This morning I left the house at some point before 7:30am, walked in the just-getting-light-now between the half-asleep headlights blinking through light rain and then through Victoria Park, where hundreds of gulls were standing around like small feathered sentinels on grass, the sort of grass beginning to resemble a sea of gentle mud in the way it sometimes can in late November, all of those bird bodies patiently waiting as if for the rest of the city to wake itself up. Even at this time of day (and I suppose one shouldn't find this surprising in London) there are countless people out in the park, many of them running, making either identical loops in the space, or selecting to take routes that are slightly more erratic, over and around the paved paths that split the ground into pieces.