Then the crisps, because people laugh at the crisps.
Then you women love making everything a problem, which is where the room goes quiet, and I have learned to leave about two seconds after it.
Then the fifty seconds, with the shoes last, always last.
And then his face, and then the gin and tonic, which is the ending and which gets the laugh and which means nobody ever asks what happened to the rest of the flight.
That gin and tonic has been doing a great deal of work for fourteen months.
It is the perfect place to stop, because it is a reward and rewards close a story, and the one time I went past it — at that lunch in the April — four people made a noise and then somebody asked about the baby.
I built a two-minute object with a trapdoor at the end of it, and I have walked out through that trapdoor thirty-one times.
