(no subject)

As always when reading Christie, I'm confounded by her definitions of 'old and moribund' as well as 'so long ago no one can remember.' Doddering oldsters of 65, and eighteen years being 'time that the memory of man runneth not.' This undoddering septuagenarian retains a perfectly clear memory of 2006 and rather wishes she didn't. I might cut some slack for British people growing up in the first half of the last century with its doubtless lamentable diet and habits, that might render you old at 60. But eighteen years, *especially* if you're older, is last month, at a stretch.

Then again, there's those memes of how everyone in the 50s looked so much older than their twenty-some actual ages. It's been explained by the fact that everyone smoked, which will certainly do it to you.

But while we're at it, I'm also kerblonxed at books labelled 'historical fiction' and set in... the 70s. I suppose the kneejerk definition of hist.fic is 'anything before I was born' but still. In the 70s, I wouldn't have called anything set in the 1920s historical fiction. History was Back Then, before the costumes and mores all changed. When it was truly another country, not this one in unfortunate clothing.