ASYLUM

* Londinium

So with yet more insanity on the underground today (in what now looks like a monstrous fuckup), it feels appropriate to write up this post, that I've been meaning to for a few days now.

See, someone was asking me — presumably owing to the ongoing match of Counterstrike going on across the city — whether I liked living in London (in a slightly whiny 'wouldn't you be happier somewhere else?' kind of way). To which I answer, fuck yeah! Well, okay, that's not what I said at the time, but that's how I feel. Fuck yeah I like living in London.

Since I changed jobs and moved to London, I've been to:

• Notting Hill Carnival

• a disused military research base

• a pirate party aboard the Golden Hinde (and won a prize)

• a bbq organised by pyros complete with firedancing

• a conference on the island of Malta

• a preview showing of Shaun of the Dead, with appearances by the scriptwriters

• a book reading with Iain (M.) Banks

• a grassroots geek conference with appearances by various internet luminaries

• and several DorkBots

...and that's just the more unusual stuff — add in a bunch of social events, evenings out on the town, the variety of food, and then there's all the random odd things you just see on the street on your way into work or home or out an about: from formula-1 cars on parade to performance art to rabid preachers to film crews... it's hard to pick out what the weirdest thing is, but I'd probably rate the street-legal motorised office desk quite high: complete with computer, monitor and license-plates, people sat at office chairs attached to it, typing, as it drove down Pall Mall.

More interesting stuff has happened since I moved here than in the entire previous five years of living elsewhere. Maybe longer. That time was treading water, a holding pattern.

I can and have read books written or set any time in the last two thousand years set here, in this city — Banks' Dead Air, or Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, or the short stories of Saki — and see the names of street I walk down every day.

And while, as Gibson once remarked, we keep our gomi on display here, there are new developments too; the Swiss Re building, apparently photoshopped into the skyline, is a commonly remarked-upon example. The Doctor Who-esque details of the Jubilee Line Extension another. Geeks and goths flourish here. After the first attacks, "Cuddly" Ken Livingstone said people "come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves."

And here I am.

* Smoke

I don't blog from work, but I'm making an exception because a) it's lunchtime, and b) they're trying to blow up my city again. So far, from the limited news available, it looks like the detonators didn't ignite the main charge — there are reports of lots of smoke and "a sound 'like a Champagne cork popping'" but no casualties, apart, perhaps, a rather scorched failure of a suicide bomber or four.

Look, is this going to happen every other Thursday? We do have schedules, you know. We can plan them accordingly.