‘Can I help you?’
‘Thanks but I don’t really like tea.’
It is Fitzroy, 2003 and the sales assistant at Tea Intersection shrugs.
‘Have you considered the possibility that you might be in the wrong place?’ she suggests.
‘All the time,’ I say. It was supposed to be flippant, but she checks the panic button.
The maitre d’ is hovering over my shoulder. An original Picasso is hovering over his.
‘I’m terribly sorry sir,’ he says in an accent so fluid I can’t tell if it is French or Hispanic, ‘but there’s a problem.’
I begin to sweat under my cravat. It is Las Vegas, October 2005, and I am about to reap the whirlwind.
When a continent is millimetring its way gradually across the face of the earth, occasionally subducting or letting out an embarrassing little slip-strike, there’s a lot of time for it to reflect, ponder and submit silly stories to its blog.
After a few hundred millions of years of this, however, the continent looks up lazily from a half-finished story about pigeons, of which it very much likes the look, to find India carving mountains out of its southern flanks.
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