Merfriends

[liv]

So the Captain Awkward community like to make up terms for stuff, which serves multiple purposes, one of which is of course helping the in-group to bond. Anyway, recently I came across a term that might fill a lexical gap in my life: The Awe Ritual says:

The Cap is my “mermaid.” On a face level, we’re ferociously compatible and mates for life and frequently go off to make brainbabies, but below the waist, we’re just different species and not equipped to handle each others’ affections

I think I need a term like that; I'm more inclined to make it gender neutral by saying merfriend, but yes, there are people that I not only love very much, but am committed to and prioritize in way people expect for partners while we are not even slightly romantically involved.

It feels that this isn't a concept that is completely lacking, just one that's not culturally favoured. Like, some internet subcultures say BFF when they're talking about friends who are really important to them, but I'm not sure of all the connotations and I am a bit nervous of the superlative. Or in historical contexts you read about intense romantic friendships, often between members of the same gender. And I'm sure some of them were in fact Queer in some sense but not accepted as such, but I reckon at least some of the friendships we read about were in fact just that, strong, loving, lifelong friendships between straight people. Now we seem to have replaced the heterosexist idea that men and women can't be friends with the idea that, well, no friends of any gender combination can ever be emotionally close and affectionate because if they are, they're not "just" friends, they must be lovers. Or conversely, if they're not romantically and presumably sexually involved, their relationship can't really be serious or important in their life.

I do have a bit of an issue with the phrasing that below the waist is where sex happens; I am sure I could fall in love with and be attracted to an actual mermaid or other gendered merperson and we could find ways to have sex even if they didn't have human genitals. Indeed, plenty of non-mythical humans have excellent sex where most or all of the touching happens above the waist, and defining that as not sex is unhelpful. But I think that's being a bit over-literal; the general image of a strong, loving emotional connection with the aspect of a person that loves and being totally incompatible in terms of the aspect that involves sexuality in its broadest sense is I think well conveyed by the metaphor of a mermaid.

I mean, I have friends I love and with whom there is the potential of a sexual-romantic connection, but that is never going to be more than just a potential. People I could hypothetically be attracted to in the right circumstances, but choose not to nurture those feelings if they would be unwelcome. And people with whom there is acknowledged mutual attraction but we're not going to act on it because for whatever reason we don't want that kind of interaction. (Honestly, as of two years ago I feel absolutely full up; not only do I not have any time or energy for any more romantic connections or sex with friends, but I have absolutely no inclination for any, all my valences are filled in the poly chemistry metaphor. So even if the hottest person I know were to proposition me right now I would almost certainly say no.) But merfriends are different, there are people I'm as incompatible with on those levels as if we were actually different species.

Some of these merfriend relationships are older than my oldest romantic relationship (nearly 9 years with jack) and at some stages have overlapped with periods when I was definitely monogamous. I was fortunate that my partners took me seriously when I told them abuot my merfriends and accepted them as an important part of my life and didn't think I was cheating sexually or emotionally. But as The Awe Ritual continues in their comment (is it possible to link to individual comments on Wordpress blogs like Captain Awkward? ETA: Yes, yes it is, thanks simont

So, yes. Merfriend is my new favourite made-up word, so I thought I'd tell you about it.

---

Wednesday current reading: The sisterhood by Penelope Friday. We found the lesbians, and I wasn't expecting realism, this is a fairly frothy romance with period trappings, but within the context of the book, where everybody is obsessed with tiny gradations of social status and whether people are trade or gentry and the Ton, it seems completely off the wall to have a society of women who love women being prepared to drop all class distinctions and be completely loyal to every other woman they meet with lesbian tendencies. But in spite of that I'm enjoying the book and I like the actual relationships in it, the way that feelings of atttraction are portrayed and the way that the characters mostly talk to eachother and clear up misunderstandings.

Comments

[kass]

Merfriend is a lovely word; that you for it.

[liv]

:-) Credit mostly to The Awe Ritual. I like passing on cool things I've found, anyway.

[ambyr]

I like the concept of a friend-who-is-emotionally-as-close-as-a-partner (and I have a few), but like you I'm not sure how I feel about the way merfriend focuses on, well, genitalia as the dividing line.

[liv]

Yes, it conflates a lot of things that might be better separate, but again, language gaps. I don't like sex = genitals, and I also don't like sex = romance or romance = emotional closeness. Part of the reason I am reaching for merfriend is that I don't like the word Platonic, partly cos it's a bit of a slander on Plato, and I don't think relationships that are non-sexual are in any way more ideal or more perfect than those that are. Also lots of my connections break those categories, whether it's friends with whom I'm occasionally sexual but never developed any kind of coupley connection, or (historically) partners where we were very much part of a socially visible couple but weren't really having sex. And merfriends with some elements that my culture puts into the romance box but definitely not the full package, so although I want to communicate that we're not a couple, the reason isn't really much to do with genitals.

[seekingferret]

I'm a little confused by your distinguishment in "But merfriends are different, there are people I'm as incompatible with on those levels as if we were actually different species." Maybe this is just that I tend not to talk as openly about my physical attraction to people as you do, but I can't see any communicative value in distinguishing between platonic friends I am physically attracted to and platonic friends I am not physically attracted to, and in fact I see the use of this vocabulary as more likely to insult and hurt people than have any clarifying effect. In what way do you treat 'merfriends' differently than platonic friends you are physically attracted to, that you need a different word for it?

[ambyr]

Hm. I don't think my answer is going to be the same as liv's, but for me at least . . . I have friends I'm physically attracted to. I have romantic partners I'm physically attracted to. I have friends I'm not physically attracted to. And I have people who are, for all intents and purposes, romantic partners I'm not physically attracted to. The last category is what I'd use "merfriend" for (although I am unlikely to use it because I don't much like neologisms, even when I admit to the need for them).

Basically there's a cultural concept for a friend with benefits, which, if you add romantic feelings, deepens into "dating." But there is no cultural concept for what a friend without benefits can deepen into. It's not about distinguishing between platonic friends I'm physically attracted to and platonic friends that I'm not attracted to; it's about distinguishing between platonic friends, and platonic friends who happen to be executors of my will and hold power of medical attorney for me.

(I guess it's worth adding that for me, the category "friends I am physically attracted to but not engaging in sexual activity with" is basically a null set; if I have interest I express it, and if it's not reciprocated it dissipates almost instantly.)

[liv]

Not exactly the same but this is really helping me to clarify my thinking, thank you. I think you're right, there are almost two scales here, one for romantic closeness (the relationship escalator, perhaps), which goes from friends with benefits to married. But there's no culturally acknowledged scale for friends; we can say acquaintances or best friends but that really doesn't cover the whole range. And yes, i'm distinguishing between two groups of platonic friends here, not primarily between non-sexual and sex-including friendships.

[ambyr]

But there's no culturally acknowledged scale for friends; we can say acquaintances or best friends but that really doesn't cover the whole range.

Right. I mentioned to a friend the other day that I have an ongoing sort-of-but-not-entirely joke going with another friend that we will eventually, absent other offers, marry each other. And her reaction was, "But do you really want her owning half your house and being your heir?"

Which made me blink a lot, because--the merfriend, to use your term, in question is already in my will as my heir. We are mostly joking about having a formal wedding; we are not joking about the closeness we share. My friend was very surprised to learn my merfriend was in my will. I don't think she would have been at all surprised to learn that one of my romantic partners was. There are steps the relationship staircase that just don't exist on the friendship staircase, and I want them to.

[wild_irises]

Yes, this!

I have said for decades that "just friends" is completely the wrong approach to discussing relationships. Anyone can find sexual partners: drop your standards, or *gasp* pay for it. Sex is there for the taking (though, of course, if your standards are high, and/or include friendship, that's a different calculus. Friendship is always complicated, always mutual, always requiring maintenance.

Using your metaphor, which I like, I have always been more interested in steps on the friendship staircase than steps on the relationship staircase.

[liv]

I am willing to take your word for it that it's easy to find sex partners, it's not really something I've ever looked for separate from enjoying a person's company more broadly. I absolutely agree that long-term friendships take significant maintenance and without even the social support that long term romantic / married couples get. And I've always hated "just friends", friends are important, including the ones I'm not quite this level of lifelong committed to.

[liv]

I like friendship staircase as a parallel for relationship escalator, is that original to you?

And yeah, it would be good if there were more ways to legally recognize frienships without having to piggy-back on structures aimed for couples. Lots of my LGBT+ activist friends hate alternatives to marriage such as civil partnerships as they're a compromise that doesn't give same sex couples proper equality in marriage, but I've always rather liked the idea (even though it's definitely lower priority) of giving pairs, including opposite sex pairs, formal recognition without having to pretend they're romantically involved.

But even at a lower level than that, I just wish it were possible to talk about these kinds of relationships without having to explain everything from first principles!

[ambyr]

I like to use the term "relationship Escher staircase" to encompass everything from friendship to romance and to push back on the assumption that relationships are linear or naturally escalating. And yeah, I think it's original to me.

[seekingferret]

(I guess it's worth adding that for me, the category "friends I am physically attracted to but not engaging in sexual activity with" is basically a null set; if I have interest I express it, and if it's not reciprocated it dissipates almost instantly.)

Right. At the most obvious, I have a category "friends I am physically attracted to, but who are not Jewish and therefore I am never going to get physically involved with them," and no matter how deep the friendship gets it's never going to be anything but a nonsexual friendship. So distinguishing between closeness of relationships with friends on the basis of not being attracted to them is out of touch with how I do friendship, for that reason among others.

[ambyr]

distinguishing between closeness of relationships with friends on the basis of not being attracted to them is out of touch with how I do friendship

But I don't think that's what either liv or I am doing? I don't know; maybe we're talking past each other.

[seekingferret]

Maybe we're talking past each other. Here's how I would summarize the conversation:

In the paragraph I quoted, liv explicitly contrasts her idea of 'merfriends' against platonic friends that she has 'the potential of a sexual-romantic connection' with.

I objected that I don't see why she's drawing this contrast between the two types of friends, as there doesn't seem to me to be a difference in how one would treat either kind on the basis of physical attraction or lack thereof.

You then said that you, in the long run, never have friends you are physically attracted to that you don't pursue sexually, so therefore all of your friends that you are not in a physical relationship with would fall in this putative 'merfriend' category.

In reply, I said that I do have friends that I am physically attracted to but who are always going to remain platonic friends, and I still don't see why I would need to distinguish those friends from platonic 'merfriends' that I am not physically attracted to, but that this is because clearly you and I approach friendship and physical attraction differently.

But maybe I was wrong to use the language "distinguishing between closeness of relationship", since you're right, that's not explicitly what liv did. I think that's just my extrapolation that since I don't understand the basis of distinguishing between 'merfriends' and 'close friend I am physically attracted but not acting on it', I assumed that it had to be something about the closeness of the relationship.

[ambyr]

therefore all of your friends that you are not in a physical relationship with would fall in this putative 'merfriend' category.

Definitely not! The vast majority of my friends would not fall into this category.

I guess I would put it this way: I have friends I have sex with. When those relationship develop a certain amount of emotional and logistical closeness, I describe those relationships as "dating." I also have friends I don't have sex with. When those relationships develop a certain amount of emotional and logistical closeness, I describe those relationships as ????. If I were to use the term "merfriend," I would put it in the ???? slot. It's a category for relationships that involve some of the aspects of traditional romantic relationships, but not sex.

I don't want to distinguish between friends I am physically attracted to and friends I'm not physically attracted to. I want to distinguish between platonic friends, and platonic friends with whom I would seriously consider co-buying real estate, conjoining finances, etc.

[liv]

I think this is the problem with the merfriends metaphor, it tends to give the idea that the key difference is sex or at least potential for sexual attraction. The important part of the description is the first half of the sentence: ferociously compatible and mates for life. The reason why the below the waist, we’re just different species part is there is because most people I interact with assume that mates for life are generally sleeping together, or at least in a couple-like relationship.

So in really emphasising that that's not the case with the kinds of relationships I'm thinking of, I sort of went off on a tangent discussing how there isn't even the low level of, potentially attracted but not going to develop or act on feelings. I do think that, for me, if there's someone I'm kind of attracted to, and we also love eachother deeply and tell eachother all our deepest thoughts and so on, we end up by default acting and feeling a lot like a couple, even if we say we're not going to do particular physical acts for whatever external reason.

[azurelunatic]

I'd say that my friend Purple and I are merfriends. We spend large amounts of time together, we understand each other on a very deep level, we can talk about nearly any emotionally fraught subject ... and I'd like to take the relationship in a sexual direction and he wouldn't. So we aren't.

My Gentle Caller and I are ferociously mentally and emotionally compatible in the same way that Purple and I are ... with the addition that my Gentle Caller finds me distractingly sexy, and I find them the same, and we've decided to give it a try. They are not a merfriend.

[seekingferret]

'Mates' is also a sexual metaphor, so I remain confused and hesitant about the distinctions you're making.

My friend freeradical42 is getting married in three months and I'll be one of his groomsmen. My friendship with freeradical42 is by far longer and closer than any romantic relationship I've ever had. I've never felt for a lack of vocabulary. He's my best friend, or at least, one of my best friends, and that communicates the relationship to people just fine. I mean, I've also had 'best friends' in the past where the relationship fizzled or ended after five or ten years, so maybe the 'best friend' relationship isn't necessarily the 'mates for life' kind of thing you're talking about, but plenty of romantic commitments also don't actually last forever the way they're expected to.

I just... unless there's something about this distinction between close friends you're attracted to and close friends you aren't, and I don't see how there is, I don't see why the normal language of friendship isn't sufficient.

[rysmiel]

I don't get that dissipating thing either, for what that datapoint may be worth. There are people I stopped being drawn to when they changed drastically, or turned out not to be the person they had been presenting as, but I still miss and feel drawn to the person they previously were or had been presenting as, and I figure that that not going away for more than twenty years means it's not going to.

[liv]

That's a really good question. I agree it's not important to the general public whether I am potentially attracted to my friends but not going to develop that potential, or whether there is no potential for attraction there. And I definitely don't want to insult anyone by making a point of how I don't find them attractive, that's almost always unnecessary. I guess if I were monosexual I could say "wrong gender for me" and people would not think I was saying that person was repulsive, but since I'm bi, the thing that's incompatible is something else, and I'm toying with the analogy of mer nature for that.

It's more that I want to differentiate between merfriends and "just" friends (when both are platonic), hopefully finding a better term than that horrible "just". The reason for the mermaid metaphor is because I want to be able to convey, I have more commitment and closeness with this person and they're more of a priority in my life than most people will assume when they hear the word "friend", but without implying that we're actually lovers or in the kind of relationship that looks like a heteronormative couple.

[seekingferret]

It sounds like the vocabulary of close homosocial relationships is what you're looking to adapt to a non-gendered language.

[rysmiel]

The concept of having friends who are within the general categories of people to whom one is attracted, but to whom one is not sexually attracted as individuals, is one I have a devil of a time trying to get my head around; I am beginning to suspect I may not actually have that in my psychological makeup.

Which is a completely different question from whether one does anything about it, of course. And I can see value in talking to, for example, how one goes about graciously and respectfully dealing with being close to someone one is strongly attracted to who does not reciprocate, and how that makes being the best friend one can be to them somewhat different from how one would approach a similar friendship where there was no attraction on either side, without at any point doing or suggesting anything hurtful or insulting.

I think, poking at my reaction here a bit more, what I am finding somewhat uncomfortable here is the notion that being told someone is not attracted to one is or should be legitimately hurtful or insulting. That feels perilous close to assuming that one is entitled to have people be attracted to one, no ?

[siderea]

I think, poking at my reaction here a bit more, what I am finding somewhat uncomfortable here is the notion that being told someone is not attracted to one is or should be legitimately hurtful or insulting. That feels perilous close to assuming that one is entitled to have people be attracted to one, no ?

Ayup. There's two distinct concepts that get twisted up in one another. There's attractiveness as a personal trait, and then there's whether an individual finds a particular other person attractive. It is, in AFAIK all Western societies, absolutely socially unacceptable to tell someone they are unattractive in general. It is an insult. Technically, it should be possible to simultaneously pay obeisance to that social rule yet tell them that you yourself are not desirous of them – to tell someone that while they possess "attractiveness" as a personal trait, one is not personally attracted to them – there doesn't actually seem to be any way to do that, practically speaking, without it being taken as a comment on their attractiveness-as-a-personal-trait.

Which is what the whole "it's not you, it's me" line of break-up explanation is an attempt to finesse.

[rmc28]

One of the many things I liked about In The Heights was the depiction of strong non-romantic relationships. (I mean, there were also two heterosex romances, it wasn't that unconventional a musical!) And also strong family connections.

I think I have the 'merfriend' concept filed under 'found family'. I know family can be a fraught thing for many people, but my own extended family is something I value and appreciate, so I think when there are people who aren't related to me by blood or romance, but whom I love and want to spend time with, that slots into my head as 'family'. Both the feelings and the practice of scheduling, negotiating, prioritising etc.

[liv]

I was already thinking from your review that I ought to see In the heights and this makes it sound even more exciting to me! I loooooooove shows with strong non-romantic relationships, it's why I love Firefly so much in spite of its glaring flaws.

The main reason I don't normally use terms like found family or clan or tribe is they seem more transitive than I necessarily want to convey. Like, my siblings and my partners have a relationship, they are (relatively distant) family to eachother, not just to me. Whereas my merfriends have a pair relationship with me, but not with eachother at all, not only do they often not know eachother but it would be unreasonable to expect them to feel even the smallest degree of family connection or obligation. I mean, people who love me very much care in the abstract about other people I love, but they aren't family.

[rmc28]

Huh, I suppose I hadn't thought about the transitiveness at all! I was thinking about how I felt / acted towards people, not how I expected them to act towards each other.

*goes away to think a bit*

[wildeabandon]

I was thinking about this yesterday, because I was talking to my Mum about visiting for Christmas, and she said "Ramesh is very welcome, and of course so is Robert", and although I expect Robert to be spending Christmas with his birth family, I was so ridiculously pleased that he'd been included :)

I tend to mostly refer to him as housemate a lot, because living together is relevant in the familyness of our relationship, but it utterly fails to convey level of closeness and commitment.

[batrachian]

this is a usefulthing and i am in agreement with it.

(including the part where differentiating-on-genitalia is not quite right. but no metaphor is perfect, and this is at least in the vicinity.)

[liv]

:-) Cool, I'm glad you found it useful!

[jack]

Would it be appropriate to apply ace terminology to a relationship, not a person? An aromantic relationship or an asexual relationship?

[liv]

Not inherently inappropriate, I think; after all by analogy you can say a heterosexual relationship, though admittedly opposite sex relationship is perhaps preferred. But I think it doesn't entirely help here, because I'm not trying to say, like a couple relationship but we don't have sex, that would be an "asexual" romantic relationship. Whereas the thing about merfriends as I understand it is that some elements of the relationship might be romantic, I don't want to say "aromantic", because it might have deep emotional feelings and long term commitment and other things which are associated with romance, but it's also not traditional couple relationship (nor a secondary poly relationship).

[jack]

I'm not sure I understand the distinction -- is it on the aromantic-romantic scale but not at one extreme? Like, partially-romantic or demi-romantic? Or is it different in some other way?

[liv]

Yes, possibly, but I'm not sure I want to posit a single linear scale for "romanticness". Romantic means a whole cluster of different things. And is also confusing because sometimes it just means couple-like as opoosed to platonic. (I remember trying to define it for Judith and ending up with saying that it means "to do with love" which really doesn't help with the distinction between "romantic love" and "family or agape love".)

I'm sure that people who identify as aro have some specific idea in mind of what sorts of experiences they don't share with alloromantic people, but I haven't read enough about the topic to be confident of what that is. And I'm not sure if demi-romantic is even a thing, I would guess that it means that you don't tend to fall in love at first sight, but that feelings of love only develop once you get to know someone well? Doesn't seem entirely helpful here.

[rysmiel]

I tend to think in terms of romantic as default meaning a certain constellation of elements fitting together into a certain narrative, or range of narratives, around the general relationship-staircase shape of assumption. Finding that emotionally appealing is something I can most easily conceptualise as a kink; a fairly widespread kink, by all evidence, but one I am utterly without, and happy to identify as aromantic in this sense.

Most of the specific experiences that has led to for me, alas, have been of the form of "person under the impression that the romance kink is a universal human default nodding and giving the appearance of listening when I say I don't do that but having bought into the bit of the romance narrative that says 'people claiming they don't do that have not met the Right Person yet' and therefore hanging around expecting that they can be the Right Person and I will then follow the appropriate steps in the narrative" and that tends to end badly; being convinced that that particular romance narrative is the way humans in general work or are meant to work tends to have the failure mode of parsing aromantic people as broken and needing fixing, or actively hostile to other people's happiness. Or of taking my not being interested in romance as specific personal rejection because they assume I must have romance in those of my relationships that look, well, couple-y.

[simont]

(is it possible to link to individual comments on Wordpress blogs like Captain Awkward?)

Thank you for asking this, because I learned something new in the course of staring at the page's HTML source and trying to answer it. Namely, my brain was still in the '90s and thought that sticking #foo on the end of a URL makes the browser jump to the corresponding <a name="foo"> tag, whereas in fact that is actually a deprecated syntax these days and most of the time #foo refers to whatever document element of any type has an id="foo" attribute. Learn something new every day!

Anyway. Now I've updated my brain for the modern web, I think I can manually construct a URL that links to the comment you seem to be referring to, because peering at the HTML source I did see some useful-looking id attributes containing the same comment id that appears in the reply link. This link, in particular, works for me:

https://captainawkward.com/2016/10/15/911-people-keep-asking-for-my-crushs-info-and-it-pisses-me-off/#comment-151437

[liv]

Ooh, thank you, this is educational as well as helpful! I had the same deprecated idea about how ids and #s work, and couldn't get a link out of the comment thread because what I was trying to do was interfering with the way the site handles actually responding to comments.

[siderea]

:O

Wow! I had no idea, either! Thank you!

[azurelunatic]

Homestuck calls the non-erotic friend of this level one's morail, and the relationship moirallegiance. It doesn't say anything about the capacity for eroticism between the people, just that it's not part of the bond being discussed. (It's possible for the same person to hold multiple roles, or to have problems reciprocating.)

The fictional troll society in Homestuck holds that people without a morail (among a few other relationships) aren't particularly fulfilled. Not all of them are applicable to real humans all the time, but moirallegiance is important.

[liv]

Yay Homestuck relationship quandrants! I think morail is covering a lot of the same space, but I also think more people have probably heard of mermaids than of HS trolls. And my impression is that moirallegiance is almost always an exclusive pair bond, whereas I have several merfriends. Though perhaps that's just the default in troll society just like the default in ours is that marriages contain exactly two people.

[rysmiel]

The thing about moirails as a concept that fascinates me is drawing the line between it and romantic relationships the way troll society does carries the implication that offering that particular kind of emotional support is something different from a romantic relationship and that doing it within a romantic relationship would be changing the relationship away from romantic. And likewise, being in a moirallegiance explicitly rules out being in a sexual/romantic relationship with the same person.

(I am in the "with the explicit differences in troll biology and reproduction troll emotional psychology is fundamentally different from human" camp within Homestuck fandom; there are people strongly opposed to this on grounds ranging from "all Hussie can be doing here is sending up angsty fanfic tropes" to "thinking of fictional aliens as being fundamentally emotionally different from humans MUST BE racism" and I have very little time for either of those.)

The notion of moirallegiance does not work for me personally because it feels weighted strongly towards only having one, and I am definitely wired for multiple different shapes of close friendships in some quite distinct ways.

[azurelunatic]

I'm a subscriber to the idea that while morail and matesprit are separate roles in troll society, and the custom is that it's separate people, that there's nothing actually stopping trolls from taking on reproductive and non-reproductive roles to each other simultaneously.

I take the weighted-towards-only-one thing approximately as seriously as I take the human partner weighting towards only one thing. (It's obviously Culturally A Thing, but then there are the people who don't follow that set of cultural presets.)

[jack]

I think I have the lingering impression that your morail is someone who allows you to function as a person. I don't know if that's an exaggeration, or applies to trolls, but (I think?) isn't what people from homestuck fandom usually mean referring to humans.

[azurelunatic]

I read morail as splitting off the emotional and intellectual side of the human concept of "partner" or "spouse" from the romantic and sexual. And it's probably not an exaggeration to say that at the points when I stop being functional as a person, there are close friends who can drag me from that point to being functional again. (The goal, of course, is to have fewer of those points where I'm nonfunctional as a person.)

[ewt]

I also have a friendship or two like this and have struggled with the lack of terminology -- and social acceptance -- for the experience. Thank you for introducing me to this term.

[ewx]

Relationships in which physical intimacy exists but is constrained in some way (e.g. because of commitments to another partner) could also be a fit to the term, though possibly not at the same time as the definition above without spreading confusion.

Tangent: people have obviously thought in detail about the mermaid mechanical compatibility problem before, because: http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/photos/2011/09-26/8758.jpg

[ephemera]

*reads with interest*