Somebody asked me

“What are you most afraid of?”

 

I think I’m most afraid of bad things happening to those I love. I’m not particularly afraid of bad things happening to me – if they’re bad enough to kill me, I’ll be dead, and if I’m not dead then I’ll work out a way to deal with them. I remember going through a period in my pre-teens of thinking “What if I go blind?”, “What if I can’t walk?” “What if I was completely paralysed and couldn’t move a finger?” (this was a particularly common scenario in my imaginings). And then I realised that there were blind people, people who couldn’t walk, or talk, or hear, and that they seemed to be getting on with life ok. (At that time no one had written a book by blinking his eye, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had). So I think, and hopefully I will never have to be tested on that.

 

But bad things happening to others, and my being powerless to help, that scares me.

 

Oh, and asparagus.

"When in doubt, tell the truth." —Mark Twain

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written, that is all." Oscar Wilde.

Thanks to Neil Gaiman, who's blog reminded me, and to juno_magic, who's icn illustrates, that Mark Twain is amongst the top ten banned authors in America.

Any list that contains Huckleberry Finn (for being racist) and The Colour Purple (for being sxually explicit) tells us much more about today than about the books...