It was christmas all wrapped up and all that jaz in a bucketful of trouble!

Ears are often closed together for whispering and listening for a late lark singing and a ghost force which are, more often than not, tricks of the imagination being played time and time again in the mind of the listener where unnatural happenings and a curious incidents appear to be heard and not seen at nightfall, and which are in fact not more than mere tales of the night in the city of  London where many people have found out to their cost that not let up in the partying spirit and a little bit of snow and too much curry powder can make their nostrils flare but I can assure you that a celestial interventions is not an everyday occurrence in this part of the world. Indeed, learning is the light that never fails to shine since within one's brain there is an ability to think imaginative thoughts which serve as food for causing material things to exist and be produced, of course. Apart from all that, the nakedness of reality must be at the helm of everyone's thought in the sea of uncertainty at the present time since the right attitude will enable us to discover a conquer new worlds but in order to kick off an enterprise, tuition and financial support must be at the front of it, and it is certainly so when it comes to carving oneself a career, as I take my own example when I left home and made my toilsome way to England, for had others, namely relatives, not paved my way so thoroughly, I would most certainly stumbled at the outset since a misjudged catch could have brought me painful consequences. Nevertheless, it must be said that I did not choose to be a foreigner as I was simply forced to be one by the circumstances of my intellectual ambitions, but that is another story, and since then I have discovered many things about myself which have helped me develop the courage to think the unthinkable as my wisdom mature. In my less educated subject - religious matters - I stood, in the past, a step away from it even though I had not a valid reason to give other than my scepticism which drove me to convince myself about the non-existence of a divine being who ruled over life on Earth as I never received an answer whenever I posed a direct questions to this supreme being about the natural and supernatural worlds. Certainly, most of my life I have searched for an answer to the creation of the universe and everyday I felt more distant from ever finding one; indeed, I was brought up as a Roman catholic but I did buy into it all and certainly not the obviously man-made rules which were drawn from unreliable sources and retailed with a tag of authenticity even though there still existed a healthy division of opinion. For all that, I thought we were tiddlers in a gargantuan pond which did not change much while it piled on more pain as it took and received without giving much in return and therefore, I thought that one was expected to have a view of such matters for I found it hard not to.  Nevertheless, my awareness of christmas and its significance since I became a father has changed my perception of the christian teaching as a conveyance of moral goodness in society as I used to be on the periphery of its indoctrination and did not care much for its philosophy of reason for I thought it served the purpose of those in a position of power to intimidate those who were at the mercy of  ignorance and those who were prisoners of their belief in a divine being. Nevertheless, once I have exorcised some demons and managed to find my inner strength there was no fear of flying high in my lofty ambitions as I began to dream of reindeers jumping over chimneys and realised that the space was bigger than its content. I opened a bottle of wine which I had been given as a christmas present by my wife and let it stand for five hours before I had a mouthful and spat it out. Don't laugh since more often than not the learning is done from past experience - especially when one is seeking to enrich the present. Raising the issue might achieve very little but sometimes it is good to go deep into other things and as I read myself to sleep I realised that it was the present from the heart and the thought from the mind which mattered most and not the source that bought the gift that seemingly tied it all together. Indeed, money makes the world go round and never more so than at this time of the year; alas, in a penny-pinching times, there is not much money in the world to go round as it sums up the boundary of one's expectation in a bucketful of trouble.

P.Figueras