All day l've been writing thoughts and phrases on pieces of paper as ideas and perceptions came to mind as i explored familiar and unfamiliar thoughts-and-places in the city, in the forest, and in my lifelong project that is only now becoming clear to me...

Here are some expanded versions of those scrappy notes:

On my way here i walked all the way from my new residence to the highest point where i could see, through clearest air, the tall buildings at Canary Wharf between which earlier today, i'd been carried in a jerky electric train without driver between glass and steel towers resembling the visions of futurist architects in the 1920s... i saw these today as defiantly anti-human, denying what i live for... though the automatic train is one of my favourite ideas.

...minutes later, Joanna and Amelia (a daughter and a grand-daughter) met me at one of the steel-and-concrete stations of the automatic train where we heard, and eventually saw, the once-ordinary sparrow which is becoming a rare bird in British cities - a signal, perhaps, that our designs and our constructions are becoming dangerous to many of us though not, it seems, to that particular sparrow!

And later, as i looked over the city from the highest point of the Heath i saw the clear sky, with small puffs of pinkish clouds, and hill beyond Greenwich, and other hills beyond that, all clearly visible.

Then, at the Vale of Health pond, i saw a heron rise slowly fom the edge of the pond and fly over the water until it was high enough to to clear the trees... and i was reminded of another heron, also flying over a pond, that i described in the second entry to this diary in France, on 2nd april 2001.

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atlas

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