London

I've just had a great day in London - once again, I've felt totally energised, by the traffic, noise and helter-skelter hurly-burly. I'm sure I could never live there, but it's like a fix, a rush of blood and I never fail to come back feeling regenerated.
I went up on the train, the 10.00 from platform 15 at Bristol's Temple Meads. Platform 15 is at the far end and there's little trace of Brunellian grandeur. It has a few 21st century features, but also some signs which look definitely 1950s. It's a cramped, narrow platform; today it was raining and water poured on to it from a broken piece of guttering. The view from the platform is of derelict 1960s office blocks with every window broken. Not only was it wet, but also cold. The mood was lightened by several skimpily and extravagently dressed girls on their way to Ladies' Day at Royal Ascot who were cheerily oblivious to the weather. It's midsummer, and Glastonbury weekend is coming up, always a cue for rough weather in these parts.
The black clouds thinned out as we approached the South-East and there were shafts of sunlight breaking through as we approached London - and I had a trip on the Tube to look forward to! It was an unusual trip - it was only two stops on the Circle Line, the line closest to the surface, so plenty of daylight, and I counted four lively conversations taking place around me. Maybe it was because it was late morning, and summer, so the passengers weren't typical - visitors to London (like me), unused to normal Tube introversion.
I took a taxi back to Victoria coach station which was interesting - the taxi driver took me through various short cuts around Mayfair and Grosvenor Square. It's unbelievably rich round there - there are the Embassies, of course, but plenty of very rich people obviously live round there as well. The wealth in that part of London is extraordinary, yet it's only in recent years that it's become so rich. Thirty or forty years ago you could buy a flat or house in a run-down part of London, Notting Hill, say, for very little. If you've hung on to your property you'll be enormously wealthy while staying a pretty humble person.
Yet around the corner from these impossibly wealthy properties are blocks of council flats - very unlike French cities where blocks of flats circle the urban conurbations far away from the centre - here the poor live cheek by jowl with the rich.
Victoria was, as usual, hectic. So many people use the coach now as trains are so expensive. The coach was packed as it always is these days, but for £6 all the way to Bristol, who's complaining?
So, a fascinating and enlivening day out - it did me good.