Eight thirty a.m

It was the beginning of March, and the avenues leading off the
roundabout
and towards Perivale and Northfields were lined with trees, their
branches
raised towards the sky like insistent, insatiable fingers trying to
catch
hold of the clouds. Some were bare, stark silhouettes against the
pale,
washed out sky, but others were covered in pink and white blossom - an
explosion of colour like florabunda fireworks. The wind was blowing
the
petals to the ground and strewing them in the gutters like
confetti.

My school is conveniently positioned on top of a hill, and as I looked
down towards Brent I could see the Hoover Building, and
streetlights and trees and houses blurring into one another in the
distance. My own house is one of these, although it was so obscured by
trees that I could only see the chimney.
At the top of each road as it joined the roundabout were street signs
neatly
marked with borough, name and postcode - London Borough of Ealing,
Victoria
Road, W5.

The air was cool but not unpleasantly cold, and it smelled of washing
powder
and petrol and frying pancakes and smoke and flowers and soil after
a
rainfall - suburban London smells. And I could hear things as well -
the
low-pitched humming of cars, and the grinding of a cement mixer, the
chatter
of schoolgirl voices as my classmates arrived, a door slamming, two
pigeons
arguing as they danced around on the grass on the roundabout... I
stopped
and observed everything I could, and it felt as if my senses had
suddenly
gone hyper as my brain tried to rememer every detail.