I ride my bike a lot since I moved to London- mostly to and from work. It's a nice little arrangement: joggers, geese and passersby, a river, and some paths- the whole place largely paved.

Riding around and still relatively new to town, every so often I come across a new street or road that offers a different vantage point on the city. There aren't that many of these, mind you. London is a bit of a... limited  place.

The view in this photo is rare for London. The city doesn't have many overpasses that don't accommodate train tracks, and so, without context, the picture may give the sense of being somewhere more... grand, or busy, or built up.

And that's all anyone wants, really. Not the London, part, but the "more" part, the "better than" part. A difference; a change; an adjustment. Something new. Something not on paper. Something else. None of us are "better off" than we'd like to be. We are where we are, which for most is neither particularly amazing nor terrible.

There's a great Blur song on Parklife called London Loves that describes a speedy, sexy life of unhappiness in the big city. Its lyrics message "the mystery of speeding car," and then later, "the mystery of a speeding heart," in a clever little turn, if you know the song's structure (as a sidebar, Graham Coxon's riff in the  traffic report outro is one of my favourites of his).

London Loves has nothing to do with London Ontario, except that a speeding car is what you may sense from this photo, and that a speeding heart looking elsewhere for something more, or something better, is, more than likely, behind the wheel.