West

At a few minutes past ten o’clock on a warm, cloudless early summer morning - one so variously excellent in its vivid particulars that it might provoke in the mind of the most determined atheist thoughts of a benign Creator - I am standing on the corner of Coleman Street and King’s Arms Yard in that part of London, England, known as the City, the venerable district of the great metropolis that is at once the commercial nerve center of Great Britain and one of the key financial strongholds of the world. For the last minute or so, relieved by the sudden appearance of resplendent sunshine after so many days of misty gloom, I have been examining that portion of Coleman Street that is visible to me, and I am unable to say that I am enchanted with the view. 

Unusually narrow and shadowy, lined with anonymous office blocks made of pre-stressed concrete and gleaming walls of steel and plate glass, harboring honeycombs of offices inhabited by firms whose urgent remit is to provoke extravagant sums of money to produce more of the same, it possesses all the charm of a rather well-maintained urban back alley. Never mind. Visually unappealing though it may be, my reasons for standing here at this particular moment in time are, I believe, quite legitimate. I am on a mission, a quest - a search for something that no longer exists…