Yesterday, as I waddled from a posh supermarket towards my bus stop at Clapham Junction with several heavy shopping bags, I was overtaken by a trotting girl who emerged from a phone shop and was laughing in to her mobile phone in a language that might have been Cantonese, BUT, her narrative was frequently punctuated with brilliant mimicry of a South London Jamaican lady that she’d just been arguing with about her phone contract, and she was totally convincing on all levels … vocabulary, syntax, and pronunciation.
Late this morning, in the space of one minute, driving the bright red truck past Sidlow Bridge, I saw a big old buzzard.flapping languidly from one solitary golden oak towards another that stood some way off in a big stubble field, then I disturbed a pair of sparrow hawks who rocketed away in different directions from the tangled hedgerow, and then after I’d blinked, a green woodpecker crossed the road in that swift undulating trajectory that typifies their top-heavy flight attitude.
On the way to Gatwick in near freezing conditions at five thirty this morning, the stars glittered and the space between us and them was filled with newly arriving intercontinental planes stacking and circling for their landing slots at Heathrow and Gatwick, and all their clockwork motions seemed compressed in to a smaller distance, their lights being so clear. When the sky eventually turned orange, the silhouettes of the incoming jets at Gatwick were pure black, even the ones that were dipping and banking fifteen miles away.
