For the first time in my life I’ve been refused entry to a country on, as far as I can tell, purely political grounds. Preparing for my fourth trip in eight months to Sudan, I applied as usual for a visa at the Sudanese Embassy here in Brussels. Immediately the vibes were a lot less positive than previously – not unexpected since the ambassador and consul have both recently been replaced, and their president has just been indicted for genocide so they are not in a mood to be nice to foreigners. Given that I am leaving for a nine day trip this evening, I was more than a little concerned as to what to do.

But it is (probably) all right in the end. The autonomous government of Southern Sudan issues its own ‘travel permits’ which gain you access to its territory (though not to the northern part of the country) and since that is where I am going, I should, in šāʾ Allāh, be able to collect such a travel permit from the Southern Sudan office in Kampala tomorrow morning in the brief window between my flights landing from Istanbul and taking off for Juba at Entebbe. (Fans of Evelyn Waugh will remember a very similar dilemma for William Boot in Scoop.) Wish me luck.

(Explanation of the title of this post – ‘PNG’ = persona non grata. Another distinction for my CV.)

From the extra tracks of Situation Vacant:

“I had a brush with Doctor Who you know… you could say! It was fantastic job, because most of the time I was in bed with Peter [Davison], which was quite nice – coming to work and jumping into bed and have bed scenes – yes, I enjoyed it!”

I didn’t forget about this yesterday, just didn’t spot any 19 July anniversaries that appealed.

i) births and deaths

20 July 1923: birth of James Bree, who played the Security Chief in The War Games (1969), Nefred the Decider in Full Circle (1980) and the Keeper of the Matrix in The Ultimate Foe (1986)

ii) broadcast anniversaries – none

iii) dates specified in canon

20 July 1966: the day that the First Doctor leaves London with Ben and Polly in The War Machines (1966) and the Second Doctor brings them back in The Faceless Ones (1967), only to find that he and Jamie need to find the stolen Tardis in Evil of the Daleks (also 1967).

20 July 1969: Neil Armstrong walks on the moon (21 July European time), an event Martha Jones says she saw four times in Blink (2007).

20 July 2006: forty years on from her depature and return, Polly Wright emails Sir Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart as a result of reading an article about Jo Jones (née Grant) in the first installment of The Three Companions audioplay (released in 12 monthly episodes 2009-10).

This is one of the most audacious ideas Big Finish have had: reuniting Team Tardis from 1983 for three new audio plays, with Peter Davison as the Doctor, Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, Janet Fielding as Turlough Tegan and Mark Strickson as Turlough. (I’m trying to think of any previous Big Finish play which reunited more than two contemporaneous members of the cast of the classic series, and so far failing. Adric’s return two years ago saw him played not by Matthew Waterhouse but, as Peter Davison cruelly said, by an actor.)

Cobwebs is a good start to this mini-season. The set-up is decently spooky: the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough encounter Nyssa – for whom many years have elapsed since she left the Tardis – on a deserted space station filled with, well, cobwebs, also robots and a deranged computer. The plot develops into a tale of cures for space plague and temporal paradoxes, and impressively manages to wrench two of the three cliff-hangers from what is apparently the same situation viewed from different time periods. I wasn’t quite sure that the temporal paradox was satisfactory in the end – to what extent did the Doctor cause his own involvement in the situation? – but perhaps this will be resolved in the two sequels – the loose ends here seem to indicate that the three stories will be linked.

What makes it of course is that the core cast are obviously having a whale of a time getting back into the spirit of ’83. Tegan if anything is more spiky than I remember her – did she ever have a go at Nyssa in the original series? She lets fly at everyone here. Of the cast of creepy scientists and others, Raymond Coulthart stands out as the various artificial intelligences, though the other guest cast (all moderately well-known actors) are decent as well.

After the increasingly fannish progression of the last mini-season (Legend of the Cybermen would be pretty impenetrable to listeners who had not seen a particular Second Doctor story, though very enjoyable to those in the know) I’m glad to say that Cobwebs would probably be accessible to listeners with only a vague knowledge of Who (basically, that it’s about this guy who travels in time), and probably a good starting point for Big Finish newbies. Recommended.

Answers to yesterday’s questions:

1) salted meal, sacred salt, great laurel, father river – Lavinia, by Ursula Le Guin
2) punishable assault, marrow wound, notice that the suit, full outlawry, fifth court, old beardless, nine neighbours, lesser outlawry, lawful notice, lawful request, property forfeit, quarter court, named witnesses, forfeited property, same bloodline, brain wound, greatest lawyers, internal wound – Njal’s Saga, identified by
3) grave handbook, word shaker, swampy eyes, standover man, dream carrier, duden dictionary, drop sheets – The Book Thief
4) most different climates, temperate productions, arctic productions, transitional gradations, modified descendants, naturalised plants, consecutive formations, sessile cirripedes, aboriginal species, unknown progenitor, transitional grades, domesticated productions, larger genera, doubtful forms, modified offspring, transitional varieties, profitable variations, diversified habits, neuter insects, systematic affinity, fossiliferous formations, mere individual differences, mongrel offspring, occasional means – The Origin of Species, identified by
5) camouflage foil, cryo pod, fairy technology, bum flap, secondary door, helmet mike, jade ring, metal man, oxygen canisters, plasma screen – Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code, identified by
6) dying earth, caribou herd, ultimate intelligence, anti entropic fields, arrestor rods, hawking mat, tesla trees, motile isles, farcaster portals, cryogenic fugue, crew clones, mini gun, standard months, flame forests, containment field, universal card, standard centuries, local years – Hyperion, identified by (and almost by ).
7) signs with falsehood, punishment doth await, shameful chastisement, grievous chastisement, thou mayest warn, herein truly, observe prayer, thou thy trust, best knoweth, hath knowledge, hath guided, thy lord, whoso believeth, believing servants, clear tokens, hath subjected, obey the apostle, hath sealed, hath cursed – The Koran
8) sensory motions, gusty air, atomic shapes, atomic compounds, sunlit world, component atoms – De Natura Rerum
9) old lady with mittens, dressing gong, gingerbread men – Charmed Life, identified by
10) expected brain size, altruist genes, sigmoidal growth, giant deer, juvenile features, antler size, periodical cicadas, organic diversity, gall midges, descent with modification – not Jones or Dawkins but Steven Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin
11) white saloon car, gone bad inside, mystery blonde – Dead Souls, identified by
12) divisional inquisitor, old broom, huge men – Witch Week, spotted by
13) ale house, lavash bread, cobblestone alleyway – Pomegranate Soup
14) green wind, third rail – Palimpsest, by Catherynne Valente

And I declare  the winner, by a substantial margin. Thanks to all who had a go.

Paddy Ashdown is one of the people I most admire in politics; I voted for him as Lib Dem leader, was a candidate and election agent for the party in Cambridge in 1990 and 1991, and then was the head of the local branch of the Lib Dems in Northern Ireland for several years (a position in no way incompatible with my Alliance Party activities). A few years later I found myself running the major source of informed but critical commentary on his tenure as High Representative in Bosnia. So I felt that I knew him a little, through politics both domestic and international.

I feel I know him better now. The book takes us through the start of his life in India, growing up in the northern part of County Down (his grandfather, from Rathfriland a bit farther south, supposedly owned the first motor car ever seen in Ireland), his decision to join the Royal Marines and the the SBS, his slipping into diplomacy and espionage, and then the momentous decision to give it all up and concentrate on a political career.

He adopted Yeovil (and the Liberals of Yeovil adopted him) in 1976, and decided then that it would take three elections to win the seat from the Conservatives. In fact it took only two, and he won in 1983 despite limited local resources and spells of unemployment. I think this part of the book is particularly instructive for anyone wanting to take up a career in representative politics; it’s tough for all political parties but particularly for smaller ones.

We then jump almost immediately from 1983 to 1988, when he was elected leader with my vote and many others, and was faced with a party in crisis, bumping along the bottom of the polls and often behind David Owen’s continuing SDP. What interested me here was that Ashdown was always on the lookout for the best political terrain to occupy: equidistance was appropriate between Major and Kinnock, but when Blair moved Labour to the right, Ashdown surged to the centre-left. He allowed himself to get seduced by Blair’s vision of a historic realignment of the British left, but once Blair had failed a couple of critical tests (most notably, binning the Jenkins recommendations for electoral reform) Ashdown decided that the project was over, as was his leadership.

The most moving parts of the book are about Bosnia; the prologue takes us to the camps of Manjača and Trnopolje, located in that long valley between Banja Luka and Prijedor which I came to know well at a later year. Always gifted for languages, Ashdown quoted pithy local proverbs – a particular favourite was “Lako je tuđim kurcem gloginje mlatiti”, which translates “it is easy to beat down thorns using other men’s pricks”. But he also did more in three years to create a sense of confidence and dynamism in Bosnia than the international community had managed in the previous decade. (All this progress, though Ashdown does not say it, was wilfully squandered by the indolence of his somnolent successor.)

The book ends with two bizarre episodes: first, Gordon Brown’s attempt to get him to join the cabinet in 2007 as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and second, his near miss at becoming UN special envoy for Afghanistan – an interesting case study of what happens when all the conditions have been put in place but one key actor (President Karzai) changes his mind at the last moment. I’ve seen some speculation that he may return to the EU as a special Balkan envoy but I fear this may just be wishful thinking from activists rather than anything based on reality.

One constant theme from about Chapter 4 onwards is the presence of his wife Jane. Despite one well-publicised wobble, this is clearly a deep and strong political and emotional partnership, as is obvious to anyone who has met the Ashdowns in action. But what comes out from the book is that Ashdown does draw his strength from his family; as he gets formally invested as a member of the House of Lords, his granddaughter shouts down from the gallery, Je veux faire PIPI! and his sympathy is entirely with the little girl.

It’s a well-written and entertaining book, and I think even those with much less interest than I have in Northern Ireland childhoods, British liberal politics, or Bosnia will enjoy it.

Attracted to this graphic novel by the glowing blurb from Time (which I have found trustworthy in the past); it’s a combination of a) the coming-of-age story which I have enjoyed in the form of Fun Home, Blankets and Persepolis I and II, and b) the liminal fantasies of Neil Gaiman. The teenagers of mid-70s Seattle find strange things happening to their bodies: one grows an extra mouth on his chest, another takes to shedding her skin, a condition transmitted by sexual contact. Small groups of them form and dissolve in the woods, in deserted houses, trying to get out of town. In some ways it’s a similar take on the terrors of adolescence to Buffy; Burns’ stark monochrome rendering gives a bleak and gripping perspective. Not exactly a cheerful book but a memorable one. Slightly surprised I haven’t seen more recommendations of it.

i) births and deaths

18 July 1926: birth of Robert Sloman, who co-wrote The Dæmons (1971), and was sole author of The Time Monster (1972), The Green Death (1973), and Planet of the Spiders (1974) – the season finales for all but the first of the Pertwee years.

18 July 1967: birth of Paul Cornell, who wrote televised stories Father’s Day (2005) and Human Nature / The Family of Blood (2007), the latter based on one of his eight Who novels, and the webcast alternative Ninth Doctor story The Scream of the Shalka (2003), as well as four-and-a-bit Big Finish audios, contributing to The Discontinuity Guide, and editing one of the Short Trips anthologies. If you’re reading this, happy birthday, Paul!

18 July 2006: death of David Maloney, who was one of the great directors of the classic series: The Mind Robber (1968), The Krotons (1968-69), The War Games (1969), Frontier in Space (1963), Planet of the Daleks (1963), Genesis of the Daleks (1975), Planet of Evil (1975), The Deadly Assassin (1976), and The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977) all benefited from his talents.

ii) broadcast aniversaries

18 July 1964: broadcast of ‘A Race Against Death’, the fourth episode of what we now call The Sensorites. The Doctor is trying to save Ian, and tracks down the poison in the city’s water supply to its source. But something ‘orrible lurks in the tunnels…

• Turkmenistan – Darvaza – a set on Flickr
  The gateway to hell
  (tags: photos turkmenistan)

This is the third of the series of audio plays by Simon Guerrier produced by Big Finish as part of their Companion Chronicle series, bringing back Jean Marsh as the short-lived Sara Kingdom, who originally appeared in Doctor Who for a few weeks at the end of 1965 and start of 1966, paired with Scottish actor Niall MacGregor as Robert, a constant visitor to the far-future house in the fens which appears to be haunted by Sara’s ghost.

Knowing that this was about to come out, I revisited the previous two plays, Home Truths and The Drowned World, which both take the established Sara story from The Daleks’ Master Plan and twist it slightly sideways. Here the story is definitely twisted backwards, and we get a lot more illumination not only into Sara’s character – she must always bear the guilt of killing her own brother – but also into the motivations of Mavic Chen, the eponymous Guardian of the Solar System, and one of the most effective villains ever to appear in Doctor Who.

There’s also a fantastic image of elderly prisoners forced to maintain a gigantic clock – I thought this might be based on Aldiss’s Wheel of Kharnabar from Helliconia Winter, but it turns out to be inspired partly by The Hudsucker Proxy (which I haven’t seen) and partly by John Noakes cleaning Big Ben on Blue Peter. (This is revealed by Guerrier in the extras track, where we also find out that Jean Marsh never actually saw her own episodes due to a) not having a television at the time and b) being very short-sighted.)

It doesn’t all make perfect sense, and the three stories will probably confuse listeners who know nothing of The Daleks’ Master Plan. But I enjoyed it.

Andrew Natsios was in charge of the US Agency for International Development from 2001 to 2006, and he knows what he is talking about in this 80-page essay (summary here, also covered by Laura Freschi here). His basic argument is that USAID is now running so scared of the multitude of government bodies to which it is accountable that the effort put into compliance with the petty bureaucratic requirements of Washington bean-counters is squeezing out actual, you know, aid work. (I was referred to Freschi’s synopsis of Natsios by John Ashworth’s mailing list, which is mainly of interest to Sudan-watchers but sometimes carries more general material.)

It made a lot of sense to me. I have twice been on the receiving end of USAID grants and my view was that they were the donor from hell; the reporting requirements bore little relation to the nature of the work (in my last job, I spent hours diligently chasing up and submitting time sheets for my entire team, purely to comply with USAID demands; I am sure that – as I warned management before we formally applied for the grant – nobody in USAID ever looked at them), and indeed the task of servicing USAID’s bureaucratic requirements was generally delegated to tolerant (and often very junior) colleagues in Washington rather than those in the field carrying out the work.

But Natsios’ essay puts this in perspective. If USAID’s demands of its grantees appeared insane to us, that was because the demands made on USAID by what Natsios precisely terms the ‘counter-bureaucracy’ were equally insane. From his account, my first dealings with USAID were at a particularly low point in morale in the mid-1990s. (It probably didn’t help the dynamics between me and my AID interlocutors that my line manager in Washington was married to Natsios’ then predecessor as USAID administrator, though everyone was entirely professional and correct about it.) No wonder the USAID officials I dealt with in the field appeared to be so paranoid; populist politicians in Washington actually were out to get them. 

I remember one occasion when I was instructed to wait in my freezing Bosnian office in Banja Luka on a Saturday afternoon for a visitation from the General Accounting Office, one of the many oversight bodies which kept USAID on its toes. Half an hour after the appointed time, a knock came on the door; it was a steamingly angry US Marine who had been nursemaiding the visitors from Washington and had come to bring me the news that it would be another two hours before they arrived. I had instructions from HQ that on no account was I to miss the meeting, but I did not engage with the GAO with terribly good grace once they did show up. I now realise that this was just one symptom of the arrogance with which the counter-bureaucrats treated the objects of their scrutiny.

Natsios does not argue that all accountancy controls should be lifted. He does however plead that they should be the right controls. Current practice is forcing USAID to look at shorter and shorter timescales, when a genuine development perspective requires committed funding and staffing for the order of a decade. The framework for judging development work is barely being developed; the framework for judging political aid (which Natsios rightly distinguishes from economic and social development) barely exists. Business paradigms can be useful for short-term projects such as disaster relief but should otherwise be taken with a pinch of salt.

If anything I feel Natsios is too nice about emergency humanitarian aid (or perhaps he just doesn’t want to open that particular can of worms here). Everyone involved in post-conflict situations knows that as the single biggest element of international assistance it is also the single biggest locus of corruption and theft. Again, going back to Banja Luka, I remember the tins of tuna in the shops labelled "This Fish Is A Gift To The People Of Bosnia From The Japanese Government Via The World Food Programme. It Is Not For Sale." Normally this would still be legible under the price tag. I’ve seen a couple of scare stories in the media recently about humanitarian aid sometimes being abused by local warlords. Not actually news, guys; and simply impossible to prevent.

Natsios makes one comment with which I respectfully if partially disagree; that "many of the European aid agencies" also suffer "from multiple layers of regulation and oversight." Actually my experience with European aid agencies – with one exception – has uniformly been positive; they treat grantees and potential grantees as partners in dialogue and programming, in the confidence that we share a joint goal rather than that we are trying to steal money from them. The one exception, interestingly, is the European Commission itself, which has precisely the problem identified by Natsios of multiple and conflicting layers of regulation and oversight – in particular, the European Parliament tends to overcompensate for its lack of authority (both legal and intellectual) in foreign affairs by striking at the budget lines and demanding more financial reporting. The EU aid budget has had other problems, not shared by USAID, as well; but I found significant flashes of recognition as Natsios described the dynamics of international aid politics inside the Washington beltway.

It’s a shame. The US has the biggest development budget of any single country (though shamefully remains among the lowest donors in per capita terms in the developed world); on political aid, the US has an expertise and ability that no other country can match. But the political credibility of this vital work seems to have tumbled off the wall of Washington discourse many years ago. While Natsios’ article has mapped out the trajectory of the fall, I don’t really see how anyone can put Humpty back together again.

I came across this meme while browsing my visitor stats and thought I should try it out. Much though I dislike Amazon, it does have some fun bells and whistles, including the listing of Statistically Improbable Phrases from any book where they have got adequate access to the text and interesting enough results. I’ve pulled out a few from books I have read so far this year; can you identify any of them?

1) salted meal, sacred salt, great laurel, father river

2) punishable assault, marrow wound, notice that the suit, full outlawry, fifth court, old beardless, nine neighbours, lesser outlawry, lawful notice, lawful request, property forfeit, quarter court, named witnesses, forfeited property, same bloodline, brain wound, greatest lawyers, internal wound – Njal’s Saga, identified by

3) grave handbook, word shaker, swampy eyes, standover man, dream carrier, duden dictionary, drop sheets

4) most different climates, temperate productions, arctic productions, transitional gradations, modified descendants, naturalised plants, consecutive formations, sessile cirripedes, aboriginal species, unknown progenitor, transitional grades, domesticated productions, larger genera, doubtful forms, modified offspring, transitional varieties, profitable variations, diversified habits, neuter insects, systematic affinity, fossiliferous formations, mere individual differences, mongrel offspring, occasional means – The Origin of Species, identified by

5) camouflage foil, cryo pod, fairy technology, bum flap, secondary door, helmet mike, jade ring, metal man, oxygen canisters, plasma screen

6) dying earth, caribou herd, ultimate intelligence, anti entropic fields, arrestor rods, hawking mat, tesla trees, motile isles, farcaster portals, cryogenic fugue, crew clones, mini gun, standard months, flame forests, containment field, universal card, standard centuries, local years – Hyperion, identified by (and almost by ).

7) signs with falsehood, punishment doth await, shameful chastisement, grievous chastisement, thou mayest warn, herein truly, observe prayer, thou thy trust, best knoweth, hath knowledge, hath guided, thy lord, whoso believeth, believing servants, clear tokens, hath subjected, obey the apostle, hath sealed, hath cursed

8) sensory motions, gusty air, atomic shapes, atomic compounds, sunlit world, component atoms

9) old lady with mittens, dressing gong, gingerbread men – Charmed Life, identified by

10) expected brain size, altruist genes, sigmoidal growth, giant deer, juvenile features, antler size, periodical cicadas, organic diversity, gall midges, descent with modification

11) white saloon car, gone bad inside, mystery blonde

12) divisional inquisitor, old broom, huge men – Witch Week, spotted by

13) ale house, lavash bread, cobblestone alleyway

14) green wind, third rail

I don’t like much of what I know about Zac Goldsmith. But I think that the media coverage of his alleged dubious election expenses should be seen in the context of the bizarre and arcane requirements of British election law. I have twice myself been a candidate, and twice an election agent, in UK elections between 1990 and 1996. I was frankly stunned at the mismatch between the actual costs of the campaign and what was required to be declared to the authorities. This was also the time when Joe Hendron, the MP for West Belfast, was found to have overspent on his expenses but the court ruled that it was OK anyway (in McCrory v Hendron and Kelly [1993], if m’learned legal friends want to look that up).

I’m obviously a bit out of touch, and I suppose it is possible that the system has been drastically reformed since 1996 to bring it into line with reality. But my suspicion is that any breach by Goldsmith’s campaign was almost certainly in line with, or not far out of line from, current practice by all British political parties running candidates in winnable constituencies. Whether or not that current practice is in line with the letter of the law is a different question, and whether the limits set by the law are in the right place is another. But I miss that context in the coverage of the Goldsmith affair.

I hesitate to use the word ‘unfair’ about the current pursuit of Goldsmith. He has a past record of failing to comply with political spending laws. Having inherited vast wealth from his father, he is not exactly under-privileged; and I suspect that his visible fury at the implication that he has managed to buy his way into the House of Commons is because at some level he himself knows it may be true. As I said above, I don’t like much of what I know about him. But I don’t like witch-hunts either.

i) births and deaths

17 July 1925: birth of Hugh David, who directed The Highlanders (1966-67) and Fury from the Deep (1968). According to legend he was also approached as an actor about playing the role of the Doctor back in 1963, but turned it down.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

17 July 1965: broadcast of ‘Battle of Wits’, third episode of what we now call The Time Meddler. The Monk is luring the Viking fleet to attack; and Steven and Vicki discover, to their amazement, that he has his own Tardis.

• Many Eyes: Every Doctor Who villain since 1963 – updated
  Not sure about the data – Sharaz Jek surely only in one story? – but a neat idea
  (tags: doctorwho)

At a reception last night I bumped into a former colleague who I hadn’t seen for a while. We compared notes on the recent election, and discovered that for slightly different reasons we had voted the same way. I was tickled by the idea of my friend, who is one of the least socialist people I know, voting for the far left PVDA+, in his case out of disgust at the raving nationalism of the other parties. We spotted the former Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies on the far side of the room; I dissuaded my friend from going over to ask him why his son, now the leader of the right-wing Liberals, is such an idiot. (It’s a fair question, but the father is probably not the person to ask.)

broadcast anniversary and date specified in canon

16 July 1964 was that day that the last episode of The War Machines, which was also the last episode of the original third season, was broadcast. The Doctor invents a way of neutralising the War Machines, defeats WOTAN, learns that Dodo is staying in England, and takes off with new companions Ben and Polly unintentionally on board.

16 July is also specified in the script of The War Machines as “C-Day”, the day when all the computers in the world are to be linked (and then WOTAN will rule supreme). The problem is, Sir Charles Summers specifies very clearly in Episode 1 that C-Day will be on Monday 16 July; and 16 July 1966 was, obviously since Doctor Who was on telly that evening, a Saturday – the next Monday 16 July was in 1973 (and the previous one, in 1962, is impossible because the Post Office Tower had not yet been built). For reasons we shall explore next Tuesday, this creates other problems. I prefer to think that Sir Charles misspoke and meant Saturday, or the 18th, and the journalists at the press conference were too polite to correct him. This would make them rather unusual journalists, but Doctor Who is a show about unusual people.

15 July 1941: birth of Geoffrey Burgon, who composed the memorable incidental music for Terror of the Zygons and The Seeds of Death Doom (thanks, ), and also the music for Monty Python’s Life of Brian and much else besides.

• Lotus Chinese Floating Restaurant – Docklands, London – Chinese Restaurants
  "What could have been an excellent dining experience (good food, wonderful location) spoiled by dismal service and unhelpful staff. Having called ahead and been told that there was no need to book… we had to flag down a waiter after twenty minutes for our order to be taken… no effort to serve the right dish to the right person… painfully obvious that our main order was not only late but had in fact been lost… At no point did any of the staff we dealt with show any sign of genuine concern… I would not recommend the Lotus."

  As one of the other people in the group, I can confirm that bradders_in_E14 captures the experience rather well, and completely accurately.

  (tags: food london)

Inspired by ‘s experiment, I have tried:

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!