Oaklands Grove, 19th August 2006

When I uploaded this I'd forgotten where it was taken, but I had a rare moment of clarity a minute ago - it was taken in the street outside my flat, in which I had been for just two days. A cheery welcome back to W12.

Yellow again too - given this, July's one and the one from 2nd August last year, you could almost say that people preferentially pick yellow balloons in high summer. Or that people selectively squash dull-coloured ones when it's bright.

Vanston Place/Walham Grove/North End Road, 29th July 2006

Spotted near home one very hot, bright summer day. Its yellowness was apt - the gunmetal one would have looked incongruously bleak with the Sun blazing so.

From the London Eye, 24th June 2006

This is the only shot I have so far of a wild balloon in flight. As is likely obvious, it's also the only shot taken with my proper camera, rather than the one on my mobile phone. From the Eye's enormous field of view I could follow this one for ages, and watched it from nearly ground level on its journey upwards and eastwards in the hot wind.

Taste of London Festival, Regents Park, 17th June 2006

I was ludicrously drunk when I took this. The Taste of London festival was ended as a food event by an early visit to the cheese hall, in which we each ate a cat's body weight in various cheeses, ruining our appetites and thus making it more of a drinking than eating affair. This sorry semi-flated example seemed appropriate. Great day though.

Holland Walk, Holland Park, 6th June 2006

Trapped in the leaf-softened branches it lived a fair while, but once deflated after a few days it just looked like it had been intentionally placed there, gibbet-esque, as a warning to other balloons: "stay in the hand, for you'll live longer there than in the wild".

Not that they can see or think. I didn't want to slide into pathetic fallacy but I've done it there. Hey ho.

Location Unremembered, 23rd May 2006

I like this because the balloon looks like the point of an exclamation mark. I remember nothing more about it.

Knivet Road, 25th April 2006

Almost too easy - this was in our front garden. Plainly, we didn't care for our front garden much (or the back one, to be honest: it required a machete and native guide to reach the back wall). It was a pleasant surprise to arrive home and find this, not least because it's a gunmetal balloon. Who has gunmetal balloons?! PlaneEasy, apparently. I approve, whoever they are.

Oxford Street, 22nd April 2006

Along with exclamation mark and in flight above, this is my favourite doomed balloon shot in terms of its visual appeal. I'm not a "proper" photographer, and anyway the nature of the subject makes the balloon photographs urgent and unrehearsed. But I like this shot as a photo as well as for other reasons:

1) It was the first time I'd taken such a photo in front of someone I knew since it became a project. After so long it was good to get it off my chest, and it led to...

2) It was the first balloon whose doom I heard. I'd not got two sentences through my explanation before a loud pop indicated its demise, and I turned around to see a child skipping away from a tattered piece of rubber. dS/dt>0, I guess. No I wasn't sad - it's only a balloon - I was just glad I got it in time. It could have happened many times before, but I always have my mp3 player on when out alone so any other pops would have been drowned by that, and I'd never know to look back.

I usually hate Oxford Street on a Saturday but this made it a bit more beautiful.

Kensington High Street, from 328 bus, 21st April 2006

They are safe from the malicious up here. This was my usual bus ride into work (the joy of walking *to* work is easily surpassed by the joy of an extra half hour in bed), and over the next few days I saw these snagged balloons wither and die.

Holland Walk, Holland Park, 10th April 2006

A second sighting on Holland Walk, this time a tiny balloon, also stalked. Its size implies that it was pretty old, although whether (as I suspect) or not that contributed to it being discarded by a capricious child will remain unknown.

Location unremembered, 19th February 2006

A dull wet late winter day, on which a less-than-spectacular walk somewhere (it was more than a year ago, and I never thought I'd want to know its location) was lifted by the presence of this pink stalked one. I imagine the stalk hinders its travels, although maybe also makes it more likely to be picked up by someone rather than popped. I didn't hang around to find out.

Kensington High Street, from 28 bus, 16th December 2005

This was the third day on which I'd seen two examples on the same day, which is quite remarkable given that this is only the seventh wild balloon sighting. There's some theory in psychology (the name of which escapes me at the moment) that says that if you see something once, your brain is primed to spot similar examples. So maybe that's what's happening. Thinking about that got me thinking: how many balloons had I missed because I'd not seen one earlier that day to prime my brain?

Kensington High Street, from 28 bus, 16th December 2005

Two months exactly until the next sighting. Really brings out the red in those lines...

FBDY concourse, Fulham, 16th October 2005

Compared to thistle patches, crowds and canals, a shopping centre seems a fairly benign environment for a balloon. But kids are very stampy so I suspect its life was short. This was on the walk home from a shopping trip to the local Sainsbury's, a short, relatively dull walk that would have been erased from my memory during the next sleep if this red one hadn't been loose.

Holland Walk, Holland Park, 2nd August 2005

So having gone the very best part of a month without having seen one after that first day, I then saw a fourth on the same day as the third. What are the odds? It was a glorious day so I was walking home from work. I wouldn't say that wanting to see wild balloons was the reason I walked rather than got on the bus, but it was a pleasant side effect.

Grand Union Canal, from Great Western Road, 2nd August 2005

As it turned out it was almost exactly a month, during which I almost forgot about it all. And then I saw this on my journey home from work. I was hooked. If you're going to put cameras on phones then you have to expect this kind of thing.

Earls Court car park, 3rd July 2005

If the miraculously unpricked mauve on Parliament Hill started the whole thing, this was the one that cemented it as a project of sorts. To see one unburst wild balloon in a day is rare (as I've ultimately found, not that you'd guess from the next six), but to see two looks like, well, a coincidence. So much so that I started thinking about how long it would be until I saw my next one.

Parliament Hill, 3rd July 2005

This was the one that started it. How could a balloon possibly end up in a dense patch of thistles and remain unburst? How long had it been there? How long would it last? I'll never know, but I couldn't not take a picture of it in its (presumably) final hour. I'd been taking photos of Giancarlo Neri's The Writer sculpture, so was in a photo-y mood.

I take dozens of photos each month of things I see and this would have just been another addition to that formless mass were it not for the next one.