A day where I've not spent at least an hour in some coffee shop or other would be like a London skyline without a pigeon somewhere scrabbling across it. I'm talking about an action so reflexive, so instinctive, it might as well be an adjunct to breathing. Perhaps it actually is.

I think we all leave our psychic footprints across whichever landscape it is we roam over daily. I long ago marked out my psycho-geographical terrain; it's central and west London, where the bulk of my life has been lived and where it's imprinted the deepest. Every paving stone, every brick, every wall has some of me sunk into it.

Coffee shops have for the part played, and continue to, a key role in this territory marking. Drunk coffee here, drunk it there. That's the story.

A day not spent flicking through the Guardian with a cappucino nearby is n't a day. I don't feel right. Something's missing. It's about preparing for entry into the rest of the day - the working day usually. Slow, gradual re-absorption into the world of the office. The world I left behind the previous day. It takes time. It takes coffee.

To every thing there is a season. And now it's time for the end of year report. How did the present year shape up in the end? No complaints. None. Not a scintilla. 2012 has been just dandy.

Have a great start to 2013 everyone...

Archimedes

Marcel Proust observed that "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes" So true.

Bar Vetro - a standout from the crowd button hole sized cafe cum deli opposite my apt on east 58th street. Glorious coffee and the divinest corn muffin ever.

Whoever does not love New York does not love life.

A superb Moral Maze this evening: abortion, which as Michael Buerk said in his introduction is the debate that buckles under the heat of ferocious argument from opponents and proponents. For anyone interested, I'm firmly in the latter camp. To roll it back is an assault on a woman's right to be, on her autonomy.

This is my equivalent to "On first looking into Chapman's Homer.."; that dizzying moment for Keats when he became aware of the, for him, hitherto hidden glories of classical Greek poetry.

That line now stands and probably has for decades as a synonym for epiphany. That door opening instance; there's no longer any before, it's only after now.

Well, it happened to me this afternoon at the London Wetland Bird centre. An epiphany with birds? They can happen anywhere. Sudden realisations of otherness, or a striking new awareness for wont of another term, are n't aesthetically reserved. Mine was this afternoon. The merest glimpse, almost a sliver of a glance of one of Britain's rarest birds - the mysterious, fugitive, Bittern. So are it's become a stalwart unfortunately of the Red List of threatened species. Blink and it could be gone

And I did, and so did it. Gone with not even a puff of smoke to say where it had been. Not a trace apart from a few trembling reeds.

Moments like this can only really happen in London. In fact they're meant to happen here. Ordained to.

Where else could you find the biggest Bavarian winter fair outside Germany, where all but a handful of the stall holders are German speakers, and where a lively, exuberant male duo can be belting out the punchiest version of The Wild Rover outside of Dublin in German in front of a boisterous, tipsy horde of German tourists, clutching steins, arms waving and dancing like the legendary uncle at the wedding. Yep, London. Where else.

The other image I can't let go is of a veiled woman in the midst of it all, carefree and smiling, dancing. This is what life is about, should be about: living, laughing, and loving. What else is there...

Only in London can the stars align like this.

'Life is too short too sleep through..." RIP Dennis O'Driscoll, whose verse I only discovered by chance this evening aimlessly wandering through Facebook.

I said to a friend in an e-mail some days ago that:'... can that feeling be beaten of opening a new door on to something unusual and revelatory... ?'  Exactly my mood now after reading my first O'Driscoll poem - 'Someone'.

Eight in the evening and I'm waiting on a very cold Calendonian road to meet a dear friend who I've not seen in a little short of thirty years. We met again only a few years ago through, what else, Facebook.

Did I worry? Of course. Should I have? Yes. Was it a grand reunion ? Absolutely. Two and half hours, or there abouts, and the years rolled back. Unforgettable.

"Maybe it really is true that some books are universal precisely because they are so provincial and spacious precisely because they are so minimalist..."

Amoz Oz in his introduction to My Michael.

"There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a comedy, a drama, and a tragedy". Mark Twain.

Amen to that.

As someone who feels himself to be an honorary New Yorker on two accounts: more visits to the Big Apple than I can remember for one, and a citizen of London, New York's bawling, brawling, excitable, chaotic Siamese twin, as the other, I am relieved that it bore Sandy the once in a life time superstorm with it's typical equanimity, courage and fortitude. Fewer cities have more charm, more brio, more grace under pressure than New York.

I have as many emotional and spiritual memories sunk into the very marrow of Manhattan as I do in the paving stones and streets of West London. Tear any one of those, you tear a strip from me.

Serendipitous London. It throws up random encounters that just don't seem possible elsewhere as it does those incidents that, for a moment at least, make it appear that there really has been a tear in the time space continuum and you're somewhere altogether different.

I went with a friend to see To Rome with Love, Woody Allen's latest film earlier this evening; afterwards we schlepped over to the cafe of the Tristan Bates actors centre for a drink and post film rumination. For a while we were the only people there, then the door popped open and in strolled a rather frail, but oddly hearty Sir Peter Hall plus entourage.

He sat next to us and incredibly we chatted. As they say only in London

On seeing the opening and the closing Olympic ceremonies, I realise that I live in the world's maddest, most mashed up city. Would n't want it any other way.

The Olympic glow is close to making me feel preposterously conceited about living in London. Why go anywhere else when the world comes here? I should stop thinking that- it's true now, and in many ways it is normally - but if I don't put the brake on it, I'm going to never leave zone two. I even found myself  for a moment two thinking Paris was really a detached suburb of the Smoke.

The Olympic opening ceremony will become one of the few truly "where were you..." moments in British life for years to come. This echo is n't going to fade.

The way to view that whole spectacle, that voyage that Danny Boyle took us on, is that everyone saw how to make the omelet britannique: every known cliche, and those still waiting patiently to be discovered, of our mad, bad, bonkers, eccentric archipelago thrown into a pan, tossed around at a very high heat, splashed with schmaltz, garnished with kitsch, served in a jus of wild self confidence to an incredulous world. I was up most of the night trying to digest it all. 

It was insane event. Everyone has a story, a view, an opinion. I held my head in my hands for the first few minutes. Mortification in extremis. It was saccarhine, the Arcadian dream of the past, sheepdogs, bonny maidens, greensward. It could have been produced by John Major.

Yet I stayed, watching it unfold, agog with horror to begin with, then thawing, encouraged by the way it advertised and celebrated that other Britain: dissident, subversive, liberal, tolerant, passionate, all embracing, multi-cultural (now that's a phrase that needs plucking out of the dustbin the righting commentators keep putting it in). 

This is the Britain I want the world to see: our pride in the NHS, the Clash, The Sex Pistols, that we have the chops to ask the director of Liberty and that noble woman, Doreen Lawrence to help carry the Olympic flag, that we can comfortably create breath taking moments like these, and still have enough in the tank to have the Queen meet and greet James Bond. 

I turned the TV off in the early hours of Saturday, a pride citizen of Planet London. 

Bitter sweet sceptic no more. I'm humbled by it all. The world on my doorstep. 

This is the most poignant description I've ever come across of how wracking the denial of motherhood. It's from Toni Morrison's latest novel, Home. I read it for the first time in the Berkeley Square pret a manger earlier this evening and paused, then re- read again and again. This is what writing, fine, sensitive writing is all about; the chance to see life in all it's quixotic glory and lonely tragedy. "I can't have children...I did n't feel anything at first when Miss Ethel told me, but now I think about it all the time. It's like there's a baby girl down here waiting to be born. She's somewhere close by in the air, in this house, and she picked me to be born to. And now she has to find some other mother" I don't know if it's trite, or indeed if that is the word to use here, but I can't stop thinking of women I know in their forties and early fifties, who live with a similar ghost.

I've noticed there's a streak of cowardice in me over the years, perhaps cowardice is too extreme a description, but certainly, I have a strong disinclination to get involved in stressful situations with unknown consequences. Yesterday was another example. Twenty or so minutes after leaving St Pancras, the silence of the carriage was ripped apart by a howl of pain. A male's roar of grief. All of us popped up like jack in a boxes and somewhere at the top of the carriage was some broken man, sobbing, and I think possibly being attended to.

It sent that uncomfortable queasy thrill across my body. The feeling I always experience during those awful moments of stress, of over-revving adrenalin. Sweaty tension.

The audible echo of that great gulp of pain ebbed away, but lived a while longer for me. It did for others, I saw a few people shift seats or even leave th carriage all together.

Then, there was another racking howl, some twenty minutes later. A single shout that seemed to break the universe. A deep grief of unknown origin. Followed by a man's long, low sobs. Again, I thought I heard another voice, softer,solicitous, trying to comfort this shattered human.

What broke it and could I have shifted out of my seat the way the young girl did several rows ahead of me to look for one of the crew. I just sat there.

I'm back to the point in my blogging life that I always hate; I'm empty of ideas. All I can celebrate is that today marks ninety days since I last ate a bar of chocolate. A minor miracle.

I wonder whether Joe Strummer or Mick Jones ever imagined that pairing London with Calling would end with that simple juxtaposition ending up with a life of it's own; a self supporting existence that's traversed rebellion, Armageddon prophecies, blade-runner dystopia, edgy pop song, to where it's now actively touted as part of the London 2012 Olympic sound scape and life as a probable regular feature in any London music mash-up that's broadcast to the world. And in the latter, it's living it's sentiment to the fullest. 

In just over thirty years it's become part of London's universal consciousness; the younger, more attitude laden sibling to Dr Johnson's eternal truth that to "...be bored with London is to be bored with life". Why go to the trouble of hiring marketers to concoct a brand or an image, when each of these carries within them the kernel of what London is all about.

London calls. It's a loud, mouthy, pushy city, wrapped within a turban of near constant noise and confusion, of sirens, traffic, helicopters, music, trains, people, random shouts, accelerating motorbikes, roadworks. I walked along Wood Lane through to Hammersmith this afternoon with a friend. We could n't hear each other. Too much ambient noise. But it's the noise of a great city. An intoxication. It's about energy.

Bored. With London? How? I've lived in West London for twenty five years. This afternoon I discovered Wormwood Scrubs, an area of common land deep in the heart of the city and maybe ten minutes north of where my flat is. It was like finding Xanadu. Woods and meadows within sight of the Westway. Tell me how do I get bored with London if it's forever holding unknown pleasures in it's hands.

Earlier this year, I went to see the Royal Academy's blockbuster Hockney exhibition, where every gallery was hung with his depictions of East Yorkshire, a forgotten, ignored region, but not deliberately, this is not Chernobyl. The ignorance is different; it's a driven through, passed by area, neither A nor B, it's the bit in between. Glanced as a blur, without the courtesy of being looked at.

Hockney turned that on it's head, and as the alchemist a good artist really is, transformed this underprivileged, overlooked region, and drew out poetry, magic, passion, colour. Cinderella has finally gone to the ball. That ugly duckling? It was a swan all along. We just did n't see it until Hockney drenched it with nectar. It shook it's feathers and our eyes opened.

That's more or less the same transmutation that Rocco Papaleo, the director of Basilicata coast to coast, managed to do for his home territory, Basilicata; another area just as unheeded, as forgotten as Hockney's East Yorkshire. If ever there were two orphans, then here they are, rendered invisible in the public consciousness, by the shouts and clamors of more excitable neighbours.

Papaleo's film, which warmed my heart to it's very last cockle when I saw it last night, as it did for the friend I was with, draws out the the unexpected beauty of this spectacular area like fine gold wire. I was riveted. Nearly every frame is a burst of intense colour, stark contours and rolling, deep horizons.

And the plot, well, there's more than a hint of East Yorkshire poking through,with all the character's shared secrets, unacknowledged fears, heartfelt dreams as they trundle for 10 days across Basilicata en route to a music festival, evoked for me the sometime bitter sweet, yet always genial camaraderie of Last of the Summer Wine. The circle squared in a sense.

From a mini debate I've been having on Facebook with a US friend; the subject, the paucity of reason in politics

It's not just the Right's dishonesty and extremism that makes them so difficult to debate with, they've handicapped themselves through the lack of any unified internal logic. There's nothing to argue against. I don't know what Socrates would have made of this. There's no possibility of anything even remotely dialectic; the give and take of persuasive debate towards an eventual and agreed truth lacks soil. There's nothing there.

If anything could be claimed as their vision, then it must be simple knee jerkism, outright objection without the intellectual courtesy of consideration. That, and mudslinging.

And it's not unique to the US I see it, I hear it, and I despair of it here. We are not immune.

As a liberal, and if there's a term that needs to be rescued from the lexicon of abuse, then this has to be candidate material, I equally despair that the Left is too ideologically purist. Christ, do we love the cut and feel of the hair-shirt. Too hard on ourselves, too theoretical, too down.

We're a progressive tribe that ought to be articulating the blessings of actually having a unified inner logic. One moreover that has palpable fruit sweet enough for anyone's taste. Yet we don't. Partly, through that grinding intellectual masochism that dogs our every move; partly due to, and how I wish fervently this was n't the case, an insane, rabble-rousing, flame grilled, vilely opportunistic, soundbite driven media. More in love with lucre than nuance and happier with emotionalism than with explanation.

Alarmist demagoguery is driving the debate, whilst reason lies in the stable, hobbled.

Yes,it is a difficult one. Far more questions than answers; the dream, though, let's keep it alive.

I don't know which is the most damnable: this I-pad I stroke every evening in a manner not that far removed from some global super villain stroking a cat, or the atlas. Either sends me into a near catatonic state, where I do nothing more agitated than dream. My blogging days gathering dust like some abandoned house. Except I damned the leak when I was trekking through the Western Balkans earlier this month. Throughout the day I was putting something down. I re-read those pages and the warm sun streams through the curtains, there's a thimbleful of perfect coffee to sip at, and an endless parade of retired, suited old men strolling through Tirana or Pristina. All of it sunk into the every line of my very busy notebook.

Staring into the tea leaves or the coffee grounds, what can I divine from Thursday's local election results? Can I indeed see anything, after all a week is a long time in politics, so what I sense may happen, may well not. But my tribal loyalty, my political allegiance, really hopes they do. The Tories were shafted, or more to the point, they were, to recycle something Neil Kinnock once said, "kebabed". Royally. Skewered.

 More than ever now the only words that can possibly any mention of the Tories is hapless or hopeless, or just both. Osbornes's poorly conceived budget started the ball rolling from which the tremors have n't settled even now, and it's over four or so weeks since he dropped his great clanger, and got engulfed by the backwash. How cack-handed could he even be if he had tried.

And Cameron, the tennis playing, horse riding, Murdochista, how joined up is his thinking? Ideologically driven to shrink the state and drive the privatisation stake through it, he offered up the nostrum of the Big Society, in other words, put it it all back to charity. That self help groups would spontaneously bloom and take over arms of the alleged failing state and turn public sector swine into charitable pearls. Except it never ran like that; the cottage industry self help pioneers are overwhelmed, out of the depth, spinning like dervishes in a world that the public sector knew expertly and could navigate through competently, providing the services we all need, whilst the well off philanthropists who Cameron hoped would take up the slack and pump money into their own pet projects, now don't want to, since Osborne desperate to appear on the side of the Hoi poloi (a species he has more than obvious deep disdain for), stopped the charitable tax advantages so keenly exploited by the uber wealthy, who now no longer want to play in the game. So why did he do that? Well, he had to do something after handing the wealthy a 5% tax cut, funded by a raid on the benefits of pensioners by the way.

 Imagine a country where the government is in cahoots with an extraordinarily media Baron, where they tell him days before they tell an elected parliament on where they stand (favourably) in relation to a commercial agreement which is to the overwhelming advantage of said Baron; where the purses of the poor and retired are picked to fund a generous tax break for the wealthy; and then the government slaps a tax on a common food item (the humble pasty). Could be that archetypal ruritanian tin pot state we occasionally read about in the small news items in the international section of the papers. But it's not. It's Britain.

How did Cameron think people were going to vote. Radar turned on? Runes read? Too indifferent, too out of touch, too arrogant to wonder? Who knows, who cares. They got thrashed on Thursday and I'm delighted, particularly as Cameron's deadly rival scraped through to become London's mayor. I've not a scintilla of enthusiasm and certainly no time for the blond do nothing Buffon. Nevertheless, imagine the night sweats Cameron's going to be having now. To the idealogues of the Tory right, Johnson is a winner, twice now (this conveniently ignores the support the blond Buffon got from an over obliging media. Take a bow, the London evening standard...)' whereas Cams, his erstwhile Bullingdon club buddie so obviously ain't. Somewhere deep in the heart of the Tory boondocks there'll be whisperings and plottings, cabals and conspiracies. They'll want him out and blondie in. It'll be like Shakespeare's Julius caesar set amongst the agas and private clubs of Mayfair; Cameron forever trembling, et tu, Boris?

As if the Tao of Birding needed to be proved; when the watcher is ready, then the birds will come. And they did this evening, the first Swallow spotted over London and a wonderful five minute spell watching a Great Spotted Woodpecker work along a tree, pounding and drilling.

Only one bar of chocolate in fifteen days; a huge shift from the time when it would have been fifteen bars in one day. Yet, I am honest enough and realistic to know that I'll never be able to wriggle free of my chocolate chains. It's the ying that pulls me by the yang.

I know years ago I posted something about unneighbourly noise and how it was slowly sending one of my friends towards the edge of despair, which in private and the ravaged confines of her flat, she may have teetered over anyway.

I had the same experience on Friday, we all did in fact, that is all of the people who live in the same small block as me. For five, possibly five hours, (I leave for the office around 7.30, so I don't know when it stopped) the whole block lay awake tormented by a dog whimpering in an unattended, and to all of we sleep denied victims, grossly unneighbourly flat.

Genetically, I am long suffering, I put up with things: through inertia at times; through the mantra I've built over time where I simply myself situations inevitably change, and at the same time throw the balm on troubled waters by telling myself repeatedly, tomorrow is definitely another day and that anything can happen. I'm also a coward and long suffering here is really not rocking the boat and upsetting someone. Why I let the latter persist, I can't say, just I know that I do, and it's insidious.

Still, on Friday, even I had had my gutfull, and reported it to the managing agent, who to my surprise, pre-empted me, and told me she knew exactly why I was calling. Seems another resident had fired off a distressed e-mail. Whether anyone else did I don't know. All I hope is they did. I hope too for action.

The after shock of unneighbourliness never quite goes; it ripples on. We wait tremblingly to see whether tonight, indeed any night, will be violated, or if it's the joy of a straight seven hours uninterrupted.

The key for me is to leave though. Another story in itself

A neat terraced house in a reasonably affluent London suburb, washing the pots, listening to the tail end of Radio 4's Woman's Hour. Why should n't I feel I've slipped in between the pages of a Hampstead set novel?

Hallelujah, I'm a blog post. The first in weeks. When I consider how my writing life has changed, possibly irrevocably, since I walked out of the Shepherd's Bush Apple store with an i-Pad. An angel and a demon sat on each shoulder now.

There is something narcotic about this irresistible tablet device: once I wrote feverishly and regularly; now, it's no more than languor and somnolence. In writing terms, I'm lolling on the sofa, peeling grapes, more satiated ottoman sultan than frustrated creator drilling into the rock bed of whatever block or impasse I was facing.

It's difficult to pick out which of these two cities (my absolute favourites, so expect implicit and explicit bias in anything I say) - London or New York - is the cities city. A hairs breath either way, and even if I could decide, then I still could n't anoint one over the other.

Nevertheless, there are some aspects that the other simply does n't have; for instance London's ceaseless churning street fashions and those fading hieroglyphic adverts that seem to be stencilled on to the sides of most of downtown Manhattan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two wonderful days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My chemical romance with the i-Pad shows no sign of ending, or even abating. Every night I'm glued to it. Where it goes, I go.

No action lives without a reaction, and so it is here; I've scarcely blogged anything for months., the excitement this device generates is still too overpowering.

I'm even starting to forget about it. Six years of writing in possible jeopardy and this when there is London laid out in front of me every day. The world's most kaleidoscopic city. Every corner a carnival of noise, smell, colour. Exemplified this evening as I headed along the Edgware Road, bathed in applewood smoke curling up from the shisha pipe customers sat outside numerous Arab coffee shops.

One is never, or should never be, tired of London. And I'm not. What I have to do is regulate my time and return to writing. Otherwise, these experiences will melt away like last year's snow.

My writer friend says about writing that, basically, you either talk about it, or you set the clock and do it, day in, day out. His authorly rule of thumb is that this regime should after 10 years or so, transform dust into something close to workable clay.

But you have to do it. And I have n't been as disciplined as I ought for several months since being bewitched by the i-Pad. This has been my fallowest period in probably a decade.

Verba volanta, scripta manent - "spoken words fly, written words remain"

Sometimes you can turn whole pages in the Evening Standard and not find an adulatory article or photo of London's blonde do nothing mayor. Seen through a different prism this is North Korea like behaviour.

Since I moved to another office in a different part of London, I'm having to adjust to a whole new world of commotion. Mayfair, where I now work, is virtually the inverse of the City, where I used to be until last Friday.

It's residential: people walk dogs, take kids to school, they amble, they stroll; there's even a church next door to my office and a pub just beyond that. It's almost the country. No sirens, no endless construction noise, no squeaking taxis or honking buses. I feel like I've gone deaf.

The sumptuary law is looser, more casual than the City's blue / black mix and match suit ensemble. Mayfair is chic and raffish in the same breath, Chanel and ripped denim. It's affluence where the edges of these two rub shoulders. There's a lot of expensive clothes horses cantering through both of these areas.

More shops, much more than the odds and sods that fluttered around my old office, a paper shop, a bookies and a hardware store. But at least the paper shop had things I conceivably might have wanted at some point, say a pen, or a pint of milk. I don't need a Stella Mcartney dress, nor I've got anything like the wherewithal to buy a Bentley or a Porsche, but this being Mayfair and it's raison d'être, luxury, rarity and expense, these are what pass for local shops.

My greatest challenge is to rebuild the foraging routes I made during my time in the city. All those tucked away little cafes and takeaways that I've bought untold number of lunches from. I'm very particular about what I eat: more or less vegetarian during the working week with meat just at the weekends. It's what I call flexiteranism. I knew just exactly where to go in the city. Now I have to unearth Mayfair's equivalents. And so far there's been no glint of gold.

I'd never heard of Joe Paterno until a few weeks ago, and all I really know even now is he had a golden reputation as an American Football coach until it came out latterly that he'd failed to act against a fellow coach accused of child abuse. Lamentable allegations, now sadly proven I understand.

You know how it works on the Internet; you roam, meander, take the road less travelled, click link after link on a journey with no particular reason until you stub your toe on something special, which is how I came across this astounding commencement speech Paterno gave in 1973. Putting to one side the absolute seriousness of what he should have done but did n't, and this I imagine is how he'll always be thought of now, this is quite a speech: learned, peppered with apt quotes, realistic and inspirational at the same time.

No comparably renowned Brit football manager could get within a country mile of something so eloquent. To be tongue tied rates as an intellectual achievement for most Brit team managers. Look no further than the dismal example Harry Redknap's setting with his faux cockney inarticulacy during his tax trial.

Oratory unquestionably is the American art form.

It's almost a week since I returned from New York. It is the city sine qua non. To not love New York City is to not love life. It is a beautiful, forever tempting, and often bruised, exotic fruit that I can't stop myself from gorging on. I love the place, unashamedly and devoutly.

Amongst the myriad of joys, treasures and pearls that constitutes this diamond city is the profusion of astrologers, tarot readers, fortune tellers, guides. Most blocks near my apartment have at least one Gypsy Rose Lee.

Why? What's the cultural motivation? Is it the fragility of living in such a cut throat, thrusting urban dynamo? People want to feel there's something mysterious, something divine waiting or them? Hope in a crowded city?

Here I am at the Aubreve espresso bar at the ground zero of New York's hipsterdom - Cooper Square, and diagonally opposite it's cultural uber nexus - the Village Voice head office. A wastrel looking Bob Dylan waif did a "hey guy, what's happening" salutation and then created the most perfect espresso macchiato I've ever had either side of the Atlantic. Perfect.

And the highlight of it all is, well aside from the Man in Black, Johnny Cash playing over the in house entertainment, is I've got my I-Pad fired up and connected. Live from New York city....

There's a scent out there which is recognisably New York. It's the Big Apple's pheromone.

I'm not a bloodhound and I don't have the nasal super sensitivity of a master perfumer, and this all means I can't adequately say what this scent is. Nevertheless, I know it's like a modern 21st century family - it's a blend.

There's an aroma of very recently polished wooden parquet floors in there; fabric conditioner curling up and out of a thousand basement laundry rooms; a door to a pizza takeout opens and a skein of garlic drifts out, strong, pungent, alluring; it's the salty tang of the pretzel cart at 52nd and Madison; the headiness of hot coffee and cinnamon; that truly undefinable smell of an antique carpet in a quiet apartment where the only noise is muted traffic.

Put me in a sensory deprivation tank where the only sense I'm allowed is to smell, release the valve on the olfactory tank, and I'll tell you in a less time than the legendary New York moment exactly where I am.

Bottle this all and call it what exactly? Eau de Apple? Manhattan mystere? Sixth avenue shimmer?

I put my head on the pillow tonight as a forty nine year old man; I take it off the same pillow in the same town tomorrow morning but as a fifty year old man. What a great journey it's been. I have no complaints. None. No me puedo quejar

Just as yesterday, I'm awake before five listening to the surf of traffic pass along 58th street. I'm still waiting for my jet-lag to flush out of me and now I additionally have the weariness of a head cold to contend with.

Yesterday was a fiercely cold day in Manhattan; a slice and dice wind of the bitterest intensity streaming along the avenues and scissoring down the streets. Cold enough to freeze any exposed extremity to porcelain. But no snow, no rain, and the tiniest hint of a weak sun, still made it a great day.

New York has no ideal season - every season is the right season.

Getting on towards five in the morning and I'm blearily awake listening to the steady rhythm of the traffic churning along East 58th street.

I'm back in New York. Arrived yesterday and carrying a sleep debt that will have to be paid at some point; but that's for another day. Right now, I'm in the city, which other than London, has more magic, more hope, more drama, more passion for living, more elemental rawness, more sheer magnetism than any other. Like London, you commune with gods here.

As a Brit, I have more in common...much more...with this bold, throbbing heart of a place than I do with the rest of my own country: the sheer density of numbers living in the smallest possible space, almost in defiance of nature, but done so with peerless grace and harmony tells me we are special cities. Where else does that happen?

Here are two adapted civic ecosystems that have withstood every insult, felt the bruises of history, overwhelmed every exigency placed on them. That's our shared badge of honour.

Viva London, Viva New York. When Plato wrote about lovers searching for their missing half, what he really meant was these two amorata separated by the chance of geography, but forever united in shared spirit.

At some point, I'll stop hearing the siren call coming from my I-Pad, and get back to blogging in strength. That moment, though, is still like the vanishing point in a painting: visible...just, but only with massive effort. Squint and you'll see it, but that's it.

Two of my relatives have offered to hold a little get together to mark my birthday. It's a significant one. A milestone. And I'm really touched by this. Never had a birthday celebration in my life for one thing, but more than that, it's the gesture I appreciate.

It'll be a low key affair. A handful of friends, some finger food, a glass or two of wine, and interesting conversations. Low key suits me. I like to be in the back of the stalls, the spear-carrier waiting in the wings, not the lead figure. Too much attention ain't me. None of this P Diddy bling thing with thousands of alleged close friends turning up. Quality matters, babe...

Nevertheless, even the beigest of people like me for example, entertains that cheeky self-mythologising pipe dream where that's at least one fire engine, police car lights raking over houses in the dark, small hours, bemused neighbours in pyjamas peering through windows, or at open front doors, and there's someone, probably bare chested being led away in handcuffs. Now is that what we call party?

God, this is the most dismal weather to crack open a new year. Thick rain, low clouds, booming wind and insidious bone-sapping cold. We are creeping along, eyes to the floor, battened down and battered by grey.

I'm a January babe, with a Capricorn's love of the dark and sere, but even for me this is draining. A little sun, a few bright, sharp afternoons please.

London on the first day of 2012 is like being inserted into the pages of some grim Russian novel; wet, dank, preternaturally dark, and full of sombre faced individuals going nowhere. How desperate a start to the New Year.

Tick, tick, tick...another year drawing to a close. So to that hardy band, that small but perfectly formed group who drop by my blog, happy new year and best wishes for 2012. Let's take it by storm and give it all we've got.

After ten years of trudging past Julie's on my way to Holland Park station and the office, I finally went in this afternoon. Everything I imagined about it realised the instant I stepped in with a friend; unobtrusive, almost butler-like service in gorgeously furnished rooms.

We were on the first floor sat on reclaimed and beautifully restored church pews surrounded by taste with a capital T. Opposite us was a horse shoe shaped alcove where four young Irish mothers, each clearly fashionable in that effortless way that affluence brings, and all in some way, shape or form, involved in something creative, were holding a birthday party for one of their daughters, a shy, brunette, who beamed when a birthday cake appeared and the table serenaded her with happy birthday.

It was quite glorious in a way I can't exactly articulate.

The ambience of Julie's is intoxicating; relaxed, arty, comfortably déshabillé, and timeless. No difficulty in imagining Harold Pinter, or a Rolling Stone or two, maybe Hitchens and Amis junior, or Stella McCartney holed up somewhere in this honeycomb of amazingly dressed rooms. I could, I can, see it so easily

I know there's more than a hint of Hyacinth Bouquet, snobby aspiration in other words, streaming through what I've written. But I loved this place.

I would have written far more this month except that I'm still honeymooning with my iPad. At some point the intensity of the infatuation will dim. It has to. Don't they all. But right now, I'm still enslaved, albeit joyfully, to this exquisite delight.

Just the pleasure of stroking the screen is enough to get me purring. I can't help it. I simply can't.

Yesterday did n't go the way I'd originally planned and I had to make some abrupt changes, otherwise my wheels would have stayed spinning in the mud; nevertheless there were compensations, small rewards, really, and there was an insight.

For the sheer need of seeing people, I walked from my flat through Kensington, along to the Edgware Road, and eventually on to the West End.

The closer to the West End, the busier the streets; Holland Park was a near tomb, scarcely a person, nothing open except for the solitary lighthouse that was the Windsor Castle pub, with just a scattered handful of drinkers

Kensington High Street was marginally busier with a small grocers open, then further towards Kensington Church St, Cafe Concerto was a sardine can of tourists, clearly relieved that at least somewhere was open. Not a table free.

After there, I headed through Kensington Palace Gardens and eventually to Queensway, the de facto beginning or end, depending on which way you're approaching, of Arab London. The London that never closes essentially and from there till Marble Arch, London fair hummed with life: cafes, restaurants, arab grocers, supermarkets, pharmacies, even a brace of hair dressers, were open.

Edgware Road, which is the passagiata for London's Arab community, spun with people, they were everywhere, at outdoor tables smoking shisha pipes, shopping, laughung, walking arm in arm eating, queuing for restaurants. It was a marvellous sight, like a latter day modernised 1001 nights. I was entranced.

I mentioned a number of small compensations: a polychromatic Jay, that I saw darting across a Holland park side street, and then later on the trek home, a fox scampering out of a garden near Queensway. I love the sense that the wilderness has n't quite left London. There are still echoes if you listen hard enough.

The insight? A woman. possibly homeless, probably friendless, reading a several days old paper in a fast food restaurant. James Baldwin described his protagonist in Another Country, as one of the "flattened", where the common denominator is quiet desperation, nameless torment and silent misery, not just on one day, but every day. London, like New York, the setting of Another Country, has too many of the "flattened". This woman was one. People should n't be falling through the cracks.

For reasons that I'm loath to talk about publicly, I've been far longer at the margins of my physical, and more importantly, emotional strength than I have been for a long, long time. Too many storms, too few ports to ride them out in.

It's been the comforting, inner world of books, the balm of words really, which have steered me away from the less pleasant side of introspection and it's cousins, anxiety and worry. I'm a firm believer in the benefits of the long dark nights of the soul; they're there for a reason, we all need to review and rethink. Life's not static and we can't be either.

Sundays and introspection. There are times, too many for my liking recently, when one is not without the other. So, I thank serendipity that I fell over these words of Samuel Johnson a few minute ago: "If solitary, be not idle. If idle, be not solitary" I've been both for several days and idle thoughts especially at such a heightend season as Xmas are not pleasant.

I got some of my mojo back - a smidgen, more has come back since I read those words of Johnson - wandering through the Freud Museum in Finchley. Parquet floors, steaming light, acres of book cases, the smell of floor polish, all are intellectual catnip to me. The sensory side of creativity and intellectual endeavour that I yearn to be part of.

I can't be alone in realising that the same books, the couch, and the row upon on row of Egyptian, African and Asian antiquities that I saw were also seen by someone who had such a seminal effect upon western cultural thinking as Freud. Remarkable and very moving.

That day has come. Christopher Hitchens, that monumental man of letters and instructive, almost edifying contrarian, is dead.

I've spent most of the evening reading the deservedly generous tributes that have appeared in the immediacy of Hitchens death. The finest, as it was with 9/11, was from Ian Mcewan. Endearing, warm, sensitive, a fine summation of a life lived well from a dear friend. Quite moving.

In some ways, Hitch was the Keith Richards of writing; prodigious talent, unstinting hard work (surprised I say that about the louche Stones guitarist? The ease and fluidity that he shows every time he plays did n't come without work), the love for what they do, that utter zest for life, the drinking obviously, but even down to their shared determination to live life at both ends and fain sleep.

If there ever is a Mount Rushmore of essayists and belle-lettrists then save the western aspect, the one that absorbs the bounty of the sun, for Hitch. I'll miss him.

I've been listening with half an ear to a radio programme where the presenter has been fluttering around the dissection table of a London hospital mortuary.

I'm left with two images, both opposing: the flensing of whales that I once saw on a programme about the Faroe islands, carcasses hauled on to the beach, sliced open, and the skin pulled back exposing innards and steaming ruby red blood; the other image, and this is driven by the home counties earnestness of the senior pathologist guiding the presenter across the extraordinary landscape of an opened up corpse is the trainspotter like enthusiasm of it all. The attention to detail is outstanding.

London, this battered, bruised, yet always juicy plum of a place, is alas never quiet. Sound leaks in as insidiously as draughts do in the bleak winter evenings. Where I am now in pleasant, affable Chiswick, I can hear the distant surf-like roar of the High Road, a gurgling fridge freezer, a hot water pump, and next door, a brace or so of drama students, who've been badged as the kids from Fame, practicing arias.

London, as I once wrote of Saigon, is an unfinished symphony of noise. If nothing else, noise is other people, who are n't necessarily hell, just misguided and unthinking.

In London the saying goes that you're never more than a few yards away from a rat. In the three decades I've lived here, I've seen just a handful; usually something slipping through the bushes in some suburban park, or once and more memorably, a large great rat hurrying across an empty Gerrard street one early morning.

So that's my experience of this assertion, and it's the way I want to keep it.

With people in the writing business however, and I include myself here, slightly because I do write, but more so because I'm a reader - a serious, heavy duty one - and the two of us need each other, I've found that you're never more than a few sentences away from a "why we write..." statement.

I'd be absolutely disingenuous if I said I did n't read them; I do, I gobble them up, page after page. And I know why. One word: reassurance. Their expressed motivations, have I got them? Have I got the writer's DNA ? What they're saying compels them then is it compelling me ? Am I writing because I feel powerful and blissful in my imagination as one of my writer friends says he does? Is it an impulse that I can't close the door on? Is it bemusement and amazement at this inestimable complex thing called humankind? Or the fun of the unobvious question: just what had that old bath I saw two workmen tugging out of the front door of a Holland Park grandee's house been privy to, for instance.

Why indeed do we write, why indeed do we read?

I'm just settling into my month long sabbatical in Chiswick - relatives have absconded to Australia for the whole of December. New twist to this bout of house sitting; there are two lodgers as well now. So it's elderly old me and two young women in their twenties. All the makings of a sit-com ...

Excited ? Of course ! I've just crossed over and bought an iPad

I've had the longest bout of jet-lag I've ever experienced and it's still not flushed out properly a week after or so after I got back from Hong Kong.

I point the finger at the time difference and the unexpected strain of having to fly to Scotland almost as soon as I got into the office on my first day back, but I'd like to think it's to do with the tenacity of the grip that Hong Kong still has on me. It simply won't let go and I don't want it to.

This Far Eastern city state stormed all my defences the moment I stepped out of the plane that brought me there. Take me again. Over-run me. No walls left to batter down. I love the place.

It's an intoxicant for all the senses: enormous statement skyscrapers stand cheek by jowl with broad sweeps of lush forest and stern, jagged peaks and crinkling mountain ridges.

Like so many Asian cities I've been to, Hong Kong has that earthy aroma of fertility, things are going to happen and quickly: throw a seed on the ground, it'll bloom; a single brick becomes a skyscraper overnight; an idea thrown into the heads of these natural born entrepreneurs and it's a new business the same day.

Hong Kong is for cliff dwellers. The only way is up. It has to be. Hong Kong's typography mandates nothing else but. So for millions it's an aerial life in the honeycomb of a giant apartment block and if you're lucky a view to die for and if you're not, then a view of someone's laundry fluttering on those metal hangers which all these cliff dwellers hang their washing on.

I got back very late last night from a trip to Hong Kong and Taiwan. Two fascinating places; generous, friendly, hospitable, seriously modern, and wired with energy, especially Hong Kong. New York, the poster child for all that's thrusting and brash, has the fury of a Zen Rock garden, compared to HK, London is a doddering pensioner, and Paris, frankly extinct.

The East is the Future.

Interestingly - and this is an adverb I've somehow become glued to, I use it freely in business e-mails and other places where I've run out of creative steam - this is the first Bonfire Night I've experienced in London in some time. Typically (another adverb, I can't throw overboard), I'm usually out of the UK on a trip.

So it's been a fascinating night; the sky's been flickering luridly with each percussive wave of non stop firework salvos, and the streets, particularly around Kensington Church Street, are thick with the smell of gun powder. Still and clear makes a perfect night for fireworks.

I'm pressing the pause button on posts for the next two weeks. I'm taking my near customary November break. Normal service resumes the end of the month.

Wole Soyinka's motivation to write was his sheer wonderment at the human phenomena around him. Better words than any of mine and absolutely true.

The sweet invisibility of middle age. I feel like my corporeal form is disintegrating any time I get near to a sales assistant in a shop.

I went into the menswear sections of several chain stores this evening. Other than one assistant commenting about my backpack, which I'd bought in his store a year ago, no one came near me. One even forcefully turned the other way as I walked by.

My presence is n't registered. Perhaps it is, but only the way a breeze stirs a ripple on a pond. A coat rack sways, or a cluster of shirts sighs and moves as something passes by. Invisibility, I've mastered it.

I heard David Norris, the garrulous cut-glass accented independent candidate for the Irish Presidency, use this assertion from Beckett.

In some way, it's more revealing of the candidate than of Beckett himself; there's a self importance and a conceit seeping through, which makes me thing Norris might be a liability rather than an asset to Ireland.

Nevertheless, it's the comment itself that matters: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better".

There are times when it seems I've fallen through a tear in the time / space continuum. As evidenced twenty minutes ago when I flipped the radio on and heard Public Enemy's "Don't Believe the Hype" on Radio 2. The incongruity is almost impossible to articulate.

Radio 2 has had an edginess to it for years; Wogan, the great raconteur, has intellect by the bundle arm in arm with a charming naughtiness; Radcliffe and Maconie pushed the musical boundaries night after night, whilst there have been notorious flame-outs a la Jonathan Ross. Still, Public Enemy...

How to reveal a character by Tolstoy: "Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when is is untied, the whole man is visible".

I go to some parts of London, and these places are always in West London, with Chiswick the dark hub, and feel I should be having another kind of life to the one I actually have. That I should be really ferrying a daughter to Saturday morning ballet; helping a son with his backhand on the tennis court; wondering in the stone-flagged, island kitchen whether we should take a gite in France for the summer; or opening patio doors in the keen air of an early morning for a brace of dogs to burst across a deep lawn.

God knows why I should think like this. I am pretty content with what I'm up to. Certainly I have ambitions which I edge nearer to. All in all I'm content. So why does Chiswick, a notoriously pampered place, make me think my life is wrong?

We have celebrity politicians in this country, and when we don't have those we have those up to their ankles in the mire of some scandal. Pace Dr Fox right now.

Americans, on the other hand, have proper, serious politicians. Look at this clip of Alan Grayson, the former Democrat representative for Florida. I would vote for this man. Why can't British politicians be like this? The same fire, the same common sense, the same straight talk, the same compassion. I look across the florid cheeked ranks of the current British Government and not a scintilla of any of it evident.

With every finely honed action and comment, Mr Cameron, spins the axis of Britain ever further to the right. Today's speech about illegal immigration panders to the ever slavering tabloids' wettest dreams and pushes us as a nation towards very uncomfortable historical memories.

Today, he wants us to report illegal immigrants, or our suspicions of who we think might be one. A fine opportunity for grudges and grievances to be aired out for one thing; for another, its not too many steps away from having people wearing stars. I don't like this at all.

I want to be proud to be British. How can I when the government are weaving dark spells like this?

I'm part of the solar dust that lies on the fringes of London's art world. I have a little gig at a gallery each month which is why I feel I can lay claim to a little foothold, but really it's no greater than a few specks.

But my few specks have enough combined purchase to get me into one or two events, usually because I've been tipped off by a friend. Like yesterday.

The two of us sat in a British Museum auditorium listening to Grayson Perry, in his finery, a canary yellow embroidered coat with a serious pink blush lining, talk about his life as an artist and letting rip at the things he dislikes about the art world. Certainly sunk that old trope of the wounded, passionate artist stripped to the waist, furiously dripping paint on a canvas, in the small hours. That went straight to the bottom of the sea. No survivors reported.

He's quite a showman, but thank God, not in the queasy, toe curling manner of Jonathan Ross, or Clarkson. And in a strange way, nowhere near as self referencing as those two, even if he does dress like a apple cheeked five year old.

Other than the Beatles, Newton, and an alleged incident that took place in the Garden of Eden, then I can't think of any other Apple that has had the cultural and global impact of Steve Job's Apple.

Visionary is one of those terms that's too freely used, yet, in the case of Steve Jobs, it's truly deserved. He saw further than the majority of us ever will ; innovated in the simplest yet most technologically sophisticated manner; cast freshness and light over what had been a daunting market place; liberated people in endless ways.

A great man. A revolutionary. Sorely missed.

I mentioned in a much earlier post that in certain areas of London, memories pour out of the walls of buildings and ooze up from the very paving stones I'm striding over.

That sense roared back this evening. I'd been to Foyles on Charing Cross Road and was walking towards Lower Regent Street, when - and this may well have been provoked by a wonderful memoir of a man looking back at a youthful trip through Mexico I'd just finished reading - all of those ghosts of happy memories of my life in this wonderful city surged along the streets.

Streets and buildings that I'd seen twenty five years ago on similar fresh, clear October evenings, I saw again as the young man I was then.

What would have I done if I'd bumped into that young man I was then this evening? So easy. Hugged him, and then told him I loved him. Loved him for being him, for being adventurous, for accepting that life would often be solitary, but when it was, that the quietest moments were so often the most exciting, and to never give up, to keep going, to push on.

A couple of weekends ago I went on an epic walk through London with a great friend from L.A.. We covered all points well known and many more not so.

One of the pit stops was the chocolate boutique that operates out of Harrods. It's not called that, but the conceit is all there; everything is hand-picked by amazingly attentive assistants, and artisan is the name of the game, bespoke, wild, inspired creations.

My friend and fellow choco-fiend bought some chocolate that had surely slipped the surly bonds of normal hand made chocolate. This stuff was beyond divine. In another galaxy.

I had that Florence moment that ultra-sensitive tourists are reputed to have the instant they get anywhere near the place and drop to the floor insensible. Knocked out cold by the the sheer emotion of it all. Except I could n't swoon. Being a man, for one thing, and a cheek by jowl crowded shopfloor for another.

Her words are much finer than mine in summing up the rapture these love-bombs produced, This article in the latest edition of the Morton Report. (Yup, that Morton...)tells it better than I could ever hope for.

It's incontrovertible that I am London's greatest chocoholic in human form and that my word is final on all matters chocolate; there's no question about the nirvana status of the cassis and hibiscus dark chocolate. I attest to that. Bluntly they rock...

Regrettably due to eye-watering expense, this will be an unrepeatable experience, and perhaps it's better that way, the memory crystallised, the fear of the next set not being quite as good as the revelation generated by the first. This is also why I've never re-read Wuthering Heights; I can't dare think it might be flawed.

Nonetheless, I regard this experience with the contentment and satisfaction one might feel looking at a cloudless Everest. The chocolate peace that passeth all understanding.

I think this underlines the American capacity to generate political good sense. Now I know for many that's an oxymoron, but it's only arrived at that unwelcome status because of the raucous behaviour of the bear-pit celebrity politicians, whose acumen I have yet to uncover. Nevertheless, that's the noise that's obscured the real sounds of a healthy American body politic. One that's decorous, civil, shorn of any flim-flam, and straight to the point.

I love this example that I spotted in an article in tonight's Standard about Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senatorial candidate for Massachusetts; it's perfect, it's also an excellent instance of exactly why tax is good, and takes the wind out of the self-appointed all government is bad, head bangers. I'll let her words take over now: "You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired the workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of the police and fire departments the rest of us paid for. You did n't have to worry that marauding bands would would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did".

There's more: "Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific? Keep a big hunk of it. But a part of the underlying social contract is that you take a hunk of that and pay for the next kid who comes along"

Smart, smart words. We need a Brit Politico who can deliver something as crisp and to the point, where are they?

Two comments that I've got memorialise here otherwise I'll forget them, or at best lose them in the thicket of daily life, and both are too good to let that happen.

"I go into the movie. I watch it, and I ask myself what happened to me" Fine, perceptive words written by that wonderful American film critic, Pauline Kael. Twenty odd years on, I can still recreate the frisson of excitement of buying an anthology of her film criticism from the old Athena bookshop in the Trocadero. It blew away me. She's still my favourite.

"...most good writers are also good talkers, writing nonetheless begins where writing ends - in silence" I've just read that apercu in an online edition of the New Yorker. Damn, it should be turned into a tee shirt slogan, or sprayed on walls. It's what happens. End of.

Take my hand someone and force it to write something.

Tonight's one of those unfortunate times when I'm writing less for the love of it, and more for the fact, I just want to see some words unroll across the screen, or my day will not feel right

Guess this is how sharks are supposed to feel; keep swimming or stop forever. Keep writing or the blog withers away. That's always been my worry. Some days the words pour out, other's it's a baleful trickle.

I have to put something down. These fingers need to flex and write the words they want to not feel themselves mastered by the demands of work and the office. Yet, tonight, I'm out of ideas. Even last night's quiet panic about an impending birthday is n't strong enough to morph into sentences. It's still there. I still have it. Just I can't articulate it.

As I edge nearer to what I call my mezzo-centenary - basically that birthday - I can't help feeling something like the bends going through my system. All those questions that I'm adamant everyone else, who's butted up to the same age I'm going to be soon, has wracked themselves with, I'm waking up with. All of those "What have I done?, Have I done enough? "Where should I be" anxieties.

The answer when the tremor eventually passes remains the same: I've lived, I continue to. I've done my best. There's been a catalogue of mistakes double sided with an equal amount of successes and much more plain ol' living.

As far as I know nothing changes the instant you surface on the other side of that birthday, it's the same as the day before, slow, continuous evolution. Yet, there's something fetishistic about the whole thing that's impossible to brush aside. Is it all about taking stock? Having a moment to pause? Is that it?

Back to Brighton for the first time in several years.

It's not changed, nor has my reaction. I raved then, I rave again. It's so atypically British, in fact it's atypically anywhere, it looks like it's been invented, except it has n't.

It's the fusion of blissful weather, a long beach, ingrained raffishness, camp glamour, and sheer youth.

And it's the latter that's the green fuse that drives this mad city. It's was the fabulous quartet of near balletic frisbee throwers; a more than passbale jazz funk cum acid rock trio with a Bez like dancer outside a very hip beachside bar; the strident sax player a few beats away from an imperturbable Bela Lugosi human statue.

Then there's the Lanes, which seems to be an endless frothing stream of nose-studded vegetarian Guardian readers (I'm the last of the two). And hardly anyone over thirty anywhere.

A couple of nights ago I wrote and told a friend that I'd found a canoli in my jacket pocket that had survived intact for nearly 8 hours. This evening, running along Cheapside, with the urgency and sweat of someone racing to the operating theatre with a kidney needed for a transplant NOW, was a man holding a lemon coloured cupcake in a dainty foil holder. Who was that for?

The best way - may be the only way - to enjoy London, is to see it through the eyes of a tourist. I took a dear friend from California across the heart of this wonderful piece of creative chaos that's been my home for coming along three decades, and it was if I'd also seen it for the first time.

Polychromatic skies, amazing street lighting, wandering street musicians, ravishing displays of flowers, descent into the voluptuary that's Harrods. Late evening sitting on a bench by the Thames watching London illuminate itself. Arabesques of light from the Wheel to a St Paul's bathed in moon light, and a solid slab of blue bulbs lighting up one side of the Heron Building. It just needed a soundtrack and it could have been Woody Allen's Manhattan.

A perfect day and a great friend to spend it with.

Spotted. In a deli near me. Chocolate cake with absinthe. Incredible. As a friend said, things like this make you wonder whether there's a higher entity that loves us. It's a sign. The union of chocolate and fin de siecle Paris's madness potion.

Today's historians and certainly those to come are going to be sucking their pencils for years pondering over what the impact of 9/11 was. The tremors certainly have n't settled and like the mainland of Japan after this year's tsunami, the ground has shifted irreversibly, direction unknown.

Did the debt crisis precede that terrible day all those Septembers ago, or was it longer in the womb? Again, a point to be contested with answers either side of that date.

But let's say it did get tailwind. What did that force us to recognise? This: that bankers sanctify profit as private, but their debt, on the other hand, has to be borne by everyone. Privatised profit, nationalised debt.

A US friend sent me this apercu that sums it all up at least if you are American. It's delightful, almost haiku like in it's awful clarity.

It's also about grasping acquisitiveness, shamelessness, hood winking, scaremongering; capabilities that have transcended geography, as palpable in the UK as they are in the US, monstering both countries, and laying waste to the Euro zone.

'A unionized public employee, a tea party republican, and a Wall Street Banker are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The Wall Street Banker reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the tea partier and says, 'Watch out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie.'

I have no linear memory of what I was doing on this day ten Septembers ago. It's more a loose thread of incidents that unspools whenever I remember Sept 11 .

I remember being in my office, which I shared with a few others, looking at huge plasma screens displaying performance statistics, flicking between those and my own computer. Then the office door was flung open. And the day began. That day.

Whoever it was, burst out that a plane had slammed in to the Wall Trade Centre. After that my sense of chronology goes. Someone brought up the BBC on one of the plasmas that I remember, as I do more and more people crowding into the office, silent, awestruck, barely talking, barely comprehending.

I remember vividly telling someone that at least 50,000 people worked in the WTC complex. I knew that from numerous visits to New York and the simple fact of spending time in it's subterranean shopping complex, where I could go to either wait for a friend who worked on nearby Hudson Street, or to wander around the two storey bookshop (Barnes and Noble ? Borders?), and for this more prosaic reason, that was where one of the very few free public toilets in Lower Manhattan was.

I remember seeing each of the Towers waver, then fall. I've no idea of my inner emotional state, horror, shock, disbelief, certainly disbelief; there was something about that rolling, broiling cloud of dust that defied understanding. That was a trope of science fiction, except it was n't, it was fact, and within that whirlwind of dust and ash, people were dying.

Even now, ten long years on, I still wonder whether it was a film. It's the unreality of being witness to something so extraordinary, so terrible. It's the province of films, but it was n't, it actually happened. Three thousand miles away from London's sister state, I saw with dozens of others crowded into a small office, as did millions worldwide, people die. I still can't believe it.

I remember eventually leaving work sometime in the evening and into a shell-shocked London. Past a winebar on Walbrook that always heaved with noise and laughter, that this evening was overflowing with hundreds of subdued office workers simply watching television, just the occasional murmur of a voice.

I remember the anxiety of trying to reach my friend, an old girlfriend in fact, who worked on Hudson Street. Endless e-mails then the utter relief of getting a line from here; shocked, fearful, but safe.

I remember an e-mail from a cousin working in Canary Wharf, apprehensive that they were a target and that an airliner had been hijacked in the Netherlands and was headed there.

That's all I remember, perhaps I could squeeze more out if I tried, but I can't, this is really all I remember of a day I wish had been as anonymous as all those that preceded it.

Some years ago I was fascinated by a set of keys that somehow had ended their useful days on a bus shelter roof just outside what was the the local tax office.

I wondered for days how they got there; whose they were; what they did, it was, from what I could gather from the top deck of the bus, a collection of various sized keys. Utilitarian Yale lock keys, stern mortise keys, maybe a car key thrown on the loop, and possibly hidden out of sight, a set of suitcase keys.

I threw around notions of who the owner might have been; the one I finished on was that it was someone on a stag night, insensible with booze, with a ball and chain tied to his ankle, and whose mates had in that toe-curling Brit phrase thrown his house keys on to the bus shelter roof "for a laugh".

That was several years ago. The shelter's no longer there, so where the keys are now is any one's guess. Perhaps there's a place where all lost and forgotten keys gather.

It's rare that I get so enamoured of such marginalia, but I have seen something this week that's similarly piqued my curiosity: a rough heart drawn in a messy off-cut of concrete on Cornhill, one of the busiest streets in the City. It's heart that's maybe drawn with a finger in just setting concrete with the initials R and J around it.

Who are R and J? When was it done? Are they still together? How many millions of feet have pattered over this symbol of eternal love?

One of my dearest friends leaves for a six month secondment to Abu Dhabi on Thursday and already I can feel a hole in London and in my life.

West London even now does n't feel the same and you're still here.

I wandered through Kensington and into Holland Park and nearly every inch of my walk saw a memory corkscrew out of the pavement: both of us open mouthed the first time we stepped into Wholefoods; standing by the bus stop, drenched after a sudden summer afternoon downpour; idling in Holland Park, talking amiable, cheerful nonsense; meals here, coffee there.

It's not even Thursday yet, and I'm missing your great sense of humour, your generosity; your zest for life, that infectious sense of adventure; your clear, wise words; your sense of justice and natural compassion. And these are a just a handful. Bluntly I'll miss you.

My head feels like the inside of a hiking boot that's had a donkey's hoof in it. I'm at a point somewhere beyond tired. I hate feeling like this. What fun is there to be had in feeling like a dimming 60 watt bulb.

I know who the guilty are. Bring forward the accused: four straight nights of sub-prime sleep, barking dogs at midnight, late night espresso, and the old favourite, too much chocolate.

Enough juice in the tank though, to read a fizzing thread running on one of my more literate facebook friends. It's all about Obama, who I'm unashamed to say is one of my political heroes, and what seems to be the uphill slog of selling his agenda.

Obama's agenda is solid, it's sensible, and it's eminently pragmatic, but it's a hard sell in a marketplace that's deformed in favour of antics and poorly considered sound bites. Bachman is hardly Plato, and Glen Beck is barely Bluto, but who else gets the copy these days but them.

Last night I felt like Howard Carter surely must have felt as he peered into Tutankhamen's tomb for the first time as I walked into Wilton's Music Hall, which justifies the title of London's hidden gem. The place had me reeling, joyfully sucker-punched with revelation, sheer wonderment and something near to radiance.

You know that terrible cliche that's always trotted out about place X being city Y's secret treasure? Well, Wiltons actually justifies that claim. I'll arm wrestle anyone who counter claims because it is.

A century old music hall disinterred and brought back to life after decades in the shadows and cobwebs. It's an eccentric and bohemian restoration, with the outer walls and those of the bars and corridors taken right back to the original brick. Bricks that are pitted, hollow, dented, denuded, almost primeval, like an ancient Galapagos's turtle, smacking of a time before time.

The manner in which the theatre itself has been restored is extraordinary. It's chiaroscuro like for one thing, full of light and shade, then there's the palimpsest effect of the walls being unevenly scraped back to their original layers, sometimes even back to the raw plaster.

The roughness of the walls comes alive with artfully placed lighting. Even the smallest sliver, a flake of a broken paint layer, shape shifts when the light catches it.

I was awed by this place. To close with another archaeological image: it was like discovering Pompeii for the first time.

As I said a few days ago, it was inevitable the pendulum was going to be swinging crazily these past two weeks; the riots sent it violently one way and the compensatory swing went straight the other way towards punishment and judicial retribution.

If today is in anyway a portent, then I think we're nearing a sense of equilibrium. I'm working from a limited dataset, but I'm really going by sense, or what I saw wandering around Kensington Palace Gardens.

Our rainbow mini-nation cum city state was en fete. It was beautiful. London's passegiata time, talking, smiling, singing, strumming guitars, or as I saw in one part of the park, dancing the salsa en masse in a band-stand. That looked especially glorious. Six years of yoga has made me appreciate the lissomness and elegance the human body is capable. Salsa takes that to another level.

Let's trust that our wounded city is on the point of putting the painkillers back in the cupboard. I reckon we're there, or as damn near abouts.

Doctor Archimedes...I've nursed my laptop back to life. I know, does n't sound like much...in fact it's beyond trivial, but two days off-line and the monkey's on my back.

She's juiced up and ready to go. Hallelujah...

I'd say that London's collective blood pressure has dropped since the horrors of last week, but has that pall of shimmering terror dissipated...probably not.

Ask a fellow Londoner and I'd think they would say they can feel the fight or flight bubbling below the surface. The ripples have n't played themselves out in regards to that sense, the city's adrenal gland is still puckering.

Maybe I can squeeze a little more time out of my laptop before the battery goes to sleep.

There is something that's sticking in my craw, actually two things: Cameron and Boris Johnson. I think that the former has some chutzpah, brass balls, to claim the Police did nothing during the riots...It's a temerity to assert that, and hope that people think it was him who plugged the dyke by returning home from holiday. Hugh Orde gave that piece of bluster short shrift on yesterday's Newsnight.

Unsurprisingly, he's returned to form and now made a back-tracking statement that the Police did do a good job. Cameron and the U-turn could almost be the title of a Harry Potter novel.

Now the Mayor, Boris Johnson, high profile, but low octane, beautiful description, which I filched from a Guardian columnist earlier this week...he's having to perform real work, make hard decisions. things he's always shyed away from. The comedy flustered persona that he's played shamelessly on, busted open now, it's properly flustered man now. Way out in the deep end. Arms flailing.

Its moot as to whether he'll be re-elected next year. On the balance of this week's events, any snap election would see him bounced out of City Hall, and it would be someone else being photographed with the very important people, and we know Boris adores that; however, given that he's got his own propaganda arm in the shape of various right wing rag you never know.

What I do know is that I'll not be marking X against Johnson. Nope. I want a proper Mayor. A serious Mayor.

I have to type quickly since the juice is leaking out of my well used laptop. It's another one that I've fully exploited. God bless Toshiba for making 'em robust enough to stand the pummelling I've given this over the years.

In this post riot London of ours, the mood, understandably, is for retribution, for something punitive to be delivered upon the shoulders of those who flooded our high streets, looting, stealing, terrifying, wounding, and sadly, murdering. Deliverance, at the risk of sounding like a tyro Daily Mail leader writer, is due.

Its the pendulum swinging the other way now. The first swing took us into this netherworld of violence; this is the compensatory swing the other way, our collective desires are being met now. Eventually the length of the rebound will lessen, ebb away, until we're back at equilibrium, or something as near as damn it.

We've gone through one door, been hurled through it really, and we're leaving through another into a different world. That's a poor way of stating the obvious, what I want to underline nonetheless, is this world we're entering will take shape and substance from the imaginative responses to this social tsumani that breached our landscape earlier this week; look at the self-help groups that sprung up organically, those sterling people who took to the streets with brooms; the spontaneous, independently organised social media sites that have raised thousands for the 89 year old Tottenham barber, whose shop was swept aside in the madness that happened there, or the site that's collecting money and presents for the innocent young Malaysian student, Ashraf, whose mugging by a "bad Samaritan" was filmed and went viral.

This growing sense of collective engagement makes me very proud; we're thinking, we're working out answers, we're helping.

It as a act of solidarity as far as I'm concerned to shop, even if it's goods I don't really need, at one those small shopkeepers whose businesses were turned over. It's not just to tell the rioters they will not win because they will not, that's obvious, they turned a corner and went straight into a dead end as far as public opinion is concerned. The main reason is to let these poor business owners they're not alone. We're family.

It feels like I'm living in some strange dystopian world. A participant in a near future docu-drama like 28 Days. The Government has capitulated to the Mob. No one feels safe. I'm so accustomed to hearing police sirens over the years that I no longer hear them; that's changed, every blast and hoot of a siren sets my teeth on edge.

We're living in a fear.

The Ledbury, a two star Michelin restaurant about a mile away from my flat, was stormed by masked men. The staff fought them off with rolling pins and kitchen implements and herded the diners into the wine cellar for their own safety. Mad...

And this virus is spreading: Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester...

There was an article on the BBC news site last week about the most suitable theme song for next year's Olympics.

The laurel leaves were draped around the neck of the Clash's, "London Calling", after an excellent dissection of the same song's actual lyrics; gloomy, somewhat doom-ridden, and at the same time firmly of the period, which had, as with other powerful songs, had it's spiky edges rubbed down, smoothed the way a pebble is, and now no one hears any other line than Joe's throaty "London Calling at the break of the day..."

So it's the Clash on the winner's podium for that; then this evening, they were anointed by the on-line version of the New Yorker, for a further award: the easy to grab theme tune for the riots popping up all over London. Yep, "London Burning" It is and I don't like it.

London seems like it's out of control: shops plundered, opportunistic looting, buses torched, teens and pre-teens taking the streets over at will.

There's testosterone preening, violent male peacock feather flaring, "look at me, go on, look...see this". Silver back, alpha male behaviour. Understandable in a sense, but only in a sense; otherwise it's completely indefensible, unpalatable and it has to be reined in.

This turns neatly to the matter of where is everyone: Cameron still on his latest holiday; Johnson, reluctantly coming home early from his, and having to face for the first time the hard realities of being mayor. Can't run away from this, I'm afraid. Can't bumble and gurn through this. Be Ken. Be like he was after 7/7. An exemplar.

To cap it all, there's a leadership vacuum at the head of the Met due to Murdoch's suborning of the top layer of officers.

I feel like a passenger in a ship with no officers, the rudder's broken, and Somali pirates are scaling the sides.

Living on my own means I don't have to pay attention to the torment that afflicts a lot of people who go away - what to get as gift or souvenir for the family, for the significant other, for the kids, and especially if it's for the latter, something that'll neutralise any "you got that for them....and I only got this" sulk.

What I get is for me. That's all there is to it. For the student in me, it's a book, at least one, usually more, particularly if I've been to the US; for the sartorial part of me, it's a T-shirt.

My wardrobe's jammed with t-shirts I've picked up hither and thither, bearing cryptic slogans in scripts I don't know, so that burst of Japanese characters across one of my favourite t-shirts could well not be the delicate Zen koan I keep telling myself it is. You take your chances that's all I can say.

I do know this, and too well now, size matters. It does, it really does. No one can escape it. Don't try to. It matters with a capital M. I'll explain.

What was marked large in Guatemala City and medium in Milan airport is n't what comes after their first wash in London. Wash 'em, dry 'em, and then try 'em on again, and hope I can still draw breath. They shrink savagely. From man-size to doll size. I've got a handful that throw water on and I'd win a wet T-shirt competition hands down.

Wherever I go next, I'm going to super-size. Go for the size up and build in a shrinkage margin