Godspeed you Wearisome Wayfarers!

Just made good my return from a brief visit to the Smokey Big Black where the StonedHolyRollers performed their heinous & blasphemous musical outpourings before tens of thousands..... or, to explain more fully, we rocked the pavements of Notting Hill as part of  our ongoing Street Outreach Programme! Enough generous people with impeccable taste dropped enough in the hat to finance a trip to the Land of the Late Night Haircut (aka: Stoke Newington!) for the finest Turkish Culinary Delights our meagre coppers could buy. Having just mentioned tens of thousands of yir Human Peoples, we must remember, my dear cyperperusers, that that figure is a small number within the context of the thronging multitudes of London.

London IS big, after all....and stuffed fulla peoples. Big Ones - Little Ones; Skinny Ones...& ones who give the bathroom scales just a little more trouble! All sorts of folks of varying shades from peely-wally Hombres, like yir StOnEdHOlybLogGer here to the blackest of shiny black folks, whose veins must course with the undiluted blood of Ham!

And all of these people, it seems, are on the move. Paddin' the Hoof North to South. Takin' Shanks' Pony East to West. Perhaps Time lapse photography shows us best the Disorganized Buzzing of Human Drones Hithering & Thithering; the Turbid Seething of Human Waters; the Chaotic Crash of Ambulatory Humanity.
In our haste to get where it is we're going to, the cold lens of the camera sees us not as individuals but a Formless & Shapeless, Unthinking & Blundering mass!

Cut to Tottenham Court Road Tube Station at 5pm and the Riotous Rampage of Rail-Users is in full swing. A Senseless Concretion of Commuters en route from Points A to B. Here you exist for a split second before morphing back into the anonymity of the Hurrying Hordes. An endless gallery of faces flits before your eyes which instinctively follow the constant stream & strain the retina. Bits of bodies desired & hungered for in an instant are quickly forgotten as another surge of visual stimuli is discharged from off the next Northern Line train bound for High Barnet. Wave after wave they flit by as the brain struggles to make sense of the experiential overload of Colour, Shape & Form.

In the confined space of the underground carriage we entertain ourselves, unknowingly almost, with the ceaseless floodtide of human faces; detached & seperated from their unimaginable lives for the seconds they take up in our own. Down here we are all voyeurs. Seemingly bored & uninterested eyes dance from place to place furtively. We steal a glance but quickly look away if our eyes collide with someone else's. We observe but exist also as observed as a thousand sightlines criss-cross one another in an intricate optical lattice. We are cardboard cut-outs against a flat, dull backdrop to be stared at, regarded, scrutinized. We sit in suspended animation waiting for our stop to arrive so that we can once more spring into some kinda life movement.

We spill out onto Archway and busy ourselves with the To-ings & the Fro-ings, the Comings & the Goings on the Avenues we've drifted onto in life.....& there are so many ways to get there : Motorways, Roadways, Byways, Highways, Pathways, Headways, This Ways, That A-Ways, By-the Ways, Sea Ways, Sky Ways, Cycleways, Throughways, Giveways, Gettaways, My Ways, Your Ways..........Bon Voyage & Godspeed, you Wearisome Wayfarers!