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.

Dariush Dianato R.I.P

My husband is marvellous

Me:  "Did you manage to get to the post office to pick up that package?"

Him:  "Yeah, I went to the post office but it said on the box 'beauty products' and you don't need no damn beauty products."

Me: "Awww, you are so sweet!"

Him: "So I left it there."

Sunday evening

Brick Lane Bargain Hunter

Dystopia

The new science fiction film Children of Men is set in a disturbing, apocalyptic Britain of the future. So which grim location would a group of terrorist kidnappers chose to shove the hooded hero Clive Owen out of a van?

Round the corner from my workplace, of course.

(the junction of Leman St and Dock St, London E1)

It really is time that I got a new job.

Benchman

Marcos & Gareth

Outside Cat

Two nephews, one niece

We sailed the kids up through the drab bleached cut-price neon wholesale-only sweatshop fashion highway into a deserted shopping arcade, wandering past the beautiful brown Shadwell people in swathes of pink and orange and turquoise and black, with ninja eye slits and mobile phones and big trainers. We bounced above the glinting docks on a red and blue train with no driver, spotting yachts and swans and a giant inflatable octopus and bubbles in the afternoon light over a floating rectangle of sand. We showed them the massive masted last surviving tea clipper in the whole wide world, soundtracked by a bandannered busker playing a didgeridoo. They walked along a tunnel under the Thames and back. We stood at the argent shining base of Canary Wharf and snapped our necks back to try to make size sense of the multistacked floors and vast repeating patterns of windows. The sun baked and brightened east London and we ate spiced chicken and walked home through the park to wrap up in blankets in the garden and make shadow puppets from the street light.

Their lasting memory of the day is of a dead dog washed up with the plastic water bottles on a beach out at Greenwich. The rotting black and fly-punctured furless streamlined cantering carcass of an indefinable breed, pulsating with stink and murky wet whispers of a vile unnatural death.

“Not something you see everyday!” said Jack, aged 9.

He told his Mum about it and also, later, confessed to having accidentally used “the f word” on her answerphone. So I am wondering if they’ll be allowed to come again? I let them have jelly (American jello) for breakfast. What can I say? It was a one time offer. I figured they are only reckless little kids for a tiny while.

Still raining

Top of the Hill

Springtime in Cheltenham

Shedgirl

Dangerous Tip

Half-team

Altab Ali Park

The bit of my desk that I look at the most.

Baishaki Mela

Brick Lane