When the weather is astounding like today, or just plain good, and I've decided not to walk home, I spend time sitting in Holland Park, reading, and listening to snatches of opera coming from the festival (tonight was la Boheme).

The park has been taken over by a colony of raucous, restless parakeets, and along with the imperious disdain of of the long time resident peacocks strolling between the beds of dragon red and apricot begonias, it feels like I'm swaddled between the sentences of a magical realist novel. The sweating evening time humidity just adds to it.

I was on line toggling between Facebook and Twitter late on Thursday evening when this electronic fog of hearsay and "that can't be true" gossip appeared.

It was like there had been a disturbance in the neighbourhood in the early hours of the morning and everyone had been jolted awake.

Lights flickering on in scattered houses, windows cautiously opened; uncertainty. Whispered conversations, rumours, then counter rumours. More lights coming on, more people out of their houses. The swirling rumours becoming a rumble of fact. And then the astonishment, it's really true. Really true.

Michael Jackson is dead.

It's the weather that's reduced the flow of postings. Blame it on the elements ? But how often do we get acres of wall to wall sunshine in dear old London Town. If it's there, then grab it, and I do. With both hands.

I like to luxuriate in Holland Park in the evening after work, sometimes idly reading, other times watching the birds compete for the bird-feeders, or simply gazing at the clouds drifting over, and enjoy the music of the outdoor opera.

More days like these please.

I should carry an emergency book of poems. Something I can dip into for sustenance whatever the circumstance. The joy of reading poetry - aloud if I can - is a sweet I'm finding impossible to put down.

This afternoon was a torment; three of us, strolling through Ravenscourt Park under a soft patter of early summer rain, on into a pocket sized Garden centre that hugs the side of the District Line.

Such a find as well. A quiet cafe full of deep sofas to sink into, small, peaceful fountains, weather beaten Buddhas folded between bushes and shrubs, and the full palette of green, from the lightest to the deepest olive. It cried out for a poem.

I needed to steady my nerves last night, so I turned to my new medicine - reading a poem aloud.

Thanks Anne Sexton, your verses took the tangle out my tiredness and unwrapped the day's stresses and strains. I'll need your help again tonight; today's been a bruiser.

One night this year I will go to bed before midnight. There's a glittering prize at stake: staying awake in the office, and not dropping off in the fug of the tube. Got to aim high these days.

Poetry is taking a larger role in my reading life than it ever has before, and I don't know why. If indeed I should ask myself that question and not simply accept is as fact, and enjoy exploring hitherto unknown worlds.

It's crept up on me. It did n't knock on the door. It just appeared. For some reason a casual glance at a forgotten book of poetry - Penguin's Contemporary American Poetry - and that's it. Quiet minute by quiet minute, absorbed.

Stolen and transported into lands of tightly compressed metaphors and deeply felt imagery. The delicacy, the almost orchid like elegance of poetry fascinates me more and more; handfuls of disparate words raked into patterns where the sum of the parts is far more meaningful than the parts.

It's an extraordinarily relaxing voyage I'm on. For a good part of this afternoon I sat on a stool in Chiswick's Oxfam bookshop rummaging through their poetry section: new lands sighted.

Most evenings over the past month, I've read a poem aloud just before I turn in for the night. My nightcap.

Money slips through my fingers the way sand goes through a sieve. My ex-gym stuffed me with a £118 cancellation fee and stoked it up a little with a letter from a Debt Collection agency. Exercise from here on, (and as it has been for months, really) is Yoga, walk everywhere, and never use the lifts or escalators. Let the meatheads and gym rats sweat it out over the weights; I'm in the urban, low-carbon gym frame of mind now.

Depressing to see that the North of England has revealed it's squalid side and elected two fascist MEPs, and that Doncaster has decided life is better under an English Democrat mayor, who probably shouted his way to the top on a sensationalist, but hopefully found to be hollow, manifesto.

I am convinced they've voted the way they have in great part due to the inaccurate, unsubstantiated smears, half-truths, and plain untruths, the Express, the Mail, and the Sun, incredibly, parade as fact on their frontpages.

What I'm interested in seeing is what the leaders of the master race will do now they're in charge. Cutting back on welfare seems self-defeating since, from what I've seen, many of their supporters are on it, have been for years, and don't want to leave it.

Going to have a be a quick one tonight. My laptop is on batteries and draining power quicker than an Investment Bank loses money.

If we could stick a tracking a device on those memorable slogans and lines that some films generate and then see if they'll thrive once they've been released as it were into the wild. I'm thinking here of a strip of dialogue between Steve Evets and Eric Cantona in Looking for Eric:

Steve Evets as Eric Bishop, a deeply depressed Mancunian Postman:"...Eric, you're the man....

Eric Cantona as lui-meme: "I'm not a man....I'm Cantona..."

Come on, that has to find life outside the confines of a great script and terrific film. It's imbued with a "Four score years and seven...." quality

There were squadrons of parakeets scorching across Holland Park this evening.

In the five years since I first had them pointed out to me in Hyde Park, I've watched these green enamelled birds work their noisy way across West London; they've stormed the skies over Richmond and Chiswick, brazenly infiltrated Kensington and Notting Hill, and dominate the air above Holland Park.

They make London feel tropical, especially on warm, piercing blue sky days like the run we've having now.

Cheap and lazy, but I'll never let a cliche wriggle away from me; maybe this is a foretaste of a globally warmed London.