In Zurich hotel bars, I see, the tendency is reversed: love in the corner, in low light, a mute tragedy. Slack over black marble, there are room-length windows behind me, with trace reflections of us stragglers, and the road outside bathed in halogen mire, stars smeared out and striated by passenger jets. This has a bleak loveliness, I concur. I'll spend one morning, one lunch, and a few hours of afternoon in the city, with its fragrant alleys. Then back to the brittle embrace of Canary Wharf; all effusive, with steely, gentle glamour. Touch down in London City Airport; rattle back to the flat (that, apparently, I almost own) along the DLR.
Switch on TV, and drink some more, and ingest more print, and probably feel content, once ingested. File findings, with due creative license, which will be brought. My lay out: almost complete.
"I'm a very anxious person," she told me, and it hardly registered at the time, I couldn't relate or take her seriously, however hard her lips sparkled, "and when I got into Xanax and Valium and Klonopin, I absolutely loved it." Seriously: I thought she was joking.
To follow the assassination of Paris, I reckon up, in this sheer, icy bar outside Zurich airport, the erasure of London. This secretly tied up in those torrents, I conclude from high wage work. I do some good just knowing this - through internal resistance to bureaucracy, vandalism, cynically enacted by engorged elites, and oligarchs with armies, and the parasites that pay me.