I stayed in London last night, and as usually totally overestimated how long it would take me to get to work in the morning. So I just spent about an hour wandering the streets, flaneuring, amazed as ever as how streets just kept on unfolding all around me. I love the always slightly tatty cafes and kebab shops and newsagents of Shoreditch, the way trendy types in skinny jeans and sunglasses loiter alongside clumps of schoolgirls in bottle green and older African ladies in flamboyant turbans. But I also fancy myself as a Bloomsbury lady of leisure, patrolling the smoky columns of the British Museum, the wide paths and grand squares that open out of the shabbiest alley. I wrote my university dissertation about the streets of London in Virginia Woolf's novels - how they gave her female characters license to be free. Eighty years or so on from Mrs Dalloway, I still find something exciting in being able to walk and explore, to hop on and off buses, to find colour in details: the faded Victorian adverts still blazoned on sooty brick walls, a girl's bright pink shoes, jumbles of fruit sold on the street as they must have been for centuries, the rather sweetly old-fashioned sex-line postcards in very Britishly red phone boxes.