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.