Putting out the rubbish and I hear a slight controlled scream from the street. Looking up the path between the hedges and a girl of about 7 glides edgily past on a pair of inline skates with a look of delight and panic on her face – the most danger and excitement you can have at one and a half miles per hour.

My Conservative voting neighbour – who still has an election leaflet in her window – comes out to inspect her bins on collection day; opens the lid, gives a proprietary glance in and down, with a face that expects disappointment, and an appraising sniff; just to see if standards are being maintained.

In Kingsbury, May means mangoes. Buying a box from a teetering pile on the street and the bloke offers me a plastic bag. “No thanks, I’m trying to give them up.” I find that this line gets a smile and the message across.

Whenever I use the cash point at the local Sainsburys I am haunted by the ghost of a horrible incident from last year. Bit of a queue. An old lady fumbling a bit with her card and the buttons and a very aggressive woman started shouting at her to get a move on or get out of the way. Everyone just looked – the way people do – while the woman looked around for approval because she was obviously doing us all a favour by harassing this inconvenient woman out of our way. So when her eye contact landed on me I told her to leave the old lady alone and have a bit of respect and care for the elderly. Quite reasonable I thought. A volley of abuse ensued. The word W*****r prominent as she stated her firm belief that the future belonged to her. This put the old lady off her stroke even more and she went off shocked and grumbling, despite some encouragement from me to stick her ground and take her time. The upsetting thing about incidents like this is always the way that people just stand and look and allow bullying to take place, even if they disapprove.

At the bus stop opposite the Magistrates Court on Sunday, a small team of young Eastern European men; clean cut, wearing (non matching) neat clothes and shoes, stand and have earnest conversations while carrying enormous black bibles zipped up in leather covers like filofaxes of the latter day saints.

Phrases that gain a little too much in the translation dept. In VBs off Kingsbury Circle – an Asian Cash and Carry that has settled in an old garage, with the feel of a barely refurbished factory where you can buy hundredweights of rice or flour, jaggery in jute sacks, gallons of mango juice, industrial quantities of ghee in huge tins and every spice known to man and then some – and I’m looking for Kashmiri chilies. Time was that my social anxiety was such that I would wander around for hours looking rather than actually ask someone. Its odd that I can stand up in front of quite large meetings full of people I don’t know and make a speech, but asking a worker in a shop if they have some produce has always been a struggle. Reflecting on how daft this is, I take a deep breath and ask the woman stacking bags of lentils if they have Kashmiri chilies. “They are in the bottom,” she says; which sounds a bit painful to me.

On election night I was in our neighbouring, less safe, ward knocking on the doors of Labour promises; and approached a house that had a taxi parked on its hardstanding, 3D hologram style Jesus last supper postcards on the door and big pictures of the Royal Family with small Union Jacks stuck across each corner, and a copy of our local candidates leaflet peeping shyly out amongst them. A plump middle aged guy came to the door and proclaimed “Labour? Yes! Jeremy Corbyn. I love him!” and blew kisses into the air. M’wah! Mwah!”

Either side of the Edgware Road a colossal amount of building is going on. Old art-deco factories, DIY stores and their attendant car parks give way to blocks of shiny new flats – some of which seem to have more gyms than people. Dusty old pubs are replaced by Care Homes – though this has been going on long enough for some of the signage to drop off, as if they were slogans on the backdrop at the Conservative party conference. Ashton Lodge has become Ashto Lodge – which is altogether more exotic. The old Hendon police College site is now a massive sea of mud and foundations. Very few of the swish flats that are being built are likely to be “affordable” in any real sense. At the Welsh Harp one bedroom flats cost £250 000 and two bed flats rent at £900 a week. What kind of slick holograms are coming to live amongst us and how long will they tolerate our company?

Nadhim Zahawi’s defence of being at the President’s club dinner last week

1) that he saw nothing untoward and

2) that he left because he felt uncomfortable

begs the question of what he felt uncomfortable about if he saw nothing untoward. Reminded me of Billy Bunter. “I didn’t eat your chocs, and I didn’t hide behind the armchair when I heard you come in.”

Flocks of seagulls soar over our road and settles on the roofs opposite. Seagulls have become much more common in recent years as they have moved inland to scavenge, but with the prospect of a 20 metre sea level rise baked in to the current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere; it feels like a premonition of when the view out of our window across west London will be filled for the most part with a mile or two of dirty khaki water lapping up against Shoot Up Hill and drowning the West End.

Taking senior moments to extremes I left my bag on the bus this morning. A bag with all my planning and assessments, my all areas school pass, my phone charger and school diary and (possibly most important) lunch and flask of coffee.

Tuesday, of course, is the day that I don’t have a minute to breathe. Teaching from the off, playground duty, then more teaching until lunch. The lost property dept at Arriva buses does not open until the point I was supposed to start teaching.

Squeezing out a bit of time between lessons I manage to get through to a voice recognition software labyrinth which was a bit like being in Phonejacker.

“State clearly the number of the bus that you lost your property on.”

“2 – 5 – 3”

“Did you say..1-6-7? ..say yes or no.”

“NO!”

…and so on for another dozen variations in which the closest it came to what I was saying was 255. But I think this was just a tease. It struck me that, as firms record messages for training purposes, this might be a fiendish practical joke designed to get recordings of people in a state of gradually escalating exasperation. Its hard to believe anyone ever gets through, especially because every time it got it wrong the option to revert to “the operator” just took you back to the beginning of the labyrinth to have another go.

“TWO FIVE THRRREEE!

“Did you say N528?..say yes or no.”

“AAAARGH!”

“I didn’t understand what you said….”

Luckily there was a general enquiries email contact somewhere on their website, which responded quickly and gave the address of the bus garage the 253 ends up at. Phoning that was a joy. Straight through to a friendly, slightly sardonic human being at Stamford Hill, who asked me to describe the bag and told me he’d got it. Blessed relief. He was waiting behind his rather cosy, old fashioned bus office desk – a bit like ticket offices used to be  before they went all slick – with a big smile on his face when I went out there after school. I asked if they had a lot of lost bags…”all the time, I’ve had two more since you called”, and held them up like a pair of dead pheasants.

On the tube on the way back from the Lumiere display in the centre of London – a cosmic acid trip without the drugs that transforms space and shape by shining different coloured lights on them – and we were sitting opposite a middle aged man with a five o clock shadow, wearing dark green camouflage trousers tucked into lace up cherry red jackboots, a purple bomber jacket and black baseball cap. He was intently reading a history of electric railways in Manchester and Liverpool. I hadn’t realised that trainspotters could be so paramilitary.

Waiting at the bus stop with the shopping and a kid with a manic look on his face zooms past on an electric powered scooter. It is making a noise like a TIE fighter.

Last week one of the children I work with dropped one of those tiny 5p pieces and without thinking about it I asked him to put “the sixpence” away. And we haven’t even had Brexit yet.

Reading this  – “The Hebrew word for fly, zvuv, is surely one of the most magically exact onomatopoeias in any language” – I thought at first that this was referring to the zip, not the insect.

Because I was reading without my glasses, the blurring of the letters creates creative miscues. I read “thankfully a time honoured solution lies close to hand, Cheers! let’s pour another cup” as “CHEESE! let’s pour another cup.”

Leafleting the Bush Grove estate for the first time since the general election and approach the house where my finger was sliced open by the hound of the Baskervilles, as I shoved Barry Gardiner’s smiling face through the letterbox, with some trepidation.

The “What part of woof don’t you understand?” sign had been taken down, but I size up the door with caution; reflecting that last time there had been no warning. The dog had been waiting silently on the other side waiting to sink its fang into the first bit of flesh that it could sense. This time I use the safe leafleting technique of folding it so it was stiff enough to go through without requiring any fingers alongside it. The dog can’t have been lurking in wait this time because there was a furious scrabbling of onrushing paws on lino, an enraged growl and the leaflets disappeared through the door with some rapidity, and in some distress, as the jaws of the beast tore them apart.

Around the corner in Old Kenton Lane there was a semi detached house; owner occupied on one side, buy to let and turned into flats on the other. The buy to let side was scruffy, the paint peeling, roof sagging a bit, amazon cardboard box in the window, front garden mostly mud. The owner occupied side was prosperous, tidy gardened, solar paneled, with its paintwork in good nick and roof clear of moss. The owner is probably worried about what next door is doing to his market value, but that’s the price of a market society and the failure to build enough decent social housing. The previous week on The Ridgeway we had passed a mattress and a load of building rubble just dumped on the pavement. One of the neighbours told us that it was put there by the landlord of the house – unwilling to pay the council the charge for taking it away, so they just dumped it and waited for the clean up crew to pick it up anyway.

The drift in this area is for more and more buy to let, turning “invincible suburbs” into a less sniffy, but rougher, places to live. The regulation (or suppression) of private landlords could very well appeal far more widely than people think.

The solar panels are also a clue to the way climate change is being mismanaged. People who can afford it have invested in solar panels or home insulation – are saving CO2 and making personal financial savings subsidised by everyone else. But this is done on a pepperpot basis. On my road, about three houses have been insulated. You look at them and they are fatter than the others. To make a difference we need ALL the houses to be insulated, starting with the people who can afford it least.

Last week I had to have a tooth out. On the way in, all the slender gun metal implements were laid out on a tray like a futurist fruit bowl: or a miniaturised set of exhibits from the London dungeon. “For what we are about to recieve…”

Jamie (my son) told me that he was relatively relaxed about having five teeth out at a sitting when he was 13 because he hadn’t seen the size of the needle until afterwards. I use his stoicism then as a model now.

I suppose its helpful to be told that “we’re just going to twist this round”; as having a rough idea of what’s going on, without being overburdened by detail, approximates to Buddha’s middle way.

It was all over quicker than I expected. they showed me the tooth, like a hard little birth, big, cracked, solid and bloodied. Red Molar.

There’s now an odd sensory battle going on between minding the gap – which feels much bigger than it looks – and a startling awareness of the remaining teeth, which are so much more present than they were; like the remaining relatives in a generation being lost.

Currently reading Extreme Cities by Ashley Dawson. The projection for sea level rise under the impact of climate change is currently set by the IPCC as a maximum of 1.4 metres above current levels by 2100, assuming a smooth and continuous expansion on existing trends.

The problem is that past rises and falls in sea levels as climate has changed have not been smooth and continuous, but more like earthquakes – long periods of little change punctuated by rapid, potentially catastrophic shifts.

The relevance of this is that the last time there was the current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, sea levels were about 20 metres above what they are now. If you want to scare yourself, have a look at this interactive map, which shows what happens as sea levels rise.

http://flood.firetree.net/?ll=52.1335,1.0108&zoom=8&m=20

If you go up to the 20 metre mark it shows that the Thames estuary will start at Windsor and central London will be inundated, taking out most of the systems that the rest of the city needs to function, Cambridge and Peterborough will be North Sea ports, what’s left of Lincolnshire will be an island, York will be like Atlantis and there will be virtually nothing left of Holland.

If we have 20 metres of sea level rise already “baked in” to what we’ve already done, the only question is not what that will look like (we have the map and can see it) but how long it will take.

We tend to think of geological time as slow – moving at the pace of a glacier. But when you think of how rapidly the glaciers are melting it seems that the impact of the Anthropocene could be accelerating in a way that will become unmanageable unless tackled with greater urgency.