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.