Her daughter had come up the stairs ...

Her daughter had come up the stairs with him and had set the camera ready to immortalise the significance of the moment. His father carried a pair of scissors in his hand with which to put an end to something that had been increasingly annoying him during the last months. The girl, aged sixteen, had understood the reasons, and supported her father. So did the rest of the family, including a grandmother for whom to arrange a new scheme seemed much too late. The old woman was going to get on with the current arrangement in the part of the house she occupies, the ground floor, a circumstance allowed by the three-storey house the family lives in. So there they were, his Greek friend and his teenage daughter, up in the roof of their house last August, in a little town northeast off Thessaloniki, the man holding a pair of scissors, the girl a camera. A clean, short, sharp cut of the aerial cable shut down forever the television signal through which the torrent of official lies had been filling their living room. This is it, done, and smiling his best smile to the camera. Such a simple fleeting action had the healing effect of releasing all the anger accumulated in his friend from the day his country had become the guinea pig of the market forces. The Internet will provide, he told her daughter as they came down the stairs.