From Kentish Town Road, 6th October 2012

So it's been a while, and it'd been a while then too. This shot up from the other side of an unusually sunny street at the end of a wet summer, and was a blue dot by the time I'd met it with a camera. Still, they all count...

From Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, 25th August 2012

I was sent this beautiful group by Luna, who released the yellow one closest here. It is always a joy to receive them from afar, and these tell a story:

"The balloons are released to honour and celebrate the lives babies lost through miscarriage or just after birth. Each balloon represented a baby. This year's emotionally charged but beautiful event was held on the rooftop of an eight storey building with a gorgeous view of our capital city and the Caribbean Sea beyond. It was a cloudy, windy and warm evening. After a short ceremony and prayer our balloons were let go. Within moments they were tiny blue, pink, green, orange and yellow dots against the clouds. We all faced the west. Toward the sun which was now peeking out from behind the white cumulus clouds as our balloons carried our emotions away. A high flying flock of birds seemed to chase after our balloons and I imagined them as guardian angels guiding our little ones, and us, to peace."

Which is quite humbling compared to the discarded ones I sporadically see on the streets. Thank you!

From Trafalgar Square, 6th April 2012

If there's one place in London that will be busy regardless of the day, it's Trafalgar Square. It was its usual self; heaving with artists, tourists, pigeons and other locals. We scattered the third for the walk's latest trick and during the process saw this green scoot by Nelson's Column, adding a random dot to a classic tourist shot.

Pancras Road, from 214 bus, 8th October 2011

Not the prettiest shot, but it's been a while since I've got one in flight, so it made me smile. It was taken more than a month earlier than the upload date too - for shame! Well what can I say, it's been busy...

From Richmond Hill, 30th January 2011

It had been the first bright clear day for a while, so we'd been out tramping the park enjoying the light and the first bright hint of spring, then watching the sun set from the pub best placed to watch it that I know. Thin high clouds caught the last rays and I was taking photos anyway when a friend pointed this one out to me as it headed oddly westward against the spectacular sky.

The tags caused some musing. Aloft it was, but it was almost certainly not black, although in that light against that sky and from that distance any photon of hue hit a rod not a cone, and a dark silhouette it remained. And sunless or not? The sun had a few minutes before sunk below the spinning world, but that tag is meant for the night, so no. A fine day indeed when those are its major wrangles.

From South Bank Centre, 16th October 2010

And yet another Giraffe balloon...

Given the prevailing wind in this city, an area northeastish of here must be literally littered with their tattered skins. How far northeast this hub lies I have no idea - how far does a modest helium balloon drift before it sinks and falls? Perhaps there's a undiscovered field of orange tatters that spooks the bears in Novaya Zemlya. Perhaps it's a stealth marketing campaign by Giraffe Norway. Actually, I suspect it's more likely Stratfordish that's so strewn.

From Holland Park Avenue, from 31 bus, 3rd July 2010

Has it really been five years? Oh yes. An anniversary balloon then, high and getting higher above a hot and sunny Westfield, which didn't exist when the thistle-trapped initiator was casually snapped. Anniversaries are often cause for looking forward as well as back - will there be posts in July 2015? 2020? What would compel me to close this blog? I can't imagine.

From Long Acre, 16th May 2010

You wouldn't know it from these sunny bookends, but in the short hour or so between this and the last there was a torrential spring downpour that left the streets slick and reflective and sent Sunday shoppers scurrying for cover. This cluster shot up to the west and my first shot was blinded by the sun, but it drifted with the weather eastwards above me and stayed low enough for a good view.

From Edbrooke Road, 4th April 2010

A very similar shot to the last, a tethered black pair aloft on a fine sunny spring day. It was Easter day too, which meant that a slew of the larger local shops were shut, turning what should have been a simple trip into a wearying trudge around various small shops. These two drifted high over the road as we were just arriving home at the end of it all, which would have been welcome enough even without them.

From Granby Street, Leicester, 21st March 2010

If snagged balloons are now deemed too unfleeting for the future, too easy to snap and compose in their entrapment, the airborne remain the most difficult, and remain. The sunlit brickwork and clear blue sky make this, for me, prettier than many of the snatched shots of the windblown. It was a truly warm spring day and my last trip to Leicester for a while, and I hope the new season brings the balloons out in London.

Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester, 30th January 2010

The northenmost balloon to date and the first not snagged for a while, on a day that looks like spring but was bitterly cold. Piccadilly was heaving on this sunny Saturday afternoon, and the crowds and blue sky had an air of balloon about them, so this was almost expected. Still a pleasure though, especially after so many dark ensnared Londoners this winter. Seasons change, then, although the skeletal branches remain.

Great Western Road, 11th September 2009

I was wandering to the tube station chatting to a friend. She stopped to wait for a bus, I turned back to say goodbye and it shot up suddenly from the pavement opposite. She'd seen this sort of thing before so was neither surprised nor offended by my frantic grasping for the camera, and it was caught before it swirled away swiftly, while we parted less hastily below.

From South Bank Centre, 9th August 2009

And another an hour or so later, whose colour betrays its shared source. No branches caught this though, and it was a far more hurried shot for it.

Incidentally, three days later and some 700 metres from this, I released a few air- and trinket-filled balloons myself, as part of Antony Gormley's capricious One & Other project on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. Although I'd expected, indeed hoped for, them to be burst quickly by the people or sharp edges below, most were gleefully caught by children, who ran off with their trophies intact. And that was more than good enough for me.

From Streamline Mews, 24th May 2009

A few hours later, still a beautiful day, and a slightly more appealing shot too, despite the distance between me and my airborne subject. It had been a long hot journey on the bus from Maida Vale to this corner of Dulwich, but the heat was subsiding as the sun swung down to tree level. It was another bank holiday weekend and again the city had an air of summery happiness, and such moods always seem to bring out balloons. Or perhaps I just notice them more when happier myself.

From Great Western Road, 27th March 2009

High and fast-moving, this metallic pink reinforced my thoughts that either balloons are getting more common, or I'm just noticing more. I suspect the latter is more likely.

From Westbourne Park Road, 20th March 2009

Hardly the best photo here, but hey - it was dusk and they were haring along at a fair lick high above the flats. It was the first dusk of spring 2009, the equinox having occurred some six and a half hours before this shot was taken.

It had been a stunning week of blue skies, almost-warm sunshine and a proliferation of flowers, and London responded with a wave of optimism and cheeriness. It is said that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather. Most people I know in London aren't English, but everyone was talking about the weather this week. Long may it continue.

Notting Hill Gate, from 452 bus, 18th February 2009

Although very close in time to the Valentine's Day glut, from its colour I'd guess that this is a random escape. I mean, who'd give a green balloon?

I was heading to work when I saw this, going around the west side of Hyde Park rather than the more usual east. Unusually I wasn't sat at the front of the bus, so had to leap forward and crouch between the occupants of the front seats to snap this. They looked at me bewildered for a fraction of a second, but this is London - no-one said a thing.

Waterloo Bridge, 17th February 2009

And more! And, even better, this time they're from a new source - my sister's chap. Cheers! Over to him:

"I saw them floating over from the festival hall, which gave me enough time to wake up from my morning walking trance and get the blackberry ready! just as I took it, a gust of wind blew them rapidly away, so got in in the nick of time! Hurrah! And bizarrely I found myself to be rather excited about getting the shot!"

Hurrah indeed... the Valentine's Day menagerie increases yet further. How many more..?

Vauxhall Bus Station, from 36 bus, 17th January 2009

Despite fearing being late, the bus was the only option as the Victoria Line was down. Just as well, as I'd have otherwise missed this pink balloon wheeling about on a wild night. I was on the upper deck, and was surprised to suddenly see a balloon shoot past the window, and such was its speed that initially I had little hope for its capture. I went for my phone anyway, and happily the gale whirled it back past the windows a couple more times, and I got lucky with my only shot. I did have to crane over a middle-aged gentleman on the window seat, which was a trifle rude, but he didn't seem to mind.

The bus pulled away straight after this was taken. And I wasn't late.

Around Oxford Street/Regent Street, 6th December 2008

It was a day of balloons. They were everywhere. I missed a few and didn't care. By the end I was so ballooned out that I wondered if I could ever take another one again - I mean, what could compare? The fleeting and scarce glimpses that have been my sustenance over the past three and a half years have been rendered farcical by today's glut.

It started like any other day. A red escape, the top one, flying low over sunlit buildings in central London, snapped happy as a rare treat. But it was a mere taste of things to come, an amuse l'oeil before the feast of sightings. The roads were closed and pedestrianised to entice out credit-crunched shoppers, and balloons had been pressed into their usual decorative service. The UK must now be in the grip of a helium shortage. So many festooned streets and shops that I suppose countless escapes were inevitable. I wonder how far they flew, on the icy wind?

So my memory is hazed by weight of numbers, and these are lumped together for convenience. 6th December 2008: Balloon Day.