Dearest Beauty,

            I may once have thought that I did not know you; that somehow our paths had never crossed. Perhaps you did not favour those without obvious intellect or the perfect amount of social confidence. Perhaps your favour lies with those who have the means to purchase sought-after objects and newly imported family saloons parked on the drive-ways of houses not rented from the council. Perhaps, if I am to be honest, I thought that you had forsaken all people such as mine, with their muddied cuticles and tempered visage, their abolishment of etiquette and dental routine so that arguments are fought regardless of company and bothersome teeth are pulled by a string tied to a door-handle – a lightening slam and a dark oral vacancy in the aftermath: every bridge crossed as we come to it.

            Beauty, my dearest and most favoured; you would have done well to forsake us. We eat our dinners from our laps in front of soap operas and yet never try to imitate their so-called example of common decency. We have our own agendas (does that worry you?) as we rush to the gathering throng surrounding a wrong-doer being pummelled by a hypocrite, not to take sides but to behold the more comical elements of a rage that only an ego’s conviction can induce. We follow sirens for our entertainment and time our activities to coincide with the timetable of the ice cream van which sold far less ice-cream than cigarettes and cheap tracksuits. We can generally enjoy the disaster of a power-cut (either by fault of the grid or the dregs of family allowance spent instead of electricity on fathers’ cider) or a sweltering heat-wave and burst water-main as a thrilling change to the monotony of the long, useless days. Enormous days that stretched out forever! Days not so much lived but rather endured as intrinsic avoidance of anything unknown.

            And I did not find you, Beauty, for a long time. What I did find, mostly (if it wasn’t a new foliage and mud-pie ingredient), was fear – of the patriarch and our counterparts: estate kids looking for a victim to torture they would be so bored. And there truly was a built-in fear of anything beyond our geographical and social boundaries. For me though, something that first and first foremost earned me the spark of true thought, was the real terror in that there would indeed be a world beyond that which I knew. Was I, could I be, missing out? That was an increasing curiosity that gained such gravitas as I imagine being in similar force to whole shelves of snow driving down a mountain. Indeed it became the only option: either to conquer the fear so naturally ingrained by this clique or to stay loyal to them, to exist without meaningful happenstance until I admitted at the firmament a waste of my one opportunity to seek out all the lessons and wonders life has produced in her gift of it.

            And yet, Beauty, you are but a thought. And in my weaknesses I have shackled myself to your influence so that I could too behold all that you touch: wild spring flowers dancing against the sunlight in a gentle breeze; a woollen scarf protecting against the chill, the chill in itself a beautiful thing; the way his face puzzles over me, in himself the manifestation of all the beauty that ever was or shall be. And Her – she was beautiful too. Like you, a double edged sword of the sharpest kind. In that I will never now be rid of you.