July. Warning: whilst in the airport, you are going to be monitored by security cameras and; additionally, there may be a writer making notes on you: sunbaked elderly woman with much gold jewellery and incredibly wrinkled, leathery décolletage and feet; sad anorexic girl with shaving rash on legs; tattoo fanatic with pregnant wife.

These last were especially interesting: he middle-aged, potbellied, wearing lightweight, rimless spectacles: utterly unremarkable were it not for the piercings in his nose, eyebrow and lip, and bold tribal tattoos - thick dark stripes - on his arms.... He had recently shaved his head (possibly to disguise a bald patch?), and there were further studs through the nipples outlined beneath his T shirt. The wife: considerably younger, dressed in a very bright turquoise green maternity dress that clung to her breasts and six months' worth of bump. She had long hair in pony tail, wore a little make-up but had no visible tattoos - just one modest nose stud & some silver toe rings. One seat away sat a seven year old miniature of the mother-to-be wearing ultra convention jeans, t shirt, baseball cap and headphones, frowning over a puzzle book. The woman stared ahead, dreamy and relaxed; the man looked around taking the place in and in a business-like fashion working out his options, what could be done with this bit of time?

Not much to be said for eleven hour flight from west to east, less still for a three hour wait for baggage in Gatwick Airport. We emerged into a week-long heat wave and a long row of sleepless nights filled with the familiar, endless throb of the city, alleviated, just before dawn, by a surprising splash of birdsong. A vast, red moon hung low over the city's rooftops. Melatonin did not work and for several days we walked in an exhausted, dreamlike state through the shade of galleries and museums taking in old favourites and seeing strange new things, such as the National Portrait Gallery's video loop of David Beckham sleeping. He was artfully lit and shot to emphasise the musculature of his shoulders; the image, poised midway between soft porn and religious icon, drew a steady stream of female voyeurs who settled themselves on the bench provided and watched the whole thing through. Teenage school boys on a field trip blundered in now and then:
'Think he's really asleep, Matt?'
'Na. Can't be, not with that effing light shining right in his face.'

My editor and I sipped cappuccinos in a dark and fearsomely air-conditioned café with tanks full bubbling turquoise water set into the wall behind the bar. We made the awkward transition from small talk to sales figures:
'I think' she said 'that Alphabet would sell much better if you were a man.'
'Pardon?'
'Some of your female readers will have been put off by the dark, edgy subject matter. Men, on the other hand, would love it - if they read it - but we just can't get men to read books by women. There's been a study that proves it.'
All I can say (but I didn't) is what a shame we didn't think of this before the book came out! I could have assumed a male name, bound my breasts and donned some kind of disguise, undergone surgery, whatever was required - these days, just writing the damn things isn't enough....
As in the best of hallucinations, there were little messages everywhere. In every touch more intimate meanings reside - Rupert Brooke was spelled out in Braille on a row of six inch square kitchen tiles at the V&A, along with a key so we could decode it one letter at a time. In the Hayward Gallery, we worked our way past Rebecca Horn's drawings and automata to the extraordinary installation at the end of the show. There, in semi-darkness, haunting music filled the room and a pattern of waves generated in the pool on the floor was projected onto the ceiling. Fragments of text slid vertiginously around the room: ... the grain of seed in the word......is light and shadow at once ...
A young woman in shorts and a running vest sat straight backed - but fast asleep - on one of the benches provided.

We took the tube and the train to Mort lake Crematorium to scatter the ashes of my father in law, who died last year. We walked the last part, along a wide road gorged with traffic and thick with fumes. The road passed along the side of the vast cemetery that precedes the crematorium and its grounds: a strange contrast of acute stillness and constant motion. All or nothing.
We followed the official to a modest garden, well-kept, pleasant enough and watched as he showed us how to dispense the gritty looking grey material into a patch of raked up ground beneath a cherry tree.
'Is it just the very important people who get to be skeletons?' my five year old asked on the way back, by the towpath this time.
'I think you can choose.'
'I want to be a skeleton.'

We took my father to the hospital to have his hip replaced, but they sent him home two hours later because he was taking an anti-coagulant medicine.
'I told them! I told them right from the start! I wrote it all down and gave it to them!' he fumed, stopping just short of calling the surgeon an idiot. Nothing to do but wait.
After this came a Rural Idyll: several days when the kids played from dawn to dusk in my sister's haystacks and at the end of the day all of us ate vast, home-produced meals.
After the Idyll, the Nightmare, which began with the mild inconvenience of being turned away at a tube station because of a 'power failure' and became over the next few hours The London Bombings: four explosions and a rising death toll of fifty or more. Between answering calls and listening to the radio, we struggled to answer the children's questions on religion, suicide bombing, US foreign policy and the difference between killing and murder. Everything around us looked the same but siren after siren wailed past.
Despite my much-touted interest in the dark and edgy side of life, I am at heart an optimist, but it was, and still is, very hard to see a how yet more deeply entrenched positions and yet more deaths won't be the result of this. More surveillance too, of course, and not by writers but by people who have power over our lives. Do we want things this way? Do we (I have my UK hat on here) trust our governments? Do we believe them when they say that there is no connection between the war in Iraq and the London bombings? I don't, and if you have any doubts, this (despite - or, on second thoughts, because of - its presumption that we have a divine right to oil) may help:
www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org/