London is lovely right now. I met up with Emilie Ems, Kathryn and Mark after work and we drank cold cold wine outside the Blue Posts, then sat in Soho Square eating the most delicious sushi. It was warm and still and full of t-shirted people lazing around, lying in small groups, chatting quietly to each other as they stared up at the trees.

The Square has been so well used this summer that some of the grass has been completely worn away, and now all that is left are small smooth deserts of fine brown dust, but that doesn’t stop anyone going there. I have to admit, most of my summer lunchtimes have been spent on an east-west line that passes through the office, extending to Russell Square in the east, which is glorious in the sun, and Marylebone in the west, my new favourite towny place.

I don’t know how I can have worked in London for so long and not discovered Marylebone High Street before. It really feels like a little village in the middle of the city, and has a character all of its own, with small quaint shops, proper fishmongers, and the most fantastic book shop, Daunt Books, which has a lovely wooden gallery in its back room, and madly organises its books by country, rather than author name. It had a book called Nicholas in its window today. Very nice binding: all brown sackcloth with a print. Unfortunately the content looked a bit dull.

I moved on through the sun, up through Paddington Street gardens, home to 80,000 graves, of which you can see only a dozen or less, and up Baker Street to 221b, one-time home of Sherlock Holmes, one-time HQ of Abbey National building society, now tacky-looking tourist attraction.

So, you win some, you lose some. That one’s lost.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 9th, 2005 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.