Bachelor padding

September has been the first month of the rest of my life, as my most recent relationship foundered on the rocks of discontent... there has been a lot of drinking of alcohol and smoking of cigarettes, both of which are conducive to exacerbating an air of being hard done by.

However, there is nothing like adversity to fire the neurons, and as well as getting back on it with my blogs and other items of keyboard-related venting, I have of course been cycling throughout - I can't not cycle, it's a joyful thing. As exercise, as pursuit for amplifying the happiness and diminishing the perceived importance of negative feelings relative to their counterweight.

It's also the only way to get around London. The cycle, my saviour and means of locomotion, the runabout that facilitates me leaving the bachelor pad at 8.20 am and arriving at work just off Fleet Street after a thrilling whizz through Barnsbury, Amwell St, Farringdon Road etc, at 8.40 am. And not a penny squandered. Except on the ciggies & drink. Well, it's all about balance, eh? I guess I can justify the aled up ['And now I feel soiled...'] Mississippi Fried Chicken £4.95 Bargain Bucket, to myself at least, with forty minutes of the Lance Armstrong Plan every day.

Reading matter this week has been Identity Crisis, which is a crime thriller/examination of relationships and what they lead people into, only with comic book superbeings displaying ambiguous and unheroic traits, beautifully drawn; I'm still finding my way through Matthieu Ricard's book on training the mind, Happiness. Comics are, like the drink, short cuts I guess, but then so is music, and as I write this there's a riot goin on and you can't say fairer than that.

So THAT's what's going on.

Uptown - that's where I wanna be

The number 17 bus from Caledonian Road goes past King's Cross, around and up onto Gray's Inn Road and then on to Holborn Circus, which unlike the other two points noted here does not have an apostrophe, so let me state that the Circus of Holborn is a fine and gaudy affair, where a man might spend many a pleasant hour flanning and bidding good morning to the comely legal lads and lasses... City types glued to their BlackBerry devices because there must have been, HAS TO HAVE BEEN a message arrive in the ten seconds between stepping off the bus very slowly in front of me and wandering onto the pavement... Sainsbury employees... cyclists crossing the pavement next to the HSBC...

One might, were it not for the impatient taxis bipping their horns at us, my fellow Hollowavians and I, as we stand between bus lane and centre island waiting to cross to Fetter Lane and beyond, in a kind of pedestrian purgatory, rudley honked as if unaware that there are hundreds of cars we have no intention of walking in front of bearing down on us. Sometimes people in London are frantic for no reason at all, they just feel, perhaps, that they should get their retaliation in first and out-brusque you pre-emptively. There's really no need.

"White, Black, Puerto Rican, everybody just a-freakin'..."

This week the music has been funky, and I have read Hellblazer: Haunted, which might put a man in speculative mood about our glorious capital, but I haven't stopped dancing yet.

Sudden scale shift at Collier Street almost causes a pile-up

Much poring over the map of North London and much wheeling of the bike up sudden one-way streets in Islington, Barnbury, Holloway, King's Cross and the adjacent areas reveals that the fabric of North London, like space-time, can be deeply incomprehensible even given intense study. How do the roads bend back on themselves, like Romanian gymnast children? Possibly emigré trainers. Probably misreading the maps.

Easily in my top ten favourite books ever, and certainly this week:
The London A-Z.
I've been using the spiral bound AA version from 2006 since I arrived in The Village... it's looking a little dog-eared, it has to be said. I may replace it with something from Geographers' A-Z Map Company, in tribute to the originator of the concept, the magnificent Phyllis Pearsall, may her name be sung by all bemused mid-century party-goers and lost cyclists, getting honked at the lights as they stand in the road frowning and thumbing between pages 75 and 9.