metrocentric | It's all animals from this point forward

St Pancras: gas holders repurposed as cages enclose new drum shaped residential blocks. That's behind me and before me the canal. It's a weekday lunchtime in summer. A woman passes by on a bicycle and as she does so a small dog leaps from her handlebar basket, into the water. She's dismounting in the swiftest manner possible and serendipitously a man running close behind reaches into the brackish soup to scoop out the hound.

She's thanking him profusely, she says the dog must have thought it was like the pond at the park, and the man is happy to have helped and now he's running on. She's vigorously rubbing the beast dry with a small blanket and chattering away to it, tones of reassurance and admonition by turns. She and it and the bicycle are strewn across the towpath.

A man walks by and she engages him in conversation: the incident is recounted. He passes on and she is busy with the dog, the blanket, the bicycle, more contents of the basket. Preparing to leave, yet not leaving; taking up a little more of the towpath than before.

A couple appear and she waylays them to tell the tale. Then another pedestrian is regaled, and so on. The woman and her dog and her bicycle and everything else are now fully in occupation of the towpath and to pass them a toll must be paid. It's been ten minutes now and she's not going anywhere.

Later I'll think I understand why she is doing this - telling the tale again and again, thereby apprehending and assimilating the incident and in so doing reducing its shock. And isn't this what our fellow people, society, are for?

But for now, when there are no more passers-by her attention is bound to turn to the occupants of the benches bordering the new flats. I'm off, quickly; I think I can hear her voice behind me but I'm not turning around.