For various reasons, I'm having to use a laundrette these days. Their service wash facility to be exact.

Since there are hardly any left in the part of West London I live in, it's a long, dispiriting schlep to the nearest, which is perched at the top of Holland Park road.

There are compensations; it's near to Holland Park, which I'm a near semi-resident of, (at some point, I shall probably just pull a carpet of leaves over me and start sleeping there); and they fold things, shirts, tee-shirts, match socks and ball them up. It goes in there, a huge knot of tired, creased, dirt and distress, and it comes back to me, near pristine. I'm not used to such transformations.

The place where I'll leave my mark may be here, in the form of this blog where I've chipped away entry after entry; or it could be Holland Park, in the form of a bench.

I love Holland Park. Acres of restorative gardens, lawns and woodland; it's a sanctuary, a place of well-being, an escape from the madhouse London inferno. I literally bathe myself in the wonderful splashes of greens and yellows, the fiery hearted flowers, the bird-song; and the air is always cool - hedgerow cool.

I've been there this evening for a few hours, idly reading, occasionally listening to fragments of opera floating away from the pavilion, and just taking in quiet lungfuls of healing air.

Then a slow walk to the Kyoto gardens, a manicured and intensely symbolic Japanese style garden. There's a small pond there, where I once saw a stately and inscrutable Heron standing one-legged oblivious to the melee of people passing by. Today there was hardly anyone there, just a solitary moorhen, a handful of tourists and the shoal of carp patrolling the pond.

Perfect relaxation after you guessed it - a hard day on the phone.

Most of my recent evenings have centred around gentle excursions to Holland Park, and long, leisurely hours there, reading and catching drifts coming over from the local Opera festival.

Totally bourgeois, completely serene; the raucous, emerald coloured parakeets and strolling peacocks, being the only real distractions.

However, an artist friend of mine has invited me out on the town with them this Friday, and I think this could well be an After Hours experience.

Do you know the movie? A mid-eighties piece about a humdrum, drudge office worker who takes a metaphorical turn left when he should have stuck to his usual right, and ends up forsaking his normal TV dinner lifestyle for one hell of a strange night.

The place, my artist friend has in their sights, and this is taking the best bits, is a "...vaguely burlesque...(and)....extremely unclean (club)...where the club owner...sings, and is always dressed like a Chicago mafia boss...but he is not a phoney; and probably his criminal records are not that clean, too..."

The main act sings in a Tom Waits style and interleaved amongst it all is a girl or two, who decides she's socially inhibited wearing clothes and therefore better off without them on.

As long as the latter entertainer does n't bounce on my knee, or shake whatever it is she can shake in my face, or brushes my head with a feather, then I'm good to go.

Then Sunday, back to the healing balm of the park.

When the weather is astounding like today, or just plain good, and I've decided not to walk home, I spend time sitting in Holland Park, reading, and listening to snatches of opera coming from the festival (tonight was la Boheme).

The park has been taken over by a colony of raucous, restless parakeets, and along with the imperious disdain of of the long time resident peacocks strolling between the beds of dragon red and apricot begonias, it feels like I'm swaddled between the sentences of a magical realist novel. The sweating evening time humidity just adds to it.

It's the weather that's reduced the flow of postings. Blame it on the elements ? But how often do we get acres of wall to wall sunshine in dear old London Town. If it's there, then grab it, and I do. With both hands.

I like to luxuriate in Holland Park in the evening after work, sometimes idly reading, other times watching the birds compete for the bird-feeders, or simply gazing at the clouds drifting over, and enjoy the music of the outdoor opera.

More days like these please.

There were squadrons of parakeets scorching across Holland Park this evening.

In the five years since I first had them pointed out to me in Hyde Park, I've watched these green enamelled birds work their noisy way across West London; they've stormed the skies over Richmond and Chiswick, brazenly infiltrated Kensington and Notting Hill, and dominate the air above Holland Park.

They make London feel tropical, especially on warm, piercing blue sky days like the run we've having now.

Cheap and lazy, but I'll never let a cliche wriggle away from me; maybe this is a foretaste of a globally warmed London.

An appeal to my vanity: the two women in their twenties who I share a Sunday afternoon's gallery duty both looked amazed - genuinely - when I said how old I was. "I thought you were thirty-seven or thirty-nine...". Feeling the love that shot through my veins even now.

An appeal to my never quite dormant sense of frustation: the block of flats I live in, mostly occupied by short-term residents who have no direct commitment to the upkeep of it, continues it's slide into becoming a slum. I feel like I'm living in one of these cities that's gradually vanishing under the sands or being slowly strangled by encroaching trees the way Angkor Wat disappeared. I don't know what to do; stay and be submerged by it all, or sell-up at a a resounding loss.

An appeal to my love of cosmopolitanism. The cafe had closed, and most of the tables were empty, but there were still a dozen or so Eastern European men absorbed, either playing or watching, several games of chess on the terrace of the cafe in Holland Park. They were there when I passed an hour or so later and still as preoccupied.