âmes pétillantes ~ classic rock imagines

• Ray Davies •

Hey everyone! I haven't had wifi for a couple of weeks, which has been both liberating and trapping. However, I am using my work's wifi to upload this, so I hope they don't snoop at my browsing history. Enjoy!

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The lights were dizzying, strung up high between the collosal buildings like old-fashioned washing lines abandoned in the cooling temperatures. As you coasted beneath them, glazed eyes cast up to the multi-coloured heavens as though waiting for God himself to emerge, your addled mind wondered in surprise as to just who put these elaborate decorations together for the multitude of town centres around the world during the festive season. You were certain those beautiful clouds of light weren't swirling through the sky when you'd paced down the same street only a day before. Or maybe you just forgot to look up.

If truth be told, you were a little drunk. There had been an occasion (though what it was you couldn't remember) and the opportunity to celebrate it was one you simply hadn't been able to pass up. And, boy, had you celebrated.

The entirety of London city had trembled beneath each of slam of a new pub door closing behind you, the echoing sounds of your footsteps becoming slowly more stumbled and jarred in the darkening alleys of the Old Smoke.

Eventually, at around 11 o'clock, you'd found yourself propped up between two of your friends who were only slightly less drunk than you were, an arm around each of their shoulders and the remnants of your red wine-tainted breath still lingering about their flushed ears.

Now, you were no stranger to a drink or two. However, when it came to undeniably messy nights out, it always fell to you to look after everyone else. To be the unanimously decided 'responsible' one. To be everyone's parent.

Yet, on this night, the night of the easily forgotten that simply couldn't pasa by without being celebrated, you had rebelled against your predetermined position of leadership. Why should everyone else get to have all the fun?

By the time all of your friends had turned up to the restaurant that the celebrations had started in, you were already a sheet or two to the wind.

And this is what had lead you, indirectly, to your curious Christmas light predicament. After at least five drinks too many, the newly selected responsible one of your tight-knit group had had enough sense to call Ray.

With a little grumbling, he willingly agreed to come and get you after you managed to swipe the payphone from your friend and began babbling absolute gibberish to him.

Somehow, your friends managed to half guide, half drag you out of the ninth pub of the night and round the corner to Hyde Park, where all of you stood shivering and swaying like the crowd at Woodstock.

If you had been even partly sober, you'd be sick with the possibility of a stray police patrol car stumbling onto your less than sensible waiting party. Fortunately, you weren't. And, even more fortunately, they didn't.

After 10 tense minutes that felt like awestruck seconds to you but weighted hours to some of your less drunk friends, the sweeping headlights of Ray's unmistakable cae materialised on the corner your friends had been anxiously watching. They swiftly turned in your decoration and pulled to a halt right in front of you.

Ray's mystified eyes glinted in the soft light of the street lamp which you and your friends had been waiting beneath, a mysterious brew of worry, curiousity and inexplicable sadness.

Incidentally, at this exact moment, you were drunkenly attempting to climb the bars of one of the cities most renowned parks, determined in your tainted haze to explore all the wonders it held in the inky blackness of night. Because of this, you didn't notice the suddenly unfamiliar eyes of your love.