We usually have a beautiful, sparkling Christmas tree and my dad reads us 'A Child's Christmas in Wales' in front of the fire and it's all very cozy. Then we pack up and head to meet my extended family, where we live out our yearly tradition of everyone gifting everyone underwear in their stockings.

This is about relationships, about the placement of potent colors and the canvas sparkling through. I want the eye to dance across the canvas but direct you, too.

Nathaniel Rich wrote 'Odds Against Tomorrow' well before Hurricane Sandy and its surge crashed onto the isle of Manhattan, well before the streets were flooded and the subways drowned, only the Goldman Sachs building sparkling above the darkened avenues.

Lettuce is like conversation; it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it.

After joining as a youth trainee at 16 from school, in my first two or three years the club was on a financial downward spiral and there was none of the new sparkling kit and the sparkling conditions that the kids get now.

When I'm with the wife, and we're having a romantic night, I occasionally think about a glass of red wine, but I'll order a sparkling water. I'd like the wine, but it wouldn't end with one glass, so I don't even go there.

Leadership is happening, but it's not coming from the leaders of the old institutions. Everywhere you look, you see these extraordinary, sparkling new initiatives that are under way.