"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value.
Breakfast: Sausage roll from the market.
Lunch: Picked at various things, nothing memorable.
Dinner: Split pea daal with grilled courgettes and diced streaky bacon. The flavours work; the textures, sadly, do not.
Music: Bruce Springsteen's Greatest Hits. The Proms on Radio Three, iPod on shuffle.
Narrative: It's been pissing it down intermittently all day. My flânerie took me, as usual, to Islington, where I sat on a wet bench, letting the falling rain gradually clear my head of its habitual distracted confusion, as my organs systematically started to sieve my blood of last night's booze. I've been a bit out of sorts recently, and I'm struggling to find an adequate explanation.
It was mid-morning, and the square was pretty much deserted even before the rain. The few remaining shoppers fled as the wind picked up and the drops became streams. I saw a man hurrying along with an empty pushchair, and a way behind him his daughter in a pink plastic coat. I guess she was about three, maybe four years old. Some of the slabs that make up the paved surface of the square are covered over with pictures of flowers, as you can see above. I don't know how it's done; or why. It appears to be some kind of photographic transfer onto a laminate, but more than that I can't tell.
I watched as the little girl jumped up and down on a purple flower. She jumped with the uninhibited glee that only a three year old can muster. Oblivious to the rain, and her father's increasingly strident pleas, she jumped, and jumped, and jumped. Eventually he came back, sighing, and took her by the hand. She gave a last, longing look backwards at the purple flower, and then they were gone, scurrying off toward the shelter of the nearby arcade.
Catch y'all soon. Have good Mondays.
Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 19:48 
