Fanatical confabulation

It has always amused me that Discworld fans talk of the place as if it were real.

When I was fourteen I discovered the Discworld, and devoured every one of the then published books. My father saw how involved I was with them, and told me that Pratchett was doing a signing at Forbidden Planet. So, off along I went, and this was my first true encounter with fanatics.

I thought I had got there early, but clearly it was not early enough. The queue was still three hours long. It was composed of such a diverse range of people: goths, trendies, suits, old, young, European, Asian.... And the thread that tied them together was the glossy new hard-back copy of The Truth they each held.

As I waited eagerly holding my paperback copy of the Fifth Elephant (I couldn't afford the wopping £14.99 for the shiny new hardback back then) there was a man behind me talking to his friend about his camping holiday in some beautiful, warmer clime. There was a mother in front of me telling her mucky-faced child about the continent of Klatch. This stuck so strongly in my memory because the conversations shared much in content and were almost equal in essence. One had magic.

"It's beautiful, peaceful, so peaceful - it was magical to be camping so far from civilisation," the guy behind me was saying.

After my three hour wait, the actual book signing itself ("Love and schmaltz, Terry Pratchett") seemed all too brief, as are all encounters with the celebrities we love, and I stood outside coming to terms with something I hadn't considered before going in, that the message I now held was in lieu of the fact that we were far too different, he was far too busy and inundated with admirers, and I was no doubt too wide-eyed in wonder for us to ever have a friendship.

There was a little crowd of curious office-workers smoking on the corner and watching this seemingly unmoving queue snaking into the building, which was chucking handfuls of people out of the other exit with gleeful smiles on their faces.

*

I once had the briefest of pleasures having the shortest of chats with a fellow Discworld fan. He said, "I would like to visit Discworld, but I wouldn't like to live there?"

"Why?" I asked. "Why wouldn't you want to live in a place where things happen just by believing hard enough?" Which is a gross misinterpretation of Discworld logic, but let's brush over that.

He replied, "Mostly for the same reason I wouldn’t want to live in any amazing city, only visit. Basically I find if you live in a place you have to 'look behind the curtain' and see how the magic works. It’s far nicer to just see the external view."

After a pause, he added, "Also because the only gay things in [the twin cities of] Ankh-Morpork seem to be bars for people into leather, and that's not my thing."