21-1-02: my fannish origins: another historical document unearthed

I found an old diary from 2001-2002 and can reconstruct it all!

Here are the origins of my two obsessions: slash and Bollywood.

Tuesday, 20 November 2001, 20:45: I saw Kuch Kuch Hota Hai at the Arts Picturehouse.

Friday, 21 December 2001: t'h and t'elder son see Lord of the Rings.

I have no record when I went to see this film! T'younger son was too little to see it! So we had to split up as a family.

Wednesday, 26 December 2001: The diary records "I could see Lord of Rings today." (But not whether I did.)

Now comes the fateful weekend: Sat/Sun, 19-20 January 2002. We spent the weekend with a good friend who lives in Leamington Spa, near Birmingham and Warwick. It was during this weekend that I read an article on Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings and how women, too, could like this! Written by a woman in the Times Literary Supplement.

That night, and I can pinpoint it exactly because it was spent on the sofabed of our Warwick friend -- that night I had a dream in which Frodo and Sam kissed.

The next day (Mon 21 Jan. 2002) I googled -- did google even exist yet? No, I'm not sure it did... well, I did something, I did an internet search: Frodo Sam kissed. I found Least Expected (remember Least Expected??? Lotr fps site.). I was overwhelmed.

And on 24 January 2002 I was already scribbling my first Lotr fps fic. It took me all of three days!

Hah.

The diary makes no mention of any of this, of course. It was my sekrit lief. The only tell-tale sign comes ten days later, on Sat, 2 Feb: 11:00 LoTR. This was when I went to see the movie for the second time, and I was already calling it 'LoTR' (and not Lord of the Rings).

The diary also makes no mention of when exactly I clicked my way through to cimness's ficsite, read my way through her Lotr fps, stumbled across her Lotr rps and was lost, lost, lost 4 evah. Clearly, by the 24th of Jan. this hadn't happened yet; otherwise I wouldn't have been scribbling Frodo/Sam.

Sometime before 19 January (on the Friday, 18 Jan., if I remember rightly) I subscribed to an odd geeky Lotr site, that was formatted yellow and green on black, with a lot of men geeking on about Tolkien (remember this one, sheldrake?), and there was one thread that talked about the actors being sexy or something of that ilk. I think it was this comment that led to my Wet Warwick Dream.

Wow. Life-changing events.

papyrology

Margaret Mountford from The Apprentice truly rocks.

It is so refreshing and so unusual to hear a serious intellectual topic being broached on prime time reality television. I nearly fell off my chair when Margaret announced she was leaving The Apprentice to finish her Ph.D. in papyrology! Papyrology!! I want to sing!

Two things about that:
1) It is very annoying and tediously symptomatic how intellectual topics get mocked and derided on TV. Both Alan Sugar and the host whose name I forget professed not to know what Margaret was talking about or not to know how even to spell or pronounce it in a kind of faux display of ignorance. On the part of Sugar, it is most doubtlessly 100 per cent faux because I refuse to believe that in the five years that he's known about this, Alan and Margaret have not once sat down over a cup of tea or a glass of beer to talk about this Ph.D. plan of hers!! I was very impressed with Margaret how she didn't take the bait and demean herself but patiently and seriously and even somewhat boringly explained what papyrology entails!

2) I am reminded of the Chinese poem: 'Businessmen boast of their skill and cunning / But in philosophy they are as little children / etc.' A person may be a successful business tycoon for 30, 40 years but what happens when their hair silvers and retirement looms? They seek refuge in the humanities to give real meaning to their lives. Yay!