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.