Continued cloudless sky despite wind being from the Atlantic for a day or two. The tail of a high flying kite is being blown to the east, the moon is low above the trees to the south-west - as it was when i wrote from this spot yesterday...

This evening i arrived while hundreds of people who have been here this hot sunday were leaving - now i can see only 30 or so and some of them are walking towards the surrounding city...

Before reaching this point i walked to the highest point - the seat overlooking the Vale of Health which is about 20 minute's walk from where i expect to be living in a month or two...

I realise now that, when there, i will have crossed a geographic watershed into a different catchment area, or valley... i expect i will also have crossed a human watershed: from the people who live on the southern slopes of Parliament Hill (close to the inner city) to those who live on the western and northern slopes of Child's Hill, close to Hampstead Garden Suburb - which became an inner suburb when, with the construction of the underground railways, suburbia expanded far beyond (copying the superficial form of the idealistic garden suburb but not its low density, social mixing, and careful planning to create what i'd call 'a city in a forest')...

...Child's Hill also overlooks the Roman road from Dover (originally the Welsh name Dwfr, or Water, the nearest point to the mainland of Europe) to Anglesey, or Ynys Mon, in North Wales (a point of embarkation to Ireland)... its Roman name is Watling Street and it is straight but for one turning... almost the same route chosen about two thousand years later by the builders of the canal, the main railway and the motorway to the north west... and there is also the site of Hendon aerodrome, now built over by suburban houses...

...but back to the present:

as i look eastward i see a kestrel (or some other kind of hawk) hovering above the meadow before me... and now it has dived half way to the ground before flying off horizontally...

an athletic looking man is jumping along and kicking his legs high in front of him as he walks in a curving path through the long grass... now he reappears skipping sideways as he runs - perhaps he is a professional athlete - he doesn't seem at all embarrassed to be performing these unusual, perhaps childlike, actions...

...i often see people performing unusual actions on the heath - from yoga and tai-chi to the two women i saw yesterday pretending to hang garments out to dry on a string tied between the trunks of large trees while another woman took what i assumed were fashion photographs... this evening i saw someone rotating his body to right and left with his arms bent at shoulder level... i suppose everything we do can seem strange to someone who is not used to it. How very obvious!

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atlas

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