My Favourite Things

Winter’s gone. Winter with its few people on darkening streets and anonymity under long black coat collar pressed up to cheek. Winter when I could step outside my front door to walk the streets of South Hampstead and round the silhouettes of hedge-lined streetcorners, all by myself. Mind sharpened by the knife-edged air, body braced against the outside world.

In a cold country a person can be alone in winter.

Now, though, summer is here, and as the daylit evenings stretch obscenely on these streets I had claimed as my own have been thrown open to public use. And sure enough, out they’ve come, with their prams and roller-skates and cute little camping chairs to go and sit at Regent’s Park and every patch of public green they can find. Sipping on beer at pavement cafes that weren’t there last week, squinting through their sunglasses wearing fewer clothes than expected, proclaiming their sunniness to all whose eyes happen their way.

The hedonists have been let out to graze on these quiet evening streets.

There are many months to go before winter comes again. All one can do now is pray for rain, for a few weeks of constant London rain: brooding grey skies, cleansings, catharses.

That should send them scurrying back in.