Face pressed to the window, I stare out at the carpet of clouds. Everything is white, the clouds and the sky, motionless, flickering fit to blow a fuse. I close my eyes. My thoughts are waiting for me, dark and murky, ready to drag me under. I feel exhausted. I open my eyes and look around. The plane drones gently, it is packed with passengers glowing with health, the light is mild, the temperature milder still. The passengers bury themselves in their newspapers, whisper to each other or doze. They are Germans, for the most part. This is their regular commute. When I was checking in at Roissy, I noticed most of them didn’t have any luggage, just a roll-on Samsonite, a briefcase, a couple of magazines tucked under their arm. This is routine to them, they could do the trip blindfolded. They’re freshly-scrubbed, well groomed, long-suffering as Buddhist monks. They’re tired, but they never let it show. It’s a matter of habit and considerable self-discipline. There is something terrifying about the deathly daily commute that passes for life in Paris. Somehow on a plane it’s even more depressing. Airports are the anthills of the third millennium, the high surveillance hubs with their business hotels like glass prisons, the hidden loudspeakers spouting counter-fatwas born in the bellies of all-powerful computers. When you arrive, there are the buses, the metros, the trains, the lines of taxis waiting to shuttle them onwards until at last everyone disappears into their hermetically sealed homes. Anonymity is daunting, definitive, spanning the planet, the movements of capital. These people arrive in Paris every morning, attend to their business affairs, then take a plane back the same night or the next day, and by the time they land there another flight is waiting for them. They come and go and all they need to pack is a toothbrush. I’m just like this when I travel on business – a robot, all I need is an oil change and a socket to plug in my electric razor. I arrive, conduct my business, go back to the hotel, pick up my things and head back to the airport. Now and then we let our hair down. With the Italians, the Spaniards and the Greeks, it happens all the time, it doesn’t matter whether business goes well or badly. Mediterraneans like to party, we can be crude, rude, tell each other anything – that’s how they relax. The Germans, the Austrians, the Swiss and the English are different, work is their religion and their hobby. We might take time off for a coffee break occasionally, talk about the weather. The most thrilling places to me are the former dictatorships still riddled with red tape, violence and corruption. I love the film noir feel of these places, they still cling to the best of socialism, the conspiracy, the cloak and dagger politics, but have adopted the choicest parts of capitalism, its killer instinct. All these hopeless people who shuffle along, and the others who are constantly chasing some insistent rumour that will not let them rest until they’re dead. The murkiness, the mystery, the frenzy, the misery. And the joy when – by the purest fluke – you stumble on some nameless civil servant, some nondescript hanger-on who, with a magician’s flourish, makes one phone call and breaks the impasse in a public finance contract someone has just sworn would never be resolved. That’s when parties start, the endless round of formal ceremonies, not to commemorate a successful conclusion to an honest negotiation or the miraculous release of a bank transfer – that would be tasteless – no, to celebrate the friendship between our two great countries, the entente cordiale between their great leaders. By the time you get home, you have lots of stories to tell your friends, and you can exaggerate as much as you like without fear of overdoing it: a spy here, a hitman there, an assassination attempt in a hotel lobby, the minister who strangles his secretary in the middle of negotiations for leaving out a zero in a memo, the minister who pisses on lobbyists who are not from the same tribe as he is, the leader who gases a rebel village then flies around in his Sunday best apologising and proclaiming a new world order. You hear a lot more than you ever see. In these countries of constant mourning, rumour and gossip are the lifeblood of every day, every minute. I’ve never quite understood how our bosses manage to make any money out of power-mad lunatics desperate to keep everything to themselves, but then again we sell pumping systems, something people can’t live without, and even if we’re motivated purely by money, it will never be as big as their appetite. We’ve got them in all colours, to suit all tastes, horizontal and vertical, manual and remote, tiny pumps the size of a marble and vast installations you’d need to build a hangar to hide. We’re the market leader, we have something to tempt even the most difficult customers.