03 August 09 AM/PM (technically lunchtime)

For once, I got out of the office this lunchtime. And almost instantly remembered why I don't usually bother. London is teeming with people who wander with neither direction nor speed, it's impossible to get anything to eat without having to queue, and I am evidently invisible.

I stopped at a crossing so as not to get run over by a bus bearing the slogan "Have you thanked Jesus yet today?" Have I? Should I? For the crappy weather? And the crappy recession which has forced me into a crappy job that makes me want to throw myself out of a window on a regular basis? No, not yet. But thanks for the reminder. Well, he can't only be responsible for all the good things - you have to take the rough with the smooth. But whilst we're talking of fictional characters, have you finished writing your thank you letters to Santa for all those years of full stockings? No? I thought as much.

As I carried on walking a girl was meanly heckling her friend who was lagging behind. In the fury of her gesticulations, her jumper had fallen from around her waist to around her ankles. She was very unaware of this, whilst I was not. Only I couldn't find any way to delay my progress on towards and then past her, to witness her falling on her leery mouth. And thus the hoped for solution has been playing its way out in my head on loop for most of the afternoon in absence of me witnessing it, or it actually happening. Loud girl fall over. Funny.

Whilst I was still tittering to myself, a man came up to me asking for directions. This happens to me a lot. Evidently I have the face of a true Londoner, which is probably an insult and also belies my utter lack of inner compass or TomTom at any time.
"Is this the way to Covent Garden?" He asked, heading toward Tottenham Court Road.
"Er, no. It's more over that way" I gesticulated in the vague direction of Covent Garden, for a change. "You need to go down Kingsway and take a right on Great Queen Street. That will take you straight to Covent Garden" This made me feel like I was some kind of directions ninja. A complete orientation back of the net. Whoop!
"And if I carry on this way?" He said
"Er, you get to some places which are not Covent Garden"
And so he carried on.

Pfscht. People.

02 Jul 09 AM

To me, the smell of summer is not that of freshly cut grass, it's chlorine, chemical toilets and the musty tang of a melamine cup which has languished at the back of a caravan cupboard for the last 11 and a half months. It's the smell of a freshly creosoted fence baking in the sun. It sounds like the gentle ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta of a hose sprinkler, and it tastes like Gini.

23 June AM

Scene: Drysdale Street, early-ish morning. The air is still cool, like the updraft from an open cornershop freezer compartment. The light promises a plesant evening for drinking in the street outside after work.

A lone woman walks West, passed on the opposite site of the street by a silent young boy (7) in non-descript uniform, eating non-descript convenience breakfast food. Behind a younger girl (5) with long blonde hair, a stride and a half - approximately longer than an adult's arm length - behind a slightly bedraggles middle-aged man, holding her hand.

Girl: [incomprehensible]
Father: "Oh Alice you're talking about nothing. It's total rubbish"

What did he expect? A pith summation of commentary on the current prescient political topics? She is a CHILD, she is SPEAKING, conveying thoughts to you using abstract audio symbols. This to me is miracle enough.

22 June 09 PM

Like Aristotle, I look to the earth as I walk. Yet my aspirations are more Platonic, as I hope for the gods to bestow great wealth upon me. Or at least a dropped fiver. How barren my soul has become.

18 June 09 AM

Today is a quintessentially beautiful day. The threat of oppressive heat filters the air I suck into my lungs, and my eyes - for once not dulled by hangover or lack of sleep - look up at this rose-tinted world as if it was new, fresh from the cellophane wrapper it had come in. I'm transported back in my mind to another street, in LA where we walked, foolishly, between districts, the sun lighting our path in a unfamiliar way to our British eyes, everything looked so culturally alien and charged with exciting possibilities. And just so today. It is beautiful. I feel beautiful.

Buoyed by this new found optimism, I find myself smiling - at children, at fellow commuters, at the window cleaner I pass on the street.

"Cheer up luv, it might never happen" he mutters, even though I am smiling.

"But it does, it will" I say, as fragments of his teeth tinkle across the pavement.
"You don't even fucking know anything about me, what I know, what I feel." I shake my wrist as my knuckles still reel from the crunch of fragile bone under flesh and sinew.
"And it's hardly as if your wit and charm are going to make me change my perspective anyhow, is it?" That last kick threw me slightly off balance. I won't be able to take these shoes back either any more, I think.

Only I don't. I just walk on. And the clouds gather and my gaze drops once more. As I have been reminded of the reasons I shouldn't be happy in the first place.

15 June 09 AM

Some bastard - some UTTER bastard - has got my bike. I don't know what happened, it was there one minute and gone the next, and I'd never even considered it going, not without my say so. I guess I just took it for granted, that I'd be able to walk past the scooter place past Farringdon station, and each morning see my little cream Vespa sat bathing in the morning sun. I'd figured out how I was going to scuttle aside the required £850, daydreamed about taking my CBT and joining the wheeled ranks which passed me in swarms to my right hand side every morning. I'd built a whole life around that bike; figured out how I was going to manage in the rain, the way I'd have to balance my haul from Sainsbury's between my legs as I pootled on back to my flat to cook. I''d even considered what to do if I ended up going for after-work drinks, where I'd lock my beautiful bike, how I'd wake up hungover and terrified that anything should have happened to it in my careless absence. I'd thought of having you on the back, the weight of your helmeted head on my shoulder, weaving through the city to some play or gallery with your fingers tight against my hips, the sunshine peeking under the rim of my helmet's visor. I'd dreamt of long trips out to the South Downs, to Whitstable, even back to the Cotswolds, just the two of us, negating the terrible taint that contact with other people from outside our little world would have on a decadent weekend. I'd thought of how I could escape; from work, from the madding crowds, from an argument with you. How my gallant charger would whisk me away through the sleet as the tears streaked my face until I could reach the warm sanctuary of home and warmth and a phonecall relaying kind words of reconciliation.

But it was not to be.

Maybe this is for the best – for an alternative scenario plays itself out in my head; that I love my bike so much that I go everywhere on it. I become on of those waddling species, unable to walk due to lack of exercise. That because of my unerring diligence towards my beloved charger, I stop frequenting the pub and become one of those dreadful bores who thinks too much and relaxes too little, that my wits – unchallenged – become dulled and wither, and my social life wanes. That essentially I become a fat, dull, bore, until one day I wobble my way in front of a speeding cement mixer. I wonder which fate shall befall the new owner. And yet, the bastard has my bike, but not my dreams.

10 June 09 AM

No RMT, we haven't had a pay rise either. But thanks for holding us to ransom and making us pay for our release in increased fares.

The streets are swollen this morning with hordes of subterranean commuters, set free of the Rotastack of the Central Line, dazzled by their freedom. The Blitz spirit of cab sharing and holding buses has been shown up as the perilously thin veneer of civilisation we suspected it to be all along, as pedestrians shout at cars, cars honk impotently on their creep along Old Street, and cyclists pit themselves against, well, everyone (including other cyclists). Men nearing retirement are riding frames evidently sized to their fruits of their loins, sporting pinstripe suits and no helmets, wobbling precariously amongst the vehicles which have been dusted down and hauled out from city centre storage for the day. And rollerblades! I ask you. "We can manage this! We're British!" Only we can't, and we're making a spectacular hash of it.

Please, RMT, take the deal. Before people start dying.

03 June 09

The soundtrack to today's stomp

02 June 09 PM

[Ring ring]
Me: *sigh* Hello Mum
Mum: Hello lovie, is this a bad time?
(Yes she calls me lovie, and she ALWAYS says "is this a bad time". And even if it is she carries on talking anyway)
Me: No, it's fine. I'm just walking home from work.
[Taxi honks to prove my point. Mum probably thinks I'm lying and just hanging out in the BBC sound Effects Dept]
Mum: Oh right. Did you get my message earlier?
(She called twice during working hours - once before lunch, and once after)
Me: No, we've been really busy at work.
(Plus I had to go out at lunch and buy shoes for tomorrow night. AND I was given a bollocking yesterday after being caught on the 'net - reading on the Guardian site about BNP nominees, nonetheless, but still on the 'net. So have been on super-best behaviour in our open plan office. Grrr, open plan offices.)
Mum: It's just that I've been trying to get hold of you
(Yes, yes, Dad's picking me up at 7 on Thursday. We have already discussed this several times)
Me: Yeah. Sorry. What's up?
Mum: It's just your Grandad's been taking into hospital. He fell over, we think he might have been unconscious for a couple of days..."

Sometimes where you are and what's going on around you don't seem so important.

01 June 09 AM

Never EVER trust a shoe sales person who tells you that, even though they don't have your size in stock, the shiny new Converse boots you've been coveting will "give" to fit.

29 May 09 AM

Watching people cross the road from my bus level vantage point, they seem so vulnerable. Their fragile little bodies being swept up in the ebb and flow of the mechanical river, little eddies conplying with Brownian motion.

28 May 09 PM

I'm not here, not really. In my mind I am thousands of miles away, walking down another street washed with the same sunlight. I can still hear the heavy hum of the city in the background, reverberating around the unusually deserted street. I can still picture the cool blue of the sky, and the trees beginning to reclothe their naked branches. This prose is terrible, but suffice to say I'm on my own at rush hour. It's not so far away in time or even distance really, but I wonder if it'll ever be possible to go back.

28 May 09 AM

I love living amongst artists. Every day I step out of my front door and someone's changed my perspective. I feel like things are happening here, and I'm being part of it just by clinging onto the coat tails as it rushes by...

27 May 09 PM

Today I have counted toilets, caught an overheated bus and broken my shoe. I need a beer. So despite my back crying out for someone to press their whole weight against it - in more ways than one - I have walked out of my way to get cheap beer from Tesco. The girl at the till seems surprised that I don't carry ID, despite it being legal for me to drink in this country for over a decade.
- No ID at all?
- No, my driving licence is on paper, in a filing cabinet in Gloucestershire. And it doesn't have a photo. And I've had my bag nicked enough times in London to not carry my passport.
- Well I'm afraid I can't serve you.
- But I'm 28!
- Well I'll tell you now you don't look a day over 20.
- That's kind of a moot point, isn't it? Given that you only need to be 18 to drink in this country?
- If you look under 25 you need to be able to show proof of age.
- But I don't look under 25. I'm a fully qualified architect, though, and I've got the business cards to prove it...
- You could have got those printed yourself.
- They're double sided, full colour, satin finish. Do you know how much that costs? Probably more than a fake driving licence, that's for sure.
- Well I'm afraid we can't accept that anyway. Those could be anyone's.
- Even if they're the same name as the one on the card I'm paying with?
- Yes.
- So you're accusing me of card fraud as well as trying to obtain alcohol under the legal drinking age...?

*huff*

Now I'm tired, red faced, frustrated and sober. And my back still hurts.

27 May 09 AM

There is a girl on the bus. She is about 7 or 8 years old. She's with her Dad, who seems a levelheaded kinda soul. Her name in Amelie. I can't help but think what an overbearing ass her mother must be.

26 May 09 PM

It is hot. Early evening sunshine - actual sunshine, rather than glow - beats down on High Holborn. There is joyous chatter floating out from open pub doorways, even this close to payday. The girl in front of me is wearing a the kind of lightweight floral dress I can never find in the shops, and is flip-flopping her way nonchalantly along the street. Yet I am wearing a leather jacket and carrying an umbrella. This is how you spot people who work during the day.

Good looking young gentlemen are making eye contact with me. Is there something on my face? Is it the jacket?

26 May 09 AM

It's raining, just to reinforce the tedium of the end of the long Bank Holiday's freedom. It's the kind of rain that makes me wonder why I'm carrying an umbrella, as it dances up to defy gravity and gently dowse my face and freshly ironed hair. In fact, it makes me I wonder why I'm wearing makeup, or indeed if I still am. Judging from the glances of some of my parallel commuters, it appears that it's certainly not all where I put it only minutes ago.

The air is still weighted down with the warmth of the weekend sun, but the rain brings a cold edge. It reminds me of late evenings in the summer playing in the sprinkler on the lawn, the soft grass and scorched earth under bare toes radiating back the heat of a long summer's day, whilst the icy cold water spatters against skin. But it's too early to give in to the calls of dinner and sleep and the prospect of another week at school just yet. Even if it is nearly dark and the shadows appear to shift ominously, now indiscernible from the trees from under which they creep...

Once upon a time...

I walked my dog every day around the lakes behind our house in the Shire, and in doing so I watched the subtleties of the seasons passing. Using the familiar landscape as my yard stick, I was able to watch the slow shift from heavily warm summer mornings to the cool, creeping crisp dusk of the winter. I always thought that I should take a photograph every day, but I never did. So this is my penance. A journey from Shoreditch to Holborn - and back - every working day.