Still a bit fragile Trudy, but much better thanks.

Well, I'm off to sleep. Hang in there. Take very good care of yourself.

Angus! Do you need anything? Can anything be sent?

Just good thoughts, Deb!

Easy-peasy, bro. Consider them being beamed, as hard as I can beam them.

I'm tired of all the good guys (including me) not being well. Enough of this.

(Only because I tend to assume most people are about the same age as me!)

Oh christ, we're not all that old!

However, the ep was redeemed by Xander's speech to her at the end.

Yeah, I think I was too far gone by the end of it. The pain of excessive eye rolling was quite distracting. Mainly, I think it's that I hate (like hatey hate hate) the way RRK writes Dawn. If I wanted to hear that much whining I'd just tape myself and play it on a loop.

Huh...I would have had you pegged as older than that.

I'm 18, but I look older apparently. A woman came into my bookstore the other day, and asked whether I was over 30. It wasn't just a random question, she was organising an over-30 marathon thing, and I think she knew she was being overly hopeful. Either way I refuse to have a mid-life crisis until I'm at least 24.

Edited to add that I'm glad you're feeling better, Angus. If things go hay-wire again I suggest bribing the health pixies with sugar.

Leigh ... I feel your pain. I have a pic taken when I was 15 -- complete with full head of hair and god-awful shirt -- and I look at least twice my age. Great for getting pissed at the pub but it sucked worse than a vacuum on crack when a girlfriend's friend thought I was in my 40s. Fucking bitca!

In the Buffy thread there was a discussion of Joseph and Mary's relationship after Jesus was born. Here's a possible answer (whitefonted for unimaginable blasphemy and rude talk):

• NOTE: The following piece may be offensive to Christians. It also contains crude words.

..Aye, well, the boy always was trouble. I knew he'd come to a bad end. It doesn't surprise me one bit. Blasphemy and sedition, is it? Oh, the shame of it. He's no son of mine. No, really, he isn't. I'm only his stepfather, you know. We let on I was his real Dad, mind, for the sake of the wife's reputation and that. There's not many men would have taken her on in her condition, but I stuck by her and look where it got me. You would think the little whelp would show me some filial devotion and respect after I'd raised him as my own all those years, but no. Look at what he calls himself. Jesus 'Christ', for God's sake. The ungrateful little sod doesn't even use my surname. ..Mind you I was never that keen on the name Jesus, either. Poncey name if you ask me, the wife's idea of course. You're asking for trouble giving a kid a fancy name like that, gives them ideas above their station. A couple of times during his childhood I tried to shorten it to 'Jez' or 'Jed' but they never stuck. ..I thought we had a pretty good father-son relationship at first. One day when he was little I heard some other kids asking him who his father was and he replied, "I am the son of God." There was a tear of pride in my eye and a lump in my throat until the wife said, witheringly, "He doesn't mean you, stupid." .."Well who does he mean?" I demanded. .."His real father," she said, rolling her eyes. ..A few direct questions to Jesus satisfied me that this was in fact the case, so I dragged the little cur in the house by the scruff of the neck and started to thrash him with a leather belt. "I'm your father, and don't you forget it!" I snarled. ..In all the times I had cause to thrash my stepson during his childhood, adolescence and young manhood, he almost never stood up to me, the jessy. I suppose in fairness if he had done I would have put him in hospital, but the way he just stood there passively, as he did now, looking so bloody meek and mild and saying, "I forgive you," the superior little sod, used to enrage me even more. .."I'll teach you to forgive me, you little bastard!" I yelled, and leathered him some more. ..On this occasion, for once, I eventually managed to make him yell back at me. I spent two weeks doing it and wore out half a dozen leather belts and a carpentry mallet in the process, but I succeeded in the end. During most of this period my wife was gliding about the house smiling tranquilly and humming hosannas to herself, as was her wont, but eventually even she noticed that all was not sweetness and light. .."Stop, Joe, stop!" she started scriking. "Jesus, why do you have to provoke him? The two of you are tearing me apart!" .."He's got to stop forgiving me!" I cried, grimly redoubling my blows. "And he's got to call me Daddy! Call! Me! Daddy! Call! Me! Daddy!" I snarled, driving home every word with a fresh thwack from the belt. .."You're not my Dad!"Jesus blubbered. "You'll never be my Dad! My Dad's much bigger than you, and he'll kick your head in one day!" .."Oh aye?" I said. "Where is he, then?" .."In heaven!" .."He fucking will be if I ever catch him," I muttered, glaring at my wife while giving Jesus a final backhand. ..This kind of thing went on fairly regularly for several years - until Jesus was thirty and left home, in fact. Once I tried family counselling. The shrink explained that it was quite common for stepchildren to fantasize that their missing parent was someone important. Understanding the problem at last, I went home with a new sense of purpose and attempted to beat the delusions out of him, but to no avail. ..Of course the question of who Jesus' real father was was something I brooded about a lot. "An angel visited me," my wife used to say, dimpling. I've been looking for a blond fucking dwarf ever since, I'll find the cunt one day. .."It's not like you think," she'd say with her usual placid smile. "Nothing happened. The spirit entered me through my ear." .."I don't wanna hear this!" I'd scream, putting my hands over my own ears. The interloper appeared to have been some imbecile yokel from a place where they didn't have any sex education. Mind you he found his way around in the end, didn't he, because nine months later he showed up. ..I suppose the mystery of Jesus' parentage was part of the reason we didn't quite bond with each other in the way I at first hoped we would. To be honest, though, even before he started to manifest his obsession with his real father Jesus was something of a disappointment to me, not quite what I'd hoped for in a son. He was a sissy and a mother's boy, he wasn't interested in sports, he spent far too much time reading books and pressing flowers. One year for his birthday I spent a month making him a full gladiator's outfit, with sword, flail, trident, the works, did he ever play with it? Did he shite. For a while as he grew up I continued to quietly nurse a dream that I might see him in the arena one day, and when he was a bit older I bought him a spear and a knackered old goat to practise on, but he stabbed like a girl. ..Any hopes I had that he might one day follow me into the family business also faded as he grew to manhood. He was the worst carpenter in the whole of Judaea. I reckon his one chance on Friday is if they let him build his own cross. He'd likely come up with a two-foot parallelogram and mumble something about the grain of the wood being wrong for a cross but he'd made a shelf-unit instead. That's all he could ever make, those bloody slanted shelf-units. Chairs, tables, roof-beams,

More foul language and blasphemy:

Chairs, tables, roof-beams, whatever I set him to work on they all ended up as an out-of-skew shelf-unit. The house was littered with them. His mother wouldn't throw them out, she encouraged him. "That's nice, dear," she'd say with a tranquil smile as he showed her yet another fucking two-foot rhomboid. "We can use it to keep things in." And then she'd go off to smile and be radiant somewhere else. I used to thrash him for it, of course. I knew he'd never make a carpenter no matter how much I did it, but I thrashed him anyway. For the exercise, mainly. ..When Jesus used tools his left hand never knew what his right hand was doing. He was forever getting nails through his hands. "Shit that hurts," he'd yell. "God, God, why are you picking on me, what the fuck did I do to deserve this?" He never could take it like a man. He was always showing his wounds off, though, getting people to put their fingers in and stuff. He had this mate Thomas and he'd put his hands over his eyes and go, "Guess who?" and Thomas would go, "There are fucking great holes in the palms of these hands, so it must be you, Jesus, you klutz." ..Once I ordered a self-assembly flatpack wardrobe from Jerusalem and let Jesus put it together, reckoning even he couldn't balls that up. It took him eight hours and when he'd finished he'd turned into a fishing boat. With a mast and everything. Don't ask me how, but he did it. "A miracle," said the wife, but it wasn't, it was just very bad furniture making. We had the bloody thing sitting in the parlour for six months before I could work out how to turn it back into a wardrobe. We used to have to sit in it to eat dinner. I thrashed him with a belt daily during this period, of course, and twice on Saturdays. ..By this point Jesus had grown into a fragile, pallid young man with long floppy hair falling over his face and a dreamy, otherworldly gaze, the cunt. I thought he'd probably become a musician. Reasoning that this might be a means of turning his adolescent weltschmertz and burgeoning messianic complex into a profitable career, and that he was probably already on drugs anyway, I actually bought him a lyre, but he was never able to master anything beyond the first three bars of The Song Of Solomon. As much as he irritated me, I could see how his brand of junkie chic might be appealing to a certain kind of female, and with a brief return to my early paternal pride I looked forward to the day when he would ask if he could borrow the donkey to take some bird out. I remembered how I used to borrow my dad's donkey to pick Mary up, how I'd take her out to some secluded hilltop and pretend to run out of carrots, not that it ever got me anywhere. The night I found out someone else had got into her I went out on it blind drunk and wrote it off, took a corner too fast and rolled it three times and put it in a ditch upside down. ..But anyway, Jesus didn't seem to be interested in girls. He was too much of a prig and goody two-shoes. I remember once when he was young he found some of his schoolmates writing 'Mary Magdalene will show you her bum for two denarii' on a wall and he made them rub it off. "Hey, come on, that's not fair," he said. "If you've never shown your bum to anyone then you can talk." Now he was older he spent a lot of time hanging round the town bikes trying to convince them they didn't have to take their drawers down to be popular. At first I thought he must be queer on top of everything else, but then one day I came home to find Jesus sitting there with one of these loose birds kneeling before him massaging his feet with olive oil and looking up at him adoringly. One of his poncey bookworm mates was standing there looking shocked. "Jesus, Jesus," he said, "why are you letting that naughty lady mess around with your feet?" "She's a very misunderstood girl," said Jesus dreamily, a big smile on his face, "and don't knock it till you've tried it." "That's my boy," I thought, affectionately taking my belt off and thrashing him, the girl, and his mate. ..By now it was apparent that Jesus was no ordinary kid, even for a sissy. For one thing there was an increasing incidence of what the wife referred to as miracles and I called showing off. Looking back I suppose the first miracle was when he was four or five, when I threw him into the River Jordan to teach him to swim, and instead of swimming, or sinking, he just sort of stood on it. After giving the matter due consideration I decided to leather him for being a smart-arse and say no more about it. ..Another incident that strikes me as unusual in retrospect was the time he went on a school outing, up a mountain looking at flowers or something. That evening his teacher came back to the house with him, carrying a basket full of bread and fish. .."What's this?" I said. .."A most peculiar thing," said the teacher. "When we got there it turned out some of the children had forgotten to bring anything to eat, so Jesus started passing round loaves and fishes out of his satchel. There was enough to feed everyone and this much left over." ..I looked at Jesus, at the loaves and fishes, and then at my wife. ..I said, "What kind of a fucking packed lunch did you make that boy? He was going on a day trip, not to bastard China. You mean he's fed every cunt in the class out of my fucking larder? You want your fucking head examining, woman." She just simpered. God, she gets on my wick at times. Sitting on her arse all day smiling and being tranquil and radiant and full of grace, and glowing a bit. I've never liked to talk about this much, but she definitely glows. Does your wife glow? No, I didn't think so. Mine does. No, you can't notice it so much in daylight, but at night you can read a book by it. Come to think of it, he never needs a candle when he gets up for a piss either.