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.