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again since the ... well, frankly, the blueness of it threatened to swallow my brand new consciousness
whole. My progress was the jerk-shuffle of the funhouse
punter on the moving staircase. I suppose it doesn't strike
you, particularly, that sunlight races ninety-three million
miles to smash itself to smithereens on Clerkenwell's concrete, transforming tarmac into a rollered trail of gem-shards?
Or that a slate wall will cool your blood's throb when you
hold your cheek against it. Or that sunmier-heated brick,
porous and glittering, has a taste unlike anything else on
earth? Or that inhaling the smell of a dog's paw-pads tells
your nose the animal's crammed and lolloping history? (I've
rubbed my nose in a good many places since then, but I'm
damned if I've found much to compare with the honk of a
dog's foot. It's the smell of idiotic and inexhaustible optimism.)
    Do you know what I thought? I thought, Something's
wrong. I've OD'd. This can't be what it's like for them. If
this is what it's like for them how do they ...? How on earth
can they ...?
    A group of bronzed and artfully stubbled labourers in
orange hard hats and lime-green plastic tank tops were
engaged in digging a hole in Rosebery Avenue. Four men in
dark suits walked past me, smoking and talking about money.
A black bus driver whose bus appeared to have died of a
broken heart sat in his cab reading the Mirror. Surely, I remember thinking in my innocence, surely it can't be like
this for them? How do they get anything done?

    Quite, I thought, looking at Gunn's watch. That's the
thing with New Time: before you know it, you've spent it.
Before you know it, it's gone. It kills us in Hell, you know,
the number of your deathbedders who, despite all the wristwatches and desk calendars, despite their life's tally of ticks
and torn-off pages, look around them in their last moments
with an expression of sheer disbelief. Surely I've only just ,c,'ot
here, they want to say. Surely I've only just be'iun? To which,
smiling and warming our palms around the arrivals hall
blaze, we reply: 1'ope.
    I must ,het on, I thought, having just finished my third 99
from the confection-coloured Super Swirl ice-cream van
which, after a jangling version of Three Blind Mice, had
stopped not thirty yards from I)enholm Mansions. That
friendly stray (mongrel, bit of German Shepherd, possibly a
bit of Border Collie, but mainly rubbish) had eaten up two
hours all on its own, what with its damned irresistible pawpads, what with its frowsty dreads, baroque breath and
try-anything-for-a-laugh tongue. (It hadn't occurred to me
that dealing with animals would be so different from inhabiting them. It hadn't occurred to me that in Gunn's skin they
might actually like me.) It had been a mistake to sit down
and share one of my 99s with him. Took the Flake in one
uninvited chomp, too, greedy hugger. Someone had walked
past and dropped 50p into my lap. Someone else had walked
past and said: 'Get a fucking job you scrounging cunt.' Well,
I thought, that's dear old London Town for you.
    Stopping at St Anne's lopped another half-hour off my
clock. Couldn't resist. You get so used to seeing churches
from the incorporeal side (I do a deal, a great deal of my
work in churches, usually during the homily, when all but the most besotted acolytes are in a state of surreal boredom
verging on hallucination) that the temptation to take a peek
from the material perspective was overwhelming. A quick
glance inside revealed thirty dark and uninhabited pews, an
iron-grilled aisle, a modernist altar in granite and oak, and,
crouched with Pledge and Jaycloth at the Communion rail,
floss-headed and strabismal Mrs Cunliffe (I kid you not),
the translation of whose galloping sexual desire for Lee
Marvin look-a-like Father Tubbs into obsessive church
cleaning leaves St Anne's spotless and the good padre unmolested. (I've got someone on her, don't worry. She's already
brought