Well, John Barrowman is great fun as Robin Hood, even if he was a little throaty and there appeared to be some lines going astray occasionally. Still, he did a great rendition of a couple of classic songs. Even better, though, was ventriloquist Paul Zeldin as Will Scarlet, who had to carry a lot of the audience interaction and did it awfully well. Also very enjoyable were the veteran Don McLean (“Crackerjack!”) as Friar Tuck, and Helen Baker and Pete Gallagher, neither of whom I had heard of before, as Maid Marian and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Some of the jokes, thank heavens, were a bit above F’s head but we all enjoyed it.

So, tracking down The News on the way home proved not very difficult. Yet again, they’ve chosen someone I haven’t heard of; I must say I think it’s a bit adventurous to go with someone in that age range, but I guess they know what they are doing. I suppose we will find out in this year’s Christmas special – if there is one.

A quick and not terribly profound read. Rowling presents this as Hermione’s new translation of traditional wizardly tales, with notes by Dumbledore as annotated by Rowling. The stories are all rather straightforward moral lessons; the Dumbledore annotations don’t add much (apart from some curiously misplaced jabs at another Potter, ie Beatrix). Pretty easy to digest, except the middle story which is rather gruesome.

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…Tony Gregory has died.

I hadn’t heard he was ill, though clearly this was not unexpected.

Dear God, a Doctor Who story set in Belgium, featuring Marcel Proust??? Why did nobody tell me about this before????? Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant as Six and Peri check into the Hotel Palace Thermae in Ostende in the year 1913, and find other guests played by Maureen “Vicki” O’Brien, Michael “Vila” Keating, Adjoa “Martha’s mum” Andoh, and most of all Paul Brookes, who I hadn’t previously heard of, as Toby the Sapient Pig. The question of whether or not it is any good is contested among fans: I am in the minority who liked it, especially with all the references to Proust (who is also staying in the hotel and is assaulted by the Doctor off-stage at one point). The showdown takes place in Brussels, and I could more or less see it coming, but it is a fun ride.

1) The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates, by Des Ekin

On 20 June 1631, pirates from Algiers descended on Baltimore in County Cork and kidnapped over a hundred of its inhabitants, most of the population, bringing them back to Africa and selling them into slavery. Ekin describes this as “the most devastating invasion ever carried out by the forces of the Islamist jihad on Britain or Ireland”, and while I regret that he asserts the jihadism of the pirates, who were clearly less interested in religion than, say, Sir Francis Drake or Oliver Cromwell, you can see what he means.

Yet in fact very little of this is quite as it seems. The leader of the pirates was a Dutch renegade whose sons settled in New Amsterdam (or as we now call it, New York), and whose descendants include, for instance, Caroline Kennedy. The kidnapped villagers were a small Calvinist colony in a hostile territory; Ekin makes a good case against a local Irish Catholic dignitary for having organised the pirates’ raid in the first place, and makes it quite comprehensible that when the opportunity of ransom came aroud fifteen years later, only two of the hundred-plus former villagers of Baltimore chose to go home. Algiers had a decent health service, running water in the houses and a decent climate; Baltimore is still lacking in some of these respects and certainly lacked all of them in the seventeenth century. (I was there when I was nine, but did not check the water or the health service; the weather, however, was poor.)

Ekin is a journalist rather than a historian, and (as points out) has got perhaps a bit carried away by his research into what life was like for the slaves of Algiers, his description of which occupies most of the book. (Having said that, his attitude is properly sceptical and his documentation scrupulous; my criticism is of his structure, not his methods.) He also doesn’t appear to have visited Algiers personally, which is not a criticism, it’s just a shame that he doesn’t give us the benefit of today’s perspective.

Even so, the story is a fascinating insight into the world of seventeenth-century maritime commerce linked by the Atlantic Ocean: New Amsterdam at one end, Don Quixote and Zoraida at the other. The fact that Algiers and New Amsterdam were such cosmopolitan places, with people moving pretty freely between them and Western Europe, makes it rather difficult to justify describing one city as “Islamic” or indeed the other as “Christian”. (And makes his choice of words to describe the raid even more regrettable.)

Anyway, fascinating stuff, which has got my 2009 reading off to a good start.

Just to record briefly that I watched a couple more films in the last few days of last year, both of which bring moisture to the eye at appropriate moments.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being – had seen this when it first came out, and loved it then; now it does seem a bit long, but the great moments – Tereza’s frenzied love-making to Tomas, the Russian invasion and immediate aftermath, the idyllic retreat to the countryside and unforgettable ending – remain great.

WALL-E – normally I hate cute robots, but WALL-E and EVE are just made to make you go awww. A couple of musical nods to 2001 (Strauss and Wagner) and Sigourney Weaver as the voice of the computer to delight us older fans; the plot is pretty simple and a lot of its details don’t really withstand scrutiny, but I have to remember that I am not the main target audience.

Some Doctor Who plays that I listened to over the holidays:

The Gathering is a sort-of sequel, sort-of prequel to Lidster’s Six/Peri/Cybermen story, The Reaping – set in 2006 rather than 1984, with Peri’s schoolfriend Kathy now practicing in Brisbane, Australia, and treating a certain Ms Tegan Jovanka for brain cancer. I thought the portrayal of the Doctor/Tegan relationship, picking up after 20 years, was fantastic, and although it leans very heavily on the precedent of School Reunion, it does at least take it somewhere slightly more interesting, with us getting a much better feeling of how Tegan has tried to fit her experience of travelling with the Doctor back into her normal life in Queensland. The ending is rather bittersweet, but very plausible.

Unfortunately the bit of plot with the Cybermen is pretty dull except where it is gratuitously horrific, but I still liked it much more than The Reaping.

At one point in Memory Lane, C’rizz complains with some reason that he, Eight and Charley have been landing in a lot of prisons lately, as the eponymous lane turns out to be yet another one. It isn’t as threatening as some, but it is definitely rather weird, with its prisoners believing themselves happy and usually back in their childhood (which gives an excuse to bring back Anneke Wills as Charley’s mother). I wasn’t completely satisfied by the explanation of the means and motivation of the imprisoning entities, but the cast just about manage to make it work.

If C’rizz has reason to complain about landing in prisons, Hex and Ace can equally complain about war zones, having jumped from 1649 in Ireland to 1917 on the Western Front, in a British field hospital near the eponymous No Man’s Land where mysterious things are happening and a murder has been announced. The story turns out not to involve any alien or time-travelling presence other than our regular cast, but does invoke some scientific knowledge which is probably more advanced than what the British really had at the time. There are some potentially interesting thoughts on the horrors of war, but these are weakened by the plot being a bit too clever by half, and by the implausibility of some of the behaviour the characters display. Also The Settling did the horrors of war rather better.

Jumping ahead to the latest Big Finish regular audio, we have Six and Charley arriving in today’s Manchester where they meet up with a memorable detective character who apparently features in one of the earlier audios I haven’t heard yet, Anna Hope’s D.I. Patricia Menzies. Here she is investingating odd goings-on in a casino that turns out to run by aliens. The Raincloud Man of the title has a special ability which I believe originates in a Douglas Adams novel, and operates here rather for the convenience of the plot. Charley is urged by another character to reveal her secret to the Doctor, but doesn’t do so. However the sparks from Anna Hope’s Mancunian policewoman very much keep it going.

In summary, The Gathering and The Raincloud Man are OK; less wowed by the other two.

On a rather tangentially related subject, most of the people I know who are from Manchester are also lesbians. Is there something in the water?

…the Channel Tunnel.

Some of you reading this will remember those crazy days when to get from England to France, and vice versa, you had to take a boat or an aeroplane. Very early in our courtship, and I took it into our heads to buy a bunch of European papers one Sunday morning in, I guess, 1991. As it happened, it was the day after the tunnelers between England and France had made contact, deep beneath the Channel. It is amazing how many countries found it appropriate to giggle at the scent of garlic which had, no doubt, been detected wafting northwards through the workings.

Nowadays the tunnel sous la Mancheis well open for business. There are two ways you can use it. If you just want to get on a train in Paris or Brussels, and get off in London (or vice versa) then you take Eurostar. The stations are in all cases decently central (Gare du Nord in Paris, matched symmetrically by Bruxelles-Midi/Brussel-Zuid; in London it’s now St Pancras rather than Waterloo, which is a shade less convenient for my own work, but I recognise that I am in a minority). It’s far more pleasant than a plane flight and (if you take into account check-in etc) probably quicker.

The other possibility is to drive your car to Calais or Folkestone (not Dover!) and load it onto the train to whiz under the sea-bed. These trains are about 500 metres long, and the carriages (for cars at least) are double-deckers, so you can work out how many fit on each run. It’s actually much more like the old ferries, except that it is a) faster and b) a train rather than a boat. Whoomph! You’re underground, in darkness (apart of course from the bright cabin lights in the carriages). Whoomph! You’re in England, or France, depending, and just have to remember which side of the road to drive on.

My first memories of both methods are quite special. When we drove to Bosnia from Belfast in late September 1997, we had baby B, then three and a half months old, in our little old Skoda. (We travelled from Kidderminster to Brussels that day, little realising that it would become a regular run for us in the future: then stopped twice overnight in Germany, before reaching Zagreb and then Bosnia.) Poor B reacted badly to the change of pressure in the tunnel, and howled all the way. Of course, 35 minutes is not all that long, but it seemed a bit eternal at the time. (She also reacted badly in those days to Bosnian mountain passes. She grew out of it, and anyway doesn’t travel much any more.)

A year or so later, I took a weekend in Brussels to mutually size up a potential employer. I needed to be in London anyway for a funeral, and my prospective boss recommended that I take the Eurostar, declaring that “it is a most agreeable experience”. Indeed it was, and this led to a sufficiently good set of first impressions that I ended up working for him for the next three years.

I must say that if I can avoid it I will never fly between Brussels and London again. Even doing it for connecting flights to elsewhere in the UK, my experience has been hellish – I remember one attempt to return from Belfast where I got home ten hours later than I expected thanks to the Curse of Heathrow. Quite apart from the environmental impact, the train is simply a lot more pleasant.

It’s weird, though, in a way. I am just old enough to remember the last of the Apollo missions, when moon landings were current affairs and the Channel Tunnel a fantasy. Now it’s the other way round.

I tried this last year, and it proved rather a useful guide to books I might like to read during the year. So, this is the list of unread books on my shelves (excluding, rather arbitrarily, Doctor Who and Shakespeare): which of these have you read?

Book review of the year

Non-fiction

Best in category: Anne Frank’s Diary, a re-read for me (though this edition has all her original text in); a searingly unforgettable account of life in an intolerable situation.

Also excellent: Primo Levi’s Periodic Table, and Alain de Botton’s guide to Proust.

Very very good: The Know-It-All, A History of the Arab Peoples, Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, Trillion Year Spree, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, Aung San Suu Kyi, Thant Myint-U, Julian Cope on megaliths, Daniel Keyes on Algernon, Patricia Fara on magnetism, Ellis and Connolly on Tudor Ireland, Bose on conflicts, Doctor Who locations, Tat Wood on Who seasons 22-26 (and The Movie).

Very good: Longitude, Lawrence of Arabia, Bertrand Russell on Christianity, Julius Caesar on Gaul, Tony Judt on Europe, Jeremy Paxman on the English, David Starkey on Elizabeth, Zlata’s Diary, Alastair Cooke, Amos Oz on Israel, Jonathan Bate on Shakespeare, Tulloch and Alvarado on Who, Time Out on Rome, Fage on Africa, Glavin on extinction, Nancy Soderberg on US foreign policy, A History of the Black Death in Ireland, The Battle of the Boyne, The Cecils, English Place Names, Jean Sibelius, Dublin Castle and the 1916 Rising, Becoming Somaliland, James Pettifer on Kosovo, Cyprus 1974 from Ankara’s viewpoint, ex-President Clerides reminisces, making a new Cyprus constitution, Brussels versus the Beltway, Arthur McMurrough Kavanagh’s hunting expedition in the Adriatic, Sarah Steele’s biography of Arthur McMurrough Kavanagh.

Good, with reservations: Alison Weir on Elizabeth I, Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches, Andrew Roberts on Waterloo, Christopher Hitchens on Cyprus, The Penguin Dictionary of Jokes, Teach Yourself to Learn a Language, Endgame in Ireland, Oxford Take-Off in Russian, After-Dinner Stories, The Fantastic in Irish Literature, Berlitz Turkish, Rosemary Freeman on Edmund Spenser, Ten Historical Fantasies, analyses of the Lisbon Treaty, local history of our village, McCormick’s biography of Arthur McMurrough Kavanagh.

OK: Ancient Wine, essays on Liberal Democracy and Globalisation, Kenneth Kavanagh’s biography of Arthur McMurrough Kavanagh

Less good: Daniel Grotta’s biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, David Cohen’s biography of Arthur McMurrough Kavanagh.

Couldn’t finish: God’s Politics by Jim Wallis, Daughters of Britannia by Katie Hickman, A History of India by John Keay.

Fiction (not sf):

Best in category: Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s story of life among the declining gentry of the early nioneteenth century.

Also excellent: Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, The History of Sir Richard Calmady by Lucas Malet, Proust vol 6, Roald Dahl, The Office vol 2.

Very very good: An Instance of the Fingerpost, Mystic River, True History of the Kelly Gang, No Great Mischief, When Nietzsche Wept, Proust vol 5, The Office vol 1, A House for Mr Biswas.

Very good: Don Quixote, The Prince of Tides, Death in Holy Orders, The Moving Toyshop, Saturnalia, Odd Man Out.

Good, with reservations: Gösta Berling’s Saga, Emma.

OK: Peter Abelard by Helen Waddell.

Couldn’t finish: The Duke and I by Julia Quinn

Comics (other than Doctor Who)

Best in category: The Fixer, Joe Sacco’s questionable tales from Sarajevo before, during and after the war.

Also very good: Alias vol 4.

Good: Fables vol 1, The Burma Chronicles, Berlin vol 2, Macedonia.

Less Good: Tales of Human Waste.

Shakespeare Plays

Best in category: A Midsummer Night’s Dream – a marvelous, inventive play.

Also excellent: The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It.

Very very good: Richard III  

Very good: Julius Caesar

Good, with reservations: The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV part I, Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, King John, Henry VI Part I, II and III.

OK: Richard II, Henry IV Part II.

Less good: Henry V.

Awful: The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost.

SF and fantasy (other than Doctor Who)

Best in category: Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, which I hadn’t read before.

Also excellent: Heaney’s Beowulf (which is certainly fantasy), The Owl Service, Nation, Silverberg’s Hall of Fame anthology.

Very very good: I Am Legend, The Last Hero, Summerland, Vellum, Halting State, Farthing, The Cornelius Quartet, Teranesia, Brasyl, Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology, Collected Short Stories by E.M. Forster (which ten are fantasy, one sf, and one not), Improbable Frequency (stage play).

Very good: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, The Atrocity Archives, Islands in the Net, Matter, Expiration Date, The Rediscovery of Man, The Child Garden, Rogue Moon, The Phoenix Exultant (Wright), The Execution Channel, The Carhullan Army, the most recent Captain Underpants, Children of the Atom by Wilmar Shiras, C. E. Murphy’s Negotiator trilogy, The Seeds of Time (Wyndham collection), Healy’s New Tales of Space and Time anthology, 5th Interzone Anthology, Year’s Best SF 13 (Hartwell/Cramer 2008 anthology), National Lampoon’s Doon.

Good, with reservations: The Possibility of an Island, Jhereg, The Faded Sun Trilogy, Gene Wolfe’s Peace, Gossamer Axe, Naked to the Stars by Gordon R. Dickson, Template by Matthew Hughes, the first seven Captain Underpants books, Walking Dead by C.E. Murphy (I read the pre-editing draft; no doubt final version will be great).

OK: The Historian, Abarat, The Pilgrim’s Regress, The Last Colony, The Ill-Made Mute, Great War: Breakthroughs (Turtledove), Sunrise Alley (Asaro), Humility Garden (Felicity Savage), Rising of the Moon (Flynn Connolly).

Less good: Little, Big (Crowley), Again, Dangerous Visions (Ellison-edited sequel anthology), Wandering Stars (Jack Dann’s Jewish sf anthology).

Poor: Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer, Astra and Flondrix by Seamus Cullen, Masters of the Fist by Edward P. Hughes.

Awful: Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice.

Couldn’t finish: Shadowkings (Michael Cobley), The Golden Transcendence (Wright), The Sword of Shannara.

Doctor Who spinoff fiction (print)

Best in category: All-Consuming Fire by Andy Lane, in which the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Benny encounter Sherlock Holmes and the Great Old Ones. Glorious.

Also very very good: Eye of Heaven, Time and Relative.

Very good: The Feast of the Drowned, Winner Takes All, Love and War, Escape Velocity, Venusian Lullaby, City of the Dead, Year of the Intelligent Tigers, Psi-Ence Fiction, Campaign, The Dark Path, Decalog 2 anthology, The Doctor Who Storybook 2007 (anthology), Doctor Who Complete Ninth Doctor Comics, The Thirteenth Stone (Sarah Jane audiobook), Revenge of the Slitheen (Sarah Jane novelisation).

Good, with reservations: The Infinity Doctors, The Witch Hunters, Drift, Corpse Marker, Terry Nation’s Dalek Special, Doctor Who Storybook 2008 (anthology), Invasion of the Bane (Sarah Jane novelisation), Eye of the Gorgon (Sarah Jane novelisation), Warriors of Kudlak (Sarah Jane novelisation), The Glittering Storm (Sarah Jane audiobook), Another Life (Torchwood audiobook).

OK: The Stone Rose, Alien Bodies, The Gallifrey Chronicles, Interference (both books), Theatre of War, Cold Fusion, Last Man Running, The Roundheads, Doctor Who Monster Book Vol 2, Doctor Who Annual 1966.

Less good: Match Of The Day, The Adventures of K9 and Other Mechanical Creatures, Doctor Who: The Pescatons.

Doctor Who audios

Best in category: The Kingmaker, by Nev Fountain, a hilarious inversion of the story of Shakespeare’s play Richard III. (I won’t do a comprehensive review here, and they are not strictly speaking books anyway, but at some future moment I’ll do the whole Big Finish run.)

Doctor Who novelisations

Best in category: The first one published, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, by David Whitaker. (General roundup here.)

I won’t nominate a single Book of the Year, as it is too much like comparing apples to geodes; but I will admit that it is Anne Frank who comes back to mind when I least expect her to.

This is the list of books I’ve read this year – please tick if you have read (including started but not finished) any of them They are blocked out by category, and (except for the very last section) ranked in order of appearances in the LibraryThing catalogue. Books in italics have a female author or editor credited. I’ve split two collections (by Roald Dahl and Dav Pilkey) where their components appeared to be better known; interestingly, this wasn’t the case for Cherryh or Moorcock. A more analytical post is on its way, explaining which ones I actually liked.

Two Second Doctor novels to finish off the year.

15) The Roundheads, by Mark Gatiss

Gatiss takes the Second Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie back to late 1648 for a pure historical story: they get involved with Oliver Cromwell and a plot to liberate Charles I from captivity. I’ll have to say up front that this didn’t completely work for me. Simon Guerrier handled this period (setting his story a year later, and the other side of the Irish Sea) far better in The Settling

Hooray for Sir Terry!

On Israel/Hamas: Ian.

Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League won bigtime! Even if I didn’t have family connections, I would still hope that this is a chance for a new start.

Meanwhile on the other side of the ocean (not Atlantic or Pacific), President Yusuf has resigned. The French Presidency of the EU salutes his efforts for peace in his country, efforts which were invisible to other observers. Unless you count the army disintegrating.

14) Sometime Never, by Justin Richards

Well, if I’m going to read more of the 8th Doctor novels at all, I’m going to have to start doing it in sequential order. Dipping into the series – in this case because I was interested to see a different treatment of the Princes in the Tower than we got in The Kingmaker – tends to confront me with characters (in this case Miranda and Sabbath) who clearly have deep significance for the author and for followers of the series but who are unknown to me. There are some vivid bits of description, and a twist at the end which I would have appreciated more if the whole book had not felt rather like fan-fiction in a canon I don’t know much about.

(I note by the way that I’ve read about the same number of Eighth Doctor Adventures as [Seventh Doctor] Missing Adventures, but in general find the latter more approachable as a series. Is this a widely shared view?]

12) The Genius of Shakespeare, by Jonathan Bate

was kind enough to get me both this and Bate’s more recent book on Shakespeare for Christmas. Since I’m just over halfway through my absorption of the Complete Works at present, I decided to read the earlier book (first published 1997, updated 2008) at this stage and save the more recent until I’ve finished the plays (probably March given my Christmas break).

Well, it’s a jolly good look at various aspects of Shakespeare, trying to identify what, if anything. The first half includes a chapter on the documents we have relating to Shakespeare, another on the Sonnets (where, against his will, Bate identifies his own candidate for the Dark Lady), a brilliant one on the authorship question, an analysis of Marlowe’s inflience on Shakespeare, and a look at the way Shakespeare uses his other sources.

His line on the authorship question is entertainingly solid. Myself I have tended to find the sheer irrationality of the supporters of alternative candidates (the Earl of Oxford, Bacon, etc) a fairly strong strike against them. Bate points out that the Oxfordians, for instance, tend to regard every line of the plays as a work of sheer unassailable genius; while we who believe that the man from Stratford wrote them are also able to accept that he occasionally had an off day.

The second half of the book broadens out to consider Shakespeare’s impact on subsequent literarature. I wondered a bit about this – it seemed to me a bit of a stretch to credit Shakespeare posthumously for the Romantic movement in England, France, Germany and Scotland; perhaps if I knew more about literature of that period generally I could assess to what extent Shakespeare’s works really were central. I found a couple of the other stories told here more compelling – the claiming of Caliban as a heroic anti-colonial figure by Aimé Césaire, and William Empson’s linkage of quantum mechanics with shades of meaning in the plays (I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t heard of Empson before, and doubt I will read him in the future, but I’m glad he existed and made the argument). Bate also pours scorn on the likes of Kenneth Baker, the Bowdlers, and anyone else who idolises Shakespeare without really thinking.

Bate’s explanation of why Shakespeare has been so successful is a) that he is simply very good at creating characters and situations which the audience / reader can relate to, b) that as an actor himself he was better at the technical aspects of writing for the stage than most of his more academic contemporaries, and c) that he was fortunate enough to be writing at a time and place where his works were preserved and propagated after his death. He finishes by wondering if, had the Spanish won in 1588, Lope de Vega might now be the set text for literature around the world rather than Shakespeare. A postscript takes the story forward over the last ten years, when Hollywood discovered Shakespeare (Shakespeare in Love, and Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, which like the rest of you he rates higher than I did).

Anyway, a good and thought-provoking book. He tends to bring in one play in each chapter to support his points, which has whetted my appetite for those I haven’t reached yet.

What I’ve read/listened to this year, with a few omissions (either where Librarything hasn’t got the cover, or where I haven’t finished the books yet). Big review post coming on Thursday, but I wanted to get this done now because I think it looks pretty. More or less alphabetical by author.

I have a new distraction on Facebook.

I’ve just finished a game of Diplomacy, playing as Germany, on Facebook; I have agreed a draw with Russia, after France dropped out – I could almost certainly have pushed my advantage and gained an extra three centres to get to the magic 18, but it would have been a rather hollow victory, and I felt I could live with the shared glory of a draw.

I used to be a big fan of postal Diplomacy; in the various archives you will find misguided advice from me on playing Turkey, and other such ephemera. I was also the second president of the Cambridge University Diplomacy Society, which I’m glad to say is still going strong. (The guy who founded the society went straight into the British diplomatic service after graduation, and is now an ambassador in central Asia.)

I dabbled occasionally with the email versions on the various Judge computers, but never quite got the hang of it – I see my ranking is about 14,000th out of 21,000, though one of my successors as DipSoc President is currently the highest rated player.

However, I like the Facebook interface a lot more. I’m not wild about the maps – took me a while to work out how to read them – and I’m not wild about the way you have to check to see how close you are to the deadline. But the basics of running the moves and communicating with other players seem to work OK.

I do wonder if there is a greater propensity for people to miss deadlines in Facebook games. In the other one I’m in at the moment, I’m clinging on with a single centre as Russia after myself missing the Spring 1901 deadline. In the one that has just finished, England and France both missed two deadlines and went into civil disorder. But I guess it just shows that the most important criterion for winning the game is to simply stay in it. (I remember a game back in my postal days where I fought back from two centres to ten thanks to a similar fortuitous dropout [Edited to add: Sad to say I just discovered that the conscientious Tom Tweedy, who GMed that game and invetned the rules for postal Sopwith, died on Christmas Day].)

Anyway, this is not going to be the obsession that Scrabulous was, back in the day; but if I have one or two games going at a time, it’s a pleasant enough diversion.

My last poll combined two quite separate thoughts – I see responses are now well into three figures!

The banana question has puzzled me for a while. I heard on a radio programme many years ago that monkeys in the wild open their bananas from the “other” end, wondered why, tried it myself, found it was easier and have done so ever since. It has puzzled me that so few people do it that way. I can cite Slate in my support, but then again who takes advice from on-line economics columns about how to eat their food?

The bluestocking question was raised in my mind by Loades’ biography of Cecil, in which he uses it a couple of times of well-educated Elizabethan women. I found the term somewhat quaint and a little confusing, and wondered whether this was a case where an old-fashioned term is considered offensive by those to whom it would be applied today (as is often the way with old-fashioned terms). The answer in this case seems to be a general but not unanimous “yes”.

Thanks for the input, everyone!

Here are a few more films that I have seen this year which I had forgotten about.

8) Operation Condor / 飛鷹計劃

Stars Jackie Chan with as his female sidekick the Spanish actress Eva Cobo – she was actually the reason I watched it because she is one of my twins. Anne knew nothing of Jackie Chan, so was enlightened and amused by the stunts, all of course performed by Chan himself. The plot, such as it is, is basically a ripoff of Raiders of the Lost Ark with Jackie being Harrison Ford. Eva, my twin, doesn’t do a lot more than make Jackie look good and scream occasionally. But it is good fun.

9) Einstein and Eddington

This stars Andy Serkis (Gollum) and David Tennant (yes) in the title roles. From my former career as a historian of science I knew some of the background – indeed, I have spent days of my life at the Observatory in Cambridge going through the papers of Eddington’s predecessor in the Lowndean chair – but actually the personal and political side of the two men’s lives is brought out much more successfully in the play than the scientific history – indeed the climactic scene (where Tennant, as Eddington, declares Einstein right) falls rather flat. But the use of various settings to convey Cambridge, Zurich and Berlin was rather good (especially if you are not too familiar with the real locations). I also loved Jim Broadbent as Sir Oliver Lodge, whose correspondence I also went through at various times; his physical resemblance to the original was quite uncanny.

10) Romeo + Juliet

The Baz Luhrmann version with Leonardo di Caprio and Claire Danes, set in contemporary L.A. The two leads are good – indeed Danes is absolutely fantastic – but pretty much nobody else is (apart from Pete Postlethwaite as Friar Lawrence), and the excellent music, direction and location settings (Venice Beach rechristened Verona Beach) have to compensate for the lousy performances. Arkangel did this better. Interesting to learn from Jonathan Bate’s book that a lot of the alterations made to the script by Garrick in the mid-eighteenth century (cut the banter, downplay Rosaline, show Juliet’s funeral, Romeo dies after she awakes not before) are repeated by Luhrman here; I wonder if Luhrman knew about Garrick’s revisions?

A couple more to come.

I found my MP3 player! It was in the cupboard along with my various skin oinkments.

11) Nation, by Terry Pratchett

A lot of people have been raving about this, and why it is the best Pratchett book for ages. It is set in a mildly alternate universe, in what might or might not be the South Pacific (the mutiny on the Bounty and Moby Dick are referenced); in Pratchett’s characteristic liberal humanist way, religion and good behaviour are explored, in a coming-of-age tale for his two teenage protagonists. Lots of gently witty one-liners, but the one that will linger with me longest is the observation that “the perfect world is a journey, not a place“. Awfully good.

I can’t imagine how I missed this story at the time: several weeks ago, Nathalie Lubbe Bakker, a Dutchwoman working in a Belgian bar in New York, wrote a blog entry about the atrocious behaviour of the Belgian defence minister who dropped in one evening after a particularly pointless taxpayer-funded transatlantic flight. Nathalie then mysteriously got sacked a few days later, after a mysterious phone call from the Belgian defence ministry to the bar owner, once the story had hit the Belgian press.

On the one hand, if you are working in any industry and write blog entries about your dealings with your customers, identifying them by name, it is a clear violation of professional confidence, and you can expect to lose your job. (Had she just been a fellow customer, that would be a completely different matter, of course.)

On the other hand, if you are the Belgian defence minister and you turn up stinking drunk in a New York bar and start singing bawdy Flemish folk songs, you can expect that the story will get back home. There is some justice in the fact that De Crem lost his job, along with the entire government, last week; with any luck, he will be among the ministers who don’t return once the new government is formed, whenever that is.

10) The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo, by Joe Sacco

This is, in a sense, a sequel to Sacco’s brilliant Safe Area Goražde, but following just one person, Neven, a Sarajevo Serb, a former fighter on the Bosnian side in the war who Sacco got to know as his “fixer” when he first visited Sarajevo just after the war ended in 1995. (I first went there myself in early 1997, and the city of Sacco’s book is definitely the one I knew.)

Anyone who has worked in that sort of environment knows the essential nature of the fixer. Sacco captures it well: but it’s not just about Neven’s murky past and dubious present, it’s also about the dodgy wartime goings on between the “legitimate” government and its bully-boys (and one of the personalities featured in the book was in the news again recently, having apparently committed suicide earlier this month) and the inevitable resulting questions about who is right and who is wrong; and it’s also about the effect that Sacco’s observation has, not only on the people and situations he is observing, but on Sacco himself.

If there is a weakness in the book, it is perhaps that the casual reader might take Neven’s experiences as in some way typical of the Bosnian (or any) war. Neven is a somewhat unusual character. But then again, we are all of us unusual characters, and perhaps Sacco is right to just take a single personality and follow him through the conflict, in his own words and as others reported him. Anyway, well worth reading.

9) Berlin: City of Smoke, by Jason Lutes

I really enjoyed the first volume of this series, and I really enjoyed this one as well. Covering the period from June 1929 to September 1930, it doesn’t have the same narrative climax (May Day 1929) as the previous book, but it does have a strong set of internal plot arcs. Marthe and Kurt delve deeper into the heart of what makes the city tick, but at the cost of their own relationship; Kid Hogan, an African American jazz clarinettist, finds love and corruption in the city’s music halls; and the marginalised, the exploited, the Jews, the Communists, the unemployed, all have their stories at least illuminated if not necessarily told. I’m only sorry that, first, we will presumably have to wait another four years for the next and final volume, and second, that it will presumably only take us to the Nazi seizure of power. But this is strongly recommended.

Before I get into spoiler territory, I just want to say that this is definitely the best of the four Christmas specials (five, counting the one in 1965).

Things I loved: The steampunk atmosphere. The montage of all ten doctors (New Who has taken a while to get to grips with the heritage of the series). That moment near the beginning when Tennant is actually wondering if Morrissey is a better Doctor than him. The line at the end where Ten admits that his companions break his heart. Dervla Kirwan (though I regret she played the part with an English accent, if at least with an Irish name). A Cyberman plot that comes close to making sense and doesn’t contort itself unduly for the sake of continuity.

Things I thought were a bit silly but didn’t spoil it for me: The Cyberking (reminded me too much of a Megazord, except less convincing). As eloquently puts it, the “Cyber-shades” were crap (though at least IMHO less crap than the Cybermats). The line about Rosita being Jackson/Frederic’s future nursemaid probably sounded much less offensive in RTD’s head than it came over on screen.

But all in all, really good stuff.

Tree, before the massacre of the wrapping paper:

My special new hot-water-bottle holder (aren’t I a lucky boy!):

U with musical Miffy/Nijntje:

F and Anne went to visit B:

F successfully entertained her with one of her presents:

᾿Εν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος, καὶ ὁ Λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν, καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ Λόγος.
Οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν Θεόν.
πάντα δι᾿ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἓν ὃ γέγονεν.
ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν, καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἦν τὸ φῶς τῶν ἀνθρώπων.
καὶ τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει, καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν.

I posted Luke 2:1-14 last year and the year before, and felt like a change this year: the opening words of the Gospel of John provide a theoretical rather than historical underpinning for the Incarnation. This is not the description of the Nativity that starts Matthew and Luke; this is an attempt to unify logic and emotion, to bring the λόγος of the philosophers into the same conceptual universe of the θεός of the believers. It is almost impossible to express the inexpressible; the evangelist has a go at it here, and I doubt if his formulation will ever be improved on.

It has particular personal resonances for me because it gave me my first real introduction to the idea that other languages could open up complex concepts which you will never get if you stick just to the one translation (or even just the one language). For this, as for many insights into how we can and do use words, I am deeply grateful to the incredible Charles-James N. Bailey, who bravely attempted to teach me New Testament Greek back in 1979, and started with this passage. I have, on a few occasions since, experienced the thrill of intellectual discovery, of insights opening up that I hadn’t considered possible. But my first such experience was to encounter the poetry of John 1:5 in the original:

καὶ τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει, καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν.
kai to phōs en tē skotia phainei, kai hē skotia auto ou katelaben.
And the light in the darkness shines, and the darkness it not has-taken-in.

That last “taken-in” is my own humble attempt to gloss the Greek κατέλαβεν (from καταλαμβάνω), a verb which means varyingly “to seize”, “to grasp”, “to comprehend”, “to catch”, “to overtake”, and even “to detect”. The contrast is clearly meant to be with φαίνει in the first half of the verse: but the word chosen by the evangelist to describe the struggle between light and darkness, as seen from the perspective of the dark, defies any simple translation. That was when I fell deeply in love with languages, and the subtleties of meaning that cannot be translated between one and the other.

For a published translation, you can use only one word, of course. I find “comprehended”, “apprehended”, “overcome”, “overpowered” in various English translations, but none of them really gets the original Greek. I think that the French “saisie” and Dutch “begrepen” are nearer the mark (not so sure about German “erfaßt”). With some difficulty I have tracked down an Anglo-Saxon version: “And þæt leoht lȳht on þȳstrum ; and þȳstro þæt ne genamon.” Somehow that is rather satisfying, as “genamon” is the past participle of both “niman”, “to take forcibly, hold, seize, catch, take away, grasp, pluck up, carry off, take away” and “geniman”, “to grasp, comprehend”.

Anyway, all of that aside, I wish everyone a happy and relaxed day, especially if, like me, you are celebrating it.