Tonight Guillermo came round with a shoebox to read me part of a novel he’s writing on index cards. We drank beer and talked about a writer who promotes himself at every available opportunity. To a hilarious extent. We had fun going over some of his latest exploits. We agreed that the only thing left is for him to interview himself and then give himself a hug at the end.

It’s eight-thirty a.m. I read the new granola packet. It’s horrible, Jonás, a woman telling her story, in the first person, all about why she started making granola at home. The brand is named after her son, who disappeared in this pointless so-called War. A mother trying to raise money, through homemade granola, to fund a private investigation. I felt powerless, I lost my appetite. What the fuck is happening here?

It’s eleven a.m. and Guillermo sends me an email with the subject ‘Let’s name the dwarf hippopotamus’, and a link to an article: ‘Lowry Park Zoo has organised a competition to name a pygmy hippo, which as the name suggests is much smaller than a normal hippo. It weighs 4.5 kilos and is 50 centimetres tall. It’s estimated that globally, there are only around three hundred left in the wild. At present, the zoo is considering various names for this pygmy hippo, although the current front-runner is Greaseball.’

Juan José Arreola says hippos are like pensioners. Lounging placidly in their swamps, chewing slowly, wearing Hawaiian shorts and with cameras dangling around their necks. Guillermo suggests calling the pygmy pensioner Roberto.

Why this tendency of nature to make the same thing on different scales? If there’s an average, then the variations, the bigger and smaller scales, are all different from one another. The further from the norm they are, the more misshapen.

Dwarf things. Small things. Little things in relation to the norm. Insignificant things. Things with different dimensions. Curiously, the stories I like the most are made up of trivialities. Details. Trifles. These days, people look to what’s big. The big picture, big sales figures, success. Bright lights, interviews, breaking news. Whatever’s famous. Importance judged by fame. Maybe small things are subversive. Living on a modest scale compared to the norm. Maybe the dwarf is the hero of our time.

On that short trip north, I talked to the girl who was writing a chapter of her thesis about Alberich. In Nordic mythology, dwarves were the creators of artifice. ‘The origin of art, no more, no less,’ she said with a smile.

The small as a bastion of the big. Perhaps that’s how something might change. Especially in this country.

I’d like to go to the sea. I’d like the blue lines of this notebook to break, suddenly, like waves. To hear waves when I open this notebook, as if it were a music box.

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