7) Alternate Generals, ed. Harry Turtledove (with editorial assistance from Roland Green, and Martin H. Greenberg getting copyright credit)

Collection of alternate history pieces with a military theme. Most of these were pretty unmemorable. “And so – Nelson fought for the French! Napoleon joined the church! Custer lived and was elected president!” If the entire story can be summed up in half a sentence I wonder why I bothered reading the rest.

Three did stand out from the crowd for me. “Billy Mitchell’s Overt Act”, by William Sanders, and “Vati”, by R.M. Meluch, both made the same historical point from opposite directions: they have a brilliant air commander in the second world war whose decisions manage to put his side in a much better tactical position, with, ironically, much worse strategic consequences than in our time-line. An interesting contrast.

The most fun was Lois Tilton’s “The Craft of War”. The idea is a little more subtle than most: Sun Tzu, exiled from China, is hired by the Persians and helps them conquer Greece. The story is told as a Socratic dialogue between Socrates himself and Alcibiades, and Tilton succeeds in casting the characteristic style of Sun Tzu in Socratic terms. My one regret was that she didn’t do much with the acerbic character of Socrates himself, but this was the one story in the book that left me wishing I knew more about the historical background.

…Via : This is absolutely glorious.

The Times has the story:

IT WAS not until midway through the live television interview that the BBC interviewer started to grow suspicious. The man whom she believed to be an expert on internet music downloads seemed to know precious little about his subject.

Not only that, but the stocky black man with the strong French accent bore little resemblance to the picture on the expert’s website, which showed a slim white man with blue eyes and blond hair.

Full interview here. The look of sudden horror, followed by a feeling of “Oh, what the hell!” that goes across the guy’s face as he realises he is being interviewed live on TV about a subject he know very little about is an object lesson to us all. In the circumstances, I think he performed rather well.

Edited to add The bloke who should have been interviewed has given us his side of the story.

Off to Germany for two days. Back Tuesday night.

6) Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi

After reading Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin, I declared that I knew which novel was getting the top vote in my Hugo ballot. I now know which of the nominees is getting the lowest vote, though the middle three will need a bit of sorting out.

It’s not that I actively dislike military sf. It’s not particularly my thing, but I will read it from time to time, as I will occasionally read horror, romance, etc. My preference is for well-thought out fantasy sagas, and for sf of the Asimov’s variety. And I think Scalzi does the military stuff here rather well: even if the plot and structure and ideas of the book are mainly a homage to Starship Troopers (Heinlein gets an explicit thank-you in the afterword) and a response to The Forever War (Haldeman is, however, not mentioned), there is more actual evidence of serious thought of what military strategy and tactics might look like in the standard sf interstellar setting than in either of the precursors.

Two things lost me however. One was a fairly minor flaw, comparable to the flaws of other Hugo nominees. Quite simply, the characters are supposed to be 75 years old when they are recruited to the space army, and then get rejuvenated to become fighting machines. Nothing wrong with that, but I found the dialogue between the 75-year-old characters simply unconvincing, sounding more like what you would hear around the table from sf fans in their mid-thirties. They just did not sound old, and that robbed some of the credibility from the set-up, and removed some of the zing from the rejuvenation process.

That on its own might well have left me pondering Old Man’s War‘s merits equally with Learning the World, Accelerando, and A Feast for Crows. But one passage in the middle of the book not only failed to convince me on its own terms but also exposed a glaring weakness in the set-up. Of course, my own experience gives me a particular vantage point here, but I think it’s worth going into details. If you don’t want spoilers, LOOK AWAY NOW!

The specific problem is the character of Thaddeus Bender, who believes that the military solution is being invoked too readily:

two-time Democratic senator from Massachusetts; former ambassador (at various times) to France, Japan and the United Nations; Secretary of State in the otherwise disastrous Crowe administration; author, lecturer, and finally, the latest addition to Platoon D. Since the latest of these had the most relevance to the rest of us, we had all decided that Private Senator Ambassador Secretary Bender was full of crap.

Bender’s background is one that, for obvious reasons, interests me:

“In my first term as Senator, I went to Northern Ireland as part of a trade junket and ended up extracting a peace treaty from the Catholics and the Protestants. I didn’t have the authority to make an agreement, and it caused a huge controversy back in the States. But when an opportunity for peace arises, we must take it,” Bender said.

“I remember that,” I said. “That was right before the bloodiest marching season in two centuries. Not a very successful peace agreement.”

“That wasn’t the fault of the agreement,” Bender said, somewhat defensively. “Some drugged-out Catholic kid threw a grenade into an Orangemen’s march, and it was all over after that.”

“Damn real live people, getting in the way of your peaceful ideals,” I said.

The conversation ends with Bender unintentionally offending his commander with the following sentence:

“Much evil has been done under the guise of ‘just following orders’… I hope we never have to find ourselves using the same excuse.”

It turns out that the commander’s own family were brutally massacred by men who were “just following orders”.

Bender dies less than ten pages later. He walks into a stadium filled with angry aliens (angry because our heroes have just landed in their capital city and are smashing it up), and offers to make peace with them; needless to say, he is cut down at once, and our heroes retaliate by killing all present.

In a postscript, the commander tells the narrator that Bender had a point when he said that the military are probably being used too much and diplomacy by other means too little, but that the answer is to follow orders long enough to get into a position where you can give them. She herself is then killed off on the next page.

I’ll save the politics until the end, because I want to start by analysing the caricature that is Bender. Working backwards, we have the following:

1. The peacenik who walks into a hostile crowd and gets cut down. A standard figure of fun in military fiction, I imagine. Reminiscent here of a couple of scenes from The Life of Brian.

   But of course totally ludicrous to portray anyone behaving in that way who had been engaged with international diplomacy as Bender is supposed to have been. Anyone who has been near a position of responsibility – especially who, it is implied, as Secretary of State had been the best thing in the US government – would know not to engage with the other side a) against direct orders, b) without having identified clearly who your interlocutors are, c) without in fact having an idea of what deal might be possible at the end.

   Bender breaks all of these cardinal rules of peacemaking diplomacy, and while it is imaginable that a peacenik activist who had no actual experience of real peace processes might get it that badly wrong (cf my discussion of the characters simply not sounding old enough, above), it fatally undermines the character’s believability – and raises real questions about the author’s overall message, which I’ll get to – that a supposed senior statesman does not.

2. The peculiar exchange with the commander about “just following orders”. It’s not at all clear to me why this turns into an argument: both characters seem to agree that the Eichmann excuse is wrong. Again, I’ll save the politics for later, but the explanation of why the commander took offence seemed weak. Perhaps she just didn’t like talking about anything reminding her of the massacre of her family sixty years before. (Then why join the army?)
3. The Northern Ireland bit. This really did offend me. It is entirely true that the two worst marching seasons we have had in my lifetime came a) in 1996, immediately after the beginning of the talks, and b) in 1998, immediately after the Good Friday Agreement had been signed. What I remember from 1998 is that, after the horrible incidents in Ballymoney, when three boys were burnt to death in a sectarian attack, and Omagh, when 29 people were killed in a no-warning bomb, the community actually came together, and there was a very strong mood (since, alas, largely dissipated) of trying to make the new agreement work. Since then, although the agreement has not been exactly 100% successful, the violence has pretty much ended rather than breaking out again as Scalzi would have predicted. Damn real live people, as none of his characters is likely to say, getting in the way of his militaristic preconceptions.
4. The American bit, including a bit more on Northern Ireland. Bender is presumably supposed to be a mixture of George Mitchell (who was indeed originally sent to Northern Ireland by President Clinton on a trade mission, and did indeed return with a peace agreement), and the two present senators from Massachusetts, Kennedy and Kerry, both of whom are hate figures for the American right. (And isn’t that use of “two-time” rather than “two-term” an interesting choice?)

   Possibly unlike John Scalzi, I have actually seen George Mitchell in action. I was a researcher for one of the delegations in the Northern Ireland peace talks which he chaired, from the start of June 1996 until I went to work for Uncle Sam in Bosnia at the end of that year. Mitchell is quite simply one of the most impressive politicians I have seen in operation. His gravitas, combined with a certain personal humility, put him head and shoulders above anybody else in the room in terms of quality of statesmanship, including the representatives of the British and Irish governments. (And, I have to admit, my own party.)

   Former senators, especially former Democratic senators, especially those who have gone off to try and do good in places that John Scalzi doesn’t know much about, are rather easy targets for writers who don’t like senators, especially Democratic senators, on principle. Quite apart from the fact that I disagree with what I understand to be the political message, this is simply lazy writing.

But it is the political message behind this chapter, and, I suspect the rest of the book, that upsets me most. Let me be clear: I am not a pacifist. I supported NATO in its campaign on Kosovo in 1999, and the US in its campaign in Afghanistan in 2001. But I think Clausewitz had it right when he said that war must be considered as a political act, in a political context – “Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln”. Politik is completely absent from Old Man’s War. We have absolutely no idea of who is in charge of the army, or who appointed them, or how the policy might be changed. The only character who raises these questions in a sensible way is the commander who is then killed on the next page.

Meanwhile even the slightest thought of peace-making is for dummies who get their come-uppance by making futile pacifist gestures. Give war a chance, and don’t ask what it is actually for.

(I didn’t mention, did I, that the army into which our heroes enlist is actually called the Colonial Defence Forces? I must say that the scene where they take revenge on Bender’s killers by slaying the entire stadium had certain resonances for me, which possibly didn’t help my mood.)

So, not really recommended, I’m afraid, unless you feel comfortable with the author’s politics. And I don’t.

Edited to add: OK, prodded by and ‘s responses below, I popped over to Scalzi’s blog and had a read: and it’s pretty clear that his political views are, in fact, a lot closer to mine than is apparent from the novel. Which in my view makes the situation slightly worse. There is already enough of this militaristic stuff out there being written by people who believe in it.

Further edited: Ulp, see reply by Scalzi himself below!

Finally edited to add: See my follow-up post dealing with some of the points made here and on Scalzi’s blog.

Re-reading Charlie Stross’ tale of attempted phishing (posted two months ago, but has only just turned up on ) reminded me of an odd thing that happened a few days ago.

I took a call from someone claiming to be a Danish journalist, asking me for a background chat about, well, let’s call it Syldavia, one of the less exciting countries I work on. Oddly, the caller display on my phone showed a +1 number, not a +45 Danish one. OK, I thought, sometimes there are glitches. But then he started asking me some questions which seemed to me to be based on a rather one-sided take on the Syldavian situation, slanted towards the country’s rather dubious dissident faction. I smelt a rat, and told him so, and asked if I could call him back. He gave me a Danish number, which did inded get through to him on the second attempt, via a convincingly Danish-sounding switchboard, and we completed the conversation.

I mean, I have to be fairly open and transparent in my job; I like to think that I would have given the same background briefing to the Dane as I would to a student, or to a spy, or to Charlie Stross if he decided to set any of his fiction in Syldavia (in fact he already has, though I did not brief him about it), or to a teenager writing an essay for high school. But, as Charlie says, the first rule of security is “Know who you are talking to”. And I didn’t feel I did, in this case.

Though the only thing I was really worried about, given the slant of the questions, was that the interview would get distorted and end up posted as an attack piece on some web-site supporting the Syldavian dissidents, who are a nasty bunch with an effective line in propaganda.

Last week, for completely unrelated reasons, I asked for a meeting in the European Commission to discuss the situation in Syldavia, and discovered that one of the officials now dealing with the dossier is a fairly senior Dane who I knew in her previous job. I asked her if she had picked up any recent press coverage in the Danish media, and explained why. She had not, and declined to speculate on what might have been really going on.

For all I know, it really was a journalist and the story got spiked due to lack of interest. I’ve searched the relevant Danish media organisation’s website and they haven’t published a story on Syldavia (at least not one that ended up online) since 5 April. Certainly that makes more sense than any other explanation, but the combination of apprently wrong incoming phone number, oddly slanted questions, and no actual media follow-up is weird. As Ronald Reagan always used to say, Доверяй, но проверяй.

As it happens, I go to Berlin this evening, and the President of Syldavia will be there too – I am hoping to attend a public event he is doing tomorrow evening. I will be very surprised if Denmark comes up.

Look, folks, this was great.

I say no more for now.

I’ve been catching up on classic Doctor Who which I had not previously seen.

Watched “The Sontaran Experiment” last weekend. It comes between two excellent stories of Tom Baker’s first season, “The Ark In Space” and “Genesis Of The Daleks”. Alas, the two episodes in between are not much cop, with the Doctor, Harry and Sarah running around a quarry and falling down holes, in the company of some dishevelled stranded astronauts, a Sontaran and a robot reminiscent of Graeme Garden’s computer from the Goodies. The final victory is implausible even by Doctor Who standards of plausibility, and the experimentation scenes gratuitously nasty without adding much to the plot.

Jon Pertwee’s first story, “Spearhead from Space”, is a different matter. Since I was not yet three when this was first broadcast, I knew about it only from the various guides and from the Target novelisation – the first ever Target novelisation, in fact – which as some may remember actually featured line-drawing illustrations in the first edition. So I was rather hoping that it might be perhaps half as good as it seemed to me when I first read the story aged roughly nine. And it was, in fact, excellent. I took detailed notes à la , as follows:

Episode 1: Wow, doesn’t it look 1970s! It’s the glasses as much as anything. And, as with “The Christmas Invasion”, we have the new Doctor out of action and comatose for much of the episode. This leaves the Brigadier and Liz Shaw (who I had never seen before) doing a sort of precursor to the X-Files – the Brigadier actually says, “We deal with the odd… the unexplained. Anything on Earth… or beyond.”

The Third Doctor’s historic first words are, “Lethbridge-Stewart! My dear fellow, how nice to see you again.” All the accents are awfully posh – well, the Doctor and Liz are anyway – which makes the poacher Sam’s accent even more noticeable. (Is that really the traditional Essex accent? I am not an expert in these matters but am somehow not surprised to discover that location filming was in Worcestershire.) Note attempt at enlightenment by having the head of the radar station in the very first scene a military woman, addressed as “Ma’am” by the bloke at the screen.

Episode 2: Good lord, I know a bloke in Brussels who looks just like the hapless Hibbert. (And this is the same actor who plays the Draconian Emperor in “Frontier in Space”, and Broton in “Terror of the Zygons”! Rather impressive.)

Great exchanges between Liz and the Brigadier:

L: “I deal with facts, not science fiction ideas.”
B: “there is a remote possibility that outside your tidy little world, other things may exist.”
L: “You really believe in a man who’s helped to save the world twice and has the power to change his physical appearance, an alien who travels through time and space… in a police box????”

Shower scene: Hmm, is Jon Pertwee the only actor ever to have played Doctor Who in the nude? (And perhaps also the only one with a tattoo?) (Indeed, is has Doctor Who ever got closer than this to a nude scene from any actor?)

Once the Doctor meets Liz they are flirting away with each other, the Brigadier having rather dashed his own chances with her by remarking that she is not just a pretty face…

Episode 3: Ooh arr, more accents from Sam and Meg. But she at least redeems herself with some brilliant reactions to the Auton towards the end of the episode. Still unconvinced by him.

The unfortunate Ransome trying to reclaim his factory – is this a subtle tribute to C.S. Lewis, I wonder? The protagonist of the trilogy that starts with Perelandra is called Ransom.

Fascinating sub-plot of the new character of the unreliable and frankly dishonest Third Doctor, perhaps in a return to the First Doctor’s nasty qualities after the good-guy persona of the Second, trying to escape his responsibilities in the TARDIS and manipulating Liz to get the key off the Brigadier. Though, again, the Brigadier digs his own hole by patronising Liz. Moral of the story: don’t patronise women. (Especially the really intelligent ones.)

Episode 4: Poor General Scobie – duplicated, hypnotised, and wakes up being stared at by the customers of Madame Tussaud’s. And I found it interesting, given the BBC’s supposed policy against advertising, that the waxwork museum is clearly identified as Madame Tussaud’s. (I’ve never seen the attraction of it myself.) I wish Liz hadn’t screamed, though other companions would have screamed for longer I suppose.

Note for work purposes: is “Scobie”‘s confrontation with the UNIT staff perhaps the first fictional portrayal of the clash between national and UN chains of command which has proved in more recent times to be such a problem in the Balkans?

Simply superb scene as Channing installs the swarm leader globule, practically kneeling in worship, and then the special effects of the Nestene consciousness coming into being are just brilliant. (“We are the Nestenes!” declared Channing, and Anne, watching beside me, squeked in recognition of the name from “Rose”.)

Doctor wearing cape and blowing the door open – very like a stage magician. He has fully captured the role now, the poor Brigadier is definitely #3 in the pecking order.

The shop window dummies coming to life – one of those great Doctor Who moments, and no surprise at all that Russell T Davies decided to reprise it almost unchanged in “Rose”.

A great climax, UNIT and the Autons exchanging fire outside while the Doctor wrestles with tentacles inside the factory and Liz wrestles with the Plot Device Gizmo to locate the “on” switch. But I shouldn’t mock, it is very well done – production values which seemed to have disappeared ten or fifteen years later.

The whole thing made me realise just how true to the series’ traditions “Rose” was. Like “Rose”, “Spearhead from Space” was effectively a relaunch of the series – six-monthly runs of stories, all in colour, all set on Earth. They had to prove that the old show could work in the new format, and they succeeded. (Compare “Attack of the Cybermen” which was surely when the writing went on the wall for the old run.)

Finally, isn’t it amazing how few of the great stories from the original TV run of Doctor Who were not touched by Robert Holmes at some point? I hadn’t quite taken in that apart from being script editor for the first (and best) Tom Baker years, he also wrote this, “The Ark in Space”, “Carnival of Monsters”, “The Caves of Androzani”, “The Deadly Assassin”, “The Krotons”, “The Power of Kroll” (well, we all have an off day), “The Ribos Operation”, “The Sun Makers”, “The Talons of Weng Chiang”, “Terror of the Autons”, “The Time Warrior”, and “The Two Doctors”. Plus a couple more I’d completely forgotten about. Will have to add more to my collection…

The Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition have given up the ghost (hat-tip Belfast Gonzo). The Irish Times states that:

The party is widely acknowledged to have had considerable influence in framing the Belfast Agreement and in smoothing relations between hostile parties in the Assembly. Ms McWilliams and Pearl Sagar were involved in the negotiations on the agreement.

Their electoral history is as follows:

1996: Founded just before the May 30 Forum/talks elections. The founders wrote to all the existing parties asking how many women would be standing in the elections, and declared that they were dissatisfied with the answers they received, so founded a new women-only party. (I wonder, if any party had assured them that it planned to run a majority of women candidates, or indeed only women candidates, would they have decided not to bother founding the party after all?)

I was the central campaign organiser at the time for the Alliance Party, and we did in fact run the most gender-balanced slate of candidates of any group standing in the elections; of course we received the letter from the NIWC’s founders before we had selected.

In the elections they got just over 1% of the vote (reaching the dizzy heights of 3% in South Belfast). Because of the peculiar electoral system adopted by the Major governemnt to ensure that the small Loyalist parties got elected, they got two seats in the Forum and a place at the talks table due to coming ninth. For a fringe party, it was not a bad result – they got more than twice the votes of longer established parties like the Greens, the Workers Party or the Conservatives who were actually in government of the UK at the time.

1997: The Women’s Coalition ran three candidates in the Westminster election who got a total of 3,000 votes and came nowhere near getting elected. In the local council elections three weeks later they won a seat in Newcastle, Co Down (a seat that the candidate concerned had narrowly failed to win, as an Alliance Party candidate, four years before).

1998: Kate Fearon has written up what I think is still the only published account by a genuine insider of the talks chaired by George Mitchell. A chapter is here. It is certainly true that the Civic Forum part of the agreement was an NIWC proposal, though other participants in the talks were reportedly less impressed by their attempt to grandstand on the electoral system in the final hours of the negotiations.

As a result of the agreement a new Assembly was elected – in this case, the Women’s Coalition’s finest electoral hour. Although their total votes were not huge, at only 1.6%, they got two representatives in through the front door, as it were, in South Belfast and North Down.

The next elections they contested were the simultaneous local and Westminster contests of 2001. In the Westminster contest, they concentrated their fire on South Belfast and got their highest percentage poll for anywhere in any election, 7.8%, coming third, ahead of Sinn Fein and Alliance. In the local council elections, they lost the Newcastle seat but picked one up in Bangor.

Howver, the 2003 elections for the Assembly (suspended then, and still suspended now) were the beginning of the end. Compared to 1998, their vote share halved (to 0.8%) and both Assembly seats were lost – the seat in South Belfast by only 127 votes, but that was that.

The Women’s Coalition were among a number of groups supporting independent candidate John Gilliland for the European Parliament election in 2004. He scored a respectable 6.6%, but was far from being elected.

In the simultaneous 2005 elections for local councils and Westminster, their only candidate was their one remaining elected representative, their councillor in North Down; and she lost her seat. So last night’s announcement came as no big surprise.

One of my contacts has this to say about the job I applied for last week:

of course this will be an open competition, the Commission will look for the best possible candidate etc….. however, there is an individual already in the Commission whose job has gradually developed into something very like the role described here etc…… In fact, the phrase “likely formalisation of a de facto situation …” was used. So, yes it looks interesting. But my gut feeling is that it is already a done deal. Of course, nobody will say that. But I thought might be useful for you to know…

Well, I didn’t get my hopes up, knowing how the system works. Nothing venture, nothing gain…

3) Dark Side of Venus, by “Clem Macartney” (W.D. Flackes)

Got this as part of my continuing exploration of the literary output of W.D. Flackes, the voice of reasonable political journalism on BBC Northern Ireland when I was growing up – see also my write-up of his Ten Years to Oblivion, which was like Dark Side of Venus published in 1951.

This is a much less imaginative story. Where Ten Years to Oblivion had alien civilisations and time travel, this is just a Dan Dare/Biggles rip-off (Dan Dare made his first appearance in 1950, the year before this was published). When you read the first sentence:

Rocket-Squadron Commander Dan Fury, one of the most distinguished and most decorated young pilots in the British Air Command, looked at the instruments of his ramjet supersonic fighter.

– well, you have a pretty good idea where this is going. (Our hero is described as “virile” as early as page 2, and indeed the evil dictator’s beautiful daughter falls hopelessly in love with him.) The Martians are planning to invade Earth from Venus; our hero’s task is to prevent them.

One thing I did find interesting was the description of Earth’s future politics. A recent Martian invasion of Russia was beaten off by the combined British and American forces, under the command of the Anglo-American World Government, which is based in Washington DC and London (the two cities take turns). What role the Russians, or indeed anyone other than the Brits and Americans (and Canada does get a brief mention at the end) play in the new world order is not explained. At least Dan Dare had a French side-kick; Dan Fury’s are a stereotypical Scot and an even worse loyal-but-thick Irishman.

Though the plot and characters are less imaginative, this is actually rather better written than Ten Years to Oblivion – so much better stylistically that I wonder if John Clute is right to state (in the electronic version of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia) that they are both by Flackes. I shall ask him.

“History and Geography of Enclaves and Exclaves”

On Mastermind, in an hour and a half.

I still owe questions to a couple of people, but anyway:

sinclair_furie

 :

1. Why and when did you stop doing science?
   I had always wanted to be an astronomer; but in the summer of 1988, between my second and third years at Cambridge, I was on the summer course for aspiring astronomy students at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, which was still just about in Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex. I spent some time attending lectures; I spent some time with the telescopes; and I spent a lot of time in the library, reading the history of astronomy. And I realised that when it came down to it I was more interested in people than in stars; so I went and did a masters and then a doctorate in history of science. (At that point politics was a hobby rather than a career.)
2. What under-rated book would you recommend to me?
   Ali and Nino by Kurban Said, the great romantic novel of the South Caucasus during the first world war. (It’s also quite short so not such an investment of time.)
3. What’s your greatest fear on an everyday basis? Not huge fears, like death or financial insecurities, but small ones, like deadlines.
   Yeah, deadlines – you got it! I hate being late for anything, and yet often seem to be struggling against the clock/calendar, or waiting around in frustration for other people to get ready.
4. Which historical period do you think you belong to or would you love to live in?
   The 12th century. My Master’s thesis turned out, by great good fortune, to deal with it. But I was already interested – this was when the Normans invaded Ireland, thus locking the Anglo-Irish relationship into one of military domination for centuries; when we have the fascinating Eleanor of Aquitaine, quite my favourite historical character; when the Crusaders lose Jerusalem; when the Glastonbury monks “discover” the tomb of King Arthur, and Thomas à Becket is murdered in Canterbury; and looking further east, this is the century that starts with Omar Khayyám and ends with Genghis Khan. What more could you ask for?
5. What’s one thing that you wish you were better at?
   Keeping to deadlines Getting exercise.

maeritrae

1. First and foremost: How did you find this entry
   I followed a link from
   deannawol

    , I think!

2. Have you ever worked in Foreign Affairs, and if so, when?
   If you mean the Irish, or indeed any, foreign ministry, no I haven’t. I am an activist, not an official.
   slovobooks

    ‘ description of me as an “international diplomat” was not completely accurate – though understandable as I do work in international diplomacy!

3. Pick a number. 😉
   Oooh, so difficult – there are so many of them! But despite the attractions of 31 (which is both 1+5+25 and 1+2+4+8+16) I admit to a sneaking affection for 37.
4. Whose posts do you comment most on on LJ?
   My own! But looking at my recent comments page,
   slovobooks

     is in second place counting the last few days only.

5. Are you in any fandoms?
   Doctor Who I reject this exclusivist approach to enjoying the genre Doctor Who.