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.

Hiding his Inertia

Walking through the city I am reminded of a time, long before I came here, imagining it to be such a land of opportunity: a melting pot of culture and ideas; a place where I wasn’t constantly looking back over my shoulder to see if I was being sneered at - judged, sentenced and caged. I remember the excitement on the day I left my sleepy little village, the train, the long journey to all possibility.

Four years later and sometimes I think I can see you amidst the throng of students and muscular laborours donning thick leather work boots - lurking in solitude behind a woman dressed in a head-to-toe burkha, a wisp of your hair waving from behind a jobseekers’ baseball cap. All those faces: every identity and every stereotype reinforcing its position, every fashion sense and every public folly presented as glory. Being spoiled for choice perhaps prevents you from looking. I mean really looking. I know, I’ve been guilty of it myself. A lovely guy dumped because his teeth are too big. A sexy guy now mere history because he didn’t know who Kate Bush was…

But sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I think I catch you looking in my direction. Just a glint of something inexplicable. Barely a fraction of a moment moves by before its gone. I know you’re out there – somewhere.

The Equipoise

As if desolate in the weeks succeeding harvest, this has not been the era that created a genius – as I perhaps once thought it would – but rather an epoch that in all necessity stripped a soul of all its pretense and guilelessly inappropriate conduct. That can be no detrimental thing when you consider some of the situations such conduct has found me in. Although, in my defense, I only ever sought balance: a life to lead that bore niether condition nor restriction upon that which I already possessed the ability to judge for myself. But there is it nonetheless, a debate for every psyche imaginable.

A few months ago I found a… I can’t decide which of the words sound less grotesque: lump? growth? cyst? Whatever you prefer to call it, it appeared brazenly and without prior warning in a most sensitive area. I ignored it at first, convinced that it was some sort of white-headed spot where soap had collected beneath the skin. And that was all fine until it became rigid - like a tiny discus, an ever increasing circle of fear inducing alien.

I was laid in bed the other afternoon, my mood missing the weekends’ lost seretonin and my brain the process of thought beyond that which was blindingly obvious. Meaning I was laid in bed studying my cock and scared enough into making a doctors appointment. It was for two days later and, as you can imagine if you know anything about me at all, I was convinced that I had the ‘C’ word and had left it too late to be treated.

Walking to the doctors in Wednesday mornings’ sunshine I lifted my head to the sky trying to catch my breath. My heart pounded and my knees weakened. But there was also clarity. I thought about what I would do if I didn’t have long: I decided merely to finish my book, leave something behind containing a life-lesson so that mine wasn’t obsolete. I wouldn’t need to in the end, it really was just a cyst. As gross as that may be at least I’m not within the clutches of the wasting.

The truth is, I had been flirting with the idea of death. Not for any reason other than to be free of that which I seem to bring upon myself. It is not the world that craves me, it is I that would prefer to devour rather than watch it glide by from my tiny hermits-window. The world is often erroneous but so much more often beautiful. I had already decided to live.

As for Nottingham: Tim is moving to London, to greet his own destiny as one of the most successful medical students in history. Michael is starting an MA at my old university, ever free from his own restrictions and with more love in his heart than the world would know what to do with. Anna has a baby and a single life now: she becomes increasingly tiresome, as loathed as I am to admit it of a woman who made me feel so welcome here. Gary is currently revisting Barcelona with some friends and, I assume, trying to piece back together the life I appear to have torn apart.

All out of love and in search of the equipoise. I have tested this city’s magnetism several times before now, but it is perhaps time to let the era rest. In the most abstract way possible I have achieved what I set out to achieve. Removed of all those erroneous naivities I leave this city with a template on which to sketch a new life…