“A good man?” considered my wife with a sigh, as she dried more thoroughly in the hall. She had returned from meeting with some anonymous official, responsible for an absurdly complicated detail of our financial affairs. “His smile was like the sweat of death, so I knew instantly that he was a bureaucrat,” she replied, anger briefly darkening the lovely turquoise of her eyes, before the oval of her mouth spread into a wide smile, as she savoured the imagery in her words. “You know what they are like,” she continued. “They are all the same, dripping dandruff in industrial quantities while ticking boxes – and sucking peppermints to hold off the halitosis.”Read