Young F’s school had the annual schoolfeest yesterday, with his class portraying incidents from the travels of Pippi Longstocking. In the video below you will see F (in the light green poncho) and three of his classmates being members of a South American tribe who Pippi encounters. Note the large artificial treetrunk, which is there not as a representation of the rain forest but as a pun (the word stam meaning both tribe and trunk). Note also that toward the end you will see two girls playing different aspects of Pippi, one with her own hair and the other with a wig.

(Delighted to find that my new camera does sound as well as movies.)

Afterwards there was face-painting.

My unread books list is down to 124 (from 143 at the start of the year). I have been a good deal more resolute about this than last year, and have actually cleared 27 of the 143 I had on my unread list on 31 December (as well as reading another 79 books that I picked up during the course of the year, and one re-read). Meanwhile there are a mere nine books acquired so far this year which I haven’t read (Alias Vol. 3: The Underneath, by Brian Michael Bendis; So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future, ed. Nalo Hopkinson; The “Star Trek”: The Next Generation Companion, by Larry Nemecek; Rethinking Europe’s Future, by David P. Calleo; The provinces of the Roman Empire, from Caesar to Diocletian, by Theodor Mommsen; Fatal Attraction, by Paticia Fara; Pussey! by Dan Clowes; Tales of Human Waste, by Warren Ellis; and Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation, by Patrick Carroll.) I have been successful in imposing a bit more discipline on my reading habits.

This is mainly by using LibraryThing as a guide. I always keep in mind – in fact you’ll find it on my Livejournal profile – a) the book added to my LibraryThing catalogue longest ago (currently Alexander McCall Smith’s In the Company of Cheerful LadiesQuidditch Through the Ages, by J.K. Rowling); c) the longest-ago-added of the books on my LibraryThing catalogue which only I own (currently Science Fiction and Postmodern Fiction: A Genre Study by Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, which I fear may be a bit of a struggle); and d) if I can be bothered to work it out, the book on my unread list most often tagged as unread by other people (currently The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas). In a house where I have read 96% of the books on the shelves, it makes it easier for my eye to fall on one that I haven’t read rather than one that I have, minimises my feeling that I somehow haven’t got any books to read, and means that I am actually utilising the literary resources I have invested in (ie reading the books I have bought).

I came close to reading as many books in May as there are days in the month – had read 28 by the end of the day on the 28th – and contemplated reading a few very short ones just to make up the numbers. But that would be silly. (I managed 27 last November, which included the ten Ian Marter novels, none of which is over 150 pages.) I’ve generally been reading more this year because of my new habit of commuting by train, and last month featured some particularly long waits in airports and also several days of feeling ill in bed. I will probably read fewer books in June.

My return to the gym this week after almost a month’s absence, combined with some solitary lunches and longer than expected train journeys, meant that I got through four more Who audios, one for each of the four participating Doctors. I liked the first of these least, and the last most.

Minuet in Hell: Fandom seems fairly evenly divided between those who thought that the fantastic acting of McGann, Fisher and Nicholas Courtney made this a success, and those who could not get past the ludicrously bad American accents and absurd plot (a new American state is being inaugurated, but the governor has done a deal with some demons). I’m afraid I am firmly in the latter camp. The episodes are far too long as well, at 35 minutes each. Really one to avoid. The McGann adventures so far for me are two hits (Storm Warning and The Stones of Venice) and two misses.

Loups-Garoux: Fandom is much less divided about this one, and I am with fandom – a very good Peter Davison story, perhaps his best after The Caves of Androzani. Lovely portrayals of Brazil, both city and forest, and a tremendously atmospheric set of performances – including Eleanor Bron, Bert Kwouk and Nicky Henson. I suspect that if I knew South America as well as I know North America, I would have found the accents as annoying as I did in Minuet in Hell; but I don’t. There is some particularly good character development of the relationship between Turlough and the Doctor, and some rather poignant moments from Davison which will have had Five fandom squeeing.

Dust Breeding: In a rare example of Who prescience, this story (made in 2001) revolves around the theft of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream. A partial sequel to The Genocide Machine, so again I found it a bit difficult to tell the difference between Bev and Ace; but I liked everything else about it, with Caroline John as the doomed grande dame in charge of festivities and Geoffrey Beevers playing the mysterious Mr Seta. (Who? Yes.) It’s not easy to convey grand planetscapes and world-busting scenarios on audio, but I felt this succeeded. (The reprises at the start of each episode were surprisingly long though.)

Bloodtide: Glorious, glorious: Sixth Doctor and Evelyn meet up with Charles Darwin and Captain Fitzroy on the Galapagos Islands, and – how utterly appropriate – meet up with the Silurians. No doubt the play’s account of Darwin’s inner dialogue with himself, as brilliantly portrayed by Miles Richardson, would fail to pass muster with real experts (such as my PhD supervisor) but you don’t expect utter historical accuracy in something like this. Evelyn and Six continue to be a great pairing, and the Silurians with their inner conflicts and betrayals make a great story. Loved it.

So, skip the first of these but the other three are all worth getting.

Big Finish’s series of audio plays featuring the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth Doctor Whos have been a roaring success. Unfortunately they cannot do the same for the first four Doctors, with the actors who played 1-3 having shuffled off this mortal coil and #4, the glorious Tom Baker, being famously unwilling to reprise the role. So what they have done is to get four actors who played companions of the first four doctors tell the story of a “missing adventure”, with one guest star in each case providing the voice of the chief villain. It’s a grand idea, and I liked all of these, though each had small problems which one can overlook.

Frostfire is the best of the four. Marc Platt is the author: he lands the Doctor, Vicki and Steven in the frozen London of 1814, where they team up with Jane Austen – Jane Austen – to defeat a nefarious force that threatens to suck the energy out from the whole of London, and maybe the world. Platt and through him Maureen O’Brien (playing Vicki for the first time in over forty years!) between them catch the First Doctor’s voice perfectly, though poor Steven doesn’t get much to do. It’s nice to have a framing narrative of Vicki – now Cressida – reminiscing about the events of years before, for her subjective time line, or three thousand years in the future, by Earth time, and it turns out to have more relevance to events than anticipated. There is a typical Marc Platt paradox by way of plot resolution, and you have to swallow the concept of Jane Austen as woman of action, but it is tremendously enjoyable.

Fear of the Daleks has Wendy Padbury reprising her role as Zoe, telling her therapist about these weird dreams of Daleks and the Doctor she has been having. There is a real poignancy in Zoe having had her mind wiped by the Time Lords at the end of The War Games, and so forgetting all of her adventures with the Doctor; and the framing narrative takes that and uses it rather well. Unfortunately I think Peter Anghelides already did it better, and the narrative which is actually framed is a confused one of half-fish-shaped scientists and Daleks, with Nicholas Briggs as ever giving it his all, but it didn’t quite hang together for me. Good for Wendy Padbury who does a fantastic performance with less than fantastic material, and there is a real poignancy in her line about being young again.

The Blue Tooth: I started off loving this purely on the grounds of Cambridge nostalgia, as Liz Shaw returns to her alma mater to sort out certain strange goings on (promising, in the framing narrative, to explain why she left UNIT). Certainly the portrayal of the University Dental Service on Trumpington Street as a place of horror, pain and fear was still perfectly accurate from my time there, twenty years after Liz Shaw. I also liked the continuity of the Cybermen being a legacy of the failed Invasion. But I went off it in the end: Liz, one of the really brainy Doctor Who companions, ends up being all fainting and unconscious and having to be rescued, and Caroline John does not really succeed in doing the voices of the Third Doctor and the Brigadier especially well. This was in the end my least favourite of the four, though perhaps a non-Cantabrian listener will have fewer dashed expectations than I did.

The Beautiful People is set mainly in a health club, which will definitely appeal to those like me who often listen to Doctor Who while on the exercise machines in the gym. It’s a rather slight plot, not awfully dissimilar from The Leisure Hive (of the same era). Lalla Ward does a great job of it, though. My biggest gripe has nothing to do with either writing or acting: it is that the four episodes are very uneven in length – 25 minutes, then 18, then 12 and 12 again, with a couple more moments that sounded like they might have been potential episode endings in the middle. That’s just poor pacing, and leaves the listener (or at least this listener) thrown off balance.

But anyway, in all cases the fun outweighs the annoyances, and they are all worth adding to your library.

Dopplr

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