sometimes the sun shines on your breakfast. Which is infinitely nicer than the cat shitting in your breakfast (that has happened too, a long time ago)

Yesterday I was really, truly, proper-job sad to read that Terry Pratchett had died. I generally can't stand fantasy but his was of such a high quality, with so much intelligence and wit and with such excellent characters that it grasped onto a bit of my brain and will never let go. My favourite character in Granny Weatherwax - for many reasons, one of which is that she is a female character that one can actually believe in and one I quite strongly identify with. One of the reasons, I think, that Granny is great is because she's actually Terry Pratchett. 

Compare and contrast:
“Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world's greatest creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. it meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.” (Wyrd Sisters)
And Neil Gaiman writing about Terry Pratchett:
"Terry’s authorial voice is always Terry’s: genial, informed, sensible, drily amused. I suppose that, if you look quickly and are not paying attention, you might, perhaps, mistake it for jolly. But beneath any jollity there is a foundation of fury. Terry Pratchett is not one to go gentle into any night, good or otherwise.
He will rage, as he leaves, against so many things: stupidity, injustice, human foolishness and shortsightedness, not just the dying of the light. And, hand in hand with the anger, like an angel and a demon walking into the sunset, there is love: for human beings, in all our fallibility; for treasured objects; for stories; and ultimately and in all things, love for human dignity."
Just as Granny has been my role model for many years, I suppose Terry Pratchett has been too - to look at the world and feel anger and love in equal measure and to harness those feelings in an attempt to move our rising-monkey society towards some kind of dignity.