spring again

It's spring, and with it come the darling buds on the trees along my road; the tree below my balcony is sprouting its tentative, yellowy-green tendrils as I type. The air feels sweet and forgiving, and each sunset spreads its pink and blue hazes far and wide, so that the rooftops I can see across north London seem not so much laid out as softly spread, as if the air were a kind of butter. The mornings are kind of golden and indistinct.

For weeks now, when I've been awake in my ill-and-not-sleeping-too-well mode at about 4am, I have heard the delicious tweeting of the early birds out the back. Yes, they are glad! Glad to be awake and alive in this wonderful nest-building season.

Indeed, young are everywhere, as befits the young year. The entirety of my block - Baroque Mansions - is full now of the sound of babies crying. They cry a lot, they cry lustily, and they cry all the time. It's one of the ways I know I'm awake in the morning.

And I've just witnessed the final harbinger of spring - as if a week of the most lovely, hot weather with lashings of sunshine all round wasn't enough to convince us. As if I had not already negotiated that strange denial, and then the weirdly naked feeling of not wearing a jacket. As if the first Havaiana outing of the year, complete with blisters between my toes, wasn't enough evidence!

No... I was sitting here typing my next post - a treat which may now be slightly delayed, continuing my current obsessive television theme - when suddenly I heard a shrill voice somewhere outside calling out: Oi! What the fuck are you doing? (pause, then an octave higher:) What the FUCK are you DOING, you CUNT!

I rush to the window, wondering if maybe my friend Jan has arrived unnanounced for a spot of tea, just in time to see a skinny little guy in a navy blue hoodie and white shorts - not a good look, btw, with spindly white legs - scurry round to the front of his little red van and drive off pronto. The fattest woman I have ever seen is leaning out the top window opposite Baroque Mansions, watching the van drive off with its two back doors flapping open. In the middle of the road, immediately behind where the van was, a scooter lies on its side. A big one, practically an almost-motorbike. The woman in the window recites the van's registration number as loudly as she can, in a voice that rings with extraordinary clarity, ricocheting off buildings in four directions.

There is a lull, in which the only thing that happens is that the skinny guy reaches the corner of our road. Rather than sceeching round it in Italian Job style, desperate to defeat the forces of law and order, he instead gets out, goes round the back, secures the two flapping doors, and gets back in. Then he does up his seatbelt and drives off into the balmy spring dusk.

Meanwhile, the couple of obligatory Hassidic guys come outside to see what's happening - they reach the crime scene just as the lady appears on her front path wearing only a mauve T shirt and enormous skin-tight knee-length shorts. He was fucking trying to steal it! she says to the two men. The cunt. Christ. The three of them lift the scooter and push it towards the kerb, after gazing down the street for a moment in the direction the red van went in. I can see the smaller of the men, the fringes on his tallis waving in the breeze, mildly saying something to her, but I can't hear him. I got the fucking registration number anyway, she continues, clear as a bell, and then heaves a great sigh as they get the scooter in its parking place. She's having trouble getting it to stand up. The fucking stand!! she expostulates.

My next-door neighbour's head appears out her window. Hi, she says. I think somebody was trying to steal a scooter.

Hi, I say to her. It's spring again!