garciamarquez's Blog

I think the time has come to lose the squirrel. It's not that my fascination with nuts is waning - that's been with me since childhood and I think it's there for the long haul. Having said that, I know that people do sometimes lose their appetite for things when they get older. For example, I remember that when my father was in his late seventies he stopped smoking not because of any health concerns but quite simply because he had lost interest in it. Anyway, the nuts thing reminds me how little conscious control we have over the things we crave and how little understanding we have of why we crave them. My earliest memories of Halloween are caught up with stuffing myself to the point of sickness with hazelnuts, brazil nuts, walnuts, almonds and peanuts. Pecans hadn’t made it to Ireland at that stage.

In fact, my love of nuts had nothing to do with me choosing a squirrel as an avatar. What was in my mind was the way in which Pete Marino, Patricia Cornwell’s detective, uses the term. It was, I suppose a reflection of my expectation that lurking on this site there would be a plethora of unsavoury characters, predators of one sort or another, stalkers, people who assume false identities with mischievous motives, fraudsters, perverts and paedophiles. But I have to say that I’ve met really good people here and, so far at least, the most unsavoury characteristic I’ve encountered has been narrow-mindedness, an unwillingness to brook another viewpoint often coupled with a failure to read comments or stories carefully and to grasp the point being made.

On a forum like this people court controversy, they seek to define the boundaries of things, to find the point at which viewpoints differ, to identify the battleground for debate and then to engage in combat. If that kind of thing doesn’t interest you, that’s fine but don’t ask for respect if you express an opinion but are not prepared to stand over it, if you attack a comment or ‘story’ not because of its inherent worth but because of the wider viewpoint from which it originates or if you indulge in personal abuse. Everyone is entitled to be treated with civility and politeness until they do something to forfeit that right. Some people call that respect. I don’t. To my way of thinking respect has to be earned. This isn’t just a matter of semantics EP is full of people demanding respect without understanding that their demands are not justified and telling other people how to behave.

Much like I’ve just done. Whoops.