That is the length, the hope, the number. We have forgotten Moebius, we have given up on the Standard. Chandler speaks to us through three hundred and seventy two divisions, and we reply, all of us in monotonous tones, one after another, each voice getting quieter and quieter, the consonants unclear, all of us lost in pronuntiatio. We are the star speakers slowly murmuring out, slowly out to fade and to nothing.

Man number one, bald, six foot three, drifts from the shadow of the shop threshold and looks up four storeys to the tenement opposite. Lady number one approaches the edge of the balcony as though it is not there. Tired, she bends down, disappearing for a moment from the view of those on the street, but not from the view of the seven pigeons crowded onto the top of the curved street lamp that arches out like a rib. Then, momentarily she reappears, a diver returning to the surface with a pearl in her hand, but it is not a pearl, it's a small laundry bag.

The woman opens her mouth slightly revealing yellowing, tridirectional teeth and flings the bag into the air some six feet from her third floor vantage. Behind it a trail of green garden twine traces the vector, slackening as gravity quickens the fall of the laundry bag certain to hold something inside.

The man strikes out in a straight line across the traffic-less cobbles, above him the twine tightens, the twine stiffens, alert to its occupation the twine redeems the flight of the bag which lands softy and immaculately into the barely outstretched arms of man number one, who gathers the windfall without breaking stride. Lady number one is no longer on the balcony as man number one removes the key from said laundry bag, switches his glance from left to right and back again before entering the block opposite letting the enormous green glass-paned door swing loudly shut behind him.

What signs can be summoned from the rain? This week has seen the return of autumn, retrieved from its locked cupboard, stored somewhere in the recesses of last year. A tiptoeing recollection brings pleasant thoughts too: hot coffees and soft pastries in the open fronted bakeries somewhere in the north of the city; long rides home through slick piles of mulch and dense drifts of clammy, sweet leaves; the setting of the fire each morning, slow heat warning off the frosts with white briquettes and tapers of glowing paper.

So, then, what signs? Alphas and omegas tumbling through the insistent drizzle, a fluid language, no longer two dimensions, no longer a simple planed form, but in fact now of three dimensions - line, volume, chronology. Letters suddenly appear with depth, written serifs and majuscules faint into the distance and loom forward once more, taking time to expose themselves. Entire stories are written into single characters that stretch on forever.

A winter ahead. The fear sets in, even during the dry times. Occasional throes of low sun dispense with the blues for an hour or two, but then that spectacular grey Berlin cloak sets in, scattering people out from the centres into the forests, the deep secret forests that belt and bank the scowling metropolis and its thick mantel. Those not native, flee. The time has come to board trains, to queue at airports, to huddle into recesses and renew passports. An exodus presents itself to the quietening city.