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That gives me something. Strangely enough. I think it’s all to do with how good it is to hide. That wonderful old-time pleasure of not being seen. Being as quiet as a mouse and crouching down and feeling confident that no one will find you. It’s invigorating.
    Bongo is almost beside himself with joy when I come back and we spend the rest of the day in the tent. We play board games and have a nice time together and I feel some of the old pally feeling I had at school. You just hang out together. Don’t talk about anything special. But Bongo’s hopeless at lotto. He’s really going to have to pull himself together if he wants me to keep on playing. I particularly chose animal lotto so as to give him a fair chance, but while I cover board after board with foxes and beavers and squirrels and wood pigeons, Bongo doesn’t match a single pair. He’s quite incapable of remembering where cards are. I point them out to him and expect him to give me a little sign such as a sound or a nod or something, but nothing. Not a sound. Not a nod. Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I say. You may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer. But you are a real friend. And a lovely pillow.
    I’ve earned my last krone, that’s for sure, I tell Bongo, as I lie enjoying my victory. He takes the defeat with great composure. I’ll give him that. No airs or graces about him in that department. But I’ve gone from being more interested in money than anything else to being as uninterested as it’s possible to be in our culture. Throughout my studies I thought about money and profit and regarded those who studied non-finance subjects as complete prats, I say to Bongo. And now I discover that nothing concerns me less than not having money. It’s completely insignificant. Like a Donald Duck joke. A bang on the head made all the difference. I was obsessed with money and organised my time and spent all my time and energy trying to accumulate as much of it as possible. Then I fall off my bike and get a bit of a knock on my head and hey presto, I’m not interested in money any more. Not in much else either, I have to admit, sadly, but I have some hope I soon will be. And maybe I also have the prequisites. I have a tent in the forest; I have loads of time and meat. And I’ve got Bongo, my new pal. It feels as if we’ve known each other for ever. And my wife is completely deluded if she thinks I’m going to go down to her and the new baby and the other people in May. I have no plans to do so. On the contrary, I have plans not to do so, I can feel. She’ll have to come and fetch me. Carry me. And she won’t be able to do that when she’s in the latter months. No chance.
    I’ve toed the line for so long.
    I’ve been so nice.
    I’ve been so bloody nice.
    I was nice in the nursery school. I was nice in primary school. I was nice in secondary school. At grammar school I was revoltingly nice, not only work-wise but also socially. I was nice without being a swot, without just fulfilling the requirements, I was sometimes rebellious and cheeky and was close to overstepping the mark with my teachers, and still they liked me more than the others, and to be able to do that you have to be nice in an almost infinitely disgusting manner, I can see that now. I was a nice student and had a super-nice girlfriend whom I married in a nice way with nice friends after being offered a nice job that gave the finger to other nice jobs. Later we had children to whom we were nice and we acquired a house which we decorated to look nice. I had been wading up to my neck in all this niceness for years. I woke up to it, went to sleep in it. I breathed niceness and slowly it was killing me. That’s how it was, I tell myself. God forbid that my children should become nice like me.
    But my daughter has been showing worrying signs of niceness and I think it was the right time to move into the forest, it was also good for her. My time in the forest, which she regards as bordering on madness,