To this day, I have yet to find a feeling comparable to the one that I get the moment the lights switch off, just before the start of a concert. Sometimes I’m downing sugar sachets (depending on how much strength I still have in me after hours—or days—of queueing)

They always fidget. I see them from a distance, two at a time usually, huddling like frozen blackbirds on a telephone line. Most of them past middle-aged but always men, always thinking themselves younger and thinner than midlife’s reckoned.

Every Saturday morning my great aunt Giovanna repainted her apartment. I should mention that this process was not a simple repainting of the walls. No, this was an artistic re-imagining of everything: chairs and couches, radiators and beds, shoes and chandeliers.