The sky was a thin, eggshell blue when T and I woke up this morning. Two cats, a ginger and a spotted black one, were playing hide and seek in the overgrown grass of the back garden. For a few hours, perhaps three or four, the sun shone in London, but the night came so quickly that every flat on the street had lamps turned on by three. I spent most of the day writing and thinking about projects sent to me by a network of friends and collaborators from whom I had solicited 'new and exciting work in the geohumanities beyond the US / UK'. My friend Cecilie sent me a link to a project called The Conference of the Birds, a transdisciplinary, socially engaged arts collaboration named after the 12th century epic poem by Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar. Focused on the loss of birds in the High North, the project involves community based exhibitions and events in Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and North-Russia. Reading the conference programme, I learned that one of the participants is a twenty five year old person who left home at 17 to learn birdsong and learn to survive alone in the forest. Apparently they can now sing the songs of 130 different species of birds, and they continue to live outside of human dwellings. In their profile photo, they are pictured shoulder up, with bright blond hair in dredlocks, and a small black bird on their shoulder, to which their face is turned in affection. News came over the weekend that the Assad regime has fallen in Syria. We see scenes of thousands of people celebrating in the streets, crying and cheering. On Democracy Now, an interviewee refuses to 'analyse' the political moment, saying that analysis needs to be suspended while the feeling of this moment resonates.

A freezing night in the park, with a clear, faintly star-lit sky. As I return to Hackney Downs long after sunset to test the open-weather Automatic Ground Stations, I am getting better at recognising night-time park activity. Though many people warned me of entering the park at night, I am growing to feel more safe. Perhaps its something about holding a tall pole with a metal object attached at the end. I've also realised that, while daytime park activity happens on the fields, with dogs galloping and racing around each other, night-time park life stays close to pathways and the deeper shadows of trees. I have rarely seen another person walk directly across the largest field, where I stood this evening. As I watch the BBC weather report later in the evening, I learn that the beginnings of a 'possibly named storm' are brewing in the North Atlantic. I wonder and try to anticipate what the name of this storm will be.

It has rained, it has snowed, and the crevices and corners of London are thoroughly drenched in semi-freezing moisture. This is testing the infrastructures of the city, a city that one might expect could have weathered many cold winters in its time. Yet, one of my best friends, K, who was over for a spontaneous Monday dinner last night, told me and T of her crumbling, disintegrating roof in Dalston. The roof has been leaking for months, and mould has been growing along the walls and in corners. She had stopped paying rent after her umpteenth attempt to ask the landlord for repairs, failed. Within weeks of her stopping payment, the landlord had workers visit the flat, and they claimed to have 'fixed' the issue. But yesterday, when she got home after dinner, she texted me photos and videos of the rain coming straight down onto her floor. A long curving crack in the ceiling gave me shivers- as if the whole roof was going to collapse. Luckily, K left to stay at her girlfriend's place. I couldn't help but think how many people in London are feeling similar exposures to the rain, the cold. How many walls are being eaten from the inside out, by the creep of humidity and the mould that thrives in it? I tested the AGS in the park late at night today. I didn't want to 'expose' the AGS in the park, less because of weather, wind or rain, and more because a number of people have had phones stolen in the park recently. As the AGS is so conspicuous with its glowing light, I hid it in a tote bag. For the antenna, I wrapped the legs of an rtl-sdr v-diple around the top of a PVC pipe. Standing in the middle of the dark field, holding the pole to the sky, I felt a little like a fictional character enacting some magical ritual. The moon rose against the silhouetted plane trees and the outlines of bodies crossed under lamp posts. Most avoided the dark, open grass.

Thankfully it is morning now, and the sun is shining on the Maljicka River in Sarajevo. I woke around 1am last night in tears, thinking of all of the places I have seen so far on this trip in the Balkans, and the way my family history is so inscribed in this landscape, a landscape that has felt so much pain. I thought about the memories the landscape holds, that monuments to anti-fascist resistance or tombs of fallen fighters, or memorials to the more recent Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, only manage to represent partially. Upon properly waking, the news of the US election was shocking, but somehow dulled by the intensity of the last few days. I almost found it darkly humorous, that in the week I am spending engaging with my family’s history, and the very concrete, serious struggle of anti-fascism, a movement for which my great grandfather risked everything, a fascist has been elected to power in my birth country. As the news sunk in later in the day, the dark humour faded and despair set in. I kept the despair at bay by throwing myself head first into the story of Sarajevo womens’ resistance to authoritarian power, and their role in the communist movement. T and I drove to see a monument to Sarajevo victims of the national liberation war at Vraća Park, on the west of the city. The park itself is not well maintained, with trash and graffiti everywhere, and much of the original stone architecture crumbling. However, at the far end of the park, stands a monument to ‘Women Fighters’ by Sarajevo sculptor Alija Kučukalić. The sculpture is a 2-3 metre tall figure of a woman, from the torso up, wearing a sharp jacket, and gazing to the sky, arms open in a cactus shape and fists clenched. She has a long braid that flows down her back, and her face turns upward. An early sketch for the sculpture that I found online shows a female figure with an agonising face - indeed the original title of the work was “Stratišta” (Executions). While the sculpture is meant to be representative of all fallen women victims and fighters, many believe the sculpture depicts Radojka Lakić, a female leader of the Sarajevo underground communist resistance who was executed at Vraća in September 1941. The sculpture is in poor condition, emblematised by the fact that the right arm has been sawed off. Yet, even with only one arm raised, the figure is striking - a reminder of the immense strength of resistance, and the cost of truly fighting fascism.

The department is hosting an 'authors meets critics' session with Henry Wai-Chun Yeung, an eminent economic and human geographer from Singapore, and I am on a panel of respondents. Henry's book is called Theory and Explanation in Geography, and it synthesises vast literatures in the discipline informed by theories such as non-representational theory, actor network theory, assemblage and feminist and postcolonial theories. As I need to formulate something to say, I spend the morning and most of the afternoon buried in this book, thinking about Henry's proposals for theorising. In one chapter, Henry proposes that 'relational' theories in geography need more concreteness, focus on causation, and specificity, so that they can better explain the world. He advocates for what he calls relational ‘geometries’ or ‘relational specificity’ or ‘relational complementarity’. An example of relational geometries is regional union networks and their ways of complementing each other, to gain power and resources. The response I decide to give reflects on what a specific focus on the geometry of relation might do - how does it operate? What does it explain? I have recently been puzzling over the geometry of relations in a paper on the ‘aerial turn’ in geography - I have been observing how, for quite a while now, geographers participating in the ‘aerial turn’ are writing about air in three key modes: i) as something that flows or can be traced, most often on a line ii) as a collection of particles iii) and as a volume. Although these three ‘orientations’ to air are persuasive, and in many ways helpfully explanatory for all kinds of aerial processes, from atmospheric warfare to the relations between breathing bodies and spaces, they produce versions of air and atmosphere that are linear, particular, and volumetric, and they distance other ‘versions’ of air that are more difficult to draw into geometric forms or shapes. I have been wondering how the ‘aerial turn’ is thus reproducing spatial geometries that say more about disciplinary formalism and perhaps modernist aesthetics than anything about air itself. Geographies of air are indeed a very small part of the discipline, but in my hesitation around the ‘relational geometries’ in Henry's book, I wonder if there is something else going on here. I wondered if the proposal to adopt ‘geometries’ felt at odds with the ‘relational irresolutions’ ‘topologies’ and disorientations being developed and theorised for studies of infrastructure by people like Jerry Zee and Aya Nassar. I think also about the outpouring of work on quantum field theory and quantum mechanics in black studies and geographies, for example in new work by Pat Noxolo, and I think it is important to take seriously what a turn to the quantum does in this work, that geometry simply can’t. As important as it is to be specific and practical about spatial relations and how our theories of relation can explain causal effects, I feel that these and other movements in the discipline suggest plural, capacious, perhaps less immediately geometric forms of relation, and yet they are doing so without the vagueness or flattening that might have characterised relational theories of ten-twenty years ago. For the seminar, the room is packed- geographers from across the department are present, as well as people from other departments. Henry gives a presentation on the book and I am impressed with the way he manages to make theory sound exciting and approachable. After me and three of my colleagues have offered responses, we discuss what it means for goegraphers to 'do theory', what kind of theory that might be, and whether the issue is rather than geography is both a social science and a humanities discipline- theory works differently and does not necessarily need to 'explain' in the humanities, as it might do in the social sciences. After the event, the atmosphere of the department is animated. A PhD student comes to my office and speaks for thirty minutes about how excited she was by the seminar. From time to time, I catch a glimpse of the ginko trees outside the window of my office. The golden leaves are glowing in the afternoon sunlight, so that they seem to be projecting light in all directions.

As I ride the 35 south from Liverpool Street the sun begins to pierce through the matted, slightly hazy sky. A current of ‘Arctic Air’ has flowed across the U.K. this weekend and lowered temperatures at least six degrees. At a performance yesterday afternoon in a roofless Anglican Church in Nunhead Cemetary, the cold entered deep into my lungs and bones. After an evening at the pub, T and I ran to the overground station and realised we had fifteen minutes to wait for the train - it felt like an interminable time in that level of cold. As we entered Tesco to warm up before the train, an older man sitting on the pavement near the streetcorner lost his paper cup in the wind and it spun into the traffic. After I retrieved it for him, he asked if I could buy him a chocolate milkshake. He drank the cold drink in big gulps as me and T ran back to the station for our train.

On London Bridge, loosely knit groups of people wander by. I notice two families in which the Dad is pointing across the Thames to skyscrapers and offering some words of information or wisdom to his children. They don’t look interested. It’s the kids instead who are interested in me, asking ‘but what is she doing ??’ in voices that implore an answer. A tall man passes very close to my left shoulder and says in passing ‘watch out with that thing’ even though I am standing well to the edge of the bridge and there is tons of empty space to walk. The pass is a bit staticy at times but I have come to expect this from most of London’s bridges - too much happening by land, river and air.

Today we put on the heating in our flat for the first time this autumn. The air temperature has dropped significantly over the last week, and there is an 'edge' or 'bite' to the weather outside. At dinner on Friday night with a very good friend, we all agreed to change our duvets to the heavier 'winter' version. This collective decision made me think of squirrels and other forest creatures adding leaves and twigs to their nests for warmth. I tested a new antenna in the frosty park this morning - a copper, weatherised V-dipole made by a radio amateur supplier in Florida. I used a PVC pipe given to me by Martin Collett (for another tape measure Yagi) to elevate the antenna above ground level, as if on a small mast. A woman walking two chihuahuas smiled at me. A small cyclone of clouds emerged, swirling over the UK, but hopefully leaving some space for bursts of sun over the rest of the day.