Aw, shucks...

All the rivers flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full

Having just finished Nesbit's almost-a-trilogy about the Bastable children, I found myself consumed by a terrible desire to know how Oswald turned out when he grew up. He has really set such a bad trajectory for getting into ill-advised scrapes already that it easy to imagine him ending up hanged. A little bit of googling has told me there is an entire trilogy of steampunk novels featuring an adult Oswald Bastable. I wonder if they are any good? One of the links said something about a 'free download' so I expect I will find out.

My thought had been to write the 'missing chapters' of some novels where it would be reasonable for an Oswald Bastable in his late forties to appear - the ones that occurred to me were 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying', 'A Handful of Dust' and 'My Brother Jack'. (The last because the obvious way for someone like Oswald to avoid being shot for desertion in the Great War is to go to Melbourne as a young man and enlist in the AIF, rather than the British Army per se.) These realistic novels seems much more appropriate to me than a steampunk setting. Of course this is setting an unrealistically high literary bar for myself for a payoff that nobody whatsoever will care about. But if you are interested in seeing how badly I can mess-up faux-Waugh and faux-Orwell, just say the word...