"...life is a series of shocks to me..." mentioned the goblin, only a day or so after the hold up at the "money exchange" across from his work place, one with that usual "someone just walking into the exchange, asking for the money at gunpoint, and then escaping on a stolen motorbike", no, what was unusual was that it happened at all, simply events like these don't happen in safe Switzerland, so times had changed it seemed, and yet, what with the gathering of the gypsies in their ever larger numbers, the lack of snow in Winter, and Summer's insufferable heat, Geneva, the goblin had to admit to himself, was different now, "...it's as if this accumulation of little changes over the years that, although insignificant in themselves and too gradual to really notice, had suddenly had one waking up to the shock of it all...", somehow the goblin's life simply seems ever to straddle this mental fault-line of his own complacency, and then bang, a new landscape appears out of the old, and his bearings have to be reset to the new norm again
