The dream itself didn't wake me but the gradual process of wakening allowed the dream to merge into the reality of the dim, pre-dawn light. Since I'm normally wakened by the alarm, the whole experience of waking in a dream is unusual but the dream itself was unsettling. It wasn't dramatic: I was answering a ringing mobile, my phone but not my iPhone. An old one with buttons and a harsh electronic ringtone. I pressed the green button to answer. The conversation was short

"Mr Hope?"

"Yes."

"They've gone."

And then the sound of a modem's chirruping and scratching, finishing with the bedong, bedong that usually confirms connection but then silence.

The dim, low-contrast backlighting on the alarm clock can't be read easily in the dark but by the time I got back to bed my eyes were focused enough to see that it was nearly 5am, too early for waking but by 5.26 it was too late and I was too awake for sleeping so I got up and went through the morning routine, tossing the dream aside with the duvet.

I got to Edinburgh about 7.15 and started cycling round my favourite spots intending, as usual, to take a quick insurance-policy shot from the blipbank before heading to work. At the back of the station on Calton Road, near the bridge formed by Regent Road crossing over the top, a crude red-pink heart had been sprayed on the concrete wall and over it hung a black cloud. Beneath it the words 'Stu is a gimp' had been written in black marker. This was now buried under a layer of Fringe posters.

Never mind. I carried on to Rose Street where I knew a gloriously colourful explosion of red and white paint was spread across one of the sandstone facing panels that covered the back of BHS. It still held flakes of the eggshell that had been blown clear of its contents and injected with cheap acrylics. At least it did before the whole facade was encased in scaffolding and shrouded in netting. I could see that the sandstone blocks had been removed.

The waking unease from the dream was starting to creep back. Just off William Street at the side door of Bert's Bar, the catering size baked bean can flecked with rust where its shiny tin coating had worn off, which had for months sat beside the door as an ashtray for staff and customers, was also gone.

It was nearly 8am now and I should be getting to work but there was still time to cycle to the end of Chester Street where a woman with a half-lit and almost DaVincian expression was sprayed in silver on the police box. She had been photographed many times before, her beauty only enhanced by the way paint had gathered at the bottom of her chin and run out of the frame. Now she too was gone with only some remnants, a ghost, still visible under swirls of abrasive cleaner.

I had to leave it and go to work with nothing, which only made the anxiety worse. Lunchtime. I'd find something at lunchtime. They couldn't all be gone.

But lunchtime was no better. Walking through Prince Street Gardens and over the bridge behind the Ross bandstand I could see that the pile of barriers stacked at the foot of the castle cliff had gone, employed elsewhere coralling tourists. Onto the High Street to find the views down the street and into the closes obscured by Fringe paraphernalia. Into the cloisters along the front of the High Court to stand at the one spot where the pillars and the gaps between buildings combine to expose an intriguing slice of the bustle of the High Street. Today it only showed bright white gazebos filling Parliament Square.

Pushing my way frantically through the crowds on the High Street, ignoring the hectoring, braying yahs crying "look at me!" and counting any passing acknowledgement as a step on the road to their 15 seconds of fame, I came to Princes Street Gardens where many photos have been found and many more are stored in its tranquility and foliage. Today it was crowded with lunchers lunching and jugglers practicing their juggling. Even the steep banks of the gardens connecting the flat path to the hill of Market Street, usually teeming with plants, had been strimmed back to grassy stubble leaving only the most tenacious weeds to begin re-establishing themselves.

It was true. They've gone. In despair I pointed my camera at the ground and clicked.


**********************************
Disclosure: Mandy was quite shocked tonight to learn that Uncoupling was completely made up. I must confess I have some misgivings about posting things that are untrue although in most cases no more untrue that my photographs. Those aren't 100% accurate representations so why should words be? Anyway, just in case, here's the truth and lies. The early waking, the dream of the ringing phone and modem are true but the dream conversation isn't. The missing photos are true, apart from one - the heart with the cloud. It existed yesterday and probably does today but somewhere else.

The ending is ripped off from a story about the photographer William Eggleston reported in the Guardian yesterday. The article says "For years, though, my favourite piece of writing about photography was William Eggleston's brief but intriguing afterword to The Democratic Forest (1989). It begins with a description of what, for Eggleston, was a photographic epiphany. When out taking photographs around Oxford, Mississippi, he realised "it was one of those occasions when there was no picture there. It seemed like nothing, but of course there was something for someone out there." So Eggleston simply pointed his camera at the earth and began "taking some pretty good pictures". It's a good article. The two quotes that I used on the forum today also come from it.

The photo is of the strimmed bank in Princes Street Gardens where only grassy stubble remains. The weeds are busy re-establishing themselves.