Blue and gold

London - MY London - today is grey, cold, and rather gloomy, and not a little emotional. It feels as if it might burst into tears at any moment, rather like a premenstrual teenager. As if nobody understands it. As if it stayed out too long at the weekend and it's parents have withdrawn priviledges for the rest of the month.

The many tourists are banked up on street corners, shivering as they stub their cigarettes out on the pavement, and muttering mutinously to each other "But zey told me zis was a party town! 'Ave you seen ze prix of zat pastry? And Starbucks is much too bizzy! Excuse me, madame, where is ze tube station?" "That would be the building behind you. And please don't - spit your gum out on the street. Too late, I see..." At which point they look at me uncomprehendingly and I stomp crossly off down the road.

Maybe it's not London feeling pre-menstrual. Maybe it's actually me.


But yesterday, MY London was blue and gold.

The sun shone, glinting off the windows, reflecting back from the white paintwork, and warming the light brown bricks to a pale gold colour. The sky was a washed-out wintry blue, the blue of my convent-school summer dress (the one with a rather kinky zip down the front, which always caused much amusement and hilarity amonst the grammer boys from the school up the road. We loved that, of course. We were convent school girls, after all.) There was not a cloud to be seen in the high arch of the sky.

In our garden square, following 3 days of unseasonably warm weather, the birds were welcoming an early spring, making plans for redecorating their nests, earmarking plots where they could raise their hatchlings in safety. The French Mafia were absent (their off-spring all no doubt causing mayhem on the snowy slopes of the Alps), so there were no chic wrap-around sunglass clad mummies pushing Bugaboos, sipping lattees, and ignoring their nasty older children fighting and bullying each other on the swings, and we had it blissfully all to ourselves. The Boys ran around shrieking, playing Power Rangers (or Power Aynjers, as Boy #1 insists on calling them), hide and seek and football. The football, of course, ended in tears when as usual, Boy #2 missed the point and ran away with the ball.

I bought pretend cookie after pretend hot chocolate after pretend sausage roll from the two year old shop keeper in the playhouse. Trousers were muddied, wellington boots were lost and found, and crocuses studied.

Blue and gold.

I love London.