early morning Cheapside, London bread and song, sushi being prepared in a window by four head-down workers in hats and latex gloves, dancing industriously around their preparation table; a city girl already proving on the street outside, her voice abandoned to the corporate money-speak and her shoulders pumped for the fight to come:

Tonight, the task in hand for me is to listen to and not be afraid of the silence, you know how it is . . . ?

Granny says, these modern women they don't know what they want any more

walker

I walk (it's what I do) for the memory of Steve Aston, of childhood walks along Dick Turpin's old hunting highways littered now with leaf matter, railway cuttings and alarmed blackbirds . . . but now I'm a peregrinator in the City, falling in step with a different pace and finding so many questions . . .

blood stains on a pavement in the shape of a palm tree . . .

A mood of timidity and exhaustion here, tangible in the air, giving the end of the week a slight holiday feel at 7.43am, an expectation of free days to come perhaps?

rancour

11/2/08

sat next to some fat, stinking, grouchy nobo-daddy on the X68 southbound, who gazed ahead of himself with eyes open but asleep, like a crocodile's lids hypnotizing the ready dead and guzzling down chain slurps of isotonic sugar drink whilst refusing to look either to his left or right -

tall woman by St Paul's whose botox face was falling apart – she was epitome of the proverbial mutton, though somewhat surprisingly she was stepping out fast paced through the thronging masses on their way to work, yet she must have been at least 110 years old – or maybe the chemical mask misled me?

7/2/08
a ball of nasty barbed pain (heartache) sits in me, right in the guts of me, that I wish I could cough up, expel readily like an owl removes the bones and matted fur of all the prey its eaten in a succinct little pellet of internal refuse, watch it shoot from me and sit there on the pavement so I could laugh at it and dance around it, out of me, gone, eradicated – but, no of course, it's here for the duration – ba boom!