I think this is my favourite of the Chrestomanci novels, a prequel with some retracing the steps of Charmed Life, but adding some extra wrinkles which I found more satisfying – the parental marriage disintegrating; the young goddess of cats; the boarding school; the interdimensional smuggling racket; and the answer to the question of what happened to Chrestomanci’s other lives. Young Christopher’s psychological alienation, temptation, and eventual redemption are a very effective story arc. Even though we see even less of the world of Chrestomanci here than we did in Charmed Life, it still feels like a rich and intriguing environment. Like all of the Chrestomanci books it reads perfectly well as a standalone, with no knowledge of the rest of the series necessary to enjoy it.

I am not going into the details of the BHV question, but apparently Leterme has offered the King his resignation after the Liberals pulled the plug (my gut reaction: everyone is being opportunist here). Fortunately, this may mean that parliament fails to vote on the absurd and offensive burqa ban.

In a week when people have been thinking about Iceland for other reasons, it was odd to be reading Njal’s Saga, much of which takes place around the very slopes of Eyjafjallajökull. Though actually I found certain similarities also with my current trip to Africa; Njal’s Saga is in part about modernisation of an agrarian society, and the challenges caused by economic change to traditional patterns of internal conflict resolution. It was recommended to me ages ago by the rarely seen , whose detailed review I strongly recommend; I can’t add a lot more to what she says, except to add my praise for the sparse writing style, the three-dimensional characterisation, the (mostly unsuccessful) attempts to resolve family feuds through law rather than blood, the sense of a small, isolated community which is none the less intimately connected with the rest of the Norse world (one of the set-pieces towards the end is the Battle of Clontarf). Tremendous stuff.

I mentioned the subtle invocation of the Third and Tenth Doctors by the first Labour election spot last week; the latest one is introduced by Peter Davison, who is the only named speaker, and again closed out by David Tennant. As Nick Barlow says, one almost expects them to tell us that there’s a hole in the economy the exact size of Belgium.

• : Volcanic ash: the UK Independence Party weighs in
  Charlemagne fisks a UKIP press release:

  Eurocontrol is not an EU agency, it was not Eurocontrol that ordered the closure of Europe's skies, the closure did not follow a single computer simulation and EU regulations will not oblige airlines to pay the costs of passengers stranded by the ash cloud. Or, to put it more briefly, out of four factual assertions in the UKIP press release, four are incorrect.

  (tags: eu)
• : Is volcanic ash really a political question?
  in which Charlemagne says No Comment at some length
  (tags: climatechange)

Latest rumours to reach me here in Africa are that Sinn Féin are to pull out of the election in South Belfast, in order to strengthen the chances of Alasdair McDonnell of the SDLP holding the seat and also to up the pressure on the SDLP to stand down in Fermanagh and South Tyrone where the Unionists have agreed a joint candidate.

This certainly changes McDonnell’s position from exceedingly vulnerable to rather more comfortable. I don’t, however, imagine that the SDLP are likely to return the favour by withdrawing star candidate Fearghal McKinney in Fermanagh-South Tyrone.

As with Flashforward, I haven’t seen a single episode of Dollhouse so wondered how much entertainment I would get from the Hugo-nominated final episode of the first series, “Epitaph One” (which was apparently never actually broadcast in the US). Not a lot, is the answer. I had no idea of the significance of the space found by the fugitives in 2019; there was no real plot resolution, just setting up (I suppose) more plot for the second series; and there simply was not enough Eliza Dushku. I shall re-watch the three nominated Doctor Who stories before making a final judgement, but I suspect that this is going fifth on my ballot.

Given my travels it took me a couple of days to catch up with this one. Also since my net access has been weak since Saturday evening, I’ve managed to remain largely unspoiled.

I see fan opinion has been a bit mixed on this. I rather liked it. I have no objections to remodelling the Daleks. I am the sort of person who has difficulty in telling the difference between different types of car, and do not credit myself with any fashion sense whatever, but the new version looks to me more substantial and perhaps evil. In my rewatch of Old Who I’m about to hit the most fundamental redesign before this, that of the Cybermen in The Invasion, and I feel this one may have a similar impact.

Still less do I mind the Moffatt/Gatiss idea of actually giving the Daleks a narrative and some sense of continuity. Under RTD the Daleks always seemed to be utterly destryoed and then coming back again for more, rather like the Master in almost every story after Delgado. I think it is rather good that the Doctor explicitly realises that the story is not yet over for them.

I liked the explicit reference to Power of the Daleks and to Philip K. Dick’s classic short story “Imposter” (that last giving Amy her moment of awesome humanity over the Doctor). And a small note, but one where this episode scored over last week’s: Gatiss, unlike Moffatt, seems to be able to dial down the British patriotism even in episodes about the Coronation or Winston Churchill.

But I was not completely satisfied. An RTD who story like this would have been crammed with incident and Significance. This season’s shows seem less heavily laden, less emotionally charged, which overall is a relief but sometimes leaves me feeling that the result could have been mroe substantial.

This is minor stuff compared to what others are going through, I realise, but I am going to tell you about it anyway. My flight from Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) to Juba (Sudan) failed to take off yesterday; the plane had come in about half an hour late from Djibouti and that made it too late for them to get back from Juba to Addis before dark.

So we were all booked into a decent enough hotel and given dinner vouchers etc, and warned to be ready for aq 0730 departure this morning. I woke up at 1 am and couldn’t get back to sleep.

At 4 am they called and said the flight will be further delayed, so we should stay put. Aaargh. I shall try and get some sleep now.

Looking ahead, I do hope that the air has cleared sufficiently by the weekend for me to get home form Africa on something like the original schedule…

The Eighth Doctor Adventures, having tried vampires a bit earlier, now switch to werewolves – though werewolves on a distant planet which is being exploited by ruthless industrialists trying to turn it into a tourist resort. The werewolf bits are memorably nasty and scary; there is a somewhat clichéd but basically endearing tough cop who has to work out the mystery and also what the Doctor and Sam are doing; I wasn’t totally convinced by the political set-up, or by the handling of the climaxes of either half of the book. But if you like Doctor Who and you like werewolf stories you’ll probably like this one.

Connie Willis has won more Hugo awards for fiction than any other writer (and more Nebulas than anyone except Ursula Le Guin), and I’m not entirely sure why. Her best stories have a decent combination of humour and nostalgic mourning; her worst are sentimental glurge. This particular collection includes two of her four joint Hugo/Nebula winning stories – “The Last of the Winnebagos” and “Even The Queen”, both of which are decent enough; I found some of the others pretty incomprehensible (especially the last in the collection, “At The Rialto”) or shallow. Some of them are OK (best being “Jack”, a story of a vampire during the Blitz), and the collection probably represents Willis at the peak of her powers – for good or ill.

Maureen O'Brien is known to discerning Who fans as Vicki, the first ever 'new' companion to join Doctor Who after the series began. She is also the author of a series of seven detective novels about London policeman John Bright, which started in 1989 with Close Up On Death and finished (for now) in 2004 with Every Step You Take. This is the sixth in the series, and takes Bright and his girlfriend Jude to the French Jura to get away from the stress of his most recent case. The lover of the owner of their hotel is gruesomely murdered, Bright himself becomes a suspect in the eyes of the local police, and Jude is faced with even worse problems. I thought this was exceptionally good. We really get into the heads of the two main characters, negotiating a new and fairly brittle relationship against the background of his job and the French holiday which is intended to bring them together but does not have that effect. There is a major plot twist about two-thirds of the way through which I really did not see coming. O'Brien's writing is as gripping as Ian Rankin's, and sexier. I shall start looking out for the other books in the series.

A while back I noted the awful Langbehn-Pond case, where a dying woman’s partner was kept from her bedside by a Florida hospital; attempts to sue the hospital for discrimination eventually failed. The story is dreadful and the hospital’s conduct simply indefensible morally – as the judge pointed out in his summing-up:

the defendants’ lack of sensitivity and attention to Ms.Langbehn, Ms. Pond, and their children caused them needless distress during a time of vulnerability. The defendants’ failure to provide Ms. Langbehn and her children frequent updates on Ms. Pond’s status, to allow Ms. Langbehn and her children to visit Ms. Pond after emergency medical care ceased; to inform Ms. Langbehn that Ms. Pond had been transferred to the intensive care unit, and to provide Ms. Langbehn Ms. Pond’s medical records as she requested, exhibited a lack of compassion and was unbecoming of a renowned trauma center like Ryder. Unfortunately, no relief is available for these failures

The actual legal documents are rather chilling – the hospital successfully argued that their duty of care was entirely to the dying woman and not at all to her family, and cited precedents including the following:

In the Middle District of Florida a plaintiff brought a claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress against the United State Bureau of Prisons (“BOP”), to which the court applied Florida law. Gonzalez-Jimenez De Ruiz v. United States, 231 F. Supp.2d 1187 (M.D. Fla. 2002). Plaintiff’s father was being held in a Florida prison, and because of concerns for his father’s health, plaintiff traveled from Puerto Rico to Florida to visit his father. From April until June the prison officials refused to allow plaintiff to visit his father, told plaintiff that his father didn’t wish to see him, and told plaintiff that his father was “fine.” Since at least May, the father was actually in a nearby hospital being treated for terminal cancer. Plaintiff learned of this from a non-prison official and visited the hospital, where he also learned that his father’s spine and neck had been broken by prison personnel who “had crudely attempted to manipulate [his] spine.” The very next day, plaintiff’s father was transferred to a prison in Texas where he died nine days later, all without notification to his family. Thus, for over a month the plaintiff was denied contact with his dying father, was lied to and denied the most basic information about his father’s terminal condition and the condition caused by the BOP personnel, and was not given information about his father’s transfer to Texas and ultimate death. The court held that because the father was in a federal correctional facility the allegations were not “beyond the bounds of decency” or “utterly intolerable in a civilized community,” and dismissed the Complaint.

I would beg to disagree with the court on its definition of “decency” or a “civilised community”; and I hope that Jackson Memorial Hospital is suitably proud to be able to point to this precedent as justification for their behaviour.

Be that as it may, two days ago Janice Langbehn got a slightly unexpected phone call. It was from President Obama, apologising for the way the family had been treated, and informing her that he has directed that all hospitals in receipt of Medicaid or Medicare funds allow equal visitation rights. The family still has had no apology from the hospital, but I think that counts as a victory all the same.

• Shaw on Ulysses
  via Bookslut, George Bernard Shaw's take on Joyce: "I am an elderly Irish gentleman, and if you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for such a book, you little know my countrymen."
  (tags: ireland literature)

I have my doubts about the UUP/Conservative narrative, but I have to admit they have been running a good campaign so far; their special election broadcast was rather good (compared to the SDLP’s which was awful). Now they’ve pulled a beautiful stunt on the DUP, which may not get many votes but does get my applause for its chutzpah.

The DUP launched this fairly sober poster a couple of days back:

Of course, the ‘voter’ in the picture is a photographic model whose images are available in a commercial archive. The UUP/Tories therefore used another picture of her for a poster of their own:

Glorious. (Perhaps a little too wordy and cluttered, but the basic point is there.)

(Hat-tip to Unionist blogger "Bobballs", via Slugger O’Toole)

I remain sceptical as to whether the voters of Northern Ireland actually care particularly about electing members of the main Westminster parties, but I admire the way the message is being delivered.

Though in the latest development, it seems that both parties may have breached terms of use for the photographs!

The highest capital cities in the world (eight at over 2000m):

Sucre (Bolivia) 2783m, though seat of govt is La Paz at 3660m
Quito (Ecuador) 2763m
Thimphu (Bhutan) 2736m
Bogota (Colombia) 2619m
Asmara (Eritrea) 2363m
Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) 2362m
Sana‘a (Yemen) 2253m
Mexico City (Mexico) 2216m

Data from here. There’s then quite a jump from Mexico City to the next highest, Kabul (1807m).

Having just arrived in Addis, I wondered what it was that was making me feel more tired than I expected, and also why the weather was rather cooler than I had expected for 9° north of the Equator. Now I know.

(Also I bet there is no really measurable difference in alitude between here and Asmara!)

I read the first in this series, the multiply award-winning Take Back Plenty four years ago, and am now at last catching up with the other two. Seasons of Plenty has the massive spaceship Plenty, commandeered by Tabitha Jute at the end of the previous book, setting off for (with any luck) Proxima Centauri, loaded with many inhabitants of different communities and factions, and also endowed with a certain life of its own. Not a lot actually happens – there is a feeling of setting the scene for the third book, while just travelling from A to B. It’s oddly reminiscent of A Hundred Years of Solitude, which I was reading at the same time, except that Plenty really is a closed social space (which Macondo is not). It’s difficult to imagine such an enterprise being quite as anarchic (or indeed diverse) as Greenland paints it, but if you can swallow that premise it is fun.

I had read this many year ago, but it popped up on one of my various reading lists last week. It’s about a small town called Macondo, founded in the middle of the jungle (though also confusingly near the Caribbean, and not far from the Pacific) and the people who live there, especially the Buendía family who dominate Macondo for several generations. Along with the everyday political fare of revolutions, war, execution of the losing side, etc, there are recurrent surges of magical realism, alchemy, peculiar family relations, children born with tails, and towards the end an unfortunate Belgian who gets sucked into it all.

There is tremendous scope and vision here, but it’s not for the faint-hearted. I imagine that Márquez’s dense prose sings rather better in the original Spanish; the Penguin translation doesn’t really sing for me. Also I was mostly reading it in short bursts on planes which probably didn’t help. But it is very enjoyable.

I would not have watched the first episode of Flashforward if it had not been nominated for the Hugo awards this year, and actually that would have been a shame. Literally the only thing I knew about it was that it was a TV series based on a novel by Robert. J. Sawyer, and frankly that was have been enough to put me off: I find Sawyer’s prose leaden, his politics twee, and his characterisation utterly flat.

But the first episode of Flashforward sets up an intriguing premise: the entirety of the human race suffers a blackout and sees the future of 29/30 April 2010 (ie two weeks from now). Our hero, played by Joe Fiennes, is an FBI agent in Los Angeles, who is charged (in the most Sawyeresque and least convincing scene of the episode) with the task of Making Sense Of It All. Sawyer’s novels often take as their theme a Humungous Event which affects the Whole Of Humanity (or at least Canada); this show takes the premise and actually makes it come alive, with the vividly realised effects of the event on real people (including California teenagers who rather implausibly wear plenty of underwear while making out).

I noted with pleasure two actors known from Stephen Moffatt’s previous shows – Alex Kingston as Fiennes’ character’s liaison in Scotland Yard, and Jack Davenport as his wife’s future lover and, it is hinted, the Villain Behind It All. I probably won’t watch the rest, but I do hope Davenport’s character turns out to be a supernatural baddie; it would be rather a career progression from This Life and Coupling.

I would not be at all astonished to learn that the rest of the series failed to build on the promise of the first episode, but this was a very good start. (Please feel free to add spoilers in comments – I doubt that I will get around to watching the rest of it any time soon.)

• elmyra: Why Content Is a Public Good
  Thoughtful economic analysis of it all
  (tags: copyright)

It’s subtle but there: the new Labour election spot begins with Sean Pertwee saying,

You know, my father always said, “Don’t give up.” “Show resolve,” he said. He was so right.

So literally the first person mentioned in the Labour Party’s first election broadcast of the 2010 campaign is the third Doctor Who. Pertwee junior speaks for most of the video, but is replaced at the 2:25 mark by none other than David Tennant (doing his native Scottish rather than Tenth Doctor Mockney). I know that some political leaders like to claim that God is on their side, but I don’t think I’ve ever before seen a political party imply that it has the endorsement of a Time Lord. (Or at least of two of the actors who played him.)

(Hat-tip to .)

In Global Post. You are very welcome to tea in my map-lined office (see page 2).

I note that two of the nominees for the 2009 Arthur C. Clarke Award are by graduates of Clare College, Cambridge. Marcel Theroux was a contemporary of mine – we both matriculated in 1986 and got our BAs in 1989. I didn’t know him particularly well, but I do remember moving into a house on Newnham Road just after graduation as he was moving out of it. I stayed on in Cambridge for another couple of years, as a CUSU sabbatical and then an M Phil student, and left in 1991, which was also the year that the intake of new students included one China Miéville (who I don’t think I have ever actually met).

They are not the only sf authors with a recent Clare College connection: I knew Rebecca Levene rather better than Marcel Theroux when we were students, though she was in the year below us. She is best known in fandom as the former editor of the New Adventures of Doctor Who but is also an author in her own right, and has glancingly referred to her past studies of anthropoliogy and social sciences in her pseudonyms ("Evan Pritchard" and "Carla Marks").

Peter Ackroyd is also an alumnus, but rather before our time. I see also that Nick Harkaway who had a nomination for last year’s BSFA Best Novel would be a contemporary of Miéville’s, and comics artist Sonny Liew appears to have been at Clare several years later.

I read The City & The City a couple of months ago; Far North is in the pile of books to read.

I’ve been faithfully following Willingham’s series of graphic novels about fairy-tale characters adapting to life in contemporary America, and the latest volume has been nominated for the Hugos this year so I was glad to pick it up in Belfast.

After the previous volume saw the end of the grand conflict between the Earth-based Fables and the evil empire which had dominated the story so far, The Dark Ages shows that problems may not be over as other ancient evils come to life, protective magic loses its cohesion, and some of the war wounded are still dying. The pieces are being put in place for future plot developments but there is of necessity noi resolution, so it’s a slightly disappointing story on its own merits. The volume also includes a dubious extra, “Return to the Jungle Book”, where Willingham (who has previously failed massively at Arabic culture) uncomfortably and unsuccessfully tackles India, or rather a parallel world that happens to look like India.

I saw somewhere (and now can’t find) a complaint that Fables Vol 12; The Dark Ages should not have been allowed on the Hugo nominations list as such, that the rules specify “a story or story arc” and that this volume contains “The Dark Ages”, “Return to the Jungle Book”, and a couple of other stories, which should have individually been eligible. If that is what the rules say, and I didn’t just dream it, then I feel their letter may be wrong and their spirit is being interpreted correctly – surely most people buy books, not story arcs? This is only the second year of the Hugo for Best Graphic Story and it is still finding its feet (Paul Cornell missed out on a nomination for Captain Britain last year through administrative error). (Edited to add: Thanks to and for pointing out ‘s posts on this here and here.)

• copperbadge: SAM’S EPIC THREE THINGS ABOUT DOCTOR WHO: LET’S TAKE IT FROM THE TOP!
  Back to the original First Season
  (tags: doctorwho)

From

The Deadly Assassin in the style of new Doctor Who
The Caves of Androzani in the style of new Doctor Who
Genesis of the Daleks in the style of new Doctor Who
The Dalek Master Plan in the style of new Doctor Who
The War Games in the style of new Doctor Who
The Daemons in the style of new Doctor Who

One or two of these would have been improvements… (Well, one, anyway.)

Since last episode was the Introducing Eleven story, this was the Introducing Amy story. It had good and less good aspects, with perhaps some of the weaknesses of Moffatt’s storytelling style showing.

The good first: Karen Gillan is excellent. Amy already feels more three-dimensional than many of her predecessors. She has a disarming combination of confidence and uncertainty. I cheered when she picked the lock with the hairpin; I want to know more about the wedding, as does she. It’s only two episodes in, but she is charming her way to the top of my favourite companions chart.

Moffatt does scary very well. The ‘orrible tentacles, the sinister two-faced creatures, the hooded brethren, the repeated memory wipes, the terrified children, the queen with her untroubled glasses of water, all made a brilliant set of images. The fact that it all turns out to be something of a misunderstanding could have made the whole thing flop, but was handled poignantly (as in The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances.

Liked also: Sophie Okonedo, Terence Hardiman, the child actors.

A great lead-in to next week’s episode as well, rather better than, say, the unseen time-space telegraph which summons the Fourth Doctor to a part of Sussex pretending to be Loch Ness.

The less good: Moffatt sometimes lays it on a bit thick. (Does anyone remember The Girl With Two Breasts?) The parallel between the fate of the Space Whale and the Doctor was a beautiful concept, but hammered home without subtlety.

There were also some significant plot holes, though perhaps I just wasn’t paying attention. I did not catch how the Doctor and Amy managed to clean themselves (and their clothes) so rapidly after their Jonah experience. I was also left a bit confused as to who had set up the machinery of repression, and how. The whale itself, and its tentacular sensory extensions, seem to be completely separated from the Demon Headmaster and the brethren, who themselves of course are allowing the queen to go her own, potentially dangerous, way. It didn’t quite hang together for me.

Also – and this is a peculiar point reinforced by having watched the episode in Belfast – the framing of the UK in the story is a bit problematic. The towers all seemed to bear the name of southern English counties – the remark about Scotland was ambiguous, no trace of Wales or Norn Iron. It will have played well enough in most of the mainland but jarred with me a bit (similarly the Ninth Doctor’s display of British patriotism marrs The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances) and I wonder if it will really help in the export market.

Still, the good outweighed the bad, even if it wasn’t quite up to the standard of The Eleventh Hour.

I’ve been back in Belfast for a reunion of those of us who (more or less) started in Rathmore Grammar School in 1978 and left in 1985, 25 years ago.

I think everyone there was aware that this event was an intense, weird and probably unrepeatable experience; we have all changed in the quarter-century since we turned 18, and of course so has Northern Ireland. Out of 150 or so in our year, around 120 showed up, all I think with a mixed sense of curiosity and apprehension. But it was strangely excellent.

In the run-up to the event I had a nagging worry that I might get trapped near the bar by someone who I didn’t know especially well and didn’t want to talk to (a generic someone – nobody particularly in mind) but in fact everyone seemed to feel the same pressure to mingle. Pretty much everyone was using the opportunity to talk to people they hadn’t seen in 25 years, rather than just hang out with those they still see regularly. Even so, I know that I left after four and a half hours wishing I had talked to more people. (I wimped out not long after midnight; I imagine it kept going for another hour or two.)

I was amazed by how well most of us had aged. (One or two must surely be keeping portraits of their older degenerate selves in the attic.) We men had in general aged less gracefully, I thought; hair loss and greying making us look distinguished if we are lucky. Though the Head Boy of our year still looks cherubic, if a little careworn. He, poor lad, was called on to make a speech late in the evening when most of us had been there for several hours. I don’t think any sound system could have helped his voice be heard against the background of two and a half decades of catchingup on gossip.

A couple of brave trailing spouses had come too, thrust into a social setting where nobody was very interested in talking to them. The cliche is of course that people use these occasions to hook up with old flames; I did enjoy chatting to those I had snogged back in the day, but nothing further was likely to happen – at least one of them had completely forgotten our brief encounter, and for something that seemed so important at the time I confess the details have mostly slipped my mind too.

There were some moments of sadness. The event which sparked the organisation of the reunion had been the death about a year ago of one of our classmates; and while most of us have now become parents, a lot of us have also lost parents, and others (such as the older sister who used to babysit for us, long ago). We are all of course in our early forties; speaking only for myself, I’ve had the worst health I can remember over the last year, with back problems in June, bad flu last month, my continuing dental hassles and the less drastic but psychologically significant experience of getting bifocals.

But for me this was a very affirming experience. Partly it was just that spending an evening with people who are all exactly my age, for the first time since the final school disco (held for some reason in a small club on Donegall Square, rather than the more usual Greenan Lodge Hotel), made me feel that 42 isn’t actually all that old. Partly also that I felt a sense of integrating my roots. I’ve moved further away from Belfast than most of my fellow pupils (one other attendee had come from Italy; a couple of no-shows are across the Atlantic), and my father is twenty years dead, my mother lives in Dublin, my sister in France and my brother in Massachusetts. But the years I had shared with the people I saw last night were an important part of making me who I have become, and it seemed right and appropriate, and slightly wonderful, to raise a glass or three to celebrate that.

Edited to add: A trailing spouse writes.

A few odd things happened over the last two days (which have been spent en route to and in my native city, for a school reunion which will be described in another post).

On the way to the airport, we ran into some congestion on the E40 – not itself an unusual occurrence; but then galloping along the hard shoulder towards us came a horse, trailing blue restraints and followed discreetly by a police car. The traffic jam continued for another couple of km, and then we found its cause: a jack-knifed and battered horse-box, with another horse standing calmly beside the road. At least I was able to say that evening that wild horses (well, a wild horse) couldn’t stop me coming to Belfast for the event.

I had booked into a B&B owned by a past teacher who was offering a discount rate for returnees like myself – I may well have been the only one who took advantage of the offer. But I arrived to find that mysterious “maintenance problems” meant my room was not available. (I noted the presence of a large wedding party in the bar, and drew my own conclusions.) However, they had rebooked me – at the discounted rate – into the Europa Hotel, which was at one point the only top-quality hotel in Belfast and also the most bombed hotel in Europe. It has competition now on the former point (and has long since been overtaken by the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo on the latter) but is still pretty luxurious, so I didn’t complain too much. Much less handy for the reunion, but Belfast is a small city where taxis are inexpensive.

Today I tried a trawl through the bookshops of Belfast, but was very disappointed; lean pickings in Waterstone’s and Forbidden Planet, and most of the second-hand shops have gone; every single one of the cluster of about half a dozen from Harry Hall’s in Smithfield down to the arcade in North Street has closed. I walked over to the charity shops on Botanic Avenue, and then to Book Finders on University Road, but was a bit unimpressed by the range of books available. I’d have thought that the recession might encourage people to offload books onto the second hand market, but I guess the downturn in purchasers’ available resources has a bigger impact.

Except in Book Finders, where I got more than I had bargained for. Sitting outside with a cup of tea, three new books, and a friend, we spotted two other customers running out of the shop – one had stolen the other’s handbag. She had intercepted him just at the pedestrian crossing; I ran over to lend a firm grip to persuade the rather incompetent and demoralised thief to return to the shop while the owner called the police, and I then guarded the front door until they arrived (which they did pretty rapidly, coming from Donegall Pass). They duly arrested him for attempted theft, and took everyone else’s names and addresses for future statements (though I will be surprised if they bother calling me in Belgium; my friend actually had a better view of what happened than I did). We had a good chat with the owners of both the shop and the handbag; not the first theft from there, alas, though the first time I can recall performing a citizen’s arrest (if that is what I did).

Well, home tomorrow, hoping for a quieter journey (and praying that the Curse Of Heathrow will not afflict me this time).

…and President of the National Bank of Poland, and over 80 other people, in plane crash.

(Hat-tip to .)