London – judders – feels like it’s barely on the rails and about to shake off its panels and parts.

PRESS AND PULL DOWN TO OPEN; My hair flying wildly as I give away my secret self, aeroplanes in a queue over London – slicing through cloud, sending cones of light out on the mist in front of them.

Orion rising, the air chill and clear, the red beacons on the black spiders’s web lattice of the Crystal Palace transmitter tower.

A beautiful night in London. Then an onrush, a push, a galloping roaring clattering careen between and under the Downs.

Flaring arcs of electric light, hurting my eyes and making the branches of trees appear, for a second, like giant dendritres pure white against the dark. The clustered, crowding rooftops. Aeroplanes at high altitude flicker as they move through the darkness.

We pass, crashing at breakneck speed, through Gatwick. I’ve got the window down. Damp smells, rushing air, Victorian brick work lines the navvy built tunnels where the smell changes and the chill becomes an emotion.

These trains are manky and soon they’ll be gone for boxes of air- conditioned restraint where you can’t open the windows. Woodsmoke. Another train smashes past on the up-line and there is such a sudden concussion of air I’m amazed the shockwave doesn’t derail us.

A fingernail clipping moon hangs over Haywards Heath. Cigarette smoke and then a young guy with a silly swagger and stinking of booze steals my spot by the window. He gets bored after five minutes and goes away. By Wivelsfield the smell of woodsmoke on the night air was almost like a solid object.

The passing of something so life-affirming is sad. A solo and perfectly dressed woman gets off at Burgess Hill and clop clops along the platform, the night air blankets the sound of her shoes.

The sharp ’ding-ding’ of conductor to driver has a colour of cold steel. We skim across more rooftops, this time of Hassocks.

Through the winter dark, and onto home, a warm bed waiting.

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Coldharbour Lane on a baking hot day. I grew up just off of Coldharbour Lane. Which is a lie, but also the truth, I fled here. It was them or me, life or death. It saved me, here I first tasted life, and learned to be. I learned to breathe on Coldharbour Lane. The light changes. I cross the street and turn the corner.

I walk in the cool shade of the railway arches. The side the sensible people walk down.

A man leans into one of the open shops and complains loudly, another man’s voice, grumpy at being disturbed in this heat, complains more loudly back. The source of the exchange a mystery to everyone walking past.

The markets that exist in five dimensions if you count the smell. The stink of decaying discarded fruit and veg, barely kept in check by a light breeze. The smell of dead meat from the butchers, stacks of chicken carcasses and thick cuts of meat, next to the sea stench of the fishmongers. Rows of iced whole fish and crabs and molluscs, with adventurous flies attracted by the scents of death and decay.

I don’t really belong here, but people like me don’t really belong anywhere, so here is fine. Here we’re all from elsewhere.

(Home – what a concept, as if we aren’t always home wherever we are.)

A woman in a summer dress, riding a bike, stops and puts one foot on the ground to balance. To let another woman cross in front of her, neither really acknowledging the other. I love this moment and all of these moments here.

The sticky pavement, swept but impossible to clean. Layers of muck and footprints. The filth of history clinging to it. Spit and gum, oil and city soot, drunken piss, dripping sweat, spilled beer, dogshit and tears, scuffed by shoe and boot flattened over decades to a sticky topcoat. The human stain.

Is there anything more beautiful than walking down Atlantic Road on a baking hot morning, when the sun is held back by deep shadows on one side of the street. The side the sensible people walk down?

If you like this, or any of my other writing you can support me here

If you like my work, you can support me here. https://ko-fi.com/msmacsee

If you like my work, you can support me here. https://ko-fi.com/msmacsee

The world is made of words future, past, and here and now. Language is the glue that holds the mess together.

Love and Hate are made of words, —you can’t have one without the other. Thats not to say that hate is right, the past has tried in many ways to warn us that it isn’t.

But men will build their lives on it and argue round and round, “you’re too obtuse to see the truth…”‘ “That Hate is Love and Love is Hate…”

They would rather burn the world, than admit that they were wrong and guard their hate with guns and words as if it was their Mum.

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Like a pebble trying to resist a desert wind. The wind that erases and abrades whole mountain ranges down to dust.

She writes to leave a sun-bleached way marker poking up from a hollow in the desert floor that says; “I was here once, but am no more.”

If you like this, or any of my other writing you can support me here

If you like my work, you can support me here. https://ko-fi.com/msmacsee