and trailing blankets, dragged along the sky by invisible celestial toddlers. Well, at least that's true for those clouds that look like the kind of thing angels and Greek gods would sit on.

Today I was pottering down the road, thinking about nothing much, and my breath was making smoky funnels in front of my face as I walked. Then it hit me, I was breathing clouds. As the warm moist air came out of my mouth, it hit the colder air around me and condensed into momentary cloud shapes, before joining all the rest of the air - or perhaps rising to meet the other clouds in the sky and add a tiny comma to their plump shapes.

And don't think that because they only last for a few seconds before floating apart that breath clouds are not real clouds. Apparently even the big ones have an average lifespan of only 30 minutes anyway. It's all the confirmation I needed to believe that I am indeed a force of nature. Thor, make way.

Patriarchy and the Chilcot Enquiry

Watching TV footage of the Chilcot enquiry last night (well, I say watching, I was footling about on the internet as I listened) I heard Tony Blair say he had no regrets about the invasion of Iraq - needless to say, in my amazement I didn't even look up from browsing Spring jackets. The crowd roared with wounded anger, sensing this was their cue for a speaking part. Again, not a flicker from me. I had found a rather nice denim model, not too pricy.

Now comes the interesting bit, Sir John Chilcot's voice boomed out "Be Quiet!" over the audience of bereaved parents, wounded soldiers and rabble-rousing journos. And there it was - immediate silence. I looked up from my idle browsing in irritation.

I had recognised it too - cutting through my random jumble of thoughts like a scythe. That bloody voice of male authority - deep, self assured, audible and commanding in even the loudest room. It was as if a silver backed baboon had lumbered into the savannah.

There's a certain quality of a certain kind of voice that resonates within all the rest of us and calls us to attention. The headteacher, the doctor, the successful businessman explaining his love for Pink Floyd on Desert Island Discs (making you think, simply through the suggestive power of his sonorous vowels, that maybe you love Pink Floyd too). They know they're right and they're always in the right, even when they're wrong.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I've grown up with this voice telling me what to do and it makes my teeth grate and the hairs on the nape of my neck stand on end. More than that, it makes me want to do wild rebellious and disruptive things, like run my nails down blackboards, throw my computer screen out of the fourth floor office window, jump around in front of moving traffic, whooping and tossing traffic cones.

This may all sound a bit unhinged and disproportionate to anyone out there reading, and if I wasn't busy contemplating paintballing The Oriental Club, I'd probably agree with you. But what disturbs me most is that I have the strong suspicion that if I'd been in that crowd, I too would have sat back down quietly, clutching my papers in impotent rage. Because I'd know that if I wanted to play with the big children I had to play nicely or go and sit outside.