Mortality Combat

No matter how it happens, whether it's sudden or long drawn out, expected or unexpected, death just fucking sucks. It just does. For the person who is dead as well as the people left behind. You can't say 'oh but he's better off now'. Like fuck he is. He’s dead. How can he be better off? He’s missing out on everything. He’s ashes. He's dust. That can't be fun. Oh sure, living the way he was wasn’t much good, so if that's what you're comparing death to then hell yes, this ending is better. But why did any of it have to happen anyway. All of it just blows. 

'Time will heal' is something you're bound to hear, many many times. Time doesn't motherfucking heal anything. Time, if at all, accentuates your loss because every single day you come across another new thing that isn't the same because this person died. What does happen is - you get used to doing without his presence. You get used to managing with other people. You manage. You never heal. You just learn to go on as if this gaping wound in your side doesn't bother you anymore. A bit like Henry VIII - without the serial marriages and spousicide. 

Next up we have 'the good die young'. Really? They do? Does kindness kill? How does that make any sense? Not everyone who has an untimely death is inherently good - this theory is hogwash.

Death, or rather, the post-death phase directly affects those left behind. And there are myriad ways in which people handle these situations. For me, personally, it’s the thought of the dead missing out on the rest of their lives and the lives they cared about that really gets to me. The fact that everything that comes after, they couldn’t experience. And these thoughts come unbidden, at the strangest moments. Anything can trigger them; from milestones in your child’s life to that moment where Stan Lee makes a cameo appearance on Eureka (which you started watching now because you remembered that he used to watch it on TV but you never got into it at the time).

Death sucks. Life after death sucks harder.

Potter not

When talking about books and kids and what our kids are reading, something that usually comes up is whether my particular offspring likes/reads Harry Potter. My answer is always 'she hasn't read them yet' - an answer that is usually met with surprise. The reason is pretty simple; I don't want to let Harry Potter into her life before she has had the chance to read better books. I have written about my issues with the series before  and  more able writers than me have explained why the books aren't the bees knees despite what most Potter-heads would have you believe.
It's not that I would ever stop her from reading them - I'd just rather delay it as much as I can. Just as I would put off getting a root canal for as long as I possibly could. (how can you compare reading Harry Potter to a root canal, you ask? They both cause me twinges of pain and go on for far longer than they should.)
I don't have anything against JKR - I just think that the blessed woman can't write very well and I think the hype surrounding her books is a tad undeserved. (That's not her fault, it's the fault of the people who lined up to buy them.) For me, her books are simply 'just okay'. I read the first book when a friend of mine started going on and on about it. A few pages into the book I was thinking  "well this isn't all that great, but now that I started it I may as well finish it'. And this was before pottermania was well on the way - so I had no preconceived notions about the book. If you had grown up reading fantasy and mind you, I'm adding Enid Blyton to the mix here (anyone who has read the Faraway Tree series would be going 'hey now, that sounds familiar' when reading about the magical sweets those Weasley twins conjure up) I don't think the Harry Potter series would offer up anything as amazing as Potter-heads would have you believe. More than the story itself, the writing - that's what really got to me. The sentences are poorly structured, nothing happens for chapters on end just because each book has to be longer than the one preceding - I'm surprised that at least one of the books weren't titled Harry Potter and the Unnecessary Sequel.

Then there is this villain - the poor sod is called He Who Must Not Be Named. That's quite a mouthful isn't it? (You can't help feeling that at some point someone meekly asked "wouldn't it be easier to call him Bob?"). It's not like the name itself has any power - like Beetlejuice. And that's the essence of what gets to me about all these books. they're all so needlessly convoluted. Stuff just happens sometimes just because JKR wants it to happen - when she killed off Sirius Black (oh, sorry, spoiler alert)  - what the heck was that? Even the red wedding, as ghastly as it was, made sense. You don't just kill off a main character just because 'oh wait, so I need this to happen on the next book so ...bye bye then'. Oh and the woman really knows how to ride a deus ex machina, bless her soul.
Another thing that bugs me is when I tell people that I don't like HP, their immediate response is "oh, so you probably like Lord of the Rings then". Well, no, Those are not the only fantasy series in existence. Besides, as much as I love them, the LOTR books are not what I would choose if I wanted an easy read. There are more books in the world people. A LOT more.
If I wanted to introduce a child to a world of magic - honestly, I'd start with Enid Blyton. Okay so she tends to get a bit repetitive, but if you wrote that many books you'd be wont to reuse a plot element here and there I bet. For slightly slightly older kids you have C S Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, Philip Pullman, look I can't list them all here. Suffice to say that there's a fairly large supply of easy to read fantasy books with a strong story, and excellent worlds and characters.
The point of my whole rant is - pretty much what I said before. When it comes to reading, I'd rather any child of mine start off by knowing what good writing is. After that, a little bit of gunk here and there can't mess up the cogs.