Boffinses

I read Our Mutual Friend whilst on "holiday". I picked it up cheap thinking it was Bleak House and kept wondering where that that girl with smallpox was. Any page now, I thought. Soon I cottoned on to the fact that I'm an idiot, but I enjoyed the novel nonetheless, because I love Dickens. I wish it was still ok to write like that, or wear top hats.

Anyway, in the book, Golden Dustman Mr Boffin goes a bit barking and starts buying hundreds of books about misers, about men and women who forewent every conceivable expenditure in order to die alone and naked, dressed in a sack.

Something about this appeals massively to me. It's the same part of me that likes TV shows about horrific foreign prisons, or turn-of-the-century serial killers. It probably wouldn't stand me in good stead were I ever to run for office, but this is the sort of quirky shit I'm into these days.

However, back in the real world, despite being seized by a burning desire to read about this sort of thing for myself, I am foiled at every turn. Google doesn't know anything about books about misers (except for a play by Molière and some sort of Arabic compendium) and I don't remember a world before Google, so how am I to track these books of misery all by myself?! Some people don't like to be alone in the world, as in without a significant other. I don't like to be alone in the world, as in without answers at my fingertips. I can cope with being single as long as I can sate my curiousity in less than fifty keystrokes.

Misers, I know you're out there. I'll never be able to learn to save any money without you and I can't track you down without Google. Ergo, Google owes me some savings.