early onset plot holes
...dainty Gladys, the Light of Bethnal Green, who graciously sacked her personal maid and took up hemming her own linens and taught temperance songs to the grubby locals...
I was thinking about concrete sea defences because they're very cool shapes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave-dissipating_concrete_block You just dump them on the beach and the natural shifting and shuffling locks them into an irrevocable snarl. Like when you put wired headphones, a hairclip, and a pen with a side clip all in your bag together.
And I was thinking that I wonder whether any concrete makers are actively trying to keep microplastics or even visible plastic shreds out of their concrete, because in the unknown future after 'we' stop releasing microplastics, there will still be occasional peaks of plastic release as different generations of concrete break down.
I was thinking about investing & stock-picking and risk, & realising how much of my financial education has come ambiently from Victorian and Edwardian novels.
I don't just mean novels about investors, I mean children's novels and moral stories in which the inciting disaster is 'Papa put all our money into a company his schoolfriend said was a sure thing, & now we have to live in aunt Betsy's second best cottage and Gertie can't have her violin lessons any more'.
Like, the stories where the entire generational wealth is bound up in one literal ship of [commodity] and then the ship doesn't arrive at, like, Whitby, the week it should, & rather than START INSURANCE PROCEEDINGS they just go 'well, guess we have to let the big house to Dastardly Lord Gropechester & go into lodgings, :('.
And then eighteen months later the news comes that the ship has just been in Porto all this time because someone had a head injury, & the family get to return to the big house and re-buy their carriage & not learn any lessons about structural inequality or financial hedging. And there's a wedding.
The possibility of avoiding financial adversity isn't meant to be your takeaway from the novel! You're meant to read it and think 'Gosh, if I were suddenly poor I hope I would be as nice about it as dainty Gladys, the Light of Bethnal Green, who graciously sacked her personal maid & took up hemming her own linens & taught temperance songs to the grubby locals before marrying rich and never seeing them again.'
You are not, for example, meant to read it and think 'well, if anyone ever murmurs about quadrupling my capital in a rubber plantation or a diamond mine, I will simply not use all my money. I will designate a sum that leaves me with a year's expenses. I will get insurance. I will think of the money as already gone.'
If I were a 1880s paterfamilias living in a mortgaged house with a carriage and two horse on payments & six staff & four offspring, only one of whom looked likely to marry, I think I would simply not put all our money into a single ship that Hugo mentioned at the club? Right? And yet, the novels consistently wrote that off as something Papas just occasionally would do.
I was thinking about the Wodehouse-style young men who genuinely thrive after the family money all sinks. The lads who were all about cards and tailors and keeping up with their Set, you know? The grandson or great-grandson of the person who actually got blisters making the money.
I was thinking about my made-up dainty Gladys, the Light of Bethnal Green, and I assigned her a younger brother Reginald, who turns out to have a proper colour sense & aesthetic taste, and falls into making a living doing set design or being a personal shopper for arriviste colonials. And then I thought no, he can specialise in dressing the Indian wives the Englishmen bring back! He can be the one who protects them from the cranky English families trying to dress them in colours & shapes that don't suit them.
'Play to your strengths, my dear girl!' I hear him saying. 'If he had wanted a pink maiden with no cheekbones, we've got stocks of them. I have to choose where I holiday to avoid 'em. But you, you blessed creature, can wear this yellow.'
I was thinking about an alternate timeline in which the suffragists refuse to accept the right to vote unless there are ranked preference ballots. I haven't played with that one much yet. Tricky to make it funny. Do you know any fun books set within the suffrage campaigns?
I was thinking 'I think it's coming back to me' and then sidling away from the thought, in case I startle it and it flutters away.