Visionary London

If you walk the wrong way or aimlessly, if you approach something from a completely different angle, as if for the first time, that is, then you are momentarily jolted out of your silent thoughts and into a reverie, to a view of something or some place glimpsed in a completely fresh light.Why does a beer garden or a sunken beer garden appeal to you if it isn't because of that sense of being at ease with yourself.

The heart is rarely so open, the understanding hardly as supple as to receive so many different images and not reduce one to the other.

What little training you have has been wasted on abstraction and theory-which are great Negatives (unless you're brilliant and can make the leap).

~~~

You walked past the Brazilian restaurant and faced the
Angel, radiated in a kind of brilliant but mellow late light. 
You've walked past it a thousand times, just off Denmark street and the dilapidated church full of drunks, collapsed on the benches, stammering or mumbling to themselves (speaking in tongues). 

You quickly-too quickly-read a book on Blake after buying Sinclair's 'lost rivers' from the nearby Swedenborg bookshop, a stone throw's away from another church made famous by Hogarth (gin?). An arresting line: Clarity. Independence. Opposition. 

Imagination and place. How time is plural and how
we can step back into it-or, more mysteriously,it might be said: the past can reach out to us now and then.

At TK-Max (yeah, don't ask) a young gay man high-fives his incredibly small dog and speaks to him adoringly: you ain't gonna find no-one in Tk-Max, he teases the dog and the cashiers tilt their heads, sigh, and you can almost hear them say: 'how cuuute'. I think I'm going to throw up. Then, to my amazement, the young man picks up his change and says to the mutt: "come on Blake". Are you serious?

You're tempted to buy Gopnik's book on food and are drawn to what looks like an interesting journal (Gastronomica. One for later, perhaps).