Shepherdess Walk

 I headed out at around 3am, up the hill to Angel, intending to follow the canal east, but distant bellowing and rythmic, pointless pounding on a bus shelter sent me down a street I hadn't seen before.

  

It was a couple of blocks before I realised where I was. I hadn't seen the City Road Basin from this end before, if you can call the middle an end.  

 

 I first started taking night walks in my late teens, leaving parties for an hour or two to test my nerve, and I'm reminded of that when I walk around Primrose Hill, but here I was suddenly reminded of other streets.

 

 In the year between school and university I'd travelled to America, finishing up in Toronto. It was a mess. I didn't always have a room for the night. One night I'd sleep under a bandstand. One night, a graveyard. Places I thought I'd be left alone.

 

  One night I just stayed up in a place that gave me free donuts because I made someone feel safe. Why was I reminded of Toronto now? Possibly because of the archietcture. Possibly because I was hungry.

 The 24 hour drive-thru was only serving people in cars, for "health and saftety reasons". I only put that in inverted commas because I suspect it's a euphemism rather than a lie.

 

 I mean, I suspect people who approach a drive-thru at 3am in a car, might well be safer than someone approaching on foot. Actually I'm not sure I do suspect that, but I could see that they might seem safer. I regretted even asking, and remembered when I used to get free donuts.

 

  Did taking photographs make me seem more or less of a threat? I mean, in general. I would have thought less. If I was at home now, I thought, watching television, the only place I'd be thinking about would be the space in front of the television. I should keep going for walks.

  I bought a "New York Deli" bloomer and a Creme Egg from Texaco next door. Already remembering Toronto, I immediately recognised the smell of the coffee machine from 1994, or whatever the coffee machine was smelling of. Twenty-five cents got you a pecan pie back then. Twenty-four cents got you nothing.

 

 The freedom to fail is a hell of a privilege, of course, the identity of "loser" only adoptable by those in no danger of being destroyed by their losses. Things seemed quieter by the time I returned to the canal.

 On the walk back, I filmed a small creature in the road. A minute into filming, I realised it had probably wanted to get past, and felt guilty for blocking its path. 

 

 I hoped it would approach.