Stuff and Moonshine

 my dad is a retired historian/geographer and back in the ‘nineties he published this paper about a 19^th-century clipper captain he’d been researching, which opens with a vivid, colourful description of Captain Anderson debarking in the port of Kobe in 1891, which feels like it should lead to an exciting adventure, but instead the poor guy just has health issues and makes comments about how “business for ships is miserable dull” and eventually gives up the sea for another career and this is why Dad is not a fiction writer (that said if you ever need a whole lot of detail about a late-19^th-c clipper voyage, including the cost of supplies, he’s your man)