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.