Well, there’s a bit of etymology I had never considered: that the usage of “smashin’!” in English to mean “that’s very good!” originates from the Irish phrase “is maith é sin!” which has the same pronunciation and meaning. Glorious.

Surprising to read that this was the very first anthology of Doctor Who short stories, published back in 1994 (other than the various annuals and fan publications). There is a supposed framing narrative of the Seventh Doctor visiting a California psychic to get readings of objects from his pockets, thus providing the stories, but it is not quite necessary enough to be convincing. Some contributors have since gone on to great things; some have disappeared completely. My favourite was Jim Mortimore’s “The Book of Shadows”, about Barbara Wright marrying one of Alexander the Great’s generals and ruling Egypt – particularly interesting to come to this so soon after Farewell Great Macedon which has a very similar theme. Also I gave a cheer for David Auger’s “The Golden Door” which features Dodo, though it is not very special otherwise. Hoping to read a few more Who anthologies rather than novels this month – you have been warned.

• Chapter XI, which is mostly about Aurelian
  A chapter full of thrilling incident. The catastrophic Gallienus is replaced by Claudius II, and he in turn very quickly by Aurelian, who conducts a series of successful military campaigns – against the Goths, reconquering Gaul and then also defeating the fascinating Zenobia of Palmyra – before being in turn assassinated.
  (tags: gibbon)

I was greatly entertained the other week by SFX’s list of the ten worst SF/fantasy shows of the decade (10: Hex, 9: Hyperdrive, 8: Jericho, 7: The Listener, 6: Blade, 5: Masters of Science Fiction, 4: Painkiller Jane, 3: Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, 2: Demons, and 1: Flash Gordon). But I was rather perturbed to realise that I had not heard of a single one of them; my diet of Who and its spinoffs, and earlier devotion to Buffy, somehow didn’t lead me to experiment with other sf shows. (I did try the new Prisoner, but just like I lasted only 20 minutes.)

So in a spirit of sientific enquiry I obtained and watched all six episodes of Kröd Mändoon, to assess whether SFX’s ratings were reliable. My mature judgement: SFX are probably right. Kröd Mändoon is rubbish, desperately trying to be funny but basically running through adolescent jokes about sex while waving swords about. At least the episodes are only twenty minutes long, and it filled a few commutes nicely.

But never mind what I thought; what do you think?

The Tenth Doctor wakes up in a mysterious museum which appears to contain relics of his past lives; tended by Martha Jones, he finds himself reliving certain experiences of each of his previous nine incarnations, until he works out what is really going on. (Set shortly after Journey’s End.)

With any multi-Doctor story, you have to assess the writer’s success in characterising each Doctor (and companions), and with comics you have to grade the artists’ ability to depict the actors’ faces as well. The Forgotten scrapes a pass mark on both counts. There are some seriously jarring notes in both the One/Ian and Three/Brigadier scenes, which suggests that Tony Lee doesn’t quite get the male companions (Jack Harkness is in the vicinity but unseen at a later point in the narrative). And unfortunately Stefano Martino, the artist for issue 3, is rather awful at portraying Ten, Four and Five. (Pia Guerra and Kelly Yates are at least adequate for the other five issues.)

At the same time there is definitely cause for fannish glee. There are an awful lot of companions featured here (in order: Susan, Ian, Barbara, Steven, Jamie, Zoe, the Brigadier, Jo, Sarah, Harry, Leela, Romana II, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough, Kamelion [!], Peri, Mel, Ace, Rose and Martha) and most of them are at least half-decently done. Putting aside my whining about the recognisability of the faces, the art is excellent. The story has a certain internal integrity and ties in rather well (as it turns out) to New Who’s Season Four, though with a decent number of continuity references to the whole of the series. Thoroughly good fun.

I had never read this children’s classic (nor have I read Burnett’s other well-known works, Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess), but like a lot of people who watched mid-70s kids shows on the BBC I have tremendously fond memories of the 1975 TV version, in which Mr Craven was played by John Woodnutt, aka the Draconian emperor / Broton the Zygon leader, and the three main child characters were played by actors who have since disappeared (though one of them is active in local drama in New Mexico).

I do remember starting to read it as a child, and being deterred by the grim first couple of chapters, where Mary’s parents die and she is sent to her uncle’s isolated Yorkshire home where she is insufferably unpleasant. I wish I had kept going. It is a lovely story of psychological and physical healing through close encounters with the regenerative forces of the natural world and also, y’know, just being nice to people.

The wind must have been worse than I realised today, because I found I had something in my eye a couple of times as I read the last chapters. Perhaps the plotline of a disabled child whose condition markedly improves resonates more with me these days than it would have thirty-four years ago.

Horrible toothache this morning. Persuaded dentist to see me at short notice. I go back to them on Monday. Root canals have been mentioned.

When I first watched The Web Planet two years ago I really didn’t rate it. In my current rewatch, it is the first story where I have revised my opinion significantly upwards. Unlike the other non-Dalek sfnal stories so far it looks weird rather than crap. I think I appreciate it much more now that I have got my watching brain acclimatised to the mid 1960s, as it were; and perhaps it is easier to take it an episode at a time rather than sitting down to watch all six. The Menoptra and Zarbi (and the Animus) are much more convincing aliens than the Voord or the Sensorites, the sets are excellent and the vaseline on the camera lenses adds to the air of alienness. It is no wonder that this was one of the very first novelisations, or that the first Doctor Who annual had not one but two stories set on Vortis. (The Optera and Venom Grubs are still a bit less convincing, but I was able to rise above that somehow.) We also see a lot more of the inside of the Tardis than ever before. Lots of good character moments for all four regulars, with Barbara saving the day.

The Crusade is a well-plotted historical story, such a huge contrast with The RomansMarco Polo and one of the best scripts, in terms of wordsmithing, ever performed on Who. In fact it’s an interesting story for gender roles and racial perceptions: much of the plot is about the parallel fates of Joanna and Barbara, one resisting marriage to Saladin’s brother, the other resisting rape and torture by El Akir – meanwhile Vicki attempts to protect herself by cross-dressing. Hartnell gets some comedy moments with the chamberlain and the clothes merchant (and in one scene both) but the focus is generally elsewhere and this is not a bad thing.

The first episode of The Space Museum is one of the best single episodes of the Hartnell era. The creepiness of the time weirdness in the Tardis, the crew’s apparently ghostly presence on Xeros and then their discovery of themselves as exhibits all makes quite a stunning 25 minutes of television. (See also here and subsequently.) The problem is that once the Moroks and Xerons start actually talking, they are very dull. Somehow Richard Shaw as Lobos the bored and cynical governor / curator comes across as a bored and cynical actor, and sucks the life out of the story on his first appearance. On the other hand Hartnell is well on form (especially in his outwitting of the mind probe) and his absence from Episode Three is sorely felt. Vicki also gets some good moments as she organises the rebels (who sadly are a rather drippy bunch, acting without enthusiasm). This is I think the first of the many stories where the Doctor and friends land on an alien planet and help the rebels overthrow the oppressors, and perhaps the only such story which also involves time paradoxes; either plot line would (and in later stories did) make an excellent yarn but somehow the combination fails to gel. Luckily the Daleks turn up at the end to remind us to keep watching.

The Chase seems like an attempt by Terry Nation to combine the episodic story-telling of The Keys of Marinus (and later, Blake’s 7) with the Daleks and also with his own original genre, comedy. It cannot be described as a roaring success. I note that there is basically a separate story for each episode (the opening two-parter on Aridius, the Empire State Building and Marie Celeste, the House of Horrors, the Doctor’s Double and the Dalek/Mechanoid battle) but it doesn’t really cohere. Apart from the Beatles, the music is the worst for any story so far – soft comic jazz with added xylophones. Some of the monsters are grossly unconvincing – everyone singles out the Mire Beast of Aridius, but the fungoids of Mechanus are worse. Having said that, the Doctor seems more upset at Ian and Barbara’s voluntary departure than for any other companion bar Rose – Hartnell actually seems to be crying at the end. Also NB that the Beatles are the first explicit and direct contemporary reference in Who. (The band Susan listens to in An Unearthly Child are fictional, and Planet of Giants could have been set ten years earlier.)

So, farewell then, the Coal Hill School teachers. Barbara’s role as the more mature woman, part mentor and part viewpoint, was never revived. (The Romana / Adric relationship has some echoes but fails for other reasons; Liz Shaw is brainy but also hierarchically junior; I think Donna Noble shares some of Barbara’s characteristics, but Donna is trying to act younger than she really is, while Barbara is more confident in her own maturity.) Her reduction to screaming terror in An Unearthly Child already seemed uncomfortably out of character, and overall she is a voice of sanity we never quite get again.

This is not to minimise Ian, who is the first of a long run of action-oriented male sidekicks (Steven, Ben, Jamie, UNIT, Harry) but is also much brainier than any of his successors. This does create dramatic conflict with the Doctor, of course, as Ian chafes at being junior male to someone so infuriating. (NB that the successive male companions are all from hierarchies so are more used to taking a lead from their elders.)

There is not much spinoff fiction featuring Ian and Barbara, but I do recommend Paul Leonard’s Venusian Lullaby, set in between The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Rescue. William Russell has made a couple of Big Finish plays, one of which reprises Ian; Jacqueline Hill appears as a misguided priestess in a late Fourth Doctor story but is unfortunately no longer available.

In some ways The Time Meddler feels like a revamp of the very first story, An Unearthly Child, with Steven’s sceptical astonishment at the Tardis, followed by a return to a primitive feuding society in which the key female role is played by Alethea Charlton. It is great fun (with the significant exception of an implied rape scene). Steven gets a great introduction to the Tardis, and we have a nicely depicted Northumbrian community, under assault from contemporary Vikings. Best of all, we have the Meddling Monk, the first fellow time traveller the Doctor has encountered. Forty years on, we know of course what is going on, but if you watch with fresh eyes the suspense is done rather well – we don’t see the Monk’s Tardis till the end of episode 3, though it’s clear that the Doctor and Monk know each other of old, leaving us (and Steven and Vicki) to catch up. Good marks also for the closing sequence of the Tardis crew’s faces against a star field.

The only completely missing story of this run is Galaxy 4, which means we are in a slightly chalk-and-cheese situation. From surviving clips, the look and sound of the alien planet was pretty impressive – I see it is Geoffrey Hodgson who gets the credit for the background noises, which really deserve to be described as incidental music. It’s also a rather interesting reintroduction of the Doctor, now shorn of his original companions, as an ethical hero – the Rills recognise his moral superiority, to the point that they are prepared to sacrifice themselves for him if necessary. And the story itself has a more explicit moral message (“don’t judge by appearances”) than most Who stories. This third season starts with far future allegory and ends with contemporary political commentary, by way of epic and slapstick. Having said all that, unfortunately the actual plot details of Galaxy Four are pretty silly – why on earth would the Drahvins send the Doctor and Vicki to capture the Rills’ ship? What possible scientific basis can there be for the planet exploding? Poor Steven, as Peter Purves bitterly points out, ends up playing a part originally written for Barbara. It is a somewhat wobbly start to the new season.

< An Unearthly Child – The Aztecs | The Sensorites – The Romans | The Web Planet – Galaxy 4 | Mission To The Unknown – The Gunfighters | The Savages – The Highlanders | The Underwater Menace – Tomb of the Cybermen | The Abominable Snowmen – The Wheel In Space | The Dominators – The Space Pirates | The War Games – Terror of the Autons | The Mind of Evil – The Curse of Peladon | The Sea Devils – Frontier in Space | Planet of the Daleks – The Monster of Peladon | Planet of the Spiders – Revenge of the Cybermen | Terror of the Zygons – The Seeds of Doom | The Masque of Mandragora – The Talons of Weng-Chiang | Horror of Fang Rock – The Invasion of Time | The Ribos Operation – The Armageddon Factor | Destiny of the Daleks – Shada | The Leisure Hive – The Keeper of Traken | Logopolis – The Visitation | Black Orchid – Mawdryn Undead | Terminus – The Awakening | Frontios – Attack of the Cybermen | Vengeance on Varos – In A Fix With Sontarans | The Mysterious Planet – Paradise Towers | Delta and the Bannermen – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy | Battlefield – The TV Movie >

More often than not, I complete the last leg of my morning commute by train, arriving at the railway station at Brussel/Bruxelles-Schuman, which is within a hop, skip and jump of my office. Schuman station was opened almost forty years ago (in December 1969) as part of the first axis of what has evolved into the Brussels metro system, between there and the De Brouckère station in the city centre. But I was surprised when I came across a Baedeker map of 1910, almost a century ago, which appeared to show the Schuman station in situ six decades early:

(For those who don’t know Brussels, the station is question is signified by the word "Halte" about half way down the right hand side.)

I delved a bit deeper and came up with this slightly more detailed map:

This time the mysterious proto-Schuman is dignified with the title of "Station" rather than "Halte", again a block west of the Rond Point.

A little more digging reveals that the old station of Wetstraat / Rue de la Loi was opened in May 1865, nine years after the track had been laid between Bruxelles-Nord / Brussel-Noord and the station we now know as Bruxelles-Luxembourg / Brussel-Luxemburg, and closed in 1922. I guess that the commuters of the early 20th century preferred to take the tram between the east and centre of the city, rather than the train which loops quite a long way to the north. Me, I rather enjoy sitting in a comfortable carriage for an extra six minutes.

All trace of the old station has now gone. Today’s Schuman metro/railway station is a fairly horrible modern jumble of stairwells dotted with fast food stalls, slightly to the south of the area marked on the maps as the Wetstraat / Rue de la Loi station, which is now a patch of ground now overshadowed by the west wing of the Berlaymont. Likewise, the covered market shown in the 1910 maps is now a bleak European Commission building beside the escalators which descend from the Rue de la Loi / Wetstraat to the Chaussée d’Etterbeek / Etterneeksesteenweg.

(NB that the metro station marked near the Schuman railway station here is actually Maalbeek / Maelbeek; the Schuman metro station is marked at the roundabout.)

But we can get an idea of what it might have looked like from the surviving closed station immediately to the north, at the Chaussée de Louvain / Leuvensesteenweg, where two slightly overgrown staircases descend to unused platforms from the main road. The railway at Schuman is at about the same depth relative to the surrounding street level.

It is now a jazz venue.

I am left with one rather minor nagging mystery. The Belgian railfan (ie trainspotter) site I linked to above has the new Schuman station at 5.8 km from Bruxelles-Nord / Brussel-Noord, and the old Wetstraat station slightly further south, at 6.1 km. But an inspection of the maps makes it clear that the difference is certainly in the other direction; the Wetstraat station was north of the road, the bulk of Schuman is south of it. Unless there is some strange convention that you measure the start of the station from the leading edge of the platform? Since today’s Schuman is a stop for international services, which I doubt was ever true of the old Wetstraat, I suspect its platforms continue rather further to the north under the Boulevard Charlemagne than was the case for its predecessor. (Or, more simply, perhaps the Belgian railfan site has got it wrong…)

Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
The Swoop: How Clarence Saved England by P. G. Wodehouse
My Name Is Legion by Roger Zelazny
Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller
Ake: The Years of Childhood by Wole Soyinka
The Castle by Franz Kafka
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
Kushiel’s Justice by Jacqueline Carey
King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild
Kushiel’s Mercy by Jacqueline Carey
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama
Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen
With the Light: v. 2 by Keiko Tobe
Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine
Farewell Great Macedon by Moris Farhi
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
This Mortal Mountain – Volume 3: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny
Last Exit to Babylon – Volume 4: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny
Medea by Euripides
Beyond the Sun by Matthew Jones
Fanny Kemble and the lovely land by Constance Wright

Non-fiction: 6 (YTD 86)

Fiction (non-sf): 6 (YTD 58)

SF (not Who): 5 (YTD 84)

Doctor Who / Torchwood / Benny: 6 (YTD 66)

Comics: 1 (YTD 26)

4 (YTD 64/325) by women (Morrison, Goonan, Wilhelm, Armstrong)
1 (YTD 15/325) by PoC (Tomine)
~7,300 pages (YTD 96,200)
Owned for more than a year: 5 (Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang [reread], Islam: A Short History, Time Of Your Life, As I Lay Dying, Notre Dame de Paris)
Also reread: none (YTD 36 rereads)

I may well be at the Tun this Thursday. <small voice>would anyone have a spare bed?</small voice>

Mr Didier Bellens
Chief Executive Officer and President
Belgacom
Boulevard du Roi Albert II, 27
B-1030 Brussels

(Faxed from a neighbouring office)

30 November 2009

Dear Mr Bellens,

I am writing once again (ref my previous letter to you of 26 March) because I am very dissatisfied with Belgacom’s customer service. Your staff have made three serious mistakes in dealing with my problems in the last week, and I still have no office telephone or fax connection.

I called your customer service to report that my line was not working on Wednesday 25 November. In fact, I thought I might have been disconnected due to the late payment of a bill which I paid on 23 November. Your colleague, however, assured me that my payments were in order and that there was a technical fault, which she said would be fixed within the day.

I called again on Friday 27 November to find out what was happening, as the line had still not been fixed two days later. It turned out that in fact your colleague had not even reported the fault on 25 November so Belgacom had taken no action to resolve my problem.

The person I spoke to on 27 November told me that he had arranged for 1) calls to my fixed line to be forwarded to my mobile phone, and 2) that a technician would come to fix the problem on Monday 30 November between 0800 and 1200. In fact, neither of these promises was kept. No action was taken by your staff to fulfil their commitment to forward calls to my mobile number; I cannot do it via your website (or at least I cannot see how I can do it myself).

This morning, expecting your technician at any time between 0800 and 1200, at very considerable inconvenience, my colleague and I waited for him in my office. I had to leave to attend an important meeting at 1130; apparently your technician arrived at 1207, in other words outside the time that had been arranged. The security guard in my office building authorised your technician to go to my office on the first floor, where apparently he was unable to find my colleague, who was sitting in the office waiting for him with the door open, as she had been for some hours.

I have been given another appointment with one of your technicians for Wednesday morning, 2 December. I am very worried, though, because the confirmation message I got for the appointment references a completely different telephone number. I hope that the technician will come to the right address, at the time that has been agreed.

To recapitulate, I was given three important promises by your staff in the last five days, all three of which were broken. I would also add that I have experienced the following additional problems in dealing with Belgacom over this issue:

• It is completely unclear from your website what number should be called in case of problems.
• I have never had less than a 20-minute wait (sometimes more than an hour) to speak to your staff
• Belgacom staff often do not have access to the information needed to sort out my problems.

I expect, Mr Bellens, that you will refund a substantial part of my monthly bill from Belgacom this month, since I have received no service from you for over a week. And I do not know who is going to pay for my lost time and energy in sorting out the mess.

Sincerely,

Once again, they are bloody lucky that their only competitor in the Brussels region, Tele2, is even worse (difficult thought that may be to imagine).

Occasionally my reading programme drags two related books separately to the top of the “to read” pile, and this was one of those occasions. Both of these are excellent and short guides to their respective subjects.

November Books 23) A History of the Middle East, by Peter Mansfield (second edition, revised and updated by Nicholas Pelham)

This really covers only the last two centuries – the period to 1800 is covered in a breathless 35-page first chapter – but I learnt a lot from it. Although I knew the general outline of the fall of the Ottoman Empire (including the Arab revolt) and was also fairly familiar with the highlights of post-1948 history, there was a lot from the three decades between that was new to me, specifically the various imperialist engagements with Arab governments and governance. Really the notion that the US and/or the Europeans could be credible advocates of democracy in the Middle East was always nonsense.

(And on reflection, a further cause for disappointment with Kissinger’s Diplomacy is that it has almost nothing to say on this subject.)

November Books 24) Islam: A Short History, by Karen Armstrong

This obviously overlaps a bit with Mansfield, and also with the books about Muhammad and his successors which I had read a couple of years back. I was expecting a largely political history of the Islamic world, but in fact Armstrong gives a fascinating account of the development of Islamic religious thought in its political context. My own political contacts have tended to the more secularised and secularist end of the spectrum (my professional interests in the Balkans, Turkey/Cyprus, Polisario, Somaliland, my relatives from Bangladesh – only one of those areas being Arabic-speaking) and my contacts on the religious side have been rather eclectic (the Bektashi tekke in Tetovo and the followers of Said Nursî in Nicosia) so it was useful to be reminded that these are only a part of the story.

Armstrong makes the point that Islam was always engaged with government and with politics in a way that few other major faiths have been. This has made the encounter between Islam and the modern particularly painful; not helped by the fact that the advocates of secularism and modernity in the Muslim world have tended to be repressive and dictatorial in their actions, and the international community’s havit of excoriating, ignoring or conniving in the corruption or cancellation of the results of democratic elections does not really help.

I don’t remember the other guy at all; apparently his name is Brian Gorman.

• Reading Gibbon’s "Decline and Fall" – Chapter X, which is mostly about the Goths
  Almost entirely about the barbarians – mainly the Goths – with the deadly succession of shortlived emperors mere background detail. And this seems right – the real story is not the politics of the Empire’s leadership, but the story of how the empire catastrophically failed to maintain the physical security of its inhabitants, the first duty of any state, as the eastern defences crumbled both north and south. It seems to me almost as if the Roman Empire collapsed at this point, the middle of the third century.
  (tags: gibbon)

If you know what I look like in RL, see if you can spot me on this photograph:

http://www.rathmorereunion2010.co.uk/

Continuing my occasional dips into classic literature with this intense stream-of-consciousness tale of a poor Mississippi family, fulfilling their wife and mother’s dying wish to be buried in her inconveniently distant home town. The family dynamics are weird and understated, and the time sequencing is occasionally jarring between the dozen or so different narrators. But the various voices feel very authentic, consistent in word and thought, and it feels like Faulkner supplied a stylistic model that others have followed (it reminded me of both Orson Scott Card and Terry Bisson, two authors from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum). An absorbing and somewhat disturbing book.

This is a fascinating might-have-been, a six episode script for the first season of Doctor Who telling the story of a murder conspiracy against Alexander the Great, by Moris Farhi. It is moderately thrilling stuff: the plot is tight; the characterisation of the Tardis team, Alexander and his generals very good; the sense of historical predestination also consistent with Who as it developed.

But it could never have been made. It’s not because of the numerous hostages to continuity offered by Farhi’s script – language-teaching machine in the Tardis, the Doctor’s belief in God, Susan’s statements about their home time – these would have been weeded out in the editorial process. It is not even that the Tardis crew don’t really impact events (though that is a weakness of the story). It is simply that it is too sad: Alexander’s three closest friends all fall victims to the conspirators, followed by Alexander himself, leaving his realm to be divided between the complicit Seleucus and the loyal Ptolemy. As one of the commentaries in this edition puts it, Barbara and Susan shed more tears in this script than Rose Tyler does in her entire career.

We also have a bonus here, a single episode story (or perhaps the last episode of an unwritten longer story), The Fragile Yellow Arc of Fragrance, in which the Tardis crew visits a planet where one of the locals literally dies of love for Barbara. It is also too sad to ever have been turned into a broadcast story, but I think that today’s fanficcers would love it – it’s totally in tune with the idea of takiing the show’s characters to places that the show’s writers never could.

So this is strongly recommended, though for slightly different reasons than I though it might be: good emotional character-driven writing, and a glimpse of how Doctor Who mght have been.

This cartoon is in today’s European Voice, along with a profile of Catherine Ashton:

There is no explanation in the article of why she is depicted in this way, so a lot of European Voice readers will be mildly puzzled.

I saw a reference to this in Michael Moorcock’s article about writing a Doctor Who book and got it from Project Gutenberg. It is a hundred years old this year, having been published on early 1909.

Moorcock describes this as a “funny, futuristic” book, but it is really a parody of the invasion scare sub-genre. I have read a few other books in that genre – The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, When William Came by Saki, and a collection edited by I.F. Clarke.

Moorcock is, however, correct to describe it as funny, despite the incomprehensible contemporary cultural references and unpleasant racial stereotypes (which as far as I remember are largely absent from later Wodehouse). England is invaded by nine different armies, ranging from the Germans and Russians down to the forces of Monaco and the Mad Mullah of Somaliland (the latter driven to further derangement by a meeting with Irish Nationalist leader John Dillon). The occupied English grumble about the disruption to cricket and the theatre caused by the invaders, but this is resolved when the German and Russian commanders agree to appear as music-hall acts.

Clarence Chugwater, the somewhat nerdy Boy Scout who is Wodehouse’s comic hero, manages to sow dissension between the German and Russian leaders by way of his day-job at an entertainment weekly. The two armies come close to wiping each other out, the Boy Scouts capture the survivors, and England is saved. Hurrah! (In the unlikely event that anyone feels I have spoiled the ending for them, I would point out that all is revealed in the very first chapter.)

This is not a good starting place for reading Wodehouse’s works. (Indeed, it wasn’t even a very good starting place foir writing Wodehouse’s works.) But it is an interesting intersection of the fringes of the sf genre with his rather different genius when both were at an early stage of development.

The Waters of Mars was shown while I was driving across southern Connecticut to catch my plane from JFK last weekend, so it was a day or two before I caught up with it. I enjoyed it. I think RTD is rather good at the base-under-siege stories, and Lindsay Duncan, who I don’t think I had seen before, was superb as Adelaide. (Has anyone remarked on the fact that this story was headed by two Scottish actors putting on English accents?)

Many electrons have been distorted (you can find all the links from ) in discussion of whether the ending worked in terms of Adelaide, the Doctor, and Time. I was satisfied with Adelaide. She took agency back from the Doctor, even though it meant her own destruction; of course, she did this because she knew what her death would mean, and valued that ahead of her life.

The Doctor has now been without a regular companion since Donna left. (We also have a whole bunch of companionless Tenth Doctor books and audios released this year, for those who are prepared to take their Who outside the TV canon.) Donna told him at their first meeting that he needs someone to tell him when to stop, and that latent part of his character was made manifest in the climax of The Waters of Mars. It’s a dramatic twist to show us a flawed hero – still recognisably the same person, but seen by us (and himself) in a different way.

I do hope that The End of Time delivers. RTD has not given us a satisfactory season-ending episode since Doomsday.

I got home to find The Circus of Doom, episode three of the new The Hornet’s Nest series, with Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, waiting for me. A half-day in Paris on Thursday gave me time to listen to it as I walked from the Gare du Nord to my meeting at the Tuileries and back. Unfortunately I wasn’t wildly impressed; it seemed to me too similar to the second episode, The Dead Shoes, with the added demerit of a comedy foreign disabled character (played very well by Stephen Thorne, but that doesn’t really help). I do hope that the fourth and fifth episodes, due out at the start of next month, are an improvement.

As I drove across Connecticut last weekend, I was listening to The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel, one of the Bernice Summerfield plays released just over a year ago. It is a sequel to my favourite New Adventure, All-Consuming Fire, and features two brilliant actors, David Warner playing Mycroft Holmes and Peter “Nyder” Miles as the evil alien, as well as of course Lisa Bowerman herself. It would alas be slightly incomprehensible to those who don’t know All-Consuming Fire but was great fun and consoled me for missing the broadcast on the other side of the Atlantic.

Well, I have very nearly caught up with myself after my 17-day trip which included five countries, five hotels and three overnight flights. I can’t write much here about the actual trip to Juba, but I can share with you some of the photographs I took (below the cut):

This is me in front of the Nile, looking toward the Juba Bridge, taken at Da Vinci’s restaurant

These are my colleagues G and S, old Africa hands both, at our (second) hotel; it was my first trip to the continent, but both of them have been living and working in Africa for over thirty years

We paid our respects at the tomb of the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, Dr John Garang, killed in a helicopter crash four years ago shortly after he had signed the treaty that ended the long-running war

Dr John Garang’s principles live on

Robert, our (Kenyan) taxi driver – call him on +249 955 037 341

The White Nile (properly the Bahr al Jabal) and Juba, from the air

Village seen from the air

The Ethiopian restaurant where I had my first injera and wot

The mango tree I blogged about

Lizard seen in the forecourt of the hotel

Another lizard – different species?

Hope I go back some day.

• reading_gibbon: Chapter IX: The state of Germany till the invasion of the Barbarians
  This chapter does what it says in the title, giving us an account of the Germans largely (and occasionally critically) based on Tacitus, and ending by wondering why they did not make more effort to attack Rome between Varus [9 AD] and Decius [251 AD] (the explanations given being lack of metal technology, and too much internal dissent). But Gibbon also uses it to attach a lot of other philosophical speculation, in particular about the politics, social life and culture of the German tribes as precursors of the civilisation of Western Europe (in particular of course England).
  (tags: gibbon)

November Books 17) Time Of Your Life, by Steve Lyons

I rather enjoyed this vicious satire on television, including biting swipes at Mary Whitehouse and the cancellation of Old Who in 1989; meanwhile the Doctor, just poist-Trial, is wracked with guilt about Peri and with unease about what will happen when he meets Mel. This is the story that Vengeance on Varos was trying to be. (And also has an eerie pre-echo of The Long Game and Bad Wolf.) Introduction of two companions, one of whom is killed off and the other apparently in another couple of spinoff novels.

November Books 18) Millennial Rites, by Craig Hinton

This was the first book I had read by the late Craig Hinton, and I thoroughly enjoyed it: resurrecting Anne Travers from The Web of Fear, references also to The InvasionThe TV Movie, let alone Army of Ghosts.) And as an extra bonus the book is a sort-of prequel to All-Consuming Fire, my favourite of the New Adventures. It also follows through on the logic of the Valeyard from the Trial of a Time Lord, which is less exciting for me but it all hangs together rather well. I shall look out for more of Hinton’s books.

November Books 19) Spiral Scratch, by Gary Russell

Russell wrote Beautiful Chaos, which is my favourite of the New Series Adventures, but this is rather journeyman stuff. In particular, the writing style of the opening passages is very clunky indeed. Eventually he settles down to the story of multiple Doctors and Mels across different universes and pursued by giant time-travelling lampreys, but it’s not his best work.

In summary, both Time Of Your Life and Millennial Rites are rather good, and Spiral Scratch improves after a weak start.

…and I am not being even slightly ironic:

She has a full-sized Dalek in her living room.

• sevenorora: The British "press" at its best?
  Fair comment
  (tags: eu Belgium)
• qcjeph: Seriously, stop it
  Couldn’t agree more!
  (tags: humour funny internet livejournal)

…that is, not the second half of it. I have to say that Cathy Ashton has not made a big splash in her first year in Brussels; the next few years may be a different matter.

More or less by coincidence, this is the second book about Congo that I have read this month. This is the story of an earlier era, of the awful exploitation, rape and murder of vast numbers of Africans under the personal supervision of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Hochschild admits that precise figures are difficult to establish with confidence, but it seems pretty clear that ten million people, half of the population, were killed by Leopold’s regime. He got away with it by a cunning combination of concealment of the amount of wealth he was extracting for his own private hoard, wishful thinking from the white world about the heroic civilising mission of European colonialism, and the conspiratorial silence of the officials involved. For any European, and particularly for us Belgians (as I have now been for a bit over a year), it is essential reading as a reminder of the atrocities of our shared past with Africa.

Hochschild’s subtitle is “A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa”. The heroism described is mostly that of the few investigators who dared to tell the truth of the mutilations, murders and slavery that characterised Leopold’s Congo, the likes of E.D. Morel and Roger Casement. Hochschild regrets that there are very few accounts available from the African perspective. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is about the destructive moral effect of the Congo experience on Europeans like Kurtz; the Africans in the story do not speak, and they were rarely allowed to tell their story in real life either.

My office is a stone’s throw from the Parc du Cinquantenaire / Jubelpark, created in the suburb beyond Etterbeek by Leopold II from his vast Congolese profits. It contains a rather disturbing monument to the Congo enterprise, as well as the pretentious archway which frames the end of the Rue de la Loi / Wetstraat. A favourite excursion for the children is to the Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, where the stuffed animals are cute but the historical record is, in more than one sense of the word, whitewashed. As Hochschild points out, the legacy of the colonial enterprise is visible in the streets of Belgium today, if you know where to look, or indeed if you just look with your eyes open.