Life and Footprints.

I missed out on my Sherlock Holmes fix tonight. That’s because I was engaging with life on a rather grander scale than usual. So now I’m doing what one habitually does after engaging with life on a grand scale: drinking scotch and listening to music, mostly. And it’s getting late.

And talking of Sherlock, it’s remarkable how the solution to the mystery nearly always comes down to implausibly well-defined footprints.

‘Hullo! Look at this, Watson. Footprints!’

Oh no, not again…

It isn’t only Sherlock who steps into this particular groove, of course. Watchers of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings might have noticed something odd. In the final scene leading to the destruction of the One Ring, Frodo and Gollum are having one of their regular spats over possession of said ring, when Frodo slips it onto his finger and promptly disappears. But Gollum wants it, and locates his invisible adversary by the little hobbit’s footprints – and this despite the fact that Frodo is barefoot and walking on rock.

Maybe he was sweating a lot from the heat. Let’s go for that one.