What a coincidence. Must be a clean out weekend.

I knew I would get to the dumpster first and worried about making awkward conversation.

At the dumpster, my hopes for a quick getaway were thwarted. My low profile cardboard box was still too tall for the opening. It was stuck. I mashed it uselessly.

‘Punch it!’ said the first bloke who reached me.

I whacked box with my palm. It slipped a little further in. Encouraged, I jumped up and used the momentum to power my next pound. Jump-Pound! Jump-Pound!

‘Punch it! Punch it!’ the guy urged, grinning.

His friend had caught up with us and admired, ‘I love the violence.’

Fwoomp! The box fell in and this short jumping Chinese girl gave a triumphant, ‘Ha!’

I then scurried away, missing out on seeing how the boys would get their larger boxes into the same bin gap.

Also, I had left my mobile phone at work and couldn’t ring Vera for instructions, such is my genius.

Naturally, then, I waited for someone to arrive and I tail gated them to get into the building. Joan the burglar at work.

I hovered in the foyer, trying to figure out my next move. Vera’s flat was number 11. I logicked that it could be on the first floor but I couldn’t see a staircase.

There was, however, a lift. A woman walked passed me, pushed the lift button and entered. I rushed in behind her before realising that the lift was tiny. There was barely room for two people.

‘Floor?’ she asked graciously.

‘Erm, one.’ I was embarrassed. If I knew my way around, I would have walked.

Suddenly, there as a pizza delivery man in front of us.

‘Come in,’ my lift mate said graciously again. I gasped silently.

The pizza man folded himself in and with some experimentation, held the pizza aloft and above our heads.

‘Floor?’

‘Five.’

‘Smells good,’ I commented during the pitiful interval between the lift taking off and stopping at the first floor. I darted out before they could reply.

Well. It turned out that Vera’s flat 11 was on the third floor so I had to find and climb the stairs anyway.

Fortunately, none of us were in a hurry because it turned out to be a day of waiting.

I went to Kings Cross Station to see in their train. Patiently, I stood at the end of Platform 1. It seemed their train was late. Then I got a phone call from Rebecca. They too had been waiting for 15 minutes, only at Platform 8. English trains aren’t like German trains. They change platforms at the last minute.

Bus 30 from Kings Cross would drop us off directly in front of Ottolenghi, one of my favourite restaurants in the UK.

We waited 10 minutes and bus 30 arrived only to go straight past the stop. We waited another 15 minutes and no bus 30s arrived. We decided to take another bus and walked 10 minutes to the restaurant.

At the restaurant, there was a long queue. There always is. I think Ottolenghi is a lot of people’s favourite restaurant. Again, we were patient. There was plenty of beautiful food in the deli to gawk at.

From Ottolenghi, we decided to skip the hour long bus ride to the Natural History Museum and take the quicker trip via the Tube. The Tube is quicker only in theory, though. The Circle and District lines were shut down so it was like rush hour on the Picadilly line. In the end, it did take an hour to get to the museum.

The last time I visited the Natural History Museum, I walked straight up the grand steps to enter. This time, I was surprised to have to join a queue. It moved slowly, then quickly, then slowly again. At the top of the queue, they were checking bags. This is a new bit of security that I also encountered at the British Museum a few months ago.

We were at the museum to check out the new Darwin Centre. I had listened to a podcast about from ABC Radio National’s Science Show. It’s funny when I learn about London and England from Australian news sources.

We followed the signs and found ourselves at the end of the line. Before we knew it, we were swept into an archway and up some stairs by a wave of harried parents, children and prams, past the orange sign pointing to the Darwin Centre to the right.

‘Hey, where are we going?’ Rebecca asked.

‘I dunno, maybe this goes around and ends up at the Darwin Centre,’ I hoped.

And so we were trapped in the dinosaur gallery for an hour. It was hot, noisy, dark and fascinating. Stumbling to the bright, cool, calm, equally fascinating Darwin Centre afterwards was a relief.

No more waiting after that, it was smooth sailing, except for the bit where I lost my new glasses.

Just kidding, it wasn’t that extreme. In certain light, though, the difference in skin colour was noticeable.

Joan at the beach

There is a big smash at the intersection near my flat.

Now there is an ambulance and a crumpled red car parked on our curb. It is flashing blue into my bedroom window as I am trying to sleep.

There were about thirty of them in neat rows of three. The horse in the middle of each row carried a police person, who also held the reins for the horses either side of him or her. All the horses were brown.

I watched for the minute that it took to get across the main intersection. The ‘clip clop clip clop’ is a lovely sound in the morning.

I have since seen this early morning parade of horses another two times. It seems to happen around once a month.

Whenever I spot it, I loiter at the edge, waiting for a break in the traffic so that I can dash past it. It’s a good three second sprint so it has to be a large break in the traffic.

This time, the puddle was bigger than I had ever seen. I waited and waited. No cars paused, no break appeared.

Suddenly, there was a lull. It wasn’t much of a lull but I figured it was the only chance I would have. I went for it.

I had almost made it when a taxi cruised into the frame. Immediately, I flattened myself against the fence bordering the footpath, cringing in anticipation of the deluge.

A second passed and there was no deluge. I was surprised. The taxi had created a wave but it was going slowly so the wave was small. Grateful, I straightened my dress and returned to the middle of the footpath.

‘I’m sorry!’ came a faint call. I looked around. The taxi driver was stopped at the traffic lights and had rolled down his window.

He leant across the passenger seat and said again, ‘I’m so sorry!’ He looked upset.

‘Oh! It’s okay!’ I said as reassuringly as a I could.

It was an unexpected moment of London kindness.

London’s neighbourhoods are beautiful right now. However, I do feel sorry for the street sweepers. During the rest of the year, they’re clearing up litter, dog poop, pavement pizzas and cigarette butts. Now, on top of their usual duties, they fight an unwinnable battle with leaf litter.

The sweepers fill their rubbish carts with red, orange and brown, and the next day, the trees have re-layered the roads and footpaths.

The sweepers’ only respite is winter, when the branches of deciduous trees are exhausted and bare.

There is one other thing about the leaves that makes me worry.

You see, when leaves fall and naturally decay, the nutrients go back into the earth. At the same time, carbon dioxide is released. This doesn’t contribute to climate change because when leaves grow back in spring, the tree re-absorbs the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

What I worry about is that all those leaves collected by all those street sweepers will go to the rubbish tip. This must happen because the sweepers are still picking up litter. No one is going to separate the leaves from the litter.

In a rubbish tip, the rubbish is stacked in layers and capped every night so that the rats and pigeons don’t make a mess. This means that organic material like leaves have no oxygen. Instead of decaying (aerobically) and releasing carbon dioxide, the leaves will decay (anaerobically) and release methane.

Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Over the next two decades, this methane released will trap 72 times more heat than carbon dioxide. Even after a hundred years, methane is still 25 times more potent than the same amount of carbon dioxide.

I wonder if anyone else has been thinking about this.

That’s what it sounded like. I turned around and saw a man grinning widely, walking behind me on the footpath.

‘Hello,’ I replied and kept walking.

‘Mumble, mumble…’

Huh? I took out my one of my earphones and looked at him, puzzled.

‘Are you going home?’ he repeated.

‘Yes.’

Oh not, he was a weirdo. I put the earphone back in and kept walking.

‘Mumble, mumble…’

Again, I took an earphone out.

‘Where do you live?’ he asked.

I considered my options.

‘I’d rather not say,’ was what I settled on.

I jammed my earphones back in and continued at the same steady pace. I didn’t turn around but could feel him drop away.

The dog looked frustrated. It was darting here and there but no more than two metres at a time because the boy was holding tightly onto its leash. I guess the boy had no option, as there is no gate to our concrete square. An unleashed dog could have run away to the wild open streets of London.

I remember seeing the boy play with the dog a few month ago. He threw a stick. The dog stood beside him, apparently confused. Only when the boy faked a sprint towards the stick, did the dog start running towards it. The dog skidded and made three attempts at picking up the stick before success.

This incident made me realise that the dog, though large, is actually quite young. A big puppy.

I also didn’t know that dogs aren’t born with the instinct to fetch.

In the first three months of the dog coming to live amongst our flats, he barked and barked. The family would frantically shush him. Soon, they too were barking. I couldn’t walk past their front door without setting off a canine and human symphony.

I think the dog has learned. I can now walk by and two-thirds of the time, the dog would watch without a peep.

Some mornings on the way to work, I see the family out for a walk with the dog. I hope they go out every day, even twice a day. It must be hard for a big dog living in a two-storey London flat.