So what would be a normal scale? What’s the median, what’s the average, what’s 1:1?

A job, an apartment with a mortgage, a car with a payment plan, a family, two boxes of cereal (one high-fibre for mum and dad, and one with chocolate for the kids). A dog needs a lot of looking-after, a kitten would be better and never mind if it gets run over, honey, because we have each other, now go on, put the dwarves to bed because there’s school in the morning.

Meaning that being thirty-one and waiting for Jonás to come back from his trip, plus a cat, some plants, some books and an apartment aren’t the average.

Let’s open the phonelines instead. The ideal notebook is inclusive, with you, and you as well, sir. In this gameshow, A Hundred Mexicans Said, here in my ideal notebook. Good evening, we asked a hundred Mexicans if they’d prefer reading or a hamper containing two bottles of cooking oil, tins of tuna, rice, beans, packets of soup, a good selection of biscuits, four bottles of table wine, a delicious cake and none other than the Golden Membership: a year’s supply of free food.

If you’re one of the hundred people surveyed who don’t feature in the most popular response, don’t worry – I hear there are biscuits at the end of book launches.

Biscuits. So do we all like biscuits? Biscuits are our unifying thread. We live in the biscuit brotherhood.

Here in Mexico City there’s a monument called the Estela de Luz. The Suavicrema, it was nicknamed, because it looks like a Suavicrema wafer. The biscuit elevated into a monument, a biscuit costing 1,575 million pesos. There’s no need to do the calculations, the biscuit encapsulates the situation: the millions are shared between a select few, while the snake eats its own tail for money.

And what about education, man?

I can’t hear you, man, the music’s too loud.

State education, what about it?

What? I can’t hear you, man, speak up, the music’s amazing. It’s wicked, what track is this?

Wild is the Wind. A country shaped like a leaf, about to fall from the tree.

I got distracted. That’s what happens when I leave the windows open. But I wasn’t distracted enough. You can always go further. Fall out of bed, fall off the Earth, fall into space, into a planetary model, a smaller scale, a styrofoam Pluto. Because Pluto is a dwarf planet. What’s a dwarf planet, Jonás? ‘Dwarf planets have different characteristics, for example they don’t orbit like other planets because their gravity doesn’t work the same way. Pluto used to be considered a planet, but not any more. So the science is being rewritten, and now it’s considered a dwarf planet. Science has always been like that; it’s constantly being rewritten.’