A warm squall fell from the night-blue sky, holding the city in a sealed embrace, silvering all that was familiar.

In Trafalgar Square, tourists and Londoners milled together.

To mark the holiday they had opened the roads to cars. But most of the revellers paid no heed and thronged across the highway; drivers were forced to give up. Even the few who inched and wove their way through did so without anger.

At a coffee shop in Monmouth Street, Woody, his woollen astrakan cocked back, held court. Not, it seemed to Hurst, with his usual pinched reserve but round-faced with pleasure. The women chatted over him and around him. Woody scanned Hurst’s eyes for hidden jealousy, then called out ‘If you’re going to The Centre you’ll need this!’ And Woody held up a thick brass key, tagged with a light blue cord.

‘No!’ Hurst laughed back above the hubbub, ‘I’m just an ordinary punter now!’

‘Well watch out for the ceiling!’

On the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields, as the spears of rain fell harder, gaggles of pedestrians stilled and huddled together in the darkening night.

From the unlit portico of the National Gallery Dr Smiley, up from Stratford-on-Avon, looked on over the mass. A lone young woman in a red cotton dress hoicked up over her dark thighs paddled in the north west fountain, cockling the water, incanting: ‘Hal-an-tow, jolly rumbelow . . .’ Her blue-black hair glistened in the rain and spray. Around the rim of another fountain three lads passed a tin of Stella from hand to hand, like Norns sharing an eye. They sipped in turn, fixed on their own conversation. Nearby a few starlings, still in their winter stars, jabbed for titbits. Dr Smiley’s wife, Grace, hooked her arm through his, dropping an inch or two to his height, her white hair spangled with raindrops,

Outside the BBC in Portland Place a knot of Tibetans gathered. Their faces were drawn with weariness and resolution; their clothes a motley of faded rainbow. They held banners, scrawled with FREE, but only  knee-high, like a used up superstition. Arrayed opposite, outnumbering them, stood a cohort of riot police; uniform in height and build, faces enclosed in silver-black helmets burnished by the dark rain, safe behind perspex shields. They eyed their quarry. At their rear a policewoman shooed away any tourist or reveller, who unawares, wandered too close.

In the old stable in the mews behind Park Square, Hurst found The Centre overflowing with celebrants who swayed and jostled together. The ceiling was mildewed and crumbling, the plaster cornices returning to mineral origins and the wooden joists sodden with sap. A photograph in a frame, of an auburn-blonde woman, retrieved it seemed from an earlier occupancy, was all that was left on the wall. The floor, was folding under the many footsteps. In the midst of the throng, Angela Waddle from PR, tilted her head, as best she could, in a simulacrum of pleasure.

Gee, though sang out, unrestrained: ‘See what you can do in London on May Day!’