I've found an upside to sarcasm. Did n't set out to find it, it walked out of the undergrowth on it's two legs. But as it's lumbering around in the open air now then might as well say what it is.

Sarcasm gets you noticed.

My professional profile is so much more heightened, my contours sharper than they were before I went on that conference call with my new boss, but did n't recognise his voice, and sent a sarcastic zinger (well, deep sigh, plus a few words) zipping towards someone else on the call.

My boss commented, I wilted like a dying rose, flushed briefly, then paler, paler, until very pale; still, he knows who I am. Upside to most things if you look.

Motto for back to the office tomorrow: keep calm and carry on. Going to need it. Big backlog of e-mails curdling over the long weekend and some not good news about jobs in this morning's papers.

I was at a Rugby match this afternoon that was neither hot, nor cold, just colourless and earthbound.

There were flashes of drama, and the occasional touchline tussle where you could almost see the shock waves radiating after a bruising tackle; but for long periods the match lacked any hook. I sat there, watched, and took nothing in.

I prayed for action, even controversy, a questionable decision, anything to make it memorable, so there would be at least something to dissect - and probably dispute in the car on the way home - but really more for a friend's young son. This was his first time at a match.

With the noise of drums and ragged terrace chanting, booming around the ground, and men shouting or whistling, the place was a cauldron.

I wanted him to go home with the foundations of a memory - the time he went with his dad and his dad's friends to a rugby match.

I was hoping he would experience, and never forget, the camaraderie, that following your side into battle fosters. Where you become part of something bigger and sense the mutual complicity that goes with it. Being amidst the hubbub of excited, roaring crowds. And how to work through the all too often heartache of the ball just not bouncing the way you hoped.

Instead, the game delivered flat nothing.

If I'm honest, then I know why I wanted it to be a gotterdammerung of a game, it's this: in remembering the game, he would remember us, his dad's friends as well. We would live on even when we're no longer here.

I had a profound sense of my own mortality throughout the whole game. Unknown adventures and excitements await this young man's generation which none of us will see.

No other city in Britain has anything like the capacity London has for chance encounters.

It's beyond stating the obvious; the size of the place, the hubbub of simply being the capital, the centrifugal force it exerts on all aspects of life, could n't allow it to be anything else but the place for bumping into someone who has an interesting, often unusual, occasionally quirky story to tell.

Many of these seemingly serendipitous meetings really are n't if you think about it.

My theory is that people of similar sensibilities seek each other out for one thing and cluster around similar nodal points for another. Take today as an example. At the gallery where I volunteer, I met a fascinating London based, Rosanna Arquette look-a-like Russian Film director, who had just finished making what seems to be an acutely poetic film of Sicily, and was wandering around the gallery late this afternoon seeking inspiration for her next film.

This would never have happened to me in my hometown. Never. Thank God for London.

To temper the joy (near joy, after all it's probably been done by some robotic device) of having a celebrity follower on my Twitter feed, I've gone through the wearisome exercise of writing a complaint to the company who manage the block of flats I live.

It's small, it's about poorly fitted hall carpets, nothing at all in the scheme of things; it's the fact I have to do it that makes me vexed. I hand these guys a sizeable chunk of money every month. Where's my return on investment?

Everything is a battle with them. Nothing is easy. It's attrition. I'd just like things to go smoothly, quietly and transparently.

Jeez, I've got a celebrity follower ! Anvil are following me on Twitter. Go, boys, go. Seeing the film again tomorrow night.

Most of the books that lie on my shelves have been read all the way from the opening sentence all the way to the closing. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly; nevertheless, however long it's taken, I've always made it to the finish line.

Usually.

The clue is most because that means not all, and that's important.

There's a growing number that I've started in hope, eager to be stirred, and taken away from the mundane, only to lay them down unfinished, disappointed, wondering what I'm missing or not getting; and on occasion even mystified as to just why a particular book has the fan base it has, when, bluntly, it's unreadable.

Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot" joined that group yesterday. However hard I persevered, the story never opened up for me. I saw words, lot's of them, scurrying everywhere, but they were n't like little parties of ants forming up into tiny platoons of words, and marching the narrative along.

So I gave up

A number of things are bothering me right now: my new credit card has n't arrived - it was supposed to be sent to where I work yesterday; then the carpet fitters have n't finished laying the carpet in the common areas where I live, and it looks a mess, particularly around my front door, where there's a tongue of carpet curling upwards that has to be trimmed, or I'll keep falling over it.

But the big one, the elephant that I can see in the room - is my utter lack of decent clothes. Any clothes really. Not got a thing, a shirt, a button, a jacket, pair of trousers, shoes. Nothing. I could n't even wrap a towel around myself; they're as frayed and threadbare as everything else.

Christ, I'm must be a sight boarding the Tube, or heading to the shops, I should ring a handbell...but redemption, I do smell nice. L'Occitan en Provence, thou art my saviour here. Untold prayers.

Still, I did get a heartlifting moment walking back to the office from Liverpool Street this afternoon. I ran into one of the G20 protests (to be honest I did want to see them - there are other ways of reaching the office), a mass sit down cum cook-out cum mini tent city just up the road from the growing Heron Tower.

In that great heaving, impromptu mass of people and passions, and ideas that will eventually become mainstream, was the nucleus of the next generation of new leaders, opinion-formers, thinkers, writers, film-makers, bubbling away growing by the moment. Democracy in motion, haphazard, raw, sometimes angry, always engaged, sincere and thoughtful. Wonderful.

Hells bells, the 13 year old son of a dear friend has 582 Facebook friends. I can't even break the 20 ceiling. Low achievement at work is something I put up with, but on Facebook as well....no..no..no... Is there a support group?

I don't know which shocks me more: the fact there are no clothes in my wardrobe fit enough even for a scarecrow, or that I'm older than the father of someone I work with.

My afternoon has been grey and ashen since I found that out. I feel like the Venerable Bede now.

"Top hat, new shoes, everybody's crazy about a sharp-dressed man..."

But no one's feeling that way about a crazily dressed man. I need a new set of threads to go out in. Jeans no longer maketh the man. Boot heels are worn to nubs; jeans more frayed then a thousand year old Arabian carpet, and shirts scorched and burnt by careless ironing.

Going to be shelling out for something decent post pay-day

Shoes to be shined.. but don't cross your feet so high that the worn soles show, though. Find the best pair of half way decent jeans, and squeeze those stubborn creases and wrinkles out before the iron whimpers and says enough.

Shirt or sweater ? And are any of them clean ?

Shave, yes, can't forget that I get five o'clock shadow, but at nine in the morning. Fingernails...bitten to the quick so no worries there. Stray hairs, no, not on my head where they ought to be, but to the dark places they've all fled to - nose, ears.... prune back, be merciless.

Have I got a coat...no...sorry...have I got anything that could actually pass as a coat...

What can I pull together from the floor and chairs that do for the wardrobe I should have - and do, just that it's packed top to toe with books - that'll make me appear even semi well dressed ?

Still in a French state of mind and enjoying the after glow, but more pressing is that I've not spoken to anyone today...well not a conversation more than twenty words, shop and cafe talk, that's all it's been. I need to call someone. Fingers start walking through that address book.

Three perfect days in Paris: sun, light winds, blisteringly blue skies.

There's barely a corner, nook, cranny, or hidden pocket of this terrific city that I did n't wander into. My feet are steaming, and my shoes fit for the dump, the soles worn paper thin and more like two upturned colanders than the sturdy two boots they started life out as.

They had to throw me back on the return Eurostar this afternoon.

Bloody hell, it's cold tonight. I was frozen walking over Hungerford Bridge tonight, especially my poor hairless head. The neurons and synapses still have n't thawed out.

If only the film I'd just seen could have a left a memory to match that of simply feeling cold on a March evening in London. In the City of Sylvie is truly awful; an art-house stalker movie with beautiful people, just staring at each other. Fetishistic, creepy, and unpleasant to boot.

Sylvie, why did n't you turn around, give your fey-faced, Chatterton lookalike either a ringing crack around the ears or scream your lungs out and tell him to shove it.

Christ, where were the gendarmarie? Put the cuffs on the poor boy and yoke him off to clink.

Every Thursday I see a trio of unicyclists with street hockey sticks slung over their shoulders pedalling along my street. Where do they go to play? I'd follow them if I could run as fast they can cycle.

There's a skyscraper - the Heron Tower - slowly appearing on the City's skyline. Two floors are added every fortnight; it's like watching a flower gradually break through the soil, sniff the new air, then begin to flex and push upwards.

I love walking past and seeing the cranes swing the beams over, then watch them guided into place and swiftly riveted into position. A giant urban meccano set.

You can't make 'em high enough in my book. I've been entranced by them from the very first time I glimpsed the Manhattan Skyline sat on the Carey Bus heading in from JFK in the summer of 1982.

Manhattan, then and now, was a jungle riot of tall, sleek, pinnacles. Mysterious, alluring and enchanting. Almost like a fairy tale city of spires and turrets. It would take the hardest heart and one stripped of any romance not to be inspired by this. Never fails to lift me or make me feel somehow special, that I'm a participant in something electric and magical. These are cloud factories.

London's skyline is crinkly, a ragged, torn strip of roofs, mid rise towers, gloriously stumpy buildings, and now, a brood of skyscrapers beginning to dominate. Seeing the Heron Tower unfurl is a visual intoxicant. I feel like a proud gardener, even parental, whenever I walk past: "look how tall you've grown...".

Hurry up and finish building. Don't slack, either, on the Pinnacle, and get the Leadenhall Tower started. Make the London Skyline magical.

In Liverpool St station this evening, hurrying to the underground...glance at the TV screen in the concourse...Sky News on...see the Pound / Dollar exchange rate and then the Pound / Euro...fall straight to the ground...near comatose.

This is it: we're a European banana republic.

Everything is intermediate; whatever it is, is coming from somewhere and heading on to somewhere new. Nothing is static.

Blogs are n't an exception, they don't buck this rule. I think a lot of people are moving over to to Twitter, and it's haiku like, 140 character restricted brevity, and leaving Blogland behind.

Tweets are like slow parades of ants: gradually, incrementally, impression by impression, the picture starts to form.

Meanwhile, Blogs are for the heavy lifters; great paving slabs of texts that have to be dragged into place the way we envisage they built Stonehenge.

Baby, I'm done, all in, I'm beat. No strength left even to whine about the bitch of a day it's been. And it all started so well.