The fox and crane

This time around I'm staying in the Docklands, hard-by the glistening towers of Canary Wharf. In part this is for reasons of comfort - trendy apartments are readily available at low rates in many of the new buildings that were thrown up in recent years here. The bankers who were supposed to occupy them stubbornly refuse to leave the classier old-world swank of Mayfair, sweaty commutes on the Jubilee line notwithstanding. It's not surprising that they haven't moved out here - there is little to speak of besides bank headquarters and after-work watering holes, and a vast subterranean mall embracing the Docklands Light Rail, the Underground stop, and the basements of many buildings, ensuring that you can emerge in the morning from whatever train brought you hither, put in a full day's work including lunch and, in many bankers' cases, dinner, and leave in the evening without ever having set foot outside. It is about 20 minutes from central London, a strange, overbuilt, under-occupied exhurb which somehow holds the greatest financial minds of Europe. It is a miserable place to live, but alright to visit. Especially - and I acknowledge the lack of compassion in this sentiment - in times like these.

Besides its promise of cheap rents and fancy bathroom fixtures, the Docklands boasts a close proximity to the centre of the days' action, European headquarters of Citigroup and Merril Lynch and the erstwhile Lehman Bros. In part I was drawn by a strange and unsavoury rubbernecking impulse, and a sense that the daily dramas that have pitched up on newspapers' A1s would be manifest and ever more dramatically drawn on the faces of those around me. This is not to mock or belittle the misery that all of this is causing - I'm far too vulnerable (as, sadly, are we all) and hopefully too thoughtful for that. But I did want to observe it all.

There isn't much. I was anticipating some amount of hang wringing, some theatrics, some despair. I was expecting the five stages of grief. I was - I won't say hoping - under the impression that some of the despair and horror that is evidenced in the more apocalyptic quotations in the Journal and the Times would reveal itself, that people would live, that there would be life in their lives. Instead, everything is subdued, everone is resigned. Confusion reigns, but panic has retreated. Bankers used to walk around these parts with eyes firmly forward and arms jauntily swinging. Now their gazes are furtive and hesitant, and their limbs are limp. Everyone seems a bit embarrassed. Everyone is dying not to be seen.

The day's end comes early in Canary Wharf, particularly on Fridays, when people start their drinking promptly at five and are usually gone by seven-thirty. At nine o'clock last night I went scrounging for some dinner and found most things closed. I wound up at a large supermarket with a single open checkout aisle queued with a mixture of credit crunchers and construction workers. On my walk home, hefting three bags that were strangely heavy and uncomfortable, I walked past one of the more hopeful construction sites on the South Quay, five minutes' walk and across a bridge to the centre of development. It had your typical blue tarpulin, warning cones and concrete barriers. There was a fox amongst them. The light wasn't great and I thought at first maybe a cat, but then he came out of the shadows to try to cross the street, bushy tail and snout, red coat, and something dead in his jaws. He found that he couldn't cross, turned round and slunk back into the mess of big-wheeled earth moving vehicles.