From the Temple of Optimistic Squalor.

In the warmth of an empty café I take a cure, a double espresso, served up by a depressed looking barista. I observe the January world from the wrong side of a confusion objected to by not-yet-fully-awakened blue optic receptors, while struggling under a haystack of multidirectional hair – welcome to my world. It doesn’t get much better than this; nor would I want it to unless you try shifting the geography around a bit to let my morning play out in Caffè Roberto in Turin, the true home of the espresso. I could live with that. The darkness of the first morning of the year persists, but it soon gives up and falls apart revealing a town that has been marinating overnight in a dank-smelling vapour, gasping for air and weighed down by the empty bottles and queasy stomachs of distant, regretted, New Year celebrations. The needle sharp spire of a hitherto obscured Church rises above the city murk as if to pierce the unseen skin of the heavenly places in the hope of letting grace and mercy gush from them like water from a ripe, cracked coconut, refreshment from that sublime and longed-for country, a salve to soothe the miserable itch we call life