The hammer is not the loud thing. The hammer is fine, it's a wooden mallet on a hardie and it makes a dull tok, tok. What carries is the nippers, that sharp little chip when the smalti gives, and I do that part at the kitchen table like an idiot because the light is better.

Anyway. Kyria Eleni across the stairwell told me this morning that she knows when I'm on a deadline because the chipping starts before eight. She's not complaining. She said it like a weather report. Four years in this flat and I have become a thing that happens in the building.

I don't mind it. Half my work is deciding where to sit. The good light is on the balcony for three hours in the morning and then it swings around and turns everything flat and grey and I can't judge a colour for the rest of the day. So the day has a shape whether I want one or not. Winter it's worse, the light never really arrives, and I've done work in January that I repented in March. Whole sections pulled out and reset. That's the tax.

Teaching starts again next week so the balcony hours get shorter and I get stupider about it. Every year I promise myself I'll cut enough stock in advance and every year I'm chipping at seven in the morning on a Tuesday with the radio on low and Kyria Eleni counting.