The work you can describe

A sign painter in Old Cairo has seen, once, a shopfront lettered by a master who died before he was born. The letters seem to move. People stop in the street to look up at it. Nobody alive can do quite that.

It would be easy for him to decide that this is the standard. That every sign should be that sign. That the job, every morning, is to make something nobody has ever seen.

But the rarity of that shopfront tells him something. Work like that turns up once in a lifetime of looking, which means it cannot be what a morning is for. If it could be done on demand, there would be more of it.

His work today is something else. A grocer wants his name above the door in letters that can be read from the end of the street. A barber wants his to look steady and clean. The painter can describe both signs before he picks up a brush: the height of the letters, the colours, the spacing that will keep them clear for twenty years. He knows they are worth doing, because the grocer will be found and the barber will be trusted a little more.

That is not a lesser job. It is the job most of us actually have. To turn up, to help the people in front of us, to make something we could explain at the start and stand behind at the end.

The miracle on the other street will still be there tomorrow. It does not need repeating. Today needs the grocer's sign.