This floated over the garden fence earlier this evening, the neighbours next door to where I'm house-sitting were having a very loud conversation: "Here's my new bra I bought yesterday. I'm very excited about it..." Why? What does it do that makes you so excited? Talk in tongues? Fire lasers? It's manproof...? Work out a tax return ? You can send a text message from it ? What !

My phone rang a few nights ago. It was a friend calling to tell me that his oldest friend, and someone who I knew reasonably well, had died quite unexpectedly. Even now, it has n't quite sunk in. It does n't seem right. I should check with my friend that he actually called me and it's not something I've imagined...except he did, and it's true.

I had known this person on and off for years; occasionally we would meet, usually in a pub, swap stories, tell tales, argue a little, but never in a head-butting manner, joke around, grope towards solutions to all manner of problems, then fold our tents and drift off into the night. He was humorous, heartfelt, and sincere: a good man.

A sudden loss is startling, it's like an earthquake of the emotions: jarring, jolting, everything thrown from side to side. It was in the voice of my friend, a man in shock. The person who had died was his oldest friend. To lose a friend is to lose part of you: that sense of ineffable youth goes - we are now mortal, starkly so; those stories and adventures, inconsequential in all probability to others, but the glue that binds friendship, and in a secular way almost consecrate it, what happens to them now, where do they go, who are they shared with? The continuum is irreparably broken.

I've never heard my friend so lost for words, let alone the sentences to express himself. Numbness is possibly the nearest I can pin it to. Bewildered and confused, certainly. From my own experience (I've lost my mother and father), I can see the likely streets my friend may have to walk: shock, grief, anger (at the fact of someone going so young), and eventually, at a time usually of it's own choosing, acceptance. And everything seems so different, so other. A new lens on life. Everything has altered; the streets are n't the same, nor the buses, the tubes. Places acquire a heightened significance, this is where this happened, that happened.

He was worrying how he might appear at the funeral. There is nothing to worry about. Appear how you want, don't predict behaviour, you're going there to celebrate and to honour a friend.. and part of your life. It's not just an act of remembrance, it's an expression of deep affection. Men are no different to anyone else; we are entitled to show affection, it may be unspoken in the main, communicated through shared experiences and adventures, but it's there, it's profound, so show it.

Starbucks and social studies. Seems you can judge the area you're in, or at least get a fair feel of parts of it, by what's pinned on to the community notice board in Starbucks. On the board in the Holland Park outlet alongside the corporate in-house bulletins are flyers for yoga, dog-sitters, open air-theatre and so forth; slap in the middle of the board in the branch outside Kings Cross station, on the other hand, is a £20,000 reward notice from the Police for anyone who can help in solving a murder.

Yep, completely unscientific, derisorily small sample size...but I know what's going to happen: more dishwater coffee bought simply to see what's on the community noticeboards.

I've eaten in New York. I've slept in New York. I've shopped in New York. Even been electrocuted by a girlfriend in New York. Not intentionally, no electric iron thrown in the bath, or a cunningly rewired light switch. None of that: all natural, straight from the source - static electricity. Something about Manhattan - that crazy energy, eh - got the two of us literally sparking. We could n't go anywhere, do anything, without an opening fireworks display. Hold hands - zap ! Pass a shopping bag over - pow ! Swap newspapers - zing ! All the time: snap, crackle, pop. I felt quite a kinship by the end of our stay with those neon blue, buzzing insectocutors you see in the prep areas of restaurants. Those things are always fizzing. Bubbling with volts. Just like us on that trip.

The highspot of our unplanned lightshow came one evening when both of our lips were momentarily singed by an arcing zip of electricity.

Is New York a static electric hotplate (though, it's not as if either of us were lovers of nylon clothing)?

My reading on static electricity leads me towards to something to do with NYC's geology as the likeliest explanation. Only time in my life I can ever say I've been a powerhouse, and very green too.

Then again, had the two of us inadvertently communed with a darker, more elemental force? Who knows what we might have seen if we had ever bothered to open the fridge in the apartment. Remember what Sigourney Weaver saw in Ghostbusters when she pulled open the fridge door...that smoking, frothing pit...

"On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok..." I thank Saul Bellow for such a voluptuous and accurate simile. In that handful of words is everything about the tropical intensity, the sweat, the thudding heat of New York in summer. It's winters are bone chilling with glass cutting winds sweeping down from cold Arctic Canada. Spring is sublime, Autumn divine. A four season city as any good one should be and a mood for each of them

Like many visitors I experienced New York years before I finally got there. I knew it's physical characteristics and social geography probably better than I did places near to my own home; and as I grew up, began to intuit it's emotional possibilities: exhilarating and inspiring, but where the floor could drop from beneath even the most gilded.

Expectations point towards hope, but they never guarantee that the destination will actually be as passionately, indeed as lustily dreamed of; New York was, all boxes ticked on my personal checklist. It was what I yearned it would be and has never let me down subsequently. Forever stirring, always exciting, and impossible to be neutral about. Any city worthy of that title must confound the senses, New York is like holding a piece of cut crystal to the light, where every plane, every edge refracts differently to the next. No street is the same, no block is the same. Sans conformity.

For such a relatively young city, there is, nevertheless, something just as epic and as timeless about the Big Apple as there is with my two other favourite cities: London and Paris. Almost Homeric: a sense of struggle and a myriad of personal odysseys. History drips downs the avenues and floods cross streets. Big, grand sweeps of history, counterpoised with the intimate, personal histories of the anonymous millions who counted, and continue to,themselves as it's inhabitants. I think it's that aspect that appeals to more than any of great historical statements and events, the idea of millions upon millions of hopes sunk into the concrete and tar, and that when I'm there I'm walking where dreams have been made, or dashed, is in a strange way, a very moving experience.

I go to New York not for cut-price shopping trips; I go to be intellectualised, to pick up new ideas, other modes of thinking, to be challenged, to be presented with new things to consider. Only huge cities can do this, contain this elixir, they're the three I've mentioned earlier.

My first ever night in New York was exactly as Saul Bellow described: torrid, steaming, and above all else thrillingly magical. A sienna yellow sunset that took an eternity to fade and held for hours the perfect silhouette of mid town Manhattan. It glowed. I felt something bestowed upon me, what that is I can't begin to explain, other than a sense, an intuition, an excitement. Better to leave the groping for words alone, instead I'll let Bellow paint the word picture I can't complete: "...people...thronging the streets...among the stupendous monuments of their mystery, the lights of which, a dazzling profusion, climb upward endlessly into heat of the sky."

They've gone back in again. Eluded me. Those 26 letters. More or less every evening, we vex each other: I want to rope them up into words, they prefer to twist and turn in my hands, it's like holding live eels. If they could only have the contentment of well-fed cats, who scarcely move. I can sense the words I want to write, I can't shape them, though. Frustrating

I don't work anymore, not in the task based sense of the word anyway; I don't do one thing, complete it then move to the next, graced with enough time, liberty and space to properly understand everything and so deal satisfactorily.

That's over. Last year's patterns. These days I speed-date, or that's how it seems. My worklife is a dazzling, driven world of promiscuous and endless contact after contact. Twenty minutes at most to get to know something, sum it up, find out what lights it's candles and what does n't, then concoct a response. And I have to commit! Often unwillingly, and to multiple partners as well. There's always another waiting in the queue angling to get my pulse racing, my cheeks flushed, and my poor heart a-twittering.

The difference with this form of speed dating is that I'm still left with making that awkward phone call or having to speak to people I really don't want to, nor can I decide not to see them either. They won't let go...

"A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many. I had not thought death had undone so many....each man fixed his eyes before his feet". This fragment from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland has stood firmly for years in my mind as the most concise description, as it is the most poignant summation too, of the trials of mass commuting. What I've long regarded as the deadliness of it all, it's unflagging dreariness. These lines have been steady companions when I've ridden the swells of people trooping from tube station to office and back. A Via Dolorosa, the undead caught in limbo between home....and wanting to go back home. An almost penitential slow shuffling passage of souls, but still they (we) march on.

Where this all falls down is that it's a cliched view, threadbare enough to see the light coming through the other side; few people willingly go to work just as few children yearn passionately for school, so to see all of this as a passage to purgatory, and lard it in sepulchral tones is really lazy and trite. By and large no one is regretful to go to work; what we are is indifferent, if anything we put up with it. A means to an end and no more.

Our common denominator, our shared commuter heritage, is that we walk the steps that our commuter forebears as we doubtless walk the route our successors will take. It's a continuum in that respect: what was, what is, and what will be. The infinity of commuting, we are timeless, another turn of the endless wheel. How very mystical in that particular sense, could almost be Eastern.

I know it's asking a lot here. I'm not advocating turning tube passes into fetish goods, or venerating the bus to work. Nevertheless, it's worth an explanation: how did all this come around? Like this: sometimes a maverick thought intrudes without knocking, and that's what happened this evening when I was at Waterloo station waiting for the Waterloo and City shuttle to pull in. For some inexplicable reason, the notion that what I was doing had been done by millions of others year after year after year wandered in. And I'm strangely glad that it has; somehow to feel part of something greater has taken the sting away of going into the office. I no longer feel part of the great undead slogging along Ludgate Hill. In it's own way, the walk to work is something as regular as the migration of Monarch butterflies, or the antelopes hurrying over the Serengeti plain...though I'll never be skipping and singing into the office.

I found myself wedged in a shop doorway this afternoon due to the coincidence of me leaving at the same time as two prams were entering. No one looking either until the moment until we all ran aground. Awkward. It took several seconds of modern dance like wriggling before we popped free, not quite corks out of wine bottle, though there was the thin seeping of withheld breath from all sides.

'People... why don't they look... how hard is it...?', more or less summed it up for me, and no doubt the two mothers were raising the same point; the two babies, something altogether different, a right angle turn in moods compared to ours. No screaming, no agitation, no crying. No, none of the emotions you might expect. Except one: boredom. Ennui, indifference, however you want to call it, these two tiny children were showing it. Moliere said something along the lines of unbroken happiness is a bore; perhaps it is, but what happens if you're stuck with unbroken boredom as these two peevish toddlers seemed to be.

How do they get so weary so young? I think I have an answer - we spend too much time gaping at them, cooing, pulling faces, trying to seem interested when we're not, but feel compelled to because we don't want to hurt parental feelings From a tiny kid's point of view what a living hell this must be. Every day wheeled out to be assailed by gaping mouthed adults talking gibberish. If babies could talk, let rip for once: "... that perfume...Jesus, it's bad....know something lipstick goes on the lips, not front teeth..."You've just finished a cigarette that's why I'm screwing my face up...your breath stinks! If I have to look up into one more pair of red veined, dark circled eyes, I'm going to throw up...."

Boredom's natural home is the workplace, not the pram

There's a bank statement on the kitchen worktop that's been keeping a steady eye on me all evening and not in a confidence inspiring way either. Let's put it like this: I've felt better auras in my time. Uncomfortable. I need a course of action. Something needs to give.

In life there are two options, or so I tell anyone who's in earshot: do nothing, and on occasion this actually works, it's the right choice in fact; or alternatively, there's the do something approach, which invariably generates all sorts of excitements, and usually the best of the pair...if there were, of course, just two; there's not, far from it, there's another, a third option, private, hidden away from the others. If only I could say I used it the way a Chef might use saffron in a recipe, sparingly and with almost reluctance, since it's so rare and discrete a pleasure. I don't. I throw the third option around with the gusto of someone drenching fish and chips in cloud of salt and vinegar. I delay, I procrastinate, I put off... why do today when I can do it tomorrow.... tomorrow's another day, and this one has been tough enough already...get my drift?

I prefer to defer misery than defer gratification, and as my gut feeling says this statement may be...er...challenging, it's sleep well this evening, fret like mad in the morning. Tomorrow we open the letter....

Noir comme le diable, chaud comme l' enfer, pur comme un ange, doux comme l'amour (or in English, black as the devil, hot as hell, pure like an angel, sweet like love). Everything, according to Marshal Talleyrand, the perfect cup of coffee ought to be. I agree on every point. Four simple statements that express the beauty and drama of coffee; it's a theatre, an opera of a drink.

Coffee means a lot to me. Its one of those rare breeds that has a life above and beyond it's immediate context. Think about the pull, the power, of that innocent question: "coffee?" I've heard it in all manner of experiences and environments: workaday, seductive, distressed, contented, rowdy, quiet, the list is endless, the permutations infinite. There can't be that many questions that will virtually guarantee a response like "coffee ?" does.

It's July in damp, steaming, London, where the Sun pokes out from the clouds on a needs must basis, and you want something that's going to deliver each of Marshall Talleyrands four great Coffee truths. Follow me. There's only a handful of stations on the Caffeine cross. This is not in any order of precedence, no place I'm about to mention out merits it's peers. All are equal.

Station number one is the Armadillo cafe. A delightful cafe, just larger than a hole in the wall, deep in Notting Hill, run by a team of New Zealanders and French. Bohemian credentials cheek by jowl with an edgy, lively neighbourhood. Luxuriant coffee, made with verve, and served exquisitely, stimulating enough to bring the near dead back to life, but, and this is the great coffee paradox, not that potent, that you'll never sleep. Whoever it was who said this in Twin Peaks got it right, it is a damn fine cup of coffee. They have a website too: http://www.armadillocafe.co.uk/index.htm

There, in the Armadillo, I'm a cappuccino man; at the Exeter Street bakery, it's macchiato or death, because that thimble full of espresso frothed with a touch of warm milk is worth dying for. Simple as that. This really is a hole in the wall. Tiny place hidden away on a side street behind Kensington High Street. For the Cognoscenti. And they're always baking, baking, baking. Hot breathes of focciacia, panini, pizza slices, lifted out of the oven every other minute. http://www.allinlondon.co.uk/directory/1156/22279.php

Near my sometimes second home in Chiswick is the Caffe Delizia, run by an industrious, hard-working pair of Albanians, with the ability to summon up devilish coffee at the drop of a cafetiere. Many, many hours sat on their terrace idling with coffee after coffee. Don't ask, it's here: http://www.caffedelizia.com/

During the average week, I'll be in one of these, or either of the brace of Costa Coffee shops around the Blackfriar's Bridge / St Paul's Cathedral axis. Come over, say hello, we can have coffee.

I'm a persistent writer, not a talented writer; the gulf between the two states is wider than I can bridge. I just have to write and I don't know why. It's not a day until I've scratched out a sentence.

My hope, and I just wish my knowledge of French was strong enough to bear it out: is that the French tradition of sports writing is as lyrical and sympathetic to cycling as the equivalent American tradition is to baseball.

I've never played baseball, never even held a baseball bat (although I did wear a pitcher's mitt once. I can't remember how or why, but it was n't for a game of anything, so let's pin it therefore to curiosity), it's twenty-five years ago too, since I saw my last, in fact my only live game; nor have I any real sense of the mores of the game, or it's heroes and villains. Yet where I do stand on much firmer ground is that I know it's loved, enjoyed, debated, argued about, anguished over; that it's expressed poetically and absorbed romantically, strike after strike, pitch upon pitch.

That love comes out so achingly well in Bernard Malamud's "The Natural", or anything with a baseball inflection written by George Plimpton, and certainly W.P. Kinsella's "Field of Dreams". These have all in their own alchemical ways explained baseball to me, not just the sport, but as a state of mind, a metaphor. I've sweated in the dug-outs; worried about curve balls; felt the expectations of thousands of spectators hang over the last man going into bat; walked into the whirlwind of recriminations thrown up in the locker room; realised the passage of time once the glory days have gone and home is the minor league. Baseball is almost Homeric; man at odds with fate, the struggle against adversity: injury, accident, the perversity of chance, racking self doubt on one hand, with contempt and arrogance on the other. Magnificent and defiant.

I saw the London stage of the Tour de France yesterday; if there is another sport that offers itself so willingly to a similar palette of emotions, then it's cycling. It has to be. Just as many heroes, just as many compromised, tortured souls, enduring fresh agonies and bearing old wounds over thousands of aching miles There have to be stories. It is a century's old Odyssey: man, machine, and an indifferent, sometimes implacable Nature. Is there a French evocation of all of this as passionate as the American for baseball?

Try arguing against this assertion because I don't think anyone can: London has morphed into an enormous multi-dimensional, real time video game. To play, it means all five senses -the sixth if you're that lucky - are needed in full working order. Most days seem to demand that. Not much goes smoothly.

There only ever seems to be a few moments to dust yourself down after the last ordeal, or act of extreme endurance has played itself out; just enough time to snatch a few breathes before the walls shift again, the floor falls away, and you're back in the arena, head-first into a new torment.

It's a full-on place: noise, chaos, confusion, disturbance. London can sometimes work with you; often it's simply neutral, even Olympian, content to merely watch the struggle; and occasionally it can be vexing, sulky, even spiteful, and when this mood is on, this face of the city set, then it's a battle.

Trains, tubes, buses inevitably conspire to break down or turn up late; the weather, well that speaks for itself right now, stir in the random acts of inconvenience a city of, perhaps, ten million will always generate, then there's a mess straightaway. And this does n't even factor in events like last Thursday.

Who needs wilderness survival training; when you can have a few days in this palpitating, stress machine.

Fall in, guys. Get in position. Form words. I need inspiration tonight. I know you're there, I can sense you. Come out into the open. Let's make some words. We do a couple, it becomes a sentence, a few sentences become a paragraph, and without thinking about it, we've got a blog entry. But I need you on parade, ready for duty. Verbs, nouns, adverbs, prepositions, get out here....some fresh air, exercise, do you good. And I need something better than simply seeing my face looking back at me from my laptop screen.

Very occasionally, they will not come out on parade, those twenty six vexing letters. Tonight I want them limbering up, stretching, and getting ready for action, but they're not responding. They're not coming out of their quarters, and it feels like it's going to be a futile effort to get them to line up with their comrades in arms - the grammar corps.

This blank page, any blank page for that matter, might as well be a parade ground. Letters turn up for duty, stand shoulder to shoulder for a moment, while I think of the formations I want them to assemble in, how I want them to march across the page. Orders are shouted and then it starts. Just tonight, it's not happening. It's a mutiny. Mutiny on the Blog?

Letters to girlfriends, and this applies particularly to those written but never sent, should be, simply have to be, sealed in a lead box, buried and never exhumed.

I found the bones of one I'd written years ago. My ears reddened, my face tingled, my heart over-revved. Did I really write that? Tell me no... Did I actually expect someone to be moved by that? Surely to God, I can't have... Years of full body immersion in great prose, heart-rending literature, and what became of it all? A line as precious as this : "Dream of me, Freud would approve". To think I stuck such a slice of over-ripe bumptiousness, sub-prime greeting card sentiment and expected someone to have a heart twanging, angels playing harps, seismic tremor. The horror, the absolute horror...

Fortunately, I never stuck a stamp on the envelope and posted it; the embarrassment remains with me alone, or did, you're privy now, but twenty years on, I'm expecting understanding and an amnesty for witlessness.

I don't know what would have happened if I had sent it. Probably endlessly dissected, by the recipient, and then her closest friends, all sat in her student bedroom passing it around, pondering, perhaps shaking their heads, or just laughing them off. Sliced at endlessly the way someone would shave away prosciutto, flake after flake, all the time wondering just what the hell was Archimedes on about.

I was in my early twenties, I did n't know any better, I really did n't. And today, I'd send flowers, or cook, or do something, anything but self-referential gushing nonsense.