memory space.

It is genuinely mind-boggling and entirely unsettling when you happen upon an empty site in the city and start wondering where you might be until it dawns on you that this is the space once occupied by a building that contained your rawest experience. I'm sure this sounds unnecessarily hyperbolic and indulgent but - and I divulge to make my point - I speak of the Middlesex Hospital on Mortimer Street, where I spent weeks at the age of 18, numb in a waiting room, waiting for my brother to die, or for a miracle to happen. Incredibly luckily it was the latter, but those harshly lit spaces, corridors, lifts, wards, windowpanes, the chapel; these were the built containers of his sickness, our sickness, suspended and ended time, numb tears.

This massive, red brick, monumental and endless building became my reluctant home. The spaces are etched in to my life; they stick to me like glue. Of course I never wanted to return there, but having it all removed without my knowledge, I feel as if reality and history have vanished - did it really happen if the place it occurred in no longer exists? I stumbled upon the new, empty, alien space and slowly realising where I was and what had been removed completely destabilised me. Its absence renders both the place and memory dream-like. It also feels as if the very ground has eaten up the walls and all their stories, consuming the bad and good until invisible. And now what? Another luxury block of flats I suppose?

I have always felt that spaces have characters, but in some kind of earthly impossibility, it is as if a space ceases to be - a black hole removes the very fabric of reality, just to replace it with a new space, for a new time.

But this is the city, and this is what happens. Always shifting, renewing, for better or worse.

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22 July: Today, by chance, I opened a John Berger book I've had for 2 years, unread. I came across the following.

"To this human ambiguity of the visible one then has to add the visual experience of absence, whereby we no longer see what we saw. We face a disappearance. And a struggle ensues to prevent what has disappeared, what has become invisible, falling into the negation of the unseen, defying our existence."

Far more eloquent than me, John.

SF: a small musing.

San Francisco is a city where I found myself using the word 'vibe'. I feel deeply embarrassed by this confession; it was out of character.

It may be because in many respects, the city was so alien to London living, particularly the way in which everything (allow me to generalise wildly) feels much more relaxed, as if the pace of life has slowed, the sharp edges of it softened by perpetual sunshine and the dominant stress of timetables and careers washed aside by more leisurely priorities.

This is not, of course, to suggest that San Francisco is not a centre of business and employment; but there exists a marked divide between its financial centre, echoing the advanced metropolitan form (albeit skewed by dramatic topography) of Chicago and New York, and the rest of the city, characterised by low-rise, iconically-beautiful wooden houses, unaltered hand-painted shop signs and ubiquitous technicolour murals. Art, like beauty, is welcomed in this city like few others.

So, it's California living: your peers drink beer and make music in the park, socialise every evening, have a resilient and optimistic demeanour and smoke a hell of a lot of drugs. Street life exists in a way it struggles to in British climes; the popularity of inventive street food initiatives are proof of this if nothing else.

The visual lack of creative destruction (as seen in original unaltered signage and the absence of postmodern/neomodern characterless 'regeneration' schemes), the liberal approach to street activity and decoration, and the striving for (albeit at times homogenous) architectural beauty gives rise to this air of relaxation, contentedness and ultimate liveability that so many cities could do well to emulate.

I'm not sure if I could really live in San Francisco, though. It is pleasant, yes, but it is a world of its own where the middle class revel in beer and zine-making (or home improvements and dog-walking) and the others are forgotten, avoided or (perhaps undeliberately) fetishised. Neverthless, there is something very seductive and powerful about its beauty. Walking through its streets gives me pleasure that is in all honesty intermittent on those of London.