An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.

The world changes, but I want that change to be necessary or respectful of what has happened before. Everything changes, and that's quite right.

Hackney at certain epochs has given itself suburban airs and graces, before being slapped down and consigned once more to the dump bin of aborted ambition.

With the world as it now presents itself, there is something perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school-lottery migration, the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination?

I am crumbling in sync with old Hackney.

There is an obvious connection, on the declining Roman empire's bread and circuses model, between political enthusiasm for public spectacles and the periods when we are least able to pay for them.