Oh dear. It’s pretty dire. The anti-matter monsters are either laughable video effects or men in not-very-threatening rubber suits. The quarry is a quarry. There is a character who is funny because he is working class. There is a human scientist with glasses and a white coat who contributes nothing except to get zapped by the monsters. The Brigadier is at his most nitwittish. Jo is at her most annoying. The incidental music is at its most cliched and intrusive. The quarry is evidently a quarry.

There are some good bits too. The Time Lords’ control centre, and Omega’s palace, are nicely designed sets which add credibility to the thin plot. The bickering between Two and Three is a delight. Even One, from within his pyramid, is pretty authoritative, though there is one scene where Hartnell has to keep looking across at his cue cards. The scene where it is revealed that Omega has no body left is very good, but fatally undermined by the fact that we have clearly seen Stephen Thorne’s chin in silhouette in the previous shot. The Brigadier does get one good line, when he first enters the TARDIS and says to Two, “So this is what you’ve been doing with UNIT funds and equipment all this time!”

But on the whole it’s pretty dire. John Williams points out, on the excellent Behind the Sofa group blog, that the Target novelisation by Terrance Dicks was way better, especially the dismally executed cliff-hanger to episode 3 where Three rolls around on the ground briefly with a guy in a rubber mask. I think since I started re-watching old Doctor Who series this is the least impressive one I have seen. Best avoided unless (like me) you are a completist. Get the idea by reading this summary.

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I’ve already written several entries about this while we were wacthing it, but it really is fantastic. It’s a 1976 BBC dramatisation of Robert Graves’ two novels, I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935), and deserves to be even higher than 12th on the list of 100 greatest British TV shows of all time. It’s almost twenty years since I read Graves’ novels; but I re-read his primary source material much more recently, so some of this was fresh in my mind. And I also vividly remember seeing the “Not my HEAD!” episode when I was 12 or 13 (and living in the Netherlands).

This really is excellent stuff, and it’s a bit of a shame (as with many of these older programmes) to watch it one episode a night for a couple of weeks, rather than one episode a week for three months as the makers intended. It means you pick up a bit more than necessary on the differential rates of aging among the main characters – Tiberius, for instance, shifts well from aspiring princeling to debauched old emperor, but Augustus as an old man just looks like a young man with make-up. And Caligula and Messalina are not quite young enough for the parts (John Hurt was 36 when it was filmed, Caligula 29 when he died; Messalina is clearly intended to be a teenager though Sheila White was 28); while Antonia starts off too old.

But it is easy to suspend your disbelief. In particular, it’s impossible to take your eyes off the two leads (who both won BAFTA awards) – Siân Philips as Augustus’ wife Livia, who poisons her way anguishedly through the first few episodes, and then Derek Jacobi as her grandson Claudius, watching in horror as the reigns of Tiberius and Caligula degenerate, and even more horror-struck when he ends up as Emperor himself. It’s all really good, even some of the minor characters – particular kudos to Ashley Knight who plays Claudius as a young boy, complete with twitch and stammer.

It’s startling to realise how close it is to the source material in places. Suetonius actually records the correspondence between Augustus and Livia about what the heck they were going to do with Claudius – as the imperial archivist a century later, he presumably had access to the original documents and didn’t just make it up. There’s a really good internet resource comparing the TV series with the actual historical facts (as far as they are known) here. My one regret is that I bought the Dutch-language version of the DVDs rather than the English version, which apparently has lots of brilliant extras.

I spotted the two-disc English language DVD version of this going cheap in the local FNAC and bought it about a month ago. I’m one of the diehard fans of the original 1978-80 radio series, and will accept no substitutes, but there are some good bits in this televised 1981 version.

In particular, David Dixon is actually a better Ford Prefect than Geoffrey McGivern was. He confidently conveys a sense of alienness, and he makes the most of the rather boring scenes in the Vogon freighter at the end of the first episode. (Compare Fit the First of the radio series, where even his fans must admit that McGivern starts off sounding shrill and unsure.)

The other thing that works really well is, of course, the Book – the superb animations of the entries in the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide, backed up by Peter Jones’ narration – the one point where televising simply could not mean pointing a camera at actors reciting the lines in a stage setting. The combination of graphics and cameos – Douglas Adams himself stripping off and disappearing into the sea, the two unspeaking drinkers of the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster – are almost without exception brilliant.

There are some tremendously naff bits as well. Rather surprisingly, Simon Jones as Arthur Dent seems to spend a lot of time standing around as if he is waiting to be told what to do. Zaphod’s extra head is simply embarrassing. The departures in script from the radio series (with perhaps the exceptions of the Dish of the Day, and the Disaster Area graphics, both of which had already featured in the novels) are not usually improvements.

One particularly weird bit of interaction is the chemistry between Trillian and Zaphod. In their first scene, when they hear the radio annoucner quote Eccentrica Gallumbits’ description of Zaphod as “the best bang since the Big One”, he and Trillian exchange what looks to me like a knowing smile. But then at the end of the fourth episode, when it looks like they are all going to be killed by the Magrathean computer banks exploding, Zaphod and Ford shake hands and sing a song, leaving Arthur and Trillian to look aghast and, in her case, very much alone. More could and should have been made of her character; she seems just a clothes-horse for skimpy red costumes. No big criticism of Sandra Dickinson intended – like Susan Sheridan in the radio series, she just isn’t given much to work with.

Still, this was worth the (low) price I paid for it – especially the documentary clips on the second disc, which do add quite a lot.

Using the weekend to catch up with three classic bits of TV I have rewatched recently, and never got around to writing up here.

First up is “The Caves of Androzani”, a Doctor Who story first broadcast in 1984. It was the last story to feature the fifth Doctor, Peter Davison, and is generally rated as the best of Davison’s 20 televised adventures by quite some way (the dynamic rankings site has it at #7 out of 186 Who stories from 1963 to 2006, with the next best-rated Davison story, “Earthshock”, at #34 and only “The Five Doctors” otherwise making the top fifty).

It’s a story with curious links to the old and the new. The writer was Robert Holmes, responsible also for some of the greatest Doctor Who stories of the Tom Baker era – “The Ark in Space”, “The Deadly Assassin”, and “The Talons of Weng Chiang”; sadly this was the last time he wrote for the show. But the director was Graeme Harper, who came back to direct four of this year’s episodes (the ones with the Cybermen). It’s a dynamite combination.

The story: The Doctor and his new companion, Peri, arrive on Androzani Minor, a planet where a resource-extraction company from Androzani Major, backed by government forces, is under attack from android guerillas. The boss of the company, Morgus, and the leader of the androids, Sharaz Jek, are both villains, but nicely sketched – Jek falls in love with Peri, and is at least fighting for a cause, whereas Morgus, if a bit more two-dimensional, redeems himself by making frequent asides to the camera – it shouldn’t work, but it does.

Two out of three episodes end in brilliant cliff-hangers – the Doctor faces execution by firing squad at the end of ep 1 (as did the Second Doctor at the end of the first ep of his last story, “The War Games”); and at the end of episode 3, as the poisoned and dying Doctor seizes control of a spaceship whose pilot threatens to shoot him if he doesn’t turn it round, he replies “Not a very persuasive argument, actually, Stotz, because I’m going to die soon anyway… I’m not going to let you stop me now!” There’s very nearly more drama in that line than in the rest of Davison’s era put together.

I’ve seen the view expressed elsewhere that this could easlily have been a Fourth Doctor/Sarah Jane, or a Third Doctor/Jo Grant story. I don’t know about that. I think that there is something peculiarly Thatcherite in the relations between Morgus and the Androzani Major government. As far as I remember the only other Holmes story featuring resistance fighters against the capitalist exploiters of resources is “The Power of Kroll”, his last and least impressive Tom Baker story, so it was good to see him revisit the theme so triumphantly here; and I’m straining to think of any other Who story with a twin-planet arrangement, surely a little inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.

Anyway, it’s very good, although I think its looks were improved at the time by the fact that the surrounding stories are simply not of the same quality (the story immediately following was Colin Baker’s first, “The Twin Dilemma”, which is currently – and likely to remain – in last place on the Dynamic Rankings scale).

I decided when I started blogging that, since I am a public figure (at least in some countries), there was no point in embracing anonymity at the risk of being exposed; so my real name has been clear here from the start. But I also decided that I would only rarely write unlocked (or even locked) entries here about my job, or work-related stuff.

As a nod to transparency, I am now making it public that I am leaving my current job at the end of this year, and joining a new organisation as head of their Brussels office. I have been in my current position for four and a half years, in the course of which I have expanded my area of operations from the Western Balkans to include also Moldova, Cyprus and the three South Caucasus states.

But I have been on the lookout for a role which would involve more of the advocacy activities which I most enjoy about my present job, and less of the grind of production of research reports, which I don’t enjoy doing so much. It also occurs to me more and more that those of us who are working in international politics, and not doing anything about Africa, have to ask ourselves why. I myself became a Balkanist largely by accident.

Thus the move. My new geographical focus will be simultanously more global, but also more concentrated in the countries where I am working; the new organisation currently has a client in Europe and two in Africa, so I am getting up to speed with the literature relating to my new responsibilities. Also on the lookout for office space in Brussels, preferably a bit closer to the European quarter than my current Avenue Louise location.

Come the new year, the number of work-related posts here will certainly decrease still further from the current low level – but that doesn’t mean that there will be none at all!

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OK, we have now watched the first two episodes – “Everything Changes” yesterday and “Day One” tonight – and we really enjoyed it.

I haven’t read anyone else’s lj entries about it except my wife‘s (will now go back and add assenting or dissenting comments as appropriate).

“Everything Changes” – reminiscent of the debut of the new Doctor Who with “Rose”, only a year and a half ago; lots of differences, lots of similarities, but on the whole I thought RTD had learnt from earlier mistakes – no problems with pacing, a more confident introduction of the cast (of course, if you have a team set-up, you can have one of your characters formally introduce the rest and remain within the spirit of it). Cardiff may seem a slightly banal place to have the European equivalent of a Hellmouth, but at the same time, does southern California really seem as exotic to its residents as it seems to me? And I loved the line about how the magic paving stone had been affected by a “dimensionally transcendental chameleon circuit”. Most viewers will have appreciated it just as technobabble; some of us will have got the in-joke.

“Day One” – I have already glimpsed critiques decrying this as a rip-off of the typical Buffy plot-line of the perils of sex, with the supernatural forces of our setting representing the onrush of adulthood. This is most unfair. The perils of sex are something we always have with us from puberty to old age; it’s a universal theme that long predates Buffy and will still be written about long after Buffy and Torchwood are forgotten. The shots of the little piles of dust in the fertility clinic mingled humour and horror in just the right way. Also, both Gwen and Captain Jack are really coming on as simply fascinating people to watch – the camera just loves Eve Myles. Gwen’s relationship with Rhys is clearly destined to implode horribly. And I have to say that I have a pretty good idea whose (or rather Who’s) hand is in the jar…

Well done to my cousin Brian who is the script editor.

We’ll keep watching.

Tom Baker and John Culshaw on Dead Ringers

(with thanks to )

I managed to get hold of the 1999 documentary, “Adventures in Space and Time” the other day, which is narrated (in another Hitch-Hiker link) by Peter Jones. Tom Baker’s interview bits, roughly in the middle of it, are hilarious. Transcribed below for your enjoyment.

My trade, such as it is, is to try to be convincing. And the more preposterous the situation or the script, then the more interesting it is to try to be convincing. If youi’re playing a realistic thing, you know a man with a gun, that can’t be difficult – but to play someone from outer space, a benevolent alien, but who still looks like a human being, and who has secrets – how do you suggest that he is alien?

And so I felt that the best way to suggest that I was an alien and came from somewhere else and had secrets, dark thoughts, and wonderful thoughts, I thought, the way to do that is just to be Tom Baker.

[about the wool for the scarf] They gave it to a woman with a wonderful name called Begonia Pope. (I wonder where she is now? I hope she’s happy.) And she was so impressed to be working for the BBC that, so, Jim gave it to her, and he knew nothing about knitting, and so she knitted up all the wool, and because the wool was on the tax-payer, you know, I mean, a whole lorry-load of wool was delivered, or something like that, and when we got to her little house, she could only talk through the letter-box because we couldn’t get into the house because of the scarf…

[On his own religious background] I mean, if you can believe in the Christian religion, you can believe in anything. You know, it’s so utterly preposterous.

When you went to Communion (it’s a big thing about being a Roman Catholic) and you take the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ; and I remember being a difficult child in a sense, always curious and wanting – I said, “Listen, doesn’t that make me a cannibal?”

My mother said, “What did you say?”

“Well,” I said, “I mean, er, if I’m eating the body and blood and soul and divinity of Our Lord, that makes me a cannibal, doesn’t it?”

And then I remember waking up underneath the sideboard, because, you know, she had a tremendous kinda short jab; she didn’t like that kind of, um, blasphemy.

So I would recall those amazing days of my faith and try to do the Doctor Who lines – which I never understood anyway – and people Believed them.

[On the overall effect:] I was very aware that people, you know, that children who were frightened, for example, used to bury themselves in their granny’s bosoms. And so grannies adored me, because when a granny would see me, you know, in Sloane Square, or Oxford Street or somewhere like that, the granny would suddenly see me, and for some inexplicable reason – here’s the power of television – her bosoms would start tingling. Which I think grannies like (I don’t know, I’m not a granny). And so, then she’d say, “Ohh! Hello, dear!” And then she’d realise who I was.

So there were all sorts of things that gave me a sense of power, because, you know, I was drunk on this. I was drunk often on other things as well, but I mean I was drunk on being Doctor Who – drunk on being this benevolent character who everyone found funny. It was amazing, that people found me funny all the time. I couldn’t pass anyone in the street. Everybody knew me. I was like St Francis of Assisi. I was kissing lepers, or, you know, embracing anyone at all. I was always catching lice from neglected children, and then going home absolutely teeming with nits.

But I didn’t mind actually catching illnesses or diseases from them. That’s so pitiful, isn’t it, really? It’s a fearful confession, that’s right. I would embrace the afflicted and the contagious, and the infectious.

Anything, really, for a laugh.

Yes, has it right: the answer to my previous question is indeed Calvin Coolidge.

On 1 June 1925, Thomas Marshall, who had been Vice-President from 1913 to 1921, died aged 71. Coolidge had succeded him as Vice-President in 1921 and was now, aged 52, the oldest – indeed the only – ex-Vice-President of the United States. By now Coolidge himself was President, having been elevated on the death of Warren Harding in 1923.

On 4 March 1929, at the end of Coolidge’s term, his Vice-President from 1925, Charles Dawes, who was seven years older, became the oldest living ex-Vice-President. He went on to outlive Coolidge by eighteen years.

A year later, on 8 March 1930, William Howard Taft, who had been President from 1909 to 1913, died, making Coolidge at the age of 57 the oldest (and, again, the only) ex-President. Coolidge is therefore the only person to have been both the oldest ex-President and the oldest ex-Vice-President at completely different times.

When Coolidge died on 5 January 1933, there were no living ex-Presidents; his successor, Herbert Hoover, had lost the election but still had two months of his term to go. Hoover, of course, went on to have the longest retirement of any ex-President, over 31 years.

For my complete workings, see below the cut.

In anticipation of November 11, when (all being well) Gerald Ford will become the longest-lived U.S. President ever, I have been mulling these statistics.

From the end of his presidential term on 4 March 1801 until his death on 4 July 1826, John Adams was both the oldest living ex-President of the USA and also the oldest living ex-Vice-President. Thomas Jefferson, who succeeded Adams in both offices, predeceased him by a few hours, or he too would have held that (admittedly somewhat obscure) distinction.

The same was true of Martin Van Buren, from 18 November 1850 (when Richard Johnson, who had been Van Buren’s no.2 in 1837-41) died, to his own death on 24 July 1862.

Likewise the otherwise unexciting Millard Fillmore, from the death of James Buchanan on 1 July 1868 till his own death on 8 March 1874; and also Andrew Johnson, from Fillmore’s death until he died on 31 July 1875.

Now we must skip forward almost ninety years. On 7 November 1967, John Nance Garner, who had been Franklin Roosevelt’s first Vice-President, died, two weeks short of his 99th birthday. Harry S Truman, Roosevelt’s last Vice-President (he had three) thus became the oldest living ex-Veep; he was already the oldest living ex-President. Truman died on 26 December 1972, and for the next month, until his own death on 22 January 1973, Lyndon B. Johnson was both the oldest living ex-President and the oldest living ex-President.

More recently, Richard Nixon was both the oldest ex-President and the oldest ex-Vice-President from the death of Nelson Rockefeller on 26 January 1979 until Ronald Reagan’s term ended on 20 January 1989 (Reagan being older than Nixon, Nixon was no longer the oldest ex-President). Since Reagan’s death on 6 June 2004, Gerald Ford has been both the oldest living ex-President and the oldest living ex-Vice-President.

The question: There is one person who was both the oldest living ex-President and the oldest living ex-Vice-President, but not at the same time. Who was it?

12) Star Songs of an Old Primate, by James Tiptree Jr

With all the buzz about Julie Phillips’ new biography of Alice Sheldon, I realised that I am not as familiar with the works of James Tiptree as I would like to be. This pulls together just eight stories in 270 pages, including two which I had already read (“Your Haploid Heart” and the Hugo and Nebula winner “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”). With the exception of the shortest story, a five page stream-of-consciousness vignette, I found them all not only enjoyable but also thought-provoking. Tiptree was really good at not so much subverting the genre’s conventions but more putting subversive material into the framework while none the less respecting it. Will try and find more of her stuff before launching myself on the biography.

From here.

1 quaff for:

• Banishments in General
• Executions in General
• Suicide in General
• Adultery in General
• Orgies

2 quaffs for:

• Murders & Assassinations in General
• Poisonings in Particular
• Incest
• Omens and Sibyls

3 quaffs for:

• Assassinations/Poisoning of Emperors (w/accompanying appropriate food if poisoned– see below)
• Banishment of Julia
• Starvation of Livilla
• Livia Becoming a Goddess
• The Winner of Messalina and Sylla’s Contest

Many quaffs (drain that goblet!) for:

• That –uh– thing Caligula does at the end of Episode 9 “Zeus, By Jove” (we don’t want to give it away if you’ve never seen the series before.)
• “Not my head!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Eat a Fig for:

• Poisoning by Fig

Eat a Mushroom for:

• Poisoning by Mushroom

Optional:

• Hum “Let’s Do the Time Warp Again” at the first appearance on screen of Livilla and of Nero (Agrippinilla’s son — don’t be thrown off by the many other characters who have Nero tacked onto their name somewhere) You deserve ten gold stars for knowing why.
• Yell “Make it so” at Sejanus at some point.
• Brandish Boiled Asparagus for: You’ll know.

Only one episode left. Sigh.

Mastermind: I thought the HP Lovecraft questions were a little easier than the Agatha Christie ones – though surely it is a bit unsporting to restrict the Agatha Christie questions to the Poirot novels alone? My knowledge of Led Zeppelin and Gustav Landauer is less complete, but I thought the Landauer guy knew so much about him that he must have written the biography.

As for the general knowledge round, no doubt but that the Led Zeppelin guy got the hardest questions – and still won.

University Challenge: Er, yes. I just sent my future colleague who is a Wadham graduate a note of congratulation. I don’t think I’m still in touch with anyone I knew at Robinson, which is probably just as well. I found the questions about flowers completely impenetrable, though had no difficulty in shouting the correct answer each time.

, may I mutually recommend who blogs both at Inuit Bikini Scarlet Carwash and Hunting Monsters? You are both into international politics and alternate history.

(And those of you who share their interests would probably enjoy reading both.)

Has anyone out there read Oracle by Ian Watson? It would seem to fit both my interest in Irish-related sf and my interest in sf at least partly set in Belgium…

9) Charlotte Brontë’s Promised Land, by Eric Ruijssenaars

Enthused by my recent reading of Villette, I ordered this little book from the Brontë Society last week and it was waiting for me on my return from Moldova. I must be in the very small minority of readers who bought it more because of Brussels than the Brontës; in my last job, I often went for a sandwich lunch in the Parc de Bruxelles, and even now I find myself trying to thread my car through the relevant streets a couple of times each month as I head to the north of the city centre. Plus there is something very fascinating about vanished streetscapes; the school where Charlotte and Emily Brontë lived in 1842, and to which Charlotte returned alon for a year in January 1843, was demolished in 1909 as part of the development which has resulted in today’s Palais des Beaux-Arts, built in the 1920s. As well as that, of course, the sense of place in Villette is so well developed that there is a certain fascination in reading more about the reality on which the fiction was based.

One does feel, however, for the unfortunate Hegers, who had taken the unattractive, reserved and disconcertingly intelligent Brontë girls under their wing for a few months as an act of kindness, and then found themselves and their country portrayed in Villette in a way they simply could not have anticipated. Ruijssenaars has attached to his own text a half-dozen glorious accounts from Brontë fans between 1871 and 1916 coming to gaze at the Pensionnat and its inhabitants, reverently plucking leaves from the pear-trees in the garden, and generally harassing the Hegers. That is not to minimise the interest of Ruijssenaars’ own work, bringing together the archives and published architectural history of Brussels with the accumulated lore of a century and a half of Brontëology.

(The one surviving picture of the Pensionnat and the garden, on the left immediately below the cathedral. The Cathedral is still recognisable but all the other buildings shown here have gone.)

(The map from Ruijssenaars’ book, with west at the top and north to the right.)

(This is the map of the area supplied by Windows LiveWriter, usual orientation ie north is up. I prefer the Google hybrid version but don’t know how to post it in an entry.)

I must admit that, time and permitting, I would love to do a guide to the Belfast scenes of Sacrifice of Fools. (Isn’t there a book somewhere out there about Philip K Dick’s California?) If I could do half as well as this I’d be very pleased.

8) One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Somewhat grim reading, but at least very short. It is basically the history of a single day in a Soviet labour camp in 1951. The prisoners are mostly there for no good reason (Ivan Denisovich himself is imprisoned on a trumped-up charge of espionage, after escaping German capture at the front ten years earlier). Conditions are brutal, but unfortunately I have read of much worse, more recently and elsewhere. The most memorable part of the book for me was the portrayal of Tiurin as manager of the squad of prisoners including the protagonist, balancing the brutality of the system against a desire to do his best for himself and his team. Anyway, that’s another Nobel laureate sampled.

6) The Scales of Injustice, by Gary Russell

I think the first Doctor Who spinoff novel I read was Gary Russell’s Invasion of the Cat-People, long long ago. I was so deeply unimpressed that it was years before I read another one. Since then, of course, I’ve become aware of Russell as the host of numerous DVD commentaries and as a talking head on Doctor Who Confidential, not to mention being reminded of his activities as child actor in the Famous Five and editor of Doctor Who Monthly. It’s not always a howling success when someone who writes about the genre turns their hand to fiction, but after my recent bout of Serious Reading this seemed like a relaxing option, snagged from the BBC website in electronic form.

And to my relief the book is OK. It’s basically a boiled together combination of Doctor Who and the Silurians plus The Sea Devils, with flash forward to Warriors from the Deep, plus some back-story about the breakup of the Brigadier’s first marriage and what Liz Shaw was really up to in Cambridge. The book also includes a very nicely done farewell scene between Liz and the Doctor, which of course was not shown on screen. The book could pass as an above-average novelisation of a seven-part TV story, which I think is what the author was aiming at, so can be rated a success.

Well, I have got through the ten unread books I listed a month ago. I think roughly two of them were books that I would whole-heartedly recommend to others to read: The Color Purple and PersuasionThe Prince if you are interested in that kind of thing, as I am.

Of the others, the one I disliked most was Beloved, a grindingly awful book with no redeeming features; also less than completely satisfactory, for different reasons, were The God of Small Things and The Lovely Bones.

The System of the World, The Brothers Karamazov and Villette were all basically too long. The Brothers Karamazov came close to redeeming itself by having an interesting plot, but, like St Augustine’s Confessions, had too much theological stodge.

I may indulge in this kind of project again. If I do, it will simply be to read the top “unread” books in my LibraryThing catalogue, ranked by how many other users own them, rather than (as I did this time) by how many have marked them as unread; easier to do that way. And I shall do five rather than ten, as it should be quicker.

Now, back to my usual diet of sf and fantasy…

5) The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

My Unread Books Project has not delivered me a barrel of laughs so far, and I have to say that my heart sank as the narrator is raped at the age of fourteen on the first page; Oh no, I thought, it’s Beloved all over again. But in fact this turns into a really heartwarming story of triumph against economic and emotional adversity, of love and laughter overcoming the obstacles of gender and racial segregation. It was also (as the last in a reading programme which included The System of the World and The Brothers Karamazov) really short, only 244 pages. In fact, of the ten books I have read as a result of my pledge to make my “unread” list less embarrassing, I think this is the only one I have unequivocally enjoyed. (I did wonder to what extent the African bits were a response to Things Fall Apart.)

4) Villette, by Charlotte Brontë

With my ancestral home being near where the Brontë sisters’ father was born, and having trudged through Jane Eyre for my O-level in English Literature (one of my two B grades, along with Religious Education), I have always had a vague interest in them. But this was the first Charlotte Brontë novel I have read as an adult (I did read Wuthering Heights a couple of years back, prompted by the BBC’s Big Read).

Part of the attraction (apart from it being part of my Unread Books Project) is that Villette is Brussels, and the small largely Francophone kingdom of Labassecour (which still retains its impenetrable aboriginal dialect) is Belgium. There’s not a lot of English-language fiction set in my adopted homeland. (Even less sf or fantasy.) The only other bit that leaps to mind is the couple of glimpses in Heart of Darkness. So it was interesting to read the book and try and match description to location. In fact, I have ordered a wee book called Charlotte Brontë’s Promised Land, by Eric Ruijssenaars, from the Brontë Society website, to slake my curiosity.

Having said all that, unfortunately Villette is not a very strong example of the sisters’ genius. There are too many unlikely coincidences, and I was very uncomfortable with the way in which the narrator reacts to being emotionally abused by one of her axcquaintances by falling in love with him. It was not at all clear to me why she did not end up with the nice doctor chap. In addition, though this is supporting evidence rather than crucial, I don’t think the book does well on the Bechdel Test. Anyway, interesting to see the Brussels of a century and a half ago through someone else’s eyes.

I told F yesterday that I am going to Moldova for a couple of days.

He asked, “Are they going to split up?”

(We had had a number of conversations earlier in the year about my visits to Montenegro and Kosovo.)

He already knew that Moldova had split up from Russia, and so did Ukraine and “Blerrus” and “Lativia”.

I explained that indeed there are people in Moldova who want to split it up and join their bit onto Russia, but the problem is that Russia is now quite a long way away from Moldova, and anyway I don’t think the people who want to split up Moldova are very nice people.

He’s only seven. I suspect we will have more conversations like this, at least as long as I stay in this line of work…

The clue is in the icon…

So, Captain Jean-Luc Picard was having an affair with Magenta (of Rocky Horror), until he was arrested and killed by Gimli…

Well now, the result of last week’s competition when we asked you to find a derogatory term for the Belgians. Well, the response was enormous and we took quite a long time sorting out the winners.

There were some very clever entries. Mrs Hatred of Leicester Said ‘let’s not call them anything, let’s just ignore them’ … (applause starts vigorously, but he holds his hands up for silence)

… and a Mr St John of Huntingdon said he couldn’t think of anything more derogatory than Belgians. (cheers and applause; a girl in showgirl costume comes on and holds up placards through next bit)

But in the end we settled on three choices: number three … the Sprouts (placard ‘The Sprouts’), sent in by Mrs Vicious of Hastings… very nice ;

number two….. the Phlegms (placard) … from Mrs Childmolester of Worthing;

but the winner was undoubtedly from Mrs No-Supper-For-You from Norwood in Lancashire… Miserable Fat Belgian Bastards. (placard; roar of applause)

Very good – thank you, Carol. (Carol exits)

Spent much time yesterday looking around two day-centres for children with learning disabilities. B is finding school too much for her, won’t participate in group activities and comes home bruised from banging herself against walls in frustration. I thought they were both nice places; one only a few km away, but I thought its facilities marginally inferior (apart from the garden) and anyway they don’t have any vacancies; the other about 20 km east of here, with a nicer interior atmosphere but not as much outside space (oddly enough, within spitting distance of the church of Our Lady of the Stone where the local saint consoles those with mental disorders). The second place does have a vacancy, so if we take them up on it, poor will get to know the motorway between here and there rather well as their bus service doesn’t run this far west.

I spoke more Dutch yesterday than I do in the average month (also when I finally got into work had to go straight out again for a meeting with a Dutch MEP) and was musing on one or two words or phrases which are particularly pleasing in that language. We were asked at both daycentres to give them our gegevens. The word gegeven is the past participle of the verb geven, “to give”; but in English you don’t ask people for their “givens”, you resort to Latin where the verb “to give” is do, dare, dedi, datum and the plural of datum is “data”. Wouldn’t it be nicer to talk of “givens” than “data”? Also there was much discussion of the prikkels which would be experienced by our daughter at each place. Although the word is pronounced identically to the English word “prickles”, in Dutch it has a wider range of meanings, including in this particular case the concept conveyed by the English word “stimuli”, which of course comes from Latin stimulus, meaning “goad”, the diminutive of stilus meaning “stick”. On the one hand, the English language has been enriched (as has famously pointed out) by its use of vocabulary from many sources. On the other, it does mean that we can lose touch rather easily with the resonances of what words actually meant originally.

Also after almost eight years here I am still getting used to Flemish rather than Dutch. The use of ge rather than U or jij to mean “you” still throws me – when I learnt Dutch a quarter of a century ago we used gij and ge only to address God. Not so different, of couse, from the use of “thou” in rural Yorkshire, but I have never spent much time in rural Yorkshire. Also I noticed, more than previously, people not pronouncing the letter “h” at the start of a word – is this a general Flemish thing, or something more restricted to areas within spitting distance of the taalgrens? And of course the diminutive form of nouns being -ske or -ke rather then -tje or -je. I wonder what else I miss because people are trying to speak clearly to us foreigners, rather than talking as they normally would?

I ought to look at Language Log more regularly. alerts me to Roger Shuy’s coverage of the fact that the FBI now has all of 33 agents who speak Arabic.

One can get by in management of a team where much of the input material is in other languages. I do this myself: my Serbo-Croato-Bosnian is at the level of a keen tourist, and my Russian very much that of a beginner. But my team members working full-time on the relevant countries are fluent in the relevant languages, or I wouldn’t have hired them. OK, we’re a specialist outfit, and can afford to hire specialists rather than rotating members of a large staff in and out of different positions every year. But still, Arabic is the fifth most widely spoken language in the world (after Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish and English – when I were a lad, English was firmly in second place) and has 600,000 speakers in the United States of America…