Young and old arrived in leaps and bounds, or in the slow shuffling of age-tired feet, up the three steps, through French doors that led to a well-lit atrium. In the early morning hours, when the winter sun doesn’t bother to care and just hits the snooze button, the light seemed to be emerging from within, as if the people entering were sparks coming back home to a bonfire lit long ago. It was warm inside too, a pleasant respite from the cold streets left behind.

In the atrium, a sign reading ’90’ stood up high, reminding us this little house was celebrating ninety years since first welcoming its wayward sparks. Paper flowers, fiercely crimson, peppered the walls and staircase, the warmth on our skin somehow visible too. As they came in, young and old were guided by students from the little house, through another set of doors, down a few other steps, towards the room where everything they came here for would be set alight.

On the way, each step we took down the corridor followed those taken in this little house by others before, some dead, some living, but all burning in the bonfire we were returning to, each life augmenting our own. Ninety years was a long time to traverse in the course of twenty meters, but then again, it is the same miracle at work as whenever a child puts pen to paper for the first time and writes ‘once upon a time’. Through an act of imagination their world becomes ours, time stands still, and another spark is welcomed to humankind’s fire.

To write, to express yourself creatively, is a deeply intimate activity. At the same time, it is a profound yearning to be involved in humankind, as language is what, at its finest, binds us together. It can certainly tear us apart as well but only when we lose sight that no man or woman is an island, but a part of the main. To celebrate creative writing, as this competition does, is to celebrate what’s best in us as human beings, to remind us that whatever is cold out there in the world, we have humankind’s bonfire inside us.