Well, of course I climbed atop the slab and I lay down on it

[sovay]

I am having a relatively miserable night, so I have been talking to spatch about various things, including Sherlock Holmes, as one does, and I mentioned the perennial post that goes around about modern AU Holmes and how people are always trying to work out an equivalent for the cocaine habit where the key features are not merely a form of self-medication of which Watson disapproves but also a drug practice popularly considered physically and mentally beneficial and without missing a beat Rob immediately said, "Microdosing." And I hadn't seen that one in the wild yet, so I mention it here.

(In the interests of honesty, he wishes me to add that his first, semi-serious suggestion was kombucha: "It's trendy and people claim it's got super-ass benefits." I have zero difficulty picturing Holmes fermenting his own kombucha, with particular attention to cultivating his own distinctive strains of yeast and bacteria and explaining them to visitors and possibly not warning Watson sufficiently about how much the flat is going to smell like a combination laboratory-brewery, which is in fact what it now is. I don't believe the terrarium in which the vials of E. coli coexisted with the plates of Dictyostelium discoideum to which I fed them ever did cease to smell faintly like hundred-year-old gym socks. I feel nostalgic about it to this day. My parents, considerably less so.)

Comments

[pameladean]

I'm sorry, my brain is bollixed. I meant Harriet the Spy. If you haven't read that, I will be happy to provide a salient quotation.

P.

[sovay]

I meant Harriet the Spy. If you haven't read that, I will be happy to provide a salient quotation.

I haven't read it since elementary school, so please, remind me.

[pameladean]

So Janie is more like a distant cousin than a sister of yours, and her parents are certainly nothing like yours. But having started, I will quote the passage, which is rather more violent than anything you describe but still seems akin, to me.

"One corner of her room had been stripped bare. The rug had been pulled back, exposing one corner where Janie had started to cut off the excess to get it out of the way, but which she had been stopped from doing by her mother in an hysterical fit. At that time there had been a large fight through which Janie grinned broadly, and her mother let her know it didn't make a whit of difference if they didn't ordinarily have rugs in labs ("They catch fire," Janie had said, which set her mother off again), that Janie had a rug in her room that was going to stay there, and that the very best she could hope for was to have it rolled back. So there it lay in a roll at the end of the room.

"The lab itself was very complex and frightened Harriet whenever she looked at it, although she would never have admitted this to Janie. It consisted of rows and rows of shelves filled with bottles, all filled with suspicious fluids and looking as though you would turn into Mr. Hyde if you drank them. Only Janie understood anything whatever about them, and she wouldn't explain but instead called everyone a cretin who asked her. The maids wouldn't go near Janie's room, so years ago she had had to learn to clean it herself."

--Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy

[sovay]

At that time there had been a large fight through which Janie grinned broadly, and her mother let her know it didn't make a whit of difference if they didn't ordinarily have rugs in labs ("They catch fire," Janie had said, which set her mother off again)

I see how we got here!