Elephant graveyard

As predicted, the old website has finally died so some of the earliest images on this 'ere blog will have sodden off too. Blimey. 

Anatomy of memory

Spent the day mostly sieving 2,200 words about children down to more like just 770. Am now able to define "harm" and "condition" like a pro. Can't think why I'd possibly want to.

Thence to the pub to play honourary boy to the Dr and her chums. One chum was down in the Smoke to lecture some medical folks about memory. It seems that such classic works of phrenology as A Chump at Oxford are wrong - you can't get your memory back by a second bump on the head.

I tend to forget things once I start drinking, even if I don't get all drunk. This may mean the following's not quite as right as it should be. (It's also why I've usually a notebook, so as not to lose important stuff like "Write that!" or "Want lunch?").

Bumps on the head don't tend to make you lose your memory - though there are a few examples of that. Instead, you tend to lose the ability to retain information; you stop making new memories.

This can be short-term, so you might forget the whole week in which you had that nasty car crash, but then everything else is fine. Sometimes it isn't, and there's one bloke who thinks he's still in his mid-twenties and can't recognise his wife. (The medical term for this is a "mid-life crisis".)

Rather luridly, I remember being told by another person medical that nobody's quite sure how anaesthetic actually works. Had leafed through a facsimile of John Snow's 1848 pageturner, "On Narcotism by the Inhalation of Vapours" (which runs broadly: "We tried this, the patient died."; "We tried that, the patient died."; "We tried something else, the patient died." And then, after quite a few patients, "We tried my new mixture and the patient didn't die... immediately.")

"We assume," said the person medical, "that the modified Snow's mixture we use nowadays stops you from feeling the pain."

I recall nodding warily, knowing how persons medical love to confound any comforting sureties.

"But," he went on, "there's no way to prove that. Which is what science is all about. So we do tests, and we're able to prove two things. One: anaesthesia paralyses you. Two: it affects the short-term memory. So while you're lying there being operated on..."

There's something seriously wrong about doctors.

Anyway. There's also a difference between implicit and explicit memory - so you forget the directions to Brighton, while still able to drive a car.

Now I've knocked my head about over the years. As well as the just-being-tall headbanging, on my 18th birthday I ran head-first into a tree. That was six months after I'd been beaten up in the street, waking next morning with no clue what had happened, wondering how I'd wing the bruises with the parents. Yet my memory for explicit detail has always been a bit hot.

I could always remember phone numbers until I got a mobile. I'm still good with people's names so long as I see them written down. And my entire neurological system seems wired solely to glean oddments of fact. Hopeless at everything else. You may have noticed.

I vividly recall being told about John Snow, and can index that up against other otherwise unrelated morsels when it comes to writing some story. I will likely not forget that this evening's chat also included discourse on the weasels and spuds of Scotland, and the suicide of cats.

Yet I've entirely forgotten to post a letter two days in a row.

Who watches the custard?

The Dr passed me "The cost of telling the truth", Neil Garrett's account of what happened after he broke the story last year that Jean Charles de Menezes was not wearing a bulky jacket, was not running, and did not vault the ticket gates.

There's something especially chilling about the arrest four times of Garrett's pregnant girlfriend - she was once held for hours without bread or water - when those who shot an innocent man eight times for... er... looking like another foreigner may not ever be held accountable. There's also been little explanation for why the media got told de Menezes was running, jumping and wearing a big coat - and worse, for where the "rapist" accusation came from.

It hardly makes you proud of the "free" society that miserly extremists want to spoil for everyone.

There is not a great deal you can do to stop people who've already decided their own lives are worth less than their "cause". Much crime prevention is about making things less easy, not impossible. I can't believe anyone joins the police force for reasons other than to make life easier, safer and better for everyone.

And since the police are exemplars of the community, we often forget that - like politicians and doctors and those folk in glossy mags - they are also human beings with the same ordinary frailties as the rest of us.

People make mistakes. People get tired. People are so caught up in nobly defending all that's obviously right that they sometimes need to be beseeched-thee in the bowels of Christ to consider the possibility that they are wrong.

Most of us can do an okay job at things - that's the law of averages. We can't all be brilliant and amazing. Mediocrity is a derogative term, but it's literally how things turn out across the board.

It was reassuring to see the huge police presence in London last summer, as it was to fill out the pubs after the memorial in Trafalgar Square. We will make a stand for what's obviously right. It might merely be a gesture of defiance, but it feels good to be able to make it anyway.

So I'm sure that most, maybe all, of those involved in the shooting made understandable errors in exceptionally difficult circumstances.

But it doesn't make any of us feel any safer when an innocent man gets shot. Nor when it turns out that all we were told about him is not actually true. Nor that the police seem to have bullied the bloke who found this out.

I also appreciate there will have been internal investigations, sincerely conducted to ensure that such a mistake can never be made again. But that's not good enough.

If the guardians of the law go unguarded themselves, how can we have any faith in them?

Even Judge Dredd, idol of a brutal, dystopian police state in a comic for boys who like killings, understands this. The lesson drummed into me as a spotty, cross teenager was that it's not enought that justice is done, it must be seen to be done.

Because without that, what happened to de Menezes could happen to any one of us. That's terrifying. Terrorists blow themselves up on public transport exactly to make us think that.

Which reminds me of Ming last week (and of Millennium who quoted him): "Human rights are there to protect all of us, and you never know when you or your family or friends might need them."

Holistic interconnectedness of all things

Spent a fun afternoon in Ladbroke Grove yesterday, listening to actors do shouting. I was able to answer some of their questions, and advise on what's happening next. The Great Plan proceeds accordingly, and as ever there was marvellous lunch. And some beers. And talk of energy and never long speeches.

Doing the same thing again tomorrow. And after that it'll be recording something I haven't finished yet, so I'd best get a shift on.

For those as have asked, the Dr is much improved - and spent the weekend in the north quaffing curry and giving a paper at some conference. It went down well, apparently, and may lead to other fun things. Her hoof is still swollen and no joy to walk on, and she's still not allowed to do hoovering.

Was into work much earlier than I needed to be today, because of the luck of the draw. Meant other things could get done, so hooroo! Have confirmed that someone I work with is an old playmate of someone I work with - not the first time that's happened in this particular office, rather oddly. And will now attempt the canteen.

For those bored rigid by these cryptic updates on the minutiae of my life, I do have a longer post forming in my brane about political-leaders-in-general. This will take some time to write up, and will likely be influenced by my tea on Wednesday, depending if invited persons can make it. I type this not because it's of any use to you, dear reader, but to remind me to get the thing done.

Shoulder to shoulder

Been a bit caught up in work and sorting other people out these last few days. Went to see X-Men: The Last Stand on Friday, which was good fun. Frasier's especially splendid as a big hairy monster, though I didn't feel the film had quite the emotional impact some of the events in it warranted.

Also watched the Great Escape for work reasons, and was entertained by the bonus stuff on the Dr Zhivago DVD. There's footage of US telly shows interviewing Omar Shariff and Julie Christie which is fascinating for how this kind of press stuff has evolved.

Julie Christie sits there demurely drinking tea and smoking amid noise and chaos off camera, while very unprepared journalists asked her coyly about her boyfriend and whether she likes America. Omar has to explain that he's been to the US before, and one interviewer cannot get over his being... you know, foreign and Egyptian and stuff. Like the food.

Loved Cybermen yesterday, and had fun in the pub afterwards mocking some friends' best attempts to find plot holes. Favourite bit was Lucy being a bit fick. And a dickie-bowed Doctor still wearing his plimsoles.

Also new in Dr Who this week is the announcement of another book I'm in. Now you'll know what Mim are.

Cats, axes and man-noise

Popped down to the shires to see family yesterday, getting work done on the train. Pretty pleased with the bit where someone hoots to see someone else watching a third party swimming. Oh yes, it’s a corker.

Admired the view from my grandpa’s new pad while my nephew detailed his morning at the nursery. A MAN had made NOISE. He’d made the NOISE with his MOUTH. And then they’d all had to go INSIDE.

After a bit of puzzling with the generations of parent I asked, “Was the man just like your uncles?”

Nephew considered, and then nodded emphatically. So we reckon a tramp kvetching at the gate.

After tuna steak and noodles, my sister – who heads home to Australia next week – helped me buy some smartish tee-shirts and another chav top (the Dr disapproves of yet more stripy arms, but she can hardly talk since she’d spent the afternoon hobbling to the shoe shops of Penge).

Then we had a few beers in a pub I used to lurk near when I was 16 – around the time a man had been axed in the alleyway. Those were rough and tumble days back then, accounting for how manly and fearless I grew up.

Had a good old natter about, well, everything really – which is a lot to cover in merely four pints. Freelancing, the adjustment of sleeves, the rubbishness-of-boys and plans for our future…

Also discussed a ghostly encounter that she’d had some months after a significant death. We have very different views on this sort of thing, but I liked the explanation that, “He’d just taken a while to find me.” Could well imagine the immaculately dressed and mannered spirit patiently waiting on a lift…

Before wending my way back to a hayfever-clogged Smoke, my parents were delighted to present me with a photo they’d taken in Zurich of a red-triangle roadsign warning of black cats.

“But cats aren’t dangerous,” said the Dr when she saw it. I loved her quite a lot for that.

Am I... ginger?

The cat nipped into to HMV on Oxford Street yesterday to pick up a little something for the still off-sick Dr. I've spent the evening working tonight (a bit of writing of my own, a bit of reading the veritable glories of Mr E Robson of the North), and every now and then I'm called through to enjoy a choice moment from Anne of Green Gables.

I'm informed that it's the epic tale of little ginger orphan who reads and talks too much, and gets into trouble with her gossipy neighbours. The opening five minutes reminded me of Labyrinthe, but it's been making the Dr squeal all evening. Apparently it spoke to her a lot when she was little. Didn't the cat do well?

One bit I was called for was the dying of the hair, and much discussion followed about the joys of being ginger. And then I found this gem while glancing through old notebooks for something (which I think I've lost), diliginantly copied out from whatever the Dr was reading one Christmas.

"The belief that red hair is unlucky dates back to the Egyptians, who burned red-haired women alive in an attempt to wipe them all out."

Lucinda Hawksley, Lizzie Siddal, the targedy of a pre-Raphaelite supermodel, p. 2.

“There was no help anywhere”

Up early this morning to be drowned on the way into Soho, where Patrick Stewart was doing his first promo stuff for the new X-Men film. I arrived too early, got the wrong room, and as a result ended up burgling a bacon sandwich. The X-Men only had pastries.

The event was in cahoots with takeastand.org, so there were kids pledging themselves against bullying and Stewart himself talked about school life in the 50s.

In the interview session afterwards, he told me that bullying means we fear being seen, so we do our best not to be noticed and hope they’ll go bother someone else. We have to confront it, he said. We should have the courage to step forward. That’s what this event was all about.

Mind you, he didn’t tell me this exclusively. I was one of a group, and too intimidated by the small women with big microphones pushing in front of me. So actually, he was really telling them and I just happened to be in the vicinity.

My boss Joe at least got to ask what next for Star Trek. The answer will be up on Film Focus soon.

Have you met the French?

What a beautiful episode - though the Dr denies that the posh frocks and cleavage qualify it as costume porn.

(Afterwards, she got to watch Sense and Sensibility (for its healing qualities), and I teased her about the Alan Rickman thing. You know, where he runs down a corridor like someones pulling at a string tied to his... breeches.)

The Girl in the Fireplace reminded me, probably inevitably, of Casanova - the style, the pace, the sexual frission of court, and the unavoidable end of the party... Loved how scary and funny it was by turns, and every line part of the ultimate, clever resolution. It's nice the audience gets an answer that the Doctor misses out on. And yes, bananas are good.

Two things struck me watching it that then didn't happen.

1. This was the first time we've ever seen Dr Who drunk.
Actually, it turns out he's pretending. We already know the Doctor can handle his booze: the Twin Dilemma referred back to the fourth Doctor's drunken antics (though onscreen he was only drinking ginger ale), and we've seen him drink wine several times.

On the intoxicants front, he also started out as a smoker (he's landed in trouble when a caveman sees him lighting a pipe with "his fingers" (actually a match). And the Left-Handed Hummingbird (a book from the days when Dr Who really wasn't for children) has him take some magic drugs that will let him get to the baddie. We also know, though that what with his alien physiognomy, an aspirin could kill him. Which might explain why he's soft on the boozing.

2. He takes the long way round
For a minute, I thought he was really going to hang around for 3,000 years and catch up with Rose and Mickey the slow way. He's a Time Lord, he can do that. Again, the books had him stuck on Earth for a century waiting for his mates to turn up, and it's the sort of huge and mad idea New Show has made work so well (just like, "It's not 12 hours, it's 12 months... Sorry.")

These aren't criticisms - I just can't really think of anything else to say.

The Dr (my Dr) is out of plaster, but has her foot strapped up for at least a week, and could be on crutches for four. We dared to have lunch in Beckenham, just to get her out of the flat for a bit. That's worn her out for the day. Cheers for all the messages (and hello to everyone who's found this blog via the mail she sent round herself). Will keep yous posted.

Right, back to my Benny homework.

Proper doctors

"Ps please buy some ‘no more nails’ on the way home x"

Said M.’s txt yesterday afternoon. I was at work and there seemed to be no context, no sense and no relevance to it. M.’s message was a bit out of nowhere too. So I rang to let her know she’d sent someone else’s text to me, and generally just to holler “Hullo”.

“We’re still at the hospital,” says M. I explain I’ve not had whatever message she PS’d to, and why doesn’t she start at the beginning.

“Don’t laugh,” says M, “but the Dr has broken her foot.”

“What?”

“Well. She’s fractured a toe. Really don’t laugh. She was doing the hoovering and a Greek statue fell on her.”

The statue now looks even more authentic, which was why M. wanted the glue.

Ho hum. The hospital took down her title (as well as her name), and thereafter assumed she was medical. Poor girl had to explain that no, she’s only qualified in old bits of carved stone and how to manage them. Not sure they believed her.

She’s fine, but frustrated that she needs someone to run around after her. I had to cook the risotto for H. and P. – who came for dinner despite the injury, and helped with the medicinal wine.

The Dr has also had to miss the conference she was meant to be speaking at, and I won’t be out with boys this evening. Got plenty of work to do anyway.

Had her watch the first half of Dr Zhivago while I did the washing up, and she now needs me to flip the disc over for part two. And then tonight, Dr Who.

I asked Moffat on Thursday what to expect. “The Aztecs with fellatio,” he said. I’m assuming that was a joke. 

Isn't salacious...

...a great word? Things Stars Wars has taught me #87576.

(Delighted to discover they're releasing the original versions of the original Star Wars trilogy later this year, with Han shooting first and the Ewoks' better song.)

Anyway, am thinking of salacious in particular following Labour's shuffling about. It's something of a shock to realise just how few of the brass have escaped some kind of muck on 'em recently.

On Saturday, the Dr had tried to explain to an Italian how it's all a bit like the mid-nineties, when every other day some high-up Tory was discovered up to things that if not illegal were at least a bit unsavoury. The Italian bloke asked what our ministers had done and, when we told him, he laughed. Yes, it could be a lot worse.

Politicians - like police officers, teachers and doctors - are as fallible as any other human beings. Mistakes get made, and sometimes priorities are a bit odd. I'd rather they had lofty ideals they couldn't always meet than that they didn't aspire to anything for fear of hypocrisy.

Yet they're also meant to be exemplars for the rest of us rough-necks to look up to. I think if you want just to be treated like any other ordinary bloke then you shouldn't lord it over other people. Dump the chauffeur for a bus pass, that sort of thing. You can't have it both ways.

Will some late substitions really changes things for the Labourers? Any timely response the Government makes to anything is going to be called knee-jerk by someone. It's also easy to snipe at whoever's in charge, without making any effort to do better.

(Discussed something similar in the pub last night about critics of new Dr Who. Just you try making something nearly as good. That's not to say you shouldn't find fault, but it's not all you should be looking for, and something isn't wrong just cos you'd have done it differently.)

Which is a rather liberal (small l), hand-wringing way of saying that I'm not sure what good will come of any of this. The various ministerial scandals recently seem more about point-scoring than making things right. Yeah, the abominably smug cabinet got a bloody nose yesterday, and so have to have a re-think. And yet East London has doubled its number of BNP local councillors, and criminals from abroard will now be shipped home automatically, even if that's effectively a death sentence.

It salacious politics: making for a good story, but with little to be proud of.

I eagerly look forward to Millennium's analysis of this week's politics, having enjoyed his crossness at Prescott's snobbery. Think it would also do the Dr good to have someone to rail about governance to, someone who knows more about the subject than just what ex-Queen Amidala says. I wonder if Millennium's daddies like curry?

Schoolboy errors

Knowing that it was the first of a trilogy (about the hunt for Jean-Luc Picard), I read Tinker, Tailor looking for people we'd see again. What with the name of the next book in the series, I'd rather assumed that the schoolboy in question would be the, er, schoolboy. The one whose parents are divorcing, and who becomes a watcher for Jim Prideaux.

Somewhat to my surprise, it's some old boy hack at the heat of book 2. Jerry Westerby is one of the well-oiled fellows Smiley has tea with when trying to rat out his mole. (If that's an expression.) He talks to Smiley in Red Indian (lots of "How!" and "Big um Chief!" stuff), and has a drinking habit that's the pride of Fleet Street.

The wheeze of The Honourable Schoolboy is that George Smiley - having ratted said mole in the top secret service shambles called the Circus - now has to get the Circus back on its feet. It's not helped that the international spying community think the Circus a bit rubbish at the moment. But that's because it's what Smiley's been telling them...

A clue leads them to suspect that a Hong Kong millionairre, Drake Ko OBE, is up to naughties, so they send the pissed old hack Westerby out to interview him and scratch around for more clues. Trouble is, Drake Ko has a pretty young girlfriend, and Westerby is not immune...

The exotic Hong Kong (and wider Far Eastern) setting explains why this middle book didn't get adapted by the BBC. It's a very broad canvas - a movie, rather than six episodes of people having meals in service stations and bedsits. "Drake Ko" is a comedy name right out of James Bond (It sounds like "Draco"... do you see?) And there's heavy doses of the sex, cynicism and sadism you expect in spy stories.

It's also hard to like any of the brutal, cold fish working in the Circus, nor the oilly civil servants politicking around them, nor the rowdy ex-pats and their parties.

Yet the book is hugely absorbing as le Carre (and his agents) unpick the details of Drake Ko's life, and of the history of the region. Imperialism - British, American, Russian and Chinese - is as much a villain as D. Ko. At one point, Westerby's on a US military base just as the war in Vietnam is declared over.

"The windows overlooking the airfield were smoked and double glazed. On the runway, aircraft landed and took off without making a sound. This is how they tried to win, Jerry thought: from inside soundproof rooms, through smoked glass, using machines at arm's length. This is how they lost."

John le Carre, The Honourable Schoolboy, p. 437.

We're never in any doubt that Smiley detests what the job requires of him, and the terrible cost on all those involved, yet on he presses anyway.

Westerby, for all he's a bit of a pickle, cares enough about the people whose lives are being mucked about to do something about it. As a result, he has far more old-school nobility than anyone he's working for, and for all he's made a hash of his life, for all he's barrelling towards hashing it once and for all, he's a sympathetic and engaging character, and one we're rooting for all the way.

This old body of mine is wearing a bit thin

63. INT. SCHOOL ENTRANCE – DAY
MICKEY shakes off the broken glass and climbs out of the car. SPECCY KID laughs as MICKEY trips over K9, and falls flat on his face.

MICKEY: How did you get out the car, then?

K9: I was not wearing a seat-belt, Master. I fell out of the back.

MICKEY: Right. There’s a lesson there, you ram-raiding youngsters.

K9: Please replace my side panel. My parts are showing.

CUT TO:

So Dr Who grows up. All right, I cried. Twice. And couldn’t get the stuff about age and death and having to let go out of my head all night.

It’s funny, lots of people have said the bat-people plot was secondary to the stuff about companions, but I think they worked deftly hand-in-hand. The monsters offer Dr Who all he longs for, the chance of saving his friends. That’s why they’re scary.

More importantly, while the you-can’t-hold-back-death stuff is bothering to us wearing-out grown ups who remember Sarah from the first time round (or, at least, from the Five Drs Who and some novels), there’s plenty to freak out the children.

The stuff that used to scare me about Dr Who was not the stuff on screen but what my head then did with it. That’s how nightmares work – they’re a sign of your imagination engaging with the consequences.

Mawdryn Undead terrified (don’t laugh) because Dr Who had regenerated alone and by accident, and was sick and covered in blood in the TARDIS. My hero had been smacked down by something vicious and random, and no one had been there to help him.

In Vengeance on Varos, the Dr rescues Peri from being turned into a squawky bird, and though the (dodgy) make-up wears off, she’s still squawky bird in her head. He hadn’t saved her, and he didn’t even noticed she was still a monster.

(Years later, I got to tell Nabil Shaban he’d given me terrible nightmares. He considered this, and then just said, “Good.”)

School Reunion had archetypal stuff with benevolent teachers being evil and the monsters amid the familiar. (Very familiar if you know Rusty’s a big fan of Buffy: blowing up the school, a Scooby gang, vampires, the loneliness of immortality, and nasty Ripper…)

More than that, though, there’s the kid left out from what everyone else is doing, locked outside the classroom and locked inside the school. He’s the one who doesn’t understand the lessons everyone else finds so easy, and the one who glimpses a monster that no one else will believe.

Stuff to lodge into your head then, whether it’s the speccy kid, Rose or Sarah you identify with. Which is a bit bloody clever, I thought.

But isn’t Speccy Kid going to be in big trouble for blowing up his own school? A speccy kid with an ASBO and a hoodie and…

More schoolboy errors tomorrow.

Easy

A long time ago, when I was feeling broken, I'd go and see a couple of chums in Bath who would make it all seem okay. There would be food, a lot of drink, and even more silly stories, and I'd head home again about three feet taller, knowing that whatever-it-was didn't really matter anyway.

I got to be Best Man to these chums, and also to kill one of them in a story. Bwa ha ha.

Bath has now been replaced by a late-Victorian farmhouse in the Marche (back of upper thigh on the Italian "leg"). I was there only last year being a farmhand, but this weekend we went for a surprise birthday.

I have met several very nice few people (including one who is, by a weird coincidence, a mate of a mate), and discussed all kinds of everything under the sun: the slow food movement; the winter procedure for lemon trees; recycled fuels in racing cars...

I also have some pretty good bruises from (not entirely soberly) helping push a Volkswagen Beetle whose battery had fallen asleep. And my shoes are muddy. BUt the Dr and I are both feeling a lot better about everything.

A ton of work sits quietly on my shoulders, and little of it got done this weekend. Also some exciting announcements very soon. And I still haven't seen K9 yet...

Bisy Backson

Off for the weekend - which means missing K9 & company tomorrow. Thanks to Nimbos, I also now have the do-do-do-dee-do theme tune in my head.

Received my copy of Big Finish Magazine #7 today, which has two bits of me on it (talking about the Great Plan for Benny, and also about the Settling). It may seem odd considering how much I write here (and rant in person), but I really don't like the sound of my own voice. And I also wish I could go back and edit the content of what's said.

Writing is much better. You can play with the words till you're happy with them. And then get someone with talent to read them out.

Oblong post

I think people should use the word "oblong" more often.

A clod … washed away by the sea

One of the Dr’s acolytes is heading back to America next week, having learnt valuable lessons as a serf. To complete her education, the Dr had her round for tea and exceedingly good cakes, and later I joined them for curry.

Currying with birds is good because you get to finish off all their food – and also, if you’re lucky, their beer. Mmm.

I asked what top facts about England the acolyte would be taking home with her, and then had to explain the whole difference between “Britain” and “England”. Someone I spoke to this morning who works for the British government admitted he wasn’t entirely sure of the difference himself.

(From the other end of London, I can hear Nimbos squawking in horror.)

“Britain” is a bit of a pickle of a term, because it can be used to mean slightly different things. It is often used to mean the same as the United Kingdom – the collective name for the gang of England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the various isles and islands (not just those immediately nearby, but ones as far off as Gibraltar and the Falklands).

“Britain” is also sometimes used to mean the single island comprising England, Scotland and Wales – and so not include Northern Ireland or the Isle of Man. Little islands that are very close, like the Isle of Wight, get included in this Britain.

So it can mean the whole, or part of the whole. And since it’s about nationality, people can get a bit hot and bothered about how it’s used (see the comments at the end of this piece about Britain’s flag, with people all steamed up about what the thing’s called).

Some people prefer just to avoid all the hassle and not the name “Britain” at all. They use “Great Britain” to mean the island itself, and “British” to mean “of the United Kingdom”.

England is just one bit of Britain/Great Britain/the UK. The largest, mind, and the richest. And, history tends to show, the most vicious in the fighting.

The general trend to thinking of ourselves as being English rather than British is a reasonably recent thing (not as recent as the Dr would like, though. She thinks 1996 is “a couple of years ago”). It’s probably connected to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland getting their own parliaments in the last decade (even if the latter is on hold). But people (well, pubs) seemed more keen to celebrate St George’s Day on Sunday than I’ve ever seen before.

Here are some top facts for any aliens reading this:

• St George wasn’t English – and probably never even came to England. He was a soldier in the Roman army, and so (what with the killing) a favourite of the Crusaders. By the 14th century he was seen as an icon of chivalry – not shagging other people’s wives, and not killing anyone from church. That’s the sort of courtesy we English love, which is why we took him as our patron.
• The “Houses of Parliament” are not the name of the building, but of the two groups of people nattering inside – the Lords and the Commons. “House” means a family of people, like a “suit” in playing cards. The building is really called the Palace of Westminster.
• Big Ben is the name of the bell inside the Palace of Westminster’s clock tower, not the tower itself. (It’s also sometimes called St Stephen’s Tower, and that’s not right either. So there.)
• The bridge with the towers on it (next to the Tower of London) is called Tower Bridge. London Bridge is the boring-looking one next along westwards. (Acolyte knew this one, admittedly.)
• We don’t call them “Bobbies”; they’re “Coppers”

When we finally ambled home, I made the Dr watch the Venetian bit of Moonraker. Venice is also an island, and used to be its own empire with territories all over the place. Some people say that’s why it’s so popular with the British, but I think that’s a bit of a stretch. It's just a bit goth and pretty.

Another silly James Bond thing: while having a BIG FIGHT with a villain, Bond remembers he’s got a delicate glass vial of DEADLY POISONOUS WATER in his top pocket. Mid scuff, he checks it hasn’t broken. By quite a miracle considering how much he’s been knocked about and how much other glass has been broken, it hasn’t. Phew.

So what does he do next? Puts it back in his top pocket and carries on fighting. You numbskull, 007!

Oh, and Bond’s English despite his parents being Scottish and Swiss. And his being played in the films by chaps from Scotland, Australia, Ireland and Wales. And Stockwell.

Is it secret, is it safe?

"And his fancy that he was being followed? What of that? What of the shadow he never saw, only felt, till his back seemed to tingle with the intensity of his watcher's gaze; he saw nothing, heard nothing, only felt. He was too old not to heed the warning. The creak of a stair that had not creaked before; the rustle of a shutter when no wind was blowing; the car with a different number plate but the same scratch on the offside wing: the face on the underground that you know you have seen somewhere before: for years at a time these were signs he had lived by; any one of them was reason enough to move, change towns, identities. For in that profession there is no such thing as a coincidence."

John le Carre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, p. 323.

I chose that bit not just for the alarming use of colons and semi-colons, but because of an alarming pair of incidents yesterday.

At a little after 9.20 yesterday morning, I poddled to the train station at the end of our road, for the purposes of getting to work. The chap in front of me at the coffee counter was gazing at the Dr Who headlines in the tabloids. It was my learned colleague M., who lives a couple of streets away.

We had a happy chat about Droo's conquest of all media, and either he was rivetted by what I had to say, or too squodged in by other passengers, because he forgot to get off at his stop. I bid him a hearty farewell as he went to look up a King Zog (I think that was his name), and stomped off through the park to my labours.

The station at the end of the road can be a bit infrequently trained in the evening, so I come back by one of two others, both involving a 15 minute walk. I'd got to the bit in Tinker, Tailor where Jim Prideaux is sure there's a busload of women after him, so was reading it as I strolled back home. This is not too easy to do without treading in what dogs have left or walking into trees, but Priddo was too exciting to leave. He has to be being tailed, you see, because the coincidence is too silly.

And then, walking towards me is M. Looking shifty. Just happened to finish with Zog and be coming back home aroundabout the same time as me... despite the different station involved, and no word on what time I'd get off work...

I am of course now checking out the window before going to the toilet. Just as a precaution.

M. did ask whether the book was any good, remembering the TV version as all a bit slow. It very much is - oddly for a book that is largely about a boring old duffer having drinks with old workmates he never really liked in the first place. I need hardly explain that George Smiley is looking for a mole among four of his top-tier colleagues in the secret service. And it's not easy because he's been booted out with a bunch of other losers, and it may all just be in his head because his wife's left him.

It is odd, though, reading it having seen the TV version because I know exactly who the baddie is. And so, it seems, does George Smiley right from the get-go. There's so much more about the villain than the other three possibles that it hardly seems a surprise.

I'll not reveal it anyway, just in case. And anyway, I'm sure it's a sign of a well-crafted mystery that it all seems inevitable once you know.

Another thing that's odd is how much everyone relies on their memories of tiny, incongruent details, and the ability to match these odd bits up with each other. Smiley's investigation means hours going through mountains of file, checking the tick-boxes against who did what when. It's a question of critiquing minutiae, of people paid for the ability to squirrel-away facts; a strange, alien existence from the time before computers.

Smiley's skill is not just his memory but his awful understanding of people. The book's full of brilliantly observed characters, all of them real and believable. More than that, they're memorable - their names and personalities sticking so firmly in the mind that when they're referred to in other le Carre books, they're instantly with us again.

Connie (played by Beryl Reid on the telly, and with much more finesse than when telling off Cybermen) is in just one scene, wintering with her cats and frustrations. I'd remembered her as a major character - and despite how little we see of her, she is.

It's been said elsewhere that Smiley's the nice guy in a shitty industry, knowing full well the misery involved in his work. It's said - even in the book itself - how ironic it is that he can't control his own wife Ann. She's unseen in the TV version and barely glimpsed here, but her presence - or the lack of it - is felt throughout.

But I think it's because Smiley really does understand what people are, is worn down to stooping by the weight of it, that he knows better than to attempt to stop her.

Now on to the next book in the sequence, The Honourable Schoolboy. Will report back soon. If I'm not compromised.

Grow up, 007

While looking for something else entirely, I discovered that there's going to be a snazzy new run of James Bond DVDs. And Sir Roj has done commentaries for all of his ones. Coo.

My top 10 favourite silly things James Bond does in the movies:

1. Woos a lady by cooking a quiche
2. Slags off the Beatles
3. Dresses up as a crocodile
4. Does a huge Tarzan yell, while trying to escape men with guns hunting him
5. Dresses up as a fish
6. Does a Barbara Woodhouse impression
7. Dresses up as a clown
8. Knows the "James Bond theme" when he hears it
9. Dresses up as a duck
10. Is best mates with Osama Bin Laden

This is obviously not including all the silly stuff in the one with Woody Allen or the one with Mr Bean (where Bond plays bagpipes in Heaven, and fails to notice he's already done his mission years before). And five of the above are from the same film.

More spies tomorrow, if you're lucky.

OMITTED

89 EXT. TORCHWOOD HOUSE - NIGHT
NINJA MONKS watch in awe as the wolf-ghost rises through the roof of the building, one last howl as it evaporates into the night sky.

Then, darkness. Quiet. It's over.

The NINJA MONKS exchange glances, shrugs. Some kick their feet as they sod off home.

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