Recoil

3.10 pm: the quivering light and warmth cry out for touch, but your blurred, sweaty hands recoil in shock, touch nothing.

Like new

12.00 noon: clusters of unfurling bright green leaves make patterns on an even brighter blue - the whole sky like a crisp, new printed cotton curtain.

Drunken

8 am: the wild wind advances, noisy and unguided, kicking over all loose objects in its drunken path.

Flutter

this is the season
of big yellow skips - their blue
tarpaulins flutter

Stretched

8.05 am: the forecast says cloudy with rain, hail, thunder, and snow in the north - time and tolerance stretched by too many weathers.

Jamaican

12.50 pm: rice 'n peas and thick brown gungy stuff - Jamaican comfort food is sunshine in the belly on a cold day.

Blurring

11.45 am: through the blurring drizzle, a frail young woman approaches, clutching a small baby to her breast - oh no, it's a large loaf of bread.

Tense

2 pm: just a mile or two up the road is tense, crowded poverty. Same shops, same buses, people about the same daily business - and a very different atmosphere.

Hunched

1.05 pm: the fine, sleety snow is visible only in the hunched, hunted posture of each passer by.

Fierce

2.30 pm: the wind is like a thousand tiny knives - not strong, but fierce and sharp and spiteful.

Bellowing

12.20 pm: in the park full of resoundingly bare trees, a single shock of billowing, bellowing blossom.