the Wharf

Canary Wharf is somewhere I love and hate and cannot stay away from. I go there to the cinema because it's close to my house and - less prosaically - while I'm there I like to stoke the fires of scorn and self-regard. Yesterday I skipped around in my jeans and navy aran jumper and my dad's tartan scarf that's older than I am and my red lipstick that smells like lily of the valley, carrying a bunch of outofseason sunflowers and I watched all those grey faced sleep deprived men and women glance at me like I was an alien creature. A medieval peasant. A martian. A woman wearing trousers in a time of corsets and hooped skirts. It makes me giddy, all those buildings that are hundreds of times taller than me, all hard edges and glinting chips of steel and glass.

The inside of no.1 Canada Square is the colour of hastily masticated steak mixed with a glass of milk taken before bed in the hope that it will cool all that meat lying on the stomach.

It is all so much of its own expanding self, existing only for itself and for the great grey gobbets of imagined coffee gold and oil that stream into it and out of it in algorithmic waves. I can't help but believe that its time will be brief and that when we are back to tilling the earth and these words are locked inside this machine and forever lost that I will survive longer than the grey faces will.