Summer dawns come all blue and winter ones have a sparkle in the fog and then it’s all over.

I learnt this a long time ago, particularly this minor lesson on blue summer dawnings; I learnt it at the bus station in Zadar, looking over to the port, watching the navy ships which were sleeping anchored, still, like dead whales stranded somewhere on sandy virgin coasts of uninhabited ocean islands. Killer whales, that’s how I imagined them, like dead killers.

Then, an 8-year-old, it seemed to me that with this outlook on the world, I’d solved all the problems of the whole world in the history of humanity. I had strange pacifist ideas on how to make use of all these war toys, I’d simply set them on fire, and then use this “low fire” to drive cars and provide power to hospitals and schools, actually even amusement parks. I was convinced of its necessity: the amusement park came only once a year to our neighbourhood, during the winter holidays and it had a least a thousand lights on just its pinball machines, let alone the rockets, bumper cars, vehicles, glass cubes with mechanical hands with which the older and more experienced guys fished out valuable and certainly their first boxes of cigarettes.