View From The Top

North to west from one of those big glass buildings in London. On the left and north, St Paul's Cathedral across the river and to the right and west, The Shard ostentatious nonsense (£29 to take the lift to the top don'cha know). I was working in a big building this morning and realised you can go out on the balcony - why did nobody mention this before?! Really quite an experience. Thatcher's £8 million funeral will be held in St Paul's tomorrow. Worth it to make sure I reckon.

Big Business.

It was quite a memorable experience to be standing in the middle of this area awash with the vast profits of copy-and-paste money - so inappropriately called "banking" - and to have quite a philosophical conversation with another bloke up there for the air. Neither of us could have been there without ourselves taking Mammon's dollar, but we both were reflecting on what this country has become.

With the deliberate destruction of the UK manufacturing base in the '70s and '80s, and the rise of amoral growth economics, came an attitude of disassociation with an industrial past. That left entire swathes of the country without purpose or prospects and has left us in a state of dependency to those economies which do still actually make stuff. Quite a lot of stuff, actually. Germany got that right.

And so, having got that off my chest, it's cycling around London again to other offices and eventually to the train home. I went up Regent Street tonight which was proper London traffic. I was actually elbowed in the chest by another cyclist, which was a new experience. Still, if that's the game, I'm playing. All good fun until somebody goes under a bus.