It's Always More Complicated

This morning I had a text to say my new glasses had arrived at the opticians, so this afternoon I went down to Oxford Street to collect them: and was exhorted by the person fitting them that I should not wear them home, as I would still be adjusting. This made me suspect that they had recently had somebody in their nice new glasses fall down the stairs (the opticians dept being on the first floor).

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I realise that there are whole swathes of the oeuvre of HG Wells with which very few people are acquainted, and indeed, the titles of which will not be known to the generality (he wrote a hell of a lot, really). So Christina Alberta's Father (1925) will not ring bells with many people. In fact I only read it myself because I had come across it in the context of it being Wells's Lunacy-Law-Reform novel, which in some respects it is.

There is an account of it here, by Adam Roberts, who set himself the task of reading and blogging Wells' entire output.

But when I saw that there was some alt-right person whose nom-de-pixel is Sargon, currently cosying up to UKIP, I could not help but snigger a little, because in the novel it is Sargon the Great whom the pathetic dreamer Mr Preemby becomes convinced that he is the reincarnation of, a delusion that leads to him being incarcerated in a lunatic asylum.