Last night's apprehensions that I'd be kept awake by the carousing kiwis next door came to naught; I slept like a top and woke up bouncing, they clearly slept, but bounced awake? No, I'd say no.

The drunker you are, the deeper the trough the following morning, so saith Doctor Archimedes.

But I know simply from experience that I'll not have been alone fretting about the hullabooloo that the first faint of breath of barbeque smoke seems to evoke. Across London, across the South-east, it'll have been the same.

This mad, crazy, complicated city state that I live in and love immeasurably has a toll to pay sometimes. I accept it. I could n't live anywhere else.

I'm at my unofficial second home, listening to the Kiwi neighbours having a barbie; they're young, they're drinking, they're right outside my window...

Is it bad if I hope there's a repeat of last night's near monsoon?

Someone I know let out a metaphorical cheer on Facebook in celebration that they were able to slide in to a dress they'd dreamed of wearing for several months.

It's obvious they're delighted; every word they've written is starburst of joy. A plan, when it comes off is an intoxicant all of it's own that defies proper articulation. It's a sense thing, an intangible asset of indefinable value.

I've been in a similar frame of mind. Something inexplicable prompted me to listen to a Roxy Music's Greatest Hits album that I'd stumbled on when I was fishing around for background music to cook lunch to.

How to tumble backwards through time. Just the faintest breath of a melody, the murmur of a line, and it's sometime in the small hours of a Winter's day in the early '80s, and I'm laying in bed with Julia, the two of us talking softly, or perhaps not at all, wrapped up in our private cocoon, Roxy humming quietly around us.

I might have forgotten I'd ever had that life if not for randomly excavating Roxy Music today.

One of my early adopter friends gave me a tour of his iPad 2. It is a design masterpiece, nothing more, nothing less; an utterly beautiful union of elegance, sophistication, simplicity, and no more weight than that of a snowflake. I am in awe. Yes, don't ask, I do want one...

My unconscious is unruly from time to time. Always been that way. I've had some extraordinary memorable dreams over the years. Nothing surprising there, we're all like that, if, of course, we remember the bizarre, baffling film strips that run through our sleep.

Mine usually have some sort of soundtrack accompaniment, and always in colour. Editing, well that's another matter, there is n't any. It's jumpcuts, time lapses, slow-mo, sometimes auteur led, sometimes I'm not featuring, but still there watching.

All of this though is another story. What's the very unexpected fallout from my nocturnal cinema is that I'm literally dreaming up new words.

Happened to me once, and I thought nothing more, other than the sheer randomness of the unconscious, after all why would a word that sounds like a French verb - Rorgner - come to me in a dream and refuse to leave?

No idea. And by the way, there is no such verb, no such word in fact.

Is twice a developing a pattern, or just coincidence? Because the new word coining machine stamped something else out last night - hyperkinaesthetics. Again. no such word exists (or not in Google at least)

I know broadly where the origins of this lie, or probably, you never can be too sure what's going on whilst you're supposedly asleep. It must be related to the talk on David Foster Wallace I went to last night at Foyles with a friend.

David Foster Wallace's was an unknown force to me until yesterday. I left the talk with the intention to read whatever I could get hold of. It's his style that rugby tackled me: fast, meticulous, highly, highly detailed, frantic, tumultuous , baroque, flamboyant, up to the minute. The style that looks as easy as it is magnetic to readers and tyro writers, but deep down, it only comes with monumental effort, discipline, and patience.

That, all of it, every vowel, consonant, verb, noun, soaked into me and the reward bizarrely: hyperkinaesthetics. My mind must have been slaving in it's workshop all night to come up with something to encompass the effect Wallace has had on me.

The unconscious. Got to love it.

It's the weather. Consecutive days of sheer sun and soft blue skies, how can anyone stay in? I can't and don't. All my non working time has been with my rear firmly parked on a seat in Holland Park, nose down in Oblomov, a fabulous nineteenth century Russian novel, which I can't get enough of.

Someone was telling me they worry they put things off. Don't. Embrace it. I do, with the tenderness of an orchid grower, slow, nurturing, no rush. Let it breath. Always have, always will.

Doing tomorrow what should be really done today, is that such an existential threat as some claim? In my eyes, no.

Viva procrastination!

Amazing, eleven years in the internet business, and until about 15 minutes ago, I was a coffee shop, internet surfing virgin.

Today is the first time I've ever taken my laptop outside and let it play in the open air, and see what the other wi-fi networks are up to.

So far, so good. Connection's a good 'un

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow: will the creature walk?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am disappointed that True Grit did n't register at the Oscars. Nothing, not even a heartbeat. Instead, everyone turned predictable, and opted for that safe old favourite: the unadventurous Limey costume drama - The King's Speech.

Yet another tired re-tread of someone's heart-breaking struggle with privilege. Where's the courage in choosing a film like that?

The reason I got robbed in Buenos Aires was that I stood out from the crowd. Every Porteno, every man jack of them were in denim; I was in chinos.

I could have passed as a citizen, quite easily in fact, B.A. is as multi-cultural as it gets, but it was the chinos, they gave me and my friend who was with me away, We might as well have been dressed in jesters motley and be carrying a pig's bladder on a stick.

Since then, (even before when I think about it), I dress to blend in, I camouflage myself, which these days, means the middle aged man's uniform of dark everything: jeans, coat, shirts, shoes. It's as standard as look as the furniture in a classroom, built for utility, designed for anonymity, hence why I wear it.

Only a handful of my male friends have the charisma to carry off a bold, bright palette of colour in the way they dress. My cousin, probably the boldest of this tiny bunch; he's a good eye for what matches, how to colour block and so on.

So when he and his wife brought me a bright red windcheater one Xmas, I inwardly died, bluffed a hearty thanks, and then stuck it on a hanger. A coat in exile.

But they knew more. No colour is an orphan. Everything goes with something. Something sat on my shoulder this morning, whispered in one ear, then fluttered over to the other and did the same: "That red coat? Try it, go on..."

I did, and it does. My little red windcheater and I got on pretty well today. Enough to make me want to take it out again.

That fleeting clip of Colonel Gaddafi as he makes his first public reaction to the growing Libyan revolution has echoes for me at least of another tragic, other worldly figure - Michael Jackson.

Even the umbrella Gaddafi's fidgeting with seems Jacksonesque. Strange clothes, that umbrella, the hint of darkness, it could be the Thriller video all over again. Except Gaddafi is an unmitigated grotesque monster; Jackson, on the other hand, merely a faun, lost in a mysterious, bewildering world.

Surprising to walk home this evening in the dark and yet smell freshly mown grass as I walked past a local park. This is February and it's cold.

Grass cutting is a late spring entrant. Not now.

What makes it even odder is that the snowdrops and crocuses - the early bird spring flowers - still have n't fully broken through the ground of another park I walk through daily. Man and Nature are both mixed up now.

I don't usually recommend book's to people - one person's meat is another's poison and so on - but this novel, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, I'm nearly evangelical about. Get a copy, lock the door, turn the phone off.

It's an absolutely charming late love story and a beautiful comedy of manners set in England. I can't get over it.

It will tell you more about the social frictions, difficulties, and nuttiness about modern England than I could do in a lifetime, with a wit ten times better than Jane Austen and it makes Martin Amis look like a cartoon scribbler.

Character lovers, this book is heaven. I've not come across such well dimensioned and lingeringly memorable characters as the eponymous Major or Mrs Ali. This is the level of writing I aspire to.

Why do people keeping abandoning fruit and veg in tube stations? A few years ago I noticed a solitary onion on the lip of the eastbound District Line platform at Monument.

Tonight, it was two avocados in the walkway leading to the lifts at Holland Park. Obviously they had fallen out of shopping bags, but they did look lonely, and to be honest they were far apart enough to seem like they had an argument, then spun on their tiny avocado heels and decided not to look at each other.

Someone wrote that one of my friends was n't awesome, he was 100 kinds of awesome. Surely that's crying to be the name of a book or a film. As for me, I'm seven shades of tired; been years since I've felt so worn to the bone as I do now.

Yeah, it's free, don't worry, sit there. Just let me move my stuff. Yes it is busy. Starts to get that way now. Be different later, the seams will be popping when the football starts. Need a shoe horn to fit people in then and it'll be an absolute madhouse to get to the bar.

Why am I laughing? ... I could n't help it...heard you muttering... what you said about warm beer. Every American, its the same thing; you were expecting cold, and you got a mouthful of unfiltered river bed instead.

And you're clearly not English, you've none of the warning signs: not fat, no tattoos or tongue piercings, you don't have the skin complexion of a cheese and onion crisp, and, of course, there's that full set of teeth. You stand out. Observe the contrast. Just look around...be discrete...see what I mean? The real population of this country should be about two million, not sixty...look at us, the ugliest nation afloat. No wonder we're an island. Quarantined to protect the global gene pool. Christ, I don't how we breed.

That's the thing with this pub, every conceivable mis-shape and some that are off the spectrum, are in here...it's like that bar in Star Wars with the wookies and God knows what else.

Ok, that's my little rant over. By the way, the pub is the spiritual home of the outburst. Take it as it comes. You'll hear all sorts of stuff in the pub. Usually low-level bitching but occasionally there's something worthwhile

So, how about you... why are you here? Studying ? Tourist? Ah..a pub experience, that's what you want. OK. Fair enough.

This place is n't too bad. Actually it's one of the better places. Food's good. Yes, that's correct, you heard right; the food in England is good now. Forget what ever you've read. It's edible, it has taste, it can be successfully digested. Look, see what's on the menu. This is a gastro pub. Gastro, that is, ending in onomy, not entitis. Incredibly, most people here, even those who look dead-eyed lumpfish standing on their flippers, can tell a raspberry coulis from a Bearnaise sauce, and a thyme infused lamb shank from a coq au vin. Put that all down to the relentless march of time and Jamie Oliver.

You've already had something here? The nuts on the bar ! No, you did n't...tell me you did n't...That's stomach pump stuff. People go to the gents, the ladies, they don't wash their hands...back to the bar...order a drink... grab a handful of nuts out the basket on the bar and ingest the urine and fecal samples of their great unwashed compatriots. Don't. Do not. You've been warned. If you want to eat, order from the menu, or get something that comes in a sealed bag.

I'm not exaggerating; I know it might sound like it, but I'm not. Just being candid on the subject of good and bad pub food. Nuts are bad. And if you're thinking of taking some nuts home from here that have feet on them, then make sure they're condom-wrapped for freshness.

Too direct. I'm sorry.

They'll be putting the football on in a minute. Be an absolute bear pit then. Pubs are tribal homes for football fans. It's like dogs and scent markings; this pub for one team, that pub for another. You'll see more pacing around when that match starts then you will in a year in the corridors of a maternity hospital. Every shade of emotion, every delicate nuance, from uber-euphoria to the darkest, meanest.

Forget the David Niven stiff upper lip, Ice cold in Alex thing, this will be pure madness. Several hundred overweight, gap-toothed men with enough hair between them to thatch the roof of a dog kennel, baying at the moon. Don't even ask what the women are going to be like either. There'll be so much shrieking it'll break every glass in the pub and the windows will probably shatter.

No, it's not every night. They do discos and bloody karaoke other nights. The speciality here is an '80s disco; crappy synth bands and power shouldered shouters with asymmetric haircuts. I loathed it then, I loath it now. Plus there's always some prat who comes along in his Flock of Seagulls gear with his over-ripe, flesh bulging in all the wrong places, Like A Virgin era Madonna wannabe partner. I never come on those days. My heart can't take it. It just can't. I'd blow a ventricle, I'm sure of it.

Karaoke...yes I have. I have tortured songs thinking I'm Mick Jagger or John Lennon. Lessons learned. That's all I'm going to say. Other nights, they might do a pub quiz. I used to be in a team that my cousin captained, but that all fall apart; I was so desperate to impress a woman on the same team how quick off the buzzer I was that I answered every question wrong. The moral from this part of my sermon is: don't take part in teams with family members who play to win and for whom defeat is unthinkable, and certainly don't think that sexy looking women are going to get turned on by a man whose only claim to fame is his advanced general knowledge skill. I have laid to rest that little notion single-handedly

The Ladies room? Where those people are going out to smoke, just before there...see the signs? You want the one that says Bitches, Bastards is the men's room. I'm joking, I'm joking...

I'll look after your stuff. Do you want another beer when you come back?

A moment ago I heard the most incredible story I've come across in days: a radio DJ read out a message from a listener, who was feeling light headed after blowing up a double air bed by mouth. The pump had broken. No wonder he's feeling gaga and woozy. Any one would

But to have that lung capacity though; I can scarcely inflate a balloon without keeling over.

It's looking like the UK will be one long stretch of concrete and Keep Out signs if the Tories push to sell off the country's woodland and forests comes off. I've signed petitions against it, so you have to hope that people power works, but the Tories are cunning as well as being the only people who can speak with forked tongues, so it's not over by any means.

Should they be wielding the auctioneer's gavel, then God helps us. We'll be crowded round the gates peering in watching the Tories and their well-heeled chums enjoying themselves in what was once public domain; or having to traipse to a Tree Museum to remind ourselves what a tree used to look like

There was a witty, but depressing comment from Simon Hoggart in yesterday's Guardian about the woodland horrors the Tories could trigger if they get this through Parliament.

The Tories' crazed plans to sell our forests and woodland will, in spite of their claims, change the British countryside forever.

I suspect they will have to drop the scheme. But imagine the loss to our literature if the best-loved parts of the countryside are privatised.

"Out of the Hundred Acre wood came a sad procession. There was Pooh Bear with his last jar of honey, Piglet, Kanga, Tigger, and Eeyore, mournfully waving his tail from side to side. Behind them a man with a roll of barbed wire was planting a placard in the Heffalump Trap. 'Keep out! Property of Globex Holdings Inc. Trespass at your peril.'"

Or "Mellors cradled Constance softly in his arms as they lay on the blanket in his hut. 'Thart a good lass, with a gradely backside,' he said with spurting tenderness. Suddenly they heard a hammering at the door. "We're bailiffs, and you're evicted!" said a rough, unlettered voice. "Injunction from Van Hoogstraten Properties! Out in 10 minutes!"

Robert Frost's best-loved poem would start:

"Whose woods these are I think I know,

Entailed to the Halliburton Co."

And the Gruffalo wouldn't have a chance, gunned down by paramilitary gamekeepers employed by some vast multinational which wants to raze the copse to build a luxury spa.

Neologism in the making: Superbole. Noun; over-exaggeration particularly during a sports event. First usage recorded during the frenzied build-up to the 2011 Superbowl. Let's see how viral this becomes.

Incidentally, if you're thinking, it was n't coined by me. Freshly minted by a US friend of mine today.

It's not an iron rule that the pen is mightier than the sword. Not at all.

Yesterday the father of one of my dearest friends passed away. I did n't know what to say when I heard and hours later, I still don't know what to say. Words have no power at times like this; flaccid, thin, feeble, all of them.

There's nothing in the vocabulary that can help. All the condolences are trite, they're too matter of fact, and they reek of routine. I'm left gasping, a fish beached.

Where are the words when I need them? I know the sentiment I want to say, but I can't dress it, the words are n't there.

V, my love, my deepest, dearest love is with you tonight.

I've loosely refuted a home made theory of mine that it's difficult to revisit a novel and expect to be flushed once more with the satisfaction of that first ever read; Crime and Punishment proved that.

I remember the pleasure, and sometimes the sense of perplexity, (it is that type of book in places), when I first read it, which seemed mostly to be on northbound Piccadilly line trains by the way taking me between Manor House and Leicester Square.

A state of mind recaptured this time round. I have been unable to put it down. It's unlikely therefore that I'll leave it decades before I re-read it.

There's no noise but the sound of the clock near my sofa and the endless swell of the traffic on the nearby Westway. Ripe time for writing, yet I can't; my imagination will not tick over. I hate times like this.

But I have been laughing my head off at a Facebook thread that's free-wheeling around a friend's on / off jury duty in LA. Umpteen theories on how to get yourself released from jury duty (not sure I would in my case; it's a public duty, there are rights, there are obligations too); nevertheless, this is my favourite so far: tell the authorities you can recognise the guilty by the distance between their eyes, then take a ruler and measure it on the judge.

Something really quite special. Another exceptional American photographer. Unknown and only discovered by chance - Vivian Maier

Shot after shot of simple beauty and immeasurable clarity; black and white photos, each one with limitless depth. No mediation between the lens and the subject either. There's nothing trespassing, no artifice, no overt signature, it's completely unadorned.

These are unwritten stories open to endless interpretations, which for me should always be the hallmark of any artwork, be it film, literature, drama, photography. It is at that point where I feel that the work has begun to inhabit me; it's not a promiscuous, fly by night relationship, it's far deeper, we grow together, I want to go back to learn more, experience more.

There's a Walker Evans echo here - a transcedence and a similar boldness, but whether that's due to coincidence or loose homage, we'll never know. But frankly, we should n't care. Maier's work stand up perfectly, with an integrity of it's own, that's probably more profound for such an, until latterly, unrecognised and uncelebrated artist.

An intensely private person, with a blessed eye for photographs, I'm awed by her. She should be a rush candidate for the pantheon of great American photographers. It will be a crime against photography if she's not ranked alongside Evans, Wee-gee, Ansel Adams, and Annie Leibovitz as an artist of especial vision and dedication.

I'm re-reading novels that I last looked at decades ago. For no especial reason other than I've found them on my bookshelves when I've been looking for something else. So it's serendipity at play instead of deliberate choice.

And that has it's benefits; deflation is n't just reserved for economics, I've had that happen to me with books - intentionally sought out something expecting it be good, or to recapture the potentency it seemed to have the first time I read it - and nothing, the bubbles have gone flat, it's curdled.

Happenstance, accidental discovery in other words, is absolutely free from any expectations. You pick whatever it is that's caught your eye off the shelves and you read. That's it. No echoes from the past, no predictions what it might be like. No, the book stands on it's own two feet. You and it, nothing else.

At the moment, I'm steadily trotting through Crime and Punishment. It's an old copy that must have sat on my bookshelves for decades. It's obvious I've read it before, there are occasional margin scribbles and underlined sentences, but I can't remember a thing about the work itself, except for the name of the protagonist, Raskolnikov, who is accepted literary shorthand for a certain character type, and it's the latter that's the reason I remember even that fragment.

So, it's effectively a novel I'm reading for the first time, which as every reader knows, carries the same trepidation as a first date. All that "What are they going to be like? Am I coming on too quickly? Are we going to make something out of this?

It's that utter sense of nervousness that's too foggy to properly pin down, let alone explain, the words simply slide around too much to form proper sentences, but whatever it is, it drives you forward. That's where I am now, turning each page with ever growing curiousity and more than a pinch of excitement.

Will it be a made in heaven thing? Let's see.

I was thinking this afternoon what musical genre my style of work might be. Looking at all the evidence - my work day modus operandi in effect -and then weighing it fairly, I settled on Jazz.

My M.O. has all the recognisable jazz signs. It's free-form. Reliant on improvisation. Full of random tootlings, then sudden pauses. Lots of shrieking horns. Odd drum patterns. A moody double bass somewhere in the background.

It's often atonal. Plenty of blue notes. A different relationship to time. Loosely structured. Sometimes the chord progressions don't follow in an exact sequence. It's all in there.

Still I could have had a heavy metal style, thrashing through work, amp up to 11, or maybe it might have been pure country, kicking back on the rocking chair and drinking the afternoon away

Two days ago, I mourned; today I praise. This is one of the best interviews I've ever read on what it is to be a writer. The joys, the perils, the excitement, the struggles, they're are all here.

Then after you've read the interview, explore the blog itself, it's perfect. An utter love affair with writing and words that I know will never end because I've carried the same fever for over thirty years.

I'm a friend of the author who's the subject of the interview. I personally attest to his commitment and discipline; he walks it, he talks it, and of course, he writes it

The Writing Nut interview.

Kensington Central Library has less and less books every time I go. It's like the ruins of Pompeii; evidence of civilisation, you can see the walls, the layout of the rooms, the street patterns but the people, the artifacts, they're gone.

There are now so few books on the shelves, I almost imagine them huddling together for warmth when the lights have been switched off and the last librarian has left for the day.

This is desertification of the library - it's not restricted to Central Library either, the other branches are withering on the vine too - and it's happening because of budgetary pressures.

I do worry that this might lead to branches actually being closed. Losing a library does n't generate the emotional ripples of a hospital being closed, but they are therapies in their own right, valuable and inspiring, places of education, of hope, of simple enjoyment, and we need to protect them for that.

This is where I broke soil and dug myself firmly into the world of work. My first place of salaried employment - Wendy's Restaurant, Cambridge Circus - in what seems now to be the dim, distant past of 1984.

The building has n't changed, other than the lurid fascia has gone, and the chief business is now Pizza Hut; Wendy's limped on for a few more years after I took this photo, until the US owners could stand it no longer and closed the UK arm down completely.

I saw the West End peering through those large plate glass windows; zonked clubbers and daintily dressed theatre goers, brawling football fans, call-girls being picked up, pickpockets rugby tackled by plain clothes police, people falling out of buses, the homeless trudging past.

And if I was n't peering, then I was without doubt panicking. Always something to over-rev my heart. No staff and we have to open in an hour! Where's the front door key? In the trash ! How come and why? The evening the back door was on fire and all the extinguishers empty.

Completely running out of all carbonated drinks on the hottest day of the summer: "...coffee? That's all you've got?... 'fraid so". A half eaten burger given to one customer and a stale bun to a visiting director, and both sold by me.

How did I survive? Somehow I did but I'll never understand why.

This was where I learnt how to think on my feet. My apprenticeship in expediency. Gruelling, but when I look back, oddly worthwhile.

Even though it was only 1984; the period of Boy George, the Joboxers, the Miners strike, the Limelight Club, slogan tee-shirts on the Frankie says theme. It still seems of a time before time.

I feel I took these photos when I lived in some remote antiquity.

I've been hoarding every page of Saul Bellow's Collected Letters the same way a great chef might with a cupboard full of the finest ingredients available: relishing each pleasurable drop, wringing out every joy, and milking every single dollop of goodness, until this afternoon when I read his final letter and sadly had to close the book.

Bellow reaches places in me no other author has ever come close to. A light bulb turned on in my head almost thirty years ago when I first began to read him and it's never gone off.

Why my enthusiasm has lost none of it's fierceness is something I can't adequately answer; perhaps I should n't try either, after all we can kill the thing we love with over analysis.

Press me, and I'll say something about the strength of the writing; every sentence of Bellow reminds me of one those Inca walls, huge blocks fitted together without a gap between them them, not a word out of place, everything fits; his imagery is delicious, in one of his letters, Bellow tells the recipient that he is like an Anaconda slowly digesting an idea. I love that, the notion of intellectual enzymes slowly breaking down a stodgy concept into something eventually nutritious.

His opening lines always sizzle and sing. The Victim begins "On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok"; I was in New York on such a night almost thirty years ago reading that book for the first time, when the night time air was steamy, dank, tropical, every street a throbbing sauna.

Bellow's characters are extraordinary in their philosophical and intellectual reach, and at the same time as conflicted and complicated as anyone else. Herzog, the metaphysically wounded scholar cum frenzied letter writer of the eponymous novel is as confused about ordinary life as anyone else, maybe even more so at times, but someone who begets empathy.

I have had so many warm nights of the soul reading Bellow, heartened and encouraged by his words, the ardour of his writing, the passion for life and of life that his characters radiate like mini-furnaces, their dilemmas, which are private to them but nevertheless universal to us all. I should have written him a letter to thank him. I have now.

The dancing in this video - Wonderful Life- is utterly mesmerising. So atmospheric, so moody, so simple.

I'm fascinated by the impassivity of the dancer. No emotion on her face. Almost like she has a mask on. Kabuki like in a way. She's so loose limbed and enviably supple. Flexing and bowing the way a tree does in a breeze, from side to side but never losing equilibrium. Always in command of her pose; never it's prisoner.

There are strong echoes of Spain too, where the dancers typically dance authoritatively and without any obvious facial emotion, indeed without any expression. Her eyebrows furthermore have an Iberian flavour, dark, thick, and arched.

Be fascinating to find out exactly where she hails from.

Met one of my oldest friends for coffee yesterday. His New Year's resolution ? Stop sighing. Worthy. Different. Better than the usual fare of cutting back on booze, going back to the gym and so on.

Wonder what became of that man in a suit wandering through Bond Street station at two in the morning on New's Year Eve with a papier mache Rubik's Cube on his head? All the colours were lined up properly, so no one was going to play with his head, but did someone anyway?

Was that eager, frisky Big Issue salesman lucky enough to sell a couple of copies to those sozzled black tied and evening dressed haute bourgeoisie slithering out of a restaurant near Grosvenor Square at round about the same time? Or did they mock him as I miserably suspected they probably did.

Did Shepherd's Bush become in the end as Romanesque as it was threatening to be when a friend and I walked past the Green thirty minutes later? Romanesque as in the last days of.

And how come I felt so perky after less than five hours sleep?

Cinderella, you will go to the ball ! I know, hyperbole and Archimedes go hand in glove. We're like Siamese twins. The pudding can never be under-egged where I'm concerned. But, I do feel pretty good.

Today, I was expecting a long night at home, listening to New Year sounds off-stage; the traditional barrage of fireworks, singing, shouting, exuberance (mostly irrational), and occasional fighting.

That's all changed. Been invited to a party. How moods can change on the spin of a text message.

To the small, hardy band of people who visit my blog, here's wishing you a great 2011.

Archimedes.

A busy thread running amongst my Facebook virtual friends this evening on the topic of " Why can't you order a normal coffee in Starbucks". I can answer that simply (and have already on Facebook).

It's a badly run boutique coffee shop; too much on the shelves, too much to choose from, too gimmicky. Result: everyone confused.

Costa, on the other hand, remains the true home of sensible coffee. Comfortably the best chain for good old fashioned coffee. And their loyalty card ain't too bad either. Am I sounding like a corporate shill now?

The days between Boxing Day and New Year's Eve always have a muffled, wrapped in cotton wool feel about them. The world is at half speed, dank, and grey, but there are atoms of excitement around. Like right now. Radio 2 is broadcasting a two hour special hosted by Slash on his guitar heroes.

Slash. Radio 2. Fifteen years ago, these two words would never have fitted, not even with the deftest of shoe horns into the same sentence, but today, there's literally no hipper station.

Once the indomitable dowager duchess of easy listening, wall-paper music; today, if there's a musical boundary they've either broken through it, or pushing at the edges.

Me genetically decoded; first, there's this, which I definitely have - the travelling gene. Then, and this is where Science has finally become interesting, there's this - the chocolate gene unravelled. I'm heavily over-represented in both. No deficiency.

Wonder if I'm going to be the first recorded case of feline flu jumping species. The cat, who's wandering over the keyboard, sneezed at the same time as I did.

To avoid coronary hardening after patiently scoffing a slab of Brie and an oozing Roquefort, I took to the still iron hard footpaths of Chiswick House, skin puckering from the sinking temperature, slipping and sliding, back to the place where I saw yesterday's conclave of very hungry birds, competing for bread balls, or in the case of the Heron, dominating the cocktail sausage field.

A much less cosmopolitan scene this afternoon; mostly, Coots gingerly stepping or occasionally skating across the frozen lake, with a solitrary Mallard at anchor.

In the midst of all this was a Coot wrestling with a loaf of bread at least one and half times it's size. Be like me trying to tuck into a life size bar of chocolate.

This is the quietest day I've had all year, possibly for a number of years; other than responding to a hurried "good morning" from an old man as I was taking a short cut through the Chiswick Old Cemetery (he was alive by the way, not a resident), I've not said a word to a soul.

As I've said to numerous people over the years, and continue to, solitude holds no particular terrors for me. I can dwell on my own resources without discomfit. Being an only child, it's an instinct.

My great excitement - albeit a silent one in a still frozen world, (so cold even at lunchtime, can't have been higher than zero) - was for the first time ever seeing a Heron catch and eat something. Just by the Lilliputian hump backed bridge spanning the Chiswick House lake, which has the iron hard tenor of the Bering Sea in Winter, inch thick ice, were two Chinese women throwing bread and unbelievably, cocktail sausages, to a mewling motley of gulls, mallards, mandarin ducks, scrabbling pigeons, and an aristocratic looking Heron.

The smaller birds harried each other for the small balls of bread; Senor Heron concentrated solely on spearing every cocktail sausage with that gimlet of a beak, then dipping it in the margins of the lake that were n't icebound.

Thanks to the very excitable little boy stood next to me, shouting to his father, I know why they do this: lubricating a catch makes it easier to swallow.

Christmas on your own, uneventful, dull ? No, not at all.

Another great satellite photo from the University of Dundee of the British Isles covered in snow. That huge, frothing cloud of white over the southern half of the country, the eastern tail is slap bang over where I live.

Marmite Chocolate. Can't believe it. The fusion of my two favourite foods.

Chocolate I view as virtually medicine - all life's healing resides in cocoa; and Marmite occupies the same place as nectar does for the Gods.

This is what Christmas is all about: pushing back culinary frontiers.

Tastes nice too, and on sale in off all places, Robert Dyas Hardware shops.

Christmas Angel, you have come early.

Uncovered by a compliment. I found a copy of an out of print book for a relative last week, and the bouquets were thrown about my "Sherlockian Sleuthing Skills".

Yes, it's one my Superhero powers. I am BookMan. Defender of the lowly paperback, protector of the humble hardback. Pledged to the rescue of bookshops everywhere

I keep very quiet about it. My alter ego is as a mild mannered middle manager.

Now you know my secret...

I'm adapting something I heard David Sedaris say during the question period of his appearance at Piccadilly Waterstones this evening. It was actually a joke he made about his home country, but it suits the UK to a tee. Unfortunately.

Here we go: one in three English people weighs the same as the other two. It's true too; we are the fattest nation in Europe, according to the results of a survey released this morning. What an awful accolade.

The toaster still has n't ejected a thought, so I've gone for a ready meal for this post: someone else's thoughts.

This morning I jotted Susan Hill's delightful description of the power of a book - not an e-book, but a true book, covers, font, pages, margin scribbles, dog-eared pages, the earthiness of a book, it's essence - as I burrowed into her book about her year long adventure to read only the books she had on her shelves, and not buy any new.

Think giving up smoking is hard? Try not buying a book when you're a confirmed bibliophile. A hard road to walk. Calvary

For her " A book which is left on the shelf is a dead thing, but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into life"

How perfect an image. My shelves laden with chrysalises waiting for that moment when they'll flex and fly again.

Occasionally I have blank periods when I can't think of anything to write. Like now. Nothing in the tank. Toaster's pressed down and won't pop up. Even the student demo in the centre of town can't get me thinking.

Sleep on it. See if tomorrow will get my neurons cycling.

Just three weeks ago, I was sat in a a small hotel room, with the window thrown open, listening to the mixed noises of evening time Melacca: there was the rush of mynah birds to reach their roost, the kerfuffle and agitation of thousands of wings; the gorgeous, unearthly call of the muezzin calling people to prayer, mixed in with the sturdy chimes of the local Anglican church tolling the hourly bell, and further away the drums and cymbals of a Hindu temple, and nearer than all of these was the hubbub of the Chinatown night market.

Tonight, I'm at home listening to the occasional Christmas song curl out of the radio and braced against the prospect of an intensely cold night.

This is so moving. An orphan with HIV. The strength of character of this young woman is amazing; she's courageous and utterly inspiring.

In less than a week, I've experienced profound weather extremes. Put a glass under the hot tap and then straight after under the cold, it's odds on, it'll crack. Maybe this is why I'm feeling so physically shattered. Anyway back to the original topic.

Every day in Malaysia was scorching, but what could you expect from a country that's slap bang up against the Equator, and where most afternoons, there's a thunderous rainstorm on a monumental, majestic scale. Clouds detonating, blazing fangs of lightening ripping the skies open wide, heavy, warm rain, fat drops of it smashing against buildings and drumming on the road surface.

Whereas now, I'm at the other end of the thermometer; temperature is barely scratching zero with any regularity, and it ain't rain, it's the thin squishy gruel of sleet and rain that masquerades as snow in London.

Gimme back that warm, perfumed rain, and those close but not quite apocalyptic tropical weather patterns any time.

One of my friends told me in bold terms that I'm "...hellbent and determined to get robbed on every continent" after I'd told him that e-mail access was hard to find in the part of Malaysia I'd been travelling in and this was why his mails had gone unanswered.

Robbed? Nope. More determined to have an encounter with the immigration authority of as many countries as possible. That's what it seems to be.

I noticed after I'd entered Malaysia that no one had stamped my passport. Thus making me technically an illegal immigrant. A condition, a state, understandably, which I'm always anxious to avoid.

So the following day I spent nearly six hours in the head office of the Malaysian Immigration Authority getting myself legitimised. One of the handful of westerners amongst the thousands of hard-working Bangladeshi, Cambodian and Indonesian house-maids and labourers all trying to get their work papers in order

I did get a visa stamped in to my passport eventually. Burden lifted, shoulders unbent; me a properly documented individual. Pity it was the wrong type of visa. I did n't find this out until I handed over my passport when I was leaving the country.

Had yet another lengthy conversation with another immigration officer this time at Kuala Lumpur airport, getting everything unravelled.

This makes the fifth country (Argentina, Italy, Slovenia and the US of A) where I've had to explain who I am, why I am there etc, etc...All of this, well to a sensible person at least, would say time to jack it in, but these boots are made for walking.

Break in service. I'm going travelling for a few weeks. If I can then I'll pop a post in whenever I can otherwise normal service resumes Monday, November 29.

Now in that interview did I come over as professional and steady, the rock around which the wild waves break; or did I sound more like a Faith healer " Believe in me, trust the vision, it will surely come to pass"; or did I put on the routine of a double glazing salesman working on a commission only basis, and if I did n't nail that sale the kids go another day without supper ?

Should n't really rake through the embers of a cold interview, but the further I am from the event I do wonder exactly what impression I made. Hey ho.

Something odd is happening over in Shepherd's Bush. Nothing unusual there: odd and Shepherd's Bush are two words that fit snugly in the same sentence, it's that kind of place. But this is something else.

All evening there's been this strange sound of groaning metal, like the noise a sinking ship makes as the seams start to pop and the rivets fly out as it turns turtle; or for anyone who watches sci-fi horror flicks where some mammoth Alien thing is eating Manhattan then it's the unearthly moaning they always generate in superabundance.

Yet Shepherd's Bush is neither a drowning ship nor Manhattan, so what's going on, and why does it seem to be getting progressively closer to where I live?

There's a looming need for me to look presentable coming up. Meaning I have to sacrifice my normal thrown together jeans and whatever shirt is n't too wrinkled look for something different. This time I have to be Mr Business.

So I disinterred my suit out of my wardrobe, checked for any moth damage, and had it properly cleaned.

Now I have to say this: do I scrub up well in a suit, or what. I look completely different. Like professional.

Sayonara to the tugboat captain chic, adieu to the man about to visit his probation office look. That's gone. All change. Time for the man about the City sartorial buzz.

Whether I'll be so charged when I come back from the assessment centre - the compulsion to be suited and properly booted - or when I return from holiday, is moot. My suit could have a sibling, or it remains an orphan at the back of the wardrobe. Watch this space.

Personality tests are pure catnip for me. Even the scent of one has me panting.

And when it's one that might just affirm something I've tantalised myself thinking I could actually have, then everything gets dropped, all extraneous events filtered out and I plunge right in.

Picture my excitement then as I idly scrolled through the firm's intranet this lunchtime and saw a link to an "How creative are you" pop quiz.

Really no truly creative person bothers doing these. I know I've met them and some are friends.

Either they're driving away at something, pushing boundaries back, borne along by the flow; or they're adrift in quiet melancholy - "my mind has one idea, my hands another" as a very gifted painter friend of mine put it to me last week.

Nevertheless wannabes, the ambitious but sans the spark people, well, we crowd round these tests like flies around roadkill. Can't get enough of them.

So I pushed back my sleeves, settled back and let the pop test do the talking. I'm 84% creative. Now to turn that stat into action.

Feel the force.

The wind is licking against the windows this evening. There are strong slaps of air and there's that chirring sound of leaves rustling on trees. Sounds of a perfect autumn evening. For me that is.

I know too well that autumn warms the hearts of less people than it's cheerier cousins, spring or summer.

Winter save for deep-dyed Capricorn goats like me and ski-nuts is less loved than reviled: the orphan season, billy no mates, the lonely kid walking home to an empty cold house.

But I love it, I relish winter; inhaling sharp, flinty air on long walks; the strong, clear outlines of leafless trees against menthol blue skies; snow, crisp layers of snow dropped over night. Can't beat any of it. Why resist.

I was shocked to hear that a sizeable minority of London school kids firmly believe the battle of Waterloo actually took place at Waterloo station.

If they think that, then what does Trafalgar Square mean for them? Site where a famous one-eyed British admiral lost his life and was then paved over a few years later and turned into a public square?

The rain scuds in, the thermometer slips into single figures, and my teeth, especially those on the right hand side ache. They're like the three musketeers, where one goes, all go. This happens every year. Without fail.

So this afternoon I've been at the dentist, where after the check-up, I sneaked a look at my dental card. I've been going to the same dentist for twenty years.

C'mon guys reward that loyalty. Maybe a free check-up or a discount on an electric toothbrush. I must have paid for the revolving, up and down dental chair several times over. What about it.

Grind away, grind away. That's what they all say. Stick one word in front of the next and keep going. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

In that Real Men don't Eat Quiche vein, don't ponder, don't dawdle, don't dither, just write is more or less what the driving force behind the The 90 day Novel is saying. So that's what we do. Every day, another grain of sand thrown on the writing pile

I've seen something I've never seen before in London, and for that matter only a handful of times elsewhere: a swarm of starlings, whirling and reforming over a sunset Wandsworth Bridge.

Amazing to watch. Like watching a cloud of iron filings pulled this way and that by unseen magnets.

One of my abiding memories of France is seeing huge swarms every evening ripping and bending in great vortices over Vichy. To see the same thing in the very heart of London was heart-stopping.

With the peregrine falcons nesting and dive-bombing by Tate Modern and now this, it's obvious that London still is red in tooth and claw.

Any art exhibition featuring New York always ends with me being in a strange blended mood of wistfulness for all the wonderful times I've had there; a frantic earnestness to go back; envy, and I have to admit this, for anyone who lives there, and yes I know it can be an unforgiving maw, but what a maw to be consumed by is my retort; and the sense that even London, this dear, sweet, mad, packed city state, is still just the little brother.

NYC is still the only place that really matters. Where else can you reach down, touch the paving stones and feel the energy of all the ages, past, present and future surge through your fingertips ?

I must be in a minority here: those who revel in Autumn. There's something enchanting about darkening nights. People. street lights, shop windows. Magical for reasons I struggle to articulate.

All around me I hear the sound of dust being blown off CVs.

Whereas years ago I was like one of these Norfolk coast villages miles from the cliff-face, today I'm running in mid-air like a cartoon figure, competing with myriad others for a job.

We were told, all 110, that our team was being root and branch restructured, with 95% of us having to pass an assessment to get a job. When the music stops, you all sit down....

Words are not enough. The affirmations anyway are exhausted. It's a day of sensations, exquisite, undiluted euphoria, utter rapture. With the rest of the world, I have been privy to a miracle, an actual miracle. The miners are coming up.

This is a demonstration of collectivism, of hope, faith, planning, humanity, endeavour. All the things that the cynics bleat don't exist. Amazing. Extraordinary. The power, the raw naked, power of the Human Spirit.

I saw a comment on the BBC news feed that I've been streaming all day which so aptly summed up how we global citizens are reacting, and that is "...with an inexplicable sense of relief every time one reaches the surface..."

I am on tenterhooks this evening for several reasons.

Tonight they begin the rescue of the thirty three Chilean miners. I have been completely enthralled by this, from the moment that grimy, bearded figure waved at the camera through the drilling and the final slow, steady breakthrough into the trapped men's chamber, the testing of the Phoenix Rescue capsule, to now.

I am awed by the meticulous planning and superb organisation of the Chileans. Magnificent.

I remain on tenterhooks as I have for almost three weeks now, wondering whether I'll get more than four or five broken hours of sleep tonight.

Not everyone takes to street dance, but I do, even if I am well outside the demographic. Something about the verve and the energy really appeals to me.

Someone in the US sent me this clip of four young men dancing in the rain on a street corner in Oakland, California. It's blown me away. Simply electric.

A Sunday for me can often be a combination of aimlessness and solitude; the former cam, in it's own way, be peculiarly attractive, the chance of an odd find, a strange discovery, serendipity, whereas the latter state although I am a lone wolf by nature too often leads to the inner pathway of regret and ruefulness. Too many of the if only, but, and what if statements fill my head in those instances just as they did today.

Still, that's only one side to my Sunday, there is aimlessness to describe. Where did that take me? To the maelstrom of the recently opened Gauguin exhibition at the Tate Modern. Hideously busy with enough room to glimpse fragments of canvasses through a thicket of heads and bodies. Probably too many works to absorb sensibly in one go, I did feel weary towards the end.

Nevertheless it is full of gems, and not just the works either; amongst the contextual material was this statement written by Gauguin "I love Brittany. I find the wild and the primitive here. When my clogs resonate on the granite ground I hear the muffled, powerful thud that I'm looking for in painting"

I've heard that thud myself in many places where instinctively I've felt alive, at home, energised, and at peace: New York City every time I've been there, Barcelona the moment I stepped off the plane; Paris, Buenos Aires in spite of being held up at knife point on my first visit, the madhouse that is Tokyo, and last, but never least, this dear old city I call home.

I keep uncovering the hidden laws that govern modern life. Want to get somewhere quick? The tube never turns up. Need to get cash from the machine at White City station? Watch it meltdown and swallow your card. Decide to listen to that unknown voicemail? It's from a director of the company you work for wanting something on the double by tomorrow.

There's enough strength in me for a one liner, a sub-Montaigne, below par Pascal pensee: I'm tired beyond belief. Beyond my endurance. Work not guilty. Living arrangements most definitely. Something has to changed. I want my bite of the inalienable right to sleep, and I want it now.

My star sign is n't the Goat. It can't be. Simply not possible. The evidence is n't there. Does n't stack up. I'm a Cappy by name only, astrologically, I'm something else, I'm the hamster on the wheel. That's my sign. Frantic pedalling and yet never getting anywhere.

Effort, effort, effort, but the work, the paper across the desk, the salvos of e-mails never go away. Nail one and another fills it's place. I worry that I can't put my finger on one particular achievement; where I am putting my finger, all ten of them is in holes popping in the dyke holding back even more work.

Nearly an hour gone and the new Adobe download has only just broken the two-thirds mark. Feels like I'm having it hand-delivered. Still, the question you also have to ask yourself, aside from re-affirming patience, patience, patience, is what would this have been like via old school PSTN.

This is for one of my dearest friends, who lost her best friend on Saturday, and faces one of the hardest days of her life tomorrow.

I know how much your friend meant to you; I've heard it in your voice, glimpsed it in your eyes, and seen it so clearly in your smile whenever you mentioned her. Love, affection, friendship, it's all there.

I can't imagine how you must be feeling. What I can say is how much I'm thinking of you now.

I was in Dijon for most of last week, alternating between strolling purposelessly, (boulevarding, I think is the exact Gallic term) and trying to impersonate the impassivity of the French coffee drinker to the vie exterieure. The when in Rome thing, really

No passes on either score. Just not in my itchy nature to do...well...nothing. I need some focus, a book usually, a paper often, a friend when the occasion permits, but I can't just have nothing. How do they do it? And alternatively, is there anything in the Anglo-Saxon way of live they actually regard the same way we seem to do all of theirs?

I did n't think I was the only reader with this prejudice and I'm not. Philip Pullman has the same thought and the capability to articulate it better than I ever could

Autumn, and how do I know ? Throbbing toothache. Every Autumn, the moment the weather changes, clouds get heavier and moister, my wisdom teeth twang. How did I become a human barometer?

I've just been looking at a slide pack of photos of old Notting Hill.

Amazing does n't begin to catch it. The pocket of Notting Hill I call home is unrecognisable to what it once was. Totally. Like it's been carpet bombed, not once, or even twice, but repeatedly, and finally what remained, the dust, the broken walls, collapsed ceilings, shattered window frames, all of it stirred in some great blender and dumped back out. Not even the street patterns are the same.

So many shops too. We are vastly under-resourced today when it comes to the small shops, there's barely anything, stumps of teeth in a nearly empty mouth as it were. Then, and by the way, then is indefinable, I can't say the fifties, or the sixties, the set of photos, I've been privileged to see cover almost a century, the seams of the neighbourhood were almost popping, at breaking point, with places to shop.

Notting Hill teemed with life, oozed it, spilled on the streets and over on to the roads. It's like the Lower East Side must have been in the 1890s and early twentieth century. Not an inch of space.

I have a very good historical sense as I do an active imagination; even with those two attributes, I still find it close to impossible to picture in my mind how Notting Hill once looked, how it breathed with life. God, it must have been like Naples, people hanging out of windows, in vests, playing on the streets, loitering, walking, shopping, singing, drunk.

Darker evenings, colder evenings. We're moving into the time of year I actually enjoy. There's something ineffable about the long evenings; deep shadows, curious patterns of light, fascinating and mysterious. It's my Saturnine Capricorn side finding itself at home for once.

But there's nothing special about it when it comes to being button holed by a stranger at the bus stop.

Like tonight. A middle-aged, pot-bellied, greying man wandered into the bus stop I was stood at; asked if the model on the advert rotating one one side of the stop, was Kate Moss. She was n't.

Then, without missing a beat, he told everyone that every Brazilian who comes to London does so simply to open a shop.

I'm still trying to find the link between the two statements

This is the second night I've walked home past the restaurants that line Chiswick High Road and unthinkingly ended up studying the body language of some of the diners.

Two nights ago, I noticed one couple, and saw a fatal sign, the woman discontentedly fiddling with her necklace, twisting this way and that. No words need tell the state of that relationship; they will not sitting opposite each other in that restaurant, or any other this time next year.

Tonight, I glimpsed a woman, caught between a pucker and a grimace, painting her lips. For some reason, it struck me as particularly horrible. I can't explain why. It just did.

There's a version of the "As one door closes another..." sentiment going mini viral on the facebook sites of some of my friends.

The statement in questions reads thus: "When one door closes another opens, we often look so long and regretfully on the closed door that we don't see the one which has just opened".

Noble words. And so unlike the version a relative of mine prefers, which is "As one door closes, another slams in your face".

Evening rain on the skylight roof, and for some reason it's making me think that all over London, there'll be people like me agonising between wanting to write, or instead follow that other equisite joy: burrow into the sofa with a compelling book.

A reasonable night's sleep and enough courage to open a bank statement pretty much sums up my view of what makes up the good life. Hardly Montaigne,or Marcus Aurelius, in it's sweep, but what works for one does n't always work for another.

End of August. Push on, push on. Not been an easy month

My sense of humanitarianism and charitableness, according to my Yahoo horoscope today,are very high. It does n't feel like that today, nor have I felt that way for quite some time now. Exhausted and fed up....oh definitely.

I can moan all I want to about the assault on my senses of living where I do along where the never ending sense of uncertainty of wondering what I'll find every evening when I return home, and I do with zeal. Ask anyone who knows me.

And then I read of the thirty three Chilean miners found alive two weeks after a huge rockfall. Alive, all of them. and waiting for possibly another three months, perhaps four before a rescue tunnel can be dug to reach them. Underground for four months, and I fret about a TV droning through the ceiling...

A lesson in priorities

Right now, it feels like there's a race on between work pressures and noisy neighbours as to which will kill me first.

Work's been intolerable with hardly any respite from pressure, then, and there's always a then, is n't there, I return home to find a cacophony of noise, stamping feet and clapping hands all to the driving rhythm of devotional music.

My flat has never been anything less than a place of misery. In fact the baseline for me has always been unease, barely a fluttering of joy at any time of me living here. There's been leaks, rodents, noise, the gradual disintegration of the flat complex, and of course I remain throughout. I've got to leave before this place nails me.

Where is the strength to come from?

Strength enough...just...to note that I'm somewhere beyond the edge of tiredness. Yawning all day and weary continuously. I wonder how much this is connected to the episodic stress of work and other environments. To live noise free.

After ten years of going to work in jeans and wearing whatever's on the bedroom floor that's not creased, I'm going to buy a suit. I want to look sharp for once.

This afternoon. Dentist. More money.

All for one tooth, but I like that tooth and want to stay attached to it as I want to with all of the others.

As long as there's something left for the dentist to build on, a stump, a flake even, then I'll pay. I've drawn a line in the enamel, if you see what I mean. It stays.

This is going to be one well regarded after tooth when every thing's finally done and I've swilled my last rinse down the small white basin that's next to the dental chair. Easy on the chomping, gentle on the chewing.

But considering the amount of money I'm investing into this pre-molar, I should be able to bite through steel. Clearly, I'll not be attempting anything a la Jaws, that's the province of that jugular snapping villain in Moonraker; nevertheless I have expectations that this tooth once reconstructed will see me out.

Another friend of mine told me that her partner was younger than she is. That makes five women I know, who in some way, shape or form, are married to, live with, or have dated men younger than themselves, and in some cases the age gap has been significant.

Life is curious, which is what makes it so worthwhile, at least for those minds like mine that puzzle over things like this. There's a personal element here as well; all these women are around my age, so what does this mean for single men like me. But one thing at a time. Why are women going for younger models?

There's the easy lob answer: unfulfilled maternal instincts. Possibly.

Or what about this: are these are all women who carry the mental scars from vastly unsatisfying relationships with men of a roughly equivalent age, where the echo of he's a" typical man, can't commit" still roars around, so they go for someone younger, who has still to acquire these unpleasant masculine traits, therefore innocent and potentially pliable. It's a guess, not answer, by the way.

Perhaps it's the allure, the excitement, even competitive flaunting, which I'm pretty certain some women engage in, "...of look what I've pulled..I've still got it...". My competitive female theory comes, bizarrely, from seeing women try to over-reach each other in, of all places, a yoga class.

Then again, it could be this bald, simple, unvarnished fact: men of the same age, early to late forties in my case, remind them inelegantly of their own inevitable ageing.

As the Summer pushes on through August, and I listen to nocturnal London play it's unfinished, never-ending symphony of sirens, cars, shouts, hubbub, and screaming motorbikes, I think of what I read this morning that one of my favourite writers died a few nights ago in New York. Tony Judt, a writer who bathed in words, made them sing and a difficult argument luminous.

"I think what we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else… but in equality. Equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and to politics. We should be more concerned than we are about inequalities of opportunity, whether between young and old or between those with different skills or from different regions of a country. It is another way of talking about injustice. "

Perfectly written, a joy to read, and a statement to live by.