The Sunrise That Got Away.
It was minus 2 degrees at 7.15am when he awoke in Hertfordshire, but he vaulted out of bed. There was, I must confess, an energy and urgency in this manouvre not seen since retirement.
Seen in the east through his rear bedroom windows was an incredible, almost spiritual, blood red sky.
Red was lucky, on this, the first day of the Vietnamese Lunar New Year of the Buffalo.
Half asleep and not quite with it, he struggled to get a shot on his mobile.
Stiff cold fingers, and eyes misted over with an interrupted sleep.
“Concentrate.”
This whole bloody routine of; turn on, swipe screen, enter capital letters mode, punch in password and eventually get a hoped for shot for posterity.
But Nature called with an urgency than could not be foregone.
Hurry to bathroom.
Back to windows.
Gone.
A moment of uplift and promise; replaced by a more subdued dawn of cirrus, atop the evolving calmness of a lighter blue in the celestial heavens.
Sandy in Taiwan had used him. An undocumented Vietnamese working in a noodles bar; she came to his hotel room every Sunday. He tried to bang her, but she kept talking. Her aim was English conversation lessons; and all things considered, she took them seriously. His intentions were less than honourable, but then a fully clothed nubile body taking an eventual nap on your bed at the weekend was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
Father O’Connell in his devotions prayed for the redemption of the soul of the ex-US President; but the cavernous Dark Gentleman was having none of it. But even for a fallen angel of his capabilities, His workload was increasing, for business was booming.
So much so, that He had little time left to cause mischief in Constantinople; where, (overlooking from his apartment, the glories of the Bosporus and the Galata Bridge), the renowned Professor Solzhenitsof was in distressing turmoil regards his 654-page didactic thread, written in three languages, inclusive Mandarin on “the spectacle of the Soviet type gangs chiefs consumed in the fires of hell whereof his kind of happiness is also going to be experienced by the noble-free thinking and liberal-people who would go to watch Mullahs' tears in Iran and Kim Yong's scream in North Korea."
A desideratum if ever one was needed.
Peradventure, allies were present in this hour of need.
There is a phrase in Italian, “In boca al lupo” which translated literally reads as ““in the mouth of the wolf.” Would it on this occasion slip its muzzle, and bay three-throated, like the Dog of Erebus? For one must recognise that this street slang idiom runs deeper. It is a somewhat superstitious way to tell someone “good luck.”
In the meantime, our hero, whilst engaged in a meditative consideration of what to do with the solitary pack of blueberries in the fridge, found his inner peace interrupted by the daily scam call from a Mumbai call centre, informing him that his internet was compromised. The usual time-wasting dance of the “dobi wallah’s” ensued, as the recipient ran up the opposites phone bill in a well-rehearsed routine akin a verbal fox trot.
The Prof would have been proud. Even perhaps, as to expressing it as;
“limits himself, as a matter of those principles, would be to refusing to see the modern civilization makers to have been humiliated without asking that other parts of The European civilization, say India, Israel, Good Gulf Arabs, and innocent coloured folks should be. He will even accept not moral pain provided his integrity is respected.”
Delusions needs must come: yet how gentle, in softening diffusion, in mild succession, was it made to fall. Like gentle showers, till all was indeed buried, and yet little was destroyed that could not be replaced.
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