Hello trees, hello sky, hello armoured riot police

What a beautiful day, I thought, as I nodded to the porter in the bowler hat and stepped out of the Westminster hotel into October sun and wind, with a dramatic, fast-forwarding sky overhead, and the dry crackle of leaves underfoot. Lovely London. Solid, masculine, powerful, exciting London. Beautiful London. Outside Westminster Abbey the pavements were thronged with tourists pointing their cameras and smartphones at anything and everything, from the traffic cops to the decorative spikes on the railings. Pret à Manger was packed with riot police in full battledress queueing nicely for their mid-morning caffeine fix.

I crossed over the road into Parliament Square and passed a statue of what looked like a black troll. The figure was stooped, possibly owing to the weight of its oversized head. Closer inspection revealed that it was a statue of Nelson Mandela. His outstretched hands were positioned like those of the fisherman boasting ‘it was that big’. Everything about this statue — the execution, the small, democratic plinth, the aimless alignment — struck me as comically botched. But it might have been just me. And on this lovely mid-autumn Saturday morning, I wasn’t going to start making fatuous judgments about art. Not when it was feeling this good to be alive and part of a London crowd, and with the added drama of a police chopper thrumming low over our heads, and the sound of distant hysterical drumming coming from the direction of Trafalgar Square.

Next to Nelson Mandela a copper was explaining to a sullen young Occupy activist Parliament Square’s new ‘no camping’ laws, drawn up especially to evict the anti-war demonstrator Brian Haw, who lived in a tent on its lawn for ten years. I once spent the night with Brian Haw.