One or two pics taken this weekend that cheered me up a bit.

I’m having a really bad day. I can’t help it. Maybe it’s just the fug of gloomy cloud that has rolled in over what was previously a quite sunny July.

My mood has just suddenly slumped and I’m taking everything really personally. I constantly feel either like I want to burst into tears, or never say a word to a living soul again.

Plus my bus journey home had to be shared with a binful of screaming children all stamping their feet, running up and down the aisle and screeching, with their mothers just looking on and smiling as the shrieks of their insect offspring tore the neurons from my very synapses.

As I sat down in the heart of the juvenile maelstrom, picking up a bag of soggy food and a half full Pepsi can that had been left on the seat for Someone Else To Deal With™ I really felt like crying. What is wrong with people? Why does no one ever give the slightest regard for anyone else?

People are horrible.

Whatever happened to that London Community Spirit of only a few weeks ago? Is it really business as usual again? Typical, selfish, thoughtless, moronic London business as usual?

I’m back to looking at maps of Vancouver again, wondering where the best place to rent an apartment is.

The parasites that ran away at the blast, terrified for their own safety and no one else’s, have now all scuttled back and are crawling all over London once more.

“Humans,” he sighed, half exasperated, half disappointed.

How inconstant both of us are. You with your whims and fancies about epic and important things, and me with my gravity and thunderstorms about matters not outweighing a sylph’s sneeze. You play house with gods and barely stifle your yawn at the breakfast table. And then there’s me, living alone, but desperately filling his house with worthwhile possessions. You live on one side, and I on the other – between us pass only shades. But the real difference between us, the only one I think, is that I only know what love is, whilst you only know where it lives.

I awoke from a strange dream of mice and death. About a search for a cage, for a mouse that changed colour and shape, from a mother possessed by her ghosts, under an eye that is ever watchful. It smudges its gaze into dust from our very bodies, settling even beneath the cage for the little life I clutch. I awake holding nothing – that life slipping from my grasp like any other dream into the morning. Either this pocket of the universe continues to unravel, or it was still something to do with the ludicrous amount drunk on Friday night.

It takes one half hour walk on a beach to remind me how much I miss the sea. The clean scent of salt mist everywhere; the pulpy beads of seaweed popping beneath your feet; seagulls playing like baby gods all around, whilst all the while the wind ruffles your hair. The sea is edge of the world and the beach is life’s last carnival, with every crisp and clean sight, sound and scent thrust into one bright place and time. When I am older I must live near moving water. If I live that long. If any of us do.

We all have our skeletons in the closet, our Beltane shadows behind the curtain, our urges and angers and indulgences behind the thin veneer of a Victorian hangover. What is beauty without its ugly twin? Nothing but a dream, untethered to reality, unreachable by any achievement or effort. Put more simply, we need the bad things to appreciate the good. Without the putrid rotting soil, not a single flower could grow. But who ever looks beyond the petals or beneath the stem? Who would ever look to see what makes beauty so fragile? Truth in itself is so seldom beautiful.

Yesterday evening, no later than about half eight when it was still bright and as I walked up the hill to Highgate Village, a fox quite calmly and quite boldly strolled out of the cemetery gates and began to trot a slow pace in front of me. Every now and then it would stop and look back at me, before continuing its pace of no more than two metres ahead of me all the time.

A man I passed had the same bewildered expression as we both watched it. It didn’t seem afraid. It wasn’t sneaking about in the shadows waiting for everyone to be snug in bed. It was walking around in broad daylight. If anything it seemed arrogant. Young and foolish.

That’s all I really want to say about the attempt to repeat the events of two weeks ago in London today. Just that somewhere in this big city they’re probably still stalking about, amidst the rubbish and the dirt and the shadows, and most likely terrified anytime anyone comes near them. Not the foxes.

Io fei giubbetto a me delle mie case.

That’s been going around and around my head all day and I don’t know why.

The news about the latest attempt to kill innocent people filtered in slowly. The reports were mostly garbled and uncertain, and just like last time, the first we heard of it was a call from New York. A friend of my colleague works in Reuters, and would pass on some pieces of unconfirmed information as they came in, most of which were soon rejected. One such piece was that they had caught one of the bombers whose detonator had failed, so he had detonated the explosives on his back. My immediate reaction shocked me. It was “good.” Hate breeds hate.

I felt Rowling’s work to be a pale imitation of that of the aforementioned Tolkien, Dahl and Cooper. And to be blunt, it seems unoriginal and poorly written in comparison.

Thank you, Rob Winder, for articulating what I’ve been saying all along!

I found this whilst going through some expenses.

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The ticket was stamped at 9:03am, so it would have been just after the initial blasts on the Underground.

I wondered if things like this would become a macabre collector’s item, like a penny pressed at the top of the twin towers on 9/11. I’m not exactly about to put it on eBay to find out.