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.