Gothic London

Earlier this week I dipped a toe into the forgotten world of Abney Park cemetery. Think Highgate is gothic and overgrown? Forget it, it's a bowling green, centre court at Wimbledon, compared to this wilderness. This is post apocalyptic London. Survivors London, when the city has been cleared of almost every inhabitant and nature has stealthily crept back through the outer suburbs and then rampaged, bloomed and dominated the ravaged inner core.

It is the Amazon with headstones and memorial tablets; an enormous, dense canopy of thirty, forty feet trees; thick, long established bushes obscure  even the tallest tombstones, the smaller ones are buried under a thick matt of vegetation or have sunk back at crazy angles in to the earth.

Nowhere is in the same breath as melancholy or as menacing and laden with brooding gothic unease as this cemetery. It is as if it was designed for modern day vampires.

London

London, yet again, enthrals me (as if it had ever stopped); the opportunities this diamond city offers are endless. In the past four, maybe five weeks, I've wandered across and through London with a quite incredible woman. It's been a voyage in the good ship Serendipity, bound for nowhere; we have unlocked London: for her, the chance to peel back the covers and see the London outside the charmed tourist bubble; for me, the opportunity to see London through the eyes and ears of another.

The way we think, the way we talk - the timorousness of the way we speak; think about it, how many of these meek, vanilla intensifiers do you use in a day - actually, really, quite - they say nothing and are fully inhibitory to any action. Even getting off a tube can be an action of hesitation as everyone eyes everyone else as to who will take that tentative first step and break the log jam before the door closes and we hurtle towards the next stop.

This both bemuses my friend and vexes her to the point of explosion. She dealt with this tube incident (because it actually happened to her) in the manner a wine waiter pops a cork from a bottle, boldly and impressively: "get off the train, will you!". To a Brit ear that's Latin  temerity (that's where her roots lie), but to the rest of the world, no six truer words have ever been said. Firm, direct, expressive, and clear.

We need more of this and less Hugh Grant mumbling, and definitely non of the allegedly endearing stammering of our faux wodehousian mayor.

Crooked timber

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made"

Immanuel Kant

Flight Behaviour

"She wondered if humiliaton ever ran its natural course and peeled off, like sunburn, or just kept blazing"

Flight Behaviour
Barbara Kingsolver

Bow Lane

" My eyeballs were burning. I could n't breathe in or out.." Oh, you should n't have said that to your friend at the very the moment we happened to pass each other on Bow Lane this lunchtime.  What was going on? What happened? What was the in extremis event that got you to this point?

 I've been thinking about this ever since. Can't ask you because I don't know who you are, and to be honest, I've only a vague recollection of what you even looked like. Young woman...mid twenties..office wear...and that's about as good as it gets.

But the words, and then how you said them, with such lightness, almost gaiety in fact. I'd really only expect to come across a remark like this coming out of the mouth of an action novel hero, or perhaps, a piece to camera clip from a survivor of something truly harrowing. Yet you were talking about it in the same tone as I could imagine someone buying a cup cake

Beautiful noise

Last Saturday I was on Oxford Street which, like every day, was a roaring river of noise. It was an experience like I imagine a surfer feels hugging the inner curl of a wave, enclosed in a near wall of water, alone and in a situation perilously close to overwhelming, yet at the same time, madly intoxicating .

That particular evening was extraordinary though;  the nearer I got towards Marble Arch, the more I thought I could hear steady, rhythmic drumming albeit on a monumental scale. Like a shape clearing in the fog, the drumming became clearer, the drum patterns more evident, then a throbbing bass strode out to greet me by the time I'd reached Marble Arch. The Stones in full flight. So this is how live is on the runway. Thudding, numbing, and bizarrely arousing.

It's the unfinished symphony of car horns, sirens, roadworks, throaty buses, squealing taxis, buskers, music leaking out of store doors, the hubbub of conversations in hundreds of languages that has melded effortlessly into London's now ever present and un-choreographed  sound track. If Babylon was being blueprinted again, I'm pretty confident it would sound, smell and look like today's London.

The Victim

I always look to the first line of Bellow's The Victim as the summation of all that hot weather is, even if it is place specific: 'On some nights, New York is as hot as Bangkok'  Ten short words and only one  of them polysyllabic'; but this is an instance where the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. Simplicity that would grace a poem. Unadorned, unfussy, I've loved this line since that day back in the early '80s when I found a cheap copy in a gas station book rack somewhere in upstate New York.

London feels like Bangkok today - pulpy, muggy, steaming - the thermometer seems set to keep this way for sometime now.

It's also had me thinking of those French novels I've read where summer is more than background, it drives behaviour; surfaces hidden, even unknown desires; and there's an alchemy present where bored dreams carry the seeds of solid reality.

In my mind here, I have a picture of middle aged office drudge alone in a Parisian summer with his family away in Normandy slipping into a series of fruitless, casual affairs. Driven out his apartment by boredom and broiling nights, it's an inevitability. As it is that there'll be no change at the end of the summer. The jigsaw reassembles itself, the old picture reforms. He'll be there at the Gare Montparnasse or Gare St Lazare, to twirl his kids in the air and kiss his wife as they step off the homecoming train.

Cram it in.

Started this week a la street urchin cheekily peering over the fence at the Stones Hyde Park gig. Good enough view and the sound surged in all the right places - especially so when it came to the audience  picking up as a single unified voice that eerie whooping that heralds Sympathy with the Devil.

But why did someone in the mass of people listening on the the other side of the tracks as it were decide to play his mouth organ nearly every time there was a solo going on? Take it from me, you don't want to hear Jumping Jack Flash played on a mouth organ.

Then the week ends up with an unexpected long, glorious evening in a pop up restaurant in London's über hip nexus - Hoxton Square. A building due for the wrecker's ball been temporarily reclaimed for sanity and humanity by an enterprising husband and wife and turned into a delightful place to eat.

 It must be one of the oldest residents in the square even if the front looks like a sixties mini office block. The husband reckoned it had been there since the 1820's; the stripped back, pared down look of the internal building certainly attests to that. Just looking at the worn down steps on the staircases testifies to an unknown number of feet running up and down. So why demolish it?

Night of Silience

I'm fresh in from seeing yet another remarkable Turkish film - Night of Silence - and as with the others I've seen (One Night in Anatolia. The name of the other, though, escapes me), it's echo has carried all the way from the Curzon Renoir to my home and it's not lost it's strength either.

Two people on the honeymoon night of their arranged wedding alone for the first time. Everything is set for cliche - an elderly, pot-bellied man and a tender, almost orchid like, teenage bride. The very grist of a potboiler, except it's not: he was not predatory nor forceful, a little wheedling perhaps, and as patriarchial as one might imagine a conservative Anatolian country dweller to be, but there is decency and an honour in him; she as might be imagined was a timid, clearly nervous, and obviously a young girl both in manner and sensibility. 

One critic called this film a chamber piece and that's what it was - two instruments, one in a major key, the other in a minor, playing in a very intimate setting, almost conversing. The almost is important: some threads were intentionally side stepped or ignored, by the understandably apprehensive bride. The intimate chamber piece image fits the setting of the film too: a single room and just two players in it. 

The claustrophobia could have been a third actor, never overt, but there nevertheless, brooding quietly, imperceptibly pushing the walls a little closer as the minutes ticked by to that critical moment before the first morning prayers when a new husband traditionally fired a shot to signal consummation. 

The power of this film was that it was a slow curtain pull-back of the constraints and expedencies levied by custom and tradition on to the Anatolian peasantry: the ancient blood feuds that arranged marriages try to end; the pernicious notion of honour; the sanctity of tradition - it can be no other way. The other Turkey explained. The one seldom talked of.

London Fields

Wherever those rooks in London Fields go to roost tonight, there's the guarantee that at least one of them will be having a poor night's sleep. Whilst a friend and I were chatting on a bench there, we both saw an enterprising rook grab a can of red bull with their beak and gulp down whatever was left in there. Twice. Caffeine before sleep is the sure road to insomnia whether human or Corvid.

Now that felt good. Cleaning my kitchen, washing crockery, bleaching surfaces, getting the vacuum behind the fridge for once. I had to do this; there's a lot at stake. I've begun to feel cowed by the stuff that has to be done - the walls are grubby, the bathroom suite's a shocker, the kitchen filthy, my living room overflowing with books, papers, clothes. In the right hands, the right writer's hands that is then this tiny flat could be as epic as Quentin Crisp's legendary New York apartment. My hands are n't those and I don't want that.

It's the last thing; no, what I want is somewhere clean, quiet, pleasant, that I can gladly invite people to see, drop-in if they do wish. I don't want to have the cortisol jolt of wondering was that mice scampering along the roof space, or the indignity of having to bear someone else stamping across their floor (my ceiling) in the wee small hours.

Tonight I think I've stopped myself going into a state of near domestic suspended animation where nothing would have happened. All sounds quite melodramatic, does n't it, but understand this: I've turned something like a corner here. I've taken a stand against that other me - the idle, the worrier, the sometimes despondent, the procrastinator, the talker but not the doer.

The other me, incidentally, is a reflection of only an aspect of my personality, not the fullness of me; after all we are complex, often contradictory beasts, perplexing to our own self as well as others, resilient, introverted and extroverted according to circumstance, active and passive.

Caution items may have shifted during flight. They have. My back's killing me since I got off the train from Birmingham. I'm having to do the old man shuffle - two hands massaging an unforgiving back muscle and all of it bent double - just to get around my flat.

This is definitely muscular. Wonder if toting that damn laptop across Birmingham is the culprit? I need everything to shift back the way it was status quo ante. Looking to you, Sleep, to do what you need to. In your hands right now. No pressure.

In London you trip over other people's conversations from the moment you close your front door and step into the public domain. It's like the city was designed for it: waiting to pay at Tesco, anywhere on the tube, even walking home through the park, the one sure thing is that you're going to inadvertently wander in, through, and then out of the smoke and fog of someone else's conversation. It's a given. A certainty.

No reason either why it should n't be either; there's nine, possibly ten, maybe eleven, or even twelve, depending who you believe, million people squeezed in to London. So why should n't we be dipping in and out of a smog of small talk?

As I ploughed through Holland Park on my way home earlier this evening, I fleetingly drifted into range of a kind of Q&A going on between a family of three, and snagged a line that resonated instantly. The father was agog about a bird of prey they'd once seen. I don't  think it was recent - something in his tone suggested that - nevertheless it carried epic connotations. It had taken his breath. It had awed him.

I know all about that despite never seeing whatever he saw; something similar happened to me at the Barnes Wetland Centre one late winter's evening last year. I'd just followed a friend into the quiet gloom of  a bird hide. He turned towards the larger front window and I made for one of the smaller side panels. In front of me, perhaps no more than six or seven feet, sat an impassive sparrow hawk, tawny brown and steel-eyed, the lean face of death, the master of the urban skies. I felt like a veil had been pulled aside and I had been given a glimpse of another reality, where I was the intruder and the sparrow hawk was master.

I've had very few moments where nature has allowed me this snatched view of a master hunter's almost imperial disdain. Quite unforgettable. For me then and just as much for the anonymous father I overheard a few hours ago talking about his own moment of wonder.

I was in a cafe this morning listening to a friend go over her holiday plans. She's been a roamer like me - the more offbeat a destination the better. It's a chronic sign of wanderlust; I know, it's printed into my DNA.

 However, she's a quieter gal these days with a partner in tow, who like her seems to exist under siege like conditions at work. So she's looking at somewhere to let the work bruises heal, the sun to carry out it's magic, and generally get the office life wrinkles ironed out. But there has to be a little culture in there alongside the beach and the sea as well. Prose and poetry.

Malta? What did I know ? Had I been there ? Thoughts? Been there and, yes, it'll probably press all the right buttons: picturesque, warm, good food, generously natured people, layers of history; in general, a place to let the imagination wander. Her kind of place in other words.

And this is where I ran into problems. Straightforward enough to emphasise that it's the ideal sanctuary cum holiday destination she needs, got no doubt on that. But harder, much harder to actually express all this in words. You should go here...pause...then here...had a great time there....pause...easy to get around...pause...people friendly, not get ripped off, and so on in that staccato style. It's something I've noticed not just me, but others falling into: the power of expression takes a swan dive right out of the window when we're trying to say what somewhere is really like.

How difficult it is to articulate the sense and effect of a physical place. It ends up coming down in my case: to gestures; 'it just is' repetitions; and salvos of go and you'll see what I mean exhortations. I might have better luck describing the the nature of the soul than this.

Still it looks like she's going to go to Malta. So something seems to have worked. Let's call it the alchemy of inarticulacy or the enchantment of the tongue-tied.

Just woken up and read that James Gandolfini died last night. This is not right. Such a fine actor. Mesmerising in the Sopranos. I'm shocked. My age too. Underlines if it ever it needs to be that every day is singularly precious.

I got a clearer view of a coastline that I've only dimly glimpsed and then only through the eyes of various conflicted characters who populate a number of Saul Bellow's novels - the unknown land being that of Wilhelm Reich. His analytic style, and particularly, the orgone accumulator he developed, mattered to Bellow for a time, cropping up in his fiction and in his real life; an article I read sometime ago had Bellow sitting in one of these wooden, metal lined boxes for hours at a time, trying to get elusive "orgone energy" before being told to run out into the woods and scream like a banshee.

Reich earlier in his career, this time in Austria, simultaneously shocked and wowed with his advocacy of something that today we take for granted because we talk about it like we do the weather - the orgasm. 

My Reichian insights owe their origins to a film I've just seen at the Austrian Cultural Forum earlier this evening. Shown in a tiny, first floor room with a disproportionately large chandelier in front of maybe thirty people. All with some interest, professional or personal, in Reich. 

The Q & A that followed was as enjoyable as the film. It felt like being in a very large Hampstead sitting room surrounded by engaging, educated, articulate Mittel Europeans, who each had some personal stake in Reich. One elderly woman, wearing a red sweater, in particular stood out: she bounced with questions, in fact it was more like a conversation she was having with the film director, which he equally enjoyed. I caught the pride in her voice when, as I expected her to do all along she said she was Viennese by birth. 

I love events like this. My intellect needs stretching every day. Evenings like this are like going to the brain gym for me.

Another four to go then it's me in front of David Sedaris. He's going to ask me what I want him to put as a dedication when he signs the new book of his I've just bought. Ask me about the weather, David, or why cats have four feet, anything but what dedication I want. I can't think of thing. Nada. Not a sausage. I'm blank, and, bizarrely, starting to feel something not unlike the tremors of a mild panic attack. C'mon Archimedes, pull it together, take a deep breath or something, he's a writer, a generous, funny, spirited man, not Torquemada...

 Sounds like the Brummies he's talking with now are having a hoot. Down specially for the reading, they're saying. That's love. Reciprocated; he's just given them some free tickets to another event he's booked in for. They're walking away in a collective swoon. 

Wonder if he thinks I'm Italian because my friend in front of me whose book he's just signing actually is. Oh, he's asked the question. I am Italian, she's saying, and now they're rapping about the UK citizenship test and a book festival near Torino. 

And it's me up, my turn, and I'm doing it already...mouth flopped open like a middle aged guppy...here we go...My name?...Archimedes. Do I speak Italian? I can, but I dare n't say so since you might be fluent in raw Tuscan or earthy Roman and ask me something or fling an Italian Bon mot at me, and I'll clam up even more.

 He's doing a doodle, I'm not that boring am I? No, not a doodle, it's a signature owl...that's different...not had that before. Most authors are scrawl and pass; scrawl something illegible then pass on to the next person. 

It's come to me! I know what I can speak to him about. Did n't he mention swimming at Kensington Leisure centre? Near enough to where I live for me to smell the chlorine and the bleach...we have a common point...finally.

This is something I never expected to see amongst the foliage of cab company stickers, flyers for gigs and missing pet posters that cover most bits of street furniture on the Goldhawk road: missing wand, sentimental value. Wand? Is there a coven in West London, or someone just a little too deep into Hogwarts and Harry Potter?

I've said it before and it's likely I'll never stop saying it or thinking it: without fiction, I'd have no sense of empathy. None at all. Well, perhaps an operating function, a sense, but nothing any deeper. Able to observe, but not able to connect. Get in there and understand, see through another's eyes, feel someone else's emotions. All of that immeasurably valuable. Humanity plus.

Since finishing "A long, long way" a few days ago, I've been wondering if any of these modestly sized turn of the century houses were handed a telegram during the first world war which spun them from one life into another. And now barely a few pages into Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" I've been gifted an insight I never expected; I can't think of describing it as anything other than 'will this be place"? Wistful hopes, if that makes sense, might be another.

The insight is this: a freshly married couple spend their early years moving from town to town as her ambitious salesman husband steps up the career ladder. She gazes at: ...each new town with hopeful eyes and think (s): this may be where I'll have my son..."

I read that and almost instantly thought of several women I know; have they felt like this, were this character's inner hopes, theirs? In the house I'm in now, did the couple who live here, imagine, mud, strewn toys, sleepovers, parties, ferrying kids to after school events? There's another woman, one who I have felt the most I've ever felt for any living person other than my parents; did she look at London and have this hope deep in her heart?

God bless fiction. Without it, I'd probably be an emotional still-born.

Holidays are a problem. The people you're with sometimes, where you go can be another, whilst my perennial is sheer reluctance to come back.  I can never over come that. No home sickness in the classically accepted view; mine is much more idiosyncratic, I'm simply sick I have to go home. That's it. No more, no less.

Half a dozen of us spent the tail end of last week in Northumberland: beautiful scenery, the most accommodating, friendly people, and a generous dollop of fine weather spread across the whole time. Blissful. And littered like a first world war battlefield with all the snares, traps, encumbrances and petty grievances of a problem holiday. A real, real pity. I think I was probably the only one not nursing some sort of injury or vexation.  

Observation is the historian's mode; perception and evocation are the writer's. Whether I read this or whether it's a home grown thought of my own raised in the sunlight of something I did actually read is moot, I just don't know. But it's a thought I've been carrying with me since I turned the last page over Sebastian Barry's WW1 novel, A long, long way, a few hours ago in the dining space at Wholefoods.

The stale has become fresh, fresher than I ever might have imagined; the tired, rejuvenated. I've seen the miserable madness of that war refracted in the most unexpected ways, which I'm struggling to articulate to myself, let alone consider putting into words.

One thing that does is the realisation that war's echoes reverberated across decades and probably never fully left people. Something, oddly picked out in Barry's most recent novel, On Canaan's Side, where elderly Lily Bere, looks back over a long life that began as the sister of Willie Dunne, the protagonist of the novel I've just finished, and takes in the decades spent as an Irish immigrant in America. She talks briefly, yet almost poetically in it's pureness and simplicity about Willie. And I get the sense of deep loss, sadness, that what might have been had it not been for the life shortening cold horrors of the trenches.

Perhaps I was already affected, thinking this way before realising it fully today;  I have after all been steadily reading " A long, long way", for several days now, snatching time to do so whenever I could. I remember looking at the roll call of names on the war memorials in Amble and Warkworth when I was up there earlier this week, thinking of the enormous, irreparable tears made in the fabric of these small Northumberland towns. Neither would have been the same again. Melancholic ghosts, broken hearts, bereft families. Sadness that might dim over time, but would never lose it's visible edge.

Something that you don't come across too often and, in it's own way, a modest rebuke to all those who think men don't emote: a man quietly discussing his relationship, it's ups, it's down, with someone who was either a friend or workmate. I'd settled down for a quiet read after finishing a meal in Wholefoods when I picked up snippets of the conversation happening over the next table.

I must have something akin to dog whistle hearing; a word or a random sentence pops out of the ether, and that's it, I'm reeled in to ear wigging.

So true, Gilbert, so very, very true: 'castration...' really does as you say in your letter, '...have a strange effect...'. Difficult, if not actually impossible, to work up a counter argument that it does n't. It just does. Never the same. No way back. But that's another story.

Gilbert, by the way, is the Gilbert White of the Natural History of Selborne fame, and it was thumbing through an illustrated copy of that book in Cheapside Daunts earlier this evening where I found this sentence beginning a letter to one of his correspondents. He, then, elegantly takes this image , and explores it's effects across a range of fauna, including, unsurprisingly, men.

There's no question, for me at least, that this is possibly one of the most original (and wince inducing) openings to a letter ever. But it's not the first genuinely different approach to a letter I've seen today. Proof, in a small way, that lightening can strike twice in the same place. 

The other example is from a letter of condolence written by Samuel Beckett, and then discovered by one of my friends and circulated on Facebook. 

Condolence letters are the hardest and as such vulnerable to well meaning cliche. And why should n't they be...after all they're written with passion, sometimes in haste, and too often in a struggle to get the right tone. Beckett's letter, however, is a masterpiece of simplicity and profundity. A template in thoughtfulness and humility, affection and sympathy. 

Here it is: "I know your sorrow and that for the likes of us there is no ease from the heart to be had from words or reason and that in the very assurance of sorrow's fading there is more sorrow. So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds". 

"Nothing has done more to retard the progress of the human race than the exaltation of submission into a high and noble virtue...it may often be expedient to submit; it may even be sometimes be morally right to do so in order to avoid a greater evil; but submission is not inherently beautiful - it is generally cowardly and frequently morally wrong". 

From the 1911 book, Women's Fight for the Vote, written by Fred Pethick-Lawrence, husband of the famous suffragette, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. 

There are places that are so rich in treasures that what would be a pearl elsewhere is merely mundane there. It's lustre dimmed by a much brighter constellation. Some places are lucky enough to be just that.

 Step forward, RSPB Lakenheath. It's you I'm talking about. Yesterday was a day of glories. Birds that would turn heads and have people running to see seemed so common there as to be relegated to the sidelines by things even more exotic

 The reeds, the woods, the sky, everything was alive.Trembling with extravagance in the guise of the red footed falcon performing just like a trapeze artist; tumbling and rolling, soaring, swooping, diving, and revealing it's wonderful anthracite body and blood red legs. Legs that are honed and like grappling hooks; several times it used them to snatch a dragonfly out of the air, and like in flight refuelling, flip it's legs up so the beak could tear into the insect. It was one of the most reflexive actions I've ever seen. Pure instinct. Spot, catch, devour. 

Swifts were so abundant that the ponds were almost hazy with the blur of birds streaking at little over head height. At another, house martins flew low enough to momentarily break the surface of the water and grab the tiniest sip to drink before veering at right angles to pluck an insect. 

Above us only clouds sang John Lennon. Above us yesterday was a cavalcade of Hobbies and Marsh Harrier. These are birds that many bird watchers fall into a swoon simply thinking about let alone see.  At Lakenheath, they're like buses, always one trundling across the skyline. We counted seven at one point: quartering the ground, spiralling up and down, and once a pair passing food between each other. 

I am increasingly convinced now that some birds virtually play to the gallery; they know they are magnificent, they know their worth as rarities and blow in migrants, and just like starlets on the beaches at Cannes, they promenade for the paparazzi. They perform, they tease, they excite. As the Savi's warbler so clearly did. We heard it's rattlesnake like song, imagine dried peas being shaken in a tube, a few long grass stalks quiver, a bush vibrate and then the slow reveal: the branches parted and there it was in full view ready for it's close up shots. The paparazzi responded perfectly: motor drives whirring, lens poked out, volley upon volley of photographs taken. 

All the time this was going on, marsh harriers were circling nearby, and no one bothered to even look their way. An embarrassment of riches. 

The moment has to be circling closer and closer to actually happening when the general body of Islamic thought and feeling begins the energetic and strenuous counter offensive that takes ownership back from the zealots, the fanatics, and the bigots, who in their extraordinarily benighted way have made this religion a synonym for backwardness and brutality.

Is this reconstruction really going to happen? Are people going to transform for modernity, for sanity and for sheer safety, Islam's public image the rest of us currently dread?

Are there pockets of people, from the thinkers, from the writers, out of the quotidian believers, who are embarked on this redemptive journey? I've only seen one article so far that's courageously discussing the need to even do this  - note the needed, not the direct evidence it's actually happening. Everything else has been the usual arms in the air platitudes: 'it's not the real face of Islam...it's a religion of peace...generosity of spirit...hospitality...graciousness' and so on. We need to see that dimension. When?

The reformation has to happen. Can I expect to see a Martin Luther style event with a manifesto nailed figuratively to mosque doors that says we have to restore our name? This reformation is essential: morality, spirituality and public safety implore it.

If it only it was that easy, of course; there's something else to tackle. Why are so many damaged, insecure, anxious, overwrought individuals drawn to easy answer solutions. Well, it's obvious in the final words of the previous sentence - easy answer solutions. I have not come across any religion or belief systems that does not somewhere state explicitly or for inference that it's not your fault. You are not to blame, someone else is. Solidarity through a sense of victim hood then takes over. I've seen it everywhere, and it's particularly prevalent in Christianity and Islam. You are not responsible. You are done to. Again, as I look for Islam to recover it's centre, I look to people to have the courage to examine, discuss, understand and resolve personal issues through their own agency.

And yet again, if only it was that simple. It's not. The vulnerable, the afflicted, have to be coaxed, they have to be given the confidence, and the tools - I look to education, emotional intelligence especially, and to jobs here - that they can be the masters of their own destiny. Not someone else's.

It's got to happen. Just when?

A world without religion. It'd be worth it. We'd all be better off. End the mania, stop the hysteria, it's an infection. It's driving people mad. A near decapitation in broad day light in Woolwich in front of scores of people committed by two young men crazed with absurd, repugnant, plain wrong beliefs. Possesed. And to have the temerity to apologise on camera that people had to see it!

Is a day like today unthinkable? No it's not. We exist under this hovering terror every day. The cause is religion. These people are obessesive, fanatical, without even a scintilla of empathy; wedded instead to some extraordinary solipsism that what they do is right. Impossible. An insufferable vile arrogance.

I still can't believe that this happened. A world without religion: free from the terrible expression of someone's perverted world view. It is the interpretation of these damn ideologies that mean a life of horror, constraint, misery, fear, intolerance and straight terror for all of us. What else could it be when Islam and Christianity are predicated on blood sacrifice. This is tyrannical, culturally, mentally, emotionally  oppressive. Centuries of this and what have we gained? Merciless, senseless killing on London streets.

Takes time (and a free ticket from a friend) but I've finally made it to a performance at Holland Park opera. Not a Tosca or Madame Butterfly style event; this was a rehearsal, and a robust, strong one of Oklahoma, put on by an equally robust, strong choral society made up of past and present of Allen and Overy, a powerhouse in the legal world. Gorgeous, rousing work, with enough echoes to have me warbling some of the show tunes on my way home.

The venue is a little work of wonder; they've made the most of a wartime ruin and fastened an enormous marquee around it, where the shadows of swooping parakeets zip over, the odd eerie cry of the park's resident peacocks wander in, and the music and tunes thump on.

At one point, very briefly, as if a door had popped open, I saw back into the past and thought of all the previous versions of Oklahoma that London has hosted. Somewhere trapped in a West End theatre is the happy ghost of a Rodgers and Hammerstein tune riffing through.

Should I applaud laziness as much as I do? Answer? No. Yesterday morning when I woke up with an almost fully formed critique of the developing feud between the two titans of nationalist politics  in the UK: the sinister clown from UKIP, which is basically, an English nationalist party in aim, sentiment, and sense of victim hood, and the cleverer Machiavelli who squats in triumph north of the border. Both fill me with horror by the way; our united kingdom, this crazy little archipelago feels uncomfortably as if we are nearing some version of the collapse of Yugoslavia.

That critique lies buried somewhere in the rubble of another day's memory because I did n't write it down. I thought about it, but again intention trumped action. Again.

"Flags are bits of coloured cloth that governments use to shrink wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead" 
Arundhati Roy.

I've been waiting for this moment with more keenness than I could ever have imagined feeling a few years ago - the Swifts are here. They're back! Over London. Now it really feels like Summer is little more than a few minutes away.

On my long meander home from work this evening, I suddenly found myself under a rolling, boiling cloud of them freewheeling near the Serpentine. Just like a gang of cats in a net bag, they were careering in all directions; feinting, tumbling, soaring, biting, and snapping at what must be a mist of aerial plankton too fine for us on the ground ever to see.

Their rubber duck  soprano squeak of a call means there's another citizen of the air about. With those squeals, shrieks and swoons, they could be characters out of a steamy bodice ripper. It's drama, it's extravagance, it's passion, it's operatic.

Of the four acrobats who dominate the skies of summer, they are the last to arrive: Sand Martins are always the metaphorical early birds, next comes the Swallow, followed by House Martins, and then cannoning across the stage, the final act, which is for me always the most rousing and dramatic - enter the Swifts. Unforgettable. How mercury skits so wildly across water mirrors to a tee the excitement of the swifts scorching across the sky. Now if they could only leave a vapour trail...

And the sky is their true home; everything happens there, eating, sleeping, mating; the only thing that happens on terra firma is egg laying. Add incredible to unforgettable; these birds are truly amazing.

 I've been reading the daily reports in the London Bird wiki on the returning migrants; every day, something new, something closer to where I live. This is the bird I've been waiting for. I am ecstatic. Summer est arrive, or as near as damn it. 

The slogan yesterday was dejeuner sur l'herbe; London loafed. Me too. A very idle afternoon, sauntering and snacking with a friend through an almost Mediterranean warm Kew Gardens. 

Bathe me in green any time you want. That colour - Kew's default - soothes me like no other does. Colour derives it's property from the light spectrum going by the Wikipeadia entry. So it does, but yesterday it was a sensory lullaby for me; I fell asleep on the grass just like a middle aged version of Huck Finn, even had a hat tipped over my face to keep the sun off and mimic the night. Slept like a baby walrus by all accounts. Dormir sur l'herbe. 

Somehow SWALEC has confused my bill with a steelworks. There's no way I could have consumed that much power. Seriously...come on...

I'm amazed at the number of units they say I've used. Yep, know that wholesale gas prices, blah, blah, blah have gone up and that translates into higher end user costs...but this is incredible. Over the edge from merely extraordinary and into somewhere all together new.

If I was singlehandedly powering all the lights in Times Square, then I could just about accept it, but a Hobbit sized studio flat in West London? Summat not right...

I wrote about Dungeness as an English version of Prospero's island and tonight in my meandering way home, I read about another candidate, one much nearer to the image of Shakespeare's ideal: Cyprus.

An island in the news for all the wrong reasons: an economy driven over the cliff, seething social pressures as a consequence, and the will they / won't they spectre of could they leave the euro stalking the land. And in my imagination as an isle of utter wonderment; a fascination driven on with every page I read of 'Journey through Cyprus', Colin Thubron's superb and seductive travelogue. I am burning to go.

I've been wanting to go to Dungeness for a long time. I finally made it yesterday.

 It is the bleakest headland I've ever been on; and in some ways the most sinister, with a quietly throbbing nuclear power plant brooding like some petrified giant of the forest dominating the background and which is never quite out of eyeshot. Wherever you are so is it. 

But it has beauty; this long, deep pebble beach has a spare, haunting quality, which for me, was utterly intoxicating; the sky was pure aquamarine, startlingly blue; everywhere there's spiky yellow gorse, tied down with long anchoring roots to stop it being torn out like twisters do trees in Kansas from the harrying sea winds that probe into every nook and cranny of this massive shingle beach. The vegetation is low, thick, matted, like a tough, hard wearing carpet.

At times it felt as if, and looked as if, we were by the cote d'azur; the sun was high and the pools that fill the old workings were deep and clear, like ice green emeralds. And at the same time, it also felt like the last of England: where the survivors of some apocalyptic event (the Anglo version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, perhaps) had fled to, with the power station being the only reminder of a now extinct civilisation.

It's certainly the place where people must be living off the grid. Like the driftwood that reaches the long pebble beach, so it is for those souls who wish to disconnect and lead another existence. They land there.

The perpetual flush of the sea, pushing the pebbles along the shore to it's own symphony of sound must be manna for those who want nothing but to hear the roar, crash and hubbub of nature. And you hear that in the birds that adore Dungeness: gulls roost on the lip edges of building in the power complex and cut dramatic outsize shadows against the building walls as they wheel and turn in the afternoon sun. Spring's first sand martins and the odd pioneer swallow cut arabesques through the sky. Full bodied ravens strut like country squires. Warblers yell like market stall holders or explode like car alarms from every bush.

A little way off the beach is the warm water outfall from the power plant; just like a dishwasher churning or the mythical maelstrom, it's frothing kettle of spume and water, which the gulls and dive bombing terns love, feasting on the fish attracted in their turn by the warm water.

The notion came to me as we wandered over the headland, first by the long pebble ridge, then across each of the nature reserves on this magical land that Dungeness is really the world's largest Japanese rock garden. It has the harmony and the serenity of a zen garden. Untouched. Natural. Forever. Yet, and this is the ever present irony of nature, what the waves bring, they can take away. The crumbling coasts of eastern England testifies to that. And, of course, there is the squat, humming presence of Dungeness A and Dungeness B as man's tacit contribution to instability.

Yet, I could live there. That frontier like quality so appeals to me. Few places have invited me to contemplation in the UK; this is one of that tiny group. I can fully understand why Derek Jarman headed south and set up a homestead. His "Prospect Cottage" is a tiny gem in black shingle. Fronted by a garden which reflects the austerity of the area - driftwood, flotsam, hardy plants, pebble cairns, minature standing stones - again, in a dreamy, zen fashion which fits so aptly the sensibility of this modern day Prospero's island. And the piece de resistance: the first verse of John Donne's "The Sunne Rising" marked out in raised lettering on the cottage's black tarred western wall.

I've thought for some years now that to leave garden behind is a gesture of the greatest generosity. A present for the generations yet to be born. Designed and created by people who may well, and I think particularly of Prospect Cottage and Chiswick House gardens here, never see it in it's realised state of exultant beauty. What existed on paper for them exists in front of our eyes. What a great legacy.

"I want all my friends to come up like weeds, and I want to be a weed myself, spontaneous and unstoppable. I don't want the kind of friends one has to cultivate"
Roger Deakin. Notes from Walnut Tree Farm.

I've said this many times. Whether I've written it down is moot. I'm never homesick. My sickness is to come home. To a job I don't particularly enjoy; to worries about neighbours; frets about what I should do to my flat (sell and leave the stresses of living here to someone else) or more likely what I won't do (sell).

I know I'm psychically running away from all the decisions that have to be made, which will  and I can see this, probably make my emotional life easier to bear in some ways, but, and ain't there always a big one of this: travelling, even the thought of it, is just so damn exhilarating.

Sarajevo. Are the two of us in love? Hard to say on such a brief encounter - three nights, four days - but there's definitely chemistry between us. Something to build on.

What I had n't realised, and, really, how can you from the media and photographs, is exactly how much of a cauldron Sarajevo is in; long, narrow, and somewhat spatulate as it fans out towards the airport, and completely overlooked by hills and then a backdrop of snow topped mountains. Nor had I realised how close the frontline actually was, in places it must have been the other side of the street. It  can only have been an unimaginable three year hell encircled, besieged and shelled relentlessly.

Yet, the city has recovered incredibly. New buildings, many, many more restored, with only a handful or so in the city centre still bearing the scars of war, or in case still a hollowed out shell. Again, my hat and my respect goes out to these brave, resilient Sarajevans.

The city is a little gem: studded with minarets, clanging with hardy looking trams, and home to the tallest building in the whole of the Balkans - the Avaz tower. I spent a good part of one morning revelling in the view from the tower's open observation deck, baking in the heat.

Walking longitudinally across Sarajevo is a journey through spiritual as much as secular architecture: from the UN lookalike of the Bosnian parliament building, the quaintly Yugoslav communist functional buildings - all right angles and wide steps - on to imperialist statement buildings thrown up by the Austro-Hungarians - very formal, Viennese fussy - and then the bee hive that is Bascarsija - the old town.

Bascarsija is where generations of people have lived, traded, prayed, wept, bought, fought, laughed, ingested endless thimblefuls of coffee. Designed for meandering, created for chance meetings and conjecture. I felt ghosts every step of the way. Every flagstone throws up a story. The walls breath, the mosques exhale stories. So where are they? Who's the chronicler?

Only I can see this through: let this be the year I sell my flat. I need space. I need quiet. I need greenery. I need respite from the unease this area generates.

There are many things I hope for and this is one: why won't the BBC man up and take on the Daily Mail. If there was just some organisation, some entity which would square up to the Mail's bullying. I dream of this. A direct challenge string enough to turn this basilisk into stones or at least clip it's wings.

The near compulsory public tribute offered to the former prime minister who died three days ago - hyper ventilating press (Usual suspects. No surprises) and the forced recall of parliament for what must have been a buttock numbing seven or so hours for the non believers wearily listening to the cult members effusions - has put the UK shoulder to shoulder with the other country dominating the media sphere. North Korea. Brothers in arms when it comes to hot torrents of strident rhetoric

We have in the space of a few days become the unwilling participants in a cheesy, grisly personality cult. Thank God, I'm out of the country when this tawdry spectacle reaches it's apogee.

If the Tories start busing public servants in and coercing them to publicly weep a la Kim Jung Il then we are a truly pantomime country. They've already tried, but excused it away as a genuine mistake to get Whitehall staff to wear mourning clothes.

It seems that Cameron has no depth to which he won't plumb. Everything up to celebrate the passage of a former PM who left only division and despair in their wake. A scorched earth, put all prisoners to the sword raison d'être that many of us living through those times frantically hoped was an aberration never to be repeated. In the same passionate way probably as medieval monks must have prayed for deliverance from the Norsemen.

 Just that even though that rotten baton slipped out of one Tory hand it has been inelegantly, but enthusiastically, plucked out of the long grass by the current incumbent and the wand of despair benights us once more. 

Again, and I simply have to say it: I am ecstatic I'll be abroad next Wednesday.

So today was the day Margaret Thatcher died. I acknowledge her passing as I do her significance for some of my fellow citizens. That's all. The urge to pen vitriol has been contained. Just.

How paradoxical it is that fiction can open up the true drama and reveal the full spectrum of human behaviour of any actual situation that's occurred than hard observed fact. I've been thinking about this after reading a lightly fictionalised memoir of a Polish Jewish young boy and his aunt on the run, never more than a step ahead of the Germans, savage Ukrainian militias, and mostly indifferent, sometimes callous Polish Catholics during the darkest days of the second world war.

It's the tiniest details that the history books either ignore or are oblivious to that this novel - Wartime Lies by Louis Begley - depicts that drives home the humming terror anyone in this the most awful of all predicament must have felt: this little boy could never urinate in public because (as I am too) he was circumcised. To do so risked discovery and a hitherto secret life instantly jeopardised. On such a thing hung a life. I can't get over that; it's almost laughable except it could be the tipping point between life or descent into hell.

Another book, a collection of short stories by an Urdu writer called Saadat Hasan Manto, is a chilling recount of the effects of another great British colonial fiasco: the partition of India and the communal demons that set free - massacre, pogrom, rape, arson.

Tell me that fiction means nothing if you dare. These two books alone would explode that canard should anyone dare to raise it.

I don't know whether we should all be laughing or holding our head in our hands in global collective horror at the lava flow of threats streaming out of Pyongyang. Either they are masters of tension to an intensity that a horror movie director would envy, or the much more frightening aspect is that it's so hermetically walled in by psychosis and persecution complexes that they will lash out against some imagined slight that only they recognise. 

There's something eerily reminiscent of the last few months before the outbreak of WW 2; every day, the ratchet cranks up another cog. What is it they hope to gain?

Will this winter ever end ? Is there actually one in sight? You know there's hardly been a more talked about theme all this week than this. The weather's constant ambushes, it's plunging cold, the sharp faced winds and the need for a hat at all times has driven this question hard.

It's coincided, and how aptly too, with the centenary of Edward Thomas's cycle ride from South London to Somerset's Quantock hills. Thomas was charged by his publisher to find Spring; he did, and one that's unrecognisable to today's bitter blue skies. His was ascending skylarks, brimming hedges, short showers, and elms ready to bloom into leaf. 

I would n't have known about Thomas's trip had the Guardian not published a piece about it, which avoided the lost idyll sentimentality that I know a clutch of other papers just could n't. 

Thomas's eventual book appears as much a meditation as a travelogue. The prose, as the article writer points out, is " on the very brink of poetry", which I can only attest to from the lines and excerpts from Thomas book included in the article. What is quoted though is like an aperitif, enough to want more. I shall read the book.

One line that is quoted resonated this afternoon; Thomas heard chiff-chaffs singing the further from London he went "...as if every note had been the hammering of a tiny nail into winter's coffin". Pulling my boots out of the Essex mud of Vange Marsh earlier this afternoon, a friend and I stumbled across a small red bed quaking with chiff-chaffs. A restless dozen of them. Almost humming bird like aerobatics. I can't forget a pair chasing each other with the lead chiff chaff almost able to turn a right angle at will inches from a thorn bush. 

"Contemplation seems to be about the only luxury that costs nothing" 
From Dodie Smith's novel: "I capture the castle"

I've started reading a speech given by Lorca when he was in New York. Too early to have a reaction? No, not at all. There are sentences in there I envy; there are more, however, that I challenge. "The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm...the sharp edged buildings rise to the sky with no desire for either clouds or glory...(they) climb coldly skyward with a beauty that has no roots. There is nothing more poetic or terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench or conceal those vast towers, but those towers (are) hostile to mystery..." 

Skyscrapers are not hostile to mystery, nor are they cold, or rootless. They are the very opposite. How can you not be mesmerised by the hive like life that flutters in, around and across skyscrapers? Those people? Where do they all come from, how do they get there, what are they thinking, doing, hoping, fearing? Surely nothing less than the ingredients for mystery and conjecture.

Cold? Not these furnaces of human life. Rootless? Again, no. Their literal roots go down fathoms. They are anchored like teeth. And anchored as deep into the NYC skyline as the Himalayas - and as sacred, as spiritual, and as elemental to that fine city too.

At Rye Meads RSPB reserve and for the third time this year colder than I ever imagined possible on the mainland UK. An inch thick or so carpet of snow that made it look more like the fringes of Siberia than commuter belt Hertfordshire. No wind, but the evidence of it was there, with reedbeds bent back, splashed with snow as if someone had flung a pot of white paint over them.

Necessity drove the birds out, cold does that. We were fair dazzled by acrobatic tits and finches gyrating around two bird feeders near the reserve's welcome centre.

It was n't too long before a party of female pheasants poured over the nearby bank or scampered through bushes to forage around the base of the feeder. Then with an almost operatic entry, a scowling, blood red-hooded male pheasant strode in the way a hot tempered, over bearing squire would have made his way through the chapters of a nineteenth century bodice ripper.

Contempt in his every move, disdain in every gesture and dominance in every step. He strutted, observed, then left. It could have been the march of some operatic despot. With a scabbard trailing by his side or a dueling scar, he would have been the perfect Prussian army officer martinet. Nature is theatre at times.

I've yet to go to Nigeria, but even the fact that I have n't can't obscure how it's written itself so large in my life: through my father who lived there for several years; through a great love, a wonderful, generous, sweet hearted, tender, sparkling, quick witted woman from Lagos; through it's writers, and how abundant a country it is for them, a random few - Wole Soyinka, Buchi Emecheta, Chimama Ngozi Adichie - and of course, Chinua Achebe, whom we lost yesterday.

Some books you never forget; Things Fall Apart, is unquestionably part of that pantheon, it's one of the foundation stones. Worlds must open and scales fall from blinkered eyes, or a novel has not done it's work. There has to be a transformation, a revelation, a new understanding; Things Fall Apart is that very constellation. 

I found this wonderful quote of Achebe in  Nadine Gordimer's appreciation of him in today's Guardian: " Everything is grist to the mill of the artist. True, one grain may differ from another in it's power of nourishment; still, we must ...accord appropriate recognition to every grain that comes our way". 

What might be mundane to many is really a novelty for me. I've had a bizarrely fulfilling evening washing a cable knit cardigan. It felt like I'd actually done something. A material achievement.

Dorset has been on my mind all week. I had three extraordinary days in Weymouth at the beginning of the week. There is something other about that county. Let's be clear here: there's something different about most of the West Country generally; less conventional, more magical, in the sense (and this is what I feel about Wales very powerfully) that rounding a corner and seeing a hobbit casually smoking a long briar pipe, or catching a glimpse of a unicorn through the steam of an early morning just would n't feel odd.

It has it's own peculiar, and by this I mean engaging and attractive, sensibility, which though is too elusive to pin to a board  - it's a mood: a felt perception, a little bohemian, a little new wave artisan, a little Eco flavour, a touch reflective, and elemental. People are out on boats, fishing, or walking the mudflats, or fully absorbed as I saw one person was, chipping away with a geologist's hammer on Monmouth beach just outside Lyme Regis.

The Dorset folk (and does n't that pong of anthropology, even condescension, but it's not meant like that) are n't hermetically sealed in, they talk to everyone. Sometimes it struck me as almost with an ingenue's naïveté; thirty years of strap hanging on a tube every morning makes a Londoner like me oddly unprepared for casual conversation. Not so people from Dorset.

Elemental is the right adjective, for the weather as much as a characteristic of the people. I experienced the coldest weather I've ever known anywhere on the UK mainland. A wind that had been sharpened to a scalpel on the whetstone, flew in over a rumbustious sea, flung itself across every nook and cranny, down every street, up every hill, and tore through to my very marrow. The recorded temperature was never much higher than -1c, windchill must have pushed that down even further.

Sunday we thrashed by rain and Monday by snow, but nature's plays many tunes simultaneously, as on Tuesday, quite incredibly, I saw four Spoonbills - long-legged, spatulate beaked waders - sheltering in the still buffeting wind at the RSPB's Lodmoor reserve. This is the type of bird that always comes to mind when I think of the Okavango delta; birds for a hot, vast, sultry, treeless landscape,  not reed marshland backing on to a Weymouth housing estate with elderly dog walkers and young mums criss  crossing.

The evening before I ended up marooned with a handful of other passengers on a double decker bus for almost four hours outside Bridport due to police investigating an accident between a heavy lorry and a teenage boy on a bike. We eventually decanted from that bus, walked through the accident scene to board another; this was the moment I realised the filtering power of ambient light pollution, you never see the night sky properly in London, here it was squid ink black and almost touchable.

I know I'll be going back to Dorset. It's pulling me there.

Yesterday I was looking at coffee table photographs of Romanov era Russian empire. All aspects: town, gown; royalty, peasantry; native Russians, conquered subjects. Quite revealing, especially those which I think had undergone some firm of early colourisation, some had certainly been sweetened with colour, although actual colour is not unlikely - that's been possible almost since the first photographs were taken.

Three dimensions and colour enlivened those images I carry of the characters in those sweeping, prairie like novels of nineteenth century Russia: Goncharov's  Prince of indecision and idleness - Oblomov; the claustrophobia of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, the sweat and neurosis of living in a casually indifferent, often brutal St Petersburg; as a counterpoint, some happier stories of Chekhov; and what I've always conceived of Tolstoy's rural Russia.

And yet, the smock clad, long, straggling wispy bearded peasant farmer look came up this morning as    I caught up on a day old edition of the Guardian and an article about Dorset cider making. There was a photograph of four men, a cider pub landlord, along with his staff, staring straight into the camera lens in the manner and style of those Russian farm workers I was looking at yesterday. Is that a recognised Dorset look? Is it intentional? Even ironic?

What then flattened my mood after such a wonderful afternoon was finding out that my friend had gone home to find her flat ransacked. If only the people who did this had an iota of awareness of just how much distress they've sown. I've been burgled myself. Twice. I despise them.

Sometimes I can do nothing but effuse about London. It's impossible not to on occasions. Tell me, I know it stinks of insufferable metropolitanism and the 'there's no life beyond zone 6' bunker mentality, which is how I once felt before I moved here three decades ago. You have to realise though that this place does wow and excite and amaze even when you think the cup cannot run over any more.

The Kings Cross St Pancras complex has had the transformation of all transformations, the de luxe, top of the range treatment. An ulcer become a pearl. I've spent many hours here, pre and post metamorphosis, either waiting for trains or getting off or getting on them. So much time spent there that I stopped seeing it. A place to grab a coffee and go, fret over delays; theorise how to get just the right seat in the quiet carriage, and that was it.

This afternoon I saw another side of this mighty urban diamond, and the best way - through the eyes of another. I spent probably five hours there lunching then wandering with an old friend through the complex.

 Lunch was magnificent: Searcy's restaurant, a deep leather,  amber hued restaurant surely channeling Grand Central's Oyster bar. Washed down with an idle saunter through the Victorian tiled, quasi gothic moorish palace that's the St Pancras hotel.

What I remember as a windswept, scruffy cab rank has been touched by the magician's wand and become the conservatory roofed reception cum atrium for the hotel. I thought how anaemic it looked when we made our way into it during the early afternoon, with a thin light over emphasising how vast the space is; then we went back towards dusk. It had become a cathedral of shadows, of honeyed warmth, intimate and personal. The power of light.

My revelation, which I explained to my friend was the sound of my tongue slapping on to the floor, was the complete makeover of what used to be the depressing, tawdry, down at heel booking office. The integrity of the room has not changed, and they've retained the chiselled booking office inscription; it's the spirit that has, a new life all together. It's been hugged and loved. Told it's beautiful. Polished and soaped up. A name too: the Gilbert Scott brasserie.

I walked in and immediately swooned; it's that fifties New York feel I love, afternoon cocktails, espressos at the bar, conversations in deep leather armchairs, romance and politics, art and mammon.

Something else that seldom fails to move my dial one way or the other and that's hubbub, commotion, activity. St Pancras was feverish this afternoon. No doubt picking up additional zip simply from the fact it's Friday afternoon. Probably the working week's only erogenous zone. Anything could happen.

There was a soundtrack: two young men playing thunderous four hand boogie woogie on one of the street pianos in the concourse. Bass and treble clefs flying like sparks from an anvil. It was red hot. Steaming twelve bar blues for a streaming, teeming destination. Can't get more apt than that.

I have just finished reading a complicated, at times allusive and elusive, essay on Foucault - somehow I never thought I'd be writing what I just have, but I have. Understood it? Yes, and not a hesitant, shaky yes either.

Learned something? Certainly. Something I'd never considered explicitly, but probably sensed: that power is only partially to do with the controlled disbursement of knowledge, a little bit here, a little bit there; power is generative, the more you know, the more you can do. Data in today's world is true power; knowing more means you can control more, think of those silent algorithms grinding away pushing us like chess pieces across a board to a game plan that we know very little of.

But what stands out for me more than anything else is the woodcut image that runs alongside the article, which is bound around the metaphor of a plague ridden city. That woodcut is clearly of London in 1665, and could plausibly be of the area where my office is: St Paul's. How amazing. I walk through time, or it's spatial equivalent everyday. My footsteps echo those of millions of others

In the lexicon of all possible neighbours to have these are the three you least want to be next to.

Actually there is n't a number three, just a shared number two spot: Australians and New Zealanders. Raucous like parakeets and immense drinkers. Clannish. They all seem to have someone who models themselves on the den mother ('den mither' as the kiwis probably pronounce it), who is the chief inciter, the whipper upper, the loudest, and in some ways, bizarrely the most inconsiderate - I'll get back to the point in a second.

Weather is no obstacle; rain, snow, shine, fog, drizzle, bone breaking cold, they'll be out there, in the handkerchief sized back garden of whichever London terraced house it is they living en masse. Night or day, work day or non work day.

Now considerate, what exactly was I hinting at there? Well, I know that if I keeled over in the street, or was frantically trying to flee a burning building, there would be as likely as not, some brave Anzac who'd do whatever they could to help. I could genuinely imagine one, either gender, (kiwi women seem to be particularly Amazonian), bursting into a rapidly smoke filled building, hurling me over their shoulder and making for safety.

If only number one in this trinity of undesirable numbers carried the consideration gene or even a trace of it. My own spawn, my kith and kin, the tribe I wish I had no bond with: the English.

Everything that the Anzacs are, the English are by a multiplier of ten, twenty, thirty...infinity. No one worse. Drunk, slovenly, unintelligent, whining, violent, uncouth (God, I feel like I'm chairing the Daily Mail editorial team), vicious, intimidating. Sans common sense, sans reason, sans thoughtfulness; an unblended psyche.

My relatives sit sandwiched between two sets of English neighbours. Bookended in misery. I spend several nights, usually each month here. The night just gone with it's early morning which is just about to was about as miserable as you could get. Singing, shouting, door slamming, obligatory loud music on one side; a screech owl of a woman yakking into her mobile at two thirty or so in the garden of the other. Man, what inanities, were you broadcasting in a voice that could pop the lid off a can.

The English. Every day I wish I could say I was Irish, or Scottish, or Welsh. But I can't.

So what I thought was someone hammering on Sunday night was actually someone banging on the wall of one of my near neighbours in an effort to get them to quieten down. I had no idea. And would have probably stayed that way until I got an e-mail from another neighbour.

This is the hell of living the way so many of us do cheek by jowl in multi-occupancy buildings. Your comfort and peace of mind is forever predicated on someone's else behaviour. You can never be assured of peace and quiet. I don't think I've really slept well for months. It's a hovering fear. Will it? Won't it?

I've felt this way about several public places, including this particular one: ' He told me that he tried to think of Grand Central Station as his apartment. One room but a nice size. High ceiling. Nice big window. Marble floor. Centrally located...a little bit noisy and could be more heat. But the high ceiling made up for everything'.

From Great Jones Street by Don Delilo.

I came across one of the most apposite adjectives ever used about New York as I was bouncing along the central line to Oxford Circus this morning. Vulval. NYC in one word: fertile, rich, earthy, forbidden, dense, sultry, steaming, lush, tropical, glistening.

It pairs up so well with another unusual adjective Don Delilo used - I'm reading Great Jones Street - one of his earlier, somewhat keatsian cum gritty urbanism prose rich novels - which is where  I stumbled over vulval.

And that other word is feculent. The antithesis of vulval, which is health and fertility; this is the reverse,the dreck, the sludge, the gunk, the muck of a great city.

Both words capture an intangible particularity about New York, a smell, a mood, a tension, a resonance, a frisson.

London is as vulval and as feculent as New York. After all, we are siblings, soul mates rendered apart only by geography and climate.

Climate is the operative word. New York has the grand gesture weather; those retreat from Moscow winters along with stunning, nigh on apocalyptic events a la Hurricane Sandy; London suffers neither...yet...climate change could herald all sorts of meteorological naughtiness, but what do we have, and right now, is soul sapping, harrowing cold.

I was bird watching along one of the Thames's loneliest estuaries this afternoon in the rawest, coldest wind I've experienced in years. Only now is blood pumping properly to all extremities. But worth it. Terry and I had a treasure trove of birds open up to us, waders of all sizes, scurrying along the mudflats, with acrobatic turnstones sweeping across the water like marine swallows with three magisterial kestrels hovering above the nearby reed beds. Vulval.

A frantic, often fraught week that I could have happily done without; Wednesday particularly, I crawled home then, beaten and wildly exasperated. But that's all in the past.

A number of beautiful things floated across the last yesterday and today: two quite blissful days in Sheffield and being reunited with an old love.

The steel city: it could be Rome or San Francisco with all those hills, steeper for every Sheffielder to be as a lean and muscular as goats...except so many are n't; and at night, eerily like night time LA, well it was from my hotel room window.

Reunited with an old love. Not a physical thing...though I felt the stirrings, but the simple chance act of picking up a copy of "Herzog"' Saul Bellow's masterpiece. Just flicking through it was akin to being aroused. I love that book.

This is the first Valentine's Day where I've seen more men carrying sprays of flowers or a single red rose than I have women. Even in the office. Outnumbered. Wonder why that it is? New cultural trend?

Far more men than I've seen before in the two card shops on Cheapside this evening as well. All with the look of something between puzzlement - the what to get conundrum - and near despair. Made me think of that urban folklore of the hapless man trying to chose lingerie for his partner. In the headlights. Frozen.

Though I did somewhat admire the stout man sat on his folded out commuter bike waiting for the lights to turn as I walked across New Change this evening; in his back pack was a tall, almost willowy red rose, cocooned in a plastic sheath, flapping in the light wind. Did that survive the pedal to wherever it was he was heading? Was that going to be his take on the Black Magic chocolate moment...pop off his cycle helmet, run fingers through his air, and bound up the stairs with a rose in his hand?

Yesterday was a day almost custom made for blogging: the pope unexpectedly resigning. I'm sure conspiracy wheels are spinning furiously in some of the more suspect media outlet. Don't be shy, Daily Mail, it's not just you I'm thinking of, but you are the most likely, admit it. Go on. Your tittle tattle mind must be in overdrive; the innuendo, the barb, the non too casual aspersion. the off stage whisper you love so much, and, of course, the all too ready 'source'. We know you want to...

Radio 4 is roughly midway through it's month long George Orwell season - this year is the 110th anniversary of his birth - and last week's Book at Bedtime was 'Down and out in Paris and London'. I remember reading it along with most of Orwell's other works virtually in one clean sweep when I was somewhere in my teens. Maybe I was fifteen, sixteen, I really don't remember. What I do, though, is the utter vividness of his writing, it's simplicity and clarity, and the fact that for me at that time it represented a world I knew little of and had no experience of whatsoever - the sprawling, brawling, anonymous, never still metropolis.

Six or seven years after that clean sweep, I made that transition from a quiet South Yorkshire ex-mining village to London, the uber-city. Not a backward look over my shoulder since.

I love London  It is my home: by spirit; by association; by implicit memory, every stone, every pavement holds a story, even if it is just a fragment its there. It's been and continues to be the palimpsest that I've written the bulk of my life's story on.

And its to people like Orwell - as it to others such as J.B. Priestley, whose novel 'Angel Pavement' galvanised my sense of London as a vast social panorama, where individuals lived intertwined hugger mugger lives, which could be every permutation of circumstance and emotion, exuberant, degrading, humorous, gritty, tenacious, defiant, introspective, but what mattered was that they were alive - that I owe so much.

It's novels that helped me begin to tease out the nooks and crannies of 'the Smoke' in the early days of living here when I only had one day off and had to pack so much into those scarce twenty four hours. How else would I have uncovered Mayfair for instance, if not for reading of Dorian Gray pacing along Audley Street; or Notting Hill through the eyes of Colin Macinnes.

Even Dickens, who I don't particularly enjoy has a place in my fictional London, with his opening paragraph to Bleak House, where the November weather was so elemental that it would n't have been unimaginable to "...meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill...

Without them the road to adventure could have been so much different.

I like this interview. I like it that the interviewer has done due diligence and steeped himself in the works of his novelist interviewee; that's a respect that not every interviewer affords their subjects, not to do that is a rudeness at worst, a gaucheness at best.

I like it that this interview reads like the transcript of a relaxed conversation between friends; there's not a scintilla of fussiness or formality anywhere. It could be a latter day version of that wonderful film, 'Dinner with Andre', with it's warm-hearted centre; with it's generous moods - intellectual, humorous, anecdotal, curious, inquiring (but not it's evil sister - prying); and just as comradely and collegiate as the film. I can almost see them sat down, smiling, rolling back with laughter or bent forward parsing a great work, a poem, a painting before the conversation rolls on another wave to some other topic, tackled just as deliciously.

I've read some interviews which would have tried the patience of angels with the knowingness, or self referencing on the part of the interviewer. Not happening here. This is pure; an uncontaminated interview.

I like it that I've glimpsed into dimensions I don't normally see in my day to day world - the world of creativity and the beauty of being in the "flow". The interviewee says time is effectively inconsequential during those steaming, heighten times when the words pour like lava and just need corralling into sentences. Time truly standing still.

I like it that I've had the rare pleasure of being a friend of the interviewee for well over thirty years. I've lucked out. I feel blessed.

I've never wanted to get married, or to be more honest, I've never expected I would be, and I am still not. But, I've noticed myself wondering over recent weeks what it would have been like. What would my notional wife have been like? Where would we have lived? A mid-terrace in west London, or somewhere further out? Overseas? (God, yes...) Kids? Would I have pushed myself to do well at work? What would it all have been like?

There's always something in London to set your heart racing and keep your spirits up.

On the tube into work yesterday I was sat opposite a young school girl, no more than thirteen, who unlike most girls that age I see on public transport was n't chatting or listening to an i-Pod, or scribbling last minute homework; she was, instead, deep into a weather worn copy of Nancy Mitford's 'Love in a cold climate', rapt with the concentration and focus that only readers know. I was privately delighted; reading is the greatest joy. We travel further than anyone else. No continent, no century, no world is too remote. Anything is possible: we can be any gender, we can be anything in fact.

A few weeks before, I'd been sat in the Pret a Manger in Paternoster Square, working my way through the Guardian and nearing the thought of saddling up and making for the office, when a youngish man - early thirties at most, and as well dressed as most are who work in the City* - sat at the table next to me. So unremarkable and mundane an event that I scarcely took any notice. But I did when I glanced over and saw that he was reading Saul Bellow's 'Herzog' - my favourite book. The one I'll be buried with. I was silently ecstatic; I've never seen anyone, anywhere, with anything by Bellow in their hands. 

Again, someone on that lifetime's journey that reading is. Readers go places.

*I dress badly. It's not quite jester's motley I'm wearing but damn close. Only this afternoon I found myself wandering across the office floor with a hole in my shirt elbow the size of small bomb crater.