Yesterday was hot and the computers stopped working. Apparently they’ve been suffering under the brief and frightening reign of corrupt local files, which are a little bit like low level North Korean communist officials, (always willing to do their job as long as they get to sell your children to the illegal brick factory). Somewhere at the centre of this vast computer system, it was discovered, is a building just like the one above, the Ryugyong Hotel, which is North Korea’s answer to starvation, with its 2, 999 empty rooms. Apparently Hank Williams is renting the other one. The electricity comes and goes, and the breeze, which comes in through the unfinished windows at 900 feet, obliges him to wear all his clothes at once. The American writer Donald Barthelme, having heard about Hank, once tried to climb the tower with one of those suction tools plumbers use to unblock the sink, during his whirlwind tour of Pyongyang.

In any case, the computer issues yesterday meant that each, half-hour transaction became a chance to meet another nice person – more like slow, platonic speed dating than book selling. There was Larry, who can give speeches about almost any topic, and has based his style on that of the revered progressive Rabbi, Dr Herman Sanger. There was Jerry, who has just started his own website, reviewing books. There’s Les who is undecided about his new moustache, and is a part time private detective. As with Noah, he likes to own two of everything, just in case.

After Les came Louis, an Irish philosopher, who compared the myth of Sisyphus to the films of Werner Herzog. According to Louis, the mountain up which Sisyphus was condemned to push boulders through all eternity was in actual fact a volcano. The myth in this version comes to represent man’s inevitable, irresolvable fascination with death, rather than, as Camus had it, his simple absurdity. Then there was Sophie, who sometimes doesn’t know what to do, or where to go, and follows other people instead, sometimes for days. Years ago she was a maid in a Venetian hotel, where she used to secretly catalogue other people's belongings. She controls the chaos these days by colour-coordinating her meals. On Tuesday’s she only eats blue things, on Wednesday, orange, and so on.

And there were many others who remained patient and happy and genuinely friendly, who spoke of their lives and hopes for the future, while Donald climbed the glass tower in the computer system and Hank Williams coughed in the wind, in a room somewhere in the centre of the world.