While sat in the restaurant car of the Paris-Milan express the old man had the idea of writing an autobiography that would be called Being A Labourer Myself. Soon he would be checking into the Hotel Aosta in the centre of Milan, calling in at the city's Derro Enamels office, and then heading down to Naples and the tiny village of Casanouvo for a two-month stint of furnace bricklaying. Untold numbers of labourers born around 1915 must played with the idea of penning their own 'what-it-was-like-being-not-far-from-the-bottom' life-story. Usually such projects fell at the first hurdle and they were unable to come up with a title which rang true. The old man found a title with what a future Twiverton Literary Supplement reviewer would call "consummate ease", but subsquent life-story events were to blow him off course and the project was never completed. No bookshop shelves groan under the weight of this international enamel furnace bricklaying labourer's autobiography. ("And groan they most certainly would!" says TLS reviewer Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic, resident of prefab number one.)
With his Paris-Milan express restaurant car meal all but finished the old man caught sight of the breathtaking beauty of Lake Como. He felt its shimmering surface beam this message towards him: "A moment is passing in the history of the world of international enamel furnace bricklayers: capture it before it is too late!" A fraction of a moment later the American business executive from Omaha who was sat opposite him in the diner set off a conversation with the following words:

"Four of us are sat round this table. We are travelling on one of the crack trains of the Continent. A day is going to come when all these coaches will be scrap and dust and all the people laughing in this diner will have passed to ashes."

After taking a drink from his bottle of Italian beer (he hated the way plastic cups took away the purity of the taste) the old man said: "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die!"
"The man sat on the old man's right then said: "I run a law firm in New York city. What do you guys do?" The cigar smoker on the Omaha executive's left replied: "Right now I am just touring around. But back in the States I make movies." The three members of The Trans-National Global Elite then looked at the man armed with the bottle of Italian beer who had flecks of cement dust embedded in his finger-nails. In what a TLS reviewer would one day call a 'Carl Sandburg' breakthrough moment in the history of unfinished books, the old man stared out at the shimmering beauty of the northern Italian lake and said: "Being a labourer myself."