For a short while everything continues to function, like the band playing on the Titanic . Shops set out their stocks of mineral water in cardboard trays and people buy them. I try to buy out the whole stock so that I can give it all away, but the manager won’t let me. "If I give it away," he says, "they’ll think everything else is free, too, and people will start to come up from the bad areas." I think I’m feeling a bit guilty about what I just wallowed in, but I couldn’t have known. In the queues at the wholesalers where you can buy those serious barrels of water for office coolers, people greet one another with a sort of alien invasion politesse while they wait to hear whether their savings have gone down with some bank, or whether they’ve landed on one of the solid islands in the stream. I could tell them. I don’t.