To all my friends and to those of you who have strayed on to my blog from God knows where, here's hoping 2007 will be a good year for all of us.

Time to thank some people here in the UK and elsewhere for encouraging me to get this thing going. You know who you are. Many thanks

The most dangerous Christmas present I have ever had came from a girlfriend, who, years ago, bought me an Atlas. An innocent paperback but a thorough time bomb of a present. No other gift has wrung so much out of me. Nor has any ever driven me to the precipitous, vertiginous distraction this one has. It beats the drum, I dance; it leads, I follow.

It has led me by the nose to strange and familiar places; to trek across mysterious and mundane worlds; to places of shattering boredom, to those of exhilaration, to others that have teetered on the edge of unpleasant; and encounters where I would have openly welcomed the comfort of others to have experienced (try a morning in a foreign Police station). What an overseer. Night after night snared by this damnable book.

A beautiful, intoxicating poison shudders through my veins, the instant I crack open this demon. Out of it's pages pushes a perfume of beguiling, enchanting names: Tashkent, Samarkand, Akron, New York, Odessa, Ushuaia, Pondicherry; the Plain of Jars. On and on and on. Names that are dangerous, seductive; all of them. Places that demand that the weak-willed character I am, has to go to, or at bare minimum, wrack his mind thinking of.

The whole book is a spider's web of unbreakable strength that I cannot struggle free of, however hard I try. I'm pinned down on to a page, tracing the route of a railway with my tremulous finger, my eyes flitting across the course of a river; worrying whether I can get from here to there without needing to go there. It's the Femme Fatale that lives on my bookcase, slipping off the shelf to stalk me through my flat. Every night a tug on the shoulder; try this, try that, go here, go there, and the worst of all - you know you want to. Enough ! Why do you keep reminding me?

In some way, shape, or form, I've shown each of the seven deadly travel sins, and on occasions, in malicious combination: -

Gloomy: "I'll never get there"
Worrisome about time: "there's not enough time left " Nothing like tracing a route out and hearing the rumble of time's winged chariot hurrying by.
Sweating: "How am I going to earn enough to be able to afford to go there…?"
Envious: "Wish I'd been there".
Feverish: "I must, I must go there!"
Gluttony: "...need to go to more places.
Wrath - "How much for a visa!"

Oh this is a bondage all right, I'm in deep here. The strange thing is, I like it. I'm complicit totally. I love flipping through the pages, idling over it's maps, wondering, pondering. It's almost another species of imagination, this atlas. Unimagined possibilities If this innocent looking paperback decides it's time, then I'll usually go, accepting naturally, there's money and time available.

A strange Christmas already and the big day still has n't arrived. I've never paid that much attention to the assertions that flow from the pens of the columnists that there is no time like this time for acutely foolhardy behaviour; ok, I know very well that Christmas disinhibits people, after all there's that hardy perennial - the bacchanalian office party, and it's embarassing, gossipy aftermath, but this year I've been privy to another world. In two days, I've seen people arrested, others fight in the street, and one youngster nervously spray paint graffiti on pristine white walls. Time of year driving aberrant behaviour or simply coincidence?

Of the two arrests, the first was in Shepherd's Bush late in the evening, for that time and for that part of town, hardly an unsual occurrence; still, a little low on drama, from my experience when a man or woman gets collared, and they're with their partner, then it's almost obligatory for their other half to roll along the street the way an exploding roman candle would chasing and banging on the side of the police van. In this instance, howver she was phlegm personified. Perhaps she'd seen it all before, then again, she may well have been shocked into silence, unable to clearly emote. We'll never know.

The notion of the criminal mastermind thrown aside and torn into pieces by the second person I saw arrested a day later and in a different, more affluent part of London, right outside the local Police station. Could n't you have found somewhere less conspicuous than the front door to Chiswick High Road station to pull off whatever piece of naughtiness it was you had in mind? Ah the criminal genius...

My fight...no, not one I was in, one I saw, happened this afternoon. Just a few blows, but we bystanders had enough evidence to guess the earlier part of the story. A cab pulled out of the torrent of traffic along Kensington Church Street and unpacked a hot-tempered youngish couple. He tried to trip her up as she stormed down the street, she, for her part, balled her hand into a fist, punched him on the back of the head, swore, then stepped smartly over to the other side of the road and vanished. Eight million people or thereabouts in London, ergo the same number of individual stories. I'll never know what the plot of this little drama revolves around, maybe the participants don't fully know themselves, but it's easy to guess the thrust of the narrative. And this is how they'll remember Christmas 2006 - the day we fought on the pavement.

Years ago, I had a meal with a girlfriend in a restaurant in New York, called, very simply, the Broadway Diner, hidden somewhere in the cluster of streets around the high west forties and Third Avenue. Unremarkable as an eating house, but, nevertheless firmly in the tradition of the Great American Diner, busily churning out the classics of American cuisine: meatloaf, burgers, ribs, chilli, turf 'n' surf. The food that built America. I've no idea whether it's still there, or if it's morphed into the local Gap now, it's some time since I've been in New York. But if it's still there, and even if it is n't, it still carries a memory.

We finished our meal, lingered for a while, drinking coffee, idly watching the world go by, then finally called for the cheque, paid the cashier, and opened the door ready to jump back in to brassy, blaring Manhattan. We were, in fact, already one foot out into that world, when our waiter yelled across the restaurant in a voice that could have comfortably sliced through steel or stripped paint from walls, that: "... in New York, no one, but no one, ever leaves less than 15% tip ! " Some rebuke! Had we? Definitely seemed like it from his aggrieved reaction. But neither of us could actually remember, whiplashed into silence by his outburst, and thrown straight into one of those wild animal caught in the headlights moments. Each of us frozen. Stunned. But let me explain that in a little more detail in my case; it was n't his eccentric, left field approach to customer relations, I've seen worse things, seen them go physical even, harsh words, a fist, although, thank God, I've never personally experienced that particular level of...uh... service. What got me was that I lacked, completely, the wherewithal to send a zinger back. There was nothing hot and sizzling to throw off the griddle of my righteous indignation his way. Nothing.

Exit Archimedes and girlfriend like two embarrassed and forlorn sheep, abandoned by the flock. Oh to have been able to call down the soul of Oscar Wilde or Churchill, or even a stand-up comic, and be handed just one custom made retort, a catch-all for use at a time like this. Nope, not a thing. Yet another instance of that sad, unbreakable rule of life that only after the event, and usually too long after, is it that the perfectly formed barbed reply takes shape. Why the time delay? Why could n't I have spun back on my heel and archly flung back that we were two location scouts busily eyeing up possible venues for the next Bond movie, and the Broadway Diner had looked good, but really, what do you think I'm going to be telling Cubby Broccoli now...

To a friend: we are born disadvantaged; we do not have the gift to see us as others do

There's a point on my daily journey to the office, when I step from one world and into another. It's not marked or sign-posted, this is n't being ferried across the Styx, it's quieter, but it tells stories in it's own fashion. The one I read Monday to Friday when I'm passing through is clear cut: how affluence has the ability to slip into an area of no especial beauty - let's call them rough diamonds - and remould it, polish it, until it's a different shape; it's an environmental change without anything really structural happening. Buildings stay the same, or at least the exteriors do, interiors are always in flux. A time traveller coming to visit the area from fifty years ago would still recognise the streets, they would still be able to navigate.

But if they walked these streets, would they find kindred spirits now? Doubtful. That world is buried. Reborn as something else. As the newspaper shops, grocers and general shops have fallen one by one to galleries, exquisite kitchen shops and glamourous dress shops, so has the demographics. The old audience is gone; it's bankers and high flying city people now. There's always a brace or two of chauffeurs parked on the streets, engines idling, in the morning. Everything around Clarendon Cross (and this is the transition zone) completely reflects their sentiments and tastes. Just one place vaguely of any value for the mythical time-traveller of fifty years ago: a stately galleon of a wine bar. They could get a drink there, at least.

There are still flakes of the past that swirl by on occasion. I ran into a flurry some time ago, it was early in the morning and I'd just stepped into this new world. Outside the remnants of an old shop, now a house, I could see an old man in slippers and wearing pyjamas, with a coat thrown over his shoulders, the front door open. He came towards me, looking bewildered and lost, I remember for no particular reason his long grey whiskers; pointing to his watch, he asked me if the banks were open. No, they would n't be for hours, I said. Are you ok? Do you want me to take you home? I asked. I'm fine, you go to work, he replied. He was n't, he was a man lost in another world. I waited a few moments and he eventually returned to the doorway of his house.

I have n't seen him since - I hope he's well and in good care - he mentioned he lived with his sister.

He was from an older era, before gentrification, I could tell that. I wondered and still do, whether he hears the sounds of today, or is it the images and sounds of an earlier Clarendon Cross buried into the walls and bricks he's hearing. I've written about streets having ghosts before, memories, things are soaked into the walls and pavement, which are only audible and visible to whoever it was who experienced them originally, but they are there, they don't go.

A few weeks ago I had a long discussion about mathematics with someone. It's a not a subject I can claim any deep knowledge - other than the basics - it had simply arisen out of a long conversation that had free-wheeled almost over an entire day. Both of us were sharing a compartment on a train which had left Beijing early in the morning bound for Ulan Bataar, where we due to arrive the following day.

The conversation mirrored the contours of the landscape the train took us past: social, precise, exchanging names, whilst we passed through the orderly Chinese capital; then more relaxed and open, as the train negotiated the blurred interfaces between city and suburb, then suburb and countryside; finally becoming more extended and abstract, suiting the openness and simple vastness of the country the train was pulling us through.

No architectural blueprints exist for conversations, you don't design them; they happen. That's how we ended up debating mathematics. Not unexpected that we would touch on this however, my traveling companion for this particular journey was a retired French-Canadian maths teacher and an indefatigable, hard-core traveler to boot, who had sold up completely to travel for a year in Asia.

The point we had reached at this stage was Zero (the mathematical term and not in the sense that the conversation had been fully mined out), and she was recounting it's history. That's right, numbers have histories. Zero, apparently is a technical invention, it came after the others in the number range. It's there so we have something to express the concept of Nothing.

So many things are taken for granted that it's difficult to imagine how it would be without them. Take a world without zero for instance. No one would ever be millionaires and some birthdays would lose their emotional sting - no one would ever be Forty. Idiomatic language would be struggling: no more zeroing in, or out, and certainly no more "We invade at zero hour !" (we did, it's now going to be at twenty past). Picture trying to explain to someone what naught or blank meant, then try zilch and zip. The awfulness that Ground Zero evokes would be gone (Like millions elsewhere I wish we had never had to use this expression in it's current context).

Funny, I often wonder about a world where there's something missing that I enjoy - chocolate, coffee, especially. But these are things that I take active interest in, I look for them, I search for them. When it's a case of trying to imagine the absence of something so deeply embedded into human thinking as to be virtually invisible like zero, and which is part of our intellectual DNA, then that's much harder. We can't live without it.

I've no Cowboy gene, it passed me by, it took a look, then walked on; but whilst I was away, I rode a horse. Just for a short time. There are, I realise, prettier sights to see in life than me clinging uncertainly to the neck of a strapping, muscular Mongolian horse. I know that, but you do what you do.

We plodded around in the main: up a hill, pattered along a dirt track, wandered over to meet some fellow horses, altogether nothing too awkward for the novice saddlesman. Yet, it's well known these beasts can accelerate though, and the thought was always there that if I do something I should n't then we're nothing more than a blur streaking across the Gobi Desert.

How the horse felt about all of this, God knows. Probably a good thing they can't talk as I said in an e-mail to someone.

The streets they are a-changin...but it would be nice if they did n't in some cases. Occasionally, I spend a few days in Chiswick; I can't claim residency status, but I feel I have accumulated enough time under my belt, to at least give me the sense of an emotional stake in the place. Nice area, comfortable, I like it. One day, I'll break camp and leave the inner city and retire here. It's rural compared to where I live. I mean it: there’s grass, trees, dogs on leads, it’s that kind of place.

Even in this relative Eden, though, there's a worm in the bud. Looming across the High Street is the shadow of a figure in a starched white apron bearing an espresso. Brasseries have arrived. In force. Popping up like mushrooms after the rain. For the small restaurant and café owners, who in my view give Chiswick it's unique signature, this can only be like having a factory fishing ship permanently moored outside. Passing trade snapped up, swallowed right in front of them. And all they’ll end up aspiring to, before no doubt eventually expiring, is a few scraps thrown over the side of these brooding monsters. Morsels fought over after the feast.

I saw their futures begin to shape a few nights ago: odd tables occupied, more staff than customers, pretty bleak. Nearby, a honey pot brasserie buzzed and hummed. How long before parts of the High Street assume the appearance of an abandoned Western stage set: doors swinging loosely, tumbleweed cannoning against empty store fronts, leaves heaped up by the wind, ghosts of diners past wandering through boarded-up restaurants.

Surely Chiswick needs a breather from any more juggernaut brasseries parking up on the High Street?

Any different where I call home ? Please, I wish. I live near Portobello Road which is curdling in front of my eyes; the corporates are slowly tunneling into this quirky and goofy and charming Souk. Today exotica, tomorrow a shopping mall? Please no. I can’t cross my fingers any tighter – the circulation’s hurting.

London's shoppers need somewhere tart, somewhere piquant, somewhere for quirky odds and sods. Let Bluewater and Thurrock do what they do best, and Portobello what it does. Two different shopping experiences, let's ensure it stays that way.

Portobello Road needs whatever the equivalent of endangered species recognition is for wacky street markets right now. West London's Bazaar can't be covered in the equivalent of shopping kudzu vine : more mobile phone shops, chain boutiques, franchised coffee outlets ….

You think I’m being precious writing just about these two areas? These are the places I know. As sure as eggs are eggs, there’ll be somewhere close to your heart that’s going the same way.

My plea to the developers and landlords. C'mon guys, leave these places alone. We need to be able to buy light bulbs and potatoes just as much as we need to idly spend hours pushing wild sea bass around a plate. Don't think I don't enjoy dropping into these places, I do, but let's get sensible.

There's a number of phenomena that I would welcome a serious study into; I'd even do it myself if there was money and time available. Back in the office after three weeks away has put this one right to the top of the pile, it's virtually the unwritten First Law of Work: if it can go wrong, it will. Atom spilt, penicillin discovered, Man on the Moon, so what about this one, should n't this be the next big breakthough?

Today was a great day for this to show itself in all it's ragged glory. Got into the office, behind the laptop, and felt like a stalled car - head on impact, shunted from the back, hit on both sides. Dazed and confused for the rest of the day.

I'm having a couple of weeks off from blogging. This is the time of year when I take my main holiday. Why November? Well, two things mainly. It's cheaper and kids are back at school. Normal service resumes the end of November.

Assumptions, don't you just love 'em. Things taken as factual on the thinnest basis; could be a glance, or an overheard conversation, even a snatched look at the headline of someone's else paper on the tube, and before you know it that's become all you really need to know. Subject mastered without trying. Like dehydrated food, add some hot water, and it's close to what it looks like on the pack, but it sure does n't taste like proper food. Where's the taste? That's the drawback of assuming - you miss the subtleties of flavour, the zest and zing, the nuances, the textures.

Assumptio ergo sum? Might as well be for a lot of people. Take a look at this essay that a friend wrote and see what I mean. My final words on assumptions, simple - just say no. Loudly. They're not good for you. Think of them as free radicals. Do you want them buzzing around?

"Three years ago I published my first novel. Set in 1984 Manhattan, Christopher tells the story of a young man struggling to revive his hope and idealism after they have been trampled to death by his unfaithful actress-wife. What sets the novel apart from the hundreds of other adulterous-actress survival yarns published each year is that it is narrated by Christopher's next-door neighbour – a fat, balding, middle-aged, erudite, chemically imbalanced, alcoholic gay man named B.K. Troop.Fuelled by thwarted lust for his hopelessly straight neighbour, B.K. narrates both Christopher's outer and inner life – a point of view which B.K. immodestly dubs the "first-person virtually omniscient.

"Despite my female name and passion for antiques, I am a straight male, yet it had never occurred to me that letting a gay man narrate my novel was a big deal, but it was.When my straight male friends read the manuscript, most reacted with genuine alarm, some with horror. Was I insane? What if people confused me with B.K.? What if people thought I was gay? This struck me as absurd. For years, I had been writing screenplays about women without anyone ever accusing me of being a woman. (Five minutes in a bright room with me naked and it's fairly obvious that I'm not.)

A few weeks later the book sold to Broadway Books, but before the good news had even sunk in, my straight female agent confessed to me that the gay male editor who had bought it was so pleased to have discovered a gay author that she had done nothing to clear up the misunderstanding. She said that if I knew what was good for me I would not breathe a word to him of my heterosexuality. It wasn't that she wanted me to lie, exactly. It was more a matter of ‘Don't tell, don't tell'.

As I am candid to a fault, the thought of living a lie, even one of omission, was nightmarish to me, but then I reminded myself that I had a right to my privacy and that an author's sexual preference really ought to have nothing to do with the acceptance of his work. If readers were so narrow-minded as to hold my straightness against me, then they weren't entitled to the truth. It's not like I chose the damn lifestyle. I mean, given its lack of good taste and of easy sex, who would?

I agreed to the plan.

Luckily, it seemed pretty easy to pull off, as my editor and I lived on opposite coasts and I speak with a subtle lisp. Things got dicey, however, during our very first phone call, when he asked what I thought of Fag Hag. He was stunned when I told him that I had never heard of it. "What is it?" I asked. "A girl band?" Turns out, it's a novel.

Weeks later, he was equally gobsmacked when I confessed that I had never watched a single episode of The Golden Girls. In midsummer, I could actually hear his sneer through the phone when I let slip my passion for the Cleveland Indians. He considered baseball "trashy."

After each of these awkward moments, I considered flinging open the closet door, but now, more than embarrassed, I was afraid. You see, I had begun writing my second novel, and it, too, was narrated by B.K. Troop. The last thing I wanted to do was unqueer a possible sequel deal.

It is one thing for a straight author to write a novel with a gay narrator, and quite another for him to do it twice. This became clear to me when I told my straight male friends about my next novel - The House Beautiful.

In this book, set four years later, B.K. Troop inherits a Manhattan brownstone and, in order to afford the upkeep, rents out rooms to young artists, to whom he might serve as mentor, if not muse. The fact that all of the tenants are straight (except for one gorgeous promiscuous lesbian) was, I soon learned, beside the point.My friends - even the most liberal of them - were flabbergasted that I was actually reinvesting in B.K. “Why not go all the way”, they asked, “and make it a friggin' trilogy? In fact, why not move to Key West and open a B&B?” Right. Like I'd move my antiques to hurricane country.

One afternoon, before Christopher had even arrived in bookstores, I casually mentioned to my editor that I had met a certain movie star at a party, and he replied, "Oh, I love him. Is he one of us?" A howling silence followed. I sighed and came clean.Although he was shocked by the news, and a bit embarrassed, he was remarkably good-natured about it, and wanted to know all about what had possessed me to write two books with a gay narrator.My answer was simple: ‘B.K.’ And it was true. When a character stands up and starts walking around, you don't question it; you type. To do anything else is the height of creative folly, not to mention ingratitude.

When Christopher came out, the gay press was kind. The Advocate picked it as one of the best reads of the summer. The Chicago Free Press called it "one page after another of witty, outrageous, raunchy, insightful, tender, and romantic prose." Instinct warned: "You'll find yourself cracking up and thanking higher powers that you aren't this much of a flaming queen!"The mainstream press was just as enthusiastic when they deigned to review it, but they rarely did, because it had already been branded gay fiction. A pink triangle might as well have been seared into its spine. Borders and other chain stores relegated it to the gay section in back.

Although I was honoured to be receiving so much support from the gay community, to have my book defined in this way made no sense to me. If Christopher is gay fiction, does that make Oliver Twist orphan fiction? Is Moby Dick whale fiction? Is Orlando dyke fiction?Okay, forget that last one.

Now, three years later, The House Beautiful is about to arrive in a bookstore near you. Despite the fact that on my website and in interviews I am officially out of the straight closet, the generous support of the gay literary community has not wavered.A gay online literary journal is publishing an excerpt, gay publications are reviewing it and I am reading and signing at gay bookstores.

If only the mainstream literary community were as gracious, openhearted, and inclusive toward gay authors. Alas, that day seems far away. The sad fact is that literature with gay protagonists is, if not ignored, ghettoized - unless, of course, it inspires a Hollywood movie starring straight people.As for my own literary future, friends ask me what's next, and, without reservation, I break the exciting news: Another B.K. Troop novel, the last in the trilogy.

Find out more at www.allisonburnett.com."

"I am the smartest man in the room...". I don't know whether Jeffrey Skilling, the disgraced, soon to be incarcerated ex- Enron chief ever said these words, or if they were appended as evidence of hubris. But I like it, it's appropriate because I think I am that man, that person. Just not in the same way as he apparently thought of himself.

So why have I pinned this label on to myself? It's self awareness, this: I don't like stress, especially if it's work related. Forget who said this exactly, though I'm leaning towards Plato, but the sense of being smart that I'm steering towards necessitates this - "Know Thyself" -a fine, precise sentiment.

In many ways I do, in more I don't, remember we are infinitely complex personalities, fragile and imperfect. I do know that I never want the chest pains or near panic attacks or the need to take drastic steps to lower seriously elevated blood pressure which two of my colleagues very recently slipped into conversations earlier this week.

Knowing what I can do, the complete awareness of what my upper operating limit is, beyond which I can purposefully do no more, along with what to do when the stress dashboard starts to flash red does in such a strange way comfort me.

The rule of thumb is that one year working in the internet business is roughly equivalent to ten human years. Don't ask where that statistic came from. Not out of an actuarial table that's for sure. Exaggeration? I'll leave that to you to decide. No, that's simply just how it seems some days. My bones creak, my eyes ache, my ears ring, my fingers, mere stumps, why not? After all, I've got six years under my belt already.

There are times when I feel a kinship with those aged, venerable and gnarled Galapagos Turtles, clambering slowly through the raucous surf before resting immobile on the beach; emblems from a time before recorded time. All around them people stand in awe, thinking, wondering, why if only these vastly old creatures could talk, then what stories they must have. Indeed, what stories we have. But we're mute sadly, or it could be we simply are n't fluent in the right language, so no one hears our stories, our cautions. And it's the past that get's repeated. The past mistakes, by the way.

Sadness only needs a few words to announce itself. I think I heard some of the saddest today. Six austere, plain words, with a collective and depthless potency far beyond their individual simplicity - "I can't make you love me". How hard is that for any of us to realise, let alone say. It's the voice of a desolate heart speaking. The clouds have shifted and now it's clear, that a cherished hope can go no further, it's too deep in the sand of someone else's indifference, their reluctance, their obstinacy, or just their wish to keep things on a cooler heat.

These words sneaked into me one by one, fragments of a song playing very softly in a bookshop. I wish knew who the singer was, even the name of the song. This is almost the oath of membership for a club no one wants to be a member of.

Men and sheds and Men and lists are two subjects I stay away from. Supposed to be elements of maledom. Really? I aim to keep clear of them. Sheds are alien to me, have never played any part in my life. There was no way they could anyway in my early days; born in a council flat in the North of England, no garden, there was no oppportunity. Nor have I ever hankered to stay for hours on end in a small wooden box, even if it does have a door and windows. What's the point? Even moles come out for air.

Lists are the same. I don't see any reason for anyone to carefully, in my eyes pedantically, itemise their top ten albums, top fifty cars, top anything. Nick Hornby fetished this behaviour, so for a while, in the bizarre and overexcited manner that only media hype can attain, list making actually became fashionable. Why? Still is in some magazines. Top thirty things to do before you're thirty. This is n't fun, it's prescriptive, do this, do that. Not too good for anyone with anxiety either "I've not done these yet....why? Something's wrong! ".

Don't think I'm fundamentalist on this point, I do myself actually have a list - it's not top ten style, though. Not anywhere as dramatic. It's the stuff I really need to do, that I should n't forget, must not forget; pole position, right at the top is "remember to go to work", and straight underneath that is " stay awake, it's only eight hours." You can understand these are important. If I think about, that's not even a list, it's really a set of exhortations. It's do this or tie a knot in my hankerchief.

I have, because it's known that I'm a keen reader, been asked by many people, which of all the books I've read are my favourites. List like, don't you think. I shy away from that, not the way a woodland animal withdraws before the sound of humans, no, more basic, I can't do it. It's as if I've been questioned on the shape of a snowflake, one from last year as well. Impossible. Books can't be listed. They're about the mood they evoke; the drama of the writing; distinct, defined characters with unruly, uncommon, unusual inner lives; prose that has to be copied into a commonplace book because of the sheer elegance of the writing. It's about externals: what was happening at the time you cracked open the pages and settled into reading it; about where you where, who you were with, or were n't. Is there anything harder to classify and sort into priorities?

Still, if I'm pressed, been button-holed by someone who really will not take no as answer, then I'll put forward one book that I've enjoyed immensely, mainly because it's hit all the buttons. Herzog by Saul Bellow. Been in and out of that for over twenty - five years. It's a book I enjoy, not the top of any list.

Strange that you don't notice things until they've almost gone. Sad. Odd, too, when you finally recognise what it is that's actually disappearing and right in front of your eyes. I had that "awakening" whilst I was walking in the area where I live. I suddenly realised that nearly all the launderettes had closed. Accepted that for some people this probably does n't mean anything; for me, it does, and it's not just that a local business has fallen by the wayside, there's more in there, personal, social as well.

The morning, or on occasions, the evening, at the launderette was a regular event during my early years in London. I had a tiny bedsit, with room enough for a bed, a table and chair, along with a semblance of a kitchen - two gas rings and a fridge that hummed and clunked. Nothing else in there. No more space. So that was it, walk to the nearest launderette with a bagful of coins. I must have read thousands of books sat on a hard wooden bench, lulled by the sound of the machines turning round and round, or patiently waiting for a dryer to come free.

After a few years, I bought somewhere, and a few years after doing that, when I still trudged to the launderette (could n't quite break the near tradition I'd fallen into for one thing along with a dire shortage of money for another), I bought a washing machine. Today, the launderette is an alien experience. In that personal sense, which I mentioned earlier, it's a stage in my life marked as over.

In those early days, there were countless people like me, living in similar rooms, having to to make the same commitment to the local laundry. What happened to all of us is the consequence of a changing demographic as much as it is a tale of personal evolution. Simply this. Bedsitland disappeared. Today it might as well be talked about in the same way as Lyonesse is. It's that relevant. Bricks and mortar have transformed their mundane state to become currencies. Those houses which were once chopped and diced into small rooms, each with it's own tenant - gone. All rebuilt and rewoven into beautiful, elegant apartments. Nothing there any longer to support the local launderettes. No need for them.

This is n't intended to be an elegy. Things change, that's life.

I don't think I've ever seen so many pregnant women in the City as I have recently. It struck me a couple of days ago, walking past St Paul's on my way to Fleet Street. There were hale and hearty bumps on every corner, crossing every street; it was wonderful to see.

But the profusion, what happened four or five months ago? Something did, strong enough, or to be cheesy about it, potent enough, to change countless lives forever. Traditionally I might have erred towards some big sporting success. Thinking about it logically that can't be the case, much of this has got to have origins earlier than this year's World Cup. Then there's this: big sporting victory equals celebration equals drunkeness. And it's the same ritualised behaviour when events go into reverse and it's a big sporting defeat. Yep, this all means one thing: an incapable man...

Where did the four or five months estimate come from? Me guessing really. I know when a bump is nearly touching the ground, it's time for me to rip off my shirt and tear it into pieces, while someone else shouts for hot water. Well, that's what men always do at these times in the Westerns. So, if the bump is kind of at a right angle, maybe that's half way there?

Plenty of gas and air remember. No, not for you future mums...for your panic stricken, sweating partner instead. You're going to be fine. Happy Birth Days to all of you.

Damned with faint phrase? Who cares. Get to a certain time in your life and you'll take both and ask no questions. Like me today. Someone told me that I was in good shape for a man my age. I'm north of forty by the way, not that far, nearly midpoint.

Anyway, I heard the first part, and preened inwardly; the depth charge came a few seconds later, with the last part of the sentence. For a moment, I became Methuselah, wizened, haggard, yes...ancient. But did n't they say I was in good shape? Can still touch my toes even if my body hair is marching to places where it was n't ten years ago and forsaking the places it used to be in. So kind of comforting. Kind of...

It was some time before it was my turn to sit in the chair. I'd worked my way through the magazines and papers that Reno scatters around his barber shop for people to while away the wait, stared idly for a few minutes at the traffic hurrying around Holland Park roundabout, all the time listening to him chatting as he worked steadily with his scissors and clippers. Waiting can be a questions of compromises; you do things, often from boredom, that you'd never do normally. I did. I turned to my right and picked up the only piece of newsprint I had n't touched. It was the Daily Mail. Not something I do regularly. Let's put it this way: it's a question of taste. We don't agree, we don't get on. Some relationships are like that

Their point of view and mine don't touch in anyway. Well, that's not entirely correct, I'm prepared to agree with them on football results, and sometimes the weather forecast, only, though, after I've stuck my head out of the window and verified for myself, but that's as far as we can go. It's a little too shrill for my Guardianista ears for one thing; blimpish, choleric prose for another; very traditional too, life was always better fifty years ago. Always. Places were known then. I think in their heart of hearts they rue feudalism passing. Squires, manor houses, doffing caps, that kind of thing.

And does it know how to champion grievance and belittle at the same time? No contenders left standing here. If you're American and reading this, then imagine Fox News with pages and ink, then you'll get the sense of what they're all about.

The headline shrieked just as it had done the previous day, and no doubt would on the next and the one after that. Yet, it got me thinking. Not about the article, or even what was in the rest of the paper; no, something altogether different. This: the Daily Mail Fridge magnet series. Make a Daily Mail headline on your fridge door using their favourite trigger words. The permutations are immense. It'd be pretty outspoken too. Might end up peeling a couple of layers off the fridge door.

Imagine what you could with these words, for instance, I've seen them appear over the years in their most emboldened font: there's betrayl - they like that; or anger and outrage; farce, yes, they are keen on that word, seen it very recently; then's these close relatives, fiasco, chaos, and crisis. Bungling is another frequent guest on their front page, usually preceding minister or department. Cynical and hypocritical get in there as well.

Then there are these words, the bad words, never to be used when children are around, or servants (it's that kind of paper, or feels it is). These are the Devil's works, the snares that always hobble this country, or at least if you follow their editorials, that is: Europe, and wait for it the baddest of all....Brussels. Oh, I'm shivering. The taboo word.

Nearly forgot, have to have some quotation marks as well for those times when they want to make a point. Important, might have to be sarcastic, even ironic, according to circumstances...you would n't mock though, would you. Would you?

What do you think, will fridge magnets like this find a market, or should I leave musing and simply get my haircut?

Come, friendly ghosts. Where are you? Come out to me. I was thinking of you walking along Kensington High Street earlier this evening. It does n't take anything for me to experience you again, just to turn a corner, or pass a particular building, and there you are, rising to meet me - affectionate echoes of those happy moments that have happened at some point of the twenty years I've known this street. You are steeped into the buildings and into the pavement. Deep and sustaining.

It's the one area in London where the memories of happy, warm, and exciting times overwhelm the neutral, or on occasion, those that are gloomier and bluer. Why is that? I really don't know. Perhaps, I suspect, it's because I've never worked around there; the route to work is a story all on it's own, not one, either, that has a regular joy to it. But here, it's only ever been pleasure.

Probably the happiest moment I've ever had, happened here. A wonderful night some years ago, (not too many, I like history, but I don't live in the past. An optimist still), in a quiet wine bar, with someone I care for a lot. Unearthly contentment. The wine bar has gone now, it's something else; it does n't matter, all I have to do is look at where it was because the glow of that evening never goes. It's like the song writers say: "you can't take that away from me".

Working. Hallelujah. Not me, no, my laptop. It's been hors de combat for nearly five days. I've been running around like a frantic parent trying to get a kidney for their ailing child, except the grail has been a battery, and one I trust will not spontaneously combust either. Thank God for Tottenham Court Road; if there's ever a souk for PCs, software, peripherals, that's it. That's where I got the kidney. Just keep pumping, old feller, that's all you gotta do.

Diets, do they work? Nah, don't even think about it. Nowhere near. They're ridiculous. I've not actually been on one, more that I've been selective about what to eat and what not to, than anything else. But the stories that I keep hearing about people falling off the diet wagon are as suitable for me as for them. Three weeks ago, I decided to stop eating chocolate. Pretty easy to do, like any on / off addict, I knew I could do it simply because I had done it before. You can read my history as a chocolate fiend in that one sentence.

The devil never leaves you, regardless of hard you renounce him. All the time, it's been there, the back of my mind: sometimes self congratulation, "gone so long, what a boy"; occasionally, leering at me with the "come on, you know you what to" smirk.

Anyway tonight, after the gym, it's always after the gym, my weakest time (I could, I suppose, pin the fall on exercise), I wandered into the local corner shop, fifty pence on the counter, and that's it. End of embargo. The lucky bar, the chosen one knew what to say, the old sweet talk: "where have you been all this time? we've missed you" Indeed, where have I been. Diets, food restrictions, call them what you want, they don't work, that's the common thread through all of them. I accept the necessity for them in certain specified cases, and these are inevitably medical, allergies or toxic reactions. But in general, no, they don't work; simply accentuates the hunger. Forbidden fruits always, but always, taste sweeter.

As for me, all I have to keep doing is walk on the right side of the line. Stay moderate, not sink back into the bad habits of four, five bar a day excess.

Until a few hundred years ago, the loudest noise, probably anyone would experience during their entire life would have been the occasional clap of thunder. Frightening, undoubtably, especially for the pious and true believers, but a pretty rare event nonetheless. Ironic, don't you think, and definitely depressing, that for so many nowadays, this may well be the quietest external noise anyone will hear. And it's likely to be the case for the legions of souls condemned to sleep-starved half lives, impoverished by someone else's whimsical decision to turn up the volume at a time of their choosing (never ours, of course) and always, but always at the worst time. Night time.

How many of us, and I can count myself in here, have resembled, with so many sadly still caught this way, the unhappy dead, each one of us yearning for sanctuary and peace, night after night, twisting wretchedly, with nerves stretched tighter than cat gut, from the 4/4 beat thumping through the partition wall. From A to Z, and all places in between and around, it's a world of noise.

Like love, noise comes in countless guises. If only it could be as pleasant. Yes, love, I know can turn and curdle, but at least there's the heady joys of early days; the private jokes, furtive glances, shared secrets. So there's an effervescence about love in the beginning anyway, sometimes all the way to the end. Try appropriating that sense the first time next door's washing machine hits spin cycle after midnight. Where's the sonnet on noise? Ode on first hearing four adults gallop across your ceiling? Unlikely.

Not wanting to list the sources, or guises, of noise. Too many to even attempt. I'm going for the varieties. Two as far as I'm concerned: continuous and random impact. The latter is the nuclear weapon; once dropped, life is never the same, irrevocable change. But let me dispatch the former before anything else. What is continuous noise? Well, it's a sound at first so disturbing, that it generates the "I can't live with this" reaction almost immediately. However, this is the chameleon of noise, which, being so repetitive settles eventually into the background. With it's status changing from threat to neutral. It's simply there. An instance: I live very near to a major arterial road, pumping traffic in and out of Central London. The road throbs day and night. No respite. It hums. The first few weeks I lived here, was a time of absolute despair, throughly unhappy, bitterly thinking of all the other places I'd turned down to live where I was, and now look what I was getting. Today, years on, it's a non noise, I no longer register it. Slipping the Zen spectacles on, then I'm at one with it. In fact I only notice it when I can't hear any traffic; that's when the existential panic crawls in. No traffic on a major road. Something's wrong.

Random impact noise is the neighbour who, following a reasoning pattern known only to them decides they can only listen to the TV a few decibels short of loaded Jumbo taking off; or who inexplicably comes home in the small hours, lacking the skill to close the door, any door, without slamming it shut the way someone might slam a car door; it's the braying, honking voices drifting across the garden fence; screeching, drunken voices wafting in from a few doors away, night after night. And always, but always, the steady thud of music.

We reach accomodation with continuous noise, mainly for two reasons; firstly, the sheer fact of it being continuous, secondly, it's the same noise, same tone, same volume. Barely any variation. If only random impact worked the same way, it does n't; it's random first and foremost, so can happen anytime, then it's impact, the sound obviously, but what it does to our lives, and that's more important. We end up waiting for it to happen. Altering our lives to it's shape. There was one point in my life when things were so bad, I used to aim to get to bed before a certain time, believing that if I did, then I'd get a few hours under my belt, before one of my neighbours came home. That's not living, it's a half life.

I do n't know anyone, who at some point during their lives has not, or in some cases still do, suffered the miseries of living under the siege conditions that random impact noise dictates. Living as many of us do, cheek by jowl with others, entails as many responsibilities as it does rights, of which a degree of understanding on what constitutes reasonable behaviour is paramount. Frankly, for me, this means no loud music, foot stamping, door-banging, appliances being switched on after eleven. Mortals sleep between then and seven the next day usually. Respect that, please. Not much to ask. Buddhists, apparently, regard this as a time of spiritual degeneration - Samsara. I don't. I just think it's bloody noisy.

We had yet another crisis meeting at work last week. The issue is irrelevant, it'll be something different next week anyway, if experience is anything to go by. I only wish we'd approach these things differently. We should be telling the seniors: look, forget about it, relax, just chill, guy. Here's the saffron robe. Go back in your office, light a couple of scented candles, put on some Yogic chanting, or listen to the sound of whales, and bliss out. It'll pass. And if it does n't, then out come the drums, and we'll pound that bad boy away.

It's a thought.

I don't how I did this, well, I do in the sense I know what I did, but did n't think I'd have enough discipline to see it through, but I meditated myself to sleep. No real idea of how long it was before I went off, just that I did, and felt pretty blissed out when I got up. I needed it. Been to bed pretty late, no, very late every night, so pretty sleep starved by now. Only myself to blame. I've noticed you can only get a few hours decent rest in Chiswick before the planes start buzzing over in the early morning. This morning they seemd to be overhead particularly early. That woke me up, desperate to get some more hours under my belt, otherwise dead for the day, I did the focus on your breath thing. Gone. Out. Brilliant

Now and again, I spend a few days in Chiswick; I can't claim residency status, but I feel I have accumulated enough time under my belt, to at least give me the sense of an emotional stake in the place. Nice area, comfortable, I like it. One day, I'll break camp and leave the inner city and retire here. It's rural compared to where I live.

Yet, even in this relative Eden, there's worm in the bud. Looming across the High Street now is the shadow of a figure in a starched white apron bearing an espresso. Brasseries have arrived. Popping up like mushrooms after the rain. For the small restaurant and café owners, who in my eyes, give Chiswick it's signature, make it the special place it is, this can only be like having a factory fishing ship permanently moored outside. All passing trade snapped up and swallowed right in front of them. I saw their futures begin to shape a few nights ago: the odd table occupied, more staff than customers, pretty bleak. Nearby, a honey pot brasserie buzzed and hummed. How long before parts of the High Street assume the appearance of an abandoned Western stage set: doors swinging loosely, tumbleweed cannoning against empty store fronts, leaves heaped up by the wind, the ghosts of diners past wandering through closed restaurants.

C'mon guys, leave the High Streets alone. We need to be able to buy light bulbs and potatoes just as much as we need to idly spend hours pushing wild sea bass around a plate. Don't think I don't enjoy dropping into these places, I do, but let's get sensible. Surely Chiswick needs a breather from any more juggernaut brasseries parking up on the High Street?"

Hard-edged, authoritative, compelling, that's the nature of commerce. A true force of nature that does not, will not accept resistance on one hand - it's gonna get done, regardless; on the flip side, clearly in thrall ( in fear of ceding advantage no doubt) to what the other big beasts are up to: if they're doing it, then so are we and going to be in there just as hard, or harder, if it's contested territory which is in play.

Slowly, Portobello Road (close to where I live, therefore close to my heart) is being pasteurised; the corporates are slowly tunneling into this quirky and goofy and charming Souk. Today exotica, tomorrow a shopping mall? My fingers are crossed - please not. London's shoppers need somewhere tart, somewhere piquant, somewhere for quirky odds and sods. Let Bluewater and Thurrock do what they do best, and Portobello what it does. Two different shopping experiences, let's ensure it stays that way.

Portobello Road needs endangered species recognition right now. West London's Bazaar can't be covered in the equivalent of shopping kudzu vine - more mobile phone shops, chain boutiques, franchised coffee outlets .

If you value your literary homeland, and think of books as buildings, then join me in insisting on a preservation order for The House Beautiful. Built (written) by Allison Burnett, it has the depth, the width and the height to carry the Babel of tongues, confusions, emotions, crushes, and zinging barbed wit, which cascade from it's chief resident, BK Troop, as he pushes forwards his dream of transforming an inelegant, down at heel Brownstone into a low rent artists colony in Babylon... well Manhattan then.

The House Beautiful is the home of endangered species: believable, eccentric, willful, memorable, fully dimensioned characters, who could pop off the page, wipe the printers ink off them, and be one of us - maddened, unhappy, lustful, mouths agape as every green light turns puce before them, and as conflicted as the next person. Could you say this of Harry Potter, don't think so. Jay Mcinerney ? Bret Easton Ellis? Ian McEwen, doubt it, Martin Amis, don't get me started!

I got face to face for the first time with BK Troop a couple of years ago when I got hold of a copy of Christopher, the author's debut novel. Then I reeled...in elation, not in horror. At last a character so distinct, so marked, that it can only be an injustice that his name has n't become a synonym for some kind of mood or behaviour. Who can be as rancourous, can swagger with bitchy brio, twiddle his thumbs nervously, emote as keenly as any adolescent, possess an enviable faculty for whiplash wit, and seems to channel the soul not just of the Knight of the Doleful Countenance, but of Shakespeare's Malvolio, a little touch of William Burroughs, and the hissing whisper of Truman Capote, than Mr Troop. Tell me, 'cos I've yet to find them.

Of course, the worry is always - Second Album Syndrome - will the next album, play, novel be as stunning as the first. How common is it for our affections to be stolen the first time round, only for the artist to be painfully swimming ashore to an indifferent world from the shipwreck of their follow on piece. So, what do I think? It's like this, I'm scanning the horizon, and it's clear, not a thing, there's no one wading ashore. This is a great novel. The writing is enviable. And it seems to be coming to the author so effortlessly.

By ye words may ye be judged, so they say. Judge me, buy the book, I think I'm right. Try Amazon or go to http://www.allisonburnett.com

Appliance karma has not been in my favour recently. Tricky situation with my fridge earlier, whilst my laptop keeled over a week ago. Nothing grand guignol, no sparks, just gently faded away. I've brought it back to life time after time, but even my Lazarus like ways have an elastic limit. What I've been doing I know now was little more than triage; patch the fallen soldier up, make sure he's steady-ish on his feet, then throw a weary, ailing body back over the parapet. Can't go on anymore. It needs fundamental attention, and now I know what after asking a relative: a new battery. It's a good, hard-working (and hard-wearing too) laptop; time for me to be a responsible owner.

Sometime ago, I had dinner at someone's house. They had questions and wanted advice on a topic I have reasonable knowledge of. We worked through what it was they wanted to know at the same time as they prepared the meal. Clue to genders perhaps? I'm talking, they're talking and cooking. Men are n't gifted multi-taskers....

I know my friend does n't look on herself a great cook. Nor does it probably help that she hails from a tradition where the assumption is everyone can whip up a three star meal using locally sourced ingrdients in minutes. I'd like to her know this: you could be a Cordon Bleu chef, or find it troublesome simply boiling an egg, but, really, it's all irrelevant to me. You're a lovely woman, a great friend. That's why I like you.

Today was the last day in the office for someone I work with. Tuesday, they start with a very well known bank, and it's been a long road they've walked to get there. Altogether it took eight interviews. Why this number, no idea, nor do they probably, and I certainly don't know what went on in each of them. But after eight, you'd think the interviewers had pretty much got through to the core of the person they were hoping to pop the question to.

But what kind of questions did they actually ask? Job interviews, after all, are unreal; they're artifical states we enter willingly, or not in many cases, to get something. One side wants the job, whilst the other, it's the plain, simple reassurance they're going to get that ace for that particular place. In a sense, everyone involved wants to please the other (one more than the other, I'll agree).

Certainly some tough interviewers out there; I've twisted and turned in the wind limply, faced with some the things that have come my way, but they were n't real questions. Nothing based on what actually happens in that cockpit called the office. All the theoretical: "how would you deal with…if x happened ?" set-ups are easily batted away by the interviewee dipping into a portfolio of sanitised responses. Where's the upfront interviewer asking this: "your idea that you've sweated over for months has been casually stolen and passed off by someone else as theirs. How do you feel, no, how do you feel, tell me the mood, describe exactly what you would like to do? Don't hold back now. All out please"

An honest answer to a real question might stop some company hiring a dissembling sociopath who's memorised some form book on stock answers to standard questions.

In between the long idle moments in the office, there are work moments. But I always prefer the idle moments every time: I'm simply more productive. That's when it all comes together.

Somehow, I got wrapped into a conversation on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Took some work trawling the 'net before we eventually pinned them all down: Famine, War, Pestilence, and the Anti-Christ. As stark and as austere a set of symbols as you would imagine given they're key dramatis personae from the Book of Revelations.

That long idle moment spread a little longer, and I started to wonder what they might look like today. Who's going to be today's runners and riders in the Apocalypse Grand National ? What would represent today's great dilemmas, our collective aches and pains? And how would they look?

It's taken a bit of time, but I think I'm there. Here goes, here's the race card: Binge drinking; obesity; the ASBO; and finally, our dear friend, the Hoodie. The first too pissed to ride; the second, too fat to mount; the third, banned from going anywhere near a horse; the fourth, well, not much going to happen there, if even the horse crosses the road every time it sees you.

Are these good choices? Let me know.

Only a day away, but I don't think I can wait any longer. No, really, I can't. We're not supposed to go so long like this. Not today anyway. It's unnatural. And I'm a man as well, it's not good for us. I've got needs, I have an appetite. If I don't get it...God knows what'll happen. Even the guys in the Big Brother house get some relief. What about me!

I've gone a month without it. The hottest month, by the way since 1914, if the record books are right. It's not testimony to my survival skills either, more the primitive way I live, that's helped me cope. But I've found the end of my tether now, had enough.

Please deliver my fridge on the day you say you will. You don't know what it means to me. I want to stand in my kitchen on Wednesday, the proud owner of a sleek fridge that's packed to the gunnels with all the stuff I've not had for weeks: milk (skimmed, semi-skimmed, full fat - really I don't care); cheese, soft, hard, smelly; yoghurts packed into the door compartments; oh, and Butter, only convalasecents in 19th century novels live on dry toast, not 20th century office workers, waking up late. I want to hear a humming fridge on Wednesday evening happily cooling all of the stuff I've crammed it with.

Come on, Delivery people, make me happy.

Swine into pearls. Is it possible to spend an hour or so walking the busiest and blandest streets in any city, then go back to your hotel to write hundreds of pages of impressions, and pass it off as an image of the entire city? Magicking the most mundane street into a candidate for a World Heritage route. That's just the notion that a friend and I amused ourselves with wandering around Oslo. No, can't be done, it'd be something beyond waffle... and you know by the fact I've just written that, that yes, it actually has been. At least in a sense.

I found out today in yet another idle moment that DH Lawrence often rode into town, got the gist of the place, then holed up in a hotel to thrash out pages and pages; mostly as a method of exorcising his own demons.

And I thought this was a novel idea we'd had in Oslo. There are no new ideas. Confirmed.

There's a place even more expensive than London. I've just come back from there: it's called Norway. I was there for a long weekend with three friends, all of us hard core Londoners, steeled to high prices, gazumping, exorbitant costs when it comes to anything. But Norway stuns; it's impossible not to wince out loud at the eye watering expense of everything

The cheapest bottle of house wine - the very cheapest, the vin ordinaire, the stuff that you would take home in a plastic box from the corner shop - was £30. Maybe I'm picky, but for that price, I expect some theatre when the bottle is opened. I want to see flourishes, drama, that price insists on the cork being popped with some gusto, not unscrewed like a two litre bottle of diet coke being poured at a picnic.

However you cut it, education in the UK, is woeful. Really came home how bad this lunchtime, talking about language teaching with a Dutch colleague. My English is reasonable (native speaker, so there are certain expectations); French, I can handle; German, ok; Spanish not too bad. Competent enough in all of them - just - to order meals etc.

They, on the other hand, speak four languages fluently - their English is enviable, written and spoken. Learnt them all as part of the state curriculum, which additionally involved them reading 30 books in each of the four languages. Not soppy romances or kids primers either, but heavyweights like Camus, Sartre etc. I thought I was bold and new wave reading them in translation in my late teens, early twenties...but as a school kid and in the original?

I feel like a street urchin...well, I did, I have read two books in the original: Grimm's Fairy Tale and Le Petit Prince, some struggle though.

Baccalaureate system needed here. I can think of only one other developed country which has as primitive an educational system as ours. Please step forward, Uncle Sam.

"London is not romantic, no, London has the violence of a bolt of lightening ....(where) ...the pulse rises fast and plummets as quickly, things get done and undone in split second...". Agree, agree, agree! The city is a force you contend with. It is a game living in London. No start, no finish. You're plunged in. Who can outwit who first? You or this confounding, ravenous city?

Everything's a snake or ladder, or both. Especially dear old transport. There's a full tube map driven into my head (then again I am a man, that old "men can read maps thing"), just so I can re-route myself out of one dead-end, closed tube station for engineering works, or whatever obstacle it is, and get back on to the open road.

Knowing not just where to sit, but which carriage to aim for when the train pulls in is all part of the game too. But I'm not going to spill the beans on whereabouts to stand on the platform at Holland Park. My secret

The quote is from Agnes Catherine Poirier. Could n't have found anything better to sum up this city that can leave you breathless, infuriated, baffled, and deeply, deeply fond of, in the sweep of a few seconds.

I've spent six months or so working "virtually" with two people, one in India, the other, in America. Apart from a fleeting handshake in an office in Delhi with my Indian colleague, that's as far as any physical contact has gone - we've never all been around the same table, everything's been handled through phone calls, e-mails, and latterly, IM'ing.

Yes, you do build up pictures, it's like piecing a jigsaw together in a sense - the way an e-mail is worded might be a piece of sky; tone of voice on a call, a bit of the edge; a casual conversation before a business call starts could make a corner, and so on.

Today we finally met. Yet, it's not how close, or not, they were to my imagined picture I'm left with. Something much different. I could n't stop myself thinking on how it symbolised our relative economic clout - me, a Brit, or the Old World; my American colleague, on the other hand, with Today's World, figuratively, in their grasp; and together, the pair of us looking at our Indian colleague as the New World. Tomorrow's World. I could feel a baton being passed on.

I spent a month in India earlier this year. There was nothing I saw to undermine the idea that India is not en route to becoming an economic powerhouse. It can't be anything but. There's almost a communal sense of mission to educate, develop and uplift.

So Les bleus did n't "gagne le coupe du monde". A pity, I was hoping they might. Still, for reasons we all know that game continues to echo, which makes me wonder how long it is before "Zinedine" becomes a verb, or shorthand to describe a particular state of mind.

Sometimes I feel like throwing my hands right up in the air. I guess we've all had that sentiment at some point. But that simple gesture has changed it's shape over the years for me. The context has altered completely. As a youngster that would have been a serious display of uninhibited joy, maybe in a club, or at a gig. Recognised anywhere, just like the VISA card symbol.

Put a distance of twenty years or more between than and now, and it's all change. The message is different; I'm signalling pain (exasperation really). My grumpy nerve endings have been slapped and this is all I can do. There's nothing else.

To be, or not to be. That's as good a capsule description of indecision as I've ever come across. But what does it cost to actually be? Forget the metaphysics here. How much do we spend each day just being? Ourselves that is.

I'm not thinking of the top rung of Maslow's hierarchy, it's not self-actualisation I'm on about. It's much simpler: how much leaks out of purses and wallets just so we can be. Every morning, unfailingly, I leave the Tube Station outside where I work and head in the opposite direction, until I find a coffee shop. Ignoring any physiological, possibly psychological, needs that may also be present, my work day does n't start until I've gone through the paper and sunk a capuccino. This is me being me. And that costs me a couple of quid every day. Get the sense of being I'm aiming for?

Another example of beingness. I like chocolate; it's my glass of red wine, or pint before getting the train home, or cigarrette on the walk back from the shops. I don't do any of those three (well, an occasional wine), but when I break open that chocolate it's me being me, just as any of those other things are for others being themselves.

Confused? I'll try to explain this way: it's not existential being, or philosophical being, it's plain old human beings being, well, human. Doing things for no especial reason; you just do them, because if you did n't, it just would n't be you.

I reckon I spend around a fiver a day on being. Would I really be better off if I took a flask of coffee into work and read a freebie newspaper?

She's gone. Early this morning. Everything simply came to an end. All that time. We'd been together for sixteen years. Both of us knew that after that length of time, everything that could have been said, had been. There was nothing I could say to bring her back. Irrevocable. Broken down.

Opening the door last night, I knew something was wrong; she sounded different. Laboured, almost like she was on the point of sobbing, but managing to hold it back. But only just. And she was shaking, I'd never seen that before. That shocked me. What the hell had I done? When I'd left to go to work, she was fine, humming like she always did. It's true: lives's really can change in a heartbeat. Mine had. I went up to her. If anything that made it worse, the staccato, punctured noises seem to deepen. Why was she doing that? All of the days and nights we'd spent together, she'd never howled like that. Never howled at all, in fact. I reached out to her. Hot to the touch and sweating.

Yes, I'm a man, so I agree what I did next, might be unfeeling, harsh even, still would n't a woman do the same as I did? It was the only thing. There was nothing else. I bent over, almost on my knees, stretched my hand out... and unplugged her. My fridge breathed it's last fresh breath yesterday. I'd caught it in it's death throes. When a fridge has the inside temperature of a cooling oven, is shaking, and starting to drip, that's all you can do.

After a long and radical defrost - if electrical goods stores are looking for that extra customer wrap, then every fridge they sell should come with it's own pasta bowl, blunt table knife, and hammer, because for me there's no better tool kit than this when it comes to emergency defrosts. The pasta bowl of hot water left in the belly of the fridge to thaw the iceberg that's built up over the years, and the gentle tap, tap of the hammer on a blunt knife to loosen it all.

If I look in my kitchen right now, I simply see the beached hulk of an old friend. In a couple of days time, the council are going to turn up, take it away and inter it on some fridge mountain. Me, well, got to buy another. It's too hot to leave milk on the window ledge, and even if it was n't, it'd be too tempting for the local squirrels not to want try a dairy diet. Tomorrow, I have to be domestic, I have to buy a fridge.

Allez les bleus. Peut-etre peuvent ils vraiment gagner le coupe du monde!

It's unavoidable that you unconsciously absorb your workplace's jargon. Eight or more hours a day, the same people all talking in the same code. Inevitable. It's a part of the office (or wherever the location is: factory floor, workshop, studio) we all take home with us. We don't just take that, there's more; there's the gossip, the bitchiness, the scandal, the grievance. But that's really shortlived, you tell the story, seek solace or agreement, whatever, that's it. Done.

Jargon is different, at least it is for me. It seeps in, it stays. I don't consciously recycle what I've used or heard...well maybe if it's a real humdinger, then it's odds on I will. Perhaps it's just because I like words. I don't know, let's just say, there's probably more receptive ground for these words to take root than there is for others.

Recently, I heard some one in a meeting talk about "Agents of change". God only knows what the context was, I've long forgotten. The term has n't though. It lives and breathes as effectively in the private world as in the business world.

It's the term I use for those people who brush against in you in life, and without them knowing it, they change you forever. Something catalytic happens. A fuse is lit. They turn thoughts around, lives around in some cases. Clearer, sharper vision on things. I don't know what Dan Brown has in mind with his novel "Angels and Demons". I've not read it, the likelihood is I won't, nevertheless the title carries weight, and extending it beyond the literal, then there are Angels who help share the burden of life, the people we talk to, swap confidences, look for reassurance; the Demons, there the ones who provoke, who challenge us - go on, try it.

Yet neither transform; it's either guidance or stimulation, and that's it. In my experience, it's only these rare people, and they've no idea they carry this power, the agents of change, that truly change lives. There is nothing magical, or supernatural, they've no "gift". But somehow, you're changed after they bump into. Reawakened. I've only encountered a handful, and that's all it's been, of this rarest of creatures. I'm in their debt, they've turned me around

You know the occupational hazard that most readers face at some point? You get the idea you can do it. No, really you can. After all, some fairy dust must have spilled off the pages. You know about plots and characters and story arcs. And your business letters always get a reaction. So you have a go.

This is a very early "go" of mine.

First jobs are like first kisses, moments that are crystallised forever. I read that once in a lifestyle magazine in a dentist’s waiting room and it has never left me; the notion that a job is as memorable as a kiss. Should n’t it depend though on who, or even how you’re kissing? Look at it like this: a kiss could be the innocent excitement of lips brushing timidly for the first time, or it could be the roiling and flailing of tongues. Then there is the sink of incisors deep into the jugular, which is a kiss too in some eyes. That’s the one I got from my first job. It reared behind me, I stumbled and it pounced. That image always came to me in the moments of my truest despair, still does even now when the blue mist swirls around.

I had blown down from the North, as soft and guileless as a rosebud, into the big City, burning with the belief that I wanted to write and that I would, whatever the conditions. The harder the circumstances then surely the better for a wannabe author like me. My letters were always entertaining and amusing, everyone said that, and I had been conducting a ribald, energetic correspondence with an American for several years. Thus in my estimation, the groundwork was already there; foundations, robust and solid. All I needed was time….and money. Grub Street is not Easy street; it costs, however frugal you may think yourself.

In the early years of the eighties before it went all go-go and even bricklayers decided it was not worthwhile to get out of bed for less than a grand, jobs were difficult to get. So I felt elated and I suppose oddly proud to get past all the hurdles and race past everyone else to land a position as a management trainee. It sounded glorious, certainly to a prestige hungry young man like me. In the wider scheme of things, however, being a fast-track management trainee with a minor fast food chain did not score highly then, nor, I imagine does it now. A job, though is a job. And would it matter anyway, since I was other directed, wanting to write, and did n’t every writer at some point in his or her life scrape bottom for a time. Paying your dues, that’s how I looked at it.
Wearing the blue trousers that I had been told to buy as part of my uniform, I walked through the side door of the head office restaurant to start four weeks in fast food boot camp. I was not alone; there were three others who had survived the culling process that passed as an interview. At the time it felt curiously heartening to know that only so few of us had made it this far. Did I need any clearer sign than we were the best of the best? Of course it only occurred years later to me that there was absolutely nothing even vaguely commendable whatsoever about this. The Will to Power would never be sublimated through a bacon cheeseburger?

The four weeks were intended to fit the four of us out to be competent and effective aspirant restaurant managers. To get us there, we went through the grinder. Up at the crack of dawn and back home with the night owls, day after day. Each day guided by a tutor, who felt himself to be indebted to the Marine school of instruction, we explored a different aspect of burger restaurant fundamentals. Some days we would be stuck in restaurant basement slicing onions or feeding thirty pound bags of steak mince into machines that would spit out four ounce hamburger patties. Other days were "theory days" when we would all pore over the aesthetics of the perfectly dressed hamburger: mayonnaise on the on the bottom of the bun to seal it, followed by ketchup, tomatoes, onion rings and a fine lettuce leaf to hold it all down. Or chew pencils in rapt contemplation over the notion of the Ideal Fry; should we always strive towards it? For all purpose use or just special occasions? Did it even exist?

All of this in preparation for the moment when we would be summoned upstairs to receive the thumbs up or down on our prowess as fast food restaurant managers. You had to be very bad, very, very bad, to get the latter hand signal. No one failed. The company could not allow it. Fast food eats people. Anyone who falls through the front door and can stay upright for eight hours is fodder for this machine. But, of course, we did not know this, and so the days before selection saw us reduced to teeth-grinding wrecks, more so than the physical demands of the job could ever drive us to. Each of us believed that no resits were possible if we did not pass muster. The goal, the Holy Grail in fact, for each one of us was to be sent to a central London restaurant. The West End, just the sound of it alone was intoxicating, was where we all wanted to be. The West End hummed, it buzzed, it sang. The focus too, for London’s stranger, odder, weirder inhabitants. It was also where the longest, hardest hours were put in. Still, if there is one way to find things out, then for so many of us it might as well be the hard way.

I was a writer. That was the delusion that I dined on daily and fed others whenever they asked what I was hoping from life. So I approached my job in the manner that I expected every other writer would, trying to become the all Seeing Eye. Everything and anything would be grist to my writing mill. A good and noble intention, which stayed in place for all of a month before I bowed and then broke, shattered by long hours. I did try, though, at least for a time to keep a diary going. It reads like something written by one of those fictitious Soviet worker heroes, boastful and indomitable, before rapidly sliding into the tone of the diary of the damned. I can excuse my blushing these days, after all I was only a kid, but did I really write: "I have anger in my soul. Something like Ahab’s fury. Only I have replaced anger with the will to succeed" Did someone hit me over the head with the grill spatula before I wrote that? They have to have done, if I was able to write this titbit: "I have fire and brimstone in my blood. I want to do well. I’m proud of my grillwork." Dear God, a child

I don't the know fine detail about Chaos theory,. but I do know this: when you tug hard at one thing, you soon find it's connected to another, and another, and another...

A good chunk of my working day - and it can be all of it on occasions - is spent on conference calls. Sometimes I lead them, other times, I just chip in comments here and there, but usually, I simply listen. And if I said I did that with even with half an ear, I'd be way off the mark, because I don't. A conference call is a distributed, scattered way of working, usually done in isolation, no one around, and if there is, inevitably it's not someone you're working with, meaning no peer pressure to look "engaged". Face to face meetings demand you look at least awake. That's one thing. Then, since there's so many, they've become routine. The calendar's full of them. So, like brushing teeth, you do them without thinking. Mind numbing in a way. You're there, but you're not there.

Nature, always, abhors a vacuum. Something has to fill that attention gap during those third state conference calls - when all I'm doing is listening...inactively. I don't doodle. No, I while away the time thinking up imaginary business games. Like, Jumping to Conclusions for instance, or how about Kneejerking, or my personal favourite, The Crawl. I'm trying to come up with enough events for a decathlon. But I'm not including Back-stabbing, that's more Ancient Rome and the Gladiators.

From time to time, I might turn my hand to dreaming up new management jargon. I am convinced that anyone who uses business jargon really has no idea what it means, yet feels compelled to use whatever it is they've picked up at any opportunity. For some people, it's like the arms race, you've simply got to have more jargon to hand than the next person. I can do my job, I can't understand the jargon we use, though. I've given up. But not wanting to feel left behind, I've come up with my own - Keyhole Thinking is one, High Concept Thinking, the other. Don't ask me what's behind either because I've no idea. Who knows, however, there could be the One Minute Manager's guide to Keyhole Thinking eventually.

See what happens when the bulk of your working day is listening to disembodied voices hour after hour.

Football, I'm ok with it. I've watched some of the World Cup. Bit of this game, bit of that, some highlights. That's about it. Enough to keep a conversation going if someone buttonholes me.

Everyone tells me I should take more risks. Be on the edge more. Push some boundaries. So I did. I watched the England game. Never again. This is not managed risk, this is a health risk. How high can blood pressure go before irreversible damage?

I think I'd feel more at ease swimming with sharks.


.

Everything is a case of pros and cons, always got to be some give and take. For instance, I love the part of London where I live - it's bohemian, cosmopolitan, sleek and smooth in places, rafffish and edgy in others. Fundamentally, I look at it as culturally motivating. That's the side of the stone that faces the sun; if I flip it over, then I have to look at exactly where I live. My flat.

Small? Depends, really. For a Hobbit, ideal. A Middle Earth masterpiece. For a human, more challenging. It's trying to find furniture and appliances to fit the spaces I've got that's the problem.

Everything I've got is a couple centimetres less in some dimension than the standard factory product. For instance, the average cooker size is, say 80 centrimetres wide; mine is 79 centrimetres, since that's all the space I've got.

Try finding a cooker that size, or for that matter, a sofa, which is what I'm searching for right now. It's got to be a certain size, and no more. Naturally that certain size is less than industry standard.

After a while, sitting on the floor does n't mean anything any more; it's the norm. I don't want to get habituated to this, though. Sitting on the office floor, trying to master mind a conference call, is n't a career progressor.

I've never yearned for kids. It's not because I'm an only child; after all, innumerable only children have troops of kids. I don't know why. The longing has never been there. Perhaps I'm simply missing the parenting gene. Looks like the father marker got left out of the design specs in my case.

But that does n't mean I lack sympathy for anyone who is a parent. Those of my friends who are parents, whether it's in the first flush of parenting, or with those approaching the Scylla and Charybdis of kids in adolescence, they all get my utter admiration, my total respect. Watching their children change and grow over time, I see a concomitant transformation in them too. In the beginning it's abrupt, overnight, where they shed ego completely, with no thought of themselves any longer. It's a beautiful selflessness. Perfect. Whereas before birth, they might well have been utterly self-absorbed and led by ego, now it's resposnsibility and care, great care.

There are many who want to be in the same position, who themselves ache to be mothers or fathers, who want to take on the same burden of joy. When is it going to happen, and will it ever for some. Only a heart of stone could n't be moved. No ache can be shared, they can be discussed certainly, but one where it's an instinct that seems beyond fulfillment, must be almost unendurable. Explain how that must feel. I can't. There's no vocabulary to catch it.

This is an effect with, to me at least, a lot of causes. Three broad groupings though. Women let down by men. Simple. We've promised, never delivered. Second, biology, male and female. Finally, pernicious scare mongering, by the press mainly, on the lines of, as soon as a woman gets to X years, her fertility has dropped by Y %; or that it is not just damaging, but actually outrageous, for a woman to want motherhood and a career. That's such an intimidating assertion. It's completely unfair. It's monolithic belief.

Things are always more complex than the press want us to know. Bear in mind this, in complexity, there's actually hope. Take inspiration from this article by Annalisa Barbieri in today's Guardian.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1804814,00.html

I like chocolate and it likes me. We were made for each other. We talk. All day, every day. All that temptress has to do is lie back on the newspaper shop shelves, give me that beseeching look, and start to whisper: "Buy me, go on you know you want to. You've had a tough day".

Whether it's good day or a bad day, we flirt: they implore, flashing and pouting their wrappers at me; I demur, play hard to get. Nevertheless, it's an age old story with the inevitable conclusion. I give in. Always. They win.

But, it's always a casual relationship. Never lasts that long. I buy it. I unwrap it. I eat it. And If I can do that after I've left the shop, then it's considered long term. We never make it home together.

The only commited relationship I've had to date is with organic chocolate. I think it's the price.

Somewhere, someplace, someone is running a a project: that will run to schedule; that will hit every milestone; where everything will slot firmly and effortlessly into place; and, of course, it'll be one where people go to bed at sensible hours, where these good folks never think of working weekends. I yearn to be part of one of these dream teams. C'mon somebody, pick me, pick me! Please!

By the way, can it be one of those projects where there are more people doing things than actually supervising this time? It's de rigeur to have one guy digging the hole and umpteen others all telling him what to do.

I know from long, hard, uphill experience, that there's only two ways a project can go: bad, or very bad. "Yours was bad? but that's great! Mine was very bad. So bad, in fact, that not even the open air sacrifice of a goat could save it. Wish mine had been bad. God, you're so lucky"

When it comes to projects, stick the gant charts as deep as you can in the shedder, stick the MS project disc on a piece of string and use it as a biurd scarer in the garden. Better still, just chuck it away. There's only two types of projects anyone in business needs to know about: Stable Door and Tourette's.

Stable Door - project has gone live before it should have...long before. Nothing's in place. And it's not working to plan....even remotely. There's soul-searching, there's shouting, there's the sound of heads hitting keyboards, then out of the fog, a phrase appears, it's the one to freeze all hearts - "We need a quick fix". No, please, shoot me.

Quick fixes are the WMDs of all projects: they do not exist. No they don't, in spite of the enormous amounts of energy and industry spent looking. They don't exist. They never have, they never will. I have more faith in being present at a UFO landing in Hyde Park, than of a quick fix fixing, and not tying the, already difficult to unpick, knot even tighter

Tourette's - you know in advance the project is going down the pan "It's beyond the clifff edge. We're in mid-air with this one". A Tourette's project is a fervent belief that only a prolonged stream of consciousness rants can save it. Nothing else can. So season the now comatose project with imprecations, flash fry with copious amounts of swear words, add a strong splash of whine, finally serve with sour grapes and misery guts. Blame everyone else, of course.

God, I know all about spam. My e-mail address must be on every spammers list. I'm swamped every day. And what's so frightening is that they are just so clairvoyant: how do they know that I have poor credit that only they can repair; that my current mortgage rate really is too high; that I'm crying out for non prescription medication to put an end to all my sexual problems. And those very nice Nigerians, who keep begging me to keep hold of zillions in my account just for a few weeks.

By the way, if you thought spam was bad, wait till you start getting spim. Its spam for mobiles. Never going to end.

Sometimes there's a book, that at the very the moment you finish it, you know exactly what you have to do, it's simple: put the sandwich board on and walk around town, imploring people to get their paws on that book, pretty damn quickly.

I had one of those "moments" recently after finishing "Christopher" by Allison Burnett. I'll let my words below do the work.

Today's fiction offers such a lean diet; there's nothing naughty, indulgent or rich. It's not toothsome. Not here, this novel is a banquet, full of flavour, which is what I liked so much. I am done with angsty, whiny, eviscerated characters, who limp from page to page of just about every other novel that drops of the presses these days. BK could almost be an endangered species: eccentric, wilful, disingenuous, corrupting, and so mischievious. He is the Queen Mother of the Eastside; plotting harder than a poor man's Macchiaveli, eyes twinkling like Captain Hook, heady with the vapours of a Schoolgirl's crush and a heart pumping with the gusto of a barrel organ.

The two main characters, BK and the eponymous Christopher are "outcasts from life's feast", which is what I felt made them so memorable. They don't know that much about life: BK wafts a smug charm or so he thinks that never, ever, entrances anyone, whilst Christopher is as equally deluded in his idealism. Neither stays that way, though. Each changes as the year changes with them. I thought the move from ignorance to enlightenment was quite skilfully done. As the year progresses,a few more scales drop off and a little more self realsiation shines in on them. Especially so in the case of Christopher where he is observed through BK's rose coloured and cracked specatcles. There are some great comic ironies in there

Christopher is a wonderful, beautifully written, comedy of manners; and just like all great ones provides a little extra in top notch characters, cracking dialogue and enviable imagery. BK Troop is a stand-out character.

http://www.allisonburnett.com/

Can football save the World? No, really I'm serious. Think about it. In what other international forum could you get people from just about every faith, and certainly every continent, most political stripes, to completely focus their minds and energies on the vagaries of a ball bouncing across a field chased by twenty two men, at the same time shutting out every other distraction?

Thought so. None

I can't think of a better opportunity for men and women to bond or at least get to understand their peers from other countries than around something as issue free as football. It's social engagement on a massive scale. Thank God, too, that football is increasingly gender neutral.

Ok, so there'll be controversies, but are they going to result in long term doctrinal schisms that'll persist over the centuries? Maybe it's different if you're English, where 1966 is still the great unhealed wound.

Class free (more or less); appeals to all ages, races, creeds and colours; once endemic gender bias fast fading away. No religion comes to mind that's got all of those ready to hand. Should FIFA replace the United Nation?

I think it's fair to say that every City has a soul. Something that catches and embodies the aspirations of the populace, their dreams, their shared myths and tales. It's how they want to be seen in some cases. And very clearly expressed in particular instances. It would take a heart of stone not to borne along in the ceaseless roar of brashness and sheer, eye-popping excitement that translates into New York City. Oh, the Big Apple is forbidden fruit, alright, but does n't that always taste better?

Some are more elusive and take time to nose out. Fugitive senses almost, darting out for a moment, then back into the once more into the shadows. These are the Istanbuls of this World; complicated, transitional, uncertain states of mind. Ghostly. Things are never exactly what they seem. Always a shade out. It's these places where the soul detective has to work long and hard; first to find the thread back that will take them back to the heart of this tantalising labyrinth.

Others seem beset by magic. Whose names alone suggest alchemy, enchantment, otherness, even before the inhabitants present themselves in their glorious motley. Bombay, Delhi, Tangiers. Sensuous and subtle. Milk and honey falling off the tongue. Conjuring spells, confusing all our senses. Is up, really up, or is actually down? To turn right, should I turn left? As they charm, though, they equally madden. Why are people doing that? Why won't they do this instead? If there's that pairing, then there's always this: beauty and rank squalor. A combination so vividly brought to life by Mother India.

One city might insinuate itself, slowly, irresistably, into your bloodstream; another will storm the barricades, it's shock troops assembled out of it's passionate, generous citizenry overwhelming all resistance. Let's think of Havanna: coffee-hued, from cafe noir to a delicate cafe creme. Sizzling, bold, open-hearted. Truly voluptuous. The city where just everyone walks to an inner beat, impossible to properly grasp for the outsider, but impossible not to want to try. How easy it is to be swept into their world of sensuality, Santeria, saints and sinners. It's a Spider's web.

Even the raindrops are larger than life here: fat, luxurious drops borne thousands of miles, hammering on roofs, pounding on doors, bursting like over ripe fruits. Bright green lizards shoot up walls, colour saturated butterflies waft elegantly on mysterious breezes. Cats and dogs idle along overheated streets, chiding and fussing, alone, in pairs or groups. Almost human. In fact, it would n't be so much outside the bounds of reason, if one did n't sidle alongside, offer a manicured paw and start to chat.

Another city might carry the spirit of decadance. Think of Nice. The Playground of the South of France. Rogue-ish and flattering. A sense of knowingness. You might think you can shock, but, really, we've seen it all before. As Nice pulverises, Monaco, it's neighbour, exudes utter contentment. A steady heartbeat of affluence, throbbing through this sliver of a country. In design, surely as in intention, perfectly proportioned, indulged to the right degree. It could be the inner sanctum of a fabulously wealthy Merchant Bank (could be? It is).

If you're British, then the national symbol might as well be an umberella. We're driven by the weather. But not the only people. Think of Buenos Aires. Heat-drenched during the summer. Sun soaking into buildings, into the pavements and certainly into it's inhabitants. Life simply has to be lived outside, the weather does not permit anything else. A life lived outside does n't mean an unquestioned life. Perhaps it's the consequence of living life in the blaze of the sun, where everyone lives cheek by jowl out of necessity, that actually makes people so clearly aware of each other, and in the example of this swaggering, life lived at full intensity, drum-banging city, to ask the deep, probing questions, of just how do they get along. No city has more psychologists than Buenos Aires (not even New York). Few cities have as many cosmetic surgeons either. That's it: nip, tuck, and tango.

If Buenos Aires can be compared to a matador dropping on one knee with carefree arrogance with careless respect for whatever he's facing, and always ready to bounceback. Montevideo, it's neighbour on the opposite bank of the River Plate, is the matador on hard times, bruised, a little unsteady on his feet, and perhaps happier to live on memories. Or is that just healthy realism?

Is that in itself the true essence of the soul of a city: realism dosed with a little romance. After all, don't we all need that in life?

Everyone, hie thee to the floatation chamber! I mean it. I feel like I've had my spine painlessly excised since this lunchtimes session. Sleep like a blessed baby tonight. It either improves my life, or I'll salt better than a herring. One of the two is going to happen.

Maybe this all owes it's existence to the day I spent listening to a Bhagwan in an industrial estate in the Valley , but I've taken several steps since on the holistic, spiritual life. Yoga every week. An hour a month in a floatation tank, that's all it takes. Very gentle, calming. Absolutely no sense of claustrophobia, or any terrors for that matter. I had been warned I'd probably end up psychotic or zombified. Just a strong aroma of epsom salts wherever I go for a few days after. Nothing more troubling.