Outside Hendon Magistrates Court the ornamental Fuschia hedge has grown through the railings in a riot of drooping magenta flowers. Getting ready for an Autumnal return to normal, a young worker with a hedge trimmer is squaring it off as a metaphor for a legal system with a limited imagination. He is wearing ear protectors. Less than a metre away from him, the old lady, young couple and small child lined up by the bus stop, are not. Confused bees waver around the cauterised bristling twigs where the flowers used to be. The young worker sweeps them up from the floor. Tidiness before life.

Beside Chili Masala, the small patch of waste ground has some fitful grass bravely trying to compete with a jumble of liberally discarded plastic bottles and beer cans, like a miniature replica of that field at the Reading Festival left full of single use tents. A sole cabbage White butterfly flutters gamely around it showing what life could be about instead.

Outside our flat, bees are weaving in and out of the flowers in the hedge. One blunders into one of the many webs strung across it with a huge tiger striped spider hanging motionless in the middle. Immediately the spider, twice the size of the bee, is on it and wrapping it up in a silk coffin with busy legs moving quickly up and down like a sewing machine. The bee is quickly reduced to future packed lunch in a silk sarcophagus in about ten seconds, and the spider lowers it down out of sight for later, before climbing back up to wait.

Looking down from the top deck of the 83 from the bridge over the wide stretch of tube lines by Wembley Park. A pair of Jubilee line trains snaking slowly round the curve towards the station, framing a line that dives steeply down to an opaque rectangular maw of a tunnel that looks like a portal to somewhere grim.

At the bottom of the hill, the first crane fly of the season. It half flies, is half blown hither and thither, long spindly legs wavering around and small wings whirring frantically. It seems far more alone than it should do.