poliphilo

The cold has reached the stage where I can't control the coughing- so I spent half the night in an armchair downstairs where I wouldn't be waking Ailz. Was this the armchair in which my grandmother spent much of the last phase of her life, smoking ciggies, drinking milky coffee and reading the Express? I think it was. Does furniture absorb the vibes of its users? Probably- though I'm not sensitive enough to pick them up. It would have been nice had I felt my grandmother's presence last night. but not sensing her doesn't mean she wasn't there. Perhaps it was she who suggested that my throat would feel better for being lubricated with a couple of snifters of port.

Some furniture picks up so much from its users that it gains the reputation of being haunted. There was a sideboard in Ailz's family which had a drawer that always contained one- just one- cigarette. If you had emptied your last packet and were desperate for a drag all you had to do was open the magic drawer of auntie's sideboard and it would provide. Objects that show up out of thin air are called apports. Sometimes there's a living human intermediary. Sathya Sai Baba was a whiz at them and many mediums have been adept at producing coins and trinkets to delight their clentele. The great Victorian medium, Daniel Dunglas Home specialied in bunches of flowers. The explanation was usually that some spirit had brought them- an Ariel to the medium's Prospero. Auntie's sideboard seems to have worked its magic by itself- and this is also not unusual,

I read a book about Home once. The writer said he couldn't explain how the man got his effects- but he must have been a cheat- because, well, he must...

Alexandre Dumas was best man at Home's wedding. Elizabeth Browning was an admirer. Robert wasn't and wrote an unkind poem about him called Mr Sludge the Medium. Apart from thinking him a fraud Robert reckoned he was unmanly by which he meant, ahem, gay- not that anyone used that word back then. The proper word to use was "invert' because it showed your interest was clinical and you were handling the issue with forceps and rubber gloves.

So who was the first unmistakably "gay" character to show up in European fiction? I ask because I like to know these things. I dipped into the information stream and came up with Vautrin- the criminal mastermind who appears in three of the novels of Balzac's Comedie Humaine. Vautrin is a wonderful character. He kills, corrupts, exploits the weak, mentors promising young men- and ends up as the Parisian Police Chief. Well, of course, he does...