[Illustration: Zekria Ibrahimi]

• SKETCHING Soho is no easy task at a late hour. Shadows were as if about to pounce in the small alley off Greek Street where a mural shouting out SOHO can be seen.

As hesitant as always, I sat before it with my chipped pencil and grubby pad. It appears colourful, giddily so. Daylight doesn’t do justice to it. It requires lamps around it in the night, to bring out its vertiginous psychedelic essence.

Anyhow, I’d just toiled through one more exhausting session involving the Greek Street mural, and I then proceeded into Soho Square.

In the achingly strange Soho darkness, I noticed a fox, which stared back at me. I suddenly wondered what hip club this particular beast had been to. In the countryside, a fox wouldn’t be so blatant, being too scared of the farmer’s gun.

On another occasion, a brace of rats in front of me leapt through the railings into Soho Square on a winter evening. They seemed to be lithe, and dancing. Perhaps they had just attended G.A.Y in Old Compton Street. I couldn’t know – they didn’t stop for a conversation.

But, in terms of being shamelessly cute, what can beat the tiny mice on the westward platform of the Central Line at Tottenham Court Road station? They cavort around at the far end like performing circus creatures. They’re always black – in some manner of Darwinian adaptation to the dirty environment they inhabit.

Darwinism is much too ruthless an ideology, against which the Greek Street mural proclaims, in vain, LOVE and PEACE – a hippy slogan lost in our cruel materialist modern world.

ZEKRIA IBRAHIMI
W1