This is just dummy text - as I am still editing what this should say - but David Copperfield by Charles Dickens just seems so appropriate.
I AM BORN
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that
station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my
life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have
been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was
remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry,
simultaneously.
In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the
nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively
interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our
becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky
in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits;
both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky
infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night.
I need say nothing here, on the first head, because nothing can show
better than my history whether that prediction was verified or falsified
by the result. On the second branch of the question, I will only remark,
that unless I ran through that part of my inheritance while I was still a
baby, I have not come into it yet. But I do not at all complain of having
been kept out of this property; and if anybody else should be in the
present enjoyment of it, he is heartily welcome to keep it.
I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the newspapers,
at the low price of fifteen guineas. Whether sea-going people were short
of money about that time, or were short of faith and preferred cork
jackets, I don't know; all I know is, that there was but one solitary
bidding, and that was from an attorney connected with the bill-broking
business, who offered two pounds in cash, and the balance in sherry, but
declined to be guaranteed from drowning on any higher bargain.
Consequently the advertisement was withdrawn at a dead loss—for as
to sherry, my poor dear mother's own sherry was in the market then—and
ten years afterwards, the caul was put up in a raffle down in our part of
the country, to fifty members at half-a-crown a head, the winner to spend
five shillings. I was present myself, and I remember to have felt quite
uncomfortable and confused, at a part of myself being disposed of in that
way. The caul was won, I recollect, by an old lady with a hand-basket,
who, very reluctantly, produced from it the stipulated five shillings, all
in halfpence, and twopence halfpenny short—as it took an immense
time and a great waste of arithmetic, to endeavour without any effect to
prove to her. It is a fact which will be long remembered as remarkable
down there, that she was never drowned, but died triumphantly in bed, at
ninety-two. I have understood that it was, to the last, her proudest
boast, that she never had been on the water in her life, except upon a
bridge; and that over her tea (to which she was extremely partial) she, to
the last, expressed her indignation at the impiety of mariners and others,
who had the presumption to go 'meandering' about the world. It was in vain
to represent to her that some conveniences, tea perhaps included, resulted
from this objectionable practice. She always returned, with greater
emphasis and with an instinctive knowledge of the strength of her
objection, 'Let us have no meandering.'
Not to meander myself, at present, I will go back to my birth.