Even though I'm pretty au fait with most American sporting metaphors, step up to the plate, out of the park, slam dunk, and so on, there's understandably many more I'm unaware of, like Full Court Press.

At first glance I reckoned it to be some sort of wrestling hold, when someone's thrown to the floor, then pinned down by the shoulders; it's not, it's actually a basketball defensive style, but that's by the by, it's where I've seen it and the context it's been used in that interests me.

For the past couple of weeks, someone I know, a funny, cheerful and very charming American woman, has used it to illustrate how she's handling a break-up. Closing down the expected grief, boxing it in, and then rebounding with a spirited counter attack.

I like that: it's the mark I think of a well adjusted person to have access to a metaphorical tool-kit, twist the lid off a seemingly insoluble issue, pop a bent nail out of a difficult situation, you can see where I'm going.

Metaphors make things understandable, the formless gets a shape, gas turns to liquid. Once you're at this stage, you're closer to making probably the most legendary of all American sports metaphors - the home run

I don't like not feeling well. I don't know anyone who does, though I am aware there are some who relish the status of invalid. I don't. I like feeling well. Unfortunately, I don't right now, which is why I've beaten back the male instinct to deny or ignore, and gone instead to the doctor. Some tests ahead of me and a week signed off. Glad I've done this. Ignorance is not always bliss.

Perhaps I should have been born a woman, or putting it less dramatically - I'm making a point and not an admission about gender uncertainty, after all - had a better smattering of the common sense and practicality that most ( not all, there are exceptions) of my women friends seem to have.

There's a resolution in so many of my women friends that I admire. They set a plan, and kick start it into action, steering it through all weathers until it's done.

I thought about this last night during a dinner with the woman who I've chased after like an eager young pup and pined over for almost a decade.

She has paid off her mortgage. Ground-breaking? Probably not, these things happen all the time, but to do so in half the time required, well that's something else.

I saw a face of quiet satisfaction, something of the job well done look, as she told me. It had been hard, she said, especially in the early years, with many things sacrificed, but she had steadily chipped away at mortgage, using any spare money she had, along with an adroit eye to making the most of whatever mortgage deals were available.

Then one day, there was nothing left to pay, nothing left to do, other than wonder where to store the mortgage deeds.

I've known for a long time that she's been disappointed by me; that's the wrong term in fact, there's something temporary about disappointment, it goes eventually, it's a state, not a permanent condition, you can return to favour.

Her view of me, on the other hand, has changed, likely irrevocably.

Of course, saying I disappointed her presupposes the question that I ever was in her thoughts, however I suspect I was, less from things said and more from how they were expressed

That's the felt evidence, there's also the concrete and undeniable evidence: I heard her say to her best friend that I was: " A typical man. Can't commit"

I'm staying in the same house where she said that. The area of the room where she said that is still radioactive for me. I can see it, how we were stood, the three of us. The image is seared into my mind. It will not go.

I'm sure I must have looked gormless, and perhaps a little shocked too. I had always secretly hoped she would extend some sign, I'm perpetually timid, a shy woodland animal in these areas, lacking the confidence to say how I feel, so a sign, like a dropped handkerchief in some 16th century chivalric poem was what I always hoped for. And I got one: the crystallised realisation that in her eyes I was no more than the common herd of men. Homo non-commiticus.

Superb weather today: the slightest of breezes, mirror-ball sky, thin, feathery clouds. Perfect for what I am about to do, which is haul my rear over to Chiswick House, commandeer a table outside the cafe, order a cup of coffee, and read.

Because I've got family in the US I've always been enamoured with Americana. Like the Queen, it's been one of the constants in my life, add reading, writing and travelling, and you've got the essence of me. What makes me tick. The stuff that powers the green fuse. I need another trip out there. I can feel the itch again

I state the obvious here, but it's always I think, worth repeating; major cities such as London, NYC, LA, Paris and every other megalopolis, are not worlds entire of themselves. World is too small a term, something far greater is required: they are individual galaxies, a confusion of whirling nebulae, of randomness and chaos, of ceaseless collisions of different and infinitely varied lifestyles.

It is this permanent state of happenstance, never quite knowing what's just around the corner, that makes London and it's sister cities, intoxicating. Why live anywhere else, when as in the instance of yesterday, within the compressed space of perhaps a mile, a friend and I stumbled into a Hare Krishna street festival hard by the northern fringe of Soho Square and into a tight funnel of ash-marked and finger cymbal clicking devotees

A scant half mile from that we wandered into St Martin's in the Field, which until Saturday I had never been and this is in spite of living in London for nearly thirty years, but that's the untold confession of so many Londoners, what we have n't seen but virtually everyone from out of town has. Something made very obvious for me the day I went on a fact-finding mission for an American script writer friend to the British Library, who wanted some background on the King's Library. I'd never heard of it until he mentioned it.

The King's Library, if you're interested is a beautiful six floor glass chimney of rare books and a commanding presence as you enter the British Library. How I had missed it on the umpteen occasions I've been to the BL is a mystery to me, other than referring back to the point I made a little earlier - you live here, but you don't see the obvious things. On the other hand, ask me where the best coffee shop, indie bookshop or humus bar is in London, then I'm your man.

There was a mixed Anglo-Chinese choir running through their pieces when we walked into St Martin's, stopping and starting at the baton swing of the choir master. Everything they sang sounded good to me, but clearly not good enough him. We sat on one the side pews, and through my film-goer's inner eye, it could have been a shot from a gangster movie, where the the two warring Dons sort out their temporal differences against a spiritual background of a choir rehearsing.

Finally, we washed up on the Southbank. An area of London that has been transformed since I first arrived here; for years a no-no area, the tumble weed blowing down the streets, bleakness of an abandoned gold rush town in the eighties to true bon-ton, arty middle-class, boutique bohemianism today.

Threading through long tables of second hand books for sale and the crowds wandering to and fro from the NFT, we bumped up literally into a group of free runners, backflipping and somersaulting by the the National Theatre. It looked exhilarating. The suppleness and daring of urban gymanstics, side flips, twists, turns on hard concrete surfaces. All of the free runners were unself-conscious. This was their area. Nothing else to consider but the easy agility of the next move.

And this is the thing about London: it's a city of parallel events which never meet in time or space, they exist on their own, self-contained; it's the casual strollers like my friend and I yesterday, who accidentally link it all together without ever thinking about it.

I'm not saying anything that has n't already been declared in countless newspaper articles and innumerable radio and TV programmes, but so many of us have become accidentally too familiar with the cooling systems of nuclear power stations since the terrible earthquake last week in Japan.

It's those anonymous, unknown technicians who are doing what ever they can to dampen the boiling hearts of those wrecked reactors - the Fukushima Fifty - as they've been dubbed, who have captivated me with their almost sacrificial heroism. No medal big enough. No honour large enough

This is one of those occasions when however hard I try, I can find nothing to populate the screen with. Neurons are n't firing or popping.

I can't inject life into any these of 26 letters. In the Frankenstein movies, there'd be mysterious smoke frothing in vials, random bolts of electricity, something twitching, before the creature breaks it's bonds and walks. None of this is happening in the laboratory of my mind. It's more numbness along with a sense that I have to put something down to maintain some mysterious momentuum.

Tomorrow: will the creature walk?

I don't know whether this is an extreme example of environmental determinism, or simply, a very confused bird, but whilst I was walking to Holland Park station this morning, I saw a Great Spotted Woodpecker pounding it's beak into the top of a metal utility pole.

That must have hurt. It has to have. Think about it. You're smashing your head against a very resistant surface. It hurts for days whenever I bang my head (always accidentally).

This is not what these birds are supposed to be doing; that jack-hammer beak is meant to break open pliable wood, grind into tree trunks, but attack metal, where did that come from?

Nor did it look like this was something they had just blundered into accidentally, I had the impression this had been going on for some time.

And then, even more bizarrely, I heard another woodpecker doing the same thing. Almost as if they were talking to each other, or more probably courting - we're getting close and closer to Spring after all.

What's going on? Is there a flock of woodpeckers with armour plated beaks on the loose in Holland Park?

The Daily Mail Song. Worth a post all on it's own. Just who buys this racist, scaremongering, misogynistic, phobic, little Englander piece of crap?
The Daily Mail Song

An image that coaxed itself out of my imagination yesterday, looks like its on the money today when I think about it.

During a light-hearted conversation with someone about the oddities of the areas we live in - me, the inner city, and her, a dormitory village on the outskirts of London - I found myself saying that there's a total difference between where I spend most of my time, the tough, edgy end of Notting Hill (you read that right, there is one. I live there) and Chiswick, another part of London where I stay for long periods.

So fine grained a contrast is it that it extends even as far as the local dog population, or so I flippantly remarked. The dogs du jour where I live are pit bulls, Staffordshires, Dobermans; things that strain at the leash and if there are steroids for dogs they're on them. Bull-necked, twitching, eyes popping. Whereas Chiswick it's chic women walking around with pint sized dogs snuffled in expensive handbags and every mutt lovingly hand fed on something organic.

All said lightly and nearly forgotten. Yet I realised this evening walking home, it's actually true: the social world is utterly different between these two parts of London, and so is the corresponding Dog world.

If there is ever a call for a Poet Laureate of commuting, I will have no hesitation in putting forward T.S. Eliot. A lanky, cerebral Mid-westerner from St Louis, who made London his home, rubbed his lamp, and out came two of the finest, most evocative, and certainly accurate pictures of commuting I've come across.

The first is from The Four Quartets: "When an underground train, in the tube stops too long between stations. And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence. And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen. Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about"

That's exactly what happens when a train pauses between stations; everything gradually winds down, the hubbub dwindles, whatever chatter there's been drops away, and we sit or stand, and think.

The other piece I have in mind is from his most well known work - The Wasteland. "Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street".

This is how we are every morning, wrapped in our personal shroud of fog, flowing the way termites do out of the mound. Automatic footsteps, grey faced, robotic. The un-dead.