7.30am

The sheep and goat pens on Buxton Street are empty early doors, save for the magpies and sparrows bouncing on the woodchip. I can hear a big dog’s echoey bark somewhere towards Hoxton. A little grey felty purebreed in a tartan jacket is being walked into Allen Gardens, twitching, its owner wearing woolly earflaps. Pigeons peck at the middle of Brick Lane, darting, chancers, almost pretty and poetic in front of the headlights of a white van in the thin dawn. The Dray Walk cleaners shelter in the kebab shack, smoking.

They are digging up the roads and the pavements. They are unloading boxes of bottles next to the wine bar. They are making San Pellegrino and olive oil deliveries to Pizza Express. They are diverting traffic. They are stopping pedestrians and cyclists to let heavy trucks come and go, flopping pale wet dirt wads onto the walkways, creamed under 40,000 shoes.

There’s an overturned cup and a puddle of Latte at the corner of Bishopsgate and London Wall. Seems to be a spill there almost every morning. Scuttles of people in big coats and striped suits and hats and gloves and scarves with briefcases, suitcases, newspapers, books, coffee, cigarettes. With rushing about their daily business. With mobile phones. With distractions and intimate calls in the middle of crowds of strangers.

I will definitely overtake people on the bridge when I spot a gap in the oncoming heave of commuters. I plan to speed up and nip out, keeping my head down – no eye contact - and my long coat away from the burning fag ends. I will sidestep the Big Issue seller’s steaming cup of tea and the diabolos at the motley feet of the juggler as he fills his flame batons with white spirit. I will absolutely bolt to the finish line of my office steps when I get into the final straight of Borough High Street, with the survival instincts of an upstreaming salmon.

But when I am only halfway there and the bloke behind me at the crossing pushes me forward, before the lights have even changed, I push back and scowl because I want to head in slowly today. Today I want to let it all go on around me. Today when it isn’t even properly light yet.