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.