A gentle breeze against my face, a glimmer of sunshine amid those drab and solemn old English days which seem to topple onto each other as some kind of joke at our collective expense; a quiet little street leading nowhere in particular, a person smiling without connotations. All these things are but sweet consolations flowing like warm summer days around my unshakeable sense of utter failure - a failure which seeps into everything and anything, to the point were it degrades and dismantles even itself.

The moment I begin to study and imagine the world, I fail. Finding a placebo in pure observation, I am more intimately acquainted with this restless society than any (post-)bohemian. I smile at the interconnectedness of everything. I smile at how the poor, lovestruck artisan (dressed well in order to distinguish himself from other artisans) feels an almighty weight fall in his heart as his beloved turns away in order to engage in a scintillating conversation about chalk, frost, sawdust - anything but him. I smile because she thinks of noone and nothing but him, and in so doing she surrenders all that she is and never was to a cultural inheritance which makes her behave with such vulgarity as to hurt the poor chap. I smile because she does not smile - at least not to him - because she saw an advert about choice and felt free, or saw a film about freedom and felt oppressed. She composes a symphony of life and imposes it on him.

This is failure. In recognising the sheer harmony of everything, I exclude myself from it. I Romanticise it in order to make it bearable, so any thought or idea of mine perishes in my heart the moment I begin to voice it. I suffer in silence, like a cold day.

Yet even to suffer is a monumental failure! I am so self-aware that I have become aware of myself as a copy of so many self-aware failures of the past - and, indeed, the present. Wallowing, as I do, in aesthetics, I repulsed by translating my thoughts into irony, or politics, or psychology, or anything which may be described as an 'issue'. I am nothing if not an infinite regress.