For Rauschenberg

I was obliged to go to North Acton this morning. I had to walk about half a mile from the underground station. The walk took me along an alley sandwiched between a graveyard and the railway tracks. It was littered with dead leaves, plastic bottles and sodden newspapers. The steel railings, warehouse walls and lamp posts were all covered with graffiti. A mournful sign on the railway tracks said 'Whistle'. It was cold and raining. I would not, on balance, walk through there at night. But this morning it made me deliriously happy for reasons I did not at first understand. Then I realised this place had been romanticised and redeemed by the work of that recently late and timelessly great artist Robert Rauschenberg. And it was Rauschenberg, I also now realise, that prompted me to take the above picture on a quite different occasion.