I am normally punctilious about my diet: five a day, fruit, veg, white meat and red only on very special occasions; today I have eaten nothing but junk. Pie and chips in Richmond, then very low grade industrial white rice and salmon teriyaki in the Hammersmith Wasabi. I can feel my veins furring up already.

The fact of having walked from Chiswick along the Thames to Twickenham and back, the inherent health of that has been obliterated.

Even for London, this was unusual; a light skinned black male comfortably jogging on the Thames river path close to Richmond, but with a thick swastika tattoo on his chest. What is that story all about?

I know it's entirely possible to make a Magellan like tour of a single tree, mapping each root, finger tracing every leaf vein, gazing from it's base to it's crown, and experiencing the multitudinous life forms that call it home, but I need more...I want more in fact. This is why I could n't see myself returning to my own roots, that city in the North where I come from, does n't have an inch on the variety of incidents London generates without thinking it about. It's like a geyser, endless activity. Ceaseless. There's always something.

Yesterday was the Holi festival in Twickenham; throbbing, pulsing, hypnotic, frantic drumming, crowds going mad, and, being Holi, almost everyone stained with paint. Clouds of it, a polychromatic, paint palette mist. Smeared on faces, rubbed in hair, smudged into clothes. The purest bacchanalia I've seen.

Holi is the Hindu festival of Spring, and the weather met it's side of the agreement perfectly. Warm enough to sense the latent fizzle and crackle of new life about to pop up.

Today, bird watching in the other side of London: Purfleet and Rainham Marsh. How less frantic can you get, but still noisy in it's own way with seemingly endless Eurostar trains thumping past and for a short time the unbelievable sight of a Spitfire wheeling and turning overhead.

It was a kaleidoscope of birds from the strawberry capped goldfinches flittering through the trees, the stately, usually solitary white egrets (which always make me think of being somewhere in the Okavango plain, rather than suburban London), a vibrantly painted greenfinch, and the piece de resistance, the glimpse, because that's all they ever offer, of a water rail scurrying through the dense reed beds. It took time and patience to spot this shy little wader. Imagine a little duck blowing a bugle because that's the only we could do was track it's march through the reeds until it came to a small opening in the vegetation and necessity made it break cover long enough for us to see it.

Two wonderful days.

This is what I've been trying to say about the sawtooth contours of London's sawtooth skyline and have struggled over, but here perfectly caught and pulled together by Amy Waldman in "The Submission" even if it is about my second favourite city, New York....

" A skyline was a collaboration, if an inadvertent one, between generations, seeming no less no natural than a mountain range that had shuddered up from the earth".

We are all closer to each other than we might possibly imagine. Without any active seeking, I'm closer to Pink Floyd than someone who's not that much of a fan would expect.

An ex-neighbour was their publicist; a good friend dated an actress whose father was, let's put it like this, the band's senior roadie; someone else, who I know loosely, serendipitously bumped into Alan Styles, the band's legendary roadie, when they were standing on a rickety gangplank in Sausalito harbour, hoping to find something filmable to encapsulate it's gentle bohemian, hippy feel, and Alan was that man.

I love it when people find their spot in life. It's clear he did. It gives me hope.

One of the cameos they 've not shown on BBC2's The Tube is the person taken ill on the train. As we were waiting to leave Oxford Street on an eastbound Central line train last night, the driver asked if there was anyone who was a doctor, a nurse, or who had some form of medical training if they could leave the train to help someone who he said was "...not in a good way..." or words close to that.

Whether anyone did I'll never know, the doors closed and we left, and as we did, picking up speed, I saw numerous passengers looking in towards one part of the platform at a small group of others including a station assistant huddled around someone Lying on the floor with another, and possibly this was that someone who had responded to the driver's request, seeming to be asking questions.

For some quite inexplicable reason this scene has frozen into my memory.