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.