Back at work [Mar. 24th, 2005|07:52 pm]

[

feels

|

amused and slightly worried

]

In the office in Glasgow, which is much less shiny than the London one. And it’s raining. Oh, well.

Didn’t
think I’d get to post this, but the story has made the Guardian and the
emails have made Popbitch and Holy Moly, so I don’t see how I can get
into trouble. This is what’s been going round the BBC about our boss
(and nobody seems to be denying it!):

—–Original Message—–
From: Jeremy Paxman
Sent: 18 January 2005 15:50
To: Anthony Massey
Subject:

I’ve got to interview Mark Thompson tomorrow. Is it true that he once bit you?

—–Original Message—–
From: Anthony Massey
Sent: 23 January 2005 08:50
To: Jeremy Paxman
Subject: RE:

Sorry
I didn’t reply in time, I’ve been away from the office for the last
week, and I missed the News Festival or I could have offered this from
the audience!

It is absolutely true. It was late summer or early
autumn of 1988, when he was the newly appointed editor of the Nine
O’Clock News, and I was a Home News Organiser. It was 9.15 in the
morning, in the middle of the old sixth floor newsroom. I went up to
his desk to talk about some story after the 9.00 meeting we used to
have then. I was standing next to him on his right, and he was sitting
reading his horoscope in the Daily Star (I always remember that
detail). Before I could say a word he suddenly turned, snarled, and
sank his teeth into my left upper arm (leaving marks through the shirt,
but not drawing blood). It hurt. I pulled my arm out of his jaws, like
a stick out of the jaws of a labrador. The key thing is, we didn’t have
a row first, or even speak, and I had never had any dispute with him
before. He was recently arrived in the newsroom, and I hardly knew him.
He just bit me in the arm for no reason without any warning or
preamble. I don’t think it was personal. Something turned in his brain,
and anyone who had been standing there at that moment would have been
bitten, Linda from the teabar, the BBC Chairman, Keith Graves, anyone.
It just happened to be me.

Thompson didn’t apologise or explain,
so I went to complain to my then boss, Chris Cramer. All Cramer said
was “This whole place is full of fucking headbangers”, which was a fair
point and indeed is still true, but didn’t help somehow. I wanted to
bring the whole BBC disciplinary process down on Thompson’s head, and
get the NUJ involved, but Cramer was desperate for that not to happen.
So I got sent abroad on some story for a month or so, and when I came
back it had lost momentum, and I never pursued it. Also I was on
attachment and applying for a permanent job, so I didn’t want to rock
the boat. And in those days dinosaurs ruled the earth, and it seemed
quite acceptable for senior people to bite junior colleagues. But
several times since Mark Damazer, who was one of many witnesses, has
said to me “You could have ended Mark Thompson’s career with a single
word, and you never did.” He sounded as though he wished I had, though
I thought he was meant to be a friend of Thompson’s.

Thompson
stayed in the newsroom for several months until he became Editor of
Panorama, and we have met a number of times since then. But in a very
British way, neither of us has ever mentioned it. But when he became DG
several people who were in the newsroom at the time reminded me of this
incident (as if I might have forgotten it) and it went all round the
building. To my knowledge the only time it’s appeared in print was
shortly afterwards, when a brief item appeared in the Londoner’s Diary
in the Evening Standard. This was nothing whatever to do with me,
though I was not sorry to see it. My name wasn’t mentioned, which was
good. But the story did go round the world, and when I was in Kuwait
just after the end of the Gulf War in 1991, an NBC producer said “Are
you the person Mark Thompson bit?” Fame of a sort.

Now Thompson
is DG, the story is probably more valuable. The joke in the newsroom is
that if ever they make me redundant, I’ll be off to the Daily Mail or
the Sun with my arm in a sling. There are several other good Thompson
stories. I know two more. He has a bit of a reputation for mindless
violence against innocent bystanders (ask the old hands in RCR about
the strangling incident). But he’s only attacked me once.

I last
saw Thompson just after he was made DG, at the BBC News 50th
anniversary party in TC1 in May. He saw me across the room and went
white. I don’t know why. He shouldn’t be afraid of me, I don’t bite.

Anthony

—–Original Message—–
From: Jeremy Paxman
Sent: 24 January 2005 14:37
To: Anthony Massey
Subject: RE:

Gosh!
I wish I’d got this earlier, although it would have been hard to know
precisely how to play it, I think. The bloke is quite clearly insane.

—–Original Message—–
From: Anthony Massey
Sent: 28 January 2005 08:39
To: Jeremy Paxman
Subject: RE:

He
certainly is. Here’s the subbed down version of the strangling story,
which I hasten to add I got at second hand and did not witness
personally:

The Nine, with Thompson editing, were leading with
the death of some famous British actor like Gielgud or Ralph
Richardson. At two minutes to nine a picture editor dubbed the obit to
get a perfect sound balance. As it was four minutes long and this was
the pre-digital age, this wasn’t very bright, and the story missed its
slot as the lead. After the Nine was over Thompson stormed down to VTs
in search of the culprit and tried to throttle him. He had both hands
round the man’s throat and had to be dragged off. All this might have
been forgotten but for the fact that the picture editor, according to
the story, had a nervous breakdown, left the BBC and never worked
again. They still talk about it in RCR.

So I got off lightly really.

—–Original Message—–
From: Jeremy Paxman
Sent: 31 January 2005 15:00
To: Anthony Massey
Subject: RE:

Bloody hell. If any of this came out, he’d be toast.

I like that Jeremy says “Gosh!” in email.

And the Guardian says there’s

A
second witness to the biting incident involving BBC director general
Mark Thompson has come forward corroborating news producer Anthony
Massey’s account.
Michael Sullivan, a former BBC and Sky News
correspondent, says he was in the newsroom the day Mr Thompson sunk his
teeth into the young Mr Massey’s forearm.

And according to him, it was not just a symptom of the macho atmosphere that was typical of many newsrooms at the time.

“It
was not horse play or high-jinks. It was exactly as Massey said – after
the morning meeting, he sat down at his desk. I happened to be casually
looking in his direction – Massey was a junior at the time, working on
the input desk which organises the camera crews. Suddenly Thompson
turned on him and did exactly what Massey said and sank his teeth into
him.

“There was no comradely, joking expression on his face,” Mr Sullivan told MediaGuardian.co.uk.

His account of the incident 17 years ago tallies with Mr Massey’s colourful email recounting the incident in 1988.

Didn’t I tell you my work had gone mad? Did you believe me? Gah.

The Mark Thompson Story, from .

This is of course the Mark Thompson who is the Director-General of the BBC. My predecessor in my current job was also called Mark Thompson but as far as I know he has never bitten anyone.

Space-time for Springers by Fritz Leiber is on Sci Fiction this week.

“Gummitch was a superkitten, as he knew very well…”

To read and digest later. Via Daniel Drezner.

You may have noticed that there’s a revolution going on in Kyrgyzstan.

As it happens one of our folks who works there is in the office today.

The Slovenian foreign ministry just emailed me to ask if we had anyone here who could personally brief their foreign minister about what’s going on. (Slovenia is chairing the OSCE at the moment, and the OSCE is the only international organisation that is likely to be able to intervene.)

So it looks like the briefing will take place using my mobile phone as I drive our chap to the airport, in about 30 minutes.

All very entertaining. Hopefully this will enable me too to find out what is going on in Kyrgyzstan.

I can’t see either myself, but I’ve learnt how to put them in livejournal entries – you write Ꮦ and ᚈ and they look like this:

and

I’ve been wondering about how widespread support for different alphabets is out there, so what better way to find out than by doing a quick poll?

(I used to think this was dependent on what browser you had – I now realise that it entirely depends on what fonts are installed on your system.)

Myself, I can barely tell the difference between the two Romanian letters, and can’t see the Cherokee and Ogham ones at all… (In fact I think I’ve screwed up the code for them both…)

Anne reminded me of this quote as we were reading a discussion started by :

…they must have had very fair notions of the artistic and the beautiful, our great-great-grandfathers. Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.

Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?

That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings. It is a white dog. Its eyes blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots. Its head is painfully erect, its expression is amiability carried to verge of imbecility. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends jeer at it, and even my landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her.

But in 200 years’ time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round, and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is lost no doubt was.

We, in this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We are too familiar with it. It is like the sunset and the stars: we are not awed by their loveliness because they are common to our eyes. So it is with that china dog. In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will have become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we did it, and say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as “those grand old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those china dogs.”

The “sampler” that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as “tapestry of the Victorian era,” and be almost priceless. The blue-and-white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up all the “Presents from Ramsgate,” and “Souvenirs of Margate,” that may have escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English curios.

I wonder if this is also the first ever reference in English literature to Japanese tourists?

by Brussels Gonzo (originally published on A Fistful of Euros)

National Gonzo Press Club Vows To Carry On Hunter S. Thompson’s Work

Even gonzo journalists who have disagreed with Thompson in the past, such as award-winning New York Times columnist Heck Murdo, count him as a freak comrade. “We did have sharp differences in opinion,” Murdo said. “He thought Richard Nixon should have had his intestines slowly unwound onto a giant cable spool. I thought he should have been lashed to an oceanside cliff near San Clemente, so that ospreys could feast on his eyes. We feuded for years, at one point conducting a bourbon- and mescaline-fueled motorized-cart demolition derby on a Lake Tahoe golf course. But we patched things up when Dubya was elected, agreeing—to our mutual horror—that Nixon far outclassed that Jesus-loving pinheaded man-child.”

From the Onion, of course.

Initiate Your Mythos Knowledge score is 63!

“You’ve read much of the original Mythos and Dream Cycle, and may have read some other authors’ interpretations too. You can tell which writers get it and which ones don’t, but you still don’t quite grasp what “it” is yet. Your SAN has dropped a bit as you’ve started seeing the fringes of what’s really going on in the world. Keep reading, but keep away from any shining trapezohedrons.”

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 16% on elderpoints

Link: The Lovecraft Mythos Test written by RevErik on Ok Cupid

I like the comment that “you’ve started seeing the fringes of what’s really going on in the world” since it’s what I do for a living as well. Will do my best to take the advice to “Keep reading, but keep away from any shining trapezohedrons”. Once I work out what a trapezohedron is. Or perhaps I’d be better off not trying to work it out…

How many of those who want to keep Terry Schiavo “alive” also oppose the death penalty, in line with their professed commitment to a “culture of life”?

Thank God for Dahlia Lithwick and William Saletan at Slate. And for Matt Conigliaro. But the whole thing is utterly horrible.

This is actually a case of me annoying them, rather than them annoying me.

I seem to have really wounded this gentleman. Ohdearwhatapitynevermind.

Dear Nicholas,

I had an idea. Would you like to be interviewed for my website? It would give you a chance to present your side of things and maybe save you time instead of having to send little messages to the RM Digest people, you could get it all out in one go. And, since it would be an email interview, you can be certain of not being misquoted.

If you are up for it, please let me know.

Thanks,
C

C,

I have to say I wasn’t awfully impressed with your “correction” to your previous article – you left the main text untouched, and put the new statement (which is not exactly a simple correction) at the bottom of the web page at http://www.balkanalysis.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=409 where nobody will ever see it. So I’m afraid I don’t think I can see my way to complying with this request, unless you conclude that earlier problem in a more satisfactory way.

Nicholas

Dear Nicholas,

You could have just said that despite the MASSIVE media coverage your organization aggressively seeks out with boot-licking media bodies across the world, you are afraid of speaking with anyone who might be in any way critical of your logic and interventionist policies.

In this avoidance you expose both your cowardice and your really wonderful interest in democratic debate – not to mention that you are quite well aware of your organization being, at bottom, intellectual fraudsters obsessed with an overblown sense of self-importance, not to mention power and money.

But I suspect that somewhere deep down you are aware of this fraudulence – and yet choose to live it out, thus foresaking any shred of individuality, independence or intellectual integrity you may once have had.

And in this I truly pity you and others of your ilk. Enjoy!

Sincerely,
C

Not at all, C. It’s just that your lack of professionalism bores me, and I have better things to do with my time.

Regards,

Nicholas

Sorry Nicholas,

But that disaffected British cynicism of yours is simply not going to cut it. Regardless of what you may think of me as a journalist, the fact remains that since my government is funding your organization, and since that by living in a “crisis region” you cover, I and my family are directly affected by the influence of your reports.

So, as long as I am paying you to endanger my life, you had damn well better be accountable – especially since you consider transparency and fair play so important for all those ignorant and savage nations you preach to.

Now, there is an easy way and a hard way to do this. I am offering you the easy way. I am prepared to be charitable, and to let you state your position on reality, in a short email interview – in which there is no chance of you being misquoted – that would be, essentially, fair. But if you continue to ignore me, you at the same time will drastically reduce the options available. I believe this would be to your long-term detriment, since not everyone shares your opinion about me and since you yourself are not nearly so popular as you may think. I beg you to reconsider.

Best,
C.

C,

Unfortunately you’ve already demonstrated that you cannot be relied on to act professionally, and this latest hysterical message is yet more evidence of that. You failed to adequately correct your untrue statement about me in a previous article, which is still on your website, and until you have done so there is no point in continuing this discourse.

If your government is unhappy with our reporting arrangements, I’m sure they will let us know. I suppose what provoked your latest outburst was the piece about me in Vreme earlier this week. I will of course continue to give interviews on the record to journalists who have not let me down in the past. I think you’ll find most people will behave that way and would consider that behaviour reasonable.

Nicholas

Dear Nicholas,

So be it.

C.

Notice how eloquently and diplomatically he tries to persuade me to do the interview with him! Needless to say, he didn’t bother notifying me that he had made further changes to his web-page after we’d concluded this correspondence. And it’s funny how he wasn’t able to make changes to the body of the text in October, and suddenly was able to in February!

I’ve been archiving my past media appearances onto here as backdated entries. My favourite exchange, just a few weeks after I started this job, doing Questions and Answers on CNN:

[JIM] CLANCY: Have you called — does this — I didn’t read it in this report, sorry.

[NICHOLAS] WHYTE: Well, someday you will read our report and you’ll see that it’s actually quite a rather more balanced picture than you put forward.

“The Serbian Lottery has not had a winning combination in weeks now. Tonight’s possible win is worth about 3.5 million Euros, and ‘lotto-mania’ is slowly becoming ‘lotto-paranoia’. While the common folk are suspicious of tampering, the authorities in the Lottery are firmly denying this, and mathematical experts claim that the period without a winning combination can in theory last indefinitely. Even though in his statement for Glas, Professor of mathematics Milan Bozic says that tampering does not seem likely, he does add that the Serb is capable of overcoming every high-tech achievement”, reports Glas Javnosti on Tuesday.

“He goes on to explain that the possibility of drawing the winning combination of seven numbers is one in ten million, or 0.000000016, which is a very small possibility, even if tens of millions of combinations are paid in. A great number of paid in combinations does not guarantee that all the possible ‘sevens’ will be covered.

“’I believe that chances for tampering are almost non-existent and it doesn’t seem likely to me. The one doing the tampering has to know what he’s about, and in this country there is no such computer equipment’, says Bozic adding that swindling does not pay for all those who organise lotteries and own gambling casinos because they earn the most money from trade.

“’We Serbs are well known for being paranoid, but cheating doesn’t make sense to me. However, that doesn’t mean that somebody isn’t being crooked, and if so, then he has abilities of cosmic proportions’, claims Bozic.

“Director of the State Serbian Lottery, Bojan Kristo, is sure that the people generally believe that this is an organised robbery of the people, but this he vehemently denies. He repeats that it is not in the Lottery’s interest not to have a winning draw for so long, because there has already been a drop of interest in the last four weeks even though the jackpot is growing.

“’Lotto is a game of fortune organised for three reasons: fun, filling up the Budget and financing salaries for the employed. Out of suspicion, the people have been buying tickets less and less, which is certainly not in our interest’”, says Kristo for Glas Javnosti.

 

You scored 60% background knowledge, 75% solar system, 100% stars, and 20% galaxies!

That’s it! Thanks for taking the test and please take a moment to rate it. This test samples your knowledge of contemporary topics in astronomy. It is by no means comprehensive. If you did well on it, you’re pretty well versed in astronomical knowledge. If you didn’t do so well, but would like to know more, your local university may have a course in astronomy just for you! A complete answer key is available at http://www.livejournal.com/users/wcg/198998.html Keep looking up! BillG

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 99% on background You scored higher than 99% on solar system You scored higher than 99% on stars You scored higher than 99% on galaxies

Link: The General Astronomy Test written by BillG on Ok Cupid

I’m a bit diappointed with that, given that I actually have a degree in astrophysics.

Happy birthday to all three of you very special people.

13) Aldiss Unbound: The Science Fiction of Brian W. Aldiss, by Richard Mathews

A very brief, 60-page pamphlet, published in 1977, in other words not even half way through Aldiss’ writing career (he was born in 1925, and first published in 1954). There’s a bit too much retelling of the plot and quoting favourite lines from Aldiss’ books and short stories. One particular concept that I found interesting, the idea of “slouch” as a particularly Aldiss brand of humour, simply wasn’t explained well enough for me to make up my mind. The one point that made me sit up and think about why I enjoy Aldiss’ work so much was Mathews’ quotation from Aldiss’ contribution to the 1975 volume of sf writers’ reminiscences, Hell’s Cartographers, which I quote here in its original form, but with my added emphasis:

I have written a number of books which I believe contain something like a creative vision, no matter in what other ways they may be flawed. Although I see my true strengths to lie in he short story field, I have novels for which I cannot but feel some warmth; most of them are involved with the portrayal of landscape, such as A Soldier Erect, Report on Probability A, Barefoot in the Head, and Greybeard, all of which depict figures in  landscape. Non-Stop and Frankenstein Unbound show figures swallowed by their landscapes. So, I suppose, does Hothouse, a novel from which I have always felt distanced, perhaps considering the miserable circumstances under which it was written. Cryptozoic (An Age) has landscape as surrealism, Male Response landscape as comedy. Eighty Minute Hour has an exploded landscape.

On rereading those words in Mathews’ abbreviated (but better contextualised) presentation, I suddenly realised that I am a real fan of books with a carefully thought out landscape behind them. I suppose (from the fact that books I hated because their fictional landscapes made no sense to me, such as Cherryh’s Downbelow Station and Cyteen, nonetheless have devoted fan followings) that this is not universal. But it helps me realise what sort of book, what sort of writer, appeals to me, personally. It’s related to the concept of dinnseanchas, as Ciaran Carson explains it. I’m trying to write something substantial about Irish sf and fantasy at the moment and it all helps to firm up the picture for me.

12) Tolkien and the Great War, by John Garth

This book carries a recommendation by A.N. Wilson to the effect that it’s “the best book about Tolkien that has yet been written”. While I don’t think it is actually better than Tom Shippey’s work, it is none the less a very good book, moving well beyond the cliches of equating the Dead Marshes to the Somme. It basically concentrates on the story of the friendship between Tolkien and three of his schoolmates, G.B. Smith, Rob Gilson and Christopher Wiseman, who together formed an intimate group called the TCBS. It could have been the story of any group of naive and idealistic young men, pledged to change the world and to renew a sense of old values through their works of literature, except of course that one of them actually did.

Garth saves his analysis of the effect of the war per se on Tolkien’s writing for an afterword, and concentrates for most of the book on the narrative of what actually happened to the four friends. This is very effective. The actual events of the Somme are dealt with surprisingly quickly, but Garth manages to balance a detailed account of where Smith, Gilson and Tolkien were (Wiseman was in the Navy) with a sense of the overall perspective of the agonising shifts in the 1916 front line. (This may be what A.N. Wilson was getting at – I haven’t read much else about the first world war, but I find it difficult to believe that there are many other accounts of it that are as lucid as this.)

Of course, the effects of the Somme were devastating. Gilson and Smith were both killed, and Tolkien invalided home with trench fever; he never returned to the front line, fortunately. And it’s fairly obvious that the deep friendship between Tolkien and Wiseman was fatally undermined by their war experiences. Garth makes a persuasive argument for the deep impact of the TCBS on Tolkien’s writing. I would like to know more about the effect of Tolkien’s relationship with his wife Edith, who he was courting and marrying at this time, on his writing. Perhaps there is little to say, or to be discovered.

There are two lengthy postscripts to the main narrative. The first looks at the relationship between what Tolkien was actually writing during the Great War and his eventually published work (two decades later for The Hobbit, four decades later for The Lord of the Rings). The second ranges freely across the whole spectrum of English literature in the twentieth century, pointing out that Tolkien describes both the heroism and the horror of war (where Owen and Sassoon concentrate on the horror, to the point of concealing what they themselves were up to), and concluding with a favourable review from C.S. Lewis about the realism of Tolkien’s portrayal of the psychology of wartime.

There’s lots more here. Recommended.

See here to get yours.

11) Bone, by Jeff Smith

This is 13 years’ worth of Jeff Smith’s epic masterpiece, Bone, all between the same set of covers in 1300 pages. It really is excellent. I had read the first ten or so back in 1996, when they were reaching Belfast monthly, thanks to the recommendations of Malachy Coney (then as now the source of all wisdom on comics in Northern Ireland).

The Bones are three cousins from Boneville, expelled by their angry fellow townspeople for offences which are only gradually revealed. Boneville sounds fairly normal; it has fast food, a mayor, Moby Dick and even a hazardous waste landfill site. The Bones end up in the pre-technological world of the Valley, under the care of Grandma Ben, who has superhuman strength, and her granddaughter Thorn Evenstar, and watched over by a friendly though mysterious dragon. The story develops, deepens and darkens. It’s what Cerebus the Aardvark could have been if Dave Sim hadn’t decided to stick his head up his own posterior.

There are lots of slapstick incidents. There’s that glorious moment early on when Fone Bone, pursued by two horrible rat creatures (which turn out to have a fixation with quiche), leaps across a small waterfall and clings to a branch on the other side. He taunts his pursuers, “Those rat creatures would have to be pretty stupid to follow me onto this frail little branch!”

And so the catch-phrase, “Stupid, stupid rat creatures!” was born.

A little later, as he and Grandma Ben are making their way to the inn at Barrelhaven, Fone Bone comments that it all looks so quiet and peaceful. “Shhh!” orders Grandma Ben. “We’re not out of the woods yet.” Fone Bone looks around at the dark trees surrounding them, and then in the next frame mutters to himself, “Can’t argue with that.”

But the story starts to get darker; Thorn begins to realise her true nature, and her supernatural enemies become more active. Fone Bone’s avaricious and venal cousin Phoney Bone develops a well-hidden caring side. The pace slackens only once, when one section of the story climaxes with what I can only call a V’ger moment. There’s much much more, and I’ve only really scratched the surface here. Go out and buy it. (Or borrow it.)

My last visit to the soon-to-close New Worlds got me:

Gaps in my library about sf:
Trillion Year Spree, by Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, edited by John Clute and John Grant
Tolkien and the Great War, by John Garth

Fiction that was on my “buy on sight in paperback list” anyway:
The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber
The Assassin’s Edge, by Juliet E. McKenna
Emerald Magic, edited by Andrew Greeley

Reduced to £1.99 each:
Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann
Brian W. Aldiss, by Michael R. Collings
Aldiss Unbound, by Richard Mathews

Reduced to £1:
Red Dwarf, first series, episodes 4-6 (video)

After that, I did manage to resist the temptations of Forbidden Planet!

Is Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien out of print? Can’t see it here, and it wasn’t it New Worlds either.

Hmm, I like the look of the House of Stratus editions of Brian Aldiss.

Coming off Eurostar, I almost collided with ex-Tory minister/EU Commissioner Leon Brittain. He still looks as evil as ever.

IWPR article on Sandzak textiles

Off to London for the day. Up too early; home rather late… at least the weekend starts this evening.

Belgian-based folks may be amused by the interview with me in this week’s Knack!