Invasion of privacy

We managed to lose our program for 'Donkeys' Years' (see previous post) but we did manage to retain this pick-me-up. Not sure what it was a relic from, given that we were at the first performance. Were we mistaken and there was a matinée first? Was the theatre used for community action rather than rehearsals in the afternoons? But closer perusal suggests it may have been the notes of someone who was watching the show, perhaps a stage management person with an interest in props.

But this morning's ponder is about the propriety of publishing someone else's scribbles. I guess a simple position is that one should not. A gentlemen does not read someone else's letter, which he comes across, open and unguarded, by accident.

On the other hand, I do not think one can work out who it was, at least in terms of name and address, from what we have got here. There were a couple of telephone numbers, and even though I think that they were probably the land-line and mobile numbers for a shop up north, I have pasted them out. Could a forensic geek recover the numbers? In any event, it is unlikely that the author or anyone who knows the author is going to come across the post. So I think it unlikely that publication in this way will cause any harm or hurt.

Which reminds me of the way in which one can have quite intimate conversations with people one bumps into on, say trains, on the basis that it is most unlikely that one will ever meet them again. Or the way in which people who you do know who have dumped on one, perhaps in the context of a bereavement, tend to avoid one afterwards. One knows too much for it to be comfortable any more. A bit too much like using the same pub as one's shrink. Maybe relaxed Californians would be up for it, but I am not.

Also of the legality that, once you put your dustbin on the pavement, everything in it becomes the property of the local council, or their agents. So if you pop the crown jewels in a dustbin to keep them safe from burglars but forget to take them out before you put the dustbins out and, then, someone rootling around in your dustbin - perhaps a sleuth in the employ of News Corporation - finds them, it is, strictly speaking, a case of finders keepers. But in the case of News Corporation one might hope that good manners would prevail. All of which reminds me that when I was at LSE, the rebel students had an ally in the form of a porter who rootled around in the waste paper bins of senior staff in search of juicy tit-bits, but that is an entirely different matter as waste paper bins and their contents are the property of whoever manages the offices, in this case LSE itself. Might have been a different matter if outsourcing had been invented at that time.