hyperopia

It's greyer out than in. Flat winter sea-side light that won't allow a texture in, stops forms from etching in the gloom. It's floodlit, but not like a photoflood. No, not warm, it's dank, fills every empty pool with a banality that depletes me. It's SAD light. Inside it's tungsten yellow, a warm mellowness, for matinees, muffins, and fireside hostages. I'm walking to the river, as it's suicide composting on the sofa. The traffic, like rain before it develops character, drizzles it's way along the road. There's a kind of slow motion here in strolling to the river. Dull days are like bewildered grammar. Today is like one long sentence without punctuation slipping and sliding uncertainly between unrelated clauses and random prepositions. I slide into the eventuality of this insular indulgent mood and hope to make sense of it by averting my gaze uncharitably from the grizzly faces of passers-by with whom I'd rather not relate.

Suddenly, also sliding, two protagonists come into my lonely little play as one black and the other silver Mercedes cross paths, smack, headlights crack, wings fray and the scene, no injuries, conveys the exclamation mark so far missing from my day. Pepped-up by a little vigour, I turn with jolly gait, into Queen Elizabeth Street, and head for Maggie Blake's Cause, and the river. I've been coming here for years to sit, contentedly, looking out blankly, not quite to sea - not awaiting the French Lieutenant exactly - but it amounts to the same thing really. In London I seek structured opportunities to expedite these vacant episodes of staring. There's Primrose Hill and it's unfolding vista rolling sight lines grazing Westminster, Canary Wharf and fading into Greenwich Park where this picture is reversed but just as blissful. Richmond Park, Wimbledon Common, I suppose even The Eye provides this visual nectar, but for me, my window on the river is where I effect a kind of sensory dumbing down. I recently considered moving onto the twenty-second floor of Aragon Tower in Deptford Creek. Here, you pay for height not space, the chic sun-kissed twenty-second floor costs twenty to thirty thousand more than the dingy lower level flats. It's expensive to eschew the floor in favour of the sky. But I end up on Butlers Wharf, and where the river swings north-east - The Pool it's called - and passes Wapping, the sky and river meet. It's not exactly what the Time-Out guide to London would call breath-stopping, but as my eyes trace the distant silhouettes of cranes, church spires in Rotherhithe and Millwall, the thrusting towers of Canary Wharf, and old warehouses, now apartments, cladding both banks, I feel that I could sit here long into the night whilst the landing planes of City Airport are reduced to pretty blinking lights.

Through the bascules of Tower Bridge, the prettiest City view of all: The Gherkin, Lloyds, Nat West, The London Port Authority, Custom House, St Paul's.

Close up, in a corner, underneath a nearby bench, some abandoned orange flowers, green stems wrapped in fine gold leaf ? I put on my glasses, oh, an empty Veuve Clicquot bottle, left from New Year's Eve.