Went to Hampstead Heath on my own yesterday, getting off the tube to a soft, constant rain; after plodding rather miserably through some suburban-looking cul-de-sacs, I walked out onto the heath. It's the strangest place: a cultivated bit of countryside, dropped into the city, where for a moment there is silence, shiny blackbirds picking through leaves, trees with acid-green moss streaked with rain, and you could be in the middle of any rural shire. Only the occasional distant siren suggests that there is something beyond the mud and fields. Then, walk up a small hill and the towers of the city rise out of the mists like some settlement from Oz.
