NIRVANA

Location:                               St.Pancras International train station

Latitude and Longitude:     51.532519 and -0.126300

Nirvana by Liam Gibson

The Eurostar sliced through the once-green English countryside, a million snowflakes drifting into the eyes of confused sheep. Poor bastards don’t even have shoes, I thought, before the clickity-clack of laptop keys lulled me back to sleep.

A minute, or an hour later, a gentle shunt roused me from my dribbling half-sleep. Brussels always seemed so plain when I looked up at the polished, carved stone of Hogwarts, sorry, St.Pancras’ interior. Wand at the ready, I plunged into the throng and was swept onto the street.

Or what used to be the street. All I could make out was white. White everything. From the sky down, the entire world was cloaked in twinkling, hushed magic. A solitary car swished past in slow-motion, spraying up a little wave of powder. Traffic lights blinked soundlessly from red to green, and back to green. A lone banker skidded from one foot to the other like a cross-country skier, using the weight of his briefcase to propel him forward. Something strange had happened here.

Unsettled by the calm, I scanned the railings for a flash of gold in the white. Yes! Holy mother of all that is good, YES! There she was, waiting patiently where I’d shackled her 4 days ago. Handlebars still attached, wheels unbuckled and not a scratch on her shimmering skin. She had been spared. Yes, London was not acting itself.

Pin-balling in and out of my flat, I swapped bike for video camera and headed to the park. By night, it was a wild place filled with mysterious shrieks and scuffles, but today it was everything that was good in the world.

A family of French elves pranced through the trees, tossing loosely-balled fists of snow as they sung their enchantments. A caramel-coloured cocker spaniel snow-ploughed its way towards me through head-height drifts, little baubles of snow swinging from the back of his legs. Even the hoodies were playing nice, smiling in a distinctly non-stabby way.

Positively giddy on the good vibes, I stumbled from the park. A car-sized snowball squatted unapologetically in the middle of a road, rolled there by a gaggle of long-gone revelers. Grown men crouched behind cars then leapt away from their pursuers with girly shrieks. A 3-legged dog tied to an ice-lolly sign eyed me benevolently, as if to say ‘Yes brother, I know. This is awesome.’

Smiling like one of those soppy Harri Krishna brain-washees, I floated into London fields on my magic carpet of glee. Huge pyramids made of yet more giant snowballs soared into the sky, clambered on by starry-eyed toddlers. Japanese girls looking for photo ops straddled mythical beats sculpted from the snow. Laughter hung in the air like light trails on long-exposure photographs. It felt like 100 Christmases had been squashed into one day. And that day had become a pill, which I’d washed down with some vodka and a little bit of acid.

And then I understood.

‘I’ ceased to exist. The world and I fused. I was made of the stars and they were made of me. Everything was light and joy, like a super-gay version of that moment in the matrix when Neo sees the matrix for what it is. All races were one, all animals, every living thing had equal weighting. Even the dimmest of Americans. For a split-second, I may even have stopped hating babies.

And then, hurled from the treacherous hands of one of my new brethren, came the hardest snowball in the known universe. Exploding on my face, the icy shrapnel fell inside my t-shirt and melted instantly, chilling my once-warm heart. Then another one grazed my right eyebrow. Adrenalin brought the hooded hyenas into sharp focus.

‘Why?’ my eyes pleaded. ‘Why break this sacred bond? Can’t you see that we are one? Hurting me only hurts yourself.’ This did not work.

With a snarl on his face, the leader of the pack rushed me and splatted a slushy handful into my face, then another. Before I could turn the other cheek, a shower of icy rocks forced me back, back, way back into the nearest pub. My face a reddened pulp and my t-shirt soaked, I fell to my knees, platoon-esque. London had not changed. I had not changed. The world was not one. It was just snowing.