The Diary — Old Hoax or New or Not a Hoax at All?​

[Herlock Sholmes]

Just out of interest, if you approached me to find you a diary suitable for what you know is to be a hoaxed 1888 record of someone's thoughts, and I came back to you and said I had found you a small 1891 diary, would you just say, Excellent, I'll take it?

Let's not play the 'proof' game when you don't have any proofs, mate - that's just a dense argument.

Look, you can keep being a bit dense, but no-one's falling for it. We can see you're being dense. The question is, are you being dense or just pretending to be dense?

The question you are asking me is a silly question which bears no relationship to the factual scenario we are dealing with.

We are not dealing with a situation where someone has found me a small 1891 diary. The scenario we need to imagine is that I know nothing about Victorian diaries but I'm in desperate need of one with blank pages to create my forgery and I'm told over the telephone by a dealer, who I don't know and have only spoken to once before in my life, but who I've instructed to find me a Victorian diary with blank pages, that an 1891 diary has been found with nearly all blank pages. I can't see the diary, and I know that the dealer hasn't seen it, but, apart from being outside my preferred decade, it would seem that he has found what I've asked him to find. I badly want the diary as soon as possible so I tell him to send it to me so I can get it my hands on it and I'll worry about payment later. (In fact I never even pay for it, I run to my wife to do so.)

The other reason why your question is silly is because it ignores all the psychological pressures that would have existed during the telephone call.

Let me give you an example. The comedian Paul Smith tells a story of how he went into a luxury high end car dealership simply to browse and ended up purchasing a very expensive car which he could in no way afford simply because he felt insulted by someone else in the shop who implied he couldn't afford it (which he couldn't). Would I do the same thing? I very much doubt it. But you just can't say that everyone will do the same thing in the same situation especially in one where there must be some degree of psychological pressure.

So what I would do or would not do is of no consequence. But if the question is: Have I made bad purchasing decisions in my life? I certainly have. Could I see myself getting it wrong when buying a diary unseen over the telephone? Absolutely I can. Might I have said in Mike's position that I would take that 1891 diary? Yes, I can envisage doing so if I'd pictured in my mind a diary with totally blank pages which is entirely plausible. For me, as I've said many times, personal diaries are written in exercise books or notebooks without printed dates.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Look, the sheer lack of support for your position regarding the small 1891 diary is proof positive that everyone reading these posts is thinking, Why does he keep pretending that Mike Barrett wouldn't have checked if the 1891 diary had '1891' printed throughout it?

Or people are wondering how you can possibly even begin to say what Mike Barrett would or would not have done in the unusual and unprecedented situation he found himself in one day in March 1992.

I also have to say that the supposed "sheer lack of support" for my position exists in your imagination only.

[Lombro2]

Then how come the "support" for your position isn't enough for you to say that Michael Barrett definitely wrote it.

Do you only have abundant or sufficient evidence to say that "maybe" he wrote it? And that anyone who says he definitely didn't do it s a fantasist? What kind of a "position" is that? Socratic, anyone?

It's like arguing with water as to whether it's wet. I can't seem to pin it down.