It's been pretty much nothing but the flat, the flat, getting reorganised, reclaiming the space. But in between, trying to focus on what's next and not get too distracted by the random. Or taken over by the specific. This article in the Guardian yesterday really set me thinking back over history and even drove me to dig out a book I've had for a while on the writing and mythology of the Declaration of Independence. So I'm going to try to read that, though it isn't quite light Tube fare.

Over lunch today I just went for a little walk to stop my spine from seizing up and of course ended up dawdling in the porn shop - really a branch of Soho Original Books, but the 'Adult section downstairs' neon arrow in the window made me rename it. I became engrossed in a book of Annie Leibowitz photos, a sort of memoir of her life in picture over the last 15 or so years. Apart from havinghaving a child at 52(!), it's the intimate pictures of Sontag that are really moving, mostly in black and white, especially when you know that for many of those years she was dealing with cancer. One sequence has Sontag in the bath, from the neck down, one arm lying across her body to cover the space where her breast once was. They are incredibly tender pictures. The spread of a contact sheet of pictures taken of Sontag laid out for her coffin, this time in washed out colour, her normally thick dark, trademark hair finally short and grey, in the long green pleated dress that Leibowitz had chosen for her lending her a medieval air, is hard to look at without tearing up. Since Leibowitz's father also died only six weeks later, again photographed, the latter parts of what looks ostensibly like a coffee table book require you to slow down as you turn the pages. It was a sort of unexpected gift on an otherwise ordinarily banal day of work and grappling with public transport that made me want to breathe more carefully and notice just how far out the leaves on the trees have come this spring.