There is a Rose in Spanish Harlem (ePub)

There is a Rose in Spanish Harlem Synopsis A young lawyer on his lunchbreak encounters what he takes to be an apparition outside St Clement Danes Church in London's Strand. The apparition consists of a vision of a young man hovering silently just above the statue of Dr Johnson, at the rear of the church. The apparition/vision seriously unsettles the young lawyer and, in the following days, he makes impulsive decisions to leave the legal profession and to sell his apartment and leave London. On a whim he chooses to go to Weymouth, his decision triggered simply by seeing a reproduction of John Constable's painting 'Weymouth Sands' on a poster at Waterloo station. In Weymouth he finds lodgings and a job as a labourer on a construction site. He finds new friends, a very different lifestyle and time to reflect on his earlier life which he now considers to have been too solitary and sensual and too cerebral. He contemplates the religious beliefs he has held to, and figures he has been lukewarm and maybe aloof in his faith. He suffers an accident on the building site and in a coma enters what could be described as an outof-the-body experience. In this state he meets again the young man who appeared to him in the apparition in the Strand. Much of what he has struggled with in his 'search for God' takes on new meaning. He wakes from the coma and returns from his sojourn in the unknown better equipped to deal with the life that he takes up again.