Monochrome set

London is daubed a drab grey and smothered of light. I haven't been in the UK in January for a few years and I feel it. I miss the brighter shades of harmattan Abuja and the warmth. Although I have my camera with me, I can't drag myself to take a single picture. Meanwhile, I have been busy exhausting myself catching up with friends, cinema, shopping etc. Babel I didn't like (too contrived and incoherent), the Last King of Scotland is worth seeing (I liked it better than The Constant Gardener, which is a similar tale of muzunga complicity in Africa - Forest Whitaker is majesterial); Perfume on the other hand is a fantastic film - more tempting as a critical allegory of the society of the spectacle than the book, and a visually phantasmagoric feast (how did they film those bridge shots?). Dustin Hoffman has a delightful cameo role...

Despite the cold, London continues to fascinate and beguile. I meet a man who has the rights to Botox in India and wonders if I'd be interested in working with him (a move to Bombay - now there's an idea), I bump into dear friends (in Mildred's, where else?) who just happen to be in town (they live in Barcelona). How weird that I chanced into them the last time I was here. I meet up with a fellow naija-blogger and realise that I'd already met him (how strange to glue person and blog together again). I am browsing in Foyles when a man nearby asks for a book called Transmission but he doesn't know the author. I tell him how to spell Hari Kunzru. Moments later, he has the book in hand and smiles at me as he leaves the shop. 'My friend is negotiating an option on the film rights.' Then there is always so much to admire in the sartorial sways of London fashion - a smart looking Asian woman with a stud in the middle of her cheek, a peroxide blonde at Euston with 8 inch foam platform shoes, a ferocious looking white man in Greek orthodox garb at King's Cross, a well-fed tramp in comfy jumper (almost everyone must think the same thing when looking at him), a man with a fantastically well cut hounds tooth trench coat on on Regent's Street etc. I slurp down mushy peas on the bus (a little rude I know, but I was famished) - a handsome olive skinned man asks me with a quizzical air what I am eating. I explain the joys of mushy peas in winter time. It turns out he is from a kibbutz very near the one I stayed at all those years ago.

Even when its cold and seemingly unyielding, London offers itself as another form of reality in a thousand ways, through chance encounters such as these. Pathways open up into other ways of knowing and seeing all the time here, if one can only remain alert to the possibilities and the potentialities. But amidst all this, I miss my wife.


Meanwhile, today, my mom is 60, 140 miles north of here. The champagne floweth, and will continue too for the next few days (all the best socialists love the stuff). To the shires, in a couple of days..