What first attracted me to Daniel was his handwriting, which I caught on yet another spreadsheet. Due to his age, Daniel really struggles with technology, so he does most of the work by hand. Daniel is 66 and his handwriting is extremely feminine, small, and a bit childlike. At times it’s sophisticated, and sometimes it looks like chaos on the page – I can tell when he’s had his Americano, and when he’s aching to have a cigarette. Before noticing his mesmeric handwriting, I had of course noticed his eyes – electric blue, and when they look at you, you’re just convinced they can see right through you. Recently, during a cigarette break, Daniel informed me that he was initially training to become a therapist, but it got ‘too intense’. When I asked if he could elaborate, he said he had to return to his desk to do some more ‘tedious but fortunately not intense’ work. I felt he did this on purpose to keep me hanging. I was dying to know what he meant by ‘intense’. In this tediously conservative country, people call the most banal things ‘intense’. A few examples are any eye contact that lasts longer than 35 seconds, women who talk, dull Netflix TV series about pointless murders in imaginary English towns, and so on and so forth.