Just had two messages forwarded to me that were sent to all registered alumni of one of the universities I have graduated from. One was a negotiation between landlady and lodger mistakenly sent to the address for all users, the other was a test message sent my one of my fellow alumni who (like me) couldn’t quite believe the system was so easily spammable. (Several of you must have also received the two messages, I expect.)
I hope they get it fixed soon!
Some day I should like to discover how these two dots on the map, in West Virginia and Minnesota respectively, got their names:
But for now, it must remain a mystery.
Meanwhile I had spotted the 1995 “Downtime” production, shortly after “School Reunion” was shown; and after several failed bids on eBay, I finally managed to get hold of a copy of it. However, my wife has meantime developed a deep dislike of Victoria Waterfield, and so I could not possibly watch it while she was conscious and in the house. Most unfortunately, she has been laid low this evening with a horrible bug of some indescribable nature; but the relatively small silver lining is that I have been able to watch “Downtime”, having listened over the course of my commute on Monday to “The Abominable Snowmen” and similarly today to “The Web of Fear”. I had meantime seen both surviving episodes (#2 of “The Abominable Snowmen”, and #1 of “The Web of Fear”) on the “Lost in Time” DVD collection. So by a strange set of circumstances, I am able to present a joint review of the Yeti trilogy.
This was the second story in the famously monster-rich 1967-68 Season 5 (preceded by “Tomb of the Cybermen“, and followed by “The Ice Warriors“, “The Enemy of the World”, “The Web of Fear”, “Fury from the Deep” and “The Wheel in Space”). The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria land in Tibet in roughly the 1930s. The Doctor (in one of those irritating references to otherwise unseen adventures) happens to have the holy bell of the local monastery stashed in the Tardis as the result of a visit several hundred years previously. Much confusion over his and his companions’ real intent ensues, especially since a) an English researcher, Professor Travers, is there looking for Yeti and thinks they are there to steal his research, and b) the monks have been attacked by the Yeti (and indeed Travers’ colleague is killed by them in practically the first scene). In the meantime, the Great Intelligence controlling the (robotic) Yeti also has an unhealthy influence over the leader of the monastery. All ends in a dramatic confrontation inside the Det-sen monastery. You can get a jolly good impression of it for free from the photonovel on the BBC website (possibly even better than from the soundtrack, narrated by Fraser Hines who played Jamie). NB that one of the two co-authors went on to become one of the co-authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (though when his two colleagues sued Dan Brown for plagiarism in The Da Vinci Code, he stayed wisely silent).
Well, it’s OK but it’s not great. Troughton as the Doctor is, as always, fantastic (he has a couple of great one-liners – “They came to get their ball back!”), and the other actors give it their best as well. And the sinister beeping of the Yeti control spheres is a noise that will haunt me whenever I hear a mobile phone give off a similar ringtone. But there is a curious sapping of tension from the scenes with the monks – even if some of them are deluded warrior monks. Troughton does a lot of agonised groaning (he was very good at that) to maintain the tension, but he is working against the tide a bit. Jamie astounds everyone by having a couple of good ideas. Victoria, sadly, just screams. And the biggest problem is that it’s not readily apparent what the sinister plan of the Great Intelligence actually is. My second least favourite thing in sf is having villains whose means and motivation are not clear (my least favourite is cute anthropomorphic robots, but at least the Yeti do not fall into that category). But if the Great Intelligence takes over one Tibetan monastery – so what? And where do the raw materials for building the Yeti come from, halfway up the Himalayas? Bad news for Det-sen and district if it succeeds, but not clear that this is a potentially world-threatening danger.
The sequel, broadcast only a couple of months later, is in quite a different category. This is truly one of the great Doctor Who stories, and it’s very sad that the only surviving episode on video is the first, which is not the best. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive in contemporary (ie 1968) London, to find that the whole city centre is deserted, the Underground closed, corpses covered by sinister webs; it turns out that Professor Travers’ souvenirs from his Himalayan adventure of decades before have developed a life of their own, and the Great Intelligence is back and re-mobilising the robotic Yeti to try and Take Over The World.
Even for us folks from the Celtic fringe, London has a particular resonance. I discovered at the age of, I think, 15, that 43p is the amount of money you leave London with, no matter how much you had when you arrived. There are several wonderful scenes of (Scottish) Jamie and a Welsh soldier trying to find their way through the tunnels. And within London the Tube is very special; there s something pretty appalling even in the audio description of the gradual extinguishing of the lights representing Tubes stations not yet overwhelmed by the enemy. I guess the idea of horrors in the Underground has an extra resonance after July last year, though this would have been very far from the makers’ minds in 1968. (The Blitz, of course, would have been nearer.)
There’s a real peak in the middle of the story. The Doctor is wholly absent from episode #2 (presumably Troughton had the week off), but rather than embarrassedly scramble for continuity as tended to be the case in Hartnell’s day, the Doctor’s absence is a real source of tension, leading Jamie and Victoria into rash efforts to track him down. When the Doctor does turn up in episode #3, it is in the company of a mysterious colonel, who seems a deeply ambiguous figure – is he what he claims to be, the new commander sent in by the authorities outside the zone affected by the crisis, or is he a tool of the Great Intelligence? Of course, we long-term fans know what the answer is as soon as we hear the colonel’s name; but the character portrayed by Nicholas Courtney here is far more interesting than the buffoonish Brigadier of the Pertwee years.
Unfortunately the last two episodes slip back into chasing through tunnels, but the form picks up again for the climax, which sees the Doctor apparently trapped in a sinister mechanism which will drain his mind into the Great Intelligence. Again, we long-term fans know that he may well have a trick up his sleeve, but Jamie and Victoria don’t, and dutifully rescue him before he has time to turn the tables on the enemy, which is therefore defeated but not destroyed, leaving room for another story.
That story was finally produced 27 years later, in 1995, in a story written by Marc Platt (author of various spin-off fiction and the canonical story “Ghost Light”) and directed by Christopher Barry (whose credits go right back to The Daleks), and starring Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier, Deborah Watling as Victoria, Jack Watling as Professor Travers, and Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith; so it’s pretty damn close to canon. Platt’s visions are, frankly, confusing. I didn’t get a lot out of his novel Lungbarrow, and I have also been listening this week to one of his audio plays which was similarly complex; I have never seen “Ghost Light” but it seems to be famously impenetrable. “Downtime” scores rather better. Victoria is now in charge of a new hi-tech academy, where all the students are controlled by rasio signals from the mainframe; it turns out that once they have been correctly programmed, they can get turned into Yeti by holding a control sphere.
I groaned at two unnecessarily self-indulgent and self-referential moments – at one point the Brigadier tells Sarah Jane that the important codes ar “NN and QQ”, the original production codes for the two first Yeti stories; and there’s a conversation when Victoria reminisces about her father (killed by the Daleks) to Professor Travers, who in turn reminiscences about his daughter (last seen in “The Web of Fear”); but we fans know, of course, that the two actors are themselves father and daughter in real life.
Having said that, Courtney again is very good as the (now long-retired) Brigadier, trying to solve the problem and also patch up his relationship with his daughter Kate (played very luminously by Beverley Cressman – who seems to have done surprisingly little else). Both Watlings reprise their parts from a quarter-century earlier well, with the added touch that both characters are now more or less under the sinister influence of the Great Intelligence (and this is reasonably canonical, as both were taken over by it at differnt point in the earlie stories). And Elisabeth Sladen is given very little to do but does it very well (and was to do essentially the same role, investigative journalist checking out what is going on in peculiar educational establishment really controlled by alien powers, even better in “School Reunion” this year). Peter Silverleaf as Victoria’s sidekick Christopher, however, is just unwatchable. (John Leeson – the voice of K9 – also has a small part, as does Geoffrey Beevers who played the Master at one point.)
To be honest, I think even completists can give this one a miss in good conscience. But I’m glad to have watched it and to have rounded out the story of the Yeti, as far as it can be taken.
Summary: Get “The Web of Fear” – essential listening for the Who fan. And if you like it, get “The Abominable Snowmen” as well.
Pictures from my presentation at the European Parliament two weeks ago:
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5) 
I do like this one:
Can’t quite see who the bloke on the far left is, but the woman is my departing assistant, and the guy between her and me is her replacement.
The United Nations Special Representative for Sudan, Jan Pronk, got into hot water recently for sentiments expressed inter alia on his weblog, which culminated in his being declared persona non grata by the government of Sudan.
He has now responded with a spirited defence of blogging in general, and blogging as a senior political figure involved in a delicate and dangerous political situation in particular.
First, he points out that despite the press spin ("Envoy Kicked Out of Sudan for Blogging", that kind of thing) in fact the statements that got him into trouble were not in any way Special Sekrit Blogging Thoughts.
It has been said that my blog reflected my personal opinion, different from an opinion in my capacity as Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations in Sudan. This is nonsense. In my blog I said the same as in press conferences and on other public occasions, attended in my official capacity. How could somebody in my position make a distinction between official and private?
He explains that he has two reasons for writing a weblog:
First, I like combining my work as a politician with analytical reflections on what I am doing and on the environment within which I am working. I have always done so, by lecturing, by writing articles and essays and by making extensive notes for myself. It helps me focus. Blogging for me was a convenient extension of this practice, simply by using a new instrument. I had a second reason. Why not share my reflections with others? I wanted to be accountable, not only to the UN bureaucracy in New York, whom we were sending regularly extensive analytical reports, but broader. I consider myself much more a politician than a diplomat. Politicians have to be accountable and transparent.
He muses a bit on the difference between his role, as a political actor and insider, and that of a journalist, and cautions against confusing the two. And he concludes with five rules of political insider blogging:
- Present only facts, not rumours or hearsay. Check the facts; don’t make up stories.
- Present only quotes of public statements. Do not quote what other persons said in official or informal meetings. In references to such meetings only quote your self. Do not breach confidentiality.
- Present criticism in a balanced manner. Approach all parties alike. Be even handed.
- Do not attack individual persons. Criticize organizations, institutions or movements. Criticize their values, policies and behaviour, when they are in conflict with internationally agreed principles and norms.
- Do not only present criticism. Do not only report negative developments. Highlight also positive facts. Do not withhold praise, when deserved.
All exceptionally sensible. Go read the original article in full. And remember as you do so that this man is trying to prevent (or at least stop) horrendous atrocities.
On yesterday’s date in 1663, Samuel Pepys went bookshopping:
Thence to St. Paul’s Church Yard, to my bookseller’s, and having gained this day in the office by my stationer’s bill to the King about 40s. or 3l., I did here sit two or three hours calling for twenty books to lay this money out upon, and found myself at a great losse where to choose, and do see how my nature would gladly return to laying out money in this trade. I could not tell whether to lay out my money for books of pleasure, as plays, which my nature was most earnest in; but at last, after seeing Chaucer, Dugdale’s History of Paul’s, Stows London, Gesner, History of Trent, besides Shakespeare, Jonson, and Beaumont’s plays, I at last chose Dr. Fuller’s Worthys, the Cabbala or Collections of Letters of State, and a little book, Delices de Hollande, with another little book or two, all of good use or serious pleasure: and Hudibras, both parts, the book now in greatest fashion for drollery, though I cannot, I confess, see enough where the wit lies.
At today’s prices:
So, the cost to Samuel Pepys of these four books (plus “another little book or two”) was within his budget of £2 or £3. Buying them today you would be lucky to get much change out of £500!
Have spent this weekend (and chunks of the last) tidying up my elections site. Not being on the ground, it’s impossible to have a sense of the likely shift of votes; and opinion polls are notoriously useless. But, on the basis of the twin elections for Westminster and the local councils in 2005, I can say the following:
i) The DUP are likely to keep the three gains made by defection from the UUP after the last Assembly election (two seats in Lagan Valley and one in Fermanagh-South TyroneEast Belfast from PUP leader David Ervine, and in North and South Belfast, from the UUP. They have outside chances of further gains from the UUP in East Londonderry and Mid Ulster, but are vulnerable to Sinn Fein in West Belfast
ii) The Alliance Party has tricky defences in Lagan Valley, South Antrim and Strangford, but I remain optimistic (indeed they ought to have a chance of picking up one of the Nationalist seats in South Belfast).
iii) The fate of independent MLA Kieran Deeny in West Tyrone is an interesting question. In 2003 he won a seat from the SDLP which in my view would otherwise have fallen to Sinn Fein. He put in a storming cross-community perfomance in the 2005 general election, though failed to win. While SF is certain to win two seats, and the Unionists another two, it’s very difficult to read which two out of Deeny, the SDLP, and a third SF candidate will make it.
iv) With total certainty, I can predict that some of the above predictions are wrong.
…possibly make an animated icon from the dancing Cyberman at about 6:40 into this?
Edited to add: Thank you,
7) Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, by Dee Brown
I’m surprised and somewhat saddened to say that I am dropping this one, not quite a third of the way in. I am sure that in 1970, when it was first published, the idea of telling the colonisation of the Great Plains from the native Americans’ point of view was ground-breaking and necessary. Of course, this side of the story has now been effectively mainstreamed into American history; see eg Tindall and Shi’s book, which is my main reference on that subject. What we have here is a collection of accounts of betrayal, massacre and forced expulsions, retrieved from official documents of the 1860-1890 period. But I felt that it leant far too much on one strand of source material to be really interesting; I had the same criticism of McCullough’s much-acclaimed Adams biography, and am left wondering if this is a common fault in American historical writing.
I would have really liked some further background: both on the white men’s point of view – some exploration of both the motivation for the settlers’ murderous expansion, and some idea of how the political establishment reacted to or dealt with these crimes carried out in their name – and indeed some more on the native Americans – some sense of their culture, religious beliefs, concepts of their relations with the land and with the white men, rather than just treating them as the objects of genocide. As it is, I spend far too much time in my professional life reading about this sort of thing (usually perpetrated by Europeans on other Europeans) and this book failed to engage my interest in reading about it in a geographical area I don’t know so well and don’t care about as much.
Well, now I can give it back to the guy who lent it to me 15 years ago.
Top UnSuggestion for this book: Against the Gods: the Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein
6) Timewyrm: Apocalypse, by Nigel Robinson
Not really great literature: Doctor and Ace on far future planet, where not all is as it seems, and the plot depends on an untold story from the Doctor’s past. Still, I will read the fourth in this series.
Via
I seems to be in a distinct minority on my f-list in continuing to find Torchwood entertaining and watchable, better than most X-Files, as good as most Doctor Who, and while not up to Buffy at her best still something I look forward to watching whenever my first free evening of the week after Sunday happens to be. (Which was Friday this week. Ooogh.) However. I make no excuses.
OK, we have to be honest and admit that there were two serious plot problems this week – the implausibility of a village getting away consistently with regular bouts of mass murder over the decades, and Jack’s arrival to save the day at the end, not so much deus ex machina as Harkness super machina. But the mood of tension throughout was, I thought, brilliant – both the physical fear of the killers, especially in a way when they turn out not to be rubber suited monsters but ordinary country folk, and the sexual tension between Owen and Gwen – I know, we’ve seen it coming, it’s a huge mistake, she must surely end up with Jack, but there you go.
As Cyberwoman was Ianto’s story, this was Toshiko’s; and she came out of it well, succumbing to the temptations of the lusty alien – less fatal than the previous sex-possession in the series – and of course hearing voices rather like Buffy in Earshot, which was one of my favourite Buffy episodes. As
We’ve been re-watching last year’s Doctor Who and were surprised to see Toshiko pop up in Aliens of London, though I’m sure I must have seen references to that elsewhere.
Was the amnesia pill called “retcon” in the previous episode where it was used? Glorious. Also, in a superb piece of pedantry,
Suzie’s plan is ever-so-slightly convoluted – she risked being locked into Torchwood with everyone else, surely, when Max started his recital; and all this just so that she could kill her father, a few weeks before the cancer would have got him anyway? But entertaining stories are often made of unlikely sets of events, and we were duly entertained. And the return of Yasmin Bannerman, from living tree to policewoman, was very welcome.
Finally, is there any decent livejournal search engine out there any more? Because I am frustrated by being unable to easily search my f-list for Torchwood-related entries. LJseek is pretty erratic, currently giving me only one link less than three weeks old, and I know some of you have been writing about it since then. I suppose I should simply add the relevant posts to my memories as I see them – but doesn’t that risk reading spoilers?
This story, first shown in 1972, brings the Third Doctor and Jo Grant to the barbarous and wind-swept planet of Peladon, ruled by a young king (also called Peladon), which is seeking admission to a Galactic Federation including the future Earth, for whose commission delegates the Doctor and Jo are mistaken.
The story is widely seen as a reference to Britain’s entry into the Common Market, now the European Union; the UK’s accession treaty was signed a week before the first episode was shown.
First off, what is really striking is that Peladon seeks to join the Federation from a position of weakness, not strength. It is a formerly closed society opening up to the outside world, a minor player seeking to be admitted to the big leagues, being dragged out of barbarity towards modernity by the young and idealistic (but weak) king. I can’t quite believe that many in newly post-imperial Britain in 1972 saw the country’s geopolitical position in that light. (King Peladon=Edward Heath? I think not.)
Combined with the question of mineral resources (the delegate from Arcturus wants to cut a side deal with Peladon’s high priest, Hepesh, giving his planet exclusive access to Peladon’s minerals but keeping them out of the Federation), the story actually has more resonances for me with the process of decolonisation, the Federation being the UN rather than the EU, and the young king’s heroism reflecting the media lionisation of the leaders of newly independent countries at the time; or perhaps even going slightly further back, King Peladon=the young Haile Selassie, getting into the League of Nations in 1923 and getting satirised for his pains by Evelyn Waugh.
The main plot revolves around conservative forces trying to prevent the modernisation process from happening, by exploiting traditional religious beliefs and using violence to undermine the state. From England in 1972, one just has to look across the water to Northern Ireland for a contemporary example; Hepesh=Ian Paisley, on this reading. Though by the time the programme was shown, the Northern Ireland conflict had slipped from debates about the modernisation of society to much older patterns of behaviour: Bloody Sunday was the day after the first episode of the Curse of Peladon, and Stormont was abolished a few weeks after the story finished. The Doctor’s taming of the mystical/mythical beast Aggedor and using him to bring about a good ending is not so very far from the aspirations of the Corrymeela community to use religion as a unifying rather than dividing force back home.
Of course, the story also reflects a general assumption of the time that federations are better than going it alone; see also the setting of the 1967 Star Trek story, Journey to Babel. Is this still as generally held a view? Would the story would carry more resonance in today’s Britain if Hepesh were the hero, defending his planet’s priceless assets against the greedy aliens, opposing the young and deluded king’s shallow fascination with the latest interplanetary political gadgetry? (And how did the royal family get to where they are, anyway? As
The final geopolitical point that struck me was the necessity for all the galactic delegates to agree before force could be used – in this case, to defend King Peladon’s authority against Hepesh’s rebel forces. This is a classic case of Chapter VII intervention, and thus strengthens the Federation=UN rather than Federation=EEC reading; the question of a European army, which remains even now a bit of a red herring, was surely not being discussed by anyone in 1972. Of course (as sometimes happens) the procedures are fudged – Arcturus has already been killed by the Ice Warriors, so his vote is not needed for unanimity; but nobody raises this procedural point.
The weather is horrible outside, and I have two more weeks in this job; my motivation is dribbling away. Also I know I’m going to have to come in tomorrow to do some of my least favourite task – editing. Also I have been suffering from nasty mouth ulcers all week, which were not cured by the miracle steroid cream which had always worked before. Also we had a bad night last night with both girls, so am feeling very sleepy.
But the new job is looking good – I changed my mind, and went for the first office I’d looked at, on Rondpoint Schuman, right in the heart of the European quarter. As noted earlier in the week, the internship advertisement went up on Monday and had attracted 100 replies by Tuesday. Though having said that, there is an intern here who has approached me already. He uses a wheelchair, which presumably means he will be less able to hump office equipment around; but on the other hand he has a car which he is allowed to park almost anywhere in Brussels, which is a serious bonus. And – joy of joys – I have been authorised to go and get myself a Blackberry!
(I know, I’m very shallow.)
Meantime, slightly to my surprise, one of the NATO jobs I applied for last year has come back to me with dates for interview in January. I’m not getting my hopes up, and in any case I suspect that if I become a serious candidate it could take months to get a security clearance. But I’ll go and do the interviews anyway. While I’m very happy to have got the new job, it remains my medium-term goal to get inside the institutions rather than outside, and if that matures a little sooner than I had anticipated, well, what the heck.
Right, time to go home. Since the car died I am beholden to public transport. I hope there is a tram soon – seems like the rain has stopped but the wind still sounds pretty vicious…
Two from the Guardian:
And one from
5) The Great English Pilgrimage, by Christopher Donaldson
A somewhat rambling book by an elderly vicar attempting to follow the steps of Augustine from Rome to Canterbury in 597, written in 1995 in the hopes that many would try and follow the same route two years later for the 1400th anniversary. Lots of circumstantial detail about the late sixth century in Italy, France and England – gosh, I would like to read a proper biography of Brunhilda! – retold in a gentle High Anglican kind of way. Quite charming, but not very deep.
4) This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace, by Swanee Hunt
I have to speak about this at an event later tonight, and if I’m happy with my speech I’ll post it here. Swanee Hunt was the US ambassador to Austria for the later stages of the Bosnian war and the immediate aftermath, and one senses that as an outsider – a political appointee in the US diplomatic service – she was trying also to bring other outsider voices into the process. But she keeps herself largely in the background, and the book is a collection of interviews with twenty-six Bosnian women of diverse backgrounds, with the interviews edited and assembled by theme, to give a rounded picture of, say, perceptions of history, actual wartime experience, the chance of reconciliation. Moving and thought-provoking.
As is inevitable, this reflects partly my speaking notes, partly what I think I said, and partly what I think I ought to have said.
Today is 6 December, the feast day of St Nicholas, so a very important day for children in this country and also an important day for those of us whose name is Nicholas.
St Nicholas, historically, was the bishop of Myra, which is now in Turkey; Myra is mentioned once in the New Testament, in Luke’s record of his landing there with Paul en route to Rome. In the previous verse, it is recorded that they had to sail around Cyprus because the winds were against them. Sometimes that happens.
The film we’ve just seen, Akamas, is set in the time written about by Lawrence Durrell in his famous book, Bitter Lemons: “The days passed in purposeless riots and the screaming of demagogues and commentators; and the nights were busy with the crash of broken glass and the spiteful detonation of small grenades.”
Durrell is of course not a completely honest witness. At the time he was playing a role in the British colonial administration not dissimilar to that played by certain present day officials.
Rather an interesting quest story from early Doctor Who – the show’s first real sf narrative apart from the original Daleks story, and like the original Daleks story written by Terry Nation. With a certain foreshadowing of the Key to Time season, thirteen years and three Doctors later, our heroes are sent across five different environments on the planet Marinus (which, unlike so many sf planets, actually has different climates depending on where you happen to be) to retrieve the five keys which will operate the Magical Machine.
The first four episodes (out of six) are standard sfnal fare – indeed, perhaps Doctor Who’s closest early approach to the monster-of-the-week concept (bottled brains, mutant plants, giant wolves) – but I think it lifts itself into something rather superior in the last two episodes, a courtroom drama where the Doctor is defending Ian against a charge of murder, with only circumstantial evidence against him, but collusion between key officials and the real culprits. (A helpful official asks Ian, “Who is he?” “Who?” replies Ian, rhetorically agreeing.) Though the trial judges do bear a disturbing resemblance to the High Priests in the 1973 film of Jesus Christ Superstar.
The climax really does take us back to the future, as the First Doctor, having assembled all of the Keys of Marinus, makes the same decision as the Fourth Doctor at the end of The Armageddon Factor; though with more explosive consequences. One of the heavily costumed bad guys nearly trips over his own shoes as he tries to bring our heroes to their doom, but recovers from it quickly; and that’s part of the charm, really.
Is this final snippet of information for real?
Amongst later changes made to Nation’s scripts was the removal of a TARDIS sequence from episode one, The Sea Of Death. Here it was revealed that the reason the Doctor and Susan had been on Earth in 1963 was because the Doctor had visited the British Broadcasting Corporation to get help repairing the colour scanner in the TARDIS, which was showing only monochrome images. He had been in such a bad mood upon his return to the TARDIS because the BBC had been “infernally secretive”!
I have my doubts.
3) Thunderbird Falls, by C.E. Murphy
I regret that I haven’t been able to get hold of the first book in this series. Urban Shaman sold out, apparently, even on the side of the Atlantic where it was available, which is not this one. I did at least get hold of the short story that comes between the first and second books.
The heroine of Thunderbird Falls is a Seattle policewoman who turns out to have psychic powers, in an environment drawing substantially from Native American traditions, with a certain helping of Celtic lore and the author’s own imagination. It is very difficult to convey such a setting without falling into the trap of being either too twee or too earnestly evangelical, and it is very much to the author’s credit that she manages it; the dangers, both physical and psychic, to the narrator make it clear that this is very far from the fotherington-tomas “Hullo clouds hullo sky hullo sun etc” view of nature.
The plot, unfortunately, depends a bit on the heroine not asking certain important questions that occur to the reader (at least to this reader) fairly early on. OK, we are given good reasons why she doesn’t think her situation through, but it’s a nagging concern. Also, I was kind of hoping (this is the romantic in me) for a more definite resolution of the various sexual tensions surrounding our narrator’s life. Having said that, I really do hope there is another book to follow, and that I somehow get hold of the earlier one.
I was slightly thrown yesterday by someone on my friends-list referring to a car called Petite, owned by a character called Jo, and thought, “Gosh, that’s someone who’s reading the same book I’m reading…” …and then realised in fact it was the person who wrote the book that I was reading. It is a small world.
The advert for the internship in my new office went up yesterday.
There are over a hundred applications already!
This for an unpaid position!!!!!
“We thought we were democratising the nationalists. But were we really ‘nationalising’ the ‘democrats’?”
B has taken to removing the duvet from our bed, swaddling herself in it, and falling asleep in front of the front door. She can’t tell us what the attraction is; perhaps she likes the cool air coming in through the doorframe. Anyway, normally it is easy enough to persuade her to go upstairs to her room when we want to reclaim the duvet for our own use. But this evening I realised another potential pitfall – if she’s already lying in front of the door when I get back from work, it is very difficult for me to open it and gain access to my own home…
I am now spending a lot more time on the tram than I did before the car died. This evening on the way from work to Brussel-Centraal I overheard the couple sitting opposite talking English. They came from Somerset, in Brussels for a couple of days’ holiday, and they were lost; expecting to get to the Grand’Place, but sitting on the #93 as it bowled along the Rue Royale, so they were in danger of going seriously off course. I took them off at the Palais stop, and walked them down the steps, past the site of the Brontës’ sojourn in Brussels, down more steps through the Ravenstein and the railway station, instructing them to keep going downhill and veer to the left. I hope they had a good time; it was her birthday treat, and it was raining very heavily, but if they end up in the Roi d’Espagne as I recommended they will probably be OK.
The first sentence of the first entry of each month from this year:
January: So as one year turns to another, I’ve returned to a youthful passion: the fourteenth century scholar Richard of Wallingford, who as Abbot of St Albans designed an elaborate astronomical clock capable of predicting lunar eclipses, as chronicled once again by John North, who published the definitive edition of Richard of Wallingford’s works thirty years ago, and here attempts to give a more accessible account (at a cost of £15 rather than the £400 that the 1976 version will cost you).
February: Fog at Pristina airport meant all flights were cancelled today (because incoming planes couldn’t land) so I get an extra 24 hours in Kosovo.
March: Apparently I’m a Chaotic Good Half-Orc Fighter
April: First of the Tardisodes
May: I’ve compiled a list of School Reunion entires from other people’s LJ’s, not just my own f-list but following links from comments to other pages.
June: Släpp in de som står utanför: My contribution to Sweden’s debate on the future of Europe, here.
July: I have a bit of an obsession with people who have certain things in common with me, like my exact date of birth, for instance, or shared interests via livejournal.
August: Reading this is a bit like reading someone’s livejournal entry when you have only one person’s side of the story.
September: Jeepers, if you’re going to apologise, you should make it look like a real apology!
October: Via Democracy Arsenal, which is the only American politics blog I really read these days (mainly because my former colleague Heather writes for it), I find Michael Signer’s essay “arguing for a doctrine of ‘American exemplarism’ that would allow America to be both strong and good”, Anatol Lieven’s response, and Signer’s response to the response, with comments.
November: Up very early yesterday for a Big Expedition to France.
December: I know it’s now December, but there are still a bunch of books I read last month which I haven’t listed here.
One of the reasons I read so many books is that we don’t get out much, a combination of the difficulty of getting babysitters for the rather unusual needs of our children (on which subject, thanks once again to
For no especially good reason I persuaded I found it none the less quite an interesting study of political crisis, of what happens when decision-makers are confronted with a situation that requires them to think out of the box. Not that the Queen actually gets to make many decisions, other than those relating to her main function, the linkage between her subjects and the idea of the State; but that is not an unimportant issue. The Potsdamerplatz in Berlin is a pretty fantastic place, including a cinema showing movies in the original English, so I though I should do what everyone else has been doing and see “Casino Royale”. I was of course thrilled that one of my favourite small countries featured so much, but puzzled as to why I didn’t recognise any of the settings: the answer of course turns out to be quite simple – none of it was actually filmed in Montenegro! The casino scenes are all in Karlovy Vary, and even the bit I thought might be the Boka Kotorska is actually Lake Como (explaining why it looked like a cold winter day). There was one other touch which I though might be deliberate or might not; the “Montenegrin” police wear shoulder flashes of the old (1993-2004) flag, while it is the new version that flies outside the Hotel Splendide. Anyway, I’m sure it will boost tourism, even if the justification for that is slim. The film itself is great. Daniel Craig’s Bond is as close as I can imagine to an updated version of Fleming’s hero, fifty years ago (I confess I have read only Moonraker and a condensed version of Casino Royale which none the less found space for the famous torture scene). It is a film that takes itself just seriously enough. Very enjoyable. Anyway, I don’t feel my knowledge is as in-depth as some on my f-list (in particular, the likes of I’m not satisfied with my indexing of my own Doctor Who reviews at the moment, and will give some thought as to how to make them better organised and more accessible, though the livejournal tagging system does help. What with the older car having died, and Anne needing the newer one to ferry B back and forth to her new place in Tienen, it looks like I will be reading even more books in the future as I will have about an hour and a half on the train every day. We were planning for this to happen after I start at the new job in January anyway, so it’s just come a bit sooner than expected. Despite my best intentions, my list of unread books now stands at 153, actually up from 146 the last time I counted, despite my efforts to be disciplined. Of those 153, 52 were acquired this year (plus, er, about 165 that I have already read); in other words, of the 130-odd I mentioned at the end of last year, I have read about a quarter. Thanks to LibraryThing I can list Most recently acquired: Robert A. Heinlein, Variable Star (for review) Added earliest to my catalogue: Anne Lamott, Crooked little heart Most popular among LibraryThing users: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 Most often tagged “unread” by LibraryThing users: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 With less than a month to go in the year, my reading resolutions are in mixed form. But I still have a chance of meeting some of my targets by the end of the year by: 2) White Eagles over Serbia, by Lawrence Durrell A more serious effort by Durrell here than his collection of humorous diplomatic stories which also drew on his time in Belgrade. The cover describes it as being in the genre of John Buchan but in fact I think it’s pretty obvious that Durrell was trying to cash in on the James Bond phenomenon (Casino Royale was published two years earlier, in 1953, and Live and Let Die in 1954) by bringing his British secret agent hero to untangle murky doings in Serbia in (one assumes) early 1948. No sex and no glamorous violence here. But there was enough vivid circumstantial description for me to pull out my map and check the topography Durrell was describing: Most of the action takes place in the Studenica valley, near the monastery of the same name, half-way between Kraljevo and Novi Pazar (on the right hand side of the map) – not, in fact, a part of the country I’ve been to, though I’ve come close – spent a night in Kraljevo in 1998, and did the Kosovo to Bosnia route via Prijepolje and Pljevlja in 2002. The walk up the Studenica valley to rendezvous with Royalist rebels at the Jankov Kamen summit of Golija seems convincing. (This is, after all, still a hotbed of that sort of thing, with fugitive war criminals from the 1990s conflict rumoured to be hanging out in this area.) However, I felt that the trek over the mountains to the Crno Jezero on the flanks of Mount Durmitor, all the way over in Montenegro (bottom left corner of my map), should probably have taken a great deal longer than the single day Durrell allows his characters, especially since they were trying to carry vast quantities of gold with them. It’s a very nicely observed book in terms of the scenery, the people, the fishing (especially the fishing!), the weather, the politics (though in fact Durrell arrived in Belgrade to work only in 1949 – but I suppose he may have explored there from Corfu before the war). Unfortunately Durrell didn’t quite pull it together in terms of plot. The narrative makes perfect sense, but our hero, Methuen, appears curiously unchanged by it all; he does get the girl out of danger, but it is not at all clear that he gets the girl; no huge lessons are learnt about love, loyalty or heroism (I was struck that the Royalist rebels were portrayed as being as unattractive as Tito’s Communist officials and militia). So although it’s a charming enough book, I felt a bit flat at the end of it.Alex Jennings’ Prince Charles or Helen McCrory’s Cherie. A lot of the audience (indeed, most of you reading this) will remember that week pretty vividly; I, however, was in Bosnia, and Am I a fanboy?
Unread books – an attempt to prioritise
Elizabeth Pond, Endgame in the Balkans (for review)
Charles Stross, The Atrocity Archives
Dee Brown, Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Theodore Zeldin, An intimate history of humanity
Marina Warner, Joan of Arc
Christopher Donaldson, The great English pilgrimage
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
Patrick Suskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Bill Bryson, Notes From a Small Island
George Elliot, The Mill on the Floss,
J.R.R. Tolkien, Unfinished Tales
Dee Brown, Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
December Books 2) White Eagles over Serbia
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