As the steady drizzle descends there is a cultural clash outside the precinct.

On the corner of George Street one of the increasingly classy breed of buskers they have here now is playing some limpidly amplified acoustic guitar, staring quietly and camly towards the trees, the war memorial and the old Courthouse. He is playing a slow, gentle, rather yearning tune, with an emotional underpunch that sounds a bit like the B Side of Mark Knopfler playing Local Hero.

Directly opposite, outside the pawnbrokers, a short black woman in an enormous hoody declaims from an equally enormous Bible held in front of her – a burden and a shield – calling for people to “repent” and “follow the Lord Jesus”. No one is paying her any mind. In the bag she carries at her side there is a magnificent brass trumpet, which she must use at some point with a divine blast to rally the faithfull and startle the faithless.

In the market on George Street, the same bloke who was selling four perfumes for a tenner before Xmas, now has piles of those ugly high crowned half baseball hats emblazoned with “Prada”, Gucci”, “YSL”. Producing bootlegs with the inverted commas might be the next stage in cool.

At the top of Cromwell Road an armada of several dozen snails sails bravely across the pavement towards the promised land of the allotments over the far horizon.

Doing the exercises for my arthritic knee in the absence of weights, I use fat, heavy books instead. James Holland’s Normandy ’44 in one hand and Vasily Grossman’s extraordinary novel Stalingrad in the other. Possibly misguided even handedness. In reality, the Ostfront was much heavier in all respects.