online: 7 october 2007
modified: 7 october 2007

29 september 2007 overlapping worlds


18:39 ...Hampstead Heath Extension, not far from the Great Wall (the mock medieval boundary of Hampstead Garden Suburb...)

...i walked here from Temple Fortune where i occasionally go to buy health food (as if the food in other shops is unhealthy... which i suppose it is, ecologically, or in its artificiality?)...

...on the way i passed a French street market... the tents and stalls, and the people selling things, are all from Normandy or thereabouts... and i heard an English woman speaking French as she asked for something... and for a moment i felt i was not in England

...i passed a bench in memory of a man who lived 102 years... (i heard recently that people over a hundred are now the fastest growing age group...)

...enjoying in the dusk the sight of a large expanse of mown grass... recently vacated by cricketers and seagulls... yes it's a monoculture ... but i must admit to its attractiveness...

...i've just eaten some of the plums and a too-large-for-me slice of French flan... together with a sandwich i brought with me...

(...in this calm and silent place i should be able to write anything... but what i was hoping to write today still evades me...)

...at a bus stop two people are speaking, even arguing, in French... a sound seldom heard here since the Norman Conquest, i imagine... Britain is now becoming physically a part of Europe... but i prefer to think of each country as spreading beyond its recent borders and overlapping (in various densities, never zero) the whole of the globe, as well as the moon or Mars, and the 800 or so satellites through which we can see the earth and ourselves as a single location and people... as well as being natives of various countries... i like to think of myself as descended from the pre-celts, with the animals and plants as distant cousins...





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