The devil is here to stay. So says the tramp who smells of piss and eats our neighbour's lavender plants. I agree and leave him to investigate our bins and give their contents value again. The A316 is a parking lot full of fat men in pink shirts driving important cars. Zooming past them on the pavement are children on scooters flanked by gossiping mothers pushing prams laden like caravan camels. A church bell rings to call the faithful but no one seems to notice.

I pine for the salt mines of Canada, because I heard a reporter on the radio describe its beauty. Cathedrals of salt carved for decades upon decades below the great lakes. I pine for Missoula, Montana because there's a good pub there and it's in a state I know nothing about. I pine for the Muslim Hajj to make the circumambulations of the Kaaba, because I want to know that sense of universal brotherhood. I want to speak a thousand languages and I want to meet a thousand people who speak those languages. I want wring from heaven and that Stingy creator at least as many lives a cat has been given. There is too much to do, to see, to be, to feel, to know, to understand, to express, to experience, to love, to have and I don't want to miss a thing. That is why life is suffering because it is never enough. We are limited to one experience and that measly but infinite gift is pinned to a single point in time. We only have the experience of now and fading ribbons of memory. To waste one tiny speck of allotted time panics my soul and I frantically search for some experience to devour.