Anomalous lighting

I had to meet someone in North London last night, which necessitated a round-trip drive of 230 miles. The train times meant I couldn't use them. Going back to London again, after seven years away, having lived there off-and-on for 35 years, never particularly appeals.

Coming down the M40 produced the first delay, with a bad accident prompting my first blip possibility. But the reality of queuing, confusion, frustration, ambulances, police, debris and delays produced nothing I wanted to share.

My iPod filled the car's speakers with John Le Carré's measured phrasing of his "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy". By the time I crawled along the Westway flyover, towards the Marylebone Road, the light was going but the traffic wasn't. George Smiley was now waiting in a Camden Town house, beside the Grand Union Canal, for the mole Gerald to reveal himself.

As the queues developed again, I was excited by a series of reflections of the setting sun from buildings ahead, whilst my car ground to a halt, allowing me a quick burst of two pictures. Then back to the reality. I realised I was inching along the road, about 50 feet above where I lived on my houseboat in 1978, right under the Westway, and adjacent to Paddington Station.

The story about Camden reminded me of taking our small runabout boat up past London Zoo, to Dingwall's Market, floating past the very house Smiley was now waiting in. Sadly we were to realise why our little boat "Patch" was so well-named. It was later holed at the waterline, being speared by the sharp bow of an out-of-control canoe ramming it, and went to Davy Jones Locker.

But this produced the well-known camaraderie of boat-owners, who all gathered one day to help us raise "Patch" from the bottom and to slap another patch on, allowing us to float her gently away. My friend John, a real sailor, found that we could join St Pancras Yacht Club, which I gather is still to be found at the end of the platforms at tithe Eurostar Terminus, but now dwarfed by the Eurostar trains. We pulled her up on their slipway to renew her woodwork and then would end up propping up the Yacht Club bar quite regularly. Heady days.

I did get home safely early in the morning, to examine my two possible blips. In the one I posted, you might notice some strange bright lights hovering over one of the tall buildings beside the Westway. They are not in the other picture. This bizarrely reminded me of DailyKeithAnomalous light's Blip from the 15th September, where he recorded an anomalous distortion in a picture he called "Bizarre". I presume my lights were strange reflections bouncing around in the air. I don't think they can be from the interior of the car's windscreen as they would be there in the second picture, taken only moments later.

A wonderful book has come to my mind ? Carl Jung's auto-biographical "Memories, dreams and reflections". I thoroughly recommend it.