On my way here, I have started to read ‘Brick Lane’ by Monica Ali. It’s a wonderful book – but then I knew it would be, it’s set in Tower Hamlets, a suburb of east London with a huge Bangladeshi population. I just love books like this – they give me a much clearer insight into the community that I lived amongst for two blissfully happy years, in my first home (that I owned) in Southall. The communities are similar in many senses although I have a feeling that the population of Southall is more diverse because there are people from all of the countries of South Asia there.

I chose the book in the same way I choose most of my reading material – I looked for a book with loads of positive criticism from the press – I defend that as being as good a way as any of choosing a book. This book has it by the truckload – the author is widely proclaimed as one of the best young British writers around.

There is a passage in it that hit home to me as I read on my flight to Barcelona this morning…..

“You can spread your soul over a paddy field, you can whisper to a mango tree, you can feel the earth beneath your toes and know that this is the place, the place where it begins and ends. But what can you tell to a pile of bricks? The bricks will not be moved.”

To me that sums it all up really – it’s the organic that matters – living, breathing stuff. Why then when I travel do I shrink from my fellow passengers, turning myself towards the window and refusing help with my baggage? Why do I glare at ‘trolley dollies’ as though they are the enemy? Why do I feel like this – closed and unwilling to engage with the world?

More importantly, don’t hotels realise that far from being aesthetically pleasing, these friezes simply serve to terrify the exhausted traveller when sleep won’t come in the middle of the night? I know they will scare me to death tonight! I once stayed in an hotel where there was a 10 foot high concrete horse’s head in the entrance lobby – having a fear of horses, that one freaked me out totally.

So – it’s the organic that counts and now I’m here, in the bosom of my peers and colleagues, I feel less like I did when I took this photo a few hours ago. I can share organic experiences with them this evening and enjoy the experience a bit. My plan with this shot actually came off quite well, the sharp freezes and little, scared me!

I think I may return to this subject of organic vs bricks and their metaphorical equivalents in days to come – I’m not done here!