People today, eh?

OK, the last couple of days of the week were spent being dyspeptically abused by a talentless, puffed-up local hack who thinks it's OK to compare equal marriage advocates with the Blackshirts and Fascists who shovelled millions of people into the gas chamber, but can't take equally heightened criticism.

My faith in humanity was somewhat damaged, though the glorious responses of my various readers were mightily heartening. Then I was cast down once more by an encounter which should have been pleasant. I found a wallet on the street, full of money and bank cards. I went through it and found an address, and set off to return it. The door was answered by a lady who immediately took several steps backwards, then announced that she was 'not interested in break-ins' after I'd addressed her by name and asked if the wallet was hers. Several minutes later I managed to persuade her that I wasn't a burglar, that what I was waving in front of her did in fact belong to her, and that I just wanted to return it. She grabbed it from my hands and shut the door. No word of thanks, no interest in where I'd found it. Not even goodbye.

I know people are paranoid these days, and I hadn't shaved for a couple of days, but I shouldn't have walked away from a good deed in a worse mood than before! Then I went to see my mum and ended up helping her sort out her dad's book shelves. Pretty much everything was published by the Catholic Truth Society. Texts ranged from Has The Catholic Church Gone Mad? (Apparently by being nice to the 'third world' and dumping Latin, it has) to Jesus's Little Yellow Book, explicitly published in response to Mao's Little Red Book. A glance through the pictures I was tweeting while I worked would be enough to give a psychiatrist a very disturbing profile. And then I lost a tooth last night.

Oh well. At least the Pope's resigned. The first example of a Ratzinger leaving a sinking ship…

Got some good books in the post today. Beautiful first editions of Peter Tate's Gardens 12345 and The Thinking Seat, which look like rather superior 1970s science fiction, and Alun Llewellyn's 1939 novel Jubilee John which seems to be about a Welshman thrust into Bright Young Thing circles. As an added surprise, it's signed by the author to Charles Kelly, whoever he was.