I expected diamonds today and it turned pretty stoney. Or papery. Brazil, India and China have my passport to play with until the end of November so I have to get an enhanced driver's license in order to enter the USA in three weeks to visit my daughter and her family - an early Christmas with them. More paper work, beginning with my marriage certificate to explain my change of name from the one on my birth certificate to the one on my driver's license. Oh dear. The permission may not come in time.

Well, isn't it wonderful that we live in a free country limited only by the amount of paper we can amass to prove we are who we say we are? We are fortunate, I know that. I am not complaining. There's a lot to be said for staying in one place, isn't there? Every once in a while I feel sorry for myself, you may have noticed. I kvetch that I have lost my friends, my family, my furniture, my doctors and so on. But you could say that they have lost me. I'm still here, sort of, like that farmer's axe, the one he's had for 30 years, with 3 new heads and 2 new handles.

I used to joke that it would be convenient if we could tattoo a number on an infant's heel, his own personal affidavit of her existence, for identification for everything: country, bank account, charge cards, marriages, social insurance, and so on. But people keep moving, so you'd have to add country numbers, and regional numbers, on and on. No one has a heel that big.

What if you cut it on a stone?

This is probably too difficult to touch on (as opposed to tackle, or deal with) in a brief blog, but it might supply a catalyst for further thinking - mine. The novelist John Gardner (1933-1982) , prematurely dead in a motorcycle accident, just before his third marriage, wrote two books about writing that -forgive me - I think are going to outlive his novels. His best-known novel was Grendel, the Beowulf story told from the pov of the monster. He taught writing and his insights and exercises and assessments offer excellent stimuli to wannabe writers, but the book that sticks with me is a collection of essays and criticism titled Moral Fiction. He thought that writing should be moral, not in the religious sense but in the acknowledgement of universal truths. He thought hat you had to be a good person to be a good writer. If you weren't that good, then writing well might make you a little better. That's my over-simplification, I guess, but bear with me. In order to create whole, believable characters, a writer has to have insight, and tolerance, He has to get inside the heads of all the people she writes about. I think this is even truer for a playwright, but then, I'm biased. It shows, though. The writer's intimate knowledge of the character in attitudes, speech and behaviour produces a fully rounded, living, breathing human being, criminal or not. Such intimacy fosters love. Doesn't it? Some kind of love. Oh, if only!

It's late, I'm getting incoherent. I'll try again tomorrow.

I did, and I amended it, but it's still not what it should be. Anon, anon.