Huge moon

I sat in a cafe today listening to a poor bloke from Australia who'd plainly just moved to the UK with his family. He was on the phone to Haringey Council trying to get a place in a school for his child. Plainly they were being completely useless, as always, asking him for stuff he simply couldn't provide, and I could hear the terrible stress and misery in his voice. "In Australia" he said, "you just turn up to admissions with your kid, and they do the rest. I'm never gonna drop mud on the Australian system again... and I'm a school teacher!"

Anyone who thinks immigrants have it easy in this country should be forced to listen to recordings of the conversations he was having. Frankly, I don't know why anyone would want to come to this country right now. I don't even know that this country exists any more. Plainly, there will be some godforsaken catastrophe in Brexit negotiations which will lead to Scotland bailing out of the UK, and then we'll just be left with the dry husk of our once, great, unified nation.

It was another crazy spring-like day today. I went to the gym in the early evening and was immediately struck by the glorious sound of birds singing. It's obviously mating season because they were having a marvellous time. The air was ripe with the scent or flowers. I didn't know spring flowers could be so pungent.

I had lunch in Camden Market today with young Harrison. He'd never seen the place before, so it was a privilege to give him his first taste. It's still quite some location. I reckon you can pretty much find any type of street food there, and if you're looking for a slightly eccentric or alternative gift, that's the place to find it. Of course, like all of the things I write about in my blog, it was a lot more of an adventure in the days before the hipsters and the truck loads of tourists took over. It felt like a proper hidden gem back in the 90s.

The moon was enormous earlier, like a giant peach dangling behind a frayed net curtain. It was almost full. I couldn't tell if it was waxing or waining. It's good to know these things because Nathan always goes a little nutty in a full moon. Fiona does the same thing. It's hardly surprising, I guess, when you consider the effect the moon's cycles has on the tides, and the fact that humans are up to something like 75% water. So basically we're all potentially dealing with our own internal tides.

When I looked at the moon later this evening it was happily sitting next to Venus, which itself was tartishly bright. I'm wondering if the cosmos is trying to tell us something.