Gas prices going up, electricity the same. Foodstuffs dearer by the minute. Value of my tiny flat eroding quicker than an iceberg in the equatorial sun. Company share price nose-diving. What would make me happy though is an actual live reader leaving a bona fide comment. Someone out there prove to me you're reading what I write. A sign, a visible sign.

My mood has n't been helped either finding out that Kate Bush turned fifty this week. What happened to my youth ? Where'd it go ?

"Greece saved from plague...", says Ioannis Latrides, Mayor of Faliraki, "Mercifully our clientele this Summer is a wonderful mix of peoples from all over Europe...far fewer Britons, which means no rapes, no accidents, no drunken debauchery, no going on the rampage. I'm so relieved..." I can hear it, Ioannis, but think of us who have to live cheek by jowl with these people.

Surely, Churchill did n't have this in mind when he dramatically uttered: "...whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender..." He can't have been that far-sighted.

On the top of the bus shelter outside St Charles House tax office on Kensington High St, there are three sets of keys. I saw them from the top deck of the bus when it stopped to drop off some passengers. I've been thinking about them ever since.

Malice probably put them up there; the detritus of a handful of street robberies, contents shoveled out, money, cards kept, everything else dumped. Except throwing three sets of keys on to the roof of a bus shelter implies premeditation of a type. Bag snatches are usually opportunistic, frantic, the bag gutted on the run, contents tossed out confetti like, as the snatcher legs it (I know by the way, my briefcase got lifted magnificently last September).

This is different: someone has consciously decided to dump three sets of keys - from what I could make out they look like two sets of house keys and a set of car keys - in an almost inaccessible, and certainly not where you'd expect, area of a piece of very public street furniture. Who were they mad at and why? I'm so intrigued.

"Geez, wish I had that Matisse poster today..."

"You don't hoard then...? I'm compulsive, got stuff going back to the seventies...tee-shirts from the early eighties that I can still slip into...all kinds of things, clothes, books, newspapers, wedged in boxes, packed into cupboards, under the bed... the seams are popping on the walls of my flat...and yes, I've got a storage unit as well.

It's like I'm laying down the sedimentary layers of my life. This is geology in action"

Shakespeare does n't mention it anywhere in "The Seven Ages of Man" - the age my friends and are find ourselves in now: that of ageing parents, of job worries, of relationship anxieties, of sudden illness, of increasingly difficult moments with children.

It's a deeply uncomfortable stage in life; as a participant, it goes without saying; and if honesty is still a worthy currency, then it's bloody troubling as a nervous spectator, literally fingering the worry beads, wondering when...if...

The only reference I can pluck out of Shakespeare's evocative prose poem that fits this stage we're all navigating through is that it is a "...strange eventful history...". It does worry me.

My first real broadband scare; I lost my connection. My fault too, not the providers. Nevertheless, I'm back online, and happily wirelessed up this time.

Head hoovered clean however of any bon mots, pensees, meditations, or judgments, that could find a life on my blog. Maybe tomorrow something will surface out of my unconscious.

"The bestiary of power" was the metaphor Roland Barthes used to capture the symbolic power, and more often than not, the awesome power, we assign to particular items, and in so doing, move them from mere commodity to icon. An example might be the Porsche, it's just a car, when all is said and done, except it's not, there's so much in there, beyond the tangible. Mont Blanc pens are another. Again, nothing more than a pen...but it is. Picture a huge business deal being signed off with a humble bic, or a pen picked off the bookie's counter. Does n't work, really, does it. That's Mont Blanc territory. They own it.

Porsches and Mont Blancs are, in Barthes's terms, full-blooded examples of "...the supreme creation of an era conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object". Barthes's words...I wish they were mine since they are so apposite.

I read them today on the tube home and I had to stop, and gaze out of the window for a moment, to properly absorb their weight; it seemed churlish to have read on without pausing.

What fascinates me is that we are so capricious in what we symbolically confer on some items. Diamonds are forever. They live on. But brands ? Goldman Sachs has heft to it, there's an oaky, mature, collegiate sense; it evokes discipline, an informed, elegant, understated body of people. Reputable.

Then there's Starbucks; when that pioneering latte stumbled ashore, life felt bohemian, creative, zany. Without being consciously aware I, no doubt alongside thousands of others, charged it with that power. A life changing power,

Today the battery's flat. Starbucks has extended itself so much that I no longer seek it out; it's everywhere. The charge has dissipated. Barthes's "...magical objects..." can, and do, have shelf lifes.

Where is it ? Where's it gone ? My book. The one I'm supposed to have in inside me. The one we're all supposed to have. It's not there. Nothing. I've been prodded, poked, measured, weighed, tested and the library doctors can't find anything. Not even a three line haiku. There are people out there carrying not just books, but entire libraries, Smithsonian, Library of Alexandria, municipal libraries, inside them, and there's not enough in me to write a "disgusted of Tonbridge Wells" letter...

I'm really taken with this idea of pocket urban gardens and growing your own stuff. Not just for the economics of it, or the reclamation of abandoned land, but for the joy of doing something I've never properly done.

We had a garden when I was a kid, mostly grass, with a roughly laid flagstone foot path bisecting it. I made a few lukewarm attempts to grow the occasional carrot or solitary onion. Now I'm in the mood to really give it a go.

Need some land though. Living in a mid-level flat (no balcony) reduces the opportunity to growing anything edible to mustard and cress by the window sill and we have a team of very acrobatic squirrels round here to boot. They'll view that as an easy challenge. I know those critters; I watch them most mornings swing through the neighbouring tree.

I'm an index finger typist. From daybreak to sunset, these two fingers crash down on the keyboard the way Jerry Lee Lewis thrashes a piano keyboard. Constant salvos all day long.

Index fingered typing has a very distinct rhythm, like pneumatic drills tearing a road up, gouging, pummelling, not the flitting poetry of every finger fully stretched and caressing the keys like eagles riding the thermals. No, not all. It's industrial. Two drop hammers pounding the dust out of my laptop. The desk shivering. Pens and coffee cups hopping across the desk top. It's that kind of effort I put in.

But the rhythm can't continue...my fingers can't stand it any more. They starting to rebel. They hurt. Imagine two fingers sore and crucified, especially my right one, it's numb nearly.

I lose all power in these two then that's it. Doomed. Industrially unfit for work.

Too much time on line has wiped my memory completely of what I did before I ever went on line. Maybe I read books, had a social life, dunno, it's all conjecture. Once a dynamically assigned IP address has wiped itself round your neo-cortex tighter than ivy strangling an Oak tree, then that's it you're gone. Lost.

And I've only realised that after two days of enforced cyber idleness. My ADSL connection popped a seam and fell apart on me. But baby, it's back, and I'm so happy I'm even replying to the spammers.

A conspiracy theory created in thirty seconds. Here we go.

Out of all my friends living in London, only one voted Bojo in May's Mayoral election, so if you extrapolated from that, then Ken would have kept the Mayoral cape on his shoulders, yet Bojo still got in. The numbers don't stack on that basis. Murky eh. Dubious, perhaps.

If this was another country, one less attuned to democracy that is, you could even push out the notion of irregularities. It's certainly got that feel to it, and drafted in a particular drum-beating way - so deafening you can't think it through - it's plausible.

Except that something concocted in thirty seconds, can be refuted in fifteen. Just by a little glance at the composition of my friends, and more significantly the nature of friendship, which is that people of similar affinities intuit each other, in the same way that birds follow the same migratory pattern year after year.

We nose each other out. It's about shared sympathies, broadly adhering to a common view on life, sharing the same wavelength, give or take a few percentage points. So is it that unexpected therefore nearly everyone I know plumped for Ken, and not t'other ? Of course not.

Nevertheless, we're not a gang of one tune playing, Stepford like clones. Rose amongst thorns, or, thorn amongst roses, depending how you might want to look at it, there was still a single dissident voice who put their X against Bojo's name. And to this day, I continue to ask, why?

I cannot imagine going without my cinq a sept in the same way that I cannot conceive of ever leaving the morning tube and going straight to the office without an hour long pause riffling through the paper in a coffee shop in the bowels of the City. The two bookend the working day for me.

The coffee shop routine is self-explanatory, but cinq a sept ? It's a mythic period in the French working day - when the average Frenchman traditionally leaves the workplace and wanders over to spend an hour or so with his mistress. Enough time to woo, satisfy, part gracefully and then stroll home for the evening meal.

No mistress me. My cinq a sept is different. It's my buffer between downing tools at the end of the day and finally reaching home. Transition time out of one space and slowly, subtly into another. Coffee shops again, idle hours in an art gallery, or library, something on these lines. I love it.