…although none of these five really deserves to be called a “classic” in its own right, and one of them is quite possibly the worst of the show’s original run.
Planet of Evil, which followed straight on from Terror of the Zygons in 1975, is not bad, though not quite great. Frederick Jaeger as tortured scientist Sorenson is great, even if it’s a scenario that we’ve seen before. There are hints that Morestra is a real planet with a real political culture – how else could the commander, so out of his depth, have been put in charge? The Sarah/Doctor relationship is good too, and we have hints of the Doctor’s concept of his own role in the universe. This is in principle a similar story to a couple of Pertwee ones, Colony In Space and The Mutants, but ends up being nothing like as awful. But somehow it doesn’t quite come together to be memorable; if you’ve see the video collection “The Baker Years”, where Tom Baker reminisces about his time on the programme, this is the one story he can’t even remember making, and I can see why.
The Invasion of Time, which was the 1978 end-of-season six-parter, is nothing like as bad as some people say. The Doctor’s apparent treachery to both Leela and his own people is very puzzling and watchable, and the scene when he explains to Borusa what is really going on is great; the cliff-hanger at the end of episode 4 is one of the best in the show’s history; not one of Leela’s great stories, especially given the unconvincing romantic departure, but Louise Jameson is as always very watchable; the concept of the Tardis having a vast hinterland of rooms to explore jars with some fans but not with me (in New Who, I wonder what lies beyond the console room of the redesigned ship). K9 also gets a reasonable amount to do, though the noise from his motor is painfully loud. The Vardans are a bit disappointing, but hey, who cares if one of them seems to have a Scottish accent – don’t lots of planets have a Scotland?
The Horns of Nimon was a story I missed first time round, as we were abroad for the Christmas season of 1979-80, and I realised it was the first story I’d seen with David Brierley doing the voice of K9 – rather jarring for those of us who are used to John Leeson’s chirpy tones. Again, this story has its detractors; I felt it was not awful, though again not really very good – the Anethans are so wet it is difficult to see why we should get excited about their survival; the Nimon costumes are pretty poor; the whole reading across from the Theseus myth feels contrived in a way that, say, Androids of Tara/Prisoner of Zenda and Brain of Morbius/Frankenstein don’t. But Graham Crowden as Soldeed is superb, and the Doctor/Romana relationship is not quite as obviously romantic as in City of Death but still very watchable.
I did catch Black Orchid first time round in 1992, and it was and is a rather charming story, the Doctor and friends relaxing in a 1920s country household and uncovering the family secret. Davison, playing cricket, and the two girls, partying and in Sutton’s case playing two roles, are great; Waterhouse as Adric won’t dance but will eat. I am left a bit uncomfortable, however, with the idea that you should hide your disabled relatives upstairs and then let then fall to their death off the roof.
From time to time as I’ve been watching old Who – say with The Sensorites, The Dominators, The Mutants, The Ultimate Foe or Battlefield – the thought has occasionally crossed my mind, “This story is bad; but is it as bad as The Twin Dilemma?” Memory fades, and sometimes fades mercifully; I remember thinking the The Twin Dilemma was bad on first broadcast in 1984, and rewatching it totally confirms that view. Every time I began to think that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as one of the other low points of Classic Who, it suddenly got worse again. Where to start? The extraordinary alienating and inconsistent characterisation of the Doctor; the utterly lousy acting of the titular twins; the appalling costumes of the gastropods; the basic incoherence of the plot (to pick two aspects of this, the implausible and poorly developed Doctor/Azmael relationship, and the bizarre decision by the Doctor and Peri to leave Lang alone and armed inside the Tardis); oh, it’s just awful. It’s amazing that the show lasted another five years after this.
So, in summary, Black Orchid and The Invasion of Time are surprisingly watchable despite their flaws; Planet of Evil not quite as convincing; The Horns of Nimon decidedly less so; and The Twin Dilemma should be skipped. It is firmly at the bottom of the Dynamic Rankings site and likely to stay there.
Holiday time is often a time for me to relax by cooking, and I’ve tried a bunch of new recipes over the last couple of weeks. The most successful of these was the product of last-minute googling: I had bought a lump of pork labelled “spiering/spiringue” and was trying to work out what the heck it was – turns out that in most parts of America it is known as “Boston butt end”, though this side of the Atlantic I think you can just refer to it as the pig’s neck – and came up with this recipe, fortunately more than six hours before dinner time:
Ingredients:
1 lump of spiering/spiringue/Boston butt/pork neck
a small amount of Worcester sauce (in fact I used soy sauce, which I think was OK)
light brown sugar
apple juice
salt
Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 200°C. Place the pork in a casserole that is just large enough to hold it and has a lid. Sprinkle the roast on all sides with Worcester soy sauce. Then press brown sugar coating on all sides of the pork. Pour the apple juice down the side of the casserole to the bottom, being sure not to drizzle it on the crusted meat. Cover tightly.
Place the roast in the oven and immediately turn the heat down to 95°C. Roast without opening the oven door for about 5 hours, until the meat is so tender that it pulls apart easily. If the meat does not pull apart easily, cover, and return to the oven and roast 30 minutes more. Check again, roast 30 minutes more as needed.
Pull the meat apart and remove the bone (actually my chunk was already filleted). Stir the salt into the juices at the bottom of the pan. Serve meat in its delicious juice hot or at room temperature.
This was really yummy, the meat ended up juicy and tender and very very tasty. I really hadn’t tried slow cooking before, and must now add it to my repertoire.
I had a couple of other experiments too. One from my sturdy Good Housekeeping book, labelled French roast chicken, not particularly exciting in terms of technique but very tasty, was simply to roast a chicken stuffed with fresh parsley, tarragon and butter, with bacon strips over the breast, rather than my more usual practice of onion and sage.
Another, less successful in my view though consumer reports were favourable, was a lamb stew recipe from Kenya from the New Internationalist food book. Stew is tricky anyway, as Diana Wynne Jones has noted. The recipe called for stewing a single large (2-kilo) chunk of lamb shoulder in a spicy onion base; I did it with two smaller chunks, which may have been part of the problem, and the flavour seemed to mainly remain at the bottom of the pan. The potatoes never actually merged with the rest of it and I ended up extracting them and serving them separately, which no doubt did not help the consistency of the stew either. So I am left a little suspicious of the recipes in the book, though I will try a couple more.
And for Christmas dinner we had the now-traditional boar, which seemed to taste particularly good this year – perhaps because I allowed it to marinade for three whole days. As with the slow-cooked pork, patience is rewarded.
1) Macedonia, by Harvey Pekar and Heather Roberson, illustrated by Ed Piskor
Long-term readers will know of my obsession with Macedonia. This is the story of peace activist Heather Roberson, who went there in the summer of 2003 to find out how the 2001 conflict had been prevented from escalating into another full-scale Balkan war, and acquired an obsession to match mine. She and Pekar portray well her fascination with this paradoxical, contradictory country, exploring Skopje and Tetovo with excursions to Belgrade and Pristina, and I found much to agree with – the curious mixture of paranoia and pessimism which otherwise enlightened individuals sometimes display; the Hotel Ambasador and the Irish Pub in Skopje, the Hotel Moskva in Belgrade, the attitudes of the international officials involved with the local process. Indeed, one or two of the internationals depicted are people I know – mostly identifiable because of the positions they hold, though they are not named and their physical appearance in the book is quite different in real life. One particularly impressive character, who oddly enough has just renewed contact with me via Facebook and LinkedIn, is given a completely different profession in the book to real life but is none the less clearly recognisable to anyone who has met him.
I’m not sure how interesting the book would be to people who don’t share the same level of fascination with the country as me and Roberson. It’s very text-heavy in places, with an awful lot of background information needed to set her experiences in context (though it seemed to me mostly accurate, with only one or two points where my eyebrows rose in disagreement). Her basic paradigm, that conflicts can be resolved through application of the rule of law, is quite a complex area to explore through the medium of the graphic novel and it’s not quite clear what her conclusion actually is, once she has seen her idealistic propositions tested in practice. Also, I’m not sure that she and Pekar quite manage to communicate the sheer charm of the country and its people of all ethnicities; I think the casual reader may end up being rather surprised or sceptical that she likes the country as much as she says she does. And there were a number of annoying errors in the Macedonia/Serbian phrases and street signs shown.
It may not be up to the standards of Safe Area Goražde, but it is nonetheless a fine effort, and certainly would be good reading for anyone thinking of getting involved in Balkan politics these days.
I resolved yesterday to make my new year’s resolutions today (other than reading resolutions). I’ve spent a bit of time this morning with the goal-setting Facebook app, which has been some help, though I’m keeping most of those goals, personal and professional, to myself.
A few areas I do feel comfortable noting here, though: a) cranking up my Russian course, bought in 2002 but allowed to slip rather – it should be ideal listening for one leg of the commute; and b) reviving a couple of my writing projects, in particular i) reviews of joint Hugo and Nebula winners, currently stuck at Hell is the Absence of GodBible. Both of those will be tracked here.
I’d been wanting to see this since reading about it in Ciaran Carson’s The Star Factory, for purely personal interest reasons – the setting in Belfast, the connection with Doctor Who – but it really is a brilliant film in its own right. Even though you pretty much know what is going to happen right from the very beginning – terrorist bank raid goes wrong, the wounded leader staggers around the city pursued by friend and foe alike – the tension is maintained throughout. James Mason is superb as the central character, suffering angst and flashbacks, inspiring loyalty and love; and the whole thing is beautifully directed with great background music.
The approach to Belfast is … peculiar. The film starts with a fantastic establishment shot from the air, coming in over the Lagan and zooming in on the Albert Clock and High Street (also the setting of the climax); but at one point we see the police inspecting a map of a completely fictional unnamed city on the edge of the fictional Fernagh Lough. However the trams in this city clearly go up the Falls Road! And while most of the adult actors seem to have southern Irish accents (basically because they were recruited from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin) the extras are definitely from Belfast – there’s a beautiful scene with a dozen kids who the BBC was trying to track down recently.
And there’s William Hartnell – only in two scenes, as Mr Fancy, the barman in charge of the “Four Winds” saloon (clearly based on The Crown, but equally clearly a studio set rather than the real thing), and sixteen years away from becoming Doctor Who: he none the less has a couple of very characteristic moments. His second scene has been Youtubed here and here: look at the way his eyes are moving about 1:25 into the first clip – we’ve certainly seen that before! – and listen his rant for the first half-minute of the second clip – very Doctor-ish until he uses the unnervingly colloquial word “quid”!
We had a very nice evening last night; F’s friend Bt and his mother and her partner came over and organised a raclette evening for us in our own kitchen, for which we were also joined by and his fiancée. At midnight we spilled out onto the street to watch the fireworks, the little boys jumping up and down with wild excitement, and our Francophone neighbours came over to share the excitement. So we had four languages being spoken as 2008 began, with Bt and his family chattering away in Dutch, the neighbours talking to us in French, and the future Mrs on the phone in Hungarian to her family in Slovakia. Great fun, but getting up this morning was a slow process!
Classic literature: Last year I resolved either to read In Search of Lost Time, or else finish Don Quixote and read Catcher in the Rye and The Tin Drum. I managed the latter two, got no further with Cervantes and am just over halfway through Proust. It should not therefore be impossible to finish both Proust and Cervantes this year, and then I think I should reread some of the classics – Middlemarch in particular would probably reward another look.
Comics: I got a lot of good recommendations in this post, and will try to work through another five or so of them.
Backlogged Books: This time last year I had 143 books on my unread list, and hoped to get through a third of them. In fact I managed 75, more than half. Of course, there has been a steady process of replacement, and my unread list is almost at the same level again, with 138 on it (one listed twice!), listed below in the order that I logged them on LibraryThing; I should be able to read a third of them. As with the previous entry, you can tick the ones you have read if you like:
We actually saw a glorious total of four films in the cinema this year, probably as many as we had managed in the previous four years combined. They were: The Last King of Scotland, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, 2 Days in Paris, and Stardust. Also I took F to see Alvin and the Chipmunks at the weekend, and Anne took him to see The Simpsons Movie during the year.
We have also been to two classical music concerts in the last few weeks, more than we have managed in the previous decade: Pieter Wispelwey playing the Bach cello suites at the Brussels Royal Conservatory at the end of November, and La Mystère des Voix Bulgares in Leuven last weekend.
Also we got through the whole of the first five seasons of The West Wing, plus Doctor Who and the Sarah Jane Smith Adventures, and The Goodies At Last!
Gradually picking up our ability to engage in these things what with the new circumstances..
There seem to have been quite a lot of books this year. Like, er, cough, about 235 of them, which is rather more than last year’s 207 let alone 2005’s 137. 81 (34%, same as last year) were non-fiction; 44 (19%, same as last year) were by or edited by women; 123 (52%, slightly up from last year) were sf, fantasy, or somehow related to the genre. In the list below the cut-tags, books in bold are the ones I gave five stars to on Librarything.
Related: I read/listened to fifteen sf-related non-fiction books, though I am reserving all but one of them to a later section. The one other was The True Knowledge of Ken MacLeod.
44 of my year’s total of books – 19% – were related to Doctor Who: 30 fiction (16 novelisations of broadcast stories, 9 spinoff novels, one unbroadcast script, one spinoff anthology, and 3 comics), 12 books about the series in general and two memoirs by actors from the show (incidentally, the only two audio-books per se that I listened to during the year).
SF + fantasy Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors were a truly superb discovery. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin was a welcome comeback from an author dead for a third of a century. The best sf novel, as opposed to fantasy, that I read was Elizabeth Bear’s Carnival.
Doctor Who The About Time series, erratic in places, are consistently enjoyable, enlightening and entertaining; and Tom Baker was the only person to make me laugh out loud on the train.
Book of the year Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, strongly recommended to everyone; a superb tale of a dysfunctional family, dealing with sexuality and great literature and love and death. We’ve had guests in our house queuing up to read our copy, and you will too.
13) Slide Rule: An Autobiography, by Neville Shute
Probably my last book of 2007, and it’s good to end on a high note – thanks,nickbarnes, for therecommendation; it was a good call. It’s a book in three parts: the first couple of chapters describe Shute’s boyhood and youth, where the most exciting part is his close observation of theEaster Risingof 1916 – his father, as it happens, was the Secretary of the Irish Post Office, so there is a certain immediacy to Shute’s account, from an angle one doesn’t often get – that of a middle-class English teenager pressed into service as a stretcher-bearer.
Then a bit over half the book is devoted to a fascinating account of Shute’s involvement with the R100, the private sector counterpart to the doomed state-funded R101 British airship. This was at the cutting edge of technology, a prestige engineering project every bit as important in its way as the moon landings, which was to open up mass travel between the continents at a time when it was thought that aeroplanes would never be able to be big enough or fast enough to satisfy the commercial demand. Shute clearly loved his own creation (he was deputy to Barnes Wallis but ended up de facto in charge) and goes into fascinating detail about the problems they faced, both technical and political; and looming over the narrative, of course, is the eventual R101 disaster, which he blames on the failings of senior civil servants as technical managers and on the general policy of having any state-run industry (and specifically the ego of Lord Thomson, the Air Minister, who paid for it with his life and the lives of dozens of others). I admit my most substantive encounter with this story before was the (excellent) Doctor Who audio Storm Warning, in which Thomson’s part, renamed “Lord Tamworth”, is played with considerable creative licence by Gareth Roberts (Blake from Blake’s 7), but there’s nothing like the real thing.
The final chunk of the book, a bit over a third of it, is Shute’s account of setting up his own aircraft company, and the difficulties of running a hi-tech startup in the context of the Great Depression. Again, an interesting human tale of innovation, struggle against the odds, the difficulties of balancing the books and the personalities, the intimate involvement of people and capital; I think it ought to be required reading for anyone thinking of setting up their own business. On top of that, the looming clouds of war – in Spain, China and Ethiopia, and coming up close to home – were crucial in making the company break even by the time he was eased out with a golden handshake in 1938.
Shute isn’t shy about his politics, which are certainly to the right: I guess that being caught on the wrong side of a revolution at 17, and then seeing your professional colleagues killed by the hubris of a Labour government minister, may well be formative experiences, but he also argues for the retention of the moneyed aristocracy as a source of start-up finance for innovation. I’m not in huge sympathy with him on these points, but I like his clear and occasionally self-deprecating prose; the two books of his that I have read, Pied Piper and Trustee from the Toolroom, are both rather enchanting tales of older men who accidentally go on long journeys to do good deeds, and it’s interesting to see where this comes from.
I tried this famously impenetrable novel at the start of last year, and bounced off it; but was spurred into giving it another go partly by reviewing my reading resolutions for this year, partly by Bob Shaw’s remark about reading it being one of the new year’s resolutions he had made every year but never managed to keep. Second time around, I found it much easier going, I think because in the interim I have read four volumes of Proust, and the narrative style is not dissimilar – quite a lot of stream-of-consciousness reflection on the central character’s state of mind, and Dhalgren even has a long sequence set at a party reminiscent of one of Proust’s soirées, though with more swearing, and various other social gatherings are set-pieces of the narrative.
Also, of course, while Proust is very naturalistically creating a recognisable picture of urban and rural France, Delany’s city of Bellona is as much as anything a state of mind, detached from the rest of the USA, where strange things happen in the sky and the central character knows that his own sense of time is as badly skewed as the local newspaper’s chronology. Where Proust’s narrator doesn’t have a name, Delany’s central character has two, though neither is complete. Delany’s other characters are more archetypal than Proust’s – the strait-laced Richards family, Newboy the poet, Kamp the astronaut, Calkins the editor, Denny and Lanya the central character’s lovers. I was not always entirely comfortable with the racial or gender stereotypes I thought I detected.
Sex, of course, is a little more frequent and a lot more explicit in Delany’s book; he is unembarrassed about polyamory and bisexuality where Proust is horrified by “inversion” – although Proust too has a lot of sex, the most explicit scene so far is one the narrator overhears rather than one he participates in. The other major difference is that Delany’s central character is a writer, and spends a lot of time thinking about the relationship between his own art and life, compared to Proust who is always observing: watching other people’s plays, listening to other people’s music, reading other people’s books.
Dhalgren is a bit self-indulgent now and then – I think I understand why the last section of the book is presented as a working draft, but the point could have been made without demanding as much of the reader. But I was relieved that the story of the central character’s poetry was told without actually blocking out the text with his poems, a practice I wish other authors (eg A.S. Byatt) would follow.
Anyhow, it was tough going in places, but worth it in the end.
Are you a Doctor Who character? Are you concerned about whether you will live to the end of the story, or die a horrible death? Here’s a useful indicator: are you played by Geoffrey Palmer?
The last of my Doctor Who catch-up posts, which may be a relief to some of you. Three Tom Baker stories, two featuring classic monsters and the third more of a classic in its own right.
Destiny of the Daleks, first broadcast in September 1979, was Douglas Adams’ first story as script editor and Lalla Ward’s first as Romana II, the regeneration happening for reasons utterly unexplained (until the second series of Gallifrey audios). The Tom/Lalla sparking is great fun; sadly the same can’t be said about the rest of it. I hate anthropomorphic robots, and the Movellans certainly qualify; David Gooderson is really not much cop as Davros; and the Daleks are particularly pointless. Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore have defended the story, but I think their hearts are not in it.
Revenge of the Cybermen has a rather poor reputation among fandom, but I rather enjoyed it this time round (I remember it first time round in 1975, when the second episode was broadcast on my eighth birthday, and watched it again in around 1990). If you treat it as Doctor Who and the Vogans, rather than pay attention to the irritating Cybermen, it is a great story – the three main Vogan characters, played by well-established pillars of Who like Michael Wisher (Davros), Kevin Stoney (Mavic Chen/Tobias Vaughn) and Ian Collings (later Poul in The Robots of Death and Mawdryn) all spark off each other well and give a convincing picture of a paranoid, factionalised society. Unfortunately the Cybermen rather spoil the plot – they have a different crucial weakness each time they appear, it seems – and I can never watch the Doctor’s discovery of the Plot Device Cupboard in the last scene without wincing.
Terror of the Zygons is a real classic, also from 1975. I went for it after reading both the follow-up Sting of the Zygons and re-reading the novelisation, Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster. While the novel is slightly better – the TV Skarasen looks really crap, the TV Scotland looks peculiarly like West Sussex and the Doctor’s banter is slightly funnier in the book – the original version is still pretty good. One thing it has that the book lacks is fantastic incidental music by Geoffrey Burgon, who went on to great things (incidental music for Life of Brian, all the music for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Brideshead Revisited, incidental music for Silent Witness). And the Zygons themselves, as my Australian friend said so many years ago, remain “two-cushion monsters”. Plus it’s a decent final story for the Brigadier in his military role.
Big Finish started with these six stories back in 1998, featuring Bernice Summerfield, a companion invented by Paul Cornell in 1992 for the Virgin series of New Adventures with the Seventh Doctor. It’s a much stronger start to the series than their early Doctor Who stories, possibly because they were adapting novels that had already been published, though I think that can’t be the whole story. I had only read one of the books, Kate Orman’s Walking to Babylon, so most of this was new to me. All good stuff, apart from the last one.
Oh, No It Isn’t! – very brave to start with a story that starts as a standard archaeological dig and then converts the cast into pantomime characters – but it works really well. And Nicholas Courtney as the cat is lovely too.
Beyond the Sun is another archaeological dig-goes-wrong story but introduces the character of Jason, Benny’s ex-husband, and lots of emotional angst as well as the actual plot. I was completely absorbed in it, and yet failed to spot the voices of Sophie Aldred and Anneke Wills until I read the sleeve notes afterwards.
Walking to Babylon has been quite heavily changed from the book, mainly to insert ex-husband Jason into the plot, though I was glad that Benny’s love affair with Lafayette survived. And Elisabeth Sladen returning as the High Priestess is gret too. A strong play based on a strong book, the Babylonian setting beautifully evoked.
Birthright brings back Colin Baker rather nicely as a Russian ally of Benny’s, and also evokes its Edwardian setting beautifully. Plus Jason seems a bit less shoe-horned in this time, and there’s a nice set of tensions between the various goodies and baddies.
I thought Just War was the peak of a good run, confronting Benny with the moral ambiguities of a Guernsey under German occupation. Apparently the Seventh Doctor was in the original novel and written out in favour of Jason, but I didn’t really see the gaps. I did spot Maggie Stables as Benny’s landlady. All generally well assembled.
Dragon’s Wrath, like Oh, No It Isn’t!, is detached from the narrative of the other four stories. It is, frankly, not as good; plot too obvious, guest star (Richard Franklin) not sufficiently engaged, sound recording rather poor in places, basically rather skippable.
Another catch-up post for Big Finish adventures 51-55, of which the first features the Sixth Doctor and Iris Wildthyme, and the others are Eighth Doctor and Charlie in the alternate universe which they were banished to at the end of Zagreus, with new companion C’rizz (pronounced “Kerres”) joining for the last three.
The Wormery had previously been recommended to me by (twice) and by by (twice). It is indeed great; I’m not a big fan of Katy Manning or of her Irish Wildthyme character, but with Colin Baker’s Doctor they work well, and I love the framing device of Jane McFarlane’s dulcet Scottish lilt as Mickey – why isn’t she doing more acting? – and the sting at the end as we find out who her listener is. The device of the bar between the worlds – isn’t that Callahan’s from Spider Robinson? (not that I’ve read any.) However this version seems a bit darker.
I thought Scherzo was a bit rubbish, but lifted by the excellent and compelling performances of Paul McGann and India Fisher, talking total nonsense but making it entirely believable.
The Creed of the Kromon takes us back into proper DW territory, slaves revolt against their oppressive rulers, and Doctor gains another companion. Decent, if standard, stuff. C’rizz is OK and balances out the core cast a little.
I thought that The Natural History of Fear was going to be rubbish as well, as it seemed that we must find out eventually that there is some secret plan that the Doctor and companions are working on. But it didn’t come, and didn’t come, and so the eventual revelation of What Was Really Going On totally subverted my expectations.
The Twilight Kingdom brings back Michael Keating – Hooray! And rather a good tale of involved conspiracies, combat and revolutionary ideology.
I’m about four DW review posts behind at the moment, so bear with me while I clear the backlog. It’s not really accurate to think of these five plays as a series in themselves; they follow pretty much straight on from the first series of four uniting Louise Jameson as Leela and Lalla Ward as Romana, the latter now president of the Time Lords, and the end is pretty unresolved. I liked the first two of these most, mainly for fannish reasons, but they were all decent enough.
Gallifrey 2.1: Lies – Romana explores the matrix and meets herself – yes, at long last we have Mary Tamm returning as Romana I, explaining why she chose to regenerate at the start of Destiny of the Daleks. Also the set-up for the rest of the series.
Gallifrey 2.2: Spirit – most of this was just not-quite-sapphic bonding between Leela and Romana, with the actual plot, such as it was, a bit confusing and distracting; but I loved it. I think this would be the play to get Old School fans hooked on the series.
Gallifrey 2.3-5: Pandora, Insurgency, Imperiatrix – the last three plays in the series bring us back to Gallifrey, and are really a continuous narrative of palace politics culminating in Mary Tamm’s return in unexpected form. All engaging enough, and finishes with a documentary interview with the creators.
11) Latin Palaeography: Antiquity & the Middle Ages, by Bernhard Bischoff, translated by Dáibhí Ó Cróinín & David Ganz
My Christmas present from my wife (I got her the lives of early saints). I dabbled in this subject during my medieval astrology phase, and had some dealings with co-translator Ó Cróinín at one point; this book is not a popular introduction, but a scholarly overview of the subject, and so it’s a surprisingly good read, especially when you consider it was originally written in German.
The book starts with an overview of what was written and how – the shift from scroll to codex (a codex being what we normally refer to as a “book”); the shift from papyrus to parchment/vellum to paper; different inks; other things that were written on, like the ubiquitous but ephemeral wax tablets. Fascinating stuff about what has survived and what hasn’t; a personal letter from the bishop of London to the Archbishop of Canterbury, for instance, written in about 704.
Then the middle section, which is the must substantial and technical, on the spread of different styles of Latin handwriting, staring in Ireland and Britain and then concentrating on Germany, France and Italy, with excursions to Scandinavia, and the Czechs get a look-in too, as do the Mozarabs, a group one doesn’t often hear much about. Not a lot of concentration on individual letters, more on general style issues and how they tie in with politics – Charlemagne is of course a very big figure here, the only person whose name is commemorated in a style of writing. But he also looks at the evolution of shorthand, and the abbreviations which are the biggest headache in palaeography (explaining why there is no real standard), and briefly looks at the evolution of the numbers.
For me, that last point was always the weirdest. Although in the documents I used to look at, the numbers 0,1,2,3,6,8 and 9 were normally tolerably recognisable, the others were not: 4 was written 5 was written 7 was written
Easy to mistake an early “5” for a modern “4” if reading quickly. Apparently the man we have to thank for this is Gerbert of Aurillac, whose contribution to Western culture and the history of science deserves to be much better known.
The final section looks rather briefly at the manuscript as a cultural artifact, and while interesting enough could have done with a bit of contextualisation with other cultural artifacts. In fact, that is my biggest complaint about the book generally, that as a monograph on a pretty technical topic, admittedly written for the specialist, knowledge of a lot of the context is assumed. Most seriously, lots of places are mentioned, but there are no maps; I would have appreciated some sense of the geographical as well as intellectual connections between Corbie and Luxeuil, for instance.
Anyway, the business end of this is only 220 pages, so despite the density of the subject matter it is a quick read, and often intriguing for the glimpses we get of individual scribes and patrons who helped to shape the letters we read today. My favourite sentence:
“Nevertheless, in the ninth century, Danila, the scribe of the three-columned bible of La Cava, mastered capitalis, uncial, half-uncial, a slanting half-uncial with uncial admixture, and minuscule, all with equal elegance.” (p. 99)
Yeah, the start, comprehensively prepared for this… Kylie, check; angels, check; small red blobby alien, check. Of course the Titanic sailed in April, so the Christmas theme is already a giveaway.
But what a shock! New theme tune arrangement! Love it!
And here’s Geoffrey Palmer, on Doctor Who for the third time. He is hiding something. Ah, the ship, from the planet.
Doctor talks to the alien which reminds me of that creature from the Bernice Summerfield audio.
The robots are malfunctioning. They have an interesting resemblance to my Christmas present last year, the Robots of Death.
Astrid finds that spaceflight isn’t what she wanted. DT and KM work well together.
Meteor shower, not quite astronomically accurate…
Psychic paper gets the Doctor shoreside. Mr Cooper (Clive Swift returns to DW also) and his off-beat take on Earth customs. Deserted streetn but Earth is exotic for Astrid.
It’s Bernard Cribbins! Christmas in London is not safe in the Whoniverse!
Ah. That might explain why the meteoroids are not standard issue. What is the captain up to? The Doctor’s onto him, but the Captain has superior man- and fire-power. And the angel robot tells them they are all going to die!
Wham!
Angels queueing up… Why?
Steward sucked into space! And lots of other people have been too… And the Tardis! Landing on Earth, so we know where this is going to finish.
Oooh, nasty angel!
Aha, so the ship crashing will wipe out life on earth. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without the end of the world!
“I am a Time Lord, I am from Gallifrey…” Great stuff!
Yes, the Doctor agrees with my statement about his Christmases.
A nice bit of character-building from the Van Hoffs. (Rather more cheerful than the Eastenders plot.)
Bk is a cyborg – how will this fit with the robots?
Kitchen staff about to get wiped out… Yep.
Killer robots… Hand stuck in door – a familiar trope – Rose, Robots of Death. (The midshipman is recovering rather well from a gut shot.)
“A Time King from Gabbadee.” “You should see me in the mornings.” “OK!” Oooer!
Space shuffles! A fake degree! Glorious!
“I was sort of made homeless…” Awww.
A bridge across the chasm. Poor Foon… But will the Doctor be able to come back for her?
Angels have wings!, and Banakaffalatta can kill them dead! But not much good for him. Rather moving sacrifice.
…And Foon sacrifices herself too.
“All I do is travel.” “I could squeeze in it…” Makes a change for someone to beg the new Doctor to come too. (Well, Mickey did.) “Old tradition, yeah.” Good music now.
Three questions. Whoops, that blows two of them.
Teleport to safety… No, to deck 31. Good girl, Astrid. (But will you survive to the end of the story?)
It’s Max Capricorn. Looks in bad shape. What is he up to? Is it all just an insurance scam? No, elaborate corporate revenge. This is rather Douglas Adams-ish. Well, if he had written Davros.
Kylie and a forklift truck… Oh dear!!!! Poor Astrid, I thought things might not end well!
How’s the Doctor in charge of the angels? Oh.
Rescue the ship now! Skip into the atmosphere… Oh dear, poor old Buckingham Palace! Getting the Queen out in time! And a near miss (reminiscent of the end of Revenge of the Cybermen) of the target. Looks like Elizabeth II is better disposed to the Doctor than Elizabeth I.
Can we save Astrid? Looks like maybe not. Every victory has a cost, and the good guys don’t always live to see the end.
“If you could decide who lives and who dies, that would make you a monster.” So true. And off they go to England.
And Mr Copper has fallen on his feet, hasn’t he!
“Where are you going?” “No idea!” “Me neither.”
And a tribute to Verity Lambert.
Well, an interesting shift of tone! And I loved the world-building, the Vones and the invocation of Vot.
Idly googling the name of my old school I discovered to my delight and slight surprise that a large feature on Europa, the fourth of the four big moons of Jupiter, has been named "Rathmore Chaos". It is about 57 km across, ie the size of County Antrim (appropriately enough, but we’ll come to that); here is a picture of it.
I was naturally a bit curious as to how this had come about. As a teenager one of my daydreams was that I would grow up to discover lots and lots of asteroids, and therefore get the right to name them; after exhausting my near family I might consider commemorating my old school; I wondered if one of my fellow alumni had ended up in the sort of job I thought I wanted then, and had managed to sort-of fulfill my ambition?
No, the truth is a little weirder than that. The International Astronomical Union, in its wisdom, has decided that features on Europa are to be named after either i) people and places referenced in the original Europa myth or ii) people and places from Celtic myth or iii) "Celtic" (sic) stone rows and circles. The IAU has a right of course to choose to name planetary features after whatever it likes, and I’m pleased that Irish culture is being celebrated in this way, but I would just remind them that the megalithic monuments in question predate the arrival of the Celts by at least a millennium. (I mean, do we talk of the Hagia Sofia as a Turkish monument?) Celtic knowledge may not be the strong point of the members of the relevant IAU sub-committeemildly Celtic name).
The specific derivation for the Rathmore nomenclature is this story by "Ethna Carbery" (Anna MacManus) from In The Celtic Past, published in 1904, two years after she died, based on this appendix to the Voyage of Bran. It’s pretty clear that the place referred to as Rathmore in the story is not my old school to the south of Belfast, but this ancient feature, known as "Rathmore Trench". ("Rathmore" just means "big ringfort", An Ráth Mhór, though there is a local legend about a woman called Mor who lived there.)
So, just think of that, those of you who have occasion to visit Antrim Town; once you’re off the motorway, just glance over to the right as the dual carriageway comes to an end; that clump of trees has bestowed its name on a far off corner of a frozen world.
We spent Christmas 1997 in Banja Luka, Bosnia, with six-month-old B and my mother. B at that stage had all the normal developmental signs, was just sitting up, smiling like anything, and weathered with resilience an attack of impetigo on her neck.
Banja Luka, on the other hand, was a city still in trauma, barely a year after the end of the war, and still worrying if it would start again; the local politicians who I was working with were locked in an internal power struggle with the war-time hard-line Serb leadership, and the political situation was still fragile. None the less I managed to buy a Christmas tree at a stall in the main street.
We used to go to Mass on Sundays at the Metal Factory outside the city, the main base for the British army in the area. On Christmas Eve they had a Midnight Mass, actually at midnight, jointly celebrated by the Catholic and Anglican chaplains (the latter was in fact from Northern Ireland, so CoI rather than CoE). We all went, carrying sleeping B with us. Rather than the usual dozen or so in the congregation, the little metal hut was packed with servicemen and servicewomen, singing Christmas carols lustily and all clearly missing home desperately. Though civilians, we got special attention for having a baby with us.
The next day was Christmas Day itself, though not for the local Orthodox Serbs who stick to the old calendar. I went down to the covered market to buy a turkey, but found my Serbian was not up to it, so found a local friend to help me negotiate.
She did the job, and I went home with a fine bird, though with all innards intact, which my mother bravely prepared and roasted. We settled down to Christmas dinner and remarked on how much fat there was in the skin of Bosnian turkeys. And, yeah, the liver had been a lot bigger than you would expect too. And it tasted different from turkeys we were used to. In fact, it tasted more like, em, a goose. We concluded that it was a goose, not a turkey. No big deal, just not quite what I thought I had brought home. We had a good day anyway, and B enjoyed her presents.
I took it up with my local friend the next day. “Did you realise,” I asked her, “that that bird we got yesterday was a goose – guska/гуска – not a turkey – ćurka/ћурка?” She shrugged her shoulders without embarrassment. “What do I know about that?” she demanded. “I am city girl.” She gave the impression that to know such technicalities of bird genus was the mark of an inferior rural upbringing, far beneath the notice of an urban sophisticate like her.
All in all it was a special Christmas – our first with B, as now we are having our first without her.
