Incongruities

It's a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world I gaze upon through the window of the hotel room. I'm looking out onto the apartment blocks and hotels on the opposite side of the street and there's that jarring, incongruous mixing of styles and periods typical of the city. A glossy structure shooting up some thirty floors or so sits adjacent to a seven storey run-down old tenement block, on the top level - I suppose the roof - of which a lady is busy dealing with her laundry. Or maybe it's a business she's running there - hard to tell. Her blue plastic bucket strikes me as the most cheerful feature of the scene.

There's something very endearing about that bucket, and its presumed owner, and the general messiness of the architecture all around us.