Work continues apace on the new sea front developments. This leaves me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it makes me weep that the council have demolished most of the 40s and 50s architecture, put in yet more shops and re-branded that part of the beach the new ‘creative quarter’. I get a bit funny about things being branded ‘creative’ when the real ‘creatives’ are being driven out of the city either because they can’t afford the increasing rents or because their studios have been demolished to make way for redevelopment… and for that matter, ‘quarter’ of what? What’s the other three quarters doing that’s so different?

On the other hand, I retain an utterly childish delight in any huge mechanical thing that can shovel vast amounts of earth from one place to another, make really big holes in the ground and then fill them with quick-setting slurry.

As a result of this ambivalence I spent a fair bit of time on the sea front today looking at the works in progress, outwardly sneering in righteous indignation while my inner 6-year old waited in forlorn hope for the site foreman to come over and say to me “here you are sonny, do you want a go on the big yellow monster?”

However, the real point of today’s entry is to highlight yet another mystery of the city, that of the zen garden immediately adjoining the building site. This is in reality a patch of mud bordered by low walls, but the mud itself had been combed into a variety of different shapes over the past few months by something big. Yesterday I noticed it was in the shape of a heart, at other times it has been a spiral, wavy lines… today it was combed into a series of concentric circles. I’ve photographed it a few times now, so scroll through some of my previous entries and see for yourself.

Today I also noticed that the diggers and bulldozers can be surprisingly sensitive when used by trained operators. Not a simple case of smashing the ground from here to there but more like old films you see of elephants nudging logs into a pile, or dexterously taking and eating buns proffered by visitors to the zoo.

So, can it be, that one of the construction workers is actually a closet Buddhist who, before starting work in the morning and while the city still sleeps, takes his metal monster and rakes the mud into these designs in an act of contemplation and oneness with the world? I imagine the dawn light filled with the asthmatic Om of mechanical devotion purring sonorously from one of the bulldozers while it completes its lonely task. There always has to be hope.