Introductions

I've been told that before we get started, it would be wise to introduce myself to you. 

 

I would rather read than eat.  

I have been forced to do so on more than one occasion when a spree left me with hardly enough for rent, let alone food money for the week.

I live near the beach in Beverly, because rose bushes and people fare better with sea breezes.  And I love the Cabot Street Cinema more than I probably should.

I have two cats, named Quentin and Flora, who I found in a shelter, batting at each other through the mesh of their separate pens and knew that we were destined to be together.

I also have a seagull named Dmetri, who crashed landed on my front lawn about a year ago with a mangled wing.  Once the MSPCA gave him a clean bill of health and tagged him as a Weather Bird (Bird DM3, hence the name), he found his way back, and now winters on my roof.  

I am a trained archivist and 'preservation specialist', which means, when all is boiled down and refined, that I preserve and repair books.  Which, considering that I like books far more than people, is a perfect job.  I trained with a blind bookmaker in Boston who taught me to detect mold and cheap bindings through smell and water damage and paper quality through touch.  It's just as effective, but does get you some pretty odd looks at antiques markets.  Which is second only to the looks I get when I tell people my name.

I should explain that, while it's on my mind.  I can't expect you to believe the rest of this if you spend half the time believing I've made up some kind of ridiculous pseudonym (which, if I wanted one, would be obscenely conventional).  My great uncle, Danny, lived near Rudyard and family in Devon until around the First World War.  He was devastated by the news of John Kipling's death and wrote home to my great-grandfather "How sad it is that the Kipling name will so soon now die away."  Fast forward some sixty eight years, with the birth of a new Philby, who, medical expertise, family convictions and some good old Irish superstition said should have been male.  When the next Patrick Thomas Philby turned out instead to be female, there ensued two days of panic, while the clan searched for a name for this unforeseen circumstance.  Then Mad Uncle Pat (not to be confused with Old Uncle Pat or Uncle Pat from Dundalk) remembered Danny's letter.  And in a fit of humor until then and as yet unparalleled, my father decided that, indeed, the Kipling name should live on.

And so it was, and so it is.  And now, on to what will be...which, I promise, will be far more interesting...