...i'm resting now about half way (on a seat i've never passed before) in the middle of Kenwood west meadow near to a valley of birch trees... this random process is indeed taking me to places where i never walked!...
...i stopped earlier to eat and to read beneath an oak near to random number 2 on my map... under the overhanging oak branches was a sycamore 1 or 2 years old... its uppermost leaves already eaten away by some kind of insect... i doubt if it has any chance of maturing... i was reading Franz Kafka's story The Great Wall of China* - with his suggestion that the purpose of the wall, as well as the power of the distant emperor, could be illusory...
...from this seat i can see a dozen or so trees, oaks and birches, fully grown and out of each other's shadows... the grass between them is already nearly knee high, and in flower or seed, but it is still green, with faintly purple or orange seeds... the sky is bluey grey with yellowy white highlights...
20:12
at the second random point: the cricket ground... a calm evening beneath a grey-and-gold sky... tall trees surrounding the expanse of green... the spire of a semi-modernist church to the north rises above the garden suburb... slanting rays from the sun in the north west... a single magpie is hopping about on the grass, its mate is perched on the practice nets, and i hear a bird sound i don't recognise in hedge behind me...
...as on previous visits to the cricket fields, i feel completely cut off from London and sealed inside a piece of rural England... a man and a woman walk by and give me rather hostile looks when i say hello, as if i were an intruder... perhaps i am, in their world...
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