The darkest hour is just before dawn ( thanks to Mama Cass)

Silence reigns over a Sunday Dawn that is only met by the sound of rushing water from a fountain and a whisper from the breeze travelling through the trees,
In this beautiful darkness it'd hard to be
opinionated or even hold on to an issue. I decide to go for a Tim Burton ( noted filmmaker of Edward Scissorhands, Sweeney Todd etc who has moved to London from LA and walks from Hampstead to the City in the early hours looking for inspiration).
The black pavement shimmers in sodium orange pools under the avuncular gaze of their steel watchers.I decide to head right down Moorgate to avoid the dregs of madness that threaten from the western edges of Shoreditch.
The pavement is glistening chocolate and I walk past dark glass and alabaster edifices with cavernous lobbies,steel entrance barriers, drooping hothouse flower arrangements, made to order corporate art and sleeping security guards.
Two White sixteen wheelers whizz past bearing their offerings to the hungry lanes of the supermarket who wait to be occupied by salad leaves or chilled ravioli.A night bus flashes it's strip lit blue interior with chattering office cleaners who ignore the slumped figures of Bacchus' children who lie scattered around them after returning from the
battle of the dance or pub floor.
Then the velvet cloak of silence resumes.

Above me, a persistent hand starts pulling away skeins of darkness to reveal a lighter umber and cerulean that portents a dark dawn. Underfoot something magical is happening as the cracked cement gives way to an intricate black and White Italianate chequered mosaic. I walk down this marchpane alley surrounded by timber and brick renditions of Dickens curiosity shop; and I arrive in a dazzling courtyard
floodlit to show off it's black and White pied design. On all sides stand the excessively ornate serried columns and arched windows of guildhall who watch me with the weight of age and wisdom. I slip out to be embraced by a mile long twenty first century under construction regimented parade of piazza, arcade, global HQ, exchange and trading floors. Deep in their foundations are the stratified and ossified
remains of two thousand year old piazza, Roman empire HQ,exchanges and markets for slaves and sorghum.
As the feeble luminous light struggles to backlight the dark massing of cloud the ancient city soothes my fluttering consciousness. For some inexplicable reason this sodden damp square mile with it's short statured river folk colonised by patrician Romans, sturdier Angles,Jutes and Saxons and then by adventurers, wanderers and the dispossessed,this little
square mile has endured it's occupation and casts an
ironic and sometimes sardonic glance at its present occupants.
A circle of squawking seagulls foretell a rainy morning and the gentle lap of the river pushes me back across London Bridge and away from the younger hamlets of the South.

I head back to find fresh waves of drunken revellers stumbling toward decisions between dietary needs and the need to be transported away to their suburban vapidity. Their raucousness is joined by vans of topiary and horticulture heading East to possess their weekly Flower Market territory and the spell of night is broken. The harsh weak grey of morning turns alabaster edifices into rain streaked stone and toughened green glass and the chocolate pavement dissolves into a slick cratered pavement interrupted by dips, kerbside skirting and cast iron Victorian sealed portals to the underworld.
I pick my way past the lonely copy of the Standard dancing in wild abandon at the bus stop and head to a backlit screen of light to trap the recently departed magic on bits and bytes for my patient readers- happy Sunday.

Beauty is love and peace is fine.