Erlend Loe

Why skimmed milk of all things? he asks.

My good man, I say, skimmed milk represents the peak of human achievement to date. Any idiot has always been able to get ordinary cow milk, I say, but the leap up to skimmed milk requires a stroke of brilliance and sublime separation technology, which has only been made possible in modern times. And, in fact, I fear that humankind will progress no further. Skimmed milk will probably always reign supreme. But it does give us something to aspire to.

Skimmed milk ennobles mankind.

And by some miracle all my bathroom thoughts had called it a day. I could hardly remember the last time I wasn’t thinking about the bathroom. But now it had gone from my mind. All of a sudden I wasn’t thinking about whether we should have Italian tiles or Spanish ones or matt or gloss, or whether we should simply treat ourselves to glass mosaic, which of course my wife was really keen on. Not to mention colour. I wasn’t even thinking about colours. Not about blue. Not about green. Not about white. It wasn’t that I no longer cared about the colour of the ceiling or the tiles, but the very idea of it had simply disappeared. I had been spared this eternal merry-go-round in my head.

In good times and bad, they said when we got married. The problem with this is, of course, that any one time can be good for one person and bad for the other.