Opinion piece

The Opinion Maker

The big man put his glass on the bar, and began: “In my opinion …” 

“Excuse me, sir,” said the Bulgarian bartender, “what is ‘opinion’?” 

The big man thought for a while. 

“Opinion,” he said, “is like a jigsaw puzzle. You take all the pieces that fit together, 

and you make a picture out of them.”

“What if the pieces do not fit?” asked the bartender.

“Then they’re not part of that picture,” he said. “They belong to somebody else’s jigsaw puzzle.”

“Surely,” the artist said, “it’s more like a collage. Two artists can start with the same material, but because of the way they choose the images their collages will be different.”

“That’s just nonsense,” the big man said. “How can the same material be used to generate two different images? Jigsaws, that’s the better idea.”

“Well,” said the artist, swinging her legs to one side and slipping elegantly off the bar stool. “That’s just a matter of opinion, isn’t it?”

And she left.