When I’m walking in the night I sometimes catch traces of smells, odours that people have left behind. This morning it was that bubble gum sort of smell, sweet and cloying, from a vape cigarette. It was lingering outside the glass block of flats opposite the M&S and Tesco depot. I also caught a whiff of cheap body spray, male, it could have been Lynx. It makes my nose wrinkle. That was on South Marine just beyond the house where the man stands outside to smoke and read his phone at 4 am.
It was a bulletin on the News. A woman had been interviewed in Ukraine. And elderly woman by the sounds of it. She’d been in her basement ever since the war began. Holed in for all that time and yet she was still positive. It will end, she said.
