I have just been described to a group of MEPs as “Baroness Nicholas Whyte”. I am many things, but I am not a baroness.

(The chairman of the meeting was confusing me with this lady. That is a bit worrying.)

Jeepers, I didn’t see that coming!

Hat-tip to 

catilinarian

: The BBC invites you to re-fight the Battle of Hastings (941 years ago today) and the Battle of Waterloo.

Also

catilinarian

: Slate’s Dear Prudence and Salon’s Carey Tennis both answer the same question: “My evangelical teenage daughter thinks I am going to hell!”

james_nicoll

: Ursula le Guin vs Cory Doctorow.

pgmcc

 reports on me and others.

Those of you who were at dinner last night may not be terribly surprised to learn that Vince Foster’s death was the result of a single gunshot wound from the front, clearly self-inflicted, rather than two shots from behind. (At least that’s what Kenneth Starr, not exactly a stooge of the Clintons, reported.)

Today’s anniversaries are, for once, quite an interesting lot:
1582: Nothing at all happened on this date in 1582 in Catholic countries in Europe, as the day before 15 October was 4 October.
1630: Birth of Sophia of Hanover, who missed becoming Queen of Great Britain and Ireland by dying two months early
1633: Birth of her first cousin James II of England and VII of Scotland, who did become King of England, Scotland and Ireland for a few years.
1882: Birth of Éamon de Valera
1890: Birth of Dwight D. Eisenhower
1912: Assassination attempt on Theodore Roosevelt while campaigning – he still gave his speech despite a bullet in his chest
1926: Publication of Winnie-the-Pooh
1927: Happy birthday Roger Moore! 80 today!
1940: Happy birthday to both Cliff Richard and Christopher Timothy, both 67 today!
1949: Happy birthday Katy Manning! 58 today!
1959: Death of Errol Flynn
1977: Death of Bing Crosby
1969: UK (and, I suppose, Ireland) replaces the ten-shilling note with the 50p coin.

I’ve managed a couple of new countries every year for the last few years, but none so far in 2007. But now the potential opportunity for a very interesting business trip has come up, for mid-December, which will involve at least two new countries, even if one is still trying to get its status regularised. Will keep y’all posted.

3) Lord of Emperors, by Guy Gavriel Kay

My write-up of the first of these two books, Sailing to Sarantium, has attracted more comments than any other book blog entry this year. I ended it by wishing that I had bought the sequel at the same time. I repeat that wish now. The two books are so closely intertwined that it’s a shame to let the memory of one fade before you start the other. (Perhaps I have a bigger problem with this than some people, given that it was about a hundred books ago for me.) Anyway, like its predecessor, this book is simply a triumph.

But with a difference. Where Sailing to Sarantium stuck fairly closely to the history of our world, in particular the story of Justinian, Theodora, Belisarius and the Hagia Sophia, Lord of Emperors starts by nibbling away at the edges, and then abruptly and brutally swerves into its own timeline a bit over half way through. Suddenly, it all is up for grabs. Viewpoint characters die horribly. Any certainty we had is lost. I think that even if you don’t know anything about Byzantium, it’s a dramatic development on a par with George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. But if you do know what is “supposed” do happen, the impact is incredible.

But the historical knowingness is not what makes this a great book. (And I add to that historical knowingness the accelerated appearance of Kay’s versions of the rise of Islam and a specific spoilerish Christian controversy, brought into the novel for justifiable plot reasons respectively about a century and about two centuries too early.) The overall title of the series is The Sarantine Mosaic, and this is not only a reference to the grand work of art which Caius Crispius is brought to Sarantium to construct, but also surely a reference to the way the books are built up from little pieces – a progression of tight-third-person narratives (some crucial characters to the plot, some purely incidental) – within the overall structure of a framing plot, most of which in Lord of Emperors takes place in the course of two intricately and intimately described 24-hour periods, two days which illuminate the book’s structure like the mosaics on either side of an orthodox church.

And apart from fantastic characters, desperate sex, Machiavellian politics, and an unforgettable chariot race, the book – indeed both books – are a deep reflection on the place of art in life, and how some are called to it, some respond to it, and some reject it. A couple of people, responding to my earlier review, said they felt the ending of Lord of Emperors was a bit of a let-down. I agree that the emotional place where the key characters end up has been signalled too far in advance to retain the dramatic momentum which Kay probably intended. But read it again, and look at what he is saying about art and the artist. And then look at the work that inspired him. I don’t think you will remain unmoved.

And indeed others who are interested: Let California Ring, the campaign for equal marriage rights. Good luck to ’em.

St Oda’s

I know they are within their rights, but it’s a crying shame that the BBC have leaned on YouTube to take down all the Doctor Who videos, including the one that particularly pacified little U…

…you assume that the John Piper who is the subject of a set of quiz show questions is the evangelical Christian writer rather than the stained glass artist.

…hypothetically speaking, if you’ve had an idea for a book (non-fiction in this case), and you want to pitch it to a publisher, do you ask one publisher at a time or try several at once?

…or is every really aggressive and irresponsible driver on the motorway driving an Audi?

I was alerted during the week to the fact that the Northern Ireland Boundary Commission has finalised its recommendations for the new parliamentary constituencies, though it now looks like they will not be needed as soon as they might have been. In fact they have stuck to their recommendations from May last year.

In related news, thamks to Conal Kelly, the 1950-1970 Westminster election results for East Belfast, North Belfast, South Belfast, West Belfast, North Antrim, South Antrim, Armagh, Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Londonderry, North Down, South Down, and Mid Ulster are all now on my site.

Two Doctor Who audios this week – yes, the month that Big Finish are publishing the 100th in their series of plays, I have got around to #50, Zagreus, a three-CD extravaganza with four Doctors (Davison, C Baker, McCoy and McGann); and I also listened to Slipback, the first proper Doctor Who audio play (I shall justify this controversial claim below), broadcast by the BBC in 1985.

Zagreus is surely the best (so far) of the various anniversary offerings. The Three Doctors is rather poor, The Five Doctors is at least an honest effort, and the less said about the 30th anniversary the better. But here we have the “current” Eighth Doctor/Charley pairing (the sparkling Paul McGann/India Fisher combination) meeting a whole host of characters, more or less real, played by former cast members of the televised series. I didn’t recognise all the voices on first listening, partly because I wasn’t expecting so many, but I may even try listening again with a crib sheet in front of me; as well as Lalla Ward and Louise Jameson reprising Romana II and Leela, with splendid Time Lady/savage bitchiness setting up the scenario for the Gallifrey spinoffs (plus John Leeson as K-9), we have the voices of Polly, the Brigadier, Sarah Jane Smith, Nyssa, Turlough, Peri, Erimem, Evelyn Smythe, Mel, Ace, Benny, and the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors all playing other parts, and also Don Warrington as Rassilon, three years before he became President of Britain. Oh, and Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor, even though he had died seven years earlier. I’m not wild about the main plot strand, though it develops quite well from the previous Eighth Doctor story, Neverland, but the device of exploring the Doctor’s past through distorted reflections in his subconscious works – it could have been really gruesome and self-indulgent, but in fact you can’t wait to find out what happens next. I am not surprised to find that Alan Barnes, who is my favourite of the Big Finish writers, gets an authoring credit here.

Slipback was produced in the 18-month hiatus between Colin Baker’s two full seasons, a six-part radio series starring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant as the Sixth Doctor and Peri. It’s an odd contrast to the more recent Big Finish audios featuring Baker and/or Bryant. The first difference to strike you is that Baker really doesn’t much reflect the egotistical brash persona of the Sixth Doctor as seen on TV and heard in the videos. (Bryant is unmistakeably Peri though.) The second difference is that the six episodes only last ten minutes each, which really is the wrong length. If this had been successful, we might have seen a seamless transitioning of Doctor Who to audio instead of television, more than a decade before Big Finish got into it. But it wasn’t. The problem is that the author was Eric Saward, trying to channel Douglas Adams and not doing it very well. One of the characters is a computer with a squeaky accent, combining Eddie and Trillian from the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide. Valentine Dyall is wasted as an insane spaceship captain who enjoys his baths. The whole thing fails to gel.

None the less, this is the first “proper” Doctor Who audio play. The 1976 Fourth Doctor audios don’t count: in Doctor Who and the Pescatons, most of the narrative is carried by the Fourth Doctor telling the story, with occasional voicing from Sarah Jane Smith and the villain, and in any case it isn’t a “real” BBC production. Exploration Earth is too didactic to count as proper drama. The two Third Doctor audio stories were recorded later. So Slipback is in a lot of ways the fons et origo for  Big Finish’s subsequent triumphs.

Ancestral rivers of the world

What if the Ice Ages had been less icy?

(Hat-tip to

tsm_in_toronto

 commenting in reply to

james_nicoll

.)

I’ve tended to rather rush through writing up the Pertwee stories I have been watching, as they are much of a muchness, but this is different. I remember back in 1981 when it was re-broadcast, we really wondered why – surely there were other, better Pertwee four-parters out there? The Terrance Dicks novelisation is only average. It seemed as if Carnival of Monsters had been chosen mainly because it followed on in continuity directly after The Three Doctors. Spoiled as we were by the Hinchcliffe and Williams years, Carnival of Monsters did not seem all that special.

I must say that now it does. The 1973 season was probably Pertwee’s second best (after his first, the 1970 season) and Carnival of Monsters is surely the best story in it – followed by Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks, which are both OK but not spectacular, and ending with  The Green Death which is also a good one, particularly because it gets rid of Jo. The one thing that lets it down is the visual effects, rather a lot of dodgy CSO being used. But if you can shut your eyes and pretend you are still six during those bits, the rest is fantastic – Robert Holmes at his very best in the script, Michael Wisher in pre-Davros days as the main villain, Ian Marter in pre-Harry Sullivan days as a minor character, a real feeling of several different completely alien cultures (the two classes on Inter Minor and the Lurmans), and an absence of the blatant padding that mars so many Pertwee stories. A special shout to Cheryl Hall, later the girlfriend of Citizen Smith, as showgirl Shirna.

And there’s a couple of serious reflections in there too – the MiniScope itself is a futuristic development of the zoo, and gives rise to a rather caricatured discussion of conservation versus entertainment’ more seriously, Inter Minor is clearly a communist totalitarian state, threatened to its very foundations by any influence from the outside. Michael Wisher’s character Kalik is the conservative brother of the unseen president Zarb. It’s nicely observed, although not all conservative backlashes end with the leader of the hardliners being eaten alive by a Drashig. Shame.

I mentioned a few days back about how I had got vol 4 of About Time by mistake from eBay, but as far as I could tell it was my error. I had a funny feeling that when I bid for it, the book advertised was definitely vol 5, which is what I wanted, but when I check all the email records and images on eBay it was definitely vol 4 that appeared. I reckoned it was unlikely that the seller had sneakily sent me the wrong book, and then changed the images on display on the web page to cover their mistake, so my own error was a more likely explanation.

But I just got an email from eBay, saying “Our records show that you were a bidder or buyer of one or more items from the seller, [***]. We recently removed this seller’s active listings and suspended the seller’s trading privileges.” It suddenly seems more likely that I was deliberately sent the wrong book.

I shall file a complaint, not that it is likely to do any good.

Thanks, everybody

Many of you reading this will know about our family situation. Those of you who aren’t on my livejournal friends list, or who I haven’t seen in person recently, may not know about the latest developments. Since things seem to be fairly certain now, this is a general public update on what has been happening and what will happen next.

Our daughter B has a very serious autistic learning disability. Having developed relatively normally for her first two years, she then lost the ability to talk, and many other facets of normal development, in the following six months. The reason we live way out here in the wilds of Flemish Brabant is that we found the best school for her to be Ter Bank near Leuven. Not only did B enjoy it, but when her little sister U turned out to have similar problems, she started attending the school as well, and still goes there.

Towards the end of last year, however, B’s behaviour had got too much for the school to cope with, and it clearly wasn’t doing her much good; so we moved her to another wonderful day-care centre, ‘t Prieeltje in Tienen, about a half hour’s drive east of here. She loved it there at first – indeed, you can see her on their web page at present, one of the pictures is of her clearly having a ball – but last June, just before her tenth birthday, she suddenly rebelled, by refusing to get into the car, which meant she could no longer be transported back and forth from here to there.

Since then she has been at home, and my heroic mother-in-law has been helping us out ever since, as B’s behaviour has been very difficult. To cut quite a long story short, we have been negotiating with the various potential care options; and they have now come up with a solution for us. On Monday, B will move to the St Oda institute in Overpelt, about an hour’s drive away from us; they specialise in monitoring and treating children with very serious behavioural problems, which is the category B clearly fits into. She will stay there for a few months, and will then transfer to the to a closer facility as her permanent (or at least long-term) home.

We know it already, as they had been on the horizon as a long-term care option for a while, and like the quality of the care that they offer, though again that leaves out significant chunks of the story. Indeed, B has already been there a couple of times, and they told us today that they can take her from tomorrow until Sunday for respite care. That means that tonight is the second last night she will be at home, and Sunday will be the last. We are relieved, but also sad.

You can never tell what is in the package. When B was born, we certainly never anticipated that she would leave our household a few months after her tenth birthday. Even until last year, I certainly thought we would probably have her with us until her early teens. But of course, there are other families who are less fortunate than us; whereas our daughter, F and U’s sister, will only be a few minutes’ drive away even after she has moved out, there are others who are separated from their children by eternity.

Here is B in our back garden. She has just in the last few months developed an interest in catching a ball if it is thrown to her, though she enjoys bouncing a ball on her own very much too.

And here she is one of her recent stays, in almost exactly the same pose; looking a bit doped up, I’m afraid, due to extra medication. But we think she will be happier there, and better looked after than we are able to manage.

I’m not doing the unread books meme again, because I actually invented it on Sunday. It’s funny how these things catch on – it seems to have been copied onto upwards of 300 blogs, and now has even reached the on-line section of the Daily Telegraph. Very gratifying.

1) The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie

This book starts well, but gets a bit heavy; still, I found it not too difficult to make it to the end. There were two themes that I found particularly attractive. First off, the whole story explores the way in which we change and adapt our personalities to new circumstances, new people: the two main characters find themselves magically transformed into an angel and a devil, and then back again, but each has also changed names and other things about themselves in presenting themselves to different countries, to family vs outsiders, to different women. It is not always subtle, but I found it very entertaining.

The second is the experience of London. I think there must be a common experience of both familiarity and alienation for all of us who encounter London as non-English but citizens of the former Empire. I’ve found this in a couple of other places (Memories of the Irish Israeli War, The Web of Fear) but I found Rushdie’s portrayal of the immigrant experience of the Big Smoke gripping and familiar. (It possibly helps that my own family visits to London when I was growing up had a Bangladeshi edge.)

For the rest, I really enjoyed the effervescent use of language in the very first chapter, difficult to excerpt, and kept hoping it would come back again later in the book (and once or twice it did). There are lots of neat allusions – one of the main characters acquires the surname Chamcha, which must be a reference to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa. Rushdie shows also a welcome sensitivity to classic sf, though his treatment of Doctor Who is less thorough.

Younger readers may need to be reminded that this book was somewhat controversial when first published. It’s pretty clear who Rushdie is “really” writing about in the two extended passages set in Mecca/Jahilia and Medina/Yathrib. To say that this is not meant to be “about” Muhammad is unconvincing. (I bought the two Rogerson books partly in anticipation of tackling this one.) However, I find it fairly mild stuff; perhaps my sensitivities have been blunted by reading too much of what other people write about Catholicism.

Ebay replacement for Volume 5 of About Time turns out to actually be Volume 4!!!!

And as far as I can tell it is my mistake not the vendor’s. So annoying!!!!