A Tuesday, mostly weather

Some days the city gives you nothing, which is to say it gives you everything and dares you to notice. Flat sky, everyone in a hurry, the kind of light that photographers call nothing light until they are old enough to know better.

I walked the same four streets for two hours.

A man cycled past with his dog in the basket, and the dog had the expression of a commuter who has seen the timetable and accepted it. One frame. That was the day, really — one frame before eleven.

The rest of the roll is umbrellas and shutters and a taxi the colour of a boiled sweet. Nothing happened, and I have rarely liked a contact sheet more. That is the whole trick of a diary, on film or on paper: you do not write it because the day was special. The day becomes special because you wrote it.