A cool grey light made London look more like London than I would have believed possible yesterday.
When Canaletto was in town around 1748, painting his masterpiece, ‘The City of London from the River Thames with St. Paul’s Cathedral’, he showed a river frantic with traffic and commerce and lavish luxury barges. St Paul’s was no less hemmed in by other buildings but it was taller than those that surrounded it, linked visually only to the elegant spikes of Wren’s other churches.
These days, you must turn to face 90° in either direction to see the full frenzy of commerce. The City, almost comically absurd now with ever taller towers of money reaching for space. In the other direction, not a stone unturned in search of opportunities for development.
Happily, we can now choose to filter out the frenzy and the exhausting uncertainty. Turn the screens off, head outside, stop. Watch an ant clearing food waste, or a bud on the brink of blooming. Plenty of those around now.
Take a moment to fill your face with beauty. There is always something.