Tick, tick, tick...another year drawing to a close. So to that hardy band, that small but perfectly formed group who drop by my blog, happy new year and best wishes for 2012. Let's take it by storm and give it all we've got.

After ten years of trudging past Julie's on my way to Holland Park station and the office, I finally went in this afternoon. Everything I imagined about it realised the instant I stepped in with a friend; unobtrusive, almost butler-like service in gorgeously furnished rooms.

We were on the first floor sat on reclaimed and beautifully restored church pews surrounded by taste with a capital T. Opposite us was a horse shoe shaped alcove where four young Irish mothers, each clearly fashionable in that effortless way that affluence brings, and all in some way, shape or form, involved in something creative, were holding a birthday party for one of their daughters, a shy, brunette, who beamed when a birthday cake appeared and the table serenaded her with happy birthday.

It was quite glorious in a way I can't exactly articulate.

The ambience of Julie's is intoxicating; relaxed, arty, comfortably déshabillé, and timeless. No difficulty in imagining Harold Pinter, or a Rolling Stone or two, maybe Hitchens and Amis junior, or Stella McCartney holed up somewhere in this honeycomb of amazingly dressed rooms. I could, I can, see it so easily

I know there's more than a hint of Hyacinth Bouquet, snobby aspiration in other words, streaming through what I've written. But I loved this place.

I would have written far more this month except that I'm still honeymooning with my iPad. At some point the intensity of the infatuation will dim. It has to. Don't they all. But right now, I'm still enslaved, albeit joyfully, to this exquisite delight.

Just the pleasure of stroking the screen is enough to get me purring. I can't help it. I simply can't.

Yesterday did n't go the way I'd originally planned and I had to make some abrupt changes, otherwise my wheels would have stayed spinning in the mud; nevertheless there were compensations, small rewards, really, and there was an insight.

For the sheer need of seeing people, I walked from my flat through Kensington, along to the Edgware Road, and eventually on to the West End.

The closer to the West End, the busier the streets; Holland Park was a near tomb, scarcely a person, nothing open except for the solitary lighthouse that was the Windsor Castle pub, with just a scattered handful of drinkers

Kensington High Street was marginally busier with a small grocers open, then further towards Kensington Church St, Cafe Concerto was a sardine can of tourists, clearly relieved that at least somewhere was open. Not a table free.

After there, I headed through Kensington Palace Gardens and eventually to Queensway, the de facto beginning or end, depending on which way you're approaching, of Arab London. The London that never closes essentially and from there till Marble Arch, London fair hummed with life: cafes, restaurants, arab grocers, supermarkets, pharmacies, even a brace of hair dressers, were open.

Edgware Road, which is the passagiata for London's Arab community, spun with people, they were everywhere, at outdoor tables smoking shisha pipes, shopping, laughung, walking arm in arm eating, queuing for restaurants. It was a marvellous sight, like a latter day modernised 1001 nights. I was entranced.

I mentioned a number of small compensations: a polychromatic Jay, that I saw darting across a Holland park side street, and then later on the trek home, a fox scampering out of a garden near Queensway. I love the sense that the wilderness has n't quite left London. There are still echoes if you listen hard enough.

The insight? A woman. possibly homeless, probably friendless, reading a several days old paper in a fast food restaurant. James Baldwin described his protagonist in Another Country, as one of the "flattened", where the common denominator is quiet desperation, nameless torment and silent misery, not just on one day, but every day. London, like New York, the setting of Another Country, has too many of the "flattened". This woman was one. People should n't be falling through the cracks.

For reasons that I'm loath to talk about publicly, I've been far longer at the margins of my physical, and more importantly, emotional strength than I have been for a long, long time. Too many storms, too few ports to ride them out in.

It's been the comforting, inner world of books, the balm of words really, which have steered me away from the less pleasant side of introspection and it's cousins, anxiety and worry. I'm a firm believer in the benefits of the long dark nights of the soul; they're there for a reason, we all need to review and rethink. Life's not static and we can't be either.

Sundays and introspection. There are times, too many for my liking recently, when one is not without the other. So, I thank serendipity that I fell over these words of Samuel Johnson a few minute ago: "If solitary, be not idle. If idle, be not solitary" I've been both for several days and idle thoughts especially at such a heightend season as Xmas are not pleasant.

I got some of my mojo back - a smidgen, more has come back since I read those words of Johnson - wandering through the Freud Museum in Finchley. Parquet floors, steaming light, acres of book cases, the smell of floor polish, all are intellectual catnip to me. The sensory side of creativity and intellectual endeavour that I yearn to be part of.

I can't be alone in realising that the same books, the couch, and the row upon on row of Egyptian, African and Asian antiquities that I saw were also seen by someone who had such a seminal effect upon western cultural thinking as Freud. Remarkable and very moving.

That day has come. Christopher Hitchens, that monumental man of letters and instructive, almost edifying contrarian, is dead.

I've spent most of the evening reading the deservedly generous tributes that have appeared in the immediacy of Hitchens death. The finest, as it was with 9/11, was from Ian Mcewan. Endearing, warm, sensitive, a fine summation of a life lived well from a dear friend. Quite moving.

In some ways, Hitch was the Keith Richards of writing; prodigious talent, unstinting hard work (surprised I say that about the louche Stones guitarist? The ease and fluidity that he shows every time he plays did n't come without work), the love for what they do, that utter zest for life, the drinking obviously, but even down to their shared determination to live life at both ends and fain sleep.

If there ever is a Mount Rushmore of essayists and belle-lettrists then save the western aspect, the one that absorbs the bounty of the sun, for Hitch. I'll miss him.

I've been listening with half an ear to a radio programme where the presenter has been fluttering around the dissection table of a London hospital mortuary.

I'm left with two images, both opposing: the flensing of whales that I once saw on a programme about the Faroe islands, carcasses hauled on to the beach, sliced open, and the skin pulled back exposing innards and steaming ruby red blood; the other image, and this is driven by the home counties earnestness of the senior pathologist guiding the presenter across the extraordinary landscape of an opened up corpse is the trainspotter like enthusiasm of it all. The attention to detail is outstanding.

London, this battered, bruised, yet always juicy plum of a place, is alas never quiet. Sound leaks in as insidiously as draughts do in the bleak winter evenings. Where I am now in pleasant, affable Chiswick, I can hear the distant surf-like roar of the High Road, a gurgling fridge freezer, a hot water pump, and next door, a brace or so of drama students, who've been badged as the kids from Fame, practicing arias.

London, as I once wrote of Saigon, is an unfinished symphony of noise. If nothing else, noise is other people, who are n't necessarily hell, just misguided and unthinking.

In London the saying goes that you're never more than a few yards away from a rat. In the three decades I've lived here, I've seen just a handful; usually something slipping through the bushes in some suburban park, or once and more memorably, a large great rat hurrying across an empty Gerrard street one early morning.

So that's my experience of this assertion, and it's the way I want to keep it.

With people in the writing business however, and I include myself here, slightly because I do write, but more so because I'm a reader - a serious, heavy duty one - and the two of us need each other, I've found that you're never more than a few sentences away from a "why we write..." statement.

I'd be absolutely disingenuous if I said I did n't read them; I do, I gobble them up, page after page. And I know why. One word: reassurance. Their expressed motivations, have I got them? Have I got the writer's DNA ? What they're saying compels them then is it compelling me ? Am I writing because I feel powerful and blissful in my imagination as one of my writer friends says he does? Is it an impulse that I can't close the door on? Is it bemusement and amazement at this inestimable complex thing called humankind? Or the fun of the unobvious question: just what had that old bath I saw two workmen tugging out of the front door of a Holland Park grandee's house been privy to, for instance.

Why indeed do we write, why indeed do we read?

I'm just settling into my month long sabbatical in Chiswick - relatives have absconded to Australia for the whole of December. New twist to this bout of house sitting; there are two lodgers as well now. So it's elderly old me and two young women in their twenties. All the makings of a sit-com ...

Excited ? Of course ! I've just crossed over and bought an iPad

I've had the longest bout of jet-lag I've ever experienced and it's still not flushed out properly a week after or so after I got back from Hong Kong.

I point the finger at the time difference and the unexpected strain of having to fly to Scotland almost as soon as I got into the office on my first day back, but I'd like to think it's to do with the tenacity of the grip that Hong Kong still has on me. It simply won't let go and I don't want it to.

This Far Eastern city state stormed all my defences the moment I stepped out of the plane that brought me there. Take me again. Over-run me. No walls left to batter down. I love the place.

It's an intoxicant for all the senses: enormous statement skyscrapers stand cheek by jowl with broad sweeps of lush forest and stern, jagged peaks and crinkling mountain ridges.

Like so many Asian cities I've been to, Hong Kong has that earthy aroma of fertility, things are going to happen and quickly: throw a seed on the ground, it'll bloom; a single brick becomes a skyscraper overnight; an idea thrown into the heads of these natural born entrepreneurs and it's a new business the same day.

Hong Kong is for cliff dwellers. The only way is up. It has to be. Hong Kong's typography mandates nothing else but. So for millions it's an aerial life in the honeycomb of a giant apartment block and if you're lucky a view to die for and if you're not, then a view of someone's laundry fluttering on those metal hangers which all these cliff dwellers hang their washing on.

I got back very late last night from a trip to Hong Kong and Taiwan. Two fascinating places; generous, friendly, hospitable, seriously modern, and wired with energy, especially Hong Kong. New York, the poster child for all that's thrusting and brash, has the fury of a Zen Rock garden, compared to HK, London is a doddering pensioner, and Paris, frankly extinct.

The East is the Future.

Interestingly - and this is an adverb I've somehow become glued to, I use it freely in business e-mails and other places where I've run out of creative steam - this is the first Bonfire Night I've experienced in London in some time. Typically (another adverb, I can't throw overboard), I'm usually out of the UK on a trip.

So it's been a fascinating night; the sky's been flickering luridly with each percussive wave of non stop firework salvos, and the streets, particularly around Kensington Church Street, are thick with the smell of gun powder. Still and clear makes a perfect night for fireworks.

I'm pressing the pause button on posts for the next two weeks. I'm taking my near customary November break. Normal service resumes the end of the month.

Wole Soyinka's motivation to write was his sheer wonderment at the human phenomena around him. Better words than any of mine and absolutely true.

The sweet invisibility of middle age. I feel like my corporeal form is disintegrating any time I get near to a sales assistant in a shop.

I went into the menswear sections of several chain stores this evening. Other than one assistant commenting about my backpack, which I'd bought in his store a year ago, no one came near me. One even forcefully turned the other way as I walked by.

My presence is n't registered. Perhaps it is, but only the way a breeze stirs a ripple on a pond. A coat rack sways, or a cluster of shirts sighs and moves as something passes by. Invisibility, I've mastered it.

I heard David Norris, the garrulous cut-glass accented independent candidate for the Irish Presidency, use this assertion from Beckett.

In some way, it's more revealing of the candidate than of Beckett himself; there's a self importance and a conceit seeping through, which makes me thing Norris might be a liability rather than an asset to Ireland.

Nevertheless, it's the comment itself that matters: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better".

There are times when it seems I've fallen through a tear in the time / space continuum. As evidenced twenty minutes ago when I flipped the radio on and heard Public Enemy's "Don't Believe the Hype" on Radio 2. The incongruity is almost impossible to articulate.

Radio 2 has had an edginess to it for years; Wogan, the great raconteur, has intellect by the bundle arm in arm with a charming naughtiness; Radcliffe and Maconie pushed the musical boundaries night after night, whilst there have been notorious flame-outs a la Jonathan Ross. Still, Public Enemy...

How to reveal a character by Tolstoy: "Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when is is untied, the whole man is visible".

I go to some parts of London, and these places are always in West London, with Chiswick the dark hub, and feel I should be having another kind of life to the one I actually have. That I should be really ferrying a daughter to Saturday morning ballet; helping a son with his backhand on the tennis court; wondering in the stone-flagged, island kitchen whether we should take a gite in France for the summer; or opening patio doors in the keen air of an early morning for a brace of dogs to burst across a deep lawn.

God knows why I should think like this. I am pretty content with what I'm up to. Certainly I have ambitions which I edge nearer to. All in all I'm content. So why does Chiswick, a notoriously pampered place, make me think my life is wrong?

We have celebrity politicians in this country, and when we don't have those we have those up to their ankles in the mire of some scandal. Pace Dr Fox right now.

Americans, on the other hand, have proper, serious politicians. Look at this clip of Alan Grayson, the former Democrat representative for Florida. I would vote for this man. Why can't British politicians be like this? The same fire, the same common sense, the same straight talk, the same compassion. I look across the florid cheeked ranks of the current British Government and not a scintilla of any of it evident.

With every finely honed action and comment, Mr Cameron, spins the axis of Britain ever further to the right. Today's speech about illegal immigration panders to the ever slavering tabloids' wettest dreams and pushes us as a nation towards very uncomfortable historical memories.

Today, he wants us to report illegal immigrants, or our suspicions of who we think might be one. A fine opportunity for grudges and grievances to be aired out for one thing; for another, its not too many steps away from having people wearing stars. I don't like this at all.

I want to be proud to be British. How can I when the government are weaving dark spells like this?

I'm part of the solar dust that lies on the fringes of London's art world. I have a little gig at a gallery each month which is why I feel I can lay claim to a little foothold, but really it's no greater than a few specks.

But my few specks have enough combined purchase to get me into one or two events, usually because I've been tipped off by a friend. Like yesterday.

The two of us sat in a British Museum auditorium listening to Grayson Perry, in his finery, a canary yellow embroidered coat with a serious pink blush lining, talk about his life as an artist and letting rip at the things he dislikes about the art world. Certainly sunk that old trope of the wounded, passionate artist stripped to the waist, furiously dripping paint on a canvas, in the small hours. That went straight to the bottom of the sea. No survivors reported.

He's quite a showman, but thank God, not in the queasy, toe curling manner of Jonathan Ross, or Clarkson. And in a strange way, nowhere near as self referencing as those two, even if he does dress like a apple cheeked five year old.

Other than the Beatles, Newton, and an alleged incident that took place in the Garden of Eden, then I can't think of any other Apple that has had the cultural and global impact of Steve Job's Apple.

Visionary is one of those terms that's too freely used, yet, in the case of Steve Jobs, it's truly deserved. He saw further than the majority of us ever will ; innovated in the simplest yet most technologically sophisticated manner; cast freshness and light over what had been a daunting market place; liberated people in endless ways.

A great man. A revolutionary. Sorely missed.

I mentioned in a much earlier post that in certain areas of London, memories pour out of the walls of buildings and ooze up from the very paving stones I'm striding over.

That sense roared back this evening. I'd been to Foyles on Charing Cross Road and was walking towards Lower Regent Street, when - and this may well have been provoked by a wonderful memoir of a man looking back at a youthful trip through Mexico I'd just finished reading - all of those ghosts of happy memories of my life in this wonderful city surged along the streets.

Streets and buildings that I'd seen twenty five years ago on similar fresh, clear October evenings, I saw again as the young man I was then.

What would have I done if I'd bumped into that young man I was then this evening? So easy. Hugged him, and then told him I loved him. Loved him for being him, for being adventurous, for accepting that life would often be solitary, but when it was, that the quietest moments were so often the most exciting, and to never give up, to keep going, to push on.

A couple of weekends ago I went on an epic walk through London with a great friend from L.A.. We covered all points well known and many more not so.

One of the pit stops was the chocolate boutique that operates out of Harrods. It's not called that, but the conceit is all there; everything is hand-picked by amazingly attentive assistants, and artisan is the name of the game, bespoke, wild, inspired creations.

My friend and fellow choco-fiend bought some chocolate that had surely slipped the surly bonds of normal hand made chocolate. This stuff was beyond divine. In another galaxy.

I had that Florence moment that ultra-sensitive tourists are reputed to have the instant they get anywhere near the place and drop to the floor insensible. Knocked out cold by the the sheer emotion of it all. Except I could n't swoon. Being a man, for one thing, and a cheek by jowl crowded shopfloor for another.

Her words are much finer than mine in summing up the rapture these love-bombs produced, This article in the latest edition of the Morton Report. (Yup, that Morton...)tells it better than I could ever hope for.

It's incontrovertible that I am London's greatest chocoholic in human form and that my word is final on all matters chocolate; there's no question about the nirvana status of the cassis and hibiscus dark chocolate. I attest to that. Bluntly they rock...

Regrettably due to eye-watering expense, this will be an unrepeatable experience, and perhaps it's better that way, the memory crystallised, the fear of the next set not being quite as good as the revelation generated by the first. This is also why I've never re-read Wuthering Heights; I can't dare think it might be flawed.

Nonetheless, I regard this experience with the contentment and satisfaction one might feel looking at a cloudless Everest. The chocolate peace that passeth all understanding.

I think this underlines the American capacity to generate political good sense. Now I know for many that's an oxymoron, but it's only arrived at that unwelcome status because of the raucous behaviour of the bear-pit celebrity politicians, whose acumen I have yet to uncover. Nevertheless, that's the noise that's obscured the real sounds of a healthy American body politic. One that's decorous, civil, shorn of any flim-flam, and straight to the point.

I love this example that I spotted in an article in tonight's Standard about Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senatorial candidate for Massachusetts; it's perfect, it's also an excellent instance of exactly why tax is good, and takes the wind out of the self-appointed all government is bad, head bangers. I'll let her words take over now: "You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired the workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of the police and fire departments the rest of us paid for. You did n't have to worry that marauding bands would would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did".

There's more: "Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific? Keep a big hunk of it. But a part of the underlying social contract is that you take a hunk of that and pay for the next kid who comes along"

Smart, smart words. We need a Brit Politico who can deliver something as crisp and to the point, where are they?

Two comments that I've got memorialise here otherwise I'll forget them, or at best lose them in the thicket of daily life, and both are too good to let that happen.

"I go into the movie. I watch it, and I ask myself what happened to me" Fine, perceptive words written by that wonderful American film critic, Pauline Kael. Twenty odd years on, I can still recreate the frisson of excitement of buying an anthology of her film criticism from the old Athena bookshop in the Trocadero. It blew away me. She's still my favourite.

"...most good writers are also good talkers, writing nonetheless begins where writing ends - in silence" I've just read that apercu in an online edition of the New Yorker. Damn, it should be turned into a tee shirt slogan, or sprayed on walls. It's what happens. End of.

Take my hand someone and force it to write something.

Tonight's one of those unfortunate times when I'm writing less for the love of it, and more for the fact, I just want to see some words unroll across the screen, or my day will not feel right

Guess this is how sharks are supposed to feel; keep swimming or stop forever. Keep writing or the blog withers away. That's always been my worry. Some days the words pour out, other's it's a baleful trickle.

I have to put something down. These fingers need to flex and write the words they want to not feel themselves mastered by the demands of work and the office. Yet, tonight, I'm out of ideas. Even last night's quiet panic about an impending birthday is n't strong enough to morph into sentences. It's still there. I still have it. Just I can't articulate it.

As I edge nearer to what I call my mezzo-centenary - basically that birthday - I can't help feeling something like the bends going through my system. All those questions that I'm adamant everyone else, who's butted up to the same age I'm going to be soon, has wracked themselves with, I'm waking up with. All of those "What have I done?, Have I done enough? "Where should I be" anxieties.

The answer when the tremor eventually passes remains the same: I've lived, I continue to. I've done my best. There's been a catalogue of mistakes double sided with an equal amount of successes and much more plain ol' living.

As far as I know nothing changes the instant you surface on the other side of that birthday, it's the same as the day before, slow, continuous evolution. Yet, there's something fetishistic about the whole thing that's impossible to brush aside. Is it all about taking stock? Having a moment to pause? Is that it?

Back to Brighton for the first time in several years.

It's not changed, nor has my reaction. I raved then, I rave again. It's so atypically British, in fact it's atypically anywhere, it looks like it's been invented, except it has n't.

It's the fusion of blissful weather, a long beach, ingrained raffishness, camp glamour, and sheer youth.

And it's the latter that's the green fuse that drives this mad city. It's was the fabulous quartet of near balletic frisbee throwers; a more than passbale jazz funk cum acid rock trio with a Bez like dancer outside a very hip beachside bar; the strident sax player a few beats away from an imperturbable Bela Lugosi human statue.

Then there's the Lanes, which seems to be an endless frothing stream of nose-studded vegetarian Guardian readers (I'm the last of the two). And hardly anyone over thirty anywhere.

A couple of nights ago I wrote and told a friend that I'd found a canoli in my jacket pocket that had survived intact for nearly 8 hours. This evening, running along Cheapside, with the urgency and sweat of someone racing to the operating theatre with a kidney needed for a transplant NOW, was a man holding a lemon coloured cupcake in a dainty foil holder. Who was that for?

The best way - may be the only way - to enjoy London, is to see it through the eyes of a tourist. I took a dear friend from California across the heart of this wonderful piece of creative chaos that's been my home for coming along three decades, and it was if I'd also seen it for the first time.

Polychromatic skies, amazing street lighting, wandering street musicians, ravishing displays of flowers, descent into the voluptuary that's Harrods. Late evening sitting on a bench by the Thames watching London illuminate itself. Arabesques of light from the Wheel to a St Paul's bathed in moon light, and a solid slab of blue bulbs lighting up one side of the Heron Building. It just needed a soundtrack and it could have been Woody Allen's Manhattan.

A perfect day and a great friend to spend it with.

Spotted. In a deli near me. Chocolate cake with absinthe. Incredible. As a friend said, things like this make you wonder whether there's a higher entity that loves us. It's a sign. The union of chocolate and fin de siecle Paris's madness potion.

Today's historians and certainly those to come are going to be sucking their pencils for years pondering over what the impact of 9/11 was. The tremors certainly have n't settled and like the mainland of Japan after this year's tsunami, the ground has shifted irreversibly, direction unknown.

Did the debt crisis precede that terrible day all those Septembers ago, or was it longer in the womb? Again, a point to be contested with answers either side of that date.

But let's say it did get tailwind. What did that force us to recognise? This: that bankers sanctify profit as private, but their debt, on the other hand, has to be borne by everyone. Privatised profit, nationalised debt.

A US friend sent me this apercu that sums it all up at least if you are American. It's delightful, almost haiku like in it's awful clarity.

It's also about grasping acquisitiveness, shamelessness, hood winking, scaremongering; capabilities that have transcended geography, as palpable in the UK as they are in the US, monstering both countries, and laying waste to the Euro zone.

'A unionized public employee, a tea party republican, and a Wall Street Banker are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The Wall Street Banker reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the tea partier and says, 'Watch out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie.'

I have no linear memory of what I was doing on this day ten Septembers ago. It's more a loose thread of incidents that unspools whenever I remember Sept 11 .

I remember being in my office, which I shared with a few others, looking at huge plasma screens displaying performance statistics, flicking between those and my own computer. Then the office door was flung open. And the day began. That day.

Whoever it was, burst out that a plane had slammed in to the Wall Trade Centre. After that my sense of chronology goes. Someone brought up the BBC on one of the plasmas that I remember, as I do more and more people crowding into the office, silent, awestruck, barely talking, barely comprehending.

I remember vividly telling someone that at least 50,000 people worked in the WTC complex. I knew that from numerous visits to New York and the simple fact of spending time in it's subterranean shopping complex, where I could go to either wait for a friend who worked on nearby Hudson Street, or to wander around the two storey bookshop (Barnes and Noble ? Borders?), and for this more prosaic reason, that was where one of the very few free public toilets in Lower Manhattan was.

I remember seeing each of the Towers waver, then fall. I've no idea of my inner emotional state, horror, shock, disbelief, certainly disbelief; there was something about that rolling, broiling cloud of dust that defied understanding. That was a trope of science fiction, except it was n't, it was fact, and within that whirlwind of dust and ash, people were dying.

Even now, ten long years on, I still wonder whether it was a film. It's the unreality of being witness to something so extraordinary, so terrible. It's the province of films, but it was n't, it actually happened. Three thousand miles away from London's sister state, I saw with dozens of others crowded into a small office, as did millions worldwide, people die. I still can't believe it.

I remember eventually leaving work sometime in the evening and into a shell-shocked London. Past a winebar on Walbrook that always heaved with noise and laughter, that this evening was overflowing with hundreds of subdued office workers simply watching television, just the occasional murmur of a voice.

I remember the anxiety of trying to reach my friend, an old girlfriend in fact, who worked on Hudson Street. Endless e-mails then the utter relief of getting a line from here; shocked, fearful, but safe.

I remember an e-mail from a cousin working in Canary Wharf, apprehensive that they were a target and that an airliner had been hijacked in the Netherlands and was headed there.

That's all I remember, perhaps I could squeeze more out if I tried, but I can't, this is really all I remember of a day I wish had been as anonymous as all those that preceded it.

Some years ago I was fascinated by a set of keys that somehow had ended their useful days on a bus shelter roof just outside what was the the local tax office.

I wondered for days how they got there; whose they were; what they did, it was, from what I could gather from the top deck of the bus, a collection of various sized keys. Utilitarian Yale lock keys, stern mortise keys, maybe a car key thrown on the loop, and possibly hidden out of sight, a set of suitcase keys.

I threw around notions of who the owner might have been; the one I finished on was that it was someone on a stag night, insensible with booze, with a ball and chain tied to his ankle, and whose mates had in that toe-curling Brit phrase thrown his house keys on to the bus shelter roof "for a laugh".

That was several years ago. The shelter's no longer there, so where the keys are now is any one's guess. Perhaps there's a place where all lost and forgotten keys gather.

It's rare that I get so enamoured of such marginalia, but I have seen something this week that's similarly piqued my curiosity: a rough heart drawn in a messy off-cut of concrete on Cornhill, one of the busiest streets in the City. It's heart that's maybe drawn with a finger in just setting concrete with the initials R and J around it.

Who are R and J? When was it done? Are they still together? How many millions of feet have pattered over this symbol of eternal love?

One of my dearest friends leaves for a six month secondment to Abu Dhabi on Thursday and already I can feel a hole in London and in my life.

West London even now does n't feel the same and you're still here.

I wandered through Kensington and into Holland Park and nearly every inch of my walk saw a memory corkscrew out of the pavement: both of us open mouthed the first time we stepped into Wholefoods; standing by the bus stop, drenched after a sudden summer afternoon downpour; idling in Holland Park, talking amiable, cheerful nonsense; meals here, coffee there.

It's not even Thursday yet, and I'm missing your great sense of humour, your generosity; your zest for life, that infectious sense of adventure; your clear, wise words; your sense of justice and natural compassion. And these are a just a handful. Bluntly I'll miss you.

My head feels like the inside of a hiking boot that's had a donkey's hoof in it. I'm at a point somewhere beyond tired. I hate feeling like this. What fun is there to be had in feeling like a dimming 60 watt bulb.

I know who the guilty are. Bring forward the accused: four straight nights of sub-prime sleep, barking dogs at midnight, late night espresso, and the old favourite, too much chocolate.

Enough juice in the tank though, to read a fizzing thread running on one of my more literate facebook friends. It's all about Obama, who I'm unashamed to say is one of my political heroes, and what seems to be the uphill slog of selling his agenda.

Obama's agenda is solid, it's sensible, and it's eminently pragmatic, but it's a hard sell in a marketplace that's deformed in favour of antics and poorly considered sound bites. Bachman is hardly Plato, and Glen Beck is barely Bluto, but who else gets the copy these days but them.

Last night I felt like Howard Carter surely must have felt as he peered into Tutankhamen's tomb for the first time as I walked into Wilton's Music Hall, which justifies the title of London's hidden gem. The place had me reeling, joyfully sucker-punched with revelation, sheer wonderment and something near to radiance.

You know that terrible cliche that's always trotted out about place X being city Y's secret treasure? Well, Wiltons actually justifies that claim. I'll arm wrestle anyone who counter claims because it is.

A century old music hall disinterred and brought back to life after decades in the shadows and cobwebs. It's an eccentric and bohemian restoration, with the outer walls and those of the bars and corridors taken right back to the original brick. Bricks that are pitted, hollow, dented, denuded, almost primeval, like an ancient Galapagos's turtle, smacking of a time before time.

The manner in which the theatre itself has been restored is extraordinary. It's chiaroscuro like for one thing, full of light and shade, then there's the palimpsest effect of the walls being unevenly scraped back to their original layers, sometimes even back to the raw plaster.

The roughness of the walls comes alive with artfully placed lighting. Even the smallest sliver, a flake of a broken paint layer, shape shifts when the light catches it.

I was awed by this place. To close with another archaeological image: it was like discovering Pompeii for the first time.

As I said a few days ago, it was inevitable the pendulum was going to be swinging crazily these past two weeks; the riots sent it violently one way and the compensatory swing went straight the other way towards punishment and judicial retribution.

If today is in anyway a portent, then I think we're nearing a sense of equilibrium. I'm working from a limited dataset, but I'm really going by sense, or what I saw wandering around Kensington Palace Gardens.

Our rainbow mini-nation cum city state was en fete. It was beautiful. London's passegiata time, talking, smiling, singing, strumming guitars, or as I saw in one part of the park, dancing the salsa en masse in a band-stand. That looked especially glorious. Six years of yoga has made me appreciate the lissomness and elegance the human body is capable. Salsa takes that to another level.

Let's trust that our wounded city is on the point of putting the painkillers back in the cupboard. I reckon we're there, or as damn near abouts.

Doctor Archimedes...I've nursed my laptop back to life. I know, does n't sound like much...in fact it's beyond trivial, but two days off-line and the monkey's on my back.

She's juiced up and ready to go. Hallelujah...

I'd say that London's collective blood pressure has dropped since the horrors of last week, but has that pall of shimmering terror dissipated...probably not.

Ask a fellow Londoner and I'd think they would say they can feel the fight or flight bubbling below the surface. The ripples have n't played themselves out in regards to that sense, the city's adrenal gland is still puckering.

Maybe I can squeeze a little more time out of my laptop before the battery goes to sleep.

There is something that's sticking in my craw, actually two things: Cameron and Boris Johnson. I think that the former has some chutzpah, brass balls, to claim the Police did nothing during the riots...It's a temerity to assert that, and hope that people think it was him who plugged the dyke by returning home from holiday. Hugh Orde gave that piece of bluster short shrift on yesterday's Newsnight.

Unsurprisingly, he's returned to form and now made a back-tracking statement that the Police did do a good job. Cameron and the U-turn could almost be the title of a Harry Potter novel.

Now the Mayor, Boris Johnson, high profile, but low octane, beautiful description, which I filched from a Guardian columnist earlier this week...he's having to perform real work, make hard decisions. things he's always shyed away from. The comedy flustered persona that he's played shamelessly on, busted open now, it's properly flustered man now. Way out in the deep end. Arms flailing.

Its moot as to whether he'll be re-elected next year. On the balance of this week's events, any snap election would see him bounced out of City Hall, and it would be someone else being photographed with the very important people, and we know Boris adores that; however, given that he's got his own propaganda arm in the shape of various right wing rag you never know.

What I do know is that I'll not be marking X against Johnson. Nope. I want a proper Mayor. A serious Mayor.

I have to type quickly since the juice is leaking out of my well used laptop. It's another one that I've fully exploited. God bless Toshiba for making 'em robust enough to stand the pummelling I've given this over the years.

In this post riot London of ours, the mood, understandably, is for retribution, for something punitive to be delivered upon the shoulders of those who flooded our high streets, looting, stealing, terrifying, wounding, and sadly, murdering. Deliverance, at the risk of sounding like a tyro Daily Mail leader writer, is due.

Its the pendulum swinging the other way now. The first swing took us into this netherworld of violence; this is the compensatory swing the other way, our collective desires are being met now. Eventually the length of the rebound will lessen, ebb away, until we're back at equilibrium, or something as near as damn it.

We've gone through one door, been hurled through it really, and we're leaving through another into a different world. That's a poor way of stating the obvious, what I want to underline nonetheless, is this world we're entering will take shape and substance from the imaginative responses to this social tsumani that breached our landscape earlier this week; look at the self-help groups that sprung up organically, those sterling people who took to the streets with brooms; the spontaneous, independently organised social media sites that have raised thousands for the 89 year old Tottenham barber, whose shop was swept aside in the madness that happened there, or the site that's collecting money and presents for the innocent young Malaysian student, Ashraf, whose mugging by a "bad Samaritan" was filmed and went viral.

This growing sense of collective engagement makes me very proud; we're thinking, we're working out answers, we're helping.

It as a act of solidarity as far as I'm concerned to shop, even if it's goods I don't really need, at one those small shopkeepers whose businesses were turned over. It's not just to tell the rioters they will not win because they will not, that's obvious, they turned a corner and went straight into a dead end as far as public opinion is concerned. The main reason is to let these poor business owners they're not alone. We're family.

It feels like I'm living in some strange dystopian world. A participant in a near future docu-drama like 28 Days. The Government has capitulated to the Mob. No one feels safe. I'm so accustomed to hearing police sirens over the years that I no longer hear them; that's changed, every blast and hoot of a siren sets my teeth on edge.

We're living in a fear.

The Ledbury, a two star Michelin restaurant about a mile away from my flat, was stormed by masked men. The staff fought them off with rolling pins and kitchen implements and herded the diners into the wine cellar for their own safety. Mad...

And this virus is spreading: Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester...

There was an article on the BBC news site last week about the most suitable theme song for next year's Olympics.

The laurel leaves were draped around the neck of the Clash's, "London Calling", after an excellent dissection of the same song's actual lyrics; gloomy, somewhat doom-ridden, and at the same time firmly of the period, which had, as with other powerful songs, had it's spiky edges rubbed down, smoothed the way a pebble is, and now no one hears any other line than Joe's throaty "London Calling at the break of the day..."

So it's the Clash on the winner's podium for that; then this evening, they were anointed by the on-line version of the New Yorker, for a further award: the easy to grab theme tune for the riots popping up all over London. Yep, "London Burning" It is and I don't like it.

London seems like it's out of control: shops plundered, opportunistic looting, buses torched, teens and pre-teens taking the streets over at will.

There's testosterone preening, violent male peacock feather flaring, "look at me, go on, look...see this". Silver back, alpha male behaviour. Understandable in a sense, but only in a sense; otherwise it's completely indefensible, unpalatable and it has to be reined in.

This turns neatly to the matter of where is everyone: Cameron still on his latest holiday; Johnson, reluctantly coming home early from his, and having to face for the first time the hard realities of being mayor. Can't run away from this, I'm afraid. Can't bumble and gurn through this. Be Ken. Be like he was after 7/7. An exemplar.

To cap it all, there's a leadership vacuum at the head of the Met due to Murdoch's suborning of the top layer of officers.

I feel like a passenger in a ship with no officers, the rudder's broken, and Somali pirates are scaling the sides.

Living on my own means I don't have to pay attention to the torment that afflicts a lot of people who go away - what to get as gift or souvenir for the family, for the significant other, for the kids, and especially if it's for the latter, something that'll neutralise any "you got that for them....and I only got this" sulk.

What I get is for me. That's all there is to it. For the student in me, it's a book, at least one, usually more, particularly if I've been to the US; for the sartorial part of me, it's a T-shirt.

My wardrobe's jammed with t-shirts I've picked up hither and thither, bearing cryptic slogans in scripts I don't know, so that burst of Japanese characters across one of my favourite t-shirts could well not be the delicate Zen koan I keep telling myself it is. You take your chances that's all I can say.

I do know this, and too well now, size matters. It does, it really does. No one can escape it. Don't try to. It matters with a capital M. I'll explain.

What was marked large in Guatemala City and medium in Milan airport is n't what comes after their first wash in London. Wash 'em, dry 'em, and then try 'em on again, and hope I can still draw breath. They shrink savagely. From man-size to doll size. I've got a handful that throw water on and I'd win a wet T-shirt competition hands down.

Wherever I go next, I'm going to super-size. Go for the size up and build in a shrinkage margin

As is the case whenever I return from abroad I high-tail it to the library and pick out whatever stock they have on the country or region I've just been to.

In the case of Milan, well, all the local libraries, here and in the City where I work, are pretty light on coverage, Naples and Sicily, on the other hand, are much richer seams; serious fiction, crime, travelogues, histories, memoirs abound. So it's these two parts of Italy that I've been reading about.

Earlier this evening, lazing on a bench in the same idle grandeur that an adult walrus basks on the beach, I came to the end of "Falling Palace", Dan Hofstadter's lyrical, often bittersweet, portrait of his extended stays in Naples.

It's a Naples of melancholy. Every corner seems shaded, occasionally with joy, more often languor, an odd sadness. It is compelling writing, to the degree that I could easily draw a sketch of it's tiny streets, abrupt dead ends, crumbling palazzi, it has a ghostly life shadow that fell over me as I read it.

His Naples is rueful, riddled with ambiguity, things are held at a distance, yet the other side of this peculiar coin, is a city that toil incessantly, everyone has another job, a sideline in something else; it's noisy, a blanket of noise that lulls people to sleep. the city is magical. I have to go.

This strange, haunting, what-if mood draws so much of it's odd potency from Hofstadter's elusive and quixotic relationship with the very complex Benedetta, his enigmatic, puzzling, gregarious, yearning, wonderfully gestural girlfriend.

I could see Benedetta very easily. I have met two women, one Italian, the other French, who have weaved spells over me, spun me into a similar webs to those that Hofstadter intimates Benedetta (is this really her name? There's more than echo of Dante's beloved Beatrice in it).

Ask me what colour mood this intimate recollection is and I say blue, the blue of wistfulness, gentle regret, sadness. Very much the way I feel when I think of each of these two women especially the one I could never properly commit to. You know who you are.

If it had n't have been for one of my Italian friends who has spent a long time on and off in the US, I would have in all probability gone to the end of my days, entirely ignorant of George Carlin. In the hour or so since I looked at the first Youtube link she sent me, I've taken the cool-aid. I'm a convert.

See what I mean: Ten Commandments and Modern Man

The things you hear that really matter not one whit and life would have passed on without them, but you heard nevertheless, and now they won't leave you.

Agree that's a complicated and infelicitous sentence in a way, yet that's what happened to me this afternoon.

I overheard a young woman say to her two friends at the table next to mine outside Sheffield's Millennium Gallery cafe, perhaps flippantly, perhaps even seriously - could after all be a nugget that she'd picked up from a magazine lifestyle quiz - that almost 60% of all couples who visit IKEA are quarrelling by the time they reach lamp section. Bloodbath by the bulbs? Interesting.

It's got to be anecdotal, and if there was any empirical data available, I'd be whizzing it straight off to Ben Acre's Bad Science column in the Guardian hoping he'd slice and dice it on the dissection table.

Of course, the next time I'm in an IKEA, I'll be on alert by the time I reach the Lamps.

A beautiful evening. Another hour or so lounging in Holland Park. But next year, I want to be in my own place with at least a balcony. Somewhere that I can walk to easily to bath in fresh air.

Something's happened to Holland Park's Parakeet population. They're not there. Vanished. They've been scratched off the canvas of the park.

Sitting in the Dutch Garden, I'd always glimpse a zap of lime green dash from tree to tree, or at least hear them squeaking and squawking.

And now, nada. So where are they? On holiday? Gone somewhere warmer? Pitched camp and headed for another part of town?

I'm going the other way to most of my friends and peer group; the older I get, the more liberal I become. However, this is in no way a binding statement, it ebbs and flows, flexes the way a muscle contracts and expands, depending on the situation, and my sense of natural justice, because it's in this area that my liberality is most tested.

Many wrong actions can be understood; some can even be excused in the specific sense that we know way some one did something, that the root cause was lack of education, or unintentional ignorance, or done in good faith, but then backfired.

The line in the sand - my line in the sand - beyond which people should not trespass, effectively the point where my liberality is replaced in a flash with the overwhelming understanding that punishment is called for and retribution demanded, was breached on Friday by the heinous, inexplicably evil and conceited (I'll explain what I mean by conceited in a sentence or two) Norwegian right wing extremist.

Can this man sleep at nights? Perhaps. There's probably a flush of toxic satisfaction coursing through him. But I don't want that, I don't like the notion this man may be at peace with himself, I want him to be haunted by this, tormented the way Lady Macbeth is, every moment, waking or otherwise, a nightmare.

Conceited? Yet again, the world has been set back and lives lost prematurely, savagely, through the arrogance of someone who feels he knows better. That they can sacrifice someone else for their illogical, paranoid aims. For them, we are but abstractions, nothing more.

How often have we seen this? Been made to suffer? The temerity is unspeakable. No empathy for others, not a shred. No sense, no feeling that others are not just flesh and bone, that they are, we are, each of us, a unique consciousness, and to be respected for that. That no one else can decide our fate, or sacrifice us on their mad altar.

I'd rather this man was pushed out of the police station, the door bolted behind him, and then made to walk into a shocked and bereaved Norwegian nation to face their anger.

How ironic, and probably predictable when you think about, that in all my travels to India, across Asia, throughout Central and South America, I was never bitten by a single mosquito. Other bitey things, yes, but never by anything from the Culicidae Family. Heard them countless times, seen them whine around other people, slapped the critters away whenever I've had to, but never has one dined on me.

So, to be bitten in Italy at the weekend, and bitten multiple times, in one of the world's most developed and civilised countries, has an ironic quality deeper than any echo sounder can probably pierce.

The Italian mosquitoes loved me; penny sized red weals all over, including to my embarassment, one on the tip of my schnoz. It's red enough to make me be seen in the dark.

Off for a week in Milan. I intend doing nothing apart from reading, writing, and thinking

Why has Rebekah Brooks hung on to her job and two hundred others have n't ? Answers on a postcard, please.

There's something nefarious going on. It's murky. Either she's acting as a firewall to protect James Murdoch from the toxicity that's billowing out because of this scandal - there's more than one suggestion going round that he knows more than he's letting on - or she has some hold over him, and so he dare n't get rid of her, or risk the whole house come down.

News International has been an intimidating, menacing presence for decades in Britain. The politicos, especially the Tories, have kow-towed to Murdoch abjectly, he's more or less had free reign to pull any levers he's wanted to; it's always the veiled threat whispered in the ear, that NI has some dubious story, or will concoct one, and then mobilise an army of outraged citizens on the back of that, and so they've all been too fearful to take him on, other than a few individuals and the Guardian.

That's been blown apart this week. There's no fear. It's liberation from media tyranny that's hobbled the British body politic for years. Nevertheless this man is too cunning, I can't see him being humbled by this.

I'm very proud of the Guardian's lone stand and tenacity in plugging way at this. I've been a Guardian reader since I was 18. It's the only principled paper in the UK

It's wonderful the NOTW has had the plug pulled. But it's little more than a human sacrifice; keeps the regulator appeased so Murdoch can absorb the remainder of BskyB. Money matters more than morality for News International. This is lip service.

All the prejudice and bigotry, the kangaroo court manners, the menace and veiled threats, the tyrannical behaviour, which make up the NOTW's call-sign, I'm convinced will get recycled into a Sunday version of the Sun. This thing is hydra-headed.

Still there's something of a Tahrir square like mood of celebration in a certain part of West London right now.

And as a Guardianista, there's only one way to end: it's the Guardian wot done it...

The fault line between Mammon and Morality has been cruelly revealed this week.

Even for a newspaper as synonymous with scandal, skulduggery and controversy, hacking into the voicemails of a murdered schoolgirl, has to be the worst thing the News of the World has done. Ever.

Nor does it stop there, wicked enough as that it is. More is being exposed by the minute.

The desire, the madness in fact, for profit, for bylines, for that inch further than the competition can reach, has fanned this immorality.

Aided and abetted by vile self-regarding newsroom braggadocio - some of those responsible regarded themselves as "Princes of Darkness" completely untouchable, beholden to no one. Able to do whatever they wanted and to revel in it.

It is as amazing, as it hideous, as it is heartbreaking for the victims. How could they? Employee behaviour takes it's steer from the management in every company I've worked at. Don't tell me it was rogue individuals flying under the radar here. Impossible.

What compounds the horror is that the News of the World's tentacles have extended into the Police now. There's a sense to me of veiled threats left by this newspaper for anyone daring to say no to this monster. Don't think about it, or if you do, expect the banner headline equivalent of a severed horse's head on Sunday. This is mafia newpaper ethics.

Unforgivable. But will Cameron actually do anything, other than mouth outrage?

It's a little after nine on Sunday morning and dimly, I'm catching the sound of Fontella Bass singing "Rescue Me". Somewhere there's a party yet to finish. I don't imagine it'll be soon, Fontella's now been replaced by Curtis Mayfield's "People get ready"

My kind of music, just not my time of day.

These are dark economic times, but London seems, in some areas at least, to running very strongly against the tide.

There is an incredible surge in building across all points of the compass; Stratford has the Olympic site rising up like a giant mushroom after the morning rain; the City is almost in some form building extremis, it's either raising skywards like the Pinnacle and The Shard, with more skyscrapers in between those, or it's coming down to make way for another. Builder's dust in the City is now as ever-present as sand in the Sahara.

We have a brand rail line in process of being threaded like a shoe lace around, through, and mostly underground London. The streets are going to be open trenches for years.

I love the sense of living in an ever changing urban landscape. Nothing's static. An ancient city still marching forward, contours and skylines altering by the second. It's still the urban jungle feel; what's going to behind that next corner.

Yet, even inside this whirling ball of dust, steel beams, noise, closed off streets, diggers and cranes, nature seemingly thrives and if it's anything to go by what I saw yesterday by the Tower of London, making a comeback. In the evening sky, I saw a rolling, moiling vortex of Starlings pirouette for several minutes over the Minories. I love those birds.

There are still social dinosaurs roaming Britain. Read on and discover the Priggosaurus. My advice to this bride to be is don't marry into this family. Not unless you love being at loggerheads with your mother in law forever and a day.

Becoming the POTUS requires innate capabilities that are really only seen in a comic book superhero, and this which I've always known, but was re-emphasised in a Radio programme last night, an inextinguishable Midas touch. Money has to flow ceaselessly, or the campaign withers.

As with every thing, that's not the full list, there's a trinity of requirements needed; the two above, and ingredient X.

Pinning down exactly what it is might as well be like herding cats. Nigh impossible. You have it or you don't is about as a good as an explanation I can give.

Barack Obama has it, and if was an American I'd vote for him in a heartbeat; the full package, gravitas, intelligence, grace under pressure, splendid oratorical ability.

Maybe that's it just there, partly pinned down the fugitive ingredient X. Perhaps.

But I can't see anyone else amongst the gaggle of people flexing in the wings hoping for their turn in the Presidential lime light, who have anything near ingredient X. Bachman and Palin have charisma, Romney for his part has experience, but they're all sans ingredient X.

As far as I'm concerned the 2012 election has Barack Obama's name all over it. Finest candidate by far.

London has been a furnace this weekend. Two days of face to face encounters with great roaring blasts of hot air and a tormentingly hot overheard sun.

I've done things that metaphorically I would n't do, meaning I've forsaken the sunny side of the street for relative mint cool of the shade. Had to. I was baking like a brie yesterday particularly.

Even if it has been two days of walking on hot coals, I've made it to places I don't normally go to, including Tooting, which I only knew of in relation to a beloved French teacher I had who came from there, and from what I saw yesterday, it must be one of the most multi-cultural places on Earth.

After Tooting, came New Malden, London's Koreatown; it really is too, not a handful of shops and lonely restaurants lumped generically by the local media on one of their periodic ethnic safaris, it is as Korean as any place I've seen in Korea itself.

Somehow I then made it to Chelsea Bridge and ran into the Chelsea cruise, a slow drive-past of lovingly restored British cars of the sixties and seventies, Ford Anglias, Escorts, Granadas, Minis, and a static parade of iconic American cars: Chevy pick-ups, Moby Dick sized Lincolns, Impalas, Mustangs. All beautifully painted, all handsomely refurbished, and throaty enough when the engines kick to bring tears to any petrol head or Americophiliac like me.

Before my legs split like matchsticks carrying an elephant, I made it to Battersea Park. To my eternal shame this park is one I'd only visited once before, possibly in the late eighties or early nineties. The park is a dream: a magical Peace pagoda by the river, with resplendent Buddha figures serenely watching London at play and rest. and where last night and again this evening, I saw people in complex, probably painful lotus like positions, meditating.

As I left this evening ( I had to go again to confirm it was as entrancing as I remembered on Saturday - it is) there was sound of a tenor sax floating into the trees and over the Thames. It could have been a movie; the protagonist walks away under the spreading shade of the trees, content and at one with everything

Christopher Hitchin, who is fast catching up with Bellow as the writer whose books I feel compelled to press everyone I meet into to reading, or if they don't then take me off their Christmas card list, has an article in a recent Vanity Fair on losing his voice to the pernicious cancer that's stolen it's way into him.

But, as is the case with the Hitch, there's always much more; and this is an article on how to talk, how speech influences prose, and the utter joy of those deep, memorable conversations that happen between friends.

How do we realise the value of a transcendental conversation? When the likelihood of one occurring again fades, even jeopardised, or worst of all, recedes into an ever diminishing point, until there's nothing but darkness. That's when. Absence, not presence.

Hitchin's quotes a wonderful piece of verse to show this. It's from an adaptation of Heraclitus by the Victorian poet, William Cory

They told me, Heraclitus; they told me you were dead.
They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.
I wept when I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.

Is n't that great? I tired the sun when I was a student and still do thirty years on

It's twenty six years, almost to the day in fact, since I first saw the E Street Band break across a stage with the energy of a cavalry charge, the stamina of stream engines, and a joie de vivre that by rights ought to be bottled and handed out as tonic for the down-hearted. They were electric.

That concert was memorable for all the right reasons. I had never been to a stadium sized concert before, and this was at the old Wembley. The venue was brimming with thousands, all of us fizzing with eagerness the way champagne does in that nano-second before the cork's pulled.

I was very tired. I'd only had a few hours sleep that morning after finishing a Friday night shift at the restaurant I worked at; so too worn down to manage hours of standing, I persuaded the friend I was with ( a Canadian I think) to find somewhere we could sit.

Eventually we flopped on to a pair of seats, a few rows above the tunnel and one row below a slightly raised tier. This, we clicked moments before the gig opened up to Bruce counting the band in, was the Royal Box, and popping at the seams with Rock Royalty: in there was Sting, Ringo Starr, and George Michael, who was absolutely in the zone, head-banging and singing his heart out.

No doubt there were probably other members of the Rock Royal family in there, but it's just these I remember.

Next to me was a man on his own wearing a long, vibrant bandana, who I was initially sceptical of, too much the rock wannabe about him, I thought. Then I forgot all about him; the E Street experience does that to a person.

I only clocked him again when he moved from his seat and disappeared in the intermission between the band closing their set and the expected crescendo of encores to follow. I imagined he'd be heading out to Wembley Park station before the crowds poured out. Except I saw him again, this time striding on to the stage with the rest of the band for the encores. I'd been sat next to Steve Van Zandt.

That memory has n't gone, it's blurred a little around the edges, put that down to edge and distance from the event, but what I've never forgotten from that, or the other seven times I've seen the E-Street Band in full flight is that sense of utter exhilaration, every nerve intoxicated, every sense alive. Swashbuckling licks and riffs played by a band, never anything but at the top of the game, not their game, I mean the Game.

Today, I woke to hear the motor of the band, it's dynamo, Clarence Clemons had died. RIP. Those sax solos will never leave me.

I'm still dazed by the horror of the photo I saw in yesterday's Guardian. Something that I had n't spotted yesterday was that the man who had brought about this slaughter was actually taunting those around him, brandishing the victim's body parts like perverse trophies. What a nightmare world, we're in.

Up till the moment I began flicking through the Guardian magazine, I'd been toying with the idea of somehow exploring the notion of the epiphany.

A friend from my Saturday morning yoga class had got me thinking on these lines this after she'd said that the moment she realised she had to move - her epiphany in other words - came without warning in Holland Park. That same afternoon, she went to the estate agent and the ball started a-rolling.

Revelation to revolution in one day. So that was what I had in mind to write about; that sign, that moment, the flash of light. Then, I opened the Guardian magazine and stopped.

Inside was an incredible article, which even putting aside my true Guardian loyal reader's mantle I don't think any other newspaper would have the courage to publish, and certainly not without some gratuitous gesture to say how daring they were. A gesture I've seen too often which replaces any impact with basking self adulation of how brave which ever paper it is believes itself instead.

The Guardian is n't like that.

This article was numbing. Stupefying. Photos taken by front-line photojournalists, briefly captioned, of shattering scenes of horror from the wars that stain this planet. There's one I can't shake. A black and white shot of a glazed killer with a knife gripped between his teeth in the manner of a cartoon pirate, but this was diabolical, bandoliered with bullets, and taken in one of those traumatised West African countries, Liberia or Sierra Leone, which have been tortured and tormented by war and death. Riven with savagery. Bereft of mercy.

This man - this pure killer - has an unfathomable madness, something deeper and wilder than blood lust about him. Gripped in one of his hands he's holding a severed hand like a sportsman might hold a trophy; in the other, and I'm still horrified by this, he's clutching the genitalia of whoever it is he's slaughtered. It is unimaginable.

The rhetorical questions have to stop. There's no point any more in theorising emptily why people do this. It has to be fought. And this is where I've had my epiphany: I'm rejoining Amnesty International.

This must be THE website that every Brit has secretly dreamed of. You want to know where the rain is, then go here - Rain Today Perfect. Thanks to my Anglo-Swiss work mate for pointing it out to me this afternoon.

It's only a few weeks since I volunteered to be interviewed on a middle aged man's experience of well...middle age.

Sat in front of a softly spoken, occasionally questioning, American psycho-therapist, I talked for almost an hour about this life period I'm in travelling through.

Good for the person listening as he needed this for a research project; good for me to be able step out of the daily cacophony and put things into perspective. I've perhaps a more ordered and sequenced mind than many, but that's not to say the cataloguing does get out of order from time, and an opportunity like this can only help.

I had mixed reasons for putting myself forward: intellectual curiosity, what would I learn not just about me but from the situation itself; an actual psycho-therapist's study offers the chance to sink deeper into the world of leather couches, Freud and those nervy, worried characters that live in Saul Bellow's world. Call it empathy.

Then, there was a sense of altruism. The need to leave something, however momentary, behind something that another in years hence might draw from, maybe nourishment, even hope, or just weary recognition that the place they're in is the the place that so many of us have walked through.

The desire to leave a trace behind after I've gone is very powerful for me. I live on my own, have no kids, no immediate family so there's not the chance of a familial memory being passed along if only for a few generations.

But that's not one tenth of it for me. It is for me the need to leave footprints in the sand that hold their shape after the first wave has swept in, the one which traditionally sweeps away all evidence of who passed.

And it has to be a foot print that someone can benefit from, whether it be the sense I referred to in the last paragraph, or simply from someone reading this blog. Something lives on. Rumbles on if I take up the cue of the thunderstorm that's edging over West London right now.

Let's get the preliminaries over and answer any lingering questions that might be there since the Girl in Damascus furore broke. My blog. Is it really mine or is it a half baked vanity project and exercise in self love penned by a show off doctoral candidate with no sense of empathy ?

It's mine. Every word scraped out of the blank page of a laptop is brought to the surface by me. Wriggled into sentences by me. Spell-checked by me. All mine.

Plenty of late nights this week getting home late from various things: yesterday the baffling, yet compelling in meditative way, Italian film, Le Quattro Volte, that focused on the mundane and routine in a small Calabrian town, but transformed for me at least the art of charcoal making into something fascinating; then this evening an avant garde music concert, a soundscape as it was termed, and it was, a melange of indecipherable voices, running water, bird song and off time percussion, which took place in Covent Garden's Swiss Church.

So I've had my cultural vitamins this week along with this booster I found in a BBC online article on Carl Jung; "The afternoon of life must have a significance of it's own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage of Life's morning"

I love the pithiness of that statement. Unforgettable and incontrovertible . So why have n't I seen it as a tee shirt slogan then?

Chiswick may be one of the most middle class areas in London, and possesed at times of it's own brand of ennui and sharp-faced moodiness - Arlington Park, the fictional suburb in Rachel Cusk's marvellous book of the same name, deftly sweeps up like leaves in a breeze the same deadening sense of frustration and inner terrors that throbs under the skin of this real-life suburb, but all that aside, Chiswick is a riot of nature. It's bursting with vitality.

It's been a cavalcade of sphinx-like foxes on the lawns of Chiswick House; fist-sized insects whirring through mid-evening skies; swallows darting and weaving, before tucking themselves under house eaves; the ubiquitious legions of squawking, charging parakeets; then a dainty pair of married Goldfinches skittering from bush to bush down the street; and Swifts cavorting and tumbling in endless arabesques; a fat, round water vole hurtling as fast as it's tiny piston like legs could take it into the undergrowth by Chiswck House lake; even a timid mouse popping it's head in and out of a piece of tubing. I have been dazzled.

Not a corner turned without something unexpected. Urban safari on my doorstep. Beat that.

Think I need to row back a little on the amount of Frasier episodes I'm watching on Youtube; a few nights ago, I was dreaming I was a psychiatrist.

If I was asked what I'd actually like to be right now, at this very second in fact, then it'd be that worthy profession of epigramist. I saw this diamond in The Guardian's Education supplement today, and I can't stop thinking of how irreducibly precise it is a description of today's webbed up and wireless world: "To the digital native, the analogue becomes wondrous".

Hole in one. Those words sum it up.

Playing in the background as I'm writing is "The Bottle", Gil Scott-Heron's incantatory prose poem and his warning to Black America, to the wider America in fact, of the easy danger of drinking.

Without hypno-therapy, or whatever it is that allegedly resurfaces memories, I'll never be able to say how I first heard of him. Perhaps, it was Charlie Gillett's world music show on Capital that opened the door. I don't know, I can't remember,

But that loping jazz, that piercing flute, those soft, delicate, perfectly weighted keyboards, that honeyed voice, every beat balanced, stories half sung, half spoken, took me by the shoulders, swept into my soul, into deep places, into thinking.

This is night-time music of intelligence and caught me a scant few years after I'd graduated in American Literature, and every note, every line, every mood chimed.

I saw Gil twice, and on consecutive days, in mid 1986. First occasion was at Hammersmith Odeon, where I was so obviously smitten that the next day when I should have been working, I pleaded a bad back - a back spasm I think - and skived off to see him again at a free concert in Clapham Common, where yet again, his magic threaded through me. Still there twenty five years on as well. The bonds are like steel hawsers.

A syllogism based on a news article doing all the rounds today: Denmark does n't like Marmite, I love Marmite, therefore I no longer like Denmark. Something's rotten there.

Here's the article in question for any completists

"I'm interested in everything and nothing else". Umberto Eco, that's me as well. Absolutely everything.

The desire to want to write will only ever be that if the hard work of actually sitting down and doing it remains a luxuriant thought - the do tomorrow syndrome, the manana school of writing in other words. The thought, not the deed is top dog, instead of the other way round, or as my comprehensive school motto more classically put it - Res non verba.

As I've done in several recent articles I'm taking yet another cue from El Hitch; you have to put the hours in, pay the necessary dues. On average he produces 1,000 words of serviceable copy per day.

Writing at such a velocity and of such clarity as Hitchen's generates does n't just occur; the furnace requires more than simple input of raw materials, nothing's going to spontaneously combust into life, without the careful hand of the creator writer stirring the pot, and the culmination of what I've been building up to is: exercise that writing muscle, every day a little ink has to hit the page. Or writing remains an idle dream. Keep supple, stay toned.

In a strange, albeit pleasant way, and for anyone who knows me, you'll realise this is something I would never normally say, but I'm pleased...oh go on...even a little proud of the way the Queen's visit to Ireland has gone.

It's the smokes and cocktails that have done for him, says Christopher Hitchens, whose memoirs I'm settling into whenever there's a moment free.

Like Dylan's never ending tour, I get the sense that the Hitch has been on an extended run of long days, late nights, (later nights in all likelihood) snatched sleep, rumbustious conversation melded with the volcanic need to know more, question more, and learn more than your mainstream homo sapien either wants to, or can handle. He drinks heady, deep unfiltered draughts straight from the intellectual fire hose.

The Hitch, whom I saw once at the Hay Festival, hurrying along the town's main street, with a focused look that I could only imagine a Zen Grand Master capable of, but sans the ineffable sweetness and serenity of the former, and replaced instead with a shimmering, crackling area of concentration that could probably cut through steel, is up there in my pantheon of socio-cultural greats.

Combative yet principled; confrontational but in the same breath, gracious; the most forensic pen with delicious, scrupulous prose; a living, breathing wikipaedia before the notion was even thought of; slayer of intellectual mis-truth merchants, purveyors of single truth nonsense and charlatans in general. The Hitch rings all my bells. Our modern times Thomas Paine.

Furthermore, he's that rara avis: the public intellectual.

Exotic bird indeed, so alien to the British cultural / intellectual body politic in fact that he had to skip that nest or risk being pushed out, and made the long migration to the US. A warmer, more intellectually stimulating environment, bursting like an over-ripe melon with possibilities. So now he nests round the clock there and we Brits for our pleasure are left with a cultural landscape that regards Jeremy Clarkson as a savant.

The smokes and the cocktails? Hitch is gravely ill; it's his partiality for these temptations, freely and openly acknowledged by him, that he wryly said are what have done for him.

Christopher Hitchens, whose memoirs I'm steadily working through, gently chastises his friend, the poet James Fenton, for " awakening (Hitchen's)...buried and dangerous lust for alcohol and nicotine". I like neither stimulant, never have, never will; but chocolate serves the purpose as strongly as either of Hitchen's companion vices, maybe as strong as the two combined.

I'm in thrall to Theobroma. The cocoa bean, that stubby, green pod, leads me by the nose, the prod in the back; it leads, I follow. I always have been, and it looks like I always will.

And in the times when the sullen, stickiness of work pressure has it's baleful shadow over me as is the case right now where I don't know whether I'm coming or going, my appetite for chocolate is gargantuan. Truly massive.

As is usual after any outburst, I've calmed down since Sunday's chest-baring jeremiad; the molten metal cooled in the water of several days reflection, steam, froth, then tempering. Nevertheless, I still don't want to see the heart and guts of this nation torn in different directions. Let's stay together.

A fine mess is what we're in since the Lib-Dems slept with the enemy. That one night stand has left the UK in a perilous state constitutionally.

Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Scottish voters voted en masse for the SNP, to such a degree that they can now hold a referendum on Independence and ace it. As an ardent believer in the Union (in itself, somewhat of a curious, paradoxical statement, since I don't hold any particular love for the English; the paradox is that I was born and still live in England), this saddens me immeasurably, so much that I've been finding it difficult to sleep. I love the idea that we are a United Island, that we can live equitably and satisfactorily; that we are an exception to the rule, and yet it could all founder, this glorious, wonderful idea. I write here as someone who is a true Brit: English, Irish, Scotch and Welsh blood powers this heart.

The outcome should this happen frightens me in exactly the same way as it saddens me: the nation collapses, Scotland ends up a peripheral North Atlantic state, whilst England slips into the default state I've always felt exists at dangerously shallow depth: sullenness, grievance, inwardness, begrudgery, tribalism, and xenophobia.

To flame this miserable bonfire, not only will the nation crumble, the shared values incinerated, the English will end up being under the almost perpetual yoke of the Tories due to the absence of Scottish Labour MPs and the boundary changes the Tories are pushing through.

Tory dominance in perpetuity of a rump Serbia like England, the UK broken into bits, Scotland a minor player. This is the most disillusioned I've ever felt. I can't believe we could be but a few years away from this.

If only Clegg had n't been such a patsy, a wimp, a Trojan Horse for the Tories and fought the tories tooth and nail, and Ed Milliband too, why did n't he carry the cudgel into the Tories ? We would n't be left like this. A nation about to split apart.

What never fails to impress about the US President is that he is a natural statesman and modern day Cicero, who to my British eyes never fails to display anything other than grace under pressure. Almost a Hemingway hero made flesh.

The US is blessed to have him; whereas we for our sins have a Tory reactionary aristocrat as PM. Are we absolutely certain that Obama is n't British? Is there no genetic pull towards bacon and eggs or fish and chips? Nothing ? What about the weather, does he talk about the weather? Now that would make him a Brit.

If only he was, I'd vote for him in a heartbeat.

Some headlines you wonder if you'll ever see, and this was one: the death of Bin Laden. Well, I have, and I can only express my complete appreciation of the extraordinary heroism and courage of the US Special Forces personnel who entered his compound deep in the heart of Pakistan.

I have equal admiration for the steadiness, the eloquence, and care in which Barack Obama announced the news; no triumphalism, no fanfares, no crowing, just the Presidential, timeless, Cicero like prose he's so blessed with.

If only we had an Obama figure in the UK.

I like the idea of the Royal Wedding so much I'm going to celebrate by going to another country.

The crowds, the nonsense, the tabloids in frothy nuptial overdrive, the fear of the street being taken over by a street party (there's already a flag pole with the English flag in a back garden a few doors away from where I'm staying). The lachrymosity, the dreary sentimentalism, the spurious nostalgia. All of it makes my heart sink like a stone. I could n't, I can't face any of it.

Hello Dublin, see you on Thursday...