Premier arrived. We chatted. He left.

So the Premier dropped by for a chat this afternoon as planned.

My furious scrubbing of the office of copies of The Anarchist Cookbook and the Communist Manifesto was all for naught, as the consensus of the Premier’s advance team¹ was that the interview would be best conducted in the basement printing closet. So we shinnied our way around the Golding Jobber № 8 and conducted our chat while draped around the press.

On the upside, the office is now a lot better organized than it was 24 hours ago. I paid the bills. Organized the paper drawer. Filled out the Dishwasher Rebate form. Sorted out which glue bottles are dried up and which have life left in them. The impending arrival of a senior public official is, it turns out, a great stimulus toward office organization. I would recommend it to anyone.

The Premier has the benefit of being both inveterately curious and being a patient listener. I have little memory of what we talked about, what with the dizzy palpitatory nature of the proceedings, but I believe we spoke of the nature of the business, about printing presses, about The Old Farmer’s Almanac and about how I came to be here doing this.

It was, in other words, a slightly more formal version of “so, what do you do?” at a house party.

As you can see in the attached photo, taken by the Premier’s photographer², my proudest achievement of the day was having the wherewithal to dress myself in a non-wrinkled not-that-poorly-fitting white shirt for the occasion (note that the art in the background is part of a show currently on in The Guild from artist Suzanne O’Callaghan).

After he departed the printing closet, the Premier kept up a relentless pace on his curiousity tour; by the time I type this, 6 hours later, he’s made it all the way to the Maisons de bouteilles in Egmont. I expect that by August he’ll have interviewed everyone on the Island.