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By Root 474 0

feet up on the seat opposite and is carried back to other evenings which looked almost exactly like this one, which were of the same temperature and clarity, but happened when his mother was still alive, before his children were born, when he was not yet divorced. He contemplates all that has been difficult, unnecessary and regrettable but from a position of distance, with a calm and poignant vantage point over his imperfections and missed opportunities, as though his life were nothing but a bad sentimental film and he its half sympathetic, half repugnant hero. He has reached the age of reminiscence, though right now, somewhere in the scattered houses outside, there is a sixteen-year-old boy for whom this will be the one central hot summer of longing and discovery, the one remembered in thirty years on a train which is not yet made and remains as iron ore in the red scrub of the Western Australian desert.

The flat is quiet and guilty. Nothing here moved while, on the banks of the Thames, the accountant was meeting with IT and striving to keep his temper with an intern. He notices the bath towel thrown hastily over the sofa after the morning shower. The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorselessly tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted and fragile. He is in no state to engage with anything significant. It is of course impossible to read, for a sincere book would demand not only time, but also a clear emotional lawn around the text in which associations and anxieties could emerge and be disentangled. He will perhaps only ever do one thing well in his life.

For this particular combination of tiredness and nervous energy, the sole workable solution is wine. Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol. The final approach will be made under the benign guidance of a Chilean Cabernet and the hypnotic, entirely untroubling retelling of the day’s misdemeanours and cataclysms on the evening news.

1.

Towards the end of this project, I ran into an inventor (solar-powered electric scooters) who told me that no essay on modern work could be considered complete if it treated only well-established industries operating in orthodox and mature fields. He urged me to consider the legions of entrepreneurs, many working by themselves in short-let offices at second-hand desks, with only a logo and a business card for legitimacy, who every year bring forward unfamiliar inventions and services, in the hope of transforming our lives and their fortunes.

It was on his recommendation that, a few months later, I travelled to a convention centre located in an unfamiliar part of north-west London to attend an annual event designed to introduce small businesses to potential investors. Two hundred enterprises from Libya to New Zealand had rented stands in a hangar and were taking advantage of discounted accommodation in an adjacent Best Western.

There were new proposals in every imaginable sector of the economy: satellite tracking systems for cattle, hand-held radar devices for recovering lost golf balls, inflatable battlefield surgical theatres, high-density ear plugs for the spouses of snorers and a gift-voucher scheme for opticians. Many companies were rethinking ways of generating energy and fresh water. Three Swedes had brought with them a scale model of a power station run on chicken droppings, with supporting statistics on global faecal tonnage. Near the entrance to the hall, a group of psychotherapists were presenting plans for a service providing executives with psychological counselling on long-haul flights.

The range of offerings suggested that capitalism as currently developed remains in its infancy. We may think