Route 79

The short walk to the bus stop takes me past a couple of residential street corners. It's at these corners that you will often find anonymous-looking dark green "boxes" planted on the side of the pavement near the kerb of the road. These boxes belong to the local cable TV company. And local youths like to break them open at night - so that they expose all of the electrical innards to the world in the morning. It's a distressing sight - and is a reminder of how vulnerable public services and utilities are. However, it always amuses me to know that each one of the wires in there corresponds to some nearby homeowner's cable TV socket. And no sooner than the cable guy comes along to fix the broken box - the next day it will have been ripped open again. As I reach my bus stop - which is directly in front of a row of houses - I take a quick look at how all the wheelie-bins are doing. Wheelie-bins are a prominent, if not grotesque, feature of the suburban landscape in London. Most of the housing here was designed well before the days that wheelie-bins were invented - and therefore there is no obvious place to hide them. More often than not - homeowners just leave them in the front garden (or more accurately: front yard). And recent London borough council recycling initiatives mean that every household now has all manner of different wheelie-bins and refuse containers. They might be considered by many to have blighted the landscape - but they're here to stay. The interesting thing is this: in some gardens they seem to have changed position from day to day. It's almost as if they have a life of their own ...