33) The Doctor Who Storybook 2007, edited by Clayton Hickman
34) The Doctor Who Storybook 2008, edited by Clayton Hickman

Great fun for the Who fan of any age. Each of these features seven lavishly illustrated text stories and a comic strip, perhaps particularly aimed at the 9-13 age group; authors in both books include Gareth Roberts, Tom MacRae, Robert Shearman, Nicholas Briggs, Justin Richards and Jonathan Morris, with Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss in the 2007 volume and Paul Magrs and Nicholas Pegg in the 2008 one. The 2007 volume features Rose in all the stories, the 2008 volume has Martha in most of them.

The two best stories are the top and tail of the 2007 volume, by Gatiss and Moffat respectively. The first is a standard enough plot of the child central character getting involved in the Doctor’s adventure, but Gatiss has given Jason a convincing narrative voice in his diary. The other is a particularly creepy Moffat tale told ostensibly as an IM conversation, with a twist at the end which raises it to a higher level.

Two minor points that grated a little with both books. First, several of the stories, as noted above, feature a child getting involved with the Doctor for the duration of the story. The child is always a boy. I know that this is not invariably the case, as with Sally Sparrow from the 2006 book (which I haven’t otherwise read), and of course you have Martha or Rose as senior kickass females, but it just struck me. Second, the artwork is sometimes a little wobbly – particularly Billie Piper’s features seem difficult to capture. On the other hand Brian Williamson’s art is particularly good, as in this illustration from Robert Shearman’s 2007 story, “Untitled”.

Isn’t that brilliant? Note especially the past Doctors’ faces in the goo!

Well, this week my commuting reading has been the eight novelisations of stories featuring Lalla Ward as the second incarnation of Romanadvoratrelundar. As so often, a somewhat mixed bag.

25) Doctor Who and the Destiny of the Daleks, by Terrance Dicks

A pretty standard transcription of what was on the screen, including the rather threadbare justification for Romana turning into Princess Astra from The Armageddon Factor.

Doctor Who and the City of Death, by David Lawrence

Alas, we miss out on the novelisation of the best story from Season 17 – it is the only one of the five unofficial ones produced by the New Zealanders which is not currently available on their website, and you can't get paper copies for love nor money.

26) Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit, by David Fisher

As with Fisher's other novelisation, Doctor Who and the Leisure Hive, he has bulked out the narrative with more background and characterisation; and unlike his other book, this one scores by being able to describe what the author imagined rather than the exceptionally naff special effects that were seen on screen. And I love the footnotes. Definitely one to look out for.

27) Doctor Who and the Nightmare of Eden, by Terrance Dicks

This story had some of the least convincing monsters and effects ever, compounded by very few of the actors appearing to take it at all seriously. Rather surprisingly, Dicks has turned into his most memorable novel from this period of the show's history, a fairly impassioned parable of drugs and altered realities which comes over much better on the page than on the screen. The best Dicks novel of this run.

28) Doctor Who and the Horns of Nimon, by Terrance Dicks

This was a fairly blah story on screen, and Dicks has not managed to make it any more interesting on the printed page.

29) Doctor Who and Shada, by Paul Scoones

Scoones says in the commentary to this book that he always wanted to be Terrance Dicks when he grew up. There are both good and bad aspects to that, and Doctor Who and Shada is basically a workmanlike Dicksian retelling of what appears on screen in the footage of the story that was actually shot, and what should have appeared on screen based on the scripts. Rather more interesting, actually, is Scoones' detailed analysis of exactly which bits were lifted directly into Douglas Adams' later novel, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and of Tom Baker's ad libs during the punting scene.

Since I read Doctor Who and the Leisure Hive quite recently, that takes us to

30) Doctor Who – Meglos, by Terrance Dicks

For once, Dicks has filled out a lot of background to what was otherwise a somewhat rootless story. The Earthling whose body Meglos borrows gets a name; we get the history of Zolfa-Thura in terms which very nearly make sense, and the whole thing is a definite improvement – though, alas, from a poor starting base.

31) Doctor Who – Full Circle, by Andrew Smith

Hmm. Smith is of course determined to give his own script a fair wind, but the end result is not very special; it is one of those rare occasions when the book doesn't quite do justice to the special effects of the original series. Of course he gives us a bit more background to the Alzarians and their origin – or not – on Terradon, but if anything it rather confuses the picture.

Since Doctor Who and the State of Decay was the first novelisation I read as I was getting back into them, we move on to

32) Doctor Who and Warrior's Gate, by John Lydecker

This is really good, the best book of this run; Romana II departing in style. Lydecker / Gallagher seems almost to be writing a standard genre sf book that the Doctor, Romana and Adric happen to have wandered into – Romana wanting to wander off on her own, of course. (And K9 gets perhaps his best characterisation in any of the novels, even if he is out of order for much of the story.) Of course, with it being the printed page rather than the screen, the story has to be told in a rather different way; but the author, whatever his name is, really rises to the challenge.

So, in summary, Doctor Who and Warrior's Gate, Doctor Who and the Nightmare of Eden, and the two David Fisher books are the ones to look out for from the Romana II set. She herself comes over rather better as a character than Romana I – I think partly because Terrance Dicks wrote relatively fewer of these novelisations, and did them relatively better. Certainly the character arc of her reluctance to return to Gallifrey is well conveyed in the later books, and her banter with the Doctor reads cutely in most of the earlier ones. Though it is a bit irritating that Dicks likes to describe her as "small" – compared to Zoe she is a giant, surely?

Right, only two more Fourth Doctor books left; but they will have to wait until next week.

Like Tetris? Like maps? Try StateTris!

• 14, 9
  14² – 9² = 196 – 81 = 115

• 11, 2
  11² -2² = 121 – 4 = 117

• 12, 5
  12² – 5² = 144 – 25 = 119

• 11, 0
  11² – 0² = 121 – 0 = 121

• 22, 19
  22² – 19² = 484 – 361 = 123

• 15, 10
  15² – 10² = 225 – 100 = 125

• 64, 63
  64² – 63² = 4096 – 3969 = 127

Of course, these were the smallest number pairs for each point in the sequence; and I used odd numbers only. The full sequence from 115 to 127 would be

• 115: 14, 9; 58, 57
• 116: 16½, 12½; 30, 28; 58½, 57½
• 117: 11, 2; 21, 18; 59, 58
• 118: 30½, 28½; 59½, 58½
• 119: 12, 5; 60, 59
• 120: 11, 1; 11½, 3½; 13, 7; 14½, 9½; 17, 13; 21½, 18½; 31, 29; 60½, 59½
• 121: 11, 0; 61, 60
• 122: 31½, 29½; 61½, 60½
• 123: 22, 19; 62, 61
• 124: 17½, 13½; 32, 30; 62½, 61½
• 125: 15, 10; 63, 62
• 126: 11½, 2½; 12½, 5½; 13½, 7½; 22½, 19½; 32½, 30½; 63½, 62½
• 127: 64, 63

113 and 127 are the lowest pair of consecutive prime numbers whose difference is 14.

24) Vellum, by Hal Duncan

Yeah, I know, I’m behind the times, I should have read this two years ago – most particularly because I bought it when the author was at MeCon and then I forgot to get him to sign it.

It was tough work – this is not light reading – but I found it unusually rewarding for such an ambitious book. The plot doesn’t really resolve – I may even get the sequel to find out if it does – but I really admired Duncan’s delicate handling of linguistics and culture. So many authors get the language thing partly (Stephen Baxter) or completely (Robert Jordan) wrong; but Duncan does have an ear for words and how they may change and re-form over the centuries. Likewise, I was impressed with his confident handling of MacLean’s Socialist Glasgow, revolutionary Dublin and the southern Caucasus – not quite at expert level in the latter two cases, but at least free of obvious howlers and successfully engaging my interest to keep me reading.

And I love the basic concept of the Book – indeed, my most serious complaint is that the book wanders away from the Book at the end. No doubt this is resolved to a certain extent in the sequel.

Anyway, a fascinating, rewarding read.

The answer is 64, 63. The sequence of numbers is therefore:

• 14, 9
• 11, 2
• 12, 5
• 11, 0
• 22, 19
• 15, 10
• 64, 63

It is entirely mathematical; this isn’t the complete sequence; for all but the last I have given the smallest pair of numbers that fits the sequence (but 64, 63 is the only pair of numbers that fits there).

So, what pair of numbers should come immediately before the 14, 9 pair? Again, there is only one correct answer.

How much do you know about the Netherlands? (Warning – Flemish quiz.)

Hat-tip to .

Full disclosure: I got 5 out of 10.

What pair of numbers fits next in this sequence?

• 14, 9
• 11, 2
• 12, 5
• 11, 0
• 22, 19
• 15, 10

1. First Name: Nicholas – definitely not “Nick”!
2. Age: 41
3. Location: Belgium; work in Brussels, live some 20 km to the east.
4. Occupation: I’m an international relations specialist. I work for an organisation that gives diplomatic advice to marginalised actors in international diplomacy.
5. Partner?: , together since 1990, married since 1993.
6. Kids: Three. Here is a rare picture of all three with their mother, taken two years ago. Our oldest no longer lives with us.
7. Brothers/Sisters: One of each: and .
8. Pets: The tadpoles! Which are growing legs. It’s all very exciting.
9. List the 3-5 biggest things going on in your life:
   1. Hoping to hold a garden party, all being well, next Saturday. (You can come if you like, but do let us know.)
   2. Anticipating small surgical procedure at end of next week.
   3. Moving to a new office on 1 July.
   4. Planning the summer holiday in Ireland.

   None of which is terribly dramatic, but I don’t mind!

10. Where and for what did you go to school for? I translate this as “what did you study in higher education” rather than “what is the point in attending high school”. I did a BA in Natural Sciences and an M Phil in History and Philosophy of Science at Clare College, Cambridge; and a Ph D in History of Science at the Queen’s University of Belfast.
11. Parents: My father died in 1990; my mother still lives in Dublin.
12. Who are some of your closest friends?: Well, let’s see who comes to the aforementioned garden party next weekend…

23) The Conquest of Gaul, by Julius Caesar

An interesting first-hand account of seven years of campaigning (essentially the summers of the years from 58 to 52 BC) by the Roman army in what is now France, with excursions to what is now Germany, Belgium and England. The Penguin edition is not bad at all, with decent footnotes drawing attention to where Caesar is nuancing the story to make himself look better (the book was published shortly after his return to Rome, engaged in the struggle which ended with him becoming Dictator in 49 BC). The maps are OK but as usual I wished they were more detailed. There must be scope for a coffee-table book with glossy photographs of landscapes and archaeological finds following his footsteps through France.

Apart from Caesar himself, the most interesting character is the Gaulish rebel leader Vercingetorix, who led the final revolt in 52 BC and was presumably a visible prisoner in Rome at the time the book first came out. Caesar puts in his mouth several set-piece speeches to his followers and allies, and gives him credit for a plan to kick the Romans out of Gaul which came close to success.

There are a few other names here that one knows from their later careers. One sub-commander in Caesar’s victory over Vercingetorix, who had also commanded an innovative Roman naval campaign on the Atlantic coast a few years earlier, is “young Brutus”. Another is Mark Antony, who otherwise only appears in the postscript, written by Caesar’s friend Aulus Hirtius after the assassination (when of course Antony’s fortunes were rising rapidly).

The most striking thing about the book is the detailed description of the waging of war in the first century BC: depending as much on psychology and local micro-politics as on military superiority. The Gauls never seem to have resorted to guerilla warfare, preferring to have large armies in the field under one or more warlords. (Perhaps guerrilla warfare requires an egalitarian political ideology?) I was struck also by Caesar’s account of the battle of the first landing in Britain in 55 BC, as much as anything because the only other example I can remember of a contested landing of an invasion force on either side of the English Channel is D-Day, almost exactly 2000 years later.

Anyway, a fairly quick and not too taxing read, helped by the scholarly apparatus.

Browsing through WikiPedia inspired by the book I am currently reading brought me to a fascinating set of objects that I had not previously heard of: the ancient dodecahedra.

Sjra Wagemans thinks they are a calendrical device.
Lloyd Kilford on the Bonn dodecahedron.
The Druidical Research Institute has an overview (in Dutch).
Good article in French.
The Kenchester dodecahedron in Hereford.
Another from Gill Mill in Oxfordshire.
Here’s one in Limerick (though I suspect originally from France)
A squashed one in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
George Hart has nice pictures including an icosahedron as well.
A German schoolkid’s essay on the one from Schwarzenacker in the Saarland.
Paul Garland’s Flickr photos: 1, 2, 3, 4

Fascinating.

22) God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, by Jim Wallis

Rather sad to report that I’m not going to finish this, even though I agree with a lot of what the author is saying – particularly, that the right wing’s capture of the religious high ground in the 2004 presidential election was both crucial and dishonest. But the style rather put me off – Wallis is preaching rather than analysing, and shows off about his own achievements rather too much. I got the message in the first couple of chapters, and don’t really feel I need to read the rest – especially since the battle lines of 2008 are rather more blurry, but not really in line with Wallis’s prescription.

When I was a Cambridge undergraduate, I was in the same yeargroup and at the same college as this guy. Mind you, in the year below us at Clare there were two Andrew Smiths.

Samuel Pepys finds himself in a slightly more extreme situation, having dinner with no less than four Richard Brownes, three of whom were knighted and thus Sir Richard Browne.

Tell me, does this ever happen to you?

How we read online.

21) A History of the Arab Peoples, by Albert Hourani (with afterword by Malise Ruthven)

I’ve been working through my backlog of unread history books this year. This one is a bit unusual in that I am not and never have been professionally engaged on the areas in question (actually not quite true – Hourani has a half page on the Western Sahara, but it is marred by inaccuracy). It’s an interesting survey – I have been reading a bit about the origins of Islam (both Rogerson’s books and this piece by Patricia Crone) but Hourani’s book starts from there and takes the narrative up to the late 80s. (The 2002 afterword, by someone else, suffers from not saying enough about Iraq.)

What I most liked about the book was the emphasis on social and economic as well as political history – and that is a big admission for me, because normally I only like the political history bits. Hourani modestly claims that in this he is following the example of the great Ibn Khaldūn, but I’m sure he brings an extra six centuries of historiography to bear as well (I am sorry to say that I have read only extracts of Ibn Khaldūn; I see the Muqaddimah is on-line here though.) By concentrating on philosophy and culture he makes a good implicit case that currents of Islamic thought had a greater direct impact on local politics than perhaps the equivalents for Christianity.

Which links neatly to my only grounds of dissatisfaction with the book; which are (rather unreasonably of me, since he covers a pretty large chunk of the world) that it doesn’t look widely enough. Iran and Persia are barely mentioned; likewise India, the Balkans and Cyprus, all of which are important interfaces between Islam and other faiths. Turkey proper, because of the longevity of the Ottoman Empire, gets a bit more coverage, as does Al-Andalus, but sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, Central Asia and Afghanistan are basically invisible. OK, the book is technically about Arabs rather than Muslims, but it concentrates so much on Islam (and correspondingly less on Arab Christians, except in Lebanon) that I felt the non-Arab Muslims got rather short shrift.

Anyway, well worth reading.

I’ve been in my current office since starting in my current job at the start of last year. We decided six months ago to move from serviced to unfurnished offices, and the decisive point has now been reached: I signed the new lease today for a new place in the International Press Centre on boulevard Charlemagne, behind the Berlaymont and just as conveniently located for most purposes.

Modern communication raised its head rather amusingly today, when a bloke who is thinking of renting my current office called me up by Skype, and I gave him a virtual tour of the place via webcam. (I should add that this was arranged via the agent, though it was my idea.) He seemed happy enough with it. It is rather extraordinary to sit in Belgium and have a conversation like that with someone who is in Brazil. But that is the 21st century, I guess.

I wrote up both Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin and the Leela novelisations some time back, and Doctor Who and the Ribos Operation is one of the Ian Marter novels, so that brings me to the rest of the Season 16 Key To Time sequence. The first of these is an unofficial fan novelisation; the other four are by the inevitable Terrance Dicks. None of them, I’m afraid, is particularly outstanding.

16) Doctor Who and the Pirate Planet, by David Bishop with Paul Scoones

This is one book you won’t have to buy; it is available on-line here, the first (in internal chronology) of the five “missing novelisations” provided by the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club, and the first of David Bishop’s contributions to the extended canon (see also Who Killed Kennedy and the second series of Sarah Jane audios).

Bishop has added a few original touches to the Douglas Adams script, but unfortunately his own writing style was still pretty rough at this stage of his career. He certainly has improved since, but this was a wobbly start.

17) Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood, by Terrance Dicks

A standard Dicks write-what’s-on-the-screen treatment, somewhat flattening a rather good story.

18) Doctor Who and the Androids of Tara, by Terrance Dicks

Another standard Dicks write-what’s-on-the-screen treatment.

19) Doctor Who and the Power of Kroll, by Terrance Dicks

The Dicks/Holmes combination is a rather uneven predictor of quality, so it is worth noting that while this is generally considered the weakest of this season’s televised stories, it is possibly the best of the Key to Time books, with the background to the Swampies, Rohm-Dutt and the refinery staff filled out a bit. Basically the only one of this season that I would recommend to the casual collector as opposed to the completist.

20) Doctor Who and the Armageddon Factor, by Terrance Dicks

Again, Dicks doesn’t add much to what we saw on screen (with of course the added constraint of cutting six episodes down to Target size) and the weaknesses of the plot are consequently more visible.

The biggest disappointment of this run is that Mary Tamm’s elegant, smart Romana doesn’t come across as especially interesting on the printed page. This is no doubt due to a combination of factors – the general phenomenon where the brainy companions seem to come across less well in novelisations than the screamy ones, the fact that we’re now in the period when Terrance Dicks was churning the books out at a rate of one a month or so, and perhaps the very visual presence of Mary Tamm – it seems to me a bigger contrast between impact on screen and on paper than for any character since the First Doctor.

Anyway, on to Romana II now. (And I am past the two-thirds mark for this insane project.)

The Bertelsmann Stiftung are first off the mark of the major European think-tanks to publish an analysis of what happens next after the Irish referendum result. (Here, in German only though they say they will have an English version available on Monday.) They describe the possible options for the EU as four in number:

1. Ireland to get declarations from the other 26 member states which will satisfy a sufficient number of ‘No’ voters, then repeat the referendum (which as they point out is the easiest option for everyone except the Irish government, and therefore won’t happen)
2. Start negotiating again from scratch (which they then go on to rather confusingly combine with an EU-wide referendum to ratify the outcome)
3. Keep the current Nice Treaty in place, with minimal changes (which they seem to think could include the EU foreign service)
4. A two-speed Europe with those who want to go for deeper integration forming a core (but who are they?)

They also describe as unthinkable the possibility of Ireland being kicked out of the EU, or out of any new Treaty arrangements, which I guess is a relief.

Myself, I think that it is important to distinguish between two different “what next?” questions. I see the logic of proceeding with the ratification process elsewhere – if nothing else, it will reveal what other flaws there are in the Lisbon Treaty as currently on the table. The constitutional court cases pending in Germany and the Czech Republic may be as crucial in this as the Irish referendum.

The immediate “what next?” is how to proceed with the institutional appointments after 2009, when the current arrangements for the European Commission expire and when Croatia is due to finish its membership negotiations, with a view to joining in early 2011. It’s pretty clear that the loss of the Irish Commissioner was indeed a factor in the ‘No’ vote, so I imagine that that, plus perhaps some fairly minimal re-jigging of the voting weights, may be factored into the Croatian accession treaty (since accession treaties do not require referenda). The permanent President of the Council and the new-look EU foreign minister are both now impossible to see happening as soon as next year. (In other words, I agree with option 3 as put forward by Bertelsmann.)

The less immediate “what next” is to ask what people actually want from the EU, rather than what the EU wants its people to vote for (in other words, I also agree with Bertelsmann’s option 2, except that they do not go far enough). I nailed my colours to the mast here two years ago, proposing that a consultative assembly be convened with a certain amount of jury-type random selection of EU citizens, to decide (in paraphrase of Douglas Adams) what the question actually is. (I explain a bit more here and here.) Of course there’s no guarantee that even the outcome of such a process would be able to gain popular support at referendum; but perhaps the outcome would be of a nature that did not need to go through such a process. One can never tell.

A shout out to Iain Weaver who has listed previous examples of British MP’s resigning their seats on points of principle – or, more strictly speaking, MPs who resigned their seats in order to fight the subsequent forced by-election. He leaves out the interesting case also of George Lansbury in 1912.

There is almost no history of this for the Dáil – nine TDs resigned in sympathy with the so-called “army mutiny” in 1924, but none of them fought the seven subsequent by-elections. Kevin Boland also resigned from the Dáil in 1970 in the wake of the arms crisis, but did not fight the subsequent by-election either (he did have a go in the next general election but lost). Purist Republican theorists of course insist that the entire 1918 election in Ireland should be retrospectively given the status of a plebiscite, but nobody seems to have argued this at the time.

I have to say that it doesn’t impress me all that much as a political move. Referendums, as we are seeing in Ireland at the moment, are referendums, and elections are elections; and if Parliament takes a decision that people disagree with, a by-election result in one seat won’t change that (and historically did not do so in 1986 or in 1912). The fact that I happen to agree with Davis on the substance (as I would have done in 1912, but did not in 1986) doesn’t change the fact that this is essentially a stunt which will do nothing to change the legislation (which may yet be blocked in the House of Lords or in the courts); the only winner will be Davis personally. Sure, he’ll get some nice publicity for embarrassing the government; but I would much rather have the focus on their coalition with the DUP.

According to the Irish Times, anyway.

But RTÉ has a different nuance.

Why is anyone even slightly surprised that the DUP a) likes the idea of locking people up for six weeks without telling them why and b) appoints homophobes to ministerial positions?

A fairly experimental set of recipes last night, with friends M and E coming over for dinner, and my mother-in-law staying, so it was cooking for five.

Starter: Asparagus Soup (Georgia – from The Georgian Feast)

500 g asparagus, cut into 2cm pieces
1.2l boiling water
2 onions, finely chopped
30g butter
salt
pepper
2 eggs, beaten together
bunch of chopped herbs (recipe says parsley, coriander and dill; I used basil and tarragon instead)

Simmer the asparagus in the water for 5-8 minutes.
Meanwhile, sauté the chopped onions in the butter.
When the asparagus is done, stir in the onions, salt and pepper.
Stir a bit of the broth into the eggs, then whisk the eggs into the soup (they should cook slightly)
Stir in the herbs and then simmer for a few more minutes before serving.

Total time: about 20 mins, starting with cutting up the asparagus.

Comment: Tasty, though I should have put in more salt and pepper (fortunately you can add that after it is served).

Main course: Bobatee (South Africa – from The New Internationalist Food Book)

500g minced beef (or lamb)
1 slice bread
400ml milk
15 ml oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, sliced
½ teaspoon chili powder
seeds from 2 cardamom pods
1-2 teaspoons crushed coriander seed
2 bay leaves
1 clove
60g almonds
2 teaspoons turmeric
1 egg
1 teaspoon mustard
½ teaspoon grated lemon peel
1 small apple, grated
50g dried apricots
50g raisins
2 tablespoons /30 ml red wine vinegar (for beef) or lemon juice (for lamb)
2 tablespoons /30 ml dry white wine or orange juice
salt

Heat oven to 160°C/325°F
Put the bread soaking in the milk in a medium-sized bowl for half an hour
Heat the oil and soften the onion and garlic. Then add the chili powder, cardamom, coriander, bay leaves, clove and almonds. Cook for 5-10 mins, stirring to prevent sticking. Then remove from the heat.
Remove the bread from the milk and squeeze it, keeping the milk in the bowl. Add the turmeric, the egg and a little salt; beat until the mixture is an even light yellow colour.
Get a large bowl and put in the bread, the meat, the mustard, the lemon peel, the grated apple, the dried apricots, the raisins, the vinegar/lemon juice, the wine/orange juice, the onion and spice mixture, and half of the yellow milky stuff. Mix it well by hand to the point where it is even and smooth.
Put it into a deep greased oven dish and smooth the top. Pour on the rest of the yellow milky stuff, add a few dots of butter and then bake in the oven for an hour or until the top is golden brown.
The book says serve with chutney, bananas, shredded coconut and tomatoes, but I chose a different route (see below).

Total time: 45 mins preparing, then an hour in the oven. (You could probably skimp a bit on the amount of time the bread spends soaking.)

Comment: I saw this ages ago in the recipe book and was really intrigued by it, because I had no idea what it would come out like. It ends up a bit like shepherd’s pie, but the meat bit is smoother and the topping is a savoury custard rather than potato. It tasted really nice. Rather than serve it with the recommended savouries I did two cold salads as described below (but did also offer tomatoes).
My mother-in-law speculates that a vegetarian version with nuts and/or lentils might be worth exploring; I look forward to hearing her reports.

Side salad 1: Cucumber and Sesame Seeds (Cambodia – from The New Internationalist Food Book)

1 large cucumber
120 ml vinegar (white wine or cider)
1 teaspoon sesame seeds
2 tablespoons /30ml sesame oil
1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, sliced
1 teaspoon turmeric
2 teaspoons sugar
salt

Peel the cucumber; cut into 5 cm pieces; cut these again into lengthwise sticks. Put them in a pan with the vinegar and salt; add a little water to cover; heat and simmer for a few mins until the cucumber is tender and transparent. Drain, keeping the liquid, and put both liquid and cucumber aside to cool separately.
Toast the sesame seeds in a pan with a little oil until they begin to jump and turn golden. Then set them aside. (Comment: this needs very little oil indeed. It doesn’t take long at all to get to the required stage – the seeds are almost like popcorn.)
Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil and cook the onion and garlic until they are golden. Remove from the pan.
Pour into the same pan the other tablespoon of oil, the turmeric, the sugar, and a judicious amount of the vinegar liquid (the recipe says half but that seems to me way too much). Stir over a gentle heat until the sugar has dissolved. Add the onion and garlic and let them heat through.
Mix in the cucumber pieces and arrange in a bowl. Decorate with the sesame seeds. Serve (it says here) warm or cold.

Total time: 20 mins, if you are fairly hasty with your interpretation of letting the cucumber and the vinegar mixture cool.

Comment: This had a lovely exotic taste to it. Certainly had a sense of south-east Asia; whether Cambodia in particular I cannot judge.

Side salad 2: Green beans (Georgia – – from The Georgian Feast)

500g young beans
1 garlic clove, crushed
½ cup chopped fresh herbs (it says coriander but I used tarragon)
3 tablespoons /50 ml olive oil
2 tablespoons /30 ml red wine vinegar

Trim the beans; cook them for about 8 minutes; drain thoroughly and mix with the other ingredients; chill.

Total time: 15 mins. (Plus of course a couple of hours cooling in the fridge.)

Comment: Again, yummy, and very straightforward. Perhaps one could go easy on the vinegar, esp since the cucumber recipe uses it too.

Dessert: Rhubarb Crumble (from The Doctor Who Cookbook, contributed by Maureen ‘Vicki’ O’Brien)

500g rhubarb
150g sugar
75g butter
150g flour
50g chopped nuts
Grated peel of ½ a lemon

Set the oven for 220°C/425°F
Chop the rhubarb into 2 cm sections, and put into a greased oven dish.
Scatter 100g of the sugar on top.
Mix all the rest together, and sprinkle it on top too.
Bake in the oven for 40 mins.
Serve with custard or cream.

Total time: 20 mins (plus the baking).

Comment: As recipes go, this is absurdly easy. It still ended up a bit overdone; I am not sure if this is because our oven is hotter than it claims to be, or perhaps I used too much sugar. I will certainly try again.

This is the end (at least, for three decades) for Sarah Jane Smith as a regular character in Doctor Who. There is only one really bad one out of these eight, and it is the one which is not based on a televised story.

8) Doctor Who and the Planet of Evil, by Terrance Dicks

This is fairly standard stuff, with (as so often) the advantage of the printed page being that it spares us the embarrassing special effects and occasional wobbly acting of the original version.

9) Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, by Terrance Dicks

A good novelisation of one of the great stories. Dicks has topped and tailed the narrative with an explanation of the Osirians, and a nice vignette of Sarah going back to see what the local newspapers said about it all at the time. Again, some of the effects work better on the page than on the screen. (Though the written word can never give us the excellent performances of the guest cast here.)

10) Doctor Who and the Android Invasion, by Terrance Dicks

Alas, this was a case where the novelisation exposes the flaws of the original story a bit more; no longer distracted by the visuals of working out who is who, the incoherency of the Kraals’ plan to Konkwer Erth is much more difficult to ignore.

11) Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius, by Terrance Dicks

For once, Dicks rises to the challenge of adapting one of his own scripts for the printed page (perhaps because it had been substantially rewritten in the meantime). One of the few flaws of the original TV version is that Karn does look every now and then like a TV studio with funny lighting; of course, on the printed page you can depict whole landscapes rather less expensively. The whole thing seemed to me to work rather well.

12) Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom, by Philip Hinchcliffe

Hinchcliffe was the producer of Doctor Who in arguably its greatest days, and his two novelisations of stories from that time give us an insight into what he thought he was doing. His Fourth Doctor is much closer to the Tom Baker screen version than the somewhat more overtly clownish character of the Dicks books; he sticks closely to the script but concentrates perhaps a bit more on the horror elements of the story, and the villainous Harrison Chase is memorably evil.

13) Doctor Who – The Pescatons, by Victor Pemberton

I read this book here because continuity experts suggest this is where it goes – Doctor and Sarah fighting off fish creatures in London. (Actually it probably belongs better before The Seeds of Doom, since the story begins with them arriving in contemporary England in the Tardis.) On the one hand, it scores over the audio version on which it is based by having a larger number of active characters and a wider view of the action. On the other hand, Pemberton’s writing style is absolutely dire, with a cringeworthy phrase on almost every page. In addition, he seems unsure which Doctor he is writing for, with the appearance of a flute (ie recorder) at the end, and a confusion about whether we are in the 1960s or 1970s. Not quite the worst novelisation or spinoff fiction I’ve read, but really one for completists only.

14) Doctor Who and the Masque of Mandragora, by Philip Hinchcliffe

As with Hinchcliffe’s treatment of The Seeds of Doom, we have a much less clownish, dark Doctor, and much more horrific elements in the story – horrible frazzling of the Helix’s victims, also the Doctor casually slaying Count Federico’s guards. But the other thing that struck me was Sarah’s relationship with the Prince – much more romantically presented here than it was on screen, and basically her closest approach to romance in the entire canon, I think. Not an outstanding novelisation but not bad either.

15) Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear, by Terrance Dicks

A pretty standard retelling of the TV original, without much added or taken away. The story line seemed slightly clearer on paper, but maybe I just was not concentrating sufficiently when I watched it. On the other hand, Dicks does not quite do justice to Sarah Jane’s farewell scene.

What struck me almost for the first time as I read these books is that this is the period when the basic format of the show as we now know it was first tried – a single, female, companion, who has a life of her own (remember that Sarah first met the Doctor while impersonating her own aunt, and her journalistic career is mentioned in both The Android Invasion and The Seeds of Doom), and the Tardis travelling from adventure to adventure, without any real fixed base for the Doctor (the last proper UNIT story is just before this sequence, and the first proper Gallifrey story immediately after). Previous companions were either a larger ensemble (with minor male exceptions – Steven in The Massacre, Jamie in a few episodes but no complete story) or part of UNIT. Sarah Jane Smith (followed by Leela, Romana, Peri, Mel and Ace) is the first real predecessor of Rose, Martha and Donna. And unlike a lot of others, the printed page does her justice – perhaps because so many of her books were written by Terrance Dicks, who after all invented the character as script editor. All decent enough reads (apart from the Pescatons).

7) Another Life, by Peter Anghelides, read by John Barrowman

My commuting listening this week has been this Torchwood novel as read in the voice of Captain Jack. I don’t think I will do that very often in future, for reasons almost entirely unconnected with the quality of the story: the full thing extends over three full audio CDs of over an hour, with no other convenient episode breaks, and is therefore several times longer than an actual Torchwood episode. My routine is much better suited to narrative cut into chunks of around half an hour in length.

Having said that, the story is standard Torchwood – alien creature comes to Cardiff, possesses its human victims, the team deal with it despite gross personal danger – but well told, with nice personal vignettes for each of our favourite characters and good descriptive writing of the horrors of flood and drowning, with an excursion into second person narrative at one point which of course is all the more compelling when delivered via the spoken rather than written word. Barrowman slightly overacts in places and his pronunciation of one or two phrases jarred me, but that is of course part of his charm.

6) Shadowkings, by Michael Cobley

I got this way back in 2002 when the author was a guest at MeCon (my first evar sf con!) and it has sat on the shelves ever since. Well, I’ve started but I won’t finish; standard sword and sorcery stuff, the writing is competent but not compelling, and I have other books that I want to read more than this.

…at the Harvard graduation ceremony (“Commencement”, in the local dialect).

An excellent speech. Transcript and video here, video only here.

(Hat-tip to

pickwick

.)

5) Lisbon: What the Reform Treaty Means, edited by Tony Brown

This volume of short analyses of the Lisbon Treaty, published for €20 by the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin, is obviously timed to coincide with next week’s referendum in Ireland. I’ve already given my views on the Treaty at some length, but I learnt a few things from this book. I had not realised that the Citizens’ Initiative proposal, where the EU must respond to a petition signed by a million citizens, had made it into the final text. And I had not appreciated quite how firmly Ireland’s neutrality has been ring-fenced both by current arrangements and in the Lisbon proposal.

Other chapters of the book give extra nuance to things I was already aware of. The Treaty’s effects on social legislation and climate change seem to me (despite the arguments made in those chapters) more rhetorical than real, though positive nonetheless. The provisions making it easier to change the EU’s rules in future are simply common sense (and these probably mean that although this is the fifth European referendum since 1986, it may also be the last for some time). Finally, I had not realised just how much Ireland is a prisoner of the UK’s policies in the area of Justice and Home Affairs, though that is a result of geography rather than of any positive policy choice by the Irish government (let alone the EU).

I’ve argued before that for the average citizen the Lisbon Treaty isn’t a big deal. The best reason I’ve seen for voting against it is from a friend who wants to bring down capitalism, and sees correctly that the Treaty will allow the EU to function more smoothly in making the market economy work; if you are opposed to capitalism in the first place, this is obviously not desirable.

Finally, Irish readers may be interested to see how their referendum debate is being explained to other audiences. Dominik Tierlemann and Christian Heydecker of the Munich-based Bertelsmann Stiftung have produced a nine-page, 580 kb PDF with the title “Green Light from the Emerald Isle? Ten Questions and Answers about Ireland”. And Hugo Brady of the London-based Centre for European Reform has written a three-page, 170kb PDF with the snappy title “Will the Irish Guillotine Lisbon?” Both give a slightly external perspective to the debate.

Anyone want to play Scrabble or Reversi/Othello?