Misguided attempts at creative writing, for your disgusted perusal.

This is going to start happening every so often. I will write things in the manner of a stroppy fifteen year old crapping out criminally shite love poetry for the benefit of a girl who will never (never!) let him put his hand up her bra. These literary gems will then be posted here, to the mutual embarrassment of all. My recommendation: pretend it isn't happening, as you would if you saw two dogs screwing mere feet away from where your nan was being lowered into her grave. Although please feel free to call me gay in the comments section.

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Out the door and round the corner, to the pub for a guinness and a cigarette or three. Monday, and the first real taste of autumn - dusk at 6:30, a chill in the air and a light mist of drizzle hanging suspended in the yellow streetlights. Drops caught swirling in the headlamps of cars. So quick: get your pint, grab a chair beneath the burgundy awnings, pay your 3.50 and take your seat at the human show. The greatest show on Earth, playing tonight and every night, right outside your door. Take your first sip of stout and let your eye laze across the passers by, such as: a girl laden down with a vast and chunky picture frame. A West Indian man sporting a wry and constant grin. A youngish guy who seems to be all fashionable beard, skinny t-shirt and spiky elbows. Then more and more, too many to count, too many to follow. All shapes, all sizes. Coats, hats and scarves of every colour and style. Skin pigments of every hue. Tics and habits and a thousand different defects of character, a million secret origins. And you, fanboy, will never know them all, never even a fraction, never even a per cent of a per cent of a per cent. These people, this race, will remain forever blank and inscrutable, a mystery from beginning to untimely end. Because who has the time to get down and friendly with everyone on the planet? Who even has the inclination? If anyone did, would they find anything of benefit?

Snatches of conversation float past, providing a melody to the bass of the traffic and the drum roll rumble of the overground. The city breathes, and I breathe with it. We both spark fire, breathe smoke and take in black liquid. We're blurring at the edges. Bleeding together. We are unknown and anonymous components of each other. I plant my feet and tip my head back and I feel the hum of seven million city folk – and exponentially more as the hum extends outwards across the island, the continent, the hemisphere and the whole of the Earth. It's always there, the hum, the thrust of it, ever constant, always ceaseless, no matter how bored or distracted or beaten you may be: it persists.

So don't fret. Don't hide or mither. Lie back. Enjoy, where possible. This is life, and you are from it. This is the city, and you are of it. This is the world, and you are in it.

Then you down your pint and rejoin the flow of people. Drift back around the corner. Just another termite in the nest.