like mine, precision is of paramount importance to success and certainty is the key to my contentment. It relieves the hefty burden of worry and allows the mind to be clear and focused; as I’ve discovered, a focused mind has the potential to produce wondrous things. One such wondrous object is my list. My daily routines – from my journey to the station to the dosage of hypnotics I take to subdue my restless mind – have been charted and perfected by two-and-a-half years of experience; a simple 297 x 210mm A4 sheet, on to it etched twenty-eight lines of clean and concise print summarizing every possible disruption to my day. It tells me what shirts go best with any of my twenty-two suits (today, I’m wearing a deep ocean blue contrast collar that perfectly complements my subtle navy pinstripe) and it ensures that the possibility of something out of the ordinary happening on my journeys is kept to as close to zero as I can physically handle. Sadly, the wondrous object in question today is not my list. I was strolling down the carriages doing my daily scour, tweezering samples into my carefully rolled sample bags. It had been a good day: thirty-eight glorious gold, fifty brown and six red. To add to that, nine pearl-white nails of the finest quality and length were found under the double pew on the left side of the carriage and amongst them, to my joy, a lone tooth, the product of a wild Saturday night no doubt. Although thrilled with the quality of my findings thus far, as you know, split ends and claws are not something my kind of clientele find to be appropriate investments. Something rather wonderful indeed caught my eye today. In the fourth of the six 3 x 10m carriages, framed in a perfect circle of the deepest burgundy and placed carefully on the window-side seat by the robotic doors of my carriage, I identified something rather delicious indeed: a fragile, slightly crooked tube of pink and ivory graced with a halo of gorgeous gold that pierced the
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