…but if you get hold of “It’s Your Funeral”, the 11th episode of The Prisoner, you can see Mark Eden (Marco Polo) as Number 100, Derren Nesbitt (Tegana) as the incoming Number Two, and Martin Miller (Kublai Khan) as the watch-maker. Nesbitt is in a strange blond wig and thick glasses, but Eden looks just like in the surviving pics from his Doctor Who appearance three years before. Miller’s hair is a bit shorter but it’s a surprisingly similar character.

Also Wanda Ventham, who is in The Faceless Ones, Time and the Rani and most memorably Thea Ransome in Image of the Fendahl, is here briefly as a computer attendant, and Angelo Muscat, the recurring Butler, was a Chumbley in Galaxy 4. And for a different cult TV link, Annette Andre, who is the main female character in this story, Number 50, is Mrs Hopkirk in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).

Edited to add: see pics from “It’s your funeral” here and here.

I can’t add anything to what  has written about the current awfulness. I am appalled. (This of course was what prompted my post on identity a few days back.)

To change the subject back to where it ought to have been, in the spirit of , I’ve done a backwards audit of my bookblogging since 2004 (the first full year that I blogged every book I read). My PoC authors percentage is not very impressive – 26/1088, 2.4%, with last year being particularly poor (thanks in part to my consumption of all-white Doctor Who novelisations and Shakespeare plays). The relevant books are:

2004 (3/146 books total, 2.1%)
Fermat’s Last Theorem
Persepolis I
Wild Seed

2005 (4/137 books total, 2.9%)
Babel-17
A Personal Matter
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw
Macedonia: The Bradt Travel Guide

2006 (8/207 books total, 3.9%)
The Kite Runner
Beloved
The God of Small Things
Things Fall Apart
The Color Purple
Never Let Me Go
The Einstein Intersection
Kapilavastu

2007 (6/235 books total, 2.6%)
The Art of War
The Satanic Verses
Wild Swans
Dhalgren
Palace Walk
Mindscape

2008 (5/363 books total, 1.4%)
A House for Mr Biswas
A History of the Arab Peoples
Freedom From Fear
The River of Lost Footsteps
Contested Lands

2009
none so far (of 52).

I should be able to do better than that. At present I have the following on my unread list:

Non-fiction:

• Reading Lolita in Tehran (Nafisi)
• A Universal History of Numbers (Ifrah)
• Search for a New Somali Identity (Hussein Ali Dualeh)

• Kindred (Butler)
• Black Juice (Lanagan)
• Cities of Salt (Munif)
• So Long Been Dreaming (Hopkinson)

• Persepolis II (Satrapi)
• With The Light (Tobe)

Comments disabled; this is more in the nature of a public note to myself.

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/main/news/17179/

Has any non-white writer written for Doctor Who?

(Noel Clarke of course has written for Torchwood.)

I may have finished all the main sequence of BF audios, but am happily working my way through the other bits and pieces of the range, starting with the Paul McGann / Sheridan Smith audios made for the BBC by Big Finish. A definite shift of format here – where the main sequence went for four episodes of around 25 minutes per story, these are single or double shots at 50 mins apiece.

The first of them is a rather good double feature, Blood of the Daleks, introducing new companion Lucie and bringing her and the Doctor to a planet under threat from natural disaster but seeking help from, of all people, the Daleks. There are some neat developments of the history and ideology of the Daleks: riffs on two of the best Dalek stories (Power and Genesis), and then the question of how the Daleks would react to a secondary creation. The politics of the human colony is well thought out too.

I was not so sure about Lucie Miller. This is not a criticism of Sheridan Smith’s portrayal – as a northern lass reacting to the Eighth Doctor’s airs, she is rather good and builds up a memorable presence very quickly. But her back story is much less credible: snatched from (where?) by the Time Lords, and then the Doctor wilfully failing to interrogate her fully. This story came out at the same time as The Runaway Bride, which also had a companion mysteriously manifesting in the Tardis, but dealt with that rather better, I thought.

Good stuff from Anita Dobson as the civilian leader and Hayley Attwell (who was the Duchess’s husband’s lover in The Duchess); also Kenneth Cranham was new to me, and I thought must be Bill Oddie at first, though a glance at the credits put me right.

Horror of Glam Rock is the Funny Episode, with Bernard Cribbins as a 1970s band manager stuck in a snowstorm on the M62, when his band members start getting eaten by horrible creatures. Stephen Gateley from Boyzone appears as an Irish wannabe popstar (incidentally revealing that he is a popstar who is a wannabe actor). There are lots of reasonably good bits here which almost gel together: Lucie’s aunt, the musical aliens, Una Stubbs. I wasn’t quite convinced, partly because Gateley’s performance drags the whole down, but it’s OK.

I think I liked Immortal Beloved best of these. It’s a fairly standard sfnal storyline, the rulers of the planet having a lifestyle which involves horrible exploitation of their subordinates – in this case, clones whose personalities are wiped at maturity for the sake of a full brain transplant. Strong echoes of Zelazny’s Lord of Light, and I thought also a bit of Today We Choose Faces. The Doctor and Lucie have to work out What Is Going On, and then How To Stop It. Not trying to be too clever, not trying to wow us with big name guest stars, just competently done sf.

On Phobos, the Doctor and Lucie find themselves in a leisure resort on the eponymous Martian moon, where there are peculiar things afoot. It turns out to be a bit of a mess of aliens, robots and conspiring humans, with Big Name Actors such as Nerys Hughes and Timothy West. It gets unpacked more or less convincingly, with a couple of lucky escapes and fortunate coincidences. Wikipedia sees links with The Fearmonger and The Impossible Planet/The Satan PitThe Leisure Hive.

I may be unfair to No More Lies but I didn’t think it worked at all. Suddenly the Doctor and Lucie are chasing time-travelling wrongdoers – where did that come from? And where did the timeloop they get inserted into come from? And it’s kinda cute to bring back the Vortisaurs from the first Big Finish story with McGann’s Doctor, but maybe someone could have taken the time to explain to Nigel Havers what he was doing? Because he doesn’t seem to know.

Given the parallels between The Runaway Bride and Blood of the Daleks, I wasn’t surprised when the office environment where Lucie was meant to be all along turned out to be a front for an alien plot. But actually it turns out to be an Ender’s Game scenario, with added Cybermen and feuding Time Lord factions, and a nearly convincing resolution to the storyline of the Head-Hunter. Sheridan Smith gets some very good moments as Lucie, realising the extent to which she has been manipulated by the Time Lords and others. A fair enough conclusion.

Basically, all of these (apart from No More Lies) are decent fare, but none really blew me away with their brilliance. I’m only listening to them now because I’m running out of BF audios to listen to. Perhaps the second series will have higher peaks.

My grandmother grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey, and on the last day of my recent trip to the States I rented a car and drove the 28 miles there from New York to see what I could find. Rather to my surprise and delight the house she had spent most of her childhood in, 144 East 7th St, is still standing, the only older house in its block; it is derelict, with tarpaulins rather than curtains shading the downstairs windows and no sign of occupancy, but at least it is still there.

It was from here that one afternoon in 1906 family friends suddenly and frenziedly swept her away to go and play with their own children. She was not immediately told why, but her mother had just died in childbirth (the baby died too). My grandmother writes about it as if it was her first clear memory; it’s rather weird to see the doorstep from which she was swept away that summer day over a hundred years ago.

My great-grandparents had moved to the much larger house on East 7th Street in 1902; originally their Plainfield home was a block away on 115 East 6th Street, which is also still standing though in worse shape than their later residence:

After her mother’s death, her father married Sallie Brooks, a widow who lived across the road in 147 East 7th St. Unfortunately that house has been demolished and the site is a car park.

However, Sallie Brooks had first lived some way to the south in Plainfield; she had two sons, one of whom, Van Wyck Brooks, grew up to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic. He described Plainfield as “a suburb of Wall Street”. I tracked down the house the he had grown up in, 563 West 8th Street, still on record in the Plainfield archives as the “Van Wyck Brooks House”:

The surrounding area is now called the “Van Wyck Brooks Historic District” and has many houses in it much more interesting than any of the ones to which I have a family connection. I liked this one most:

Gallico wrote a number of sentimental novels about cute animals, and this is one of them: a young boy is turned into a cat, and gets to know the feline world of London (and Glasgow) under the loving tutelage of fellow cat Jennie. It’s sweet and even moving in places. Also not very long.

I’ve been musing on a couple of posts elsewhere about on-line anonymity and its virtues or vices. This reflection is not especially explicitly related to those posts.

I’ve been very fortunate. My various employers have not only understood and accepted, but even to a certain extend expected that I have an intellectual life of my own apart from the day job. So when I decided to start blogging, I also decided that I would not take particular steps to conceal my identity. (Indeed, I recently renamed this journal from nhw to in order to make it even clearer who I am.) And, perhaps surprisingly given the number of people who hate the work I do, I have never had any serious blowback from it at all. Of course, I’m not posting slash (or even het) fics here, and if I am doing so elsewhere I am certainly not going to link to it in any visible way from this account.

I am also restricted what I can say in a public forum even on non-pornographic topics. By the nature of my work, I am privy to a lot of stuff that needs to stay off-line. I have professional relationships which I cannot put at risk by posting about them here. Though I have to say that I think most people with jobs are in a similar position, including, say, the guy who blogged about how crap his temping job was at company X (and named the company), or the barmaid who blogged about how badly her celebrity customer behaved. That strikes me as stupid behaviour, and the fact that they both got sacked is pretty inevitable.

There are ways around it. Livejournal’s locking and filtering can be a useful mechanism for venting about the shitty day you’ve had at work (which in my case, I’m glad to say, are not very frequent.) La Petite Anglaise famously got sacked although she had discreetly maintained her own anonymity and that of her employer; she won substantial compensation for unfair dismissal. Others seem to get away with more.

One of the reasons I keep adding to my own on-line presence in my own name is to try and drown out the occasional hostile commentary I have picked up (and which I also link to in embittered, locked, filtered entries) by ensuring that most of the stuff that comes up when you google me is stuff I’ve written or consented to.

I have of course set up google alerts on myself; the other week an Irish blogger completely misquoted me on a sensitive issue, and I picked it up and demanded (successfully) that he delete the inaccurate paragraph. I was probably the only person who actually read the entry in question, but I felt it worth putting energy into; once it’s online it’s in the public domain.

Online anonymity is going to become increasingly difficult to maintain. I routinely google shortlisted candidates whose CVs hit my desk, looking for evidence of political activism (which, from where I’m sitting, is a Good Thing). Is that an invasion of privacy? I think it’s due diligence, as long as you treat the results of your googling with a serious reliability filter. If a candidate isn’t on Facebook these days, I tend to wonder why not – indicates a lack of interest in new technology and networking which is rather surprising for someone looking for a job in my line of work. (There is a Facebook group for my growing number of ex-interns.)

But I entirely understand why many people whose personal or professional circumstances are less favourable than my own choose to try and maintain on-line anonymity. (And, as stated above, I recognise that my own choice cuts me off from certain topics, at least using the identity of .) I won’t add people whose real names I don’t know to my most private LJ entry filters, but otherwise I don’t really care what degree of anonymity you choose. I may mildly regret some choices – thinking of one person in particular whose friends-locked list of livejournal entry tags is in itself tremendously entertaining reading! – but I respect the fact that they are made for reasons which I have no right to inquire into. edited to add: And if you are an pseudonymous user who annoys me or my friends, I promise I will not devote any energy to exposing your real identity, because two wrongs do not make a right.

We all have choices to make; and they are new choices that previous generations did not have to make.

It’s been brewing for a while, but it now looks like Fianna Fáil are going to join the European Liberals. As a member of both the UK’s Liberal Democrats and the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, I’m very much in favour of this development. I wouldn’t have said that a few years ago, and I suspect that a number of my good friends in both the Lib Dems and Alliance are twitching a bit uneasily at the prospect. Let me explain.

The European political parties are essentially vehicles to enable MEPs to operate procedurally in the European Parliament, only loosely held together by ideology. (The most ideological MEPs – the Euro-sceptic far right – tend to find it the most difficult to form lasting alliances.) We should not be terribly surprised by this. Political parties, in the end, are tactical alliances of individual party members who want to see the world changed in a particular way. They often like to behave as if they are monolithic bodies, but this is rarely the case. In the European Parliament, given the vastly different political bases from which its member sderive support, it is almost surprising that ideology plays as big a role as it does.

There have historically been about half a dozen party groups in the European Parliament: the two big ones are the centre-left Social Democrats, and the centre-right European Peoples Party (Christian Democrats for the most part). Next in size, at present, are the Liberals, and some way behind them are the Communists, the Greens, and a couple of other right-wing groups, plus some MEPs who cannot or will not join larger groups.

Non-Irish readers (if any have got this far) may need reminding that Fianna Fáil, founded in 1926 by Éamon de Valera, has been the largest party in every Irish election since 1932 and indeed has been in government for 59 of the subsequent 79 years (winning again in 2007). They are in trouble at the moment, though, with latest polls putting them not just in second place to Fine Gael but within striking distance of the third-placed Labour Party.

The natural European partnership for Fianna Fáil was and probably still is with the largest block of centre-right political parties, the European People’s Party. But Fine Gael managed to get membership in that grouping at an early stage, and (as the PD’s later did with the liberals) were able to prevent Fianna Fáil from joining. Fianna Fáil’s participation in Europe-wide politics then became to an extent a hostage of the internal politics of the Right in France and later Italy.

We have to backtrack a bit here. Originally, the French Gaullists had sat with the Liberal Group in the old unelected European Parliament. They split off to form their own faction, the European Democratic Union, in 1965, roughly at the time of the Empty Chair crisis. (Meanwhile, Alain Poher’s Republicans were firmly integrated into the European People’s Party, Poher himself being leader of both at the time, and they were able to block the Gaullists from membership just as FG have subsequently done with FF). The arrival of FF in the then unelected European Parliament in 1973 supplied the Gaullists with potential allies, and together they created a block called (with eerie prophetic resonance) the European Progressive Democrats.

After the first elections to the European Parliament in 1979, they were joined by Winnie Ewing of the Scottish Nationalist Party, and by a random Dane. In the 1984 elections, they lost the Dane but gained a few more French MEPs, and renamed themselves the European Democratic Alliance. In 1989 they picked up a splitter from the Greek Νέα Δημοκρατία, but lost Winnie Ewing (the SNP having jumped ship to the Rainbow Group / European Free Alliance which represented various regional parties). By 1995 they had absorbed Berlusconi’s Forza Italia MEPs, two from a smaller Portuguese party (Partido Popular), and the nutcase Samaras Πολιτική Άνοιξη from Greece, and renamed themselves the Union for Europe.

But this was the height of their strength: Berlusconi took his lads to the European People’s Party in 1998, having managed to persuade the other Italians already there not to block his membership. After the 1999 elections, the Gaullists followed Berlusconi into the EPP, having managed to smooth the way with their fellow French right-wingers. Again, because of Fine Gael, they could not bring FF with them.

FF and the Portuguese PP then formed another new group, the Union for a Europe of the Nations, and were joined by the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale from Italy, and another random Dane (Samaras’ nutcases having been meantime rejected by the Greek voters, though unfortunately Samaras himself has since returned to the European Parliament for Νέα Δημοκρατία).They didn’t do too badly in the scramble for new members in 2004 – picking up two small Lithuanian parties, one larger Latvian one, and most importantly the Kaczyński twins’ Prawo i Sprawiedliwość in Poland. Since then they have acquired three more Polish parties and two more Italian groups (the Lega Nord and a random Sicilian).

But it cannot be comfortable company for Fianna Fáil. It was all very well to be in with the Gaullists, but times have changed; when the two largest delegations in your group are the Italian post-fascists and the Kaczyński twins, you may want to start thinking about moving. In any case the alliance with the Gaullists and Berlusconi was really more a matter of style than of substance: these were strong right-wing parties with impeccable nationalist credentials set up by powerful leaders, and yet they felt that the Christian Democrats would suit them best.

In addition, the growing importance of the pan-European parties as political vehicles is starting to rub. At the height of his powers, Bertie Ahern was being talked about for one of the top EU jobs. Although that prospect seems much less likely today, the fact is that the internal dynamics of  EU politics meant that no FF candidate could ever be a serious runner in the first place. FF’s current political grouping is fourth in the pecking order, a long way behind the Liberals, who themselves are not exactly snapping at the heels of the Socialists or the EPP. Given that the Christian Democrats and Socialists are blocked for FF, the Liberals are the obvious next choice.

The Liberal group includes not only parties of the vaguely left-of-centre orientation of the British Lib Dems, but also numerous parties with their roots in free-market ideology such as the German FDP, and some other interesting minorities – Swedish-speaking Finns, the ethnic Turks of Bulgaria, the Catalonians. They also at present include independent Irish MEP Marian Harkin, a small-town politics candidate from  Sligo. On FF’s economic record, good and bad, they would fit as well with the Liberals as with the Christian Democrats (some of whose members are avowedly centrist rather than right-wing in orientation). In the European Parliament, if you want to be effective, it is easier to be a smaller fish in a bigger pond rather than a big fish in a small pond.

I referred earlier to the possible particular concerns of Alliance and Lib Dem members about FF’s membership of ELDR. A few years ago I would have shared them. Fianna Fáil’s traditional attitude to the Northern Ireland problem was not a liberal one. It was based firmly on Irish nationalism, as one would expect from a party with its origins. The Progressive Democrats, now defunct, split from Fianna Fáil at least partly on the Northern Ireland issue. But here again times have changed. The 1998 Agreement, negotiated by Fianna Fáil on the Irish government side, has punted the Northern Ireland problem into the long grass; Fianna Fáil successfully urged the replacement of Articles 2 and 3 of the constitution by referendum. While I still wouldn’t vote for FF, it is clear that they have moved on from the days of Haughey. (And even in the old days, one would have to reflect that if the Ulster Unionists and British Conservatives can sit in the same group as Fine Gael, perhaps liberals can be as flexible.)

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t for a moment think that Fianna Fáil can reasonably be described as a liberal party as matters stand at the moment. Indeed, I think it’s very likely that Fine Gael at some (probably rather distant) future date will drop their opposition and allow them to join the EPP – ELDR have suffered defections in that direction before, most notably the Portuguese PSD and Hungarian FIDESz. On the other hand, I can live with three or four or five FF MEPs swelling the Liberal ranks in the European Parliament; and who knows, the ideology may rub off on them?

Big Finish have returned to an old theme in Who: the search for the Key to Time, as originally carried out by the Fourth Doctor and his Time Lady companion Romana in 1978.

The story starts with a Doctor-less narrative, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, with Ace, the Seventh Doctor’s companion, sharing a prison cell with the mysterious Zara, who is on a quest. I was not impressed, for much the same reasons as Rob Buckley. The plot resolution didn’t make a lot of sense to me (apparently an irreversible brain wipe is not irreversible after all), and Sophie Aldred’s weaknesses as a performer seemed to me cruelly exposed – Laura Doddington as Zara is better, but unfortunately this is not saying much. Can safely be skipped if you want to enjoy the other Key 2 Time stories.

I enjoyed The Judgement of Isskar rather more. First off we have Amy, the new companion and Key-to-Time-segment-trace-in-human-form. Ciara Janson, though very young for a Doctor Who audio companion, is really pretty good in this rather unusual role. On top of that, we have the Key to Time itself, Amy’s evil twin Zara plus sidekick, the early history of the Ice Warriors, and a rather odd insect-like culture, whose set-up frankly is total nonsense but the actors carried it off well. Peter Davison, who has now been doing the Doctor for 28 years, still seems to be in good form.

While The Judgement of Isskar was decent fare, I really enjoyed the latest BF, The Destroyer of Delights. Most of it is set in ninth-century Sudan, at the height of the Islamic caliphate. This is a potentially uneasy setting – Big Finish screwed up with a sensitive historical setting in The Marian Conspiracy, though did rather better with The Settling. This is more on the laughs side (Arabian Nights) than the didactic side, but both elements are there, and in my opinion it works.

It works also because of the cast. Ciara Janson again is good as Amy, backed by comedienne Jess Robinson as slave girl Nesrin; and Will Barton, who played Midge in Survival, gets to show off his fluent Farsi (not very accurate for the Sudan, but few will worry about that). But most of all, we have Peter Davison and David Troughton as the Doctor and the Black Guardian – not exactly a reprise of Daker v Buzzard in A Very Peculiar Practice (though I harboured a secret hope for an appearance by the High Priest Soldeed from The Horns of Nimon) but in one scene in particular gloriously picking up on each other. Each of them also gets some separately very funny moments: Davison with an exchange about the way in which “blue man” actually means “black man”, except, er, when it doesn’t; and Troughton in a brilliant gag from Oscar Wilde. Troughton also gets Jason Watkins, playing the White Guardian, to argue with.

Indeed, one of the other successes of the play is that it takes the concept of the Guardians and goes somewhere completely new with them, really cutting them down to size. And I must say I cheered. There are a few too many beings or entities with ultimate power over all life and matter in the Whoniverse, and it’s good to see that writers can demote them as well as create them. So, Destroyer of Delights is my favourite BF release this year. Admittedly, that’s from a field of, er, two.

This also marks the moment when I have actually listened to every single one of the 118 Big Finish regular releases to date. I’m not going to do a big assessment post now – that can wait until the tenth anniversary of The Sirens of Time in a few months, and in the meantime I can catch up with the other BFs I haven’t otherwise got to. I’ll just say, listen to The Kingmaker and also Spare Parts (both starring Davison’s Doctor, but at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum) and that will probably decide whether Big Finish is for you.

Non-fiction: 12 (YTD 16)

Shakespeare: 3 (YTD 7)

Fiction (non-sf): 2 (YTD 6)

SF (non-Who, but including Homer): 6 (YTD 12)

Who: 7 (YTD 8)

Comics: 1 (YTD 2)

7/31 by women (Ker Conway, Bryant, Augestad Knudsen, Austen, Rowling, Llewellyn, Bartlett) (YTD 10/51)
0/31 by PoC (YTD 1/51)
Total page count ~9,200 (YTD ~14,900)
Owned for more than one year: 7 (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone [reread], A Canticle for Leibowitz [reread], Rasselas, Red Branch, The Road from Coorain, Rocks of Ages, Sarajevo Rose) (YTD 12)
Also reread: Doctor Who Annual 1967 (for a total of 3, YTD 8)

This is surely one of the best New Series Adventures, and one of the better Who novels in general. It is largely set in Bromley, which may not sound like a promising start, but this becomes the jumping off point for the Doctor (Nine, in this case) and Rose to get involved with Bromley’s prehistory, where Neanderthals, local homo sapiens, and humans who have travelled there from the far future are all under threat from ambitious monsters and montrous ambition. Meanwhile, in the early 21st century, Jack Harkness is helping a displaced Neanderthal settle into contemporary Bromley. There is a certain amount of playing the situation for laughs, but also a bit of exploration of what it is that makes us human. The question of whether or not this applies to the Doctor lurks in the background, of course, but it’s more about Rose and the people she meets, with the Jack story line operating as a contrast. Very interesting, and recommended.

Strongly recommend, if you have the time and patience, the Boekenfestijn currently in the Brabanthal near Leuven. Young F and I spent the morning there, and came away laden with cut-price goodies – not just books, but games and craft kits as well. The downside is that the Brabanthal is not that easy to get to without a car (though there are fairly regular buses from Leuven station) and that the internal sorting of the goods is not very thorough (hence my comment about the patience). But a good bit of bookshop therapy to start the weekend.

Morrow had a launch party for this book at Boskone, complete with giveaway toy fire-breathing lizards, so I acquired a copy; and great fun it is, too. I’m not a big expert on either 1940s Hollywood (as recently demonstrated) or on later Godzilla, but I still very much enjoyed this whimsical story with a hard edge to it, about the role of B-movie star Syms Thorley in the secret US project to end the war by unleashing giant fire-breathing lizards on the Japanese mainland. Recommended. (See also Strange Horizons review.)

In H.P. Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark, and other Grotesque Visions, John Coulthart provides us with lavishly and horribly illustrated retellings of both “The Haunter of the Dark” and “The Call of Cthulhu”, along with pictorial meditations on the Kabbalah envisioned as aspects of the Great Old Ones, with invocations by Alan Moore, who also provides a quite bizarre introduction. Tremendous stuff, and would be a good if not very gentle introduction to Lovecraft for those who don’t know his writing.

Purists may complain that Coulthart’s depiction of Providence does not look like the real thing at all. This is true, but misses the point: Lovecraft’s stories are only weakly rooted in the real details of geography, mainly for local colour, and Coulthart was probably right to create a Providence of his own mind rather than worry too much about what buildings Lovecraft might have known.

Coulthart asks, “Sixty years from now, when Stephen King and James Herbert have gone the way of Dennis Wheatley and Seabury Quinn, will their books still be read as Lovecraft’s are today?” He thinks not, and I agree with him.

Benjamin Franklin established the first overseas mission of the United States in 1779, in Paris.

The first ever US embassy was opened by John Adams in The Hague in 1782.

The first ever US consulate was opened in Liverpool in 1790. However, it was closed down a few decades ago.

Guess where the oldest remaining US consulate is? (Click here to see its web-page.)

I have seen very few films.

Thanks to ‘s research, these are all the films ever nominated for Oscars. I have seen 65 of them. I bet you have seen more.

1920s

1927-1928: Wings; The Racket; Seventh Heaven

1928-1929: The Broadway Melody; Alibi; The Hollywood Revue of 1929; In Old Arizona; The Patriot

1929-1930: All Quiet on the Western FrontNinotchkaThe Wizard of OzThe Great DictatorCasablancaAn American in ParisThe King and IThe Bridge on the River Kwai12 Angry MenTo Kill a Mockingbird

1963: Tom Jones; America, America; Cleopatra; How the West Was Won; Lilies of the Field

1964: My Fair LadyMary PoppinsThe Sound of MusicDoctor DolittleThe GraduateOliver!Romeo and Juliet

1969: Midnight Cowboy; Anne of the Thousand Days; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; Hello, Dolly!; Z

1970s

1970: Patton; Airport; Five Easy Pieces; Love Story; MASH

1971: The French Connection; A Clockwork Orange; Fiddler on the Roof; The Last Picture Show; Nicholas and Alexandra

1972: The GodfatherThe StingThe Godfather Part IIThe Towering Inferno

1975: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Barry Lyndon; Dog Day Afternoon; JawsAll the President’s MenAnnie HallStar WarsThe Deer HunterBreaking AwayThe Elephant ManChariots of FireRaiders of the Lost Ark

1982: GandhiE.T. the Extra-TerrestrialTootsieAmadeusA Passage to IndiaWitness

1986: Platoon; Children of a Lesser God; Hannah and Her SistersThe MissionA Room with a View

1987: The Last Emperor; Broadcast News; Fatal AttractionRain ManDangerous LiaisonsMississippi BurningWorking Girl

1989: Driving Miss Daisy; Born on the Fourth of July; Dead Poets SocietyDances with WolvesThe Godfather Part IIIThe Silence of the LambsThe Crying GameHowards EndIn the Name of the FatherThe PianoFour Weddings and a FuneralPulp FictionQuiz ShowThe Shawshank Redemption

1995: Braveheart; Apollo 13Shakespeare in LoveAmerican BeautyChocolatThe Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the RingThe Lord of the Rings: The Two TowersThe Lord of the Rings: The Return of the KingThe Queen

2007: No Country for Old Men; Atonement; Juno; Michael Clayton; There Will Be Blood

2008: Slumdog Millionaire; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Frost/Nixon; Milk; The Reader

Fifth Doctor v Black Guardian
Stephen Daker v Bob Buzzard

Just waiting for the High Priest Soldeed to appear…

(NB Ciara Janson was born between the two series of A Very Peculiar Practice.)