Tradecraft.

Foggy, grey, the day begins with a smudge, a wisp of espionage. Today things happen behind closed doors, whilst the streets set their jaw with a grim determination that life will go on. People walk by with their shoulders hunched, head downward - or laser focused on their destination, intent on listening to... well whatever gets them from A to B, and maybe back again.

This is Friday in the fog, the smog, the pea-soup or the pollution. It creates the paradox of life closed in, while around the corner, and the next, life teams and spreads. Buildings begin, but disappear before they can finish - only hinting at what might be; rearing out of the mist like drifting cruise-liners with their eerie crew of memories. This sense of the unknown makes the normal noir, and I sit in a coffee shop at a station nexus and have the everyday throng of work, travel, arrival and departure, the meet and greet all thrown together. Hi Viz and Hi fashion jostle in the street outside - passing secret messages from capital to labour, inside there are preparations for tonight, while others fuel for the day ahead.

The weekend looms in front of us all, the beat of hope of expectation - the optimist prepares while the pessimist PREpares. Some look for oblivion in sleep - or whatever, others look to make the last five days worthwhile, and we all seek to understand what we are doing with and to our lives. Suitcases roll by, their owners attached to the leads; buses punctuate the traffic trying to keep the city beating, despite roadworks and lemming like pedestrians - still under the thrall of Nocturne. On this day we all respond to the oncoming - some fighting against their natures, refusing to slump - though this is what they cry out for, others giving in to the sense of the carefree, the what-the-hell-I'll-do-it-on-monday, despite the foreboding it brings for Sunday night.

This world made strange lifts me, calling to my more macabre self and childhood tropes; riffing on the traditions of Bond, Smiley and the Cold War. At a time when nations seem determined to refashion alliances and national interests, when our understanding of privacy is exploded, notions of truth and betrayal are fudged and blurred, and in a stunning bout of pathetic fallacy we are cast into a cloying miasma; well, if nothing else, the idea of double-dealing, tradecraft and the world on the knife edge of Armageddon seems like something I can relate to.