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.