Chorus

15 February 2010

You know you are in Tokyo when the dawn brings with it an electronic chorus of speaking voices from screens and speakers, the sound addressing the gray light in the more or less empty streets and crossings – a song awaiting its intended ears. The city speaking to itself about pedestrians who are only just starting to emerge. Babbling and enjoining them to cross or to stay still, to buy goods or services, to buy themselves a better life. From where you lie – in a bed in room on the 12th floor of a hotel linked directly to Shibuya – this sound comes to you blown on the wind, in erratic wisps and gusts, with the slowly emerging traffic sounds and the wind itself, the light slipping in gently from round the edges of the plasticised curtains.

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Coming home. Taxi conveys a cargo of passengers from London to Sheffield, adults and kids all sleeping all the way. A strange cargo these slumberers, all limb curled and eyes closed, in another timezone than the driver, daylight immune, dreaming, sleepfidgeting.