This post contains spoilers for Going Postal by Terry Pratchett. You have been warned. If you’ve not read it, read it. It is one of the single best books in existence.

I’ve fallen into good ways. I keep thinking I can give it up at any time I like, but I don’t. But I know if I couldn’t give it up any time I liked, I wouldn’t go on doing it
– Moist von Lipwig

I love the character of Moist von Lipwig. I think, of all the fantastic characters created by the late great Sir Terry Pratchett, he is my absolute favourite. I’m divided on why exactly this is. He is the character I can relate to the easiest, which helps. He is one of the most morally ambiguous of Pratchett’s creations. The two who come close behind in my list of all time favourites, Sir Samuel Vimes and Granny Weatherwax, are both good characters, but they have unerring moral compasses. They know what good and bad are, and the know how to act.

But Moist… Well Moist has his own troubles in that area. He delights in tricking people – stupid people, sure, with more money than sense. And then he likes to move on, before he gets to see the fallout from his crimes. Moist also struggles to face the fact that people can actually like him. He wishes he were a better man, and when he fakes the fact that he is one, it starts to rub off on him. I can really empathise with a character like that.

There’s the rub – that word empathy. I can’t truly empathise with Granny Weatherwax, or Sir Samuel Vimes. Oh, I can empathise with some of their situations or some of their reactions. But there is something alien to me in that high-minded “I can do what I want in this situation, because I am a good person.” It always strikes me as somewhat “ends justifying means”.

Moist, on the other hand, sees things as a set of rules to be followed or not. The morality is there, but it’s about moving along the right tracks, and staying within the right set of parameters, living within the right character. And it’s about being yourself, on a base level.

It’s only when Moist becomes able to be himself, that he becomes a good person. And in stepping back into his name, into his own character, in admitting his previous mistakes, he becomes a stronger man and a better one. That person isn’t radically different from the legion of sneak-thieves and conmen he has played before that, but the difference that there is is enough.

The other big thing that endears old Moist to me is the fact that he insists on doing the impossible. People throughout my life have looked at me and said “That’s impossible. Noone can do that.” Then I’ve done it, and it’s been quietly forgotten that it might be impossible. Quick, move on. I don’t believe in the word impossible. Nothing is impossible. The only times I have really lost my temper, in a shouty shouty way in the workplace, have been because someone told me that something I had been told to do was impossible.

Nothing is impossible. I want that written across my gravestone, and tattooed across my heart. If there’s space, I want this there too.

You should promise to do the impossible, because sometimes the impossible was possible, if you could find the right way, and at least you could often extend the limits of the possible. And if you failed, well, it had been impossible.