Why is America going to go bankrupt and what are going to be the effects of this?

This was shot just over a year ago in Paris but it seems quite topical now.

Ritzy Cafe, Brixton

Listening to some people on the other side of the cafe talking about cycling: cyclists breathe in less pollution than car passengers apparently, according to a woman who sounds like she knows what she's talking about, though often the people who sound like they know what they're talking about are the ones who don't. It's because of the height, she says. Cyclists are higher up, unless they're children or recumbants, so the air they take in is better quality, whereas cars take in air from lower down which is where the pollution hangs.

Grudge Monkey

Discovered the Parfitt brothers' new band on MySpace and listened to some before getting cut off, perhaps for having too slow an internet connection. Still no internet at home so sitting in the Ritzy cafe, where the wifi is a bit unstable, but free and comfortable. Also warm. No heating in the flat since I can't get the boiler to light, and British Gas want a minimum of £200 to come out and take a look at it - and then would probably charge me for the matches, so I'll make do with a hot water bottle.

Brixton, London

There is a hole in the roof of the house I am living in and people are coming in, down a ladder. I don't know where they're coming from but there are loads of them. Some of them I know but most of them are strangers. They're making themselves at home. I'm not sure if this is my house or not. Maybe it isn't. Most of these people are quite friendly. I don't really want to kick them out, and I think if I asked them to leave they would just be baffled.

The hole in the roof doesn't really bother me. It's not raining and it's not cold. It's nice to get some air in the place. If there wasn't the hole it would probably be very stuffy. Blue sky is visible beyond the rafters.

I think this dream is related to the work I'm doing at the moment. I'm working on a website for the BBC, to go with a TV series about white British people. The work involves writing a script that scans through discussion forums looking for certain key emotional words: happy, sad, angry, confused etc.. As a result I've been looking at a lot of posts by people who don't like immigrants, people who feel their country is being swamped by foreigners. I don't think that, but maybe reading all that stuff has seeped into my subconscious.

I go into a room full of women. It's a bedroom. Many people are sitting on the floor. They invite me to join them. It's like a party. I'm just another person at the party. I don't feel like the host. Someone asks me why I'm so grumpy. She's someone I know, someone I knew when I was in another country.

In a bar in Vilnius a drunken Lithuanian thought I was Turkish. He told me to go home. He started to get aggressive. I told him to take his hands off the table we were sitting at. He'd come over and was standing in front of our table. In the end we left.

Vilnius is now a very expensive city by Lithuanian standards. Prices there have gone up a lot more than wages in recent years, largely because of wealthy westerners going there as tourists or buying up property there. Some locals told me that many people could no longer afford to live in the city and were being forced to live on the outskirts and commute long distances to get to work. Others were moving away altogether. About a fifth of the population has gone to western Europe in order to work. Someone told me his brother, a qualified engineer, was working as a cleaner in Denmark because he could earn more than he could if he were doing the work he was trained to do in Lithuania.

In a bar in Lviv, Ukraine, I got chatting to some locals. One of them wanted to know what I was doing there and why I didn't speak Ukrainian. Why come to Ukraine if you don't speak Ukrainian? Why not? was the only answer I could give. Most of the places I'd been were places where I didn't speak the language, but where it was quite easy to get by if you spoke English. In Ukraine it wasn't so easy to get by with just English. Russian would have been useful. In Odessa, where people speak Russian rather than Ukrainian, a couple of people shouted at me for not speaking Russian. One was a woman who thought I was taking a photograph of her. I wasn't - she just happened to be in the background.

Part of my reason for being there, in countries where the cost of living was cheap compared to London, was so that I could live without having to work in jobs I don't really want to do just to earn enough money to pay the mortgage, which is how it is at the moment, though this work for the BBC isn't bad. Better than doing dull corporate websites, though I worry that this thing I'm working on, if it does go live, might just have the effect of promoting the views of bigots.

It seems wherever you go you meet British people, and in many cases they don't have a positive effect on the places they go to. Krakow was full of British and Irish, mostly large groups of men over there to get drunk. So long as there are cheap flights and big differences in wealth between these countries there's going to be movement in both directions. People from the poor countries will come to the rich countries to work, and people from the rich countries will go to the poor countries to get drunk, to get laid, to buy property or set up call centres.

Brixton, London

Back after almost a year away. Things don't seem to have changed much.

Getting the train up here from Eastbourne, where I've been staying for the past week, took about 3 hours since no trains were running between Lewes and Three Bridges, and then the Victoria Line wasn't running so there was another replacement bus, though taking the bus gave me a chance to look at London. After Paris it looked quite chaotic, a lot more messy, though a woman from Hong Kong I met in Paris last February was telling me she thought London was much cleaner than Paris. But I mean messy on a larger scale. Not litter on the streets so much as the buildings and the layout. Central Paris has quite a unified feel about it, whereas London has various bits and pieces that don't seem to be part of any overall plan - if Paris is an organized garden like Versailles



London is more like an area of wild scrubland.

As I walk up Brixton Hill with my backpack I notice the Housing Benefit offices have been done up, with new glass doors, and there are some new blocks of flats opposite. A woman I overtook a minute ago calls out: Got a cigarette, love?

I go into the Costcutter shop that used to be my local to buy a bottle of wine. I recognize one of the women working in there but I'm not sure if she recognizes me.

A new restaurant has taken over what used to be the camping shop on Brixton Hill. It has a load of blue lights in the windows a looks more like a nightclub. That building has had about one restaurant per year for about the past five years. None of them seem to do very well. The last one, that was there just before I went away, was an Ethiopian restaurant. I don't remember ever seeing any customers in there.

On Blenheim Gardens estate they've cut down some elm trees, though the trees behind my flat are still standing. Just before I went away I had to pay about £600 for works on the estate. If I'd known I was paying for them to cut down trees I would have refused.

Paris, France

Went to see JLG / JLG, a Jean Luc Godard film / video / home movie / essay. My French wasn't really good enough to understand most of what he was saying, and I kept dozing off, but there were some nice images of snow covered landscapes and waves and some good sounds. May try and watch it again with subtitles when I get back to England, which could be tomorrow.

Paris, France

At midnight on 1st January 2008 it became illegal to smoke in public spaces throughout France. Due to a concession it remained legal to smoke indoors throughout New Year's Day.

Sitting in a bar just after midnight. The floor is clean, white tiles, and there are no ashtrays on the tables. I sit at a table with a beer, not smoking. A man who was propping up the bar steps outside for a cigarette, moving about in an attempt to keep warm. He comes back in complaining about the cold. Usually there would be a mound of cigarette butts lining the foot of the bar so you can't see where the bar ends and the floor begins. In France prices are lower if you stand at the bar, and though ashtrays were usually provided, people seemed to prefer using the floor.

A group of men dressed in black walk in. One is desperate for the toilet. A couple of the others want to buy cigarettes. This place is not a tabac. Tabacs are the only places allowed to sell cigarettes, but late at night when the tabacs are closed many bars sell them under the counter at an inflated price - about €8,50 for a packet, whereas you would pay €5,50 in a tabac.

A man in an overcoat walks in holding a lit cigarette, apparently having forgotten the new law. No one notices, but he seems to suddenly realize, perhaps spotting the lack of ashtrays and smoke. He drops his cigarette on the floor and discretely stubs it out with his foot, then, after shaking hands with a couple of people he leaves. One of the bar-props notices the butt and points it out to the barman. The barman comes round to the front of the bar and they both stand staring at the butt for a while, neither one of them speaking, as if a turd has just appeared on the floor. The barman kicks it over to the foot of the bar, where today it would have found many friends and relatives but now it is all alone. The barman wipes away the black marks it has made with his foot.

The following night I'm sitting outside another bar, warmed by a gas heater. A number of bars and restaurants have canvas covered outside areas with such heaters blasting away. Sometimes these areas have canvas or perspex sides, making them almost interiors, but not quite, at least not as far as the law is concerned. Others just have small canopy, with the vast majority of the heat dissipating into the atmosphere. The one I'm in has one partially open side to it. Though it is a cold night it is quite warm sitting directly under a heater, though not warm enough to take my coat off. Some passers by stop in to warm themselves and smoke. This outside area of the bar has more people in it than the inside.

There are no ashtrays. The floor is littered with cigarette butts. I decided before Christmas, after a brief period of not smoking, that I would quit when France quits, but France doesn't appear to have quit, it's just moved outside.

My prediction for 2008: France's carbon emissions will increase due to its outdoor heating pour les fumeurs.

BBC: Smoke ban 'threatens environment'

Top garden centre to ban patio heaters

Energy Saving Trust

Montreal Dream

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A dream I had whilst in Montreal, taking a break from cycling across Canada. It is illustrated with some basic animation.

Montreal Dream

Pompidou Centre, Paris, France

I was taking photographs in the Pompidou centre when a guy in a black suit came up to me and asked me if I was filming. I said no, I'm taking photos. He ordered me to show me the photos I'd taken, which I did. He stopped at one of them and said: Delete that one. I'm in that. I couldn't see him - if he was in it he was very small and in the background. But now standing next to me he was big and intimidating, so I deleted it and he was happy. I guess he was a secret service government agent or something.