Mirror shades...

I doubt that you've ever seen any man that you would deem as more attractive than he is. As she talks to him, she notices herself playing with her hair in the reflection of his mirrored sunglasses. She blushes slightly and rests both of her arms on her lap. Almost indestinguishably, her eyes constantly shift focus as she alternately moves her attention from his face to her own body language. Subconciously, her manner becomes more flirtatious as she begins to question her own attractiveness.

His mind and his blood burn hot...

It starts to rain. At 6pm in the winter it is already dark and often bitterly cold. There's a guy in Marks & Spencer's doorway, greasy and huddled in a mess of blankets. They all see him there every day. He asks them for money. Some of them oblige, most of them ignore him. Some tell him that they are sorry. His mind and his blood burn hotter with every hour that passes until he can make up the money to earn a 75cl bottle from the off-licence over the road.

It's Friday night. Around the corner there's a bar that is famed for it's atmosphere. Lively, friendly, fun. A good glass of whatever it is that you like. City traders, weekend ravers, office workers, construction workers - everyone drinks there, but social boundaries are only broken when sex is involved. A man breaks away from his friends to buy a £150 bottle of champagne for a woman who has been drinking Bacardi Breezers. She is impressed with his money and his dynamism, he is impressed at her looks and her openness. He will take her home, and then they will never speak again.

On La Ramblas, a mixed group of EasyJet revellers grate the peace of evening with innane chanting and obnoxious shouting. A young Spanish couple walks past them. The boy feels nervous, the girl feels disgust. Chanting and shouting, they trample Barcelona.

Four middle-class Guardian reading couples sit eating lobster in an expansive suburban home. Greg opens a 1990 Château Latour, the conversation turns from knife-crime to Dutch care-homes. Everyone has somthing to say. Some of them learn something, others refuse to be wrong. Greg comes on to Alun's wife in the kitchen. She refuses him and in the morning he laughs about it, privately. It was a good evening.

A twelve year old boy smokes a cigarette and waits outside an off-licence for some eighteen year old passer-by to come out carrying eight cans of Stella Artois.

Saturday afternoons are made out of pasta...

They sit and drink wine in a modest little Italian place set back from the waterfront. This is a place where life comes to while away the hours, relaxing in its own company and bathing in its own warmth; heedless of itself. This is a place where Saturday afternoons are made out of pasta and where great deeds are made out of words. The sun shines lazily upon the streets and through its windows.

Burning through the ocean of forever...

Deep, deep blue. The unfathomable ocean of a complex and troubled genius. A colour torn through and a fire bursting out to consume eternity with its brilliance. Fire-red consuming everything. Objects move as crackling embers; white-hot architecture aglow, bathed in flame.

The horizon is on fire. The sky is a revelation.

He leans back against the station wall, smoking and staring into the divine. Flash-point. God engulfs his very being, evaporating every tedious problem, laying waste to every minutae of pity and sorrow. There is only now; and now the inferno of life burns in his soul.

There are moments in life that lift the burden of truth. Human truth, so fanciful and full of itself. Human truth, so vainly narrating God's infinite complexity. Defiling experience with its story. Defiling life with its language. He feels as lost as a poet.

Clarity is found in the absence of clarity. The deep blue ocean of life is alight with the fire of existance.

And existance is his only certainty.