Back only five minutes, I kick over another mound without realising, trampling the crazy paving of the undone. The Road to Hell. The half-finished, half-started journal entries and half-read books. Unfinished chapters and half eaten plates of food; plates and chapters staling together in the gardenshed air. This is London, where I could just as easily have kicked over an old woman. I stare at thy which has not been done, and my bed like a whore on tap perched despotically above it all. Slow sad breath.

This is a war.

It all looks exactly like the peoplechaos I encountered when I stepped off the train. An Asti bubble bursting into the bigger bubble of the surface. The world. Broken bubbles puffing air at the universe. London is more anonymous than ever.

People scream across its paving with silent heavy footsteps. Not Tom, Dick, Harry or Harriet. Just people. Just Tomdickandharry. A sea where everyone is sludged together. A boiling pot of coffee, custard, beef, liquorice, bean sprouts and honey; a sickly adrenaline goo of loneliness, alcohol, money, terror and frustration. Is this really my home? This great hungry mouth, this vomit, this violence? Away for only a week I can now see its teeth, hidden behind the shale, the rain and the neon - all decayed, uncleaned and stained with indulgence and neglect alike in another unhappy marriage of convenience.

Are you happy?

Exiled from saltwater all over again, I pretend I’m back on the train, pulling a coat I no longer own over me and staring out at vistas through Mona Lisa glass. Reflected over the sea like an oil slick and beneath hair clipped in a receding pique I see my face - my baggy eyes, two day stubble and chapped bitten lips. I watch the sea. I see my face. I look at the clouds. I see my face. I try and read the names of stations, shops and sidestreets as they whizz past like bad decisions, again and again and again. I see only my eyes trying to take it all in, desperate, clumsy, failing.

By London I see nothing. Saltwater, seabreeze and sunsets become McDonalds, pavement and traffic lights. My face bobs in the Tesco Value soup of other faces, all dilated pupils and trackmark smiles. This neon drug doesn’t work anymore. There is clarity only after that inevitable next hit. London. London London London. We can’t go on like this, London. We just don’t talk anymore, London. You know I’ll always love you, London. I think one of us should move out, London.

Our absence was my language.