So, the headline is that Nationalist parties (those who would designate as Nationalists in the Assembly) outpolled Unionist parties (those who would designate as Nationalists in the Assembly) in Thursday’s local elections by 19,000 votes, and more than two percentage points. This is a first for Northern Ireland.
My tweet about this last night got a lot of pickup, including getting me quoted in the Guardian. Some people pushed back at me saying that I should have counted People Before Profit as Nationalists, though they don’t designate as such; or that I should have counted Alliance as Unionists, though they too don’t designate as such; or that I should have counted independents, though they are not political parties by definition; or that I shouldn’t have done the calculation at all. The point remains: Unionist parties were outpolled by Nationalist parties for the first time ever.
This is important psychologically but not operationally. The criterion for triggering a referendum on a United Ireland is pretty much that the UK thinks it is likely to go that way. That outcome is not apparent from the above numbers, which show only 40.8% of voters supporting the election of candidates from Nationalist parties to local councils with limited powers. 40.8% is a lot – it’s more than 38.2% – but it’s not 50%, and the Nationalist vote share would need to be higher or have a larger lead to justify calling a Border Poll.
In the case of Catalonia, which I am familiar with, where pro-independence forces were in the zone of getting a majority of the electorate, the picture was complicated by a significant clump of voters who wanted a referendum on independence, for the sake of clarity and dignity, but also wanted to stay part of Spain. There is no such pro-referendum caucus within the 20% swing voters of the centre in Northern Ireland. Nationalists (in both Northern Ireland and Scotland) might start usefully working out how such a caucus could be persuaded into existence.
And, as I’ve said before, winning such a referendum is a different matter again. It requires three things: Brexit continues to be an obvious negative (✔), Unionists continue to talk only to their own core voters and ignore the persuadable middle (✔) and Nationalists come up with a credible counter-offer, including robust proposals on health care (✘). Nationalists have time to work on the third of these; Unionists are running out of time to work on the first two.
Not shown in above table: 2 PUP losses in Belfast 1 Ind loss in Causeway Coast and Glens 1 Aontu loss in Derry and Strabane 1 Lab loss in Fermanagh and Omagh 1 Green loss in Lisburn and Castlereagh
It will be apparent that while the majority of the SDLP’s losses were directly to Sinn Fein, only about half of the Sinn Fein gains came from the SDLP. The rest came from smaller groups/independents and Unionists. The campaign successfully persuaded many voters who don’t normally vote SF, or vote at all, to show solidarity with the concept that the leader of the party with the most votes should become First Minister. It is a stunning success, the best vote share ever for Sinn Fein in a Northern Ireland election. Alliance’s gains also demonstrated support for getting the institutions back up and running.
On the other side of the argument, the TUV failed to break through in any significant numbers – though they are still there – and the DUP were fortunate to avoid a net loss of seats despite slipping a full percentage point on vote share. It’s clear that their message has not resonated beyond the core vote, which is tactically a successful defence but strategically questionable. Cards on the table: I don’t see how blocking the institutions can be a successful strategy. It’s clear that London doesn’t care very much, so the blockade imposes no pressure on Westminster, while damaging the interests of the people who Unionism claims to represent. Worse, it undermines the legitimacy of Northern Ireland’s continued existence as an entity. (See above.)
The crunch on smaller parties is severe, and I don’t see an easy way out of it. It’s the worst election result ever for the SDLP, and the second worst for the UUP. Neither has a clear unique selling point relevant to the current situation. I heard one SDLP speaker complaining that the electorate have forgotten who got the Good Friday Agreement 25 years ago. In the real world, nobody fights this year’s elections on 1998’s outcomes. A UUP speaker complained that Nationalists were running too many candidates and should let other parties have a chance. That’s not how elections work.
On these numbers, the SDLP Westminster seats in Foyle and South Belfast look vulnerable, though I’m inclined to think that the incumbent will hang on in South Belfast. On the other hand, Alliance look more secure in North Down and better placed in East Belfast. Come an Assembly election, SF would be well in the lead, and Alliance in third place but some way behind the DUP.
Parasite won the 2019 Best Picture Oscar, and three others: Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film, more than any other film that year. The other contenders were Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, Little Women, Marriage Story, 1917 and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I have not seen any of them. The Hugo that year went to a TV series and the Ray Bradbury Award to an episode of that same TV series.
It was the year of the pandemic so I don’t think I have seen any other films made that year except Knives Out, which I liked a lot, maybe a bit more than Parasite. (I think this is the least number of films that I have seen from any year since 1958.) IMDB users rate Parasite 3rd and 6th on the two rankings, respectable enough, with only Avengers: Endgame ahead of it on both.
Here’s a trailer.
Usually I run through the crossovers in terms of casting between each year’s Oscar winner, previous Oscar / Hugo / Nebula/Bradbury winners and Doctor Who, but here there aren’t any because the film is entirely Korean.
It’s the story of a deadbeat family in Seoul, the Kims, who manage to insinuate themselves into a rich household, the Parks, without revealing to their employers that they are all relatives. It turns out that there is a secret in the basement, and disaster ensues. It’s very funny and very well done. The Jungian theme of buried secrets is nicely executed. The audacity and sheer chutzpah of the Kims in pulling off their scheme can be seen as a small example of the class struggle, or a metaphor for any other sort of transformation if you like.
It’s great to see a completely local ensemble cast, with as many leading women as men, shining a light on a society that I don’t know very much about at all. English slang is freely used (as indeed it is in the streets of Brussels). European classical music is played. But there’s also the shadow of the nuclear rogue state whose frontier is only 40 km from the centre of Seoul. The Kims joke about it, but you know it’s serious as well.
I found the violence at the end of the movie as their scheme disintegrates rather jarring and not at all funny, after an hour and a half of solid laughs. So I’m bumping it down my ratings a bit. But otherwise this was a real find, and I’m ranking it between two other films about criminals, exactly a third of the way down my table, just below The Godfather and above The Sting.
He was on a street corner when he stopped, hand abrupt and white- knuckled on the wet metal of a lamppost, and took a few deep breaths with his eyes closed.
Another one from last year’s Best Editor Hugo packets (edited by winner Ruoxi Chen). A story of gay magicians in a very slightly parallel late Edwardian England. I actually thought the pacing was a bit off here, with the middle half set around the protagonist’s visit to his love interest’s family mansion, and then an abrupt jump forward in time before we get to the final section. But an unusual magic system, lushly described. You can get it here.
This was the top unread sf book in my pile. Next up is The Outcast, by Louise Cooper.
John had also overseen a complete change of regular cast, and once ‘Logopolis’ was completed in the early weeks of January 1981, he would be in charge of a show that he had totally cast himself. The unveiling of Peter Davison as the fifth Doctor had afforded a welcome shot of publicity, and the show now needed to capitalise on this.
The one Who book that I picked up at Gallifrey One this year, this is the archive of papers retrieved from John Nathan-Turner’s estate after his death, briefly running through most of the days of each of the years in which he was in charge of the show. The bones of the story have been told elsewhere, notably by Nathan-Turmer himself and by Richard Marson, so this is just extra supporting documentary evidence.
I did find a couple of points of interest, all the same. I hadn’t appreciated that JNT and Peter Davison were already friends from All Creatures Great and Small, which both had worked on. It’s clear that the 1986 cancellation crisis was caused in part by JNT taking his eye off the ball and doing too many pantomimes and US conventions. And I don’t think I had absorbed that the eventual cancellation in 1989 came about almost accidentally after a co-funding opportunity for the show fell through.
It’s also interesting to see the scripts that never were. A few of these have since been completed and recorded by Big Finish, most notably “Song of the Space Whale” by Pat Mills. I wonder what happened to American writer Lesley Elizabeth Thomas, who submitted a four-part story which never got to screen? There’s not much else about her online; I bet she is mainly known under a different name.
Anyway, this really is for the completist only, but the completist will enjoy it. You can get it here.
It was the only thing they really rowed about, the biggest stumbling block to their relationship and the main reason they’d split up in the first place. Alex carried on where he was, working at the Gateway supermarket in Queen’s Road and trying to amass enough money to get away on. He found he couldn’t forget Linda though. He kept waiting for her to get back in touch but she didn’t. At the end of three months he finally caved in and phoned her.
Kindly given to me by the author in 2016, after it was one of the few BSFA shortlisted novels of the previous year that I did not read (I was burnt out by my first Clarke run). It’s a really good linkage of four stories, set in at least two different parallel near-contemporary Earths, with enhanced greyhounds and deep dark family secrets. Reflects on gender and gender violence, and on journeying to find yourself. Recommended. You can get it here.
This was the most popular unread book on my shelves acquired in 2016. Next on that pile is Can You Solve My Problems?, by Alex Bellos.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
Another month when I did not leave Belgium, though I started going to the office regularly again. F, U and I had a particularly interesting excursion to just the other side of the Dijle valley where there are not one but two eleventh-century churches.
This was also the month that my involvement with the 2021 Worldcon came to an abrupt end, after weeks in which the internal difficulties became ever more apparent. I resigned along with my entire team on 22 June; the Chair of the convention resigned in turn three days later.
I read 25 books that month.
Non-fiction 6 (YTD 22) China’s Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy, by Peter Martin A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, by Lynell George Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech, by Rana Foroohar Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins Boys in Zinc, by Svetlana Alexievich The Johnstown Flood, by David McCullagh
Non-genre 3 (YTD 13) Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding All Among the Barley, by Melissa Harrison The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje
Poetry 3 Blind Harry’s Wallace, translated by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield Beowulf: A New Translation, by Maria Dahvana Headley Beowulf: A New Translation, by Seamus Heaney
SF 9 (YTD 63) Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey Comic Inferno, by Brian W. Aldiss The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, ed. Alex Dally MacFarlane Roger Zelazny’s The Dawn of Amber: Book 1, by John Gregory Betancourt “Stories For Men”, by John Kessel Come Tumbling Down, by Seanan McGuire Cemetery Boys, by Aiden Thomas The Monster’s Wife, by Kate Horsley Light, by M. John Harrison
Comics 4 (YTD 18) Monstress, vol. 5: Warchild, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda Once & Future vol. 1: The King Is Undead, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain, and Ed Dukeshire Wonder Woman: The Golden Age, Vol. 2 by William Moulton Marston Parable of the Sower, written by Octavia Butler, adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings
Michael Collins’ Carrying the Fire was tremendously enjoyable and ended up being my book of the year; you can get it here. Also good were David McCullough on the Johnstown Flood, which you can get here, and Heaney’s Beowulf, which you can get here. I tried Light by M. John Harrison again, and bounced off it again; you can get it here.
I’m proceeding through the Discworld books that I have not previously written up online, in order of their popularity on LibraryThing, and that has brought me to Guards! Guards!, the first of the Watch books. I think that this is the first that is really about politics and government – recurrent features in the previous ones, but here Pratchett introduces and / or develops the characters of the Patrician and Vimes, and of course Carrot, as three different takes on how the state could or should be run – contrasted with the conspirators with their unnamed king and then the dragon. Almost all of the humour is well-aimed (there’s a skit with a rich beggar that landed rather poorly for me) and it’s a good example of Pratchett getting into his humane and angry mode. I was glad to return to it. You can get it here.
Current Home Fires Burn, by Gareth Madgwick American Gridlock, eds. James Thurber and Antoine Yoshinaka The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross
Last books finished Johnson at 10: the Inside Story, by Sir Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell The Race, by Nina Allan The John Nathan-Turner Doctor Who Production Diary, 1979-90, by Richard Molesworth A Marvellous Light, by Freya Marske The Shape of Sex to Come, ed. Douglas Hill
Next books Doctor Who – Vengeance on Varos, by Philip Martin The Second ‘If’ Reader, ed. Fredrik Pohl Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, by Mary Beard
I was recently contacted by Joshua Kotin, Associate Professor of English at Princeton University, who runs a fascinating resource: the Shakespeare and Company Project. Any of you who know Paris today probably know the current bookshop of that name, just across the river from Notre Dame. But today’s bookshop is its second incarnation; the first Shakespeare and Company, run by Sylvia Beach from 1919 to 1941, was a hub for expatriate Americans (and to a lesser extent Brits and Irish) between the wars, and most famously published Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 when nobody else would do so.
Shakespeare and Company was also a lending library, and Joshua Kotin and his team have been putting together as much as they can about the community who borrowed the books. There are some big names there: Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Aimé Césaire, Simone de Beauvoir; there are some less well known names too, and one of them is Dorothy Hibbard, my grandmother, who lived in Paris from late 1918 until she married my grandfather in 1927 in Malaya (now Malaysia). She joined Shakespeare and Company for a month in August 1923, and renewed for a year in September 1923, September 1924, and October 1925. The address given in 1925 is 278 Boulevard Raspail, where she lived in a studio apartment from June 1924.
Frustratingly we don’t have the record of what she actually borrowed. Her own memoirs don’t name any books that she was reading, though she certainly read a lot (and her step-brother was the writer and critic Van Wyck Brooks). There is one tantalising note from late 1923, a couple of months after she joined the library, when her boyfriend of the time came to visit with his younger sister; she notes “We had some difficulty in finding a book in my library which was suitable reading for a well-brought-up French girl of sixteen!” I wonder what exactly she had borrowed from Sylvia Beach?!
The boyfriend, Loïc Petit de La Villéon, was a French naval officer whose first wife had died earlier that year, and I think his romance with my grandmother must have been a bit of a rebound for him, and as far as I can tell was her first semi-serious relationship (she was 24). He later married again and had several daughters. There is a marine scientist of the same name alive today, but it must be a great-nephew as he had no sons by either marriage.
The studio apartment at 278 Boulevard Raspail has a rather glorious history of its own. Ten years before my grandmother lived there, it was the base for Guillaume Apollinaire’s literary journal Les Soirées de Paris from 1912 to 1914, and hosted a concert by the musician and surrealist painter Alberto Savinio in May 1914. And ten years after my grandmother’s departure, it was the home of Dutch artist Piet Mondriaan from 1936 to 1938. It still exists as a mix of offices and apartments. It’s close to the Catacombs which are among my favourite Paris attractions.
For most books I review, I like to publish the second paragraph of the third chapter, or section; or just the third paragraph if there are no chapters or sections. For comics, I try and identify the second frame of the third issue, but this is a compilation of a short singleton story and two two-part stories, whose four parts are actually merged into a whole to the point where you can’t easily see where the issues started and finished. So here is the third frame of the first story.
Starts with a short and breezy story about the Tenth Doctor, Gabby and the Tardis’s washing machines, answering the question my mother always used to ask about how the Doctor and companions keep their clothes clean.
Then we’re into a story marketed under two titles, “The Fountains of Forever” for the first two parts and “Spiral Staircase” for the third and fourth, set in New York where an unexpectedly rejuvenated movie star become the focus of the Osirians attempt to return to Earth after the Pyramids of Mars. There’s a nice little moment where the Tenth Doctor retro-regenerates into the Ninth, and back again. Good atmospherics in general. You can get it here.
I’ve had better luck with this Who reading project than with some. Next up is The Endless Song, by the same team.
‘One hundred and nineteen days, Prime Minister. George Canning,’ replies an aide.
Tantalised by the reviews and published snippets, and searching for something very different to read after finishing the Clarke submissions, I gave in and coughed up $11 (on American Amazon) for this much discussed book about the dreadful mess of Boris Johnson’s term as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It’s not just, or not even a matter of policy; he was quite simply a very bad prime minister.
I think readers will be aware that I was never Johnson’s biggest fan. He cynically supported Brexit because he thought (correctly) that it would make him Prime Minister (though he screwed up on the first attempt in 2016), building on a career of lies about Europe and about his personal life. In office as Foreign Secretary, he displayed casual incompetence to the point where he endangered the life of a British citizen held captive in Iran. He endorsed Theresa May’s Brexit deal with the EU, before deciding that it would be more convenient to resign in protest, disrupting and upstaging a Balkans conference in London that the UK had laboured on for months. From then on, it was only a matter of time before he got to Number 10.
Seldon and Newell have interviewed hundreds of people who worked in the Johnson government, mostly but not all off the record, to build a comprehensive picture of how and why it was such a disaster. And the answer is pretty clear. Like Lloyd George a hundred years before, Johnson came into the office distrusted by large parts of the political system and with a chaotic personal life distracting him. But Lloyd George was good at surrounding himself with other strong figures and listening to them, and also had a vision for what he wanted to achieve, which enabled him to achieve it.
Johnson filled his cabinet with mediocrities and created a team in Number 10, including his partner/wife, whose main job was sniping at each other. (His mayorship of London had been supported by a strong team of advisers, most of whom refused to work with him again in Number 10.) His vision did not exist, beyond winning the 2019 election and “getting Brexit done”. But most of all, his personality is so flawed that he is unable to exercise leadership. He says one thing before a meeting, another in the meeting and something else entirely after it is over. He hates making decisions. He doesn’t really like or understand people in general. He has no idea how government works, and is therefore incapable of governing.
Seldon and Newell have arranged their book thematically rather than chronologically. This is sometimes a little confusing as events come out of order, but probably for the best overall. They look at Johnson’s rise, Brexit, the 2019 election, the (lack of) agenda, COVID, Cummings, domestic policy, foreign policy, the shifting cast of characters in Number 10 and the eventual collapse. The Cummings chapter is the longest, at 69 pages, and his gaunt shadow looms over most of the rest. At the end the authors ask which of the many possible culprits was most responsible for Johnson losing office, and the answer is clear: it was Johnson himself.
There are a couple of points to be said in Johnson’s favour. He did win an election with a clear majority, which is a notable achievement even in the supposedly decisive British system (helped of course by the incompetence at the time of Labour and the Lib Dems). He was seriously committed to Net Zero, and was ready to argue the toss on climate with sceptics in his own party, though less good at doing the preparatory legwork for the Glasgow COP meeting. He came in early and strong on Ukraine’s side in the war, and helped consolidate the G7 and NATO in support. (Though there too, the UK is a smaller player compared to the US and the EU.)
But otherwise there is nothing much to be said for him as a prime minister. His Brexit deal was deeply deficient; I wish the authors had gone a bit more into the Northern Ireland Protocol, though I must admit they may be right to leave that to the specialists. His flagship “levelling-up” agenda got nowhere because he was unable and unwilling to give it leadership. His reluctance to lock down earlier in the COVID waves cost thousands of lives. He allowed Cummings to erode the structures of the constitution, and tolerated unethical behaviour by his allies to beyond the breaking point of government standards. He learned nothing, and forgot nothing. (Also, he seriously thought you could build a bridge/tunnel between Northern Ireland and Scotland.)
None of this can come as any surprise. Johnson’s character flaws were obvious, and widely reported by those who had previously attempted to work with him, going back to his days as a schoolboy at Eton. I have some sympathy for those who joined his team after the event, hoping to make the best of a bad job. But nobody who supported Johnson’s rise to power deserves to have their political judgement trusted on anything else. (And that includes Rishi Sunak, whose late endorsement during the leadership campaign was an important moment.)
This is already long enough, but I was interested in personal glimpses of two people who I know a little and a third who I am fascinated by. I knew Martin Reynolds, the Principal Private Secretary to Johnson, when he was a mid-level diplomat in Brussels fifteen years ago. He is more capable than most officials, but was nonetheless out of his depth in the sheer awfulness of trying to manage the Johnson system. On the other hand, John Bew, Johnson’s main foreign policy advisor, is one of the few people to come out of the book looking good; he gave sound advice and wrote a substantive paper on UK global strategy post-Brexit. His father was a colleague of my father’s; I last saw John when he was about ten years old, and I’m glad he is doing well.
The third person of interest is the late Queen Elizabeth II. Although manipulated by Johnson into proroguing Parliament, she did him a massive favour during the pandemic by giving him permission to jog in the grounds of Buckingham Palace – a nice human gesture, at palatial scale. Much more importantly, it’s strongly hinted that the crucial breakthrough in the Brexit negotiations, when Johnson and Leo Varadkar spoke on the afternoon of 8 October 2019 (after a disastrous conversation between Johnson and Merkel), was directly suggested to Johnson by the Queen. It’s certainly difficult to identify anyone else who could have made the suggestion and that he would have listened to, and impossible to imagine him thinking of it on his own. If so, it’s one of the most consequential personal political interventions of her reign.
The acknowledgements include this peculiar back-hander:
We would like to thank Isaac Farnworth and John Paton, but cannot for the life of us remember what you did to help.
This is not a great book. The writing style is breathless and occasionally out of breath, sometimes repetitive, sometimes clunky. The trees get a lot of attention, the forest as a whole not so much and the outside world very little. I can really recommend it only to fascinated spectators of slow-motion political train crashes (though I admit that I am one, and there are a lot of us around). You can get it here.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
The most important news of the month was getting my first COVID injection. Weird to think that the pandemic had been going on for fourteen months at this stage. I also seemt o have started going back to the office at this stage, and we were holding office parties in the nearby parks.
With the public holidays, I had two excursions southwards: to Mons on my own, and with two colleagues to see Merovingian metalwork at Mariemont near Mons.
Non-fiction 2 (YTD 16) Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens: Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor, by Frank Collins Statement and Correspondence Consequent on the Ill-Treatment of Lady de la Beche by Colonel Henry Wyndham, edited by Ann Auriol
Non-genre 3 (YTD 10) Schindler’s List, by Thomas Keneally The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant Forrest Gump, by Winston Groom
SF 7 (YTD 54) The Evidence, by Christopher Priest In the Days of the Comet, by H. G. Wells Cloud on Silver by John Christopher All the Fabulous Beasts, by Priya Sharma Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton Finna, by Nino Cipri City of Blades, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Comics 4 (YTD 14) DIE, Volume 2: Split the Party, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans and Clayton Cowles The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, by Adrian Tomine Ghost-Spider vol. 1: Dog Days Are Over, by Seanan McGuire, Takeshi Miyazawa and Rosie Kämpe Invisible Kingdom, vol 2: Edge of Everything, by G. Willow Wilson and Christian Ward
4,600 pages (YTD 25,900) 6/16 (YTD 39/98) by non-male writers (de la Beche/Auriol, Sharma, Cipri, Hans, McGuire/Kämpe, Wilson) 3/16 (YTD 18/98) by PoC (Sharma, Tomine, Miyazawa)
All the Fabulous Beasts, by Priya Sharma, is really fantastic. You can get it here.
Way back in 1989-90, as the world changed forever, I shared a house in Cambridge with a guy called Andrew. Years passed and we fell out of touch, and then it suddenly turned out that he was writing science fiction as a side gig from his environmental consultancy job, and we net for the first time in a quarter of a century at Eastercon in 2016. It is a small world sometimes.
This was his debut book, and I’m sorry to say that I’ve only now got around to reading it. It is jolly good. There are two and a half interlinked plots: one follows the memorable villain, the other the spunky heroine, with flashbacks to explain the history of her relationship with her AI guardian. Both villain and heroine are chasing abandoned ancient tech of mindblowing capability (the eponymous Creation Machine). It’s mostly space opera but leaps into cyberpunk at the end. I found it compellingly written, and I shall get the sequels in the trilogy – though I’m glad to say that this first volume is self-contained. You can get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Second ‘If’ Reader, ed. Fredrik Pohl.
This was the first non-Clarke book that I finished reading this month, so now I’m only a week behind. But once the Clarke shortlist is announced, I’m going to start publishing brief reports on the books that I read through to the end but were not shortlisted.
When I first listened to the audio of The Underwater Menace in 2007, and watched what was then the only remaining episode, I had fully absorbed the fan consensus that it is terrible, and I wrote:
The Underwater Menace, from Patrick Troughton’s first season in early 1967, is notorious – even the normally upbeat Howe and Walker describe it as “undoubtedly the weakest of the second Doctor’s era, if not of the sixties as a whole”. Fortunately, in a way, only episode three (out of four) survives, and today’s fan can buy the soundtrack with narration by Anneke Wills who played Polly (the story featuring her, Ben and new companion Jamie). This means that we are not subjected to the awful production values and can let our imaginations fill in for the cheap-looking sets. As a sound only production it comes close to succeeding, with the main problems being the baffling ballet of the fish people in episode three (which in fact becomes more rather than less confusing when you actually see it) and the utterly clichéd villain, Professor Zaroff, who actually ends the third episode by declaring that nothing in the world can stop him now. The director, Julia Smith, went on to create EastEnders; this cannot have been a high point of her early career.
It does feature the most extensively featured Irish character in any Doctor Who story [arguably until Thaddea Graham as Bel in 2021], P.G. Stephens’ trapped sailor Sean (who is teamed up with Jacko, a trapped Asian sailor played by Paul Anil). As I have previously noted, there is not a lot of competition. It is not fair to say that he has “the least convincing Irish accent in television history”, as he has a long acting career both in Ireland [dead link] and England (playing mainly Irish parts, including a comedy IRA bomber [another dead link]), but he is certainly as wobbly in his acting as any of the rest of the guest cast, especially in the deeply embarrassing scene where he urges the fish people to revolt.
Ow. The Underwater Menace is the first really bad story for some time, in fact almost as bad as The Sensorites which is my least favourite story so far. The plot is dreadfully padded – the Tardis crew faffing around getting captured in the first episode, wandering around in caves in the second episode, the hideously embarrassing fish-people dance in the surviving third episode, more cave wanderings in the last episode. The plot is fundamentally stupid, and Joseph Furst intensely annoying as Professor Zaroff. (Likewise Peter Stephens, doing a reprise of Cyril the schoolboy as Lolem the high priest; and the risible parts written for Token Irish Guy and Token Black Guy.)
As minor compensation, it looks decent enough, and the early Dudley Simpson score generally works; and some of the supporting cast are good – Ara (played by 16-year-old Catherine Howe who went on to a successful career in music) is clearly deeply in love with Polly, in the most overt gay crush in Who since Ian and Marco Polo. And Troughton carries it well, conveying at least his own confidence in the story (however feigned that may have been). Episode Three is the thirteenth Second Doctor episode, but the earliest to survive. I can’t help feeling that any one of the previous twelve would have been better.
A year later, of course, the missing second episode was recovered, and I watched it for the first time last month in preparation for this post; and you know what? I have revised my opinion of the story substantially upwards. Perhaps it’s that the second episode generally looks good enough; perhaps it’s that the intervening decade since 2011 has seen Moffat and Chibnall stories which were easily as silly in their premises as The Underwater Menace; perhaps my own tastes have matured enough that I am confident in my own judgement without relying on fan wisdom. The fish people are still a bit strange, but we’ve seen similar in New Who. I think my tolerance for what Doctor Who should be like has been broadened by the last two show-runners. You can judge for yourself by getting the DVD with reconstructions here and the audio only narration by Anneke Wills here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation by Nigel Robinson, introducing Dr Zaroff, is:
Lolem stalked angrily up to the figure who had just entered the temple and had evidently given the black uniformed guards their orders. The newcomer was tall and dressed in a high-collared white coat; a short black cloak hung over his shoulders. A shock of prematurely white hair covered his head, and a pencil-thin moustache topped his cruel mouth. The skin of his long aristocratic face was sallow but his large eyes gleamed with an icy-blue brilliance.
When I read it for the first time in 2008, I was also unforgiving:
This is very poor. It’s not quite as bad as Robinson’s novelisation of The Sensorites, and in the earlier chapters I thought it seemed quite promising. But the prose soon descends into his trademark clunkiness, and the story’s most famous line actually manages to come over even worse on the printed page than it does in the original.
Again, I don’t think I was being fair. It’s a perfectly adequate novelisation; a bit of back-story is given to Ara, Sean and Jacko, and even to Zaroff. You can get it here (if you are lucky).
This is the first time in this run of rewatches that I have found myself substantially revising my opinion of a story. Of course, it’s partly that there was a whole new episode here that I had not seen before. I was therefore in an open frame of mind when I started on James Cooray Smith’s Black Archive monograph; he had already done yeoman’s work on The Massacre and The Ultimate Foe, so my expectations were high.
And I was not disappointed. This is a more personal account than some of the Black Archives have been, as Cooray Smith was actually present at the BFI event in 2011 when, without any prior warning, the missing episode was shown to a crowd who had mainly come to the event for other reasons. Several of the Black Archives have made the point that our reception of past Doctor Who episodes is often dynamic rather than static; this is a very good case in point.
The first chapter, “Prehistoric monsters” looks at the reception of The Underwater Menace before 2011, pointing out that it was one of the most obscure of Old Who stories.
It neither introduces or writes out any memorable characters, nor features any popular monsters or villains. There are no references to it in subsequent television Doctor Who. It is one of a vanishingly small number of 20th-century Doctor Who stories to have no substantial sequel or prequel in any medium. With very few photographs taken during production, there was little visual material for use in the various glossy Doctor Who history books produced in the 1980s, whose printing of often striking colour photographs from black-and-white serials did much to shape fandom’s perceptions of the series’ earliest years.
The second chapter, “Hope it’s the Daleks”, describes the event on 11 December 2011 when Mark Gatiss presented both the third episode of Galaxy 4 and the second episode of The Underwater Menace. I remember this vividly too, though I was not there; the news hit Twitter as I was dining in a bistro near the main station in Luxembourg, on my way to a plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, possibly the first time I learned something important from Twitter as a news source. Cooray Smith also points out that the episode’s subsequent DVD release was a bit underwhelming.
The third chapter, “Please let it be… 1966”, briskly recounts the fraught writing and production of the story. Its second paragraph is:
The Tenth Planet (1966) had been rewritten as a swansong for William Hartnell’s Doctor and then its third episode had been hurriedly redrafted1 when Hartnell became unavailable. The Power of the Daleks required the temporary return of former Story Editor Dennis Spooner to the role (in addition to work performed by Davis in that capacity and rewrites by credited writer David Whitaker). The Highlanders (1966-67), made before The Underwater Menace but commissioned and initially intended to be made after it, was written by Davis after the contracted writer, BBC executive Elwyn Jones, failed to deliver any material at all, and was scripted with such urgency that all the necessary paperwork surrounding Davis’ commission was delayed until after most of the story had been made. 1 The original version, the Doctor playing a larger role in events, is retained in Gerry Davis’s novelisation.
The fourth chapter, “What have I come upon?”, looks in depth at Episode 2 and how watching it changes one’s perceptions of the story as a whole, exactly the experience I had had myself a few days before reading the chapter.
What the recovery of episode 2 has gifted us, however, in addition to a whole extra episode of 20th-century Doctor Who to enjoy, is a tremendous real-time demonstration of how any even only partially missing Doctor Who serial cannot ever really be understood as a piece of television, no matter how much secondary and supplementary material exists.
One utterly glorious bit of trivia. For many years, the only surviving segments of Episode 2 were those that had been cut from it by Australian censors for being too scary. The recovered copy of the episode turned out to have been the very one from which the Australian censors had cut the scenes, so they were reinserted into the master copy, half a century later on a different continent.
The fifth chapter, “Science is in opposition to ancient temple ritual”, looks at the tension between science and religion in the story, in the course of which the Doctor allies himself with the High Priest against Professor Zaroff, not the usual way around for these situations in Doctor Who.
The sixth chapter, “Nothing in the world can stop me now!”, offers a redemptive reading of the character of Professor Zaroff. Again, now that we have episode 2 as well, I can see that Joseph Furst’s performance, and the character as written, are much less over the top than fan lore would have had you believe.
The seventh chapter, “I should like a hat like that!”, looks at the question of the Second Doctor’s tall hat, which is seen for the last time in The Underwater Menace. Cooray Smith reckons that it was badly damaged in the filming of the previous story, The Highlanders, and thus quietly abandoned.
The eighth chapter, “Look at him! He’s not normal, is he?”, makes a good case that Troughton’s performance as the Doctor only really settles down after The Underwater Menace.
The ninth chapter, “A New Atlantis”, looks at the very little that is known of the writer, Geoffrey Orme, and examines the socialist elements of the plot – notably the strike of the Fish People as one of the few cases of industrial action in Doctor Who, and speculates that their infamous dance is rooted in the work of Ernst and Lotte Berk, with whom Orme had professional connections. I was convinced.
An appendix, “Vital secret will die with me! Dr. W”, looks in amusing and extensive detail at the question of whether the name of the lead character of the show is “Doctor Who” or not.
A second and final appendix reviews the production schedule of the story, whose studio sessions were recorded only a week before they were broadcast.
It’s all very satisfactory, and after a run of Black Archives which I was less happy with, this is reassuringly back to the usual excellent form.
Having said that, there is one very annoying production glitch. As has sometimes been the case before, it involves the footnotes; in this case, most of them are duplicated. It rather breaks up the reading experience.
Other than that, I really recommend this – after you have seen the recovered second episode. You can get it here.
Current The John Nathan-Turner Doctor Who Production Diary, 1979-90, by Richard Molesworth The Race, by Nina Allan A Marvellous Light, by Freya Marske
Last books finished Creation Machine, by Andrew Bannister The Fountains of Forever, by Nick Abadzis et al ω4 α5 (did not finish) Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett β5 (did not finish) ψ4
Next books Home Fires Burn, by Gareth Madgwick The Shape of Sex to Come, ed. Douglas Hill The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross
Anne and I had a little 24-hour excursion at the end of the long weekend just gone, mainly exploring the arrondissement of Avesnes-sur-Helpe in the département du Nord of the Hauts-de-France region, a small corner of the Republic that ended up French rather than Belgian due to the 1678 Treaty of Nijmegen which allowed Louis XIV to take it from the County of Hainaut. It has been rather neglected by its overlords in the 345 years since.
But before we got there, we stopped off at the Collegiate Church of St Ursmer in the small town of Lobbes near Charleroi. It is supposedly the oldest church in Belgium, and this year is celebrating the 1200th anniversary of its consecration in 823. Little is known of St Ursmer, a local boy who became bishop and is buried in the crypt (well, most of him; bits and bobs are in reliquaries). But the crisp, clean geometrical arches of the ninth-century church fabric are currently crowded with an exhibition of the iconography of the saint and how this affected the church.
The external view shows the ancient core and 19th-century spire.
St Ursmer’s major miracle was exorcising a demon from a nun, whose name has been forgotten, though artists agree that the demonic presence was expelled from her mouth.
The exhibition will stay in the church until, er, next Monday, and will then transfer to the former sacristy of the Abbey of Good Hope in Lobbes from 18 June, if you want to catch it there.
The church is only 10km from the border with France, and so we slipped across to the small French village of Sars-Poteries where various menhirs from the neighbourhood have been collected. My Celtic soul is still a bit revolted at the thought of moving the sacred monoliths from the places where their builders put them, but I suppose it is better than losing them altogether. One of them stands proud and upright in the centre of the village; the others recline in retirement nearby.
We stayed at Les Mout’ânes, a pension in the small town of Saint-Hilaire-sur-Helpe, where a luxurious double room with breakfast costs a mere € 89. Strongly recommended. They also have donkeys.
They don’t, unfortunately, do dinner for groups of less than four, so in the evening we headed down to La Petite Ferme de Lucien in Fourmies, a steakhouse in the style of an American diner except with French culinary standards. Very yummy.
On Monday morning we decided to explore the Parc naturel régional de l’Avesnois, which occupies most of the land surface of the arrondissement. This proved a little difficult; there are no real centres of tourist information, no established walks, and not a lot of information on the ground. We stopped at the arboretum in the Forest of Mormal near Locquignol where there are a couple of amusing wooden statues.
As we drove on to our next destination, we passed a sign labelled “Wilfred Owen”, and went back to investigate. Like all UKanian schoolkids, we were taught several of his gut-wrenching war poems in our English Literature classes. The house where he wrote his last letter to his mother on 31 October 1918 has been transformed into a large sculptural memorial, but sadly was not open on 1 May.
We parked there anyway and walked for twenty minutes through the woods to his grave in the nearby village of Ors; a few dozen British soldiers are buried in the municipal cemetery, including Wilfred Owen, who was killed exactly a week before the war ended. The woods were alive with birdsong and the cemetery was quiet. It was a thought-provoking walk.
I should add that I had consulted many French tourism websites about things to see in the arrondissement, and not one of them mentioned Wilfred Owen’s grave. We found it completely by accident.
Our destination at that point was the Matisse museum in the former bishop’s palace at Le Cateau-Cambrésis, the town where he was born. As is often the case with such museums, most of his best known art is elsewhere – there are two other museums in France alone which have more of his work. But there is enough here to show his evolution as a painter, from the 1899 First Still Life with Orange:
…to the 1906/07 portrait of his daughter Marguerite:
…to his later experiments with cut-outs, as with the 1946 Océanie – La Mer.
Upstairs, the museum has a lot more art by modern artists – lots of Alberto Giacometti, some Miró, a Picasso, a few by Fernand Léger (who impressed me at the Kröller-Müller Museum last year); and a large collection of art by Auguste Herbin, another local boy who neither Anne nor I had previously heard of, but who completely wowed us. This is a case where almost none of his art is elsewhere and the Matisse Museum in Le Cateau-Cambrésis has almost all of it. He started fairly representational, eg these early Chrysanthemums:
But then he went completely geometric in various media. Here’s a flat piece with the title Napoleon:
Here’s a more three-dimensional piece whose title I failed to record:
Here are two stools with Herbin covers:
And most spectacular of all, here’s a stained glass window, with the title Joy, that he designed for a local elementary school (this is an exact copy; the original is still in the school, where we later saw it from the outside).
This stunning museum charged us € 4 each as the cost of entry. I can certainly think of many occasions when I have spent five times as much to have five times less fun. It was practically empty and it was well worth the trip. (The same, sadly, could not be said for the lunch at the Restaurant du Musée Matisse across the street, where the service was slow and the food a bit disappointing.)
Finally we stopped off at Bavay for a look at the huge ancient Roman forum there; but unfortunately it was closed due to the bank holiday. We’ll have to go back.
Why his followers had this experience is an interesting question. After all, many other Jews in this period followed other charismatic, prophetic figures (John the Baptizer comes readily to mind); but none of their movements outlived the death of their founder. Why was this group different?
An interesting book on the very early history of Christianity, between the time of Jesus and the fall of Jerusalem, looking at what are effectively trace fossils in the records to get a sense of what the followers of Christ believed and did. The only real contemporary witness is St Paul in his letters, though Fredriksen also gives a lot of weight to Flavius Josephus.
The crucial point is that the early Christians expected the apocalypse at any moment, and structures therefore didn’t need to be established for the long term; but they gradually evolved from being dissident groups within local synagogues to becoming free-standing communities, a process partly driven by their acceptance of non-Jews among the ranks. (Fredriksen observes that Jesus himself was a bit hesitant about non-Jews.)
The destruction of the temple – and indeed Caligula’s earlier threat to desecrate it – convulsed the Jewish world and shook the Christians definitively into a separate channel. That’s a different story, but the decades leading up to that are well depicted in this book. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2019; next on that pile is One Bible Many Voices, by Susan E. Gillingham.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
Another month when I mainly stayed at home, apart from a birthday excursion to the east of Belgium for more megaliths.
Worldcon continued to provide drama, with the publication of the final ballot arousing much controversy, and the entire convention being postponed until December (giving rise to further arguments about the rules). More positively, it was announced that I would be a Guest of Honour at the next year’s Eastercon.
Non-fiction 1 (YTD 14) Kathedralen uit de steentijd, by Herman Clerinx
Non-genre 2 (YTD 7) The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
SF 12 (YTD 47) Worlds Apart, by Richard Cowper Network Effect, by Martha Wells Kaleidoscope: diverse YA science fiction and fantasy stories, eds Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo The Gameshouse, by Claire North Legendborn, by Tracy Deonn (did not finish) The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal The Serpent Sea, by Martha Wells The Orphans of Raspay, by Lois McMaster Bujold Two Truths and a Lie, by Sarah Pinsker The Consuming Fire, by John Scalzi Doctor Who 1 (YTD 2, 4 inc comics) Adventures in Lockdown, ed. Steve Cole Comics 5 (YTD 10) Muse vol 1: Celia, by Terry Dodson & Denis-Pierre Filippi Muse vol 2: Coraline, by Terry Dodson & Denis-Pierre Filippi Le dernier Atlas, tome 1, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval and Fred Blanchard Feeders & Eaters & other stories, by Neil Gaiman, art by Mark Buckingham Sculpture Stories, by Neil Gaiman with Lisa Snellings
4,800 pages (YTD 21,300) 9/21 (YTD 33/82) by women (Wells x2, Krasnostein/Rios, Vo, North, Deonn, Kowal, Bujold, Pinsker) 3/21 (YTD 15/82) by PoC (Onyebuchi, Vo, Deonn)
There were a couple of these that I did not like, but you know what, let’s celebrate half a dozen that I liked very much.
Kathedralen uit de steentijd: hunebedden, dolmens en menhirs in de Lage Landen, by Herman Clerinx (get it here) The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris (get it here) Kaleidoscope: diverse YA science fiction and fantasy stories, eds Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios (get it here) Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi (get it here) The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo (get it here) Two Truths and a Lie, by Sarah Pinsker (get it here)
We ate breakfast out in the garden, under the small tangerine-trees. The sky was fresh and shining, not yet the fierce blue of noon, but a clear milky opal. The flowers were half-asleep, roses dew-crumpled, marigolds still tightly shut. Breakfast was, on the whole, a leisurely and silent meal, for no member of the family was very talkative at that hour. By the end of the meal the influence of the coffee, toast, and eggs made itself felt, and we started to revive, to tell each other what we intended to do, why we intended to do it, and then argue earnestly as to whether each had made a wise decision. I never joined in these discussions, for I knew perfectly well what I intended to do, and would concentrate on finishing my food as rapidly as possible.
As a teenager, I read several of Gerald Durrell’s autobiographical notes on collecting animals in Africa with great interest and enthusiasm. Nowadays I’m not so sure about the ethics of bringing animals out of their home environments, to which they are well adapted, to be gawked at by Europeans in cages. I’m sure that there are good arguments to be made on both sides.
Anyway, this is the story of Durrell’s childhood on the island of Corfu, as the youngest of a large family who settled there in the 1930s. He was already a keen collector of animals, and clearly drove his eccentric relatives mad with the inevitable domestic accidents that took place. But it’s a very affectionate portrait of an untroubled childhood, even if it leans a little too much on the funny foreigners that happen to live in foreign parts. You can get it here.
This was both my top unread non-fiction book, and my top unread book acquired last year. Next on those piles are A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford, and The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman.
NB that this post is not a complete history of the Cyprus problem; it is more of a note to myself about why two different publications are interesting. I should also say that my employers, former and current, are under no obligation to agree with me on any of the below.
Second paragraph of third chapter of The Cyprus Crisis and the Cold War: USSR duplicity versus US realpolitik (1974-1977), by Makarios Drousiotis:
Military operations had displaced 160,000 Greek Cypriots – one-third of the population – from their homes. Most of them fled empty-handed. They were housed wherever they could be accommodated, with tens of thousands living in tents and under trees. Approximately 13,000 Greek Cypriots remained enclaved in the northern part, mostly in the Karpas peninsula. By the end of the military operations, 25,000 of the 120,000 Turkish Cypriots remained in the south. Of these, about 10,000 fearing reprisals, fled to the British Bases west of Limassol. Around 10,000 Turkish Cypriots lived in Paphos and a smaller number in Larnaca. Those who were close to the Attila line left easily for the north. The two-way movement of people, whether pushed out by force or prompted by fear, and the control of the northern part by the Turkish army created a new reality on the ground.
Second paragraph of third section of An Island Divided: Next Steps for Troubled Cyprus, by the International Crisis Group:
The working groups set up through this process reached preliminary agreement on citizenship and voting issues, as well as much of the post-unification governance framework. In their first meeting off the island, during a round of negotiations in Mont Pèlerin, Switzerland, in November 2016, the two leaders agreed on a range for the area of the island’s territory the Turkish Cypriot constituent state would cover: from 28.2 to 29.2 per cent.
A quirk of fate threw these two documents together for me. They cover rather different periods of the recent history of Cyprus, but end up in depressingly similar places. Drawing on many official documents, including those recently declassified, Makarios Drousiotis has compiled a good and authoritative book-length account of what actually happened immediately before, during and after the Turkish military operations of July and August 1974, as a result of which the island has been divided between Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot territory ever since (with also a UN-controlled buffer zone and two sovereign British military bases). Talks to reunify the island have made very little progress since then, or really since 1963.
Drousiotis’ explicit aim in writing the book was to puncture the myth that the Americans and Henry Kissinger in particular were behind the Turkish military intervention; and also the myth that the Soviet Union had been helpful and supportive of the Greek Cypriots throughout. Both of these propositions are widely believed among Greek Cypriots, and elsewhere. Neither, as Drousiotis shows, is true.
The contemporary evidence is clear: when the Greek junta attempted to kill Archbishop Makarios and overthrew his government, they were condemned by pretty much everyone, including the Soviet Union. The swiftness, extent and brutality of the second Turkish military operation in August came as a surprise to all other international actors, including the Americans. Drousiotis writes of personally witnessing a friend dying under the wheels of a British armoured vehicle during one of the subsequent protests.
The Americans, consumed by the domestic crisis leading up to Nixon’s resignation on 9 August, were concerned to keep Turkey on board with NATO, didn’t care too much about the government of Greece, and cared even less about Cyprus except in so far as it was a nuisance factor. The USSR on the other hand didn’t care about Cyprus at all except that they wanted to prevent the island being used by NATO, and if possible to use it to weaken Turkey’s relationship with NATO. There was no grand scheme to aid the Turkish intervention from the USA, and no coherent strategy of opposing it from the USSR.
The full detail of failed negotiations between Denktash and Clerides / Makarios over the next three years, up to the sudden death of Makarios, is actually rather tedious. Neither side was really interested in reaching a settlement, because both felt that they would be strengthened by the passage of time. Despite the massive investment of time and energy in the process from the United Nations, the UK, the USA and others (though not the USSR), negotiations were basically a sham to cover the race between the principals to be out of the door second. I found a compelling 1974 quote from Makarios on one of the key issues:
“If I have to choose between the 40% held by the Turks and the 28% that we shall probably end up with, I prefer that they keep the 40% even against our will, rather than that they hold 28% with our consent.”
Well, he got what he wanted, or at least what he wanted at that point.
It is striking just how poorly most of the Cypriots on both sides behaved. Makarios appointed Clerides as chief negotiator and then undermined him from the first moment. Denktash knew his side had won the ground war, and enjoyed watching the Greek Cypriots tie themselves in knots. Even Clerides, who generally gets a good press (and usually deserves it), decided at one point to ally with the remnants of EOKA B who had connived in the short-lived July 1974 coup. (Not mentioned here, but he had also overseen the expulsion of Turkish Cypriot MPs in 1963.)
In the last few months of his life, Makarios suddenly decided that he wanted a settlement after all, and was ready to concede bizonality, a vital Turkish Cypriot demand. But he had not prepared his own hardliners for this about-face, and was losing authority at the time of his death. Another good quote has him at this stage telling hardliner Vassos Lyssarides (who died only two years ago at the age of 100),
It is not sufficient to remain on the heroic ramparts but it is necessary to advance.
But it was too late – not just three years too late, but fourteen. In his closing summary, Drousiotis assesses Makarios’ record brutally; it was his choices and strategy that led to the Greece-backed coup and the Turkish intervention in 1974; even though the Greek and Turkish government obviously bear responsibility for their own actions, better choices by Makarios (and other Greek Cypriot leaders, but he was at the top) from the very beginning would have prevented the situation from getting to that stage.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. You can get it here. Next on that list is American Gridlock: The Sources, Character, and Impact of Political Polarization, by James A. Thurber.
The International Crisis Group’s latest report on the situation, An Island Divided: Next Steps for Troubled Cyprus, rehearses in convincing and depressing detail the internal (and external) blocks to any new negotiation process starting, let alone finishing. I was a bit stunned by the bleak conclusion; I am used to Crisis Group making virtuous if not always practical recommendations for what could be done to improve a particular situation, but in this case it’s just “the parties should try a more conciliatory approach”. Well, yes.
A helpful appendix lists 22 proposals related to trade, hydrocarbons and/or Varosha/Maraş which were put forward between 1978 and 2022. Eighteen of them were completely blocked, and only four of them were in any way implemented; the opening of checkpoints, the demining process, the EU’s regulations and the interoperability of the cellphone network. Otherwise we are where we were in 1974.
The report has particular resonances for me because 19 years ago, when I was Crisis Group’s Europe Program Director, I wrote an op-ed signed by my bosses, former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans and former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, advocating the Annan Plan for the reunification of the island (NYT, ICG). I wrote then:
A failure to seize the opportunity of a peace deal now, against the imminent time-scale of EU membership, will mean years of further stalemate, with no refugees returning anywhere, continued armed presence on the island, and an EU member state government that controls only 60 percent of its own territory.
Well, I told you so. The plan was passed by the Turkish Cypriots but rejected by Greek Cypriots in twin referenda a few days later, and the situation now is exactly what I predicted in 2004. (I don’t claim any special genius in making this prediction; I was certainly not alone.)
Two years later, in 2006, I went to Nicosia, Athens and Istanbul to present Crisis Group’s first report on Cyprus. We were among the first to say directly that the Greek Cypriots had voted for continuing partition by rejecting the Annan Plan. This was not universally popular, and one newspaper accused me of coming to the island with “the impudence of a thousand monkeys”, “με αναίδεια χίλιων πιθήκων”. But I think it had to be said.
Shortly after, I left Crisis Group to join Independent Diplomat, where I became an adviser to Denktash’s successor as Turkish Cypriot president, Mehmet Ali Talat, a sincere and modest man who was genuinely committed to reunifying the island but lacked a serious partner on the other side. (Tassos Papadopoulos was too hardline, and Dimitris Christofias too stupid.) A Greek commentator, Marios Evriviades, in a blog post of around 2011 that has been widely reprinted on Greek nationalist sites (I won’t link, you can easily Google them), states:
Whyte, υπεύθυνος της ICG για την έρευνα και την συγγραφή της κυπριακής έκθεσης, εξαναγκάσθηκε σε παραίτηση διότι άρχισε να αντιδρά στο μακρύ χέρι της Άγκυρας και να διαφοροποιείται κάπως από τη μέχρι τότε απόλυτα φιλοτουρκική στάση του ICG.
Whyte, ICG’s head of research and writing of the Cyprus report, was forced to resign because he began to react to the long arm of Ankara and diverge somewhat from the ICG’s until then completely pro-Turkish stance.
This is all completely untrue, and it is very much to Evrivriades’ discredit that he allows these untruths to continue to circulate years after I informed him of the facts. My ICG job was not head of research; I was not the major writer of the first Cyprus report, though I agreed with it and was its main editor; I was not forced to resign from ICG; I didn’t and don’t diverge from ICG’s stance which I think was and is largely correct; I don’t think that ICG’s stance was completely pro-Turkish, beyond the obvious facts; and in any case I moved from ICG to a job where I was actively working with the Turkish Cypriot leadership, which hardly supports the proposition that I was reacting against the long arm of Ankara.
President Talat lost the 2010 election, and my personal involvement with Cyprus ended there; I have only been back once since then. His successor was a hardliner; he was in turn succeeded by a pro-settlement leader; he too was unable to reach a deal at Crans-Montana in 2017, lost election in 2020 and has been replaced by yet another hardliner.
I no longer think it matters. Back in the day when I was involved, I did think that it was possible that there might some day be a convergence of a pro-settlement leadership on both sides of the island, with or without the blessings of Ankara and Athens. I think this has now been disproved by the failure of the rounds of negotiations since then. I know and admire several of the previous chief negotiators on each side, but I think their task is impossible.
Both Drousiotis’ book, dealing with the mid-70s, and the Crisis Group report, from almost half a century later, make it clear that there is not and has never been a critical mass in Greek Cypriot political discourse in favour of agreeing a deal with the Turkish Cypriots that will involve sharing power and territory with them. On reflection, I think that this has been consistently the case since at least 1963. The default position now is still Makarios’ “I prefer that they keep the 40% even against our will, rather than that they hold 28% with our consent”. It doesn’t matter who the Turkish Cypriots elect; the systemic blockage is on the other side.
As I said, I am no longer involved in the situation myself; I’m just saying that the status quo, which has now lasted since 1974 is likely to be the long term situation, and that’s probably a better basis for strategy than wishful thinking about any comprehensive settlement. I am very sorry about that. Cyprus deserves better, and so do we all.
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 27) The Cyprus Crisis and the Cold War, by Makarios Drousiotis My Family And Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell The Silurians, by Robert Smith? When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation, by Paula Fredriksen The Underwater Menace, by James Cooray Smith
SF 23 (YTD 87) β4 Galactic Girl, by Fiona Richmond γ4 ε4 (did not finish) ζ4 (did not finish) Redwood and Wildfire, by Andrea Hairston δ4 θ4 ι4 (did not finish) κ4 (did not finish) η4 λ4 ν4 (did not finish) ξ4 (did not finish) ο4 (did not finish) π4 (did not finish) ρ4 (did not finish) σ4 (did not finish) μ4 τ4 (did not finish) υ4 (did not finish) φ4 (did not finish) χ4
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 13) Erasing Sherlock, by Kelly Hale Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters, by Malcolm Hulke Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace, by Nigel Robinson
Comics 1 (YTD 8) The Weeping Angels of Mons, by Robbie Morrison, Daniel Indro and Eleonora Carlini
6,500 pages (YTD 32,700) 11/32 (YTD 57/142) by non-male writers (Fredriksen, β4, Richmond, Hairston, θ4, κ4, ν4, ρ4, Hale, υ4, χ4) 2/32 (YTD 23/142) by a non-white writer (β4, Hairston)
389 books tagged “unread”, as of last night; that is 6 fewer than last month as I get through the Clarke submissions, and did not go wild at Eastercon.
Reading now Creation Machine, by Andrew Bannister Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett ψ4
Coming soon (perhaps) The Fountains of Forever, by Nick Abadzis et al The John Nathan Turner Production Diary, 1979-90, by Richard Molesworth Home Fires Burn, by Gareth Madgwick Doctor Who – Vengeance on Varos, by Philip Martin Vengeance on Varos, by Jonathan Dennis The Rings of Akhaten, by William Shaw The Race, by Nina Allan The Shape of Sex to Come, ed. Douglas Hill American Gridlock, by James Thurber The Second ‘If’ Reader, ed. Fredrik Pohl A Marvellous Light, by Freya Marske The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, by Mary Beard Winter, by Ali Smith The Cider House Rules, by John Irving The Memory Librarian, by Janelle Monáe “Bears Discover Fire”, by Terry Bisson Ancient, Ancient, by Kiini Ibura Salaam Partitions irlandaises, by Vincent Baily and Kris One Bible Many Voices, by S E Gillingham Falling to Earth, by Al Worden Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman DALEKS Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett
Current Creation Machine, by Andrew Bannister Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett ψ4
Last books finished υ4 (did not finish) φ4 (did not finish) When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation, by Paula Fredriksen Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace, by Nigel Robinson χ4
Next books The Fountains of Forever, by Nick Abadzis et al The Race, by Nina Allan A Marvellous Light, by Freya Marske
Green Book won the 2018 Best Picture Oscar, and two others: Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali as Don Shirley) and Best Original Screenplay. Bohemian Rhapsody, which I also enjoyed, won four Oscars that year, more than any other film. As well as Bohemian Rhapsody, the other contenders for Best Picture were Black Panther, which I have also seen, and BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, Roma, A Star Is Born and Vice, which I haven’t. The Hugo that year went to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, with Black Panther second.
The only other films I have seen from that year were Bohemian Rhapsody, First Man and the six Hugo finalists, which I did not comment on because I was the administrator of the awards. I voted for Black Panther, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, A Quiet Place, Sorry to Bother You, Annihilation and Avengers: Infinity War in that order. IMDB users rate Green Book 4th and 7th best film of the year, with no film ahead of it on both lists.
Here’s a trailer.
A couple of high profile returnees from previous Oscar-winners here. Viggo Mortensen, starring as Tony Lip, led the Army of the West to the gates of Mordor before being crowned King of Gondor as the second of two title characters in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. (He was of course in the two previous films of the trilogy as well.)
Mahershala Ali, here the other main character Don Shirley, was Juan in the first section of Moonlight two years ago.
Nick Vallelonga, the writer of the film and son of Tony Lip, appeared as a young wedding guest in The Godfather, 45 years before, and also has a minor speaking part here. (Tony’s father and father-in-law are played by his real-life brother and brother-in-law). I didn’t spot any other Hugo/Nebula or scar crossovers, let alone Doctor Who.
I rather enjoyed this. True, it’s the story of a white man’s education about racism, rather than an in depth exploration of racism from the point of view of the oppressed; but it’s also a witty buddy movie, of two men who are different in many ways coming to a joint understanding of their common humanity, and each having a humanising effect on the other. The mixture of music is sensitively done. The scenery all looks like Louisiana, because it all is Louisiana despite being set in various other places. Loses marks for Tony being a white saviour a little too often, and for not much agency for the women characters. But the banter between the two principals is crackling.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
Another month when due to COVID restrictions I did not leave Belgium, and indeed I appear to have gone to the office only twice. It was a year since the first lockdown. Apart from diplomatic walks in Brussels parks, my two excursions were to the Dolmen of Duisburg and the video games museum at Tours et Taxis.
I also researched the parenthood of the baby in the park, but came to the wrong conclusion.
Hugo Award nominations closed, and it became clear that we had some potentially controversial finalists, including a blog post whose title gave a very direct instruction to a well-known author. From the technical point of view it was relatively smooth; we had one nominated editor decline nomination, one artist inform us that they were not eligible and one TV series that we disqualified from the Long Form category because it also had two episodes in Short Form. (Some felt that we should have disqualified others too, but we did not.)
I read 20 books that month.
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 13) The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest, by Paul Kincaid Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd, by Nick Mason It’s the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of?, by Adam Roberts Romeinse sporen: het relaas van de Romeinen in de Benelux met 309 vindplaatsen om te bezoeken, by Herman Clerinx Scottish independence: EU membership and the Anglo–Scottish border, by Akash Paun, Jess Sargeant, James Kane, Maddy Thimont Jack and Kelly Shuttleworth
Non-genre 1 (YTD 5) Dances With Wolves, by Michael Blake
Scripts 2 Driving Miss Daisy, by Alfred Uhry Mostly Void, Partially Stars, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
SF 12 (YTD 35) The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson Comet Weather, by Liz Williams “Sandkings”, by George R.R. Martin Chasm City, by Alastair Reynolds Enemy Mine, by Barry B. Longyear The Doors of Eden, Adrian Tchaikovsky Threading the Labyrinth, by Tiffani Angus The Fountains of Paradise, by Arthur C. Clarke Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake Light of Impossible Stars, by Gareth Powell Water Must Fall, by Nick Wood The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, by M. John Harrison
5,600 pages (YTD 16,500) 3/20 (YTD 24/61) by women (Williams, Angus, Sargeant/Thimont Jack/Shuttleworth) 1/20 (YTD 12/61) by PoC (Paun)
A lot of these were very good, and I’m going to recommend three by friends which were also shortlisted for the BSFA Award:
When I first watched Doctor Who and the Silurians in 2007, I wrote:
Doctor Who and the Silurians was the second story of Jon Pertwee’s first season in 1970 (and for some reason the only TV story with “Doctor Who and” in the title). Those who have seen Quatermass are keen to point out the links; for me, it was one of the most X-Files-like of Doctor Who stories, with our team of investigators checking out mysterious happenings which turn out to have an entirely Earthly explanation (rather rare among Who stories). The first three episodes seemed reminiscent of yer standard rural horror story, but the second half, alternating between science labs and the Silurian caves, steps back into familiar territory. Very familiar in fact – there’s Peter Miles, to return playing essentially the same character in Invasion of the Dinosaursand even nastier in Genesis of the Daleks; there’s Geoffrey Palmer, who lasts two episodes this time before dying horribly (he was only in one episode of The Mutantsbefore dying horribly; and now of course he is due to return as the captain of the Titanic – spot a pattern here?); and, most surprising, there’s Paul Darrow, nine years before Avon became one of Blake’s Seven, being the Brigadier’s second-in-command. The Young Silurian is overacting a bit though. I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as Spearhead from Spaceand Inferno, but I can see why some regard this as Pertwee’s best season.
In 2010, when I came back to it for my Great Rewatch, I was less forgiving:
There are some good bits in Doctor Who and the Silurians, but they are an awful long way apart; this would have been an undisputed classic if it were a four-parter. The length of the story may not have been the choice of director Timothy Combe (who also did Evil of the Daleks and The Mind of Evil, after which he was apparently barred from future Who work), but it has other problems that clearly are his fault: too many static scenes of the Brigadier sitting talking to someone in an office, several of which are interrupted by the Doctor arriving just as his whereabouts are beng discussed. This all made me wonder about the distance between the research centre and the caves; I didn’t get a good sense of that (and Malcolm Hulke’s map in the novelisation is actually a bit confusing).
The story falls quite naturally into two halves – the “something nasty in the woodshed” bit before we actually meet the Silurians properly, and the “clash of civilisations” bit when we do. The two halves are not linked well (what’s the story with the dinosaur, for instance? or the Silurians’ relationship with Quinn?) but the second half is better, and for once we get monsters with decent characterisation, balanced by the Brigadier’s monstrous behaviour at the end – the first time we have seen a regular character defy the Doctor so wilfully, and as a result we viewers are asked to sympathise with the alien agenda rather than the forces of the British state.
It’s also a great story for spotting guest stars: Avon is the Brigadier’s second-in-command, Khrisong / Hieronymous is also there, Nyder is running the research centre, and Geoffrey Palmer, who dies horribly every time he is on Doctor Who, is the Permanent Under-Secretary. (If you haven’t heard the super two-hander audio between Paul Darrow and Peter Miles set in Kaldor City, I do recommend it.) Finally, of course, by pure chance I was watching it immediately after the New Who two-part Silurian story was broadcast, but my thoughts on that will have to wait.
This time around I found myself in between my two previous takes. The pacing is slow, and not everything in the early episodes makes sense compared with what we learn in the later episodes. But the tensions between and among the human and Silurian characters are well depicted, and this time around I was particularly grabbed by Fulton MacKay, in his only Doctor Who appearance of a distinguished career, as the misguided and doomed Dr Quinn. And after recent years, I must say that I sat up and paid attention a lot more during the plague sequences.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation, Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters, is:
Miss Dawson’s mother had died, of incredibly old age, a year ago. At last free, Miss Dawson immecliately applied for, and got, this job at the research centre at Wenley Moor. Derbyshire wasn’t exactly Australia or America, but at least it was some distance from London, and it was the start of her new life.
This was a favourite when I was a kid. When I reread it in 2008, I wrote:
This was the second original novel in Target’s series of novelisations after Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, the first of Hulke’s six books for the range. It is a good one; Hulke tells the story in part from the point of view of the eponymous cave monsters (the word “Silurian” is not used here), showing us humans as alien vermin. He also makes the story a more overt parable about authority and power, and adds little bits of character especially for the Brigadier and Liz. (And see note below on a minor character.) I suspect this will be near the top of my list of Third Doctor novels.
[It has an explicit reference] to Northern Ireland, which are otherwise very rare in the Doctor Who mythos (though see also Daragh Carville’s play, Regenerations). In Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, we get the following back story for Major Barker (renamed from Baker in the TV story, where he was played by Norman Jones without a beard):
“…he saw himself one rainy day in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, leading a group of soldiers who were trying to pin down an IRA sniper. The sniper had already shot two of his men dead, and wounded a third. The Major carefully worked his men into a position so that the sniper was completely surrounded. Then he called upon the sniper to surrender. A rifle was thrown down from a window, and a man appeared with his arms raised. As Major Barker called on his men to break cover and arrest the sniper, shots rang out from a sniper in another building, instantly killing the young soldier next to Major Barker. Without a second’s thought, Barker aimed his revolver at the sniper standing with his hands up in surrender, and shot him dead. For that moment of anger, Major Barker had been asked to resign from the British Army and to find another job.”
Things had changed rather drastically in Northern Ireland between the time of broadcast of this story (January-March 1970) and Hulke’s novelisation, published four years later. According to the grim and masterly Sutton index, before the summer of 1970 the only people killed by the British Army in Northern Ireland were two Protestants shot during riots on the Shankill Road. IRA sniper attacks on the army began only in February 1971. (I don’t know if this is at all helpful for the UNIT dating controversy.) The idea that Barker would have been removed from the army in the circumstances described is rather grimly laughable; even the odious Lee Clegg was eventually allowed to walk free and return to the ranks.
I still think that the book is one of the best novelisations, with a lot of the plot points rounded off, the Silurians (not given that name here) getting much more characterisation and agency, and Major Barker voicing the ideas that Hulke himself hated.
‘It’s as plain as a pikestaff there’s sabotage going on,’ said Barker, taking the Doctor’s bait without realising it. ‘Anyone can see that.’ ‘I may agree with you,’ the Doctor said. ‘But sabotage by whom?’ ‘Communists, of course.’ Major Barker gave his answer as though it should have been obvious to everyone. ‘Why should communists cause these power losses?’ said the Doctor. ‘They hate England, that’s why.’ Barker started to warm to his subject. ‘They train people to come here to destroy us.’ ‘I see,’ said the Doctor. ‘Are these Chinese communists or Russian communists?’ ‘There’s no difference between them,’ said Barker. ‘And if it isn’t them, it’s the fascists. Or the Americans.’ ‘The Americans?’ said Liz, almost but not quite laughing. Major Barker turned to Liz. ‘Miss Shaw, England was once the heart of an empire, the greatest empire the world has ever known. But the bankers and the trade-unionists have destroyed that great heritage. Now we are alone, backs to the wall, just as we were in 1940, only there is no Winston Churchill to lead us. The whole world is snapping at us like a pack of hungry wolves. But the day will come, Miss Shaw, when England will rise again…’
I also want to salute Chris Achilleos’ lovely internal art, a tradition that I wish had been continued for novelisations of later years (of course I understand the commercial constraints too). They gave us a tremendous sense of the visuals of the story, at a time when we had no reason to think we would ever be able to see it for real.
After all of that, I found Robert Smith?’s Black Archive monograph on the story, titled just The Silurians, a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, he explores the themes of the story in some depth. But on the other, I found his presentation of some of the political issues a bit out of date; and in particular, I don’t think you can really write properly about any Malcolm Hulke story without reference to Doctor Who and the Communist, by Michael Herbert, which looks at the relationship between Hulke’s politics and his writing. Only one previous Black Archive volume is mentioned; I think the book could have benefitted from more dialogue with its own predecessors.
The first chapter, “Can Technology Solve All Our Problems?”, looks at the Cyclotron as a supplier of free (or at least cheap) energy, and the shadow of the atom bomb, as twin aspects of technology.
The second chapter, “What’s the Ideal Length for a Doctor Who Story?”, defends the length of Doctor Who and the Silurians, arguing that, for instance, the whole Hartnell era could be considered as one long story, if you like. It would have been interesting to know if there are other episodic Sixties and Seventies series from which comparisons could be drawn.
The third chapter, “What’s the Point of UNIT?”, actually concentrates on the Doctor’s role and character especially in an Earth setting. The second paragraph is:
‘In science fiction, there are only two stories. They come to us or we go to them.’3 So claimed Malcolm Hulke, when despairing of the then-new Earthbound format that he felt Doctor Who had been saddled with for the start of the 1970s. Consequently, he went and wrote a story that was neither: they come to us, except that they’ve always been here. 3 Quoted by Gordon Roxburgh in Matrix, Issue 6.
The fourth chapter, “Who Has the Moral High Ground Here?”, looks at the story’s takes on colonialism and violence.
The fifth chapter, “Is Doctor Who a Science Show?” points out the rarity of science as such actually being portrayed in the show (as it is here), also veering into conspiracy theories and animal rights.
The sixth chapter, “Could the Silurian Plague Have Killed Us All?” is the one which turned out to be the most timely for a book published in January 2020. Unfortunately this also means it has dated badly; most of the gosh-wow facts about epidemics are now either common knowledge or overtaken by events. This is hardly Smith?’s fault, of course.
The seventh chapter, “Who’s Responsible for All This?”, attempts to round off the narrative by looking at the Doctor, especially the Third Doctor, as a character and explaining that the end of the story ought to be a “hyperobject”, a concept that is not really well explained.
A brief look at one particular year in the career of Belgian actor Andrée Tainsy, born in Etterbeek 112 years ago today, on 26 April 1911. She trained in Paris in the mid-1930s where she fell in love with the singer Jane Bathori, thirty-four years older; they stayed together until Jane’s death in 1970. Together they fled the Nazis to Argentina, where they set up a French theater in exile; back in Paris after the war, Andrée kept acting until the end of her life (she lived to be 93). She appears uncredited in Woody Allen’s Love and Death.
In 1967, the year that she turned 56, Andrée Tainsy was a well established character actor in France, and thanks to IMDB we know what TV shows she appeared in. Her big project that year was a French TV version of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, shown on 24 October, where she plays Hedda’s husband’s aunt Julie.
She also appeared on 18 July 1967 in an episode of a historical crime docudrama series, En votre âme et conscience, as Anne Dumollard, wife and accomplice of the nineteenth-century serial killer Martin Dumollard.
Here she is in video, in an episode of the show Allô police, shown on 20 June, where she plays a grumpy concierge (from 12:06):
https://youtu.be/0gxjhlRRwOM?t=726
I have a smaller picture of her from one more crime show episode that she filmed that year, as the dodgy nanny in a kidnap story from Malican père et fils, shown on 24 July:
I’m posting this because I was born on Andrée Tainsy’s 56th birthday in 1967, and today is my 56th birthday. I think she wore her years well, and I hope I have the energy to keep going until I am 93!
I think I prefer her to another figure born on the same day, Paul Verner, who became the second most important man in the Communist regime of East Germany. Here he is receiving a delegation of the Free German Youth in 1967:
More positively, the noted photographer Max Yavno was also born on 26 April 1911. Here is his photograph “California Street”, from 1967:
26 April 1911 was also the day that Albanian chieftains declared independence in the northern village of Orosh, and Australians rejected two referendums on strengthening their federal government. The F.A. Cup Final, replayed after a draw on 22 April, was won 1-0 by Bradford City, beating Newcastle United. Aren’t you glad you know that?
I have been fortunate enough to travel to many places. In fact, the number of countries I have been to has generally kept pace with my calendar age. Today seems like a day to reflect on the places I have been, in seven-year cycles.
I was born in Belfast, and celebrated my 7th birthday in Washington DC. In the meantime I had also been to the Republic of Ireland, Italy, France and Canada, for a total of 6 countries before my 7th birthday.
By 1981, we had had family summer holidays in Bulgaria, Romania, Malta, Spain (with a side trip to Andorra), and we lived for a year in the Netherlands with side trips to Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, Yugoslavia as it then was (Ljubljana and Zagreb), Switzerland and Liechtenstein. That got me to 19 countries by the time I turned 14.
By 1988, I had added only three small countries to the list – Monaco and San Marino in our 1981 family summer holiday, and the Vatican City while inter-railing with my then girlfriend in 1986 – for a total of 22 countries by the time I turned 21.
By 1995, Yugoslavia had split up, giving me an extra notch for the earlier visit to Zagreb and Ljubljana which were now in separate countries; I’d had a Nordic trip to Finland in 1990 with my sister, going overland via Denmark and Sweden with a side trip across the water to Estonia (then still part of the USSR); I went to Portugal with another girlfriend, and then to Cyprus on honeymoon when I married her, which all got me to 29 countries by the time I turned 28.
By 2002, I’d added what were then the other successor states of the former Yugoslavia – Bosnia/Herzegovina (where I lived in 1997-8), Serbia/Montenegro (Serbia in 1998, Kosovo in 2000 and Montenegro in January 2002), and Macedonia, now North Macedonia (first visited in 1997, and I love going back – my favourite of the Balkan countries). I’d also visited Hungary, Greece, the Czech Republic, Moldova, and Israel, with a foot into the territories not internationally recognised as part of Israel. So that takes me to 37 or 38 countries, as they then were, by my 35th birthday.
By April 2009, I had added the three South Caucasus countries – Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan – also Russia and Ukraine, and the last South-East European gaps, Albania and Turkey, and Slovakia for extras. In addition, the independence of Montenegro (2006) and Kosovo (2008) gave me another two. So that takes me to 47 or 48 by the time I turned 42.
The following year added another four, as my trips to South Sudan (then part of Sudan) took me through Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. (I have never been to the northern part of what was then Sudan, so I get no extra point for South Sudan’s independence in 2011.) I went to Poland for the first time in 2013, and 2014 brought business trips to Iraq and Nigeria. So as of my 49th birthday, I had been to 54 or 55 countries.
The last seven years (especially the last three) have seen fewer additions to the list. I went to South Africa in 2017 and Latvia in 2018. So as of today, my tally is either equal to my calendar age, 56, or still one ahead on 57 if I’m allowed to count the Latrun salient and/or East Jerusalem. (I am not tallying the TRNC, or the Green Line, separately from the rest of Cyprus, for technical reasons.)
I still have not been to four European countries – Iceland, Norway, Lithuania and Belarus. I’ve never been to Latin America or the Caribbean, or to Africa outside Nigeria, South Africa and the eastern cluster, or to Asia apart from three countries in the Middle East, let alone the Pacific. But I hope I will have a few more years to put some of that right.
As I landed in Azerbaijan for the first time in May 2004 in the company of my then boss, I mentioned to him that it was my 41st country. He growled that he was roughly 100 ahead of me. I suspect that he still is.
OK. No reason to panic. Why should he suspect a dirty wench with her head in the fireplace? Still, it was all terribly déjà vu, or unpleasantly coincidental, seeing as I’d had my head in a fireplace when they’d spoken of whores. And me.
Last of the books I bought when I was thinking of giving the Faction Paradox sequence a try, and I must say the most enjoyable of those that I have read, perhaps because it is barely connected to the incomprehensible main story-line. Our protagonist is a far-future researcher who installs herself as a maid at 221b Baker Street in order to observe the young Sherlock Holmes at work. Romance, sex and criminal violence ensue. I really liked it. Hale’s Sherlock Holmes is not the somewhat austere figure of Doyle (and indeed most theatrical presentations); he’s a young man starting to establish himself, often short of money, emotionally vulnerable, and a lot more convincing as a human being. Good stuff. You can get it here.
I’m afraid that one hit out of five for the Faction Paradox series is not enough for me to want to continue/resume reading, though.
He batted her hand away. “Just ’cause you finally be sixteen, you know it all, huh?”
A pretty intense novel set between 1898 and 1913 (with a brief excursion to 1893), partly in Georgia and partly in Chicago, about the relationship between Redwood, a young black woman, and Aiden Wildfire, half Irish and half Seminole, and their friends and relatives in the course of their separate journeys. There is a lot of magic; there is a lot of racist oppression; there is a decent amount of romance; I thought it was pretty good. You can get it here.
Redwood and Wildfirewon what was then the James Tiptree Jr Award for 2011 in 2012. The Honor list included five novels and four short stories; I have read I think one of the five novels, God’s War by Kameron Hurley. The long list included eight novels, five shorter works and one collection. Again I have read one of the novels, Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, which won the previous year’s BSFA Award.
I was interested to see that one of the other long listed novels is Outies by my old friend Jenny Pournelle, who I had not realised was also a published author among her many other talents; it’s an authorised sequel to The Mote in God’s Eye and The Gripping Hand by her father.
Next in this sequence are the two Tiptree winners for the following year, The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan and Ancient, Ancient by Kiini Ibura Salaam, as I have already read the BSFA and Clarke winners.
Got through a lot of Clarke submissions this week…
Current When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation, by Paula Fredriksen Creation Machine, by Andrew Bannister
Last books finished λ4 Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters, by Malcolm Hulke ν4 (did not finish) The Cyprus Crisis and the Cold War, by Makarios Drousiotis ξ4 (did not finish) My Family And Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell ο4 (did not finish) π4 (did not finish) ρ4 (did not finish) σ4 (did not finish) μ4 The Silurians, by Robert Smith? τ4 (did not finish)
Next books Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace, by Nigel Robinson The Race, by Nina Allan Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
Doctor Who 1 (YTD 2, 4 inc comics)
Comics 5 (YTD 10)
