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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two wonderful days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oratory unquestionably is the American art form.

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