"Late nights in black silk in East London / Church bells in the distance / Free bleeding in the autumn rain / Fall in love again and again" sings Caroline Polachek in a somewhat cheesy but also beautiful remix of the Charli XCX song 'Everything is romantic'. The song has been circling around in my head for several days, and I hear it when I leave my flat in the dark at 6:30am this morning, spotting the waning moon in a fuzzy glow above. A tank truck rolls slowly along the edge of the park. A man in a high viz jumpsuit is walking ahead of it, using a pressurised hose to blast aside the golden leaves that paper the asphalt in wet layers. In the early morning moonlight, they look like a chimera - half machine, half person. Though Storm Ashley has not affected the southeast of England, the world feels soaked with water- a ubiquitous saturation.