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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's got to happen. Just when?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Great Jones Street by Don Delilo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like so many today I've been enthralled by the confirmation that for several centuries, the body of Richard the Third - the villain, the scheming scuttling monster of Shakespeare's eponymous drama - has lain in an untidy and crude grave underneath that most British of things, the car park.

It's that moment again, where we're able through dogged and scrupulous forensic archeology to lean back and meet the past. Meet the ancestors; and, in this case, see the bones of not just an historical figure, but someone whose cultural power has echoed down the centuries. I am amazed.

The one thing that does stand out for me is the tremendous torsion of his spine, almost an S shape, or the barb of a deformed hook. Life must have been anything but quiet for Richard; he must have been mocked even if it was silently, voices that would n't dare speak, but eyes that certainly could, must have left their mark. Unusual body types still generate stares even today in these more enlightened, sympathetic times. For him it must have been hell.

Traveling on London's public transport is a lottery when it comes to the people you can find yourself sat or stood next to. I think I've experienced most types over the near thirty years I've lived here.

The majority, that great silent crowd of momentary neighbours have been exactly that, silent; there's been the surly - avoid any bus or tube with football fans, especially English in it; the chatterboxes, usually from out of town, who don't know London's informal code of conduct on public transport, the unwritten credo that you shall be silent and uncommunicative - we really are islands, entire of ourselves - or they do, and intentionally set out to talk, self strengthening their folk belief that people in London really are n't friendly.

I've been next to school kids, swivelling around in near riotous mood on the top deck of buses; seen fights break out on a tube; someone been given oral sex; plenty of people weeping; far too many drunks; been up close and personal with London's lost and lonely, muttering to themselves; too close to some very smelly people, including oddly one or two who were extremely well dressed, proving that a good sartorial state does n't always mean an equivalent olfactory one.

But tonight, coming home on the 148, was a fresh, new number: a somewhat overweight woman in an adult sized fluffy romper suit. From what I could make out from the four or five minutes we were sharing the same seat on the top deck, this was not a stunt or exhibitionism or someone en route to a party, this looked to be her normal life.

My age has me plumb in the middle of the"squashed generation"; those of us around our forties and fifties sandwiched between anxieties of ailing parents and the boisterous, sometimes surly demands of young adults creeping up behind. Pressure here, pressure there. It's a much remarked cultural observation. And most will segue through the three stages.

It's being in it, the filling in the generational sandwich, that I think, and I say this purely from observation (I'll clarify exactly why later), is potentially the most poignant because people are leaving. Kids become autonomous. they become people in other words; angry, passionate, excitable, effervescent, hopeful, invincible, moody, everything that goes with the great state of being human.

We also start to lose those who brought us here: our parents. Someone I know, a fine, happy spirited, deeply amiable person who carries an aura with her wherever she goes, a woman of great and sincere sensitivity, and a "squashed generation" member too, quite unexpectedly, lost her mother a few weeks ago.

Her heart aches. In an e-mail she wrote the simplest, tenderest sentences on how she felt. Her mum died on the final day of her holiday in a country several thousand miles away. Her words are few, unadorned and of the heart,  plain yet so pure, and they express unequivocally the depth of love she had for her mother: "...she died, away from me.."

I know exactly what weight these words carry, just what they symbolise: that she wanted to hold her mum, see her, laugh with her, chatter with her, see her again. And she can't. These five words have n't left me since I read them this morning. They echo with inexplicable feeling.

Bereavement is a room you never want to enter. I know: both of my parents passed away and to this day I still feel their absence.

When I don't have a book or something to read on public transport then it's whatever is going around me that's going to get my attention.

Bouncing back from Richmond on the 391, I could n't escape the conversation going on in the seat in front. It was two people, clearly somewhere in the warm glow of romance: a tall South African man, quite elegantly dressed in a well made brown three quarter length coat with a lighter brown polo neck underneath; his partner had her hair pinned back ( the seats are so close on the 391, I could see how many pins there were: three.) and was as comfortably dressed as the man.

There was a little, at times, coy, question and answer session going on between them. She wondered what type of clothes he looked, the styles, short sleeves, V necks, long sleeve t shirts, what colours did he like. Like me he was an earth toned creature: browns, chocolates, greens, some shades of blue, and no, he did n't mind if she from time to time pointed something out in store when they were shopping, or even bought the odd item.

Love. What a beautiful thing.

I saw these two a few days ago in Rome.If it is an illusion then it's one of the best I've ever come across.

Personally, I'm suspending all rationality and assuming it's something entirely other -not inexplicable - simply a testament instead to the power of mind over matter. And this was some effort, barely a movement from either during the twenty minutes or so I was watching, they'd clearly been in the same stance before I arrived and were still when I turned to leave.

They were n't the only pair I spotted in Rome, I ran across another on the Via Del Corso on my way back t my hotel. Perhaps, just perhaps, there is a little something going on. But for me, belief remains suspended; both are exhibiting a strength, endurance and spirit that I can only marvel at. Somethings are better left.

Interestingly, the hyper concentrating duo in this photo had approached their site with acumen and foresight, they were on the bridge just before the Castel San Angelo, which guards one of the main thoroughfares to that seat of spiritual power - the Vatican.

Those five days I've just spent in Rome were among five of the most enchanting days I've ever had. Rome rendered me mute. Speechless. Everyday was discovering a new joy, something utterly unexpected. I am in love with the eternal city. Inamorata. Why? Who knows. Who cares. It's a sensory thing, inchoate, fugitive; it could be a vapour, or a perfume, something too strong, yet paradoxically too fragile, to break down into actual parts. It's so stealthy, like a magical kiss in some fairy tale, utterly transformative.

I felt for the whole time that I was there that I was in the original City, the foundation City, the place where it all began. It's the only city I've been to which makes two thousand year old London or Paris feel young. Mesopotamia is acknowledged as holding the the seeds of the oldest recognised urban settlements; but Rome surely trumps that. Where else can you see millenia old frescoes in the catacombs or the basement of the Basilica di San Clemente and then see almost the same faces you've just seen walking past you on the street or stood at the bar drinking coffee

I'll leave the final word to Goethe, who in his Italian Journey, wrote: "Now at last I have arrived in the First city of the world"

Another turn of the wheel for me this week: my birthday, so I'm having a short break. I'll post if I can. I'm still not decided whether I'm taking my i-Pad with me. If not then I'll be depending on the bounty of whatever internet cafe I can flush out in Rome.

It's happened again: yet another near St Francis of Assis moment as Terry and I trudged through a bitterly cold Hyde Park trying to work out just exactly where in the this 350 acres of park, the resident Tawny Owls call home.

A quest in vain as it ultimately turned out; wherever they were, we were n't.

Still if one door closes, another really does open, and opens wide. We were given what might as well have been the avian equivalent of a cavalry escort. Birds popped up and out of everywhere; like miniature dust storms, whirling through the undergrowth.

Birds of every stripe and colour filled the bushes as we strode through the park. Close enough for them to have eaten out of our hands. They were fearless. It was something almost out of a Disney cartoon where humans and animals chat away; that surreal. 

Even the normally raucous parakeets put a sock in it as they drew nearer to us. So near in fact that either one of us could have made for a very passable Long John Silver with a parrot on his shoulder had we thrown an arm out.

This has happened before at the Barnes Wetland centre where we were virtually shadowed by a roving, darting band of extraordinarily acrobatic long tailed tits for hundreds of yards.

Why is this happening? 

Had there been any more of us squinting up at a non-descript bare branched tree tucked into the corner of just as a bland an end terraced house in South Ealing then the police would have probably pulled out the crowd barriers. Eight buff coloured waxwings sat out the occasional shrieks of wind tunnelling down South Ealing Road the way I imagine surfers wait for the next big rise. Riding each pulse before skimming down to a small tree draped with reddish coloured berries which is effectively Waxwings' spinach; gives 'em strength, health and vigour.

And these are hardy birds. Driven over from Scandinavia by hunger, they've irrupted into the UK in roving bands on the look out for waxwing ambrosia - anything red and in berry form. So this means they've dropped into some of the most unexpected areas - car parks, city centre churchyards and a temporary colony of eight, perhaps a few more, outside South Ealing station.

They are glorious birds. Buff, almost pinkish breasts, splashes of Matt yellow on wing tips and tails; that Scandinavian dress sense again, as if they've all seen the same costume designer, each one kitted out in the same thick, gorgeously knitted jumper that every Danish or Swedish actor wears in some Scandinavian noir series. Topped off with a jaunty cockade; they're one of the few birds I know who actually look like they have a feather in their cap.

People of South Ealing look up. There's beauty above.

The compulsion to read is this: once you have it you never lose it. As constant as a sunrise, as abiding as a sunset. Mine's been there since I can remember, in fact the first fragments of any real memory involve reading and the last will, no doubt, have a book in there somewhere.

I was talking about this with a friend a few evenings ago in the cafe of the National Gallery, doing my best to sketch out  exactly what is so intoxicating about reading. The shape of what I was trying to say did n't come out; feelings are n't easily captured sometimes, so the sense was there, but the taut description, which is what I wanted remained out of focus.

But you're never more than a few books away from the sentence or the statement that pulls the ether down, grabs it with both hands, moulds it, bends it, and throws out the exact shape of what you were hoping for. So what has the compulsion to read done for me? This: "My mind has travelled through words and books to places where my feet will never touch the earth" This is the most heartfelt and the most accurate explanation of what words have meant for me. Taken with joy from a short story by Ishmael Beah, an exciting writer from Sierra Leone now living in New York City.

How do I know it's Epiphany even if I'm a secularist?  A stroll on the evening streets is how.

The tide went out in Notting Hill, then it came back in again and sluiced up Xmas trees. Tree after tree. They are everywhere: on side roads, main roads, down tiny alleys. Many still luxuriantly green and all pine fresh fragrant, lying at crazy angles on the pavement.

Against the steps of warm houses or propped against the London Plane trees that etch their way down Holland park avenue. Or balanced against the side of municipal waste bins. Bought, used, forgotten, dumped.

Sad, silent, forlorn sentinels who bore the baubles of the season and now waiting in the cold to be picked up and fed to the council chipper. I see this every year.  Tempus fugit

Naked without a book, indeed anything to read on the tube home tonight. So that meant staring vacantly at the adverts, or glancing at the reflected blackness of the tunnel as the tube swished between stations.

The thing not to do is accidentally, and certainly not deliberately, engage eyes with any other passenger. This is Friday night on the tube. A small gesture like this can go rogue, flare way out of control.

I think what someone was trying to accuse me of but without actually saying it this morning was that I was guessing.

Correct. I was. Undeniable.

However the way he said it on the call was so garlanded with choicest cuts of corporate speak that I can even now only (yes, wait for it) guess that's what he was imputing.

There was something in there about me being offline too much, that I needed to dialogue and engage more with the matrix team, otherwise the dials won't change and we'll not achieve glide-path. And should I have really spent so much time boiling the ocean?

I would have pleaded guilty or refuted it all with the energy of someone swinging a long drive down the fairway at St Andrews. But, guy, you left me no real clues. just a tangle of perhaps he meant this, or was it that, or even something at odds with both of those. I don't know. Never will. I did n't understand then, I don't now, so I'm really working just on sense and mood, Like braille but without the raised dots.

Still, I did throw a hot one back, and hopefully just as mystifying, when I retorted that what I'd actually done was "...de-risked the mid point.." No, me too, no idea what it means; or from which neuron it popped up from. Just call it my contribution to the gobbledygook lexicon of corporate jargon

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.