Night Walks. Clifton Oct 12th

It’s relatively mild outside the flat. There’s a moist stillness in the air. A three quarter moon bangs over Buckingham Vale blurred by a veil of cloud. the road is unusually quiet for a city. A car passes vaguely like an old memory. Someone laughs somewhere.

The first yellow leaves are under the apple tree. Students will be out in force tonight but they’re not making their loud, boisterous way home yet.

The long haired grey, the Lord of Buckingham Vale, is on Pembroke Road tonight. He normally sits in the middle of the road during the day looking displeased with passers by. I only know this because a sudden movement surprises me outside no 58 Pembroke Road as he jumps down from a high wall onto the low wall next to me. We both get a shock. He does that cat thing of freezing briefly, one front paw further forward than the other, leopardlike and then bolts off into some dark corner.

A Voi scooter swings drunkenly down the middle of Alma Vale Road, its red tail light getting blurry. And the moon now is just a vague smudge like the thumbprint of the artist.

All is still under the great tree on Thorndale Mews. A woman screams from a TV in one of the top floor flats and the little alleyway has a sheen lit up poorly by the orange lamp post at its end. As I step between the pools of light the sound of my footsteps echo off the walls on either side of me. It could be a scene from a Cold War spy film.

Why have I never noticed the four trees outside All Saints Church before? They have been trained so perfectly that they seem like a neat hedge but in shape and size like one of the old London Routemaster buses, its leaves half green, half brown, while a brown mass of leaves gradually gathers on the lawn beneath.