London Bridge Fantasia by Peter Marcan

Do not try to understand what this crazy turmoil of a place is all about, as it is quite beyond all understanding. Point of arrival and departure, human society here is so chaotic, so entangled, all on the move that no one can surely make head or tail of it all.

During office hours faces gaze out of a hundred and one office-windows, fists long to smash into smithereens a hundred and one computer screens; caged in during office hours, the home going time stampede of people who have become animals in a zoo let loose. At home going time, it is frightening to behold the savage desperation of so many people on their way out; do not scrutinize these people too closely; the young men may give you a karate chop in the stomach; the young women will cut you down with their withering glances.

You hear the music of Bela Bartok in this place; everything out of synchrony, jangling dissonances and frenzied inner despair; shrieking stumps of humanity, bodies lurching forward, minds crushed into nothingness.

"Promise me you will practice your Bartok," said the artist Mike Challenger when I visited him at his studio home in Park Street; and after our meeting when he played Bach preludes and fugues to me, we went out and heard the squeals of incoming and outgoing trains, felt the abandonment of the market emptied of its traders, yet still full of intangible energy, and saw the desperate gregariousness of people away from their work pouring drink down through their throats in street corner pubs.