From the top of the bus this morning, I saw

• A couple wearing suits, canoodling hungrily within the dark cave of a speeding cab on Waterloo Bridge. He holds her face tenderly as he laps at her upturned mouth; her fingers splay on his pinstriped knee; a phone sits on the seat behind the distracted flap of her sensible skirt.
• A german tourist bus rounding the corner near the Strand and, from the shiny windows which bank the sides, twenty round lenses peering up at Somerset House roof while a bored guide in lemon transfers the mic to her other hand so she can point, and gives her commentary in the background.
• A family with parents in jumpers and children in neon-bright shalwaar kameez holding hands and elbows and clutches of documents as they skitter together across the road at Aldwych.
• Three men in pink striped/checked/plain shirts and spiky overgelled hair hovering near a turnstile lobby entrance on Kingsway, each propped against a wall or pillar, independently comtemplating their morning smoke, overlooked by a bank of CCTV cameras, impatiently blinking.
• A bald man in a striped t-shirt with his belly poking out, a ten-o’clock shadow and a half-burnt cigarette smouldering tight between his fingers stopping mid-pavement at Red Lion Square to devote his full attention to the front cover of the tabloid he’s reading. Behind and before him, a current of crotchety commuters tuts and splits around him, rejoining the flow on the other side, but he is oblivious, transfixed.
• A girl in soft shoes, exercise tights and jersey top, smoking on a step near the ballet school off Grays Inn Road. As she talks, she picks distractedly at the nape of her neck, releasing painful strands of mousy hair from a tightly scraped-back, regimentedly high bun, and flexes her toes in the sunshine