Therefore, just the same, don’t you meddle with old unloaded firearms; they are the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created by man. Mark Twain

Only four days ago, right in the next farm house to the one where I am spending the summer, a grandmother, old and gray and sweet, one of the loveliest spirits in the land, was sitting at her work, when her young grandson crept in and got down an old, battered, rusty gun which had not been touched for many years and was supposed not to be loaded, and pointed it at her, laughing and threatening to shoot.

In her fright she ran screaming and pleading toward the door on the other side of the room; but as she passed him he placed the gun almost against her very breast and pulled the trigger! He had supposed it was not loaded. And he was right–it wasn’t. So there wasn’t any harm done.

It is the only case of that kind I ever heard of.

Therefore, just the same, don’t you meddle with old unloaded firearms; they are the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created by man. You don’t have to take any pains at all with them; you don’t have to have a rest, you don’t have to have any sights on the gun, you don’t have to take aim, even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him.

A youth who can’t hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three quarters of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his grandmother every time, at a hundred.

Everything you could ever want in the world is just outside your comfort zone.

The first flat I ever had was a teeny little place where each room doubled for the next. A two hundred year old, not-exactly-kept, terraced house converted into upstairs/downstairs apartments. I lived on the top floor and caught the draft from the attic. It had a closed up fireplace with a false one sitting in front of it. Two boilers. Four radiators. And a bidet I filled with magazines.

It was Northern England and, even though I only remember it snowing once that year, it was cold. Very. Cold. I owned one twin duvet bought from Bhs. I still have it and it still keeps me warm when nothing else will.

There was just enough space in my bedroom for a half bed, a wardrobe, and a low-sitting bathroom hamper covered in pvc roses that I used to store books and sit my computer upon. The bed itself sat beneath double windows that weren’t double glazed. I never saw any cracks around the edges but sometimes at night my curtains would blow around like they did.

When this would happen I’d pull them open and lay there, in the dark, staring at rows and rows of roofs of terraced houses and the sets of chimney stacks that sat on top of each of them and think, It’s just like Peter Pan.

Everything you could ever want in the world is just outside your comfort zone. Jennifer Aniston said something like this in Vogue this month.

I think she’s right.

Legal niceties permitting, The Guardian wonders which literary character you’d marry.

At present, I’d have to say Arthur Clennam. But that’s mostly to do with Matthew Macfadyen. Other than that, my favourite literary characters tend to be a bit troubled. Diseased even. Not really the sort you want to hop in bed with.

Take Flannery O’Connor’s Mrs. Turpin from the short story “Revelation”. The flipside of ‘crush’. But I dare you to find another one worth her weight in thought.

In the following excerpt Mrs Tuprin is standing on the pig parlour speaking to God…

“What do you send me a message like that for?” she said in a low fierce voice, barely above a whisper but with the force of a shout in its concentrated fury. How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?

A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, “Who do you think you are?”

The wife of Estel Thomas, foreman of a Tug River Lumber Company mill, and her three-year-old child were sleeping in their home in the Dry Fork of Tug River when the stream flooded the house with three feet of water. They were still inside, when “a huge drift came by, striking the structure which forced it from its foundation and over the bank.”

It was reported that the woman cried piteously for help as the structure floated down by the town of Davy “and that hundreds of people stood lining the banks, helplessly watching as the house struck the railroad bridge and sank from view”.

Real article from my hometown newspaper, circa 1902.

“I fixed Ernest’s roof and he said I could have all the peaches I could crawl up there and pick. He didn’t know I liked to climb trees.” – Pa

A few weeks ago The Euro and I crawled into the West Virginia mountains to visit my grandparents. We sat on the porch and Pa talked about how you couldn’t drink the town water – even if it did cost $80 a month – but how it didn’t matter because ‘Richard still lets me use his spring. I just keep these jugs and fill ‘em up.’ How food prices were going up but how the fish he caught over the summer were prettier than they’d been in years. How he packed four family freezers full of fresh fruit.

He talked too about filling his wood box and his coal bins and about cleaning out the gutters and mixing concrete for a new set of stairs.

I thought, again, My grandfather shouldn’t have to have it so hard and asked him “Do you ever sit around and wonder at how different things are? Back when you were young and now. How different things could have been or might still be?”

This is what he told me:

“You know, a lot of things have changed. A lot of people aint around any more. I think about that a lot. Sometimes. But it don’t bother me like all the talk going on now. What bothers me is people saying ‘I don’t know how we’re gonna make it. Times is so tough’.

“I can’t understand it. Everybody talking about the hard times we’re in. They don’t know a thing about it. That’s the trouble. Talking about hard times and such. They don’t have no idea what hard times is. People starving in other parts of the world. Let me tell you, there’s all kinds of things that start to not-matter real fast when you can’t put food in your belly.

“Buddy I know about that stuff. I aint kidding you. Back when we was raised up there was times there wasn’t things to eat. And winters! You aint never seen such winters. You couldn’t even walk in the snow it was so deep. I remember wearing old thin shirts. Shoes you had to strap on cause they wasn’t nothing much but bottoms. I seen many a day where all there was to eat was a little meat grease and some green onions. I had that a lot. And it tasted real good too.”

He laughed.

“It was years ago. Man, that comes back to me whenever I see people filling their plates so full they gotta throw half of it away. Then standing there, shaking their heads and rubbing their bellies and talking about how hard times is.

“Why, I never had it so good. Neither have they. They just don’t know it.”

I’ve never been a beach person. I’ve got four pale, pasty limbs to testify to the fact. But I’m enjoying it in a really primeval way right now. I feel the same sitting in front of a fireplace during the winter. It’s the cave man in me.

Friday night. After three hours of trick-or-treating the Buffy costume didn’t hold up as well as the Little Renaissance Princess. Clearly.