Dear Diary, I went to London today

I like alone time, because when I'm alone, I don't have to explain myself so much.

When you're in a car speeding down the motorway on a day that looks like a 1920 film, it's possible to find riveting entertainment in peeling a tangerine and trying to reconstruct it, hollow.

I decide to have no destinations. On the train into central London, packed like grains in a muesli bar, the woman on the other side of the glass is wrapped in a blanket of oblivion. Curious, the corner of my eye steals down to her book title. It reads Solitaire's Mystery, and she becomes my victim.

When she gets off the train, I do too.

I follow her all the way to Pret a Manger. While she's inside, I make a steep decision and a steeper sacrifice. See, I collect Jokers, and I usually have a few itinerant ones about me, and she's just emerged from Pret with an open brown paper bag. Opportunity batters the door down.

When she sits down to have lunch, and the memory of a random girl who "accidentally" bumped into her on the street is fading into daily miasma, she'll find a Joker sitting unobtrusively on her sandwich. It'll have, scribbled on the back with black ink, a stolen line from Solitaire's Mystery:

He She stole into the village Tottenham Court Road like a poisonous snake.

She'll understand the Joker context and the paraphrased quote because I saw her read the chapter it's from, and I'd pay a lot to see her reaction.

See, when I'm alone I don't need to explain myself so much.

And then, standing on the pavement, as though from nowhere, I'm suddenly surrounded by soap bubbles, like rainbowed pearls drifting on the wind. Instead of being mesmerized by the way they sail down air currents like kamikaze feathers, I spin endlessly to look for the source. Fool.

On a whim, I leave my reconstructed tangerine peel on a bicycle seat, with a note inside that reads "Just kidding :)".

I spend the next half hour crammed geometrically into an avant garde phone booth, sending free email-card greetings to people I know.

Hi, guess where I am. London would be cool, if it wasn't so cold. There aren't any porn ads in this phone booth, which is disappointing cos I think I'd like to phone one up and ask the ladies on the other end if they get any job satisfaction. I think I'm running out of sp

Hi, phone booths have gone all high tech.

Hi, there's a lady waiting to use this phone booth, and I wonder how long it'll be before she starts to bang on the door and yell, oh wait, here she comes.

On the way out, I stop to laugh at this, and to spend 30p on three postcards. Pay attention, because that's an important plot development.

I never like staying on the main road too long, so I veer off. It's when I pause to drool at a red Jag parked on a yellow line that I notice the sign on the glass double-doors to the right. Verbatim, the content escapes me, but in essence the sign reads "You can't come in here until you call security, at [phone number]". The door is open. Hmm.

"Can I help you?"

I realize I've been gazing in amusement at the sign for a good few minutes, contemplating whether or not to ring the security number and do something puerile. In the mean time, there's a fresh-faced boy - a security officer? - staring quizzically at me.

"I was just wondering if you knew the door's open, so your sign is pretty ineffective."

He paused, looking like a mirror. Reflective.

"Shit." He looked guiltily at me. "Would you like to come in and take a look around?" Bribery, I think, but sure. The lobby exudes glamour like pheromones. On the far wall there are glossy technicolour women - sultry, pouty cover queens in two dimensional glory. It's a TV and radio station, the boy informs me, you know. Yea I know, I add silently, the ones where beauty is a marketable commodity.

"So you're a security officer." He nods, eager. His accent's lilting, strange, like his tongue's doing all it can to wrap around native British lingo, but hasn't quite made the jump. "If I took out a gun and started waving it around, would you shoot me?"

"If I had a gun, I might."

"Oh. I don't have a gun."

"Good, because I don't either." Pause. "If you had a gun, though, I'd probably run upstairs and jump out of a window to get away."

Which just goes to show that they don't pay the grunt guys enough. His manner is engaging, easygoing, and I peel his life story off him like wallpaper. South African pursuing the British Dream - to exploit the exchange rate. Earn here, spend there. "I live like there is a tomorrow," he says gravely, and I want to hug him.

I get him to give me a visitor's pass, and on a whim, I write a note on one of my postcards, and give it to him. I'll never see him again in my life, but at least he was part of it long enough for me to learn his name - and that's how it is, I guess.

When I step outside, the red Jag's gone.

Around the corner, I sit on the curb to pen a thought, but an insistent clink jolts me out of my reverie. Suddenly there's 10p lying at my feet, and the retreating figure of an important-looking businessman doing his bit for impoverished Asian immigrants on the street. I laugh for at least 20 seconds, which is 0.5p per second of laughter - a good deal, because I usually laugh for free. The beggar in me feels accomplished.

The universe has, I think, reimbursed me for my postcard.

So later, I give 10p to this family, because now I'm 10p up on the universe and counting, but also because they're really, really good singers.

For amusement, I spend the next half hour calling operators from phone booths to complain about porn advertisements, and an indeterminate amount of time lying back on the curb, pretending that it's really me that's moving and not the clouds. I'm easily amused.

I amuse myself further by sticking notes like these on the windshields of cars crammed on the roadsides. It gives me an oddly satisfied feeling, to know that with such a small gesture, I've managed to touch someone's life, even if all I will be to them is a one-liner in a weekend conversation: "Last week I got a really silly note".

It's the same feeling I get when, after getting bored with simply sticking them on cars, I start handing them out like flyers. Because, like many before, he starts to decline my homemade flyer, but in midsentence, he glance-reads it and does a double-take. Throwing me an odd look that settles satisfyingly into an odd smile, he takes the note and leaves. I'll forget how to derive the monumental Newtonian Laws, forget how to spell "miscellaneous", never remember the American Presidents...but I'll never forget that smile; it's seared into my mind like warm, fuzzy hellfires.

I make my way eventually to Harrods, where I goggle appropriately at the prices of ugly things, and lose nearly two hours to the grand piano showroom on the third floor, because it's deliciously sexy having my fingers caressing £20,000 worth of equipment.

And in the tube station, as I crouch round the corner taking photos of a man who dances to a beat of his own on the platform, oblivious to stares at his amusing gyrations, I realize that I've spent today exactly as that man is dancing on the platform - alone, any way I like it, and to a beat that only I can hear. And I'm thinking maybe, just maybe, that's the way it should be.

So here's to more solitary eccentricity. And may I have many more days in which I don't have to explain myself, to anyone.