What the celebrities use I wouldn’t know— the message, in triplicate, was spam and I threw all three of them away immediately. Probably a remedy for “ED dysfunction”. I never tire of pointing out that if a remedy for ED dysfunction works, it will leave you with functioning ED, and that’s probably not what people want to achieve. (Yes, I know that it’s probably a case for the Department of Redundancy Department, like Bengloarafurd Ford.)

But it did make me think. Celebrities don’t usually impress me, at least not the mere fact that someone is a celebrity. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of people in the Netherlands called “BN’ers”, Bekende Nederlanders (Well-Known Dutchpeople) who seem to be known only for being well-known: TV starlets, featherweight singers, footballers’ girlfriends, all of whom I can joyfully ignore because I don’t follow the media much.

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If Barack Obama wins the election —which I sincerely hope— he will be the first president of the United States who is younger than I am. That’s truly a sign of advancing age: that it’s not only doctors and police(wo)men who are younger than oneself, but also presidents of the United States. And when Queen Beatrix retires, the king as well.

On the upside, he will be the first president of the United States I’m conscious of who isn’t an old white man. Though technically Bill Clinton wasn’t old either: almost a year younger than Obama when he was elected. (This surprised me a bit when I looked it up.) But older than me, at the time, and undeniably white.

In fact, this post is in the first place an excuse to link to slacktivist’s post about bigotry and stupidity which everybody ought to read.

In this unassuming clumsily-restored medieval hall lie the deepest roots of Valdyas.

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On my way to go grocery shopping, I was waylaid by a very small knight in shining plastic armour. And an even smaller squire in a crenellated red doublet and an incongruous headscarf.

“Password”, they demanded. When I said “sorry, I don’t know it” the squire came up and whispered something in my ear, which I repeated, and they let me pass.

Only then did I notice that the knight was also wearing a headscarf, under her helmet.

I don’t know what these girls will be like in ten years, whether they’ll be wearing headscarves or wildly flowing hair or neat coiffured heads, but I hope that whatever it is, they’ll be doing it proudly and of their own free will. That they’ll be themselves, as they were when I met them today.

(On the way back I was waylaid by a tabby cat in almost the same spot. Cats are uncomplicated: they don’t want passwords, they want to be scritched behind the ears. And they don’t grow up to make choices.)

The first time after the summer that I have to turn on my bicycle light on an evening errand, and of course the tail-light battery is flat. Fortunately I remember that one of my daughters has the same type of light, and yes, hers works.

While I’m trying to pry her light off in the gloom a scruffy man passes and asks “Hey! What are you doing?” Not aggressive or belligerent, just curious and concerned.

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My aunt died last week. That didn’t make me very sad —she’d been incapacitated for fourteen months after a stroke already— but I did want to go the funeral. The problem is that I’ve grown apart from my family a lot: I didn’t go to the previous family funeral partly because I thought I’d make a mortal fool of myself. This time I thought “well, if it’s horrible, I can always use it as writing material!”

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No, not the folk group, though they seem interesting.

Boudewijn is making backups of all our CDs, and putting old LPs on CD, making our whole musical history scroll past. There was a time in my teens when almost all I listened to was Alan Stivell (or here if you want to go straight to the English version without the cover page). And everything that was like it, such as Ar Skloferien and Gweltaz: Celtic music with political texts. And I was wistful —every teenager needs something to be wistful about— that I didn’t have any Celtic roots.

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