I’m Not Really Here

I think it was the Ancient Babylonians who decided there would only be sixty minutes in an hour, sixty seconds in a minute, and sixty ways to leave your lover – no, wait, that was Paul Simon, and even he had to trim it down to fifty so it would fit on a 7″ (thereby depriving listeners of ten of the most esoteric/contrived ways – conspiring with the window cleaner to kidnap you while your inamorata was downstairs making breakfast always seemed particularly desperate, and only really worked if your windows opened inwards, or had sash cords). But, yes, it was those pesky six-fingered folk from Mesopotamia who bequeathed to us the temporal system by which our lives are now governed, and whom I therefore blame whenever anyone asks why this blog hasn’t been updated for a bit: there just aren’t enough minutes in the day.

This is particularly relevant at the moment, as I’m working round the clock trying to get a book finished. Possibly it would help if I moved the clock out of the way, but… I digress. Basically, over at Smoke (my, ahem, “day job”), we’ve been putting together a book about London’s response to last year’s Olympics, and it was supposed to be at the printer’s, ooh, about three weeks ago. So now I’m doing nothing else till it’s finished.

This, of course, as well as being an apology/explanation, is also a blatant plug for said book. But given it contains quite a lot about Greenwich, as you might expect from a book about the effect of the Olympics co-edited by someone living in SE10 who had a man with a giant foam hand stationed outside his house for much of the duration, I’ve no qualms. But I’ll let you know more once it’s actually published. In the meantime, here are a few words to tantalise.

Don’t ever get me started on the Ancient Sumerians, by the way, them and their bloody stick writing.

Oh, this too; taken yesterday in Mountsfield Park, Catford:

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