A long day of work and endless admin. I arrive home wanting to write the opera Bureaucracy in three acts. The main character would deliver an intense soliloquy in front of the photocopier. I imagine this main character, an office-worker. There’s a beautiful woman, coveted by everyone in the office. The main character would compete, he’d fight for her love. He wouldn’t manage to win her, and the situation would spiral out of control. An apocalyptic moment: the lights in the office begin to fail, some of the bulbs blow. Photocopies whirl around in the air. The telephones all ring at once, the computers turn off and on. The fluffy animals, picture frames and miniature toys on the monitors bounce up and down, and some tumble to the floor. A fax machine goes crazy, the photocopier hurls itself against the window. It’s time for the main character’s anagnorisis: he sings.

Opera, musicals. Two genres I don’t like. Still, as soon as I work out whether I’m getting closer or getting further away I think I’ll burst into song.

This evening I went for a walk in the park. Near the paved area, I saw two girls holding hands. Two sisters in different school uniforms. When I passed close to them, I realised one was blind. The younger girl, who was around seven, was leading her by the hand and describing what she saw, the trees, the dried-up fountain, a dog running along. ‘And what do you think the doggie’s called?’ her older sister asked. ‘Oh, he’s called Doggie, of course,’ the younger girl answered. A girl who sees the world through what her younger sister tells her. This is love, I thought, pure and simple. Isn’t the voice, at the end of the day, made for other people to hear it? And aren’t stories what create bonds? Isn’t trying to describe what the other person can’t see an act of love?

9

9

I’m in the waiting area. They’ve just announced that the flight’s delayed. This situation is also the shortest possible summary of this story.

I’m at the airport. A man in a fluorescent yellow jacket is pushing a miniscule old lady in a wheelchair. The old lady, like the Sibyl in the Metamorphoses, is shrinking by the day. Or so it seems. I’d say she’s probably the same height standing up as she is sitting down. In this waiting area, at the back, there’s a Mennonite couple. They’re dressed in sombre colours. It’s like fluorescent yellow is a technological advance they’ll arrive at in a few centuries’ time, if at all.

Perhaps if an old lady lived for enough decades she’d end up the same height as a dwarf.

I find the following products in the in-flight magazine: ‘Bigfoot, the ideal garden statue’ and ‘Gnomes, an ideal set of statues for the home’.