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.