Scene I'd like to see.

[QUIRKY BUT LOVABLE DETECTIVE is addressing a CROWD OF UFO "ENTHUSIASTS". They are, of course, all dressed up in silly costumes or else looking like hoboes or slackers.]

QbLD: That UFO we saw wasn't real. It was just a toy. Now, please...you're good people. Go out into the world. Live your lives. Find employment and...fall in love.

(There may have been more of that BS, but I was already seething by then. Being characters in a TV show, the UFO enthusiasts refused to believe him and he had to appease them by pretending to be an alien, which I expect the writers found highly amusing. Had the scene taken place in real life, the crowd would have mumbled discontentedly and dispersed, and later filled the blogosphere with vitriol d'escalier.

But here's what *I* would like to have seen...)

MAN IN CROWD: Just where the hell do you get off, you arrogant snob?

[QbLD is nonplussed.]

MAN IN CROWD: I'm a corporate banker. I handle billions of dollars a year for my company, and nobody has ever had cause to question my probity, or my sanity. My wife is a buyer for a major museum. She establishes authenticity and provenance of artifacts thousands of years old, and in thirteen years she has made not one mistake. Our daughter is going into MIT next semester, and yes, she's hoping to work on the space program. How dare you make assumptions about us, sir.

[QbLD looks uncomfortable.]

MAN IN CROWD: And yes, some of my friends here are unemployed, and some of them are lonely. How dare you imply that this is their choice. How dare you make judgments about us based on our beliefs. Would you do that with a crowd of Jews? Or Muslims? Some of their beliefs are pretty wacky, you know. And quite a lot of them don't have jobs at the moment.

[Some of the CROWD are starting to voice support.]

QbLD: I--I didn't mean to imply--

MAN IN CROWD: Yes you did. You arrogantly assumed, because we believe something you think is untrue, that you are a more successful human being than we are and therefore have the right to condescend to us. You solved the crime. Your work is done. Take your prejudices and go back where you came from.

[QbLD, whupped good and proper, turns to go.]

MAN IN CROWD: Oh, and Detective... [QbLD looks back.] Next time you're talking to your friends in the police force...look carefully. One of them might be...one of us.

OTHER PERSON IN CROWD: Several, actually.

[QbLD retreats in disorder.]

A find

Going through some of my mother's memorabilia, I came upon a book.

It's bound in brown paper, and covered (by Mum, I believe) in sticky transparent plastic, and it looks to be a commonplace book that belonged to my grandmother on Mum's side. Just about every page is filled with beautifully written poems or drawings or paintings or quotations, written in by people whose names mean nothing to me. The last entry is from "2285, Sergt. A. Anderson, The King's Own Scottish Borderers, Wounded at the Dardanelles during an attack on Achi-Baba on Orange Day, 12th July 1915." (He wrote "By Hook or by Crook, I'll be last in your Book." Well, I didn't say every page was brilliant.)

Here's a scan of one of the pages, bearing a poem that struck a chord with me. I have no idea who the original writer was (a brief search fails to uncover it) but I like it. (If it turns out too big, I shall do a thumbnail, but the writing is so small I think it needs to be largish.)

There's a lot in Mum's stuff that will have to be winnowed out and disposed of (she kept *all* my Christmas cards to her, even the naff home-made ones), but this is definitely a treasure.

Voices from the past

More treasures. My grandfather's Masonic certificates, his indenture to a chemist in Dartmouth (on parchment with wax seals), poems by both my maternal uncles written while they were serving with the Navy overseas (good ones too), my great-grandfather's sketch book and his will (also on parchment, with a hefty seal), and a pouch full of (I think) my great-great-grandfather's records while serving on board various Revenue cutters in the early eighteen-hundreds.

And a letter, written on black-edged paper in a lovely copperplate hand, which I think is from my great-grandfather to my great-grandmother-to-be on the occasion of his father's death.

( I've copied it out behind this cut )

If someone wrote a letter like that today, it would be for public consumption; this is a private letter, so much so that I had some misgivings about sharing it, till I remembered that the only person who would be likely to object would be, well, me. But the frame of mind in which one could write "O dearest Rosa" and so on and mean it, and not be striking a pose or being ironic or merely funny--is that gone beyond recall? Are we now so knowing, so self-aware, that no actual emotion can pass our lips or our writing fingers without being censored, unless it comes in a great primal howl of grief or rage that overwhelms the filters? And is that a good thing?

I don't know. I do know I haven't expressed any actual tangible grief at all over either of my parents, and I'm starting to think I never will, that maybe I can't. They were truly the kindest of fathers, the most loving of mothers, and I miss them terribly, but...nothing.

Ah well. You probably can't get black-edged notepaper any more either.

(no subject)

Apparently I am not to object to people being offensive and rude in online discussions because they are beating children in Africa.

As a logical argument this is up there with "eat up your cauliflower, think of the starving Chinese."

And since this was posted--admittedly--purely for my benefit, deliberately to provoke me and to make me ashamed of my position, at a time when it was hopefully clear from my posts that I was feeling better and not trying to engage in argument, and since there is nothing anyone could say that would make me any less enraged about this, I am disabling comments to this post and going quiet for a while to cool down.

Sorry about this. I am now really upset. And they are still beating children in Africa. So how that helps I really don't know.