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By Root 475 0

and prominently advertised deals on discounted bathroom furnishings. He knew how panicked we could be made to feel about the girth of our thighs but also how greedy we could become upon spotting a competitively priced sausage (his holding company had just a few years earlier acquired a profitable stake in a Hamburg-based fast-food chain, Goldene Bratwurst). Yet for all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation and evidently did not care to study whether commerce could by itself deliver any of societal benefits he so mockingly relegated to the pious and unmanly field of charity.

Still, an imaginary merger between the best sides of the visionaries and of Sir Bob yielded something resembling a picture of the ideal entrepreneur. In character a judicious fusion of the utopian and the practical, he or she would succeed not only in identifying an important need but also in mastering the challenges of bureaucracy and finance in order to give the resolution of that need an institutional form, and thereby affect others’ lives in ways that theory alone could never do.

This ideal was not, in the event, limited to the realm of the imagination: there were a tantalising array of real-life cases in which entrepreneurs had succeeded in founding innovative schools and progressive political groupings, new forms of community and life-enhancing technologies. I knew how deeply I admired them, because any accounts of their exploits that I came across in the media or (even worse) heard from old friends at parties had an exceptional capacity to catapult me into spasms of envy and inadequacy. These enterprising types had not – like me – fled back into their own dreams at the first mention of a sales tax or an employee ledger; they had instead managed to survive the challenges of finance, law and recruitment and, as a result, they had been able to give their flights of fancy a lucrative and consequential dimension. These paragons bore much the same relation to the mere intellectual as a restaurant-owning chef might to a writer of cookery books.

If there is any excuse for making such bathetic confessions of envy in public, it is that my feelings in this context are unlikely to be unique. A striking number of us (that is, we who have yet to become who we are) are apt, in our private moments, to express our understanding of how the world could be altered for the better by picturing to ourselves various businesses we would like to start. In our more self-indulgent moods, we may even entertain detailed musings about what the awning should look like above the shop or how the advertisements for the new service ought to be phrased. These pleasing and all-consuming daydreams appear to spring from those very same aspects of our personalities which led us as children to delight in running a grocery store out of a corner of the kitchen or to open a hotel in a cardboard box in the garden – as though there was some sort of innate and enduring human impulse to lend entrepreneurial form to certain of our deeply held enthusiasms and insights.

I pledged that I would return to the fair one year with some floating shoes of my own.

1.

During a time when I was finding it hard to write anything and often spent whole days on my bed wondering about the point of my work, I received a phone call from a Slovenian newspaper, which I had never heard of until then, asking if I might want to travel to Paris on their behalf in order to write an article about the airshow at Le Bourget airport, a major biannual event in the aerospace calendar, where manufacturers gather before the world’s airlines and air forces and try to interest them in wheels, radars, missiles and cabin curtains.

The editor hoped that I might be able to convey to his readers, some one hundred thousand people in Ljubljana and its surrounding hills, what