fog, foggy fog

England is under a thick fog. The airports are in chaos, with controllers limiting the number of take-offs per hour. Planes are sitting all over the runways and the trains out of town are packed: apparently tickets are selling out. If you're trying to go to Spain you're stuffed.

I've never really understood this English obsession with going places on planes, seemingly just for the sake of it. I just don't get it. Even les enfants Baroque can tell me instantaneously that "it is because of the English weather" - but I still don't get it. Relentless sunshine makes everything empirical and commands spurious perfection. And it hurts your eyes. Well, I guess it hurts my eyes.

Right now the traffic is creeping along, but in a nice way. As you walk along the road everything looks sort of soft, so that even Seven Sisters looks charming; the charcoal branches loom overhead like surprises, in unknowable relation to the red or green lights that hover near them, like baubles.

In the absence of stark detail everything that shows is a decoration.

And the people who come towards you on the pavement seem only noncommitally substantial: coming out of nothing they have to materialise before they can pass you. If you turned around afterwards you would see them gradually disappearing again; if you think about it you know you must be doing the same. This does raise a question about how substantial any of us were to begin with, and it has always been a slight sadness of mine that I could never see myself disappear in the fog.

Of course as a child I used to try. Spurred on by the promising adage 'it was so foggy you couldn't see your hand in front of your face' I used to walk to school on foggy mornings with my arm stretched out as far as it would go, trying to get my hand to go far enough away to vanish.

I have always loved fog.