I read this today, and then went out for my daily walk. Now, I do not live in the English countryside, not to mention Epping Effing Forest (sorry, I just wanted to say that). I live in the (sort of) middle of a city of three million relatively poor, cilantro-loving souls. My neighborhood is rather old and rather poor, and has lots of quasi-crumbling buildings. And I love it. It is an aesthetic feast on which I gorge myself daily. And today, I framed this from a different perspective.

Kate talks here about magic, which seems to fit the context of the English countryside nicely, especially around the time of Halloween. But here in my ugly urban paradise, with its cobbles and yellow buses and its smells of grilled meat, I have difficulty connecting to magic. The intensely aesthetic sensibility that this setting (and maybe a bit too much coffee) produces in me is one that is more cinematographic. And then it hit me: On a good day, I feel like I am living in a Wim Wenders film. (Pick any one you like, but if you haven’t seen “Perfect Days”, do see it.) And that feeling, which is a strange mixture of the grandiose and the humble, is exactly how I want my life to be.