Spectreville

I must have read Diamonds Are Forever when I was about 11 or 12. Reading it again, the only bit I remembered was James Bond meeting up with Felix Leiter, who pretends to hold him up and who is missing a hand and a foot after their last adventure. Even having finished it only yesterday, I’m struggling to remember the plot.

It starts in French Guinea with a scorpion and an arch-racist dentist who hates anything black. Including scorpions and ants. He hands some diamonds to a bloke in a helicopter. And thinks some not very reconstructed things.

Then Bond is given a crash course in diamonds and learns how to put a jeweller’s glass into his eye socket.

“’Don’t push it in. Screw it in,’ said M impatiently.”

Ian Fleming, Diamonds Are Forever, p. 12.

Yes, even Bond laughs at that.

He’s sent to Valance, the policeman from Moonraker, who gives Bond some make-up to hide his scar and warp his cheekbones. Then they go to Hatton Garden and annoy a dodgy bloke flogging diamonds.

Bond’s mission is to locate and extinguish the diamond-smuggling line, and of course it just so happens that he’s spotted the villain straight off. To do this, he pretends to be a posh burglar called Peter Franks, who’s already been hired by a sassy broad called Tiffany Case.

Bond flies to America (the plane stops off in Ireland on the way) with diamonds hidden in his golf balls. He’s dismissive of the American mobsters he’s out to bamboozle, and they turn out to be tough customers – a ginger hunchbuck and a guy who lives a cowboy fantasy in his own purpose-built town just a little out of Vegas.

The blurb on the back of the book quotes fellow shocker-writer Raymond Chandler in the Sunday Times:

“The remarkable thing about this book is that it is written by an Englishman. The scene is almost entirely American, and it rings true to an American. I am unaware of any other writer who has accomplished this.”

But I kept feeling Fleming was pushing the clichés. Perhaps it’s because we’re more familiar with Las Vegas and the mobsters after a string of films about them. As Bond is told the story of Buggsy (sic) Siegel I was thinking of Warren Beatty. And Spectreville – the villain’s Victoriana train and playset – reminded me of the villain in Once Upon A Time In The West. It also foreshadows the villainous gang behind Thunderball.

Again there’s the pornographic level of detail: the simply dressed women with little make-up and jewellery, Bond’s woollen clothes, his drinks (bourbon and spring water; his famous Martini with a twist of lemon) and omelettes. There’s psychological realism (or verisimilitude) in describing how casinos are built to drive people to the games, and the dead-eyed women filling the fruit machines with change.

Tiffany Case is a funny, lively broad, and Fleming gives her an awful past to make her that much more interesting. But I felt it was “interesting” like early 80s Doctor Who companions – they become awkward and difficult because of the burden of backstory. In this instance, Tiffany got brutally raped in her teens and hasn’t slept with a man since. How does Bond flatten her prickles and cure her of her horror? He, er, looks at her in a certain way. And buys her a few drinks.

That’s the most frustrating thing: Fleming suggests real difficulties and complexities and then doesn’t deliver on them. Case just switches side at the moment most plot-convenient. Likewise, Fleming’s attempts to address the race issue are quite startlingly clumsy. One paragraph might as well open with, “I’m not a racist, but…”

“Bond had a natural affection for coloured people, but he reflected how lucky England was compared with America where you had to live with the colour problem from your schooldays up.”

Ibid., p. 91.

There then follows an ill-considered joke from Leiter about the response to insensitive language – along the lines of “It’s political correctness gone mad!”

And then of course there’s the two homosexual villains, Mr Wint and Mr Kidd. There’s admittedly a delicious bit of detail in Mr Kidd being a nervous traveller – he carries a suitcase with the label “My blood group is F”. But these two killers don't feel particularly gay: they wear the label like an eyepatch, just something to make them less bland as henchmen.

A friend who has recently started reading Bond has been surprised by the latent, repressed… well, everything about the man. So I was amused by Bond’s qualifications for the perfect wife: “Somebody who can make Sauce Béarnaise as well as love.” He’s joking of course:

“‘And you’d marry this person if you found her?’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Bond. ’Matter of fact, I’m almost married already. To a man. Name begins with M. I’d have to divorce him before I tried marrying a woman. And I’m not sure I’d want that. She’d get me handing round canapés in an L-shaped drawing room. And there’d be all those ghastly “Yes, you did – no I didn’t” rows that seem to go with marriage. It wouldn’t last. I’d get claustrophobia and run out on her. Get myself sent to Japan or somewhere.’”

Ibid., pp. 163-4.

So no issues there, then. Case wins him over by, er, making a Sauce Béarnaise Bond finds “wonderful”. And she demands of him,

“’Everything you’ve ever done to a girl. Now. Quickly.’”

Ibid. p. 173.

Yes, that’s the mark of a Secret Agent. He can be in and out in perfect, swift silence – without you even knowing he was there.

No sooner has Bond got his leg over with un-legoverable Ms Case than Wint and Kidd turn up to bump them off. I’d mis-remembered Bond spotting them as crooks because one of them can’t whistle (yes, Bond thinks a man who can’t whistle is a homosexual, but he thinks it about Scaramanga) or because they’re wearing perfume (that’s what happens in the film). There’s a moment when Bond almost spots them based on a carefully dropped (clang!) signpost. But no. Instead, M sends him a telegram about the two would-be assassins just in the nick of time.

Bond stages a dashing rescue and leaves Wint and Kidd looking like they killed each other. But for all the slyness of this, it all feels convenient rather than clever. There’s no explanation of how Bond then traces the smuggling line back to French Guinea, where the last loose threads are played out.

No mention of what’s happened to Tiffany, last seen installed in Bond’s London flat. No mention of whether he’ll marry her. In all, it’s a disappointing book, with too few action sequences which anyway feel a bit abrupt and rushed.

Overall, I got the feeling Fleming was getting bored, and just wanted done with the thing. But that’s more true of the next one…

James Bond will return in From Russia With Love.

Paperback writer

An exciting surprise delivery this morning: a box-set of "Ten bestselling novels based on the TV series" - including my own badger-faced nonsense. Didn't even know they were doing these.

I have, of course, already rearranged the books into chronological order. Which makes mine the last in the set.

Poor Jim Swallow misses out on this paperback version, but I assume they can add him to a box-set of the nine books out this year.

ETA: The Book People are selling the box-set for £9.99. That's a quantum less than £1 per book. You'd be bogglingly foolish-like not to.

Zero zero colon zero zero

I’ve never been especially squeamish. A trip to an abattoir only made me hungry and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre leaves me cold. In fact, a lot of what’s labelled “horror” just comes across as nasty, brutal and short on much intelligence.

So I recently set myself the challenge of writing something spooky, and in the process tried to understand how spookiness is done. (Whether what I wrote is successful you can judge for yourselves later in the year...)

It’s not the splatter and spray of gore that freaks the audience so much as the spooky idea. The scariest bit in Halloween is not the teenagers being torn limb from limb but the moment Jamie Lee Curtis runs to her neighbours’ and they coolly ignore her plea for help. It’s the easy way they condemn her, the casual, banal meanness...

It’s not horror films and telly that appeal so much as disquieting ones. So I love the old BBC adaptations of MR James stories – and have recently reread a whole bundle of the originals. (It’s weird how varied his style can be. The Rose Garden is a comedy of aspirational manners, like a David Nobbs sitcom with an added angry ghost.) I love the shiversome unsettlingness of the silent, child ghosts in Lost Hearts and the simplicity of the adaptation of Dickens’ The Signalman, where our only cue is the increasing botheredness of Denholm Elliot.

These things often depend on us waiting for weirdness to happen: Don’t Look Now and The Wicker Man are both about the anticipation of something awful (and then the delivery is a surprise). They often rely on performance – good quality actors carrying the lack of budget: Mawdryn Undead terrified me as a kid, all down to how David Collings plays it. And they often hinge on beautifully simple idea: the Buffy episode Hush achieves something like that bit in Halloween when a freshman can’t call for help.

So last night’s Doctor Who was, I thought, spectacular. A simple idea expertly spooled out, where the reaction of ordinary humans is just as spooky as the alien monster. Well done Mr T Davies OBE. I hope Steve Moffat employs you in future.

I even dared to suggest to the Dr that Midnight was Doctor Who as scripted by Dennis Potter.

“Minus,” she said, “an unhealthy obsession with breasts.”

No, but you can’t have everything.

The Disquiet Dead

The Dr has something of the night about her. In fact, we met at a goth dinner party where I was in a black velvet suit and she was vamped out with mad hair and make-up in what I suppose is now an Amy Winehouse stylee. The Dr could – and did – hide tiaras and horns in her high Barnet back then. These days she’s really quite staid.

(Yes, it occurs to me that this is my fault like some kind of Petruchio.)

Recently, two things have been flicking her gothic switches and making us giggle with glee. First, we’ve read Paul Magrs’ Never the Bride – at least I’ve been doing the reading and even some of the voices.

Poor old Brenda runs a guesthouse in Whitby while being on the run from her past. She and her best mate and next-door neighbour Effie like nothing more than tea and a gossip, and there’s plenty of scandal to go around. A magic boutique that makes waitresses younger, or a séance live on TV… What terrible something are the nice Green family escaping? And how long can Brenda resist revealing her own awful secret?

It’s a lively, funny and often moving story full of rich description. Magrs nicely ploughs his way through all kinds of classic goth sources which it would be a shame to spoil here. Effectively, it’s five separate adventures for our aged but plucky duo – and it looks like the sequel Something Borrowed (which we’ve just bought) continues in that style.

This giddy mix of frothy fun and hijinks is really tricky to pull off (as I’ve been discovering recently in my own Magrs-inspired writing that’s still yet to be announced). But Brenda’s a delight, as is the spotting of clever references and the witty, twisty plot. My only complaint is that it needs more “she said” tagging if you want to read it aloud. So I added my own.

Annoyingly, we missed the radio version. But I’d love to see this on telly and spent more time than is probably sensible casting it in my head. Julie Christie as Brenda is my best so far.

We’ve also been utterly in thrall to Young Dracula, a CBBC series that won awards Sarah Jane was up to. The wheeze is that Dracula’s kids go to the same state school as the son of Van Helsing, but the thing’s an outrageous steal of Buffy (the Dracula episode and season seven especially).

Importantly, neither Young Dracula nor Magrs’ book are clever because of the references they make to other films and telly. (It’s an old joke but “semiotic thickness” is when you’re not as clever as your references.) Rather, they both freely thieve high-concept elements and warp them into something new.

Keith-Lee Castle never knowingly underacts as the Count, and has got himself in the litany of camp goth gentlemen the Dr recites when she’s fighting her own vampires. The rest of the large cast are also fantastic, though its Simon Ludders as the is-that-joke-really-suitable-for-kids Renfield I like best.

Like Magrs, it mixes strong plotting with strong characters and bad jokes and slapstick. And for knockabout silly children’s TV it is far more clever and funny and surprising than it has any reason to be. It’s one of the best British TV shows in ages. (And how fantastic that in just two seasons they’ve clocked up a whopping 27 episodes!)

It is an accursed outrage that Young Dracula’s not already being commissioned for a third series or out on DVD. I feel like raising an army of undead celebrities to bring these things about.

“The Trojan War did not take place”

So says Ken Dowden on page 65 of his book “The Uses of Greek Mythology”, which I finished today. His point is that accounts of the battle of Troy and etc. are all from many hundreds of years later, and that those accounts are not “history” as we would understand it – assessments based on evidence.

The end of the Bronze Age (the Mycenaean period in Greece) is prehistoric – literally before history. That basically means we don’t have any written evidence; if they wrote anything done at the time we have lost it.

The equivalent I suppose is to think of historians in the space year 4500 AD. There’s been a terrible war in the meantime (probably featuring Daleks) and they only have scrappy evidence for the Norman invasion of 1066. In fact, all they’ve got are bootleg videos of Excalibur and The King’s Demons. How much can those tell them about real history?

“There is of course no Mycenaean history. There is Mycenaean archaeology and there is Greek Mythology. Archaeology has its limits as a historical tool: I do not think we can use it to distinguish between various Greek tribes; and we certainly cannot discover much about named important individuals of the past. There is no narrative … Myth is treacherous because its accounts of peoples and individuals are usually designed to construct identities and make statements … I think it is not going too far to say that there is not a single individual in mythology in whose actual existence we can believe.”

Ken Dowden, The Uses of Greek Mythology, p.62.

Even the classic writers of Greece and Roman acknowledged the problems of authenticity in myth, and justified it in terms of allegory and real-history-that’s-been-eroded, as more modern classicists have also done. Dowden is a little scathing of psychoanalytical readings, and prefers to see in stories of girls transforming into bears and young men transforming into wolves some kind of ritual significance.

This, I’m afraid, rings alarms bells. My taller brother once dabbled in things archaeological and says that when archaeologists speak of something having a religious or ritual purpose, what they mean is “no idea, Guv’.” Dowden, admittedly, makes the point repeatedly that we are at best guessing our way.

Myths are not facts; each fragment of story we possess now is just the end of a centuries-long game of Chinese Whispers. He quotes the chronological table given on the Marmor Parium (“Marble of Paros”), in which one bloke recorded history from Cecrops or Kekrops, first king of Athens in 1581 BC, to his own time of 264 BC. There are 25 entries for the years up to 1208 BC, and then just seven between then and 683 BC.

“There are two reasons for this phenomenon, both of which are revealing: first, real historical information just peters out in the Dark Age and the quantity of what precedes is a measure of the success with which myth masquerades as history of the prehistoric period. But second, this period of beginnings, firsts and legend has a magic aura about it, luring the Greeks into their mythology. That is what it is for.”

Ibid., p. 52.

Myth, then is often about origin stories: how the Gods were born (theogony), who has best claim to a particular bit of land because their heroic ancestor was born out of the earth there (autochthony) or experienced some adventure or event nearby (basically, who stuff is named after), where laws and religious observances come from, or even why particular trees and rivers furnish the landscape. Myths are then explanations of how we are here. And they’re also stories. Like our own present ideologies, the reasons given impose moral codes of conduct: not just how we are here but why, for what purpose.

I’ve argued before that stories don’t have to be true to mean something. Dowden shows that the same stories can be retold - have always been retold – to suit the particular needs of the teller. And, from this distance, we can barely glimpse what those needs might have been.

Origin stories, he says, tend to mark the beginning of order. A great flood washes away the chaotic past, leaving space for the new social system. It’s no coincidence then that, according to the Marmor Parium, the first king of Athens more or less coincides with Deucalion’s flood and the competition between Poseidon and Athene for the heart of the city. In an age before writing, with knowledge passed on by oral tradition, these origin stories aren’t just exciting adventures featuring gods and monsters. They answer the question eternally asked by any inquiring child: why do we do things like this. Because there must have been a point back in history when we didn’t.

But myths are also more than that. The fact that they survive after all three-and-a-half thousand years, and so infuse our own culture, speaks of an extra appeal.

(Incidentally, it’s odd realising how much of Doctor Who nicks from Greek mythology. That’s not just Troy and Byzantium or the two Tom Baker versions (this one and this one)of the story of Theseus. I assume when David Tennant talks of the Fall of Arcadia it’s a nod to the Doric invasion of Earth. And then there’s references to Demeter, Kronos, Lamia, Megara… Yes, so the writers have been classically educated. But diegetically, I assume so have the TARDIS’s telepathic circuits.)

“We have got to recognise that there is a deep yearning in us to make contact with the world of myth , as we can see from the Turin Shroud , the countless fragments of the True Cross and the multiple heads of St Peter.”

Ibid., p. 65.

Hence also Schliemann’s determination to uncover (and, in the process, rather demolish) the site of Troy. (Incidentally, I didn’t know that the “correct name” of the city we call Troy is really Ilion – hence the book about the siege there being the Iliad. Our modern name for the city follows the convention of naming a place after one its local heroes.)

We want to believe in stories when they make sense of the world. Perhaps we like myths because they reassure us that there’s a reason behind all the random-seeming viciousness tumbling out of the sky. If heroic, smart chaps like Oedipus or Odysseus are fated to get totally dumped on, at the whim of all-powerful gods and monsters, then we don’t really have cause to complain about our own, relatively petty concerns.

And stories are orchestrated contrivances that seek to manipulate the audience. So it’s no wonder they reassure us the world is ordered on moral lines; that there are rules we might not see, that we might suffer under, but rules nonetheless.

More than that, a good story makes us care for its characters and forget they’re constructed from smoke, there specifically to fulfil some kind of story function. Our heroes capture our imaginations, ignite our tawdry fantasies. We write to characters in soaps as if they are real or write our own knock-off Doctor Who adventures.

Myths are things that we know are not true and which tell of awful calamity and suffering. And yet the reason they still flourish so abundantly is because we want them to be true.

One of those what I'm up to posts without saying what I'm up to

It’s been a busy couple of weeks writing, re-writing and researching, but all the things that needed signing off now have been and some of them are even recorded. Or about to be recorded. Or being scheduled today.

How strange that only the most recently written is the one to have been announced. And in the last five months I’ve written as many as –

No, I’ll hold off saying that one till they’ve been announced.

What has been announced is three new Doctor Who books that’ll be out in December. Gary Russell’s one has got Bernard Cribbens on the cover which is something of a delight – and has already prompted much rabid hope that he’ll do the audio version. Dan Abnett told me a bit about his anthology one when we meet a few weeks back to –

No, that’s embargoed information as well.

But anyway, his writers include Rob Shearman and the bloke responsible for Dimensions in Time. Ha ha! I got married in one of the locations for that, too the Dr’s delight. (R. trumps that by having been at the filming.)

Lance Parkin is already blogging about his one, The Eyeless. Plenty of good stuff to be said about being a proper writer, and only a bit more than six months to go. Personally, I'm holding out for his first obligatory cat post.

Also, how strange to be plotting something new to do with Bernice Summerfield, a hangover of my producing her adventures until the end of last year. (No, it’s not the Inside Story, which is still held up in technical, legal wossnames. I don’t actually have any influence over that, besides infrequently jibbering at my former bosses who are the ones doing all the work. Wearily they assure me that it’s all being seen to.)

I’ve also made a start on my two huge summer projects, have written three short films for Codename Moose (he already wants one of them rewritten without the bits at the train station) and promised myself I’d finish a new spec TV script by the end of the month.

The wheeze behind it is based on an original Doctor Who novel submission knocked back in 2003. (My response to the “no but try again” letter was what ended up as The Time Travellers.) And having written all my efforts in Word so far, I’m finally going to need to invest in Final Draft.

Like some kind of proper writer.

Why read?

"Living your life is a long and doggy business, says Mrs Lupey. And stories and books help. Some help you with the living itself. Some help you just take a break. The best do both at the same time."

Anne Fine, Goggle-Eyes, p. 139.

Foom!

The sister is back from Oz for six months and we had a summons back to the ancestral home of the Guerrier clan yesterday. It should only take an hour and half to get down there, but there's always something, like trains being diverted via Switzerland or the end of the world.

So we were a bit cautious. At about eight in the morning the Dr, who is better at getting up at the morning, fell into the shower and I went to answer the insistent buzzing of the doorbell.

"Are your lights working?" asked the man from next door. And they weren't.

"Eek!" added the Dr from the shower, where the water was all icy cold. The boiler and lights rely on power not being cut.

So we boiled pans of water and washed the old-skool way, then headed out to see if there might be such things as trains. People texting to tell me I had no power quickly used all my phone's battery, but not before I snapped the darkening of the sky.

Later, we'd discover that Sydenham Park substation had caught fire, thieving the lights and hot water from quite a lot of South East London.

In the meantime, we traded information with strangers - yes, in London! - and as we passed his house our friend M. called down to us for what titbits we had gleaned. There were lots of people out, making the best of it and the nice weather, and lots of burglar alarms and fire engines.

"How like Survivors," I thought.

There were no trains - at least none that were stopping - so we tramped on to a bus and enjoyed the acrid stink of the previous night's vomit, all dried and steaming in the morning heat. Finally found Waterloo and narrowly missed a train to the parents as I queued for tickets. Ng.

A nice few hours with lots of family I'd not seen in ages (even L. who lives just up the road), and then we tramped back again on a train that said it stopped only at London but which stopped every moment it could. And still no trains where we live, so we had to get one sort-of near. Spent the whole journey back looking for signs of electric life: working traffic lights, the glow of people's doorbells, the signs above shops...

And, after more than seven hours travelling, we got home to find our power back on. A block away they were still going without, as we found when we thought we'd enjoy the last of the sunlight with a sly pint of beer. Schleped back across the postcode to another pub, and discovered R., who was also without power. Had a beer in the candlelit Dolphin, where the power came on just in time for last orders. It looks like everyone had their power back by the end of the day - well done everyone involved.

R. said he'd seen a two-car family making the best of it: in one car, a child had a laptop plugged into the dashboard and was watching cartoon; in the next child's parents were, with the same method, sharing a DVD.

Not the end of the world, then, but for a moment - and despite the nice weather - it did feel like a rehearsal. A timely reminder of how much we depend on the fizzing electrons in the wall. I'm rather stuck in my hackery without a working computer - yes, there's still paper and pens and notebooks and stuff, but blimey it's so much harder. And I'm already a little behind on a project or two, and was despairing of how this week might go anyway.

And, since I'm in a jolly, apocalyptic mood, how likely does the looming energy crisis mean this is just a foreshadowing of things to come a lot more?

Dinosaur-flavour custard

“On paper, it may have looked as though Wildcat was a no-brainer – sci-fi thrills for the junior audience – but in fact it was a decidedly dicey proposition. With the comic audience aging dramatically in the Eighties, it just didn’t seem as though there was a new generation coming through to pick up the habit. As a result, juvenile publications were dropping like flies and , in truth, it flew in the face of all the evidence to tailor a new publication to what was the once traditional eight to twelve-year-old target group.”

Graham Kibble-White, “Wildcat”, The Ultimate Book of British Comics, p. 285.

Fleetway’s Wildcat ran for just 12 fortnightly issues from 1988-89 and was “the last new traditional adventure comic (to date) to be launched in this country” (Kibble-White, p. 287).

Until now.

The DFC launched two weeks ago. It’s not a tie-in with films or telly or computer games or a newspaper. It’s not trying to flog you something. It doesn’t carry advertising and – amazingly – the first issue didn’t come with some precious free gift sellotaped to the cover.

Instead, it’s a subscriber only comic, delivered to your door every Friday in a distinctive red-and-yellow striped envelope. There’s a subscription offer where you get issues free, but it’s basically £3 per shot of 36 full-colour pages. Issue two arrived yesterday and, after a lot of prologueish scene-setting in issue one, it seems already to have hit its stride.

The contents page includes a running gag about what DFC might stand for – though this Times interview with the thing’s creator reveals it’s really the David Fickling Comic. And Fickling, who publishes Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upon A Time in the North, is the reason the headline strip is by Philip Pullman.

Illustrated by John Aggs, “John Blake” is about a ghost ship seen sailing about the Pacific – seeing it augers a sudden change in fortune. In issue two the Henderson family are out sailing round the world, when they’re suddenly caught in a unexpected tropical storm…

As you’d expect from Pullman, it’s a rich and involving story that gets going really quickly. It’s also quite scary and strange, and I was a bit surprised by Mr Henderson shouting “bastards” on page 7. But I’m already caught up in the story. And, like the best stuff I used to read (and watch) when I was eight-to-twelve, it feels a little like we’re getting away with something too adult here, that it’s almost not really suitable and Mum and Dad wouldn’t approve…

The other science-fiction adventure story is Kate Brown’s “The Spider Moon”, about Bekka Kiski’s diving exam in a strange and doomed sci-fi landscape. Somehow as yet unexplained, Bekka’s diving can save the world.

I love the artwork, and the story is playful as well as strange. Fickling talks in the Times interview about the Manga influence on this one. I can see what he means, but am also aware of how many people will shout, “But Manga just means ‘comics’”.

There are two school stories. “The Boss” by John Aggs and his mum sees a whole bunch of school kids involved in foiling a crime, all taking their lead from one organised kid who shows his authority by not wearing a blazer. Neill Cameron’s “Mo-Bot High” sees Asha arriving at a new school to discover everyone has Digital Mobile Combat-suits – or giant robots – with which to settle playground scores.

Both work on the wheeze of empowering the kids and both are distinctive and fun, though both are still setting up their stories at this point.

Dave Shelton’s “Good Dog, Bad Dog” is about two detectives in what looks like a 1930s American city… where everyone is a dog. It’s smart and funny, and nicely orchestrates some great slapstick set pieces – something I’ve not seen much in comics. The two detectives have just met up, caught two crooks and it looks like issue three will be a new adventure.

The Etherington Brothers’ “Monkey Nuts” really got going with issue two, in which Sid the newly unemployed tap-dancing monkey meets Rivet the newly unemployed robot coffee machine, just in time for the flashoom entrance of The Amazing Amazing, who’s going to flatten the whole town unless everyone submits to slavery. As Sid says in the last panel so far, “Do you think dancing will help?”

The other comedy strips are all one-pagers. James Turner’s “Super Animal Adventure Squad” is about “the world’s maddest mad scientist” stealing some cakes. Sarah McIntyre’s “Vern and Lettuce” and Jim Medway’s “At the Zoo” have both so far based themselves round terrible puns. Oh, and on the back page is Simone Lia’s “Sausage and Carrots”, a four-panel delight of weirdness.

With a competition page which leads to extra web content, a puzzle page and endorsements to draw your own comics, there’s plenty to get involved with, too.

All the stories are very different, which should mean there’s something for everyone here. It's a shame they're all part ones of ongoing series; it’d be nice to have an anthology series of one-off stories so that each issue offers something complete. And some of the part ones did feel a bit too prologuey, so it's hard to judge the strips just yet.

But this is a bold and exciting comic, and very much worth supporting. I am already looking forward to Friday.

The dialogue person

To mark five years of his own blog, the noble and gallant Duke, Lord James Moran has posted a whole bundle of things he's learnt as a writer. And what a wondrous collection it is, too. I'm delighted his 1-in-10 hit rate is roughly the same as mine (if, ahem, mine's on a much smaller scale).

A moran is, of course, a Maasai warrior, after he's passed the initiation of being circumcised. Morans share their wives, go in for jumping competitions, and wear coloured sheets called shuka.

Anyway, here's a handful of other pointers:

Nobody owes you a job
Really, they don't. Even if you know them, even if you bought them drinks, even if they employed you before. Even if your idea or finished story is the most fantabulous thing in the universe. When they say "no", they mean it. Don't hang on like a stalker ex. You just walk away.

Likewise, if they say, "That sounds interesting - email me," or "Can you write that up," that's code for "Go away just now." Don't continue to harrass them about your brilliant idea; you're just making them less likely to love it. Especially if they're in a pub or anywhere else not on duty. They don't owe you this. And it's really very creepy if you're still following on their heels, explaining your brilliant idea, as they go to the toilet.

(This happened to me once. Well-meaning bloke still pitching to me while I was having a pee.)

Make it easy
James quotes the great Wil Wheaton's "Don't be a dick". And that's true. Be as not like a dick as you can be. (I see various people at least raising their eyebrows at me of all people saying this.) But also make things easy for the people you are working with, and also those people you're not. It's a small world and you never know when you'll bump into these people again, or what position they'll be in. You don't want to be the difficult genius who makes everyone's lives just impossible. Be the perfectly competent workman who can just get on with the job.

That doesn't mean just doing whatever they say. If you think something's wrong, you say it; you get to argue your case. But if whoever's in charge then makes a decision, you kind of have to abide by it. No use storming off or shouting at them. They're the ones in charge. As it will tell you in the contract you signed.

You don't want to have to surrender your genius? Well, you'll have to produce it yourself. Good luck! You want someone to stump up the cash and make your writing into a real thing? Then they get a say.

Don't get comfortable
Once you've been doing this a while, once you've found your style and "voice", make sure you're still stretching. Try different styles, try different voices. The broader portfolio of things you can do, the more likely you'll stay employed. But also (and perhaps more importantly) the more you stretch and hone your writing. As one editor told me recently, when it feels easy you are doing it wrong.

Pay the rent
There's this idea of writers in smocks in garrets, all booze and syphilis and frustration. I know people who've lived off food parcels, or been late on a deadline 'cos their word processing kit got impounded by bailiffs. Get a day job if you need to. Get one that involves writing if you can. (Again, writing adverts and labels and speeches and jokes all strecthes what you can do.)

And don't carp on at your editors, like it's all their fault. Especially when they pay you on time. You don't want to give them the impression they employ you out of pity rather than 'cos you're good.

Call for back-up
I've got an accountant, know a few lawyers and have used their sage advice quite a lot. It's much easier to chase madly late payment. One time I was several thousand pounds out of pocket at Christmas, and had to get a lawyer involved. Having big guns on your side is good because they have to start taking you seriously.

(I don't, though, have an agent. I don't need one for what I do at the moment; it's all take-it-or-leave-it fixed rates and conditions. It's haggling over that stuff which - I think without having one - that an agent is for. They have the awkward conversations so that you don't have to. They're not there to edit your stuff or tell you you're brilliant (though the good ones do that as well).

That said, one of the projects I'm working on might mean I need an agent...)

Enjoy it
You don't have to be a writer. Or rather, you can write just for yourself. So if you're going to make a go of writing for a living, just remember that it's your choice. 'Cos if it's just like any other daggy old job, you might as well get one with more regular payment and hours.

And that's it.

This blog, incidentally, was three years' old on Monday.

Work, rest and play

Scott pointed me in the direction of a new pic from NASA: sunset on Mars. Cor.

I'd assumed at first glance it was a new one from Phoenix. (You know that lander designed by Damien Hirst with a landing bleep composed by Blur? The one that pinged off the Sycorax space-asteroid a couple of Christmases past? Well, Phoenix is just like that, only it didn't break.)

Phoenix is very exciting. It sifts Martian sand not for alien life, but evidence of Ice Warriors and Ambassadors...

... of Death. I half expect Phoenix to have been secretly stashed with clever sci-fi lichen that will transform the atmosphere, like what happens in the Mars Trilogy.

And you look at the pictures from Phoenix, of black and white dust and equipment, and no you can't spot the monsters. But, to quote Rob from last week:

"While some see a disappointingly familiar, Earth-like desert, when they were secretly hoping for tangerine trees and marmalade skies - I can see an Earth-like desert, but with no life of any kind. How weirdly, wildly fantastical is that?"

Rob Stradling, 27 May 2008.

100% official

Slowly and slowly things I've been doing can be talked of.

The new issue of Doctor Who's Magazine contains word of some things of mine. The Pirate Loop came 10th out of 14 in the readers' survey for best Doctor Who book of last year - with some 6.71 average points out of 10. Ho hum.

But excitingly I can now reveal who's reading the audio version. I got rung by the director one Thursday a while back who wanted to check a few things. Once I'd pronounced "Guerrier" and "Kodicek" and he'd repeated them back to me, I could hear a familiar voice in the background.

"Is that..." I stumbled... "Is that Martha Jones?"

And - hooray! - it is.

Also, my Sara Kingdom play is now called "Home Truths".

All right, that's not the most exciting scoop you ever heard. There's plenty more excitements to come. I was at a thing on Saturday... And then on Monday week...

No. You'll have to wait.

Devil May Die

100 years and five days ago, Ian Fleming was born in London. The man who’d later create James Bond and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was two days older than Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, and three years older than Thora Hird.

To celebrate this (well, the 100 years bit), Penguin have produced a new James Bond novel, written by Sebastian Faulks. Faulks had previously pastiched Fleming’s style in Pistache, and Devil May Care makes every effort to be the book Fleming would have written had he not died prematurely at the age of 56 – just as Bond was becoming a screen icon.

It’s set in 1967, eighteen months after the events of Fleming’s final Bond (in which a brainwashed Bond tries to kill M, and then tries to make up for it by chasing a man with a golden gun). Bond is on enforced sabbatical, wandering the world and struggling to decide if he’s going to quit the Secret Service.

In Marseilles, his killer instincts spot a man wearing one glove. And then in Rome he acts completely out of character, declining nookie with an amazing, married woman. What do these chance encounters have to do with a corpse in Paris that’s had it’s tongue torn out, and with the terrifying increase in heroin addiction amongst posh kids in London and Manchester?

This is very much the Bond of the books – a man who hates gadgets because they are cheating, and who doesn’t always get the girl. Yet Fleming was himself influenced by the films, and gave Bond a Scottish mother in the wake of Sean Connery.

(I’d argue that the films cast a much more definite shadow over the subsequent, post-Fleming Bond novels. The ‘M’ in Kingsley Amis’s Colonel Sun reads just like Bernard Lee, while there’s a tricky moment in John Gardiner’s novel of Licence to Kill where he has to rationalise Felix Leiter getting fed to sharks twice.)

Faulks, though, consciously steers away from the films. As early as page 4 we’re following Rene Mathis – a loyal friend in the books, but a suspect in the most recent film. It’s a neat and immediate signpost that this Bond’s not Daniel Craig.

Throughout, there’s evidence of Faulks’ spotless research, with a great weight of references back to Bond’s earlier adventures. He remembers his card games with Le Chiffre and Sir Hugo, or his time on the Orient Express with Tanya. There’s the skin graft on his right hand, and mention of his various adventures in Jamaica. (Fleming would also reference his previous books, with footnotes explaining which books you should have read already.)

Bond aficionados will also spot specific Fleming turns of phrase: the comma of hair that hangs down over one of Bond’s eyebrows, or how we always know exactly what he’s wearing. The pornographic detail for clothes and food and pretty objects remind us Bond is an eagle-eyed watcher. Yet his constant omelettes and whiskies remind us that while he may be a snob, his tastes can be pretty bland. He likes simplicity: beautiful women who don't wear too much make-up, cooking that doesn't need fuss. For all he likes good wine, he often order food more as fuel than pleasure.

This is an old-skool secret agent, who despairs at the Beatles and Rolling Stones, and doesn’t like using gadgets. It’s the villains who have the cool new vehicles and ways of cheating at tennis. There's also something rather gentlemanly about how, while clothes and lipstick are painstakingly documented, we get no description of girls when they're naked. (When clothed it's okay to keep mentioning their breasts.)

But Bond’s muttering about silly, middle-class kids ruining their lives smoking marijuana makes him sound out of touch; from a generation and set of values that is ebbing away. Of course, Bond can identify the strain that they’re smoking with his brilliant nose. And he is himself a big drinker and smoker, as well as guzzling Benzedrine and sleeping tablets. But you feel a little as he drives perplexed through hippy London that he's being left behind.

Just as with the period setting in the most recent Indiana Jones, there’s fun to be had in making references that resonate with now. A sizeable chunk of the book has Bond agenting in Iran – or Persia, as it was under the British-positioned Shah. There are mentions of Afghanistan and Iraq and some hand-wringing about Western intervention in these countries. There’s a great gag, too, when Felix Leiter has never heard of Tehran.

But this isn’t an especially profound book with things to say about Britain’s role in the world – then or now. The villainous Gorner gleefully quotes the horrors done by the British under the imperial banner – the opium trade in China, the Mau Maus and the Irish potato famine. But these things seem more there to show he’s a maniac obsessive than to adeptly critique anything Bond himself stands for.

(The films have done better there: Sean Bean has a justifiable grudge against the Brits in Goldeneye, and there’s a brilliant moment in Casino Royale when Le Chiffre, in the midst of torturing Bond, knows the British will still offer him clemency.)

Gorner is a pantomime villain with a deformity, very much in keeping with the grotesque sadists Bond has fought before. Faulks obviously has a brilliant get-out clause that anything clunky, cliched or absurdly contrived in this is just him being authentically Fleming.

How convenient that Bond just happens to spot the villain several chapters before he’s even briefed on him. How convenient that Bond so uncharacteristically turns down the advances of Scarlett when he first meets her, so that he can spend the rest of the book anticipating getting into her pants. You wonder how differently things would have gone if he’d shagged her on that first night – without the thrill of the chase, would he have been half so bothered?

There’s an outrageous attempt to cover the mad coincidence by having people ask Bond if he believes in destiny. (The same trick is tried in John Buchan’s The Island of Sheep, where Richard Hannay also just happens to stumble into all the people who’ll be vital to the story. And, like here, you can only gape at the bare-faced cheek of trying that excuse.)

But Faulks also writes a gripping tale, full of Fleming’s abrupt and sadistic surprises. He improves on Fleming’s woeful ear for dialogue while still doling out pages of exposition.

There are some great set pieces: a tennis match where Bond insists on playing fairly against a foe who won’t; a fight on a train which ends like Vivyan in The Young Ones; an incongruous machine described early in the book that ends up doing for the villain at the end. The final twist is also neatly done, and just about manages to explain away some very odd behaviour by one person.

One small blooper: Bond says he's not been to Russia before, but that's where he got brainwashed in the period between You Only Live Twice and The Man With The Golden Gun. Okay, so maybe he doesn't remember being there, but he'd know that he had been.

What makes the book so enjoyable is how much it feels like Fleming. But that also means it doesn’t push the format too far. Fleming himself tried to keep things varied, setting Moonraker all in the UK, for example, or telling The Spy Who Loved Me in the first person. Faulks brilliantly captures the crude thrill and hackneyed inelegance of the books’ Bond, and it’s a considerable achievement to produce what feels so like perfectly generic Fleming.

It’s a seamless addition to the James Bond canon and a rollicking, punchy old shocker. But I think Faulks’ regular readers, or those who don’t know their Fleming, or only know Bond from the films, may well be scratching their heads. If Devil May Care pricks your interest, make sure to have read Casino Royale first.

The lions in the castle

Have been feverishly meeting a deadline the last couple of days. But on Thursday I was also required to do acting, at the lavish showbiz launch of Dr Debbie Challis' new book. In a strange reversal of the norm, Ms Lisa Bowerman played "Narrator", and I was the famous archaeologist.

The Lions in the Castle
Narrator: Two stone lions sit either side of the South Staircase from the entrance hall of the British Museum. Visitors largely ignore them in their haste to do the top ten sights of the museum or get to whatever blockbuster is showing.

The lions once adorned the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. An earthquake dislodged them at some point in the middle ages and they were re-used to decorate the late crusader castle of the Knights of St John in Bodrum. And then 150 years ago in 1856, they were identified by archaeologist Charles Newton who thought they’d be a lot better off in the British Museum. In excavations of the Mausoleum, Newton had found many of the hindquarters of lions and hoped to be able to unite the bodies with the heads in the British Museum. As Newton wrote:

Newton: I was anxiously awaiting for the papers empowering me to take possession of the lions which I had discovered in the Castle last year. Unavoidable delays had prevented the granting of this document.

Narrator: To hurry things up, Newton despatched his good friend the painter George Frederick Watts to Istanbul to acquire the paperwork needed. Although perhaps ‘hurry’ is the wrong word: on the way, Watts had time to cruise through the Greek islands to Athens and paint one portrait of the British ambassador and another of the commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet.

While Watts was away, word was spreading that the lions were of value. Why then, should they be shipped off to London? The Ottoman Minister of War had ordered the Commandant of the Castle of St Peter to remove the lions from the walls and send them to Istanbul.

Newton: It was not a pleasant sight to see this operation performed under our very eyes . . . Two more lions were soon dug out of the walls. The extraction of two of my eye teeth could not have given me so great a pang.

Narrator: Just to rub it in, the Commandant visited Newton at the excavation site where he contrasted the ‘little fragments’ of sculptures Newton had found on the excavation site with the big impressive lions he had extracted from the castle.1

Newton: I endured his civil impertinence for about a quarter of an hour, till at last my inward chafing found vent in a strong expression or two in English addressed to Captain Towsey. The Turks did not understand what I had said: but guessed from the expression of my countenance what was passing in my mind . . .

Narrator: Thinking he had lost them for good, a dejected Newton had photographs taken of the lions. Then they were placed on a ship ready to sail for Istanbul.

[Beat]

At four AM the next morning Watts sailed into Bodrum with the paperwork Newton had been waiting for. A sailor was sent to wake Newton, but:

Newton: I had had so many disappointments about the paperwork that I received this news with sceptical indifference, and doggedly fell asleep again.

Narrator: He was woken up again two hours later by another messenger from Captain Towsey.

Newton: I answered Towsey’s news very sulkily as I believed the lions were gone. But he told me that the ship was still in the harbour awaiting a fair wind. I jumped into the boat without a word more: a few vigorous strokes brought us to the harbour.

Narrator: Newton and Towsey went to see the Commandant, who was surprised to see them so early in the morning.

Newton: We disrupted him with that indecent haste with which mad Englishmen occasionally invade the kieff of an Oriental when any real emergency occurs. I put the firman in his hand with that air of cool satisfaction with which a whist player trumps an ace on the first round.

Narrator: The Commandant was astonished. But once he checked the details, he claimed that the statues on his boat were not the lions described in the paperwork but leopards. Newton was having no more delays.

Newton: Come, come my friend. Aslanlar or caplanlar, you know very well what are the beasts meant by the firman, and where to find them. I claim those beasts, and no other.

Narrator: The lions were handed over, though Newton reimbursed the Commandant for his expense in removing them. Although, one solitary lion from Bodrum made it to the museum in Istanbul where it is displayed on its own. The lions were duly transported to London were they sat in a shed until there was room in the museum to display them. Newton’s friend and fellow archaeologist, Austen Henry Layard objected to the treatment of these antiquities in a creaky shed that let the rain and soot in, but that is another story.

"Are you a builder. Are you from Brazil?"

A wrong number just called, insisting I spoke to her earlier today.

(This was itself a clue. The only person I've spoken to all day is the Dr, who was fretting about wine.)

I asked what number she'd meant to call, and could then explain the error. But she wasn't having any of that, and still asked the above.

In fact, she was so insistent that I thought perhaps I was.

Henry Jones Junior Junior

As Paul Cornell might say, ITEM! Dr Debbie Challis will be speaking unto the huddled masses at a free lecture for the National Portrait Gallery, at 1.15 pm on Thursday. “Not Indiana Jones: Portraits of Archaeologists” is a chance to plug her book, which has a showbiz launch bash in the evening.

To ensure this lecture is bang on the moment, we went to see the new Indiana Jones movie this afternoon. It’s had mixed responses amongst our pals but we loved it – with two niggling exceptions.

Spoilers

Curse

All

Who

Delve

Further

Than

This

Point

It’s a rip-roaring, great fun adventure with plenty of jokes and pratfalls. It’s got some nicely icky bits in graves, with skeletons and creepy crawlies. The action sequences are exemplary and the whole thing licks along. It’s not a revisionist new version of the old hero, in the style of Dark Knight Returns. This is Indy as he always was, just a couple of decades later.

Older and greyer after his heroic service in the war, the film opens with Indiana tied up in the back of a car. It’s an ignominious beginning, with the Russians invading the iconic warehouse from the final shot of Raiders, which (as when The X-Files pilot ripped that shot off) is the Area 51 of Roswell.

As well as the Ark of the Covenant, this warehouse also includes an artefact that has magic, magnetic properties and soon Indiana is fighting to stop the Commies getting their hands on an alien.

Oh yes; this one’s about an alien. Though I’d point out that each of the first three movies feature a magic deux ex machina – the angry God of the Old Testament, Shiva feeling betrayed and a goblet used by Jesus.

The Von Danniken plot is just like the overly generalising anthropology so evident in the first three movies. Here the Mayans are sun-worshippers just like the Egyptians, and at a stroke they might have shared the same religion. It’s the fallacy of Hero With A Thousand Faces – that because different cultures show some similarities that they must all be the same.

The Communist baddies and alien crash are both nods to this being the 1950s. Mud Jones owes something to James Dean, and the speeding kids in the opening titles reminded me of American Graffiti. Dr Jones also has to contend with an atomic test – his last-minute solution of hiding in a fridge isn’t exactly a great example for any children watching. And the convenient it gets picked up by the bomb blast and carried out of danger is the same unlikely, easy get-out as in Fires of Pompeii. (the Dr's only criticism of Mr Moran’s clever script is that Donna and the Doctor couldn’t have made the long trek back into town ahead of the suffocating dust.)

Which is a shame, because often the film is really rather smart. It’s got something to say – and with subtlety – about the erosion of civil liberties and academic freedom as Jones is suspected by the McCarthyites. Only his old mates – Alan Dale and Jim Broadbent – stand by him, while the young folk pooh-pooh his list of medals.

(There’s something odd about his alluded war service, like Jones was in special ops alongside MI6. I realise now that it’s possible he was working alongside the book James Bond.)

The film’s also good at showing Indiana’s brains: he’s multilingual, his experience counts and we see him puzzling stuff out. He even kvetches that Mud Jones hasn’t finished college – while his son is another of George Lucas’s irritating, sulky teens, the film manages to steer clear of that Hollywood cliché of the Bad Dad who Gets Better.

I saw Neal Stephenson lecture at Gresham College a few weeks ago (and hadn’t blogged about it ‘cos what he said was going to be posted on their website). He was good on the “bifocal” careers of actors like Hugo Weaving, Leonard Nimoy and Sigourney Weaver, talented, highly competent actors with very varied careers, yet who have a special appeal to sweaty palmed sci-fi fans.

Stephenson’s contention was that it’s not just that Nimoy was only getting offered Vulcan roles; everyone else being offered those pointy ears after him was a bit of a disappointment. Because Nimoy – and Weaving and Sigourney Weaver, and Brent Spiner and Patrick Stewart and Lucy Lawless and all the Doctors Who, and now I realise Harrison Ford – all have the ability to suggest there’s something smart going on behind their eyes. The best heroes of sci-fi are clever.

In part, Indiana using his brains is a response to his being that much older. His increasing frailty is also used to comic effect – he misjudges distance and isn’t so firm on his feet. But Indiana’s brains and his new-found son’s brawn match the relationship Indiana had with his own father.

Oddly, Harrison Ford is now older than Sean Connery was in 1989, when he was playing Henry Jones Senior – a doddery, tweedy old academic who used his brains instead of his fists. His absence and that of Denham Elliott as Marcus Brody are keenly felt in the film – indeed, Jim Broadbent and John Hurt are like stunt replacements for them.

And the film is very keen to acknowledge Indiana’s past: there’s Indy mourning Marcus and Dad, and being reunited with Marion. A reference to Indy’s teenage past meeting famous figures in history (I assume) acknowledges the TV show. But there’s no mention at all of the Temple of Doom, as if it’s an embarrassing aberration. I half hoped to see a photo of Shortround on Indiana’s desk, or him turning up as yet another old mate who’s gone to the dark side.

Indiana’s not great with choosing buddies is he? There was Alfred Molina in the first one, and the Nazi girlfriend in the last. And now there’s Ray Winstone – who Psychonomy didn’t think had the breeding and accent to have worked for the Secret Service.

Winstone’s cheeky, crooked adventurer is just one example of the broad-brushstroke characterisation. Evil Commie villainess Cate Blanchett wields a sword and severe haircut, and might as well sport an eye-patch and beard she’s such an alpha baddie. You’d expect there to be some crude binary oppositions here: the evil of Communism against heroic, individualist freedom. But Winstone’s a villain for being a capitalist, and while previous films made the Nazis baddies because of their ideology, there’s no mention of what the Russians actually stand for.

And it’s not even that America = good. As I said, the film greys the moral black and white by making the FBI suspect Indiana; in a film about archaeology, only an idiot thinks his past counts for nothing. But these government spooks are the same dunderheaded bureaucrats Indy railed against at the end of Raiders when they put Top Men on the Ark. Indiana sticks it to Cate Blanchett by saying “I like Ike”, and I suppose there’s an argument to be made that as an example of Nietzschean wilful hero archetype of 1930s pulp, he is the kind of self-sufficient Republican who stands against state interference in his life.

But I’m not sure this anti-establishment stuff squares with Indy as a respectable college professor (and, at the end of the film, a dean), horrified at the damage done to a public statue. And the film acknowledges the contradiction: he supports Mud quitting college and following his own dream until he finds out he is family.

Or maybe that’s all just me imposing values (the film also leaves some odd threads dangling, like warning us to watch out for small scorpions... and then getting a swarm of hungry ants). But I’d at least argue that the film that could be much simpler in its morality than it is. And that makes it more rewarding than the pulp hokum of the past that it is pastiching.

And, of course, also all the less forgivable that it’s so very white. Even The Last Crusade gave it’s native peoples dialogue to explain that they’re attacking Indy for a reason – that they’re protecting the artefacts he’s stumbling through and blowing up. Here the nearly naked savages are mute. A plot cherry-picking from the 1950s could have at least nodded at civil rights – perhaps in place of that anti-Red campus protest.

The other thing that bothers is the crappy CGI. Just as with Star Wars, it sticks out like it’s from another movie altogether. Just as with James Bond, it feels like your cheating, betraying the manly realism of the stunts and set pieces. The comedy groundhogs are over-used and stupid, as is Mud swinging through the trees having learnt how from some monkeys.

It’s this – and only this – that makes the film sit oddly with its predecessors.

How you get there

Who knew Liverpool has a spaceport? It’s conveniently on the edge of the Mersey, looking out across to the Capital of Culture, nestling about halfway between the two tall towers that ventilate tunnels under the river. The art deco building looks like something out of Dan Dare, but there’s no rockets or spaceships or evil Treens on show. Just a Doctor Who exhibition.

We passed the spaceport on Saturday morning as we made our way to the building next door, the Seacombe ferry terminal. As a treat for my brother-in-law’s 30th birthday, we were off on a cruise down the Manchester ship canal – all 36 miles up to Salford.

Yes, it’s up – the five locks we went though lifted us a total of 17 metres. And since the working ships take precedence over a pleasure cruise like ours, there was a lot of hanging around to get into the canal in the first place. We spent more than an hour shunting around in front of the Eastham entrance waiting for the tide, as one such heavily laden ship in the lock needed the Mersey to be deeper.

When the sun peeked through the clouds, it was all very pleasant. But there was a general grey drear and biting gale from the east that meant our red faces owe us much to frostbite as to suntan. We resorted to whisky and crisps and canoodling to keep back the cold.

There was also plenty of waving to be done; the workers on the boats we passed and on the docks and quays, people even coming out of their canalside houses to wave as we went by. Perhaps that suggests the quietness of the route. My late grandmother could remember a trip down to Cornwall sometime in the 1920s, and people coming out their houses to gawp at the car going past. Perhaps it's also to do with the canal being a gentler, more amenable way of getting about than your usual 21st century haste.

The canal was opened in 1894 – the same year as Tower Bridge in London – and all along the route there’s evidence of the extraordinary Victorian engineering. The Dr had fun taking pictures of the various bridges: ones that swung apart to let the masts of ships through, or built up so high over the canal the mast could duck under them.

There was also a constant commentary: not always audible outside on deck, where the gale blew it all about. They turned up the volume, which only made it like shouting below deck. And a little off-putting when you went to the toilet, which had it’s own set of speakers. The lady speaking gave a broad, industrial history – including what industries line the canal today – but tactfully ignored any mention of how vehemently Liverpool opposed the canal in the first place. And maybe there was a bit too much pointing out of things we could already see: ducks and heron on the water, or yet another bridge.

(J. also objected to the idea that traffic on the M60 overhead would all be going to the Trafford Centre.)

The main industry today seemed to be things of power: coal for the coal-fired powerstation, or colour-coded pipes full of gas. And much was made of the canal’s green credentials. It had been neglected after the Second World War, and not just from the impact of bombing. The huge number of planes built in the war meant that airfreight was cheap in peacetime, and quicker than going by boat. But these days, the cost of petrol and environmental concerns mean that the canal is on the up.

In fact, there was plenty of economic joy on show. Liverpool’s Liver building and twin cathedrals are overshadowed by splendid new skyscrapers. It reminded me and the Dr of Sydney; the huge and sturdy Victorian buildings dwarfed by the shiny new tier. But maybe the modern architecture makes all cities look too much the same: this could have been Cardiff or Bristol or Canary Wharf too.

And at journey’s end there was Salford, with its Imperial War Museum and Lowry Centre, and the building site that will soon be the BBC. Again, it felt Canary Wharf and Cardiff, shiny and groovy with plenty of posh drinking and eating, but no different from too many other places. Were it not for the accents of the deferrying passengers, we could have been anywhere.

We trammed into town to join more of J.’s chums (including the Yemayan Ambassador from page 91 of The Pirate Loop) and had our second curry in two days. Made the last train back to Macclesfield, and were home for the last half-hour of Moonraker.

Journey back to London the next day took as long as the canal trip; there are no trains through Macclesfield this whole week – I assume they’ve closed the line at half-term because working commuters take precedence over paying customers merely using the train for fun. So we went via Reading (and beer with H. and J.), and enjoyed screaming children and a girl who wept into her mobile that the boy she’d dumped and told to go find someone else to snog had only gone and done that.

Blimey, we thought. How long ago that teenage stuff now seems. And like the canals and railways, we struggle against the laws of physics to fend off our decrepitude. It is back to the gym tomorrow…

Bite my wire

Just this minute watched episode 1.13 of The Wire. Yes, I am very behind on this one, and yes, I've been meaning to get to it for ages. And oh god yes, it's as good as everyone has made out.

Jimmy McNulty is working in Baltimore Homicide, and is aggrieved that anyone he catches gets off, and that none of his colleagues or anyone in the DEA even knows the name Avon Barksdale - the man running all the drugs. So Jimmy kvecthes to his mate who is a judge, and the judge sets up a special operation tailing Barksdale. But this only pisses everyone in the two departments off, so McNulty's unit is mostly a bunch of lazy, sweary no-hopers, the deadwood everyone else has been looking to get shot of for years.

Or so it seems at first...

It starts slow and for the first three episodes I just thought it was a perfectly competent cop show. Being HBO, there's sporadic nudity, violence and swearing. I know one chap who was turned off the whole thing by a scene in episode one where some cops are stupid and crude.

But firstly, it's clouding up the moralities, so there's nothing so simple as good guys and bad guys. Every one of the huge cast is morally conflicted and there's all kinds of stupidity on show due to short tempers or not giving a stuff.

Secondly, in episode four the real genius kicks in. We get scenes playing off - without spelling out explicitly - stuff we've already seen. And we're often privy to stuff that particular characters don't know: what really happened or how close they came to a lead. And yet at the same time the show holds stuff back from us, so something said earlier on in the series gets shown to be macho bluster in the last episode.

From episode four it is utterly compelling, and when they start bumping off regular characters, you genuinely have no idea where it's going to go. And I have years of this stuff still to get to - hooray!

But Charlie Brooker enthuses much better than I (and has all sorts of stuff about why it feels like a novel and has such an authentic feel):

XO2

I'm not usually hot and sweaty for technological nubbins, but phwoar! check out the news about the X02.

I've been following the One Laptop Per Child project for ever and am a bit surprised I've not blogged about it before. The prototype model of the chunky green thing even came with a yellow crank handle. How can that not be cool?

The BBC news story is especially exciting because the laptops are going to be released to us greedy Westerners:

Prof Negroponte announced the resumption of the Get-One-Give-One programme to allow people in wealthy nations to buy two XO laptops and donate one to a child in a developing country.

The programme will be open to people in North America and Europe and start in August or September.

Stamp duty

Our local Post Office depot closed earlier this year, and collecting parcels or mail that needs signing for – which we do about once a week – now means one stop on the train, and juggling time off work.

Royal Mail is fast running out of solid ground under it, like the polar bears. Branches of Post Office are closing up and down the country – which, one claimant argues, is a breach of human rights.

There was also a story a couple of weeks ago that, since 2006 and the end of Royal Mail’s 350-year monopoly on delivering post in this country, nobody’s actually come forward to try to compete.

It’s apparently just not worth their while; the volume of letters is declining at the same rate as the polar icecaps. And of course, the postal regulator thinks the solution to this is privatisation.

The mail system we understand today is a Victorian invention – Rowland Hill’s revolutionary “Post-office reform: its importance and practicability” was published in 1837, the year Victoria gave up being a princess.

Hill begins his argument for reducing the cost and complexity of the postal system with some numbers. Taxing postage is counter-productive, he says. The tax deters people from using the state-owned mail, and fewer people using the system means less revenue to the state overall – Hill himself quotes a loss of some half a million pounds for 1835 on page 2.

“The loss to the revenue is, however, far from being the most serious of the injuries inflicted on society by the high rates of postage. When it is considered how much the religious, moral, and intellectual progress of the people, would be accelerated by the unobstructed circulation of letters and of the many cheap and excellent non-political publications of the present day, the Post Office assumes the new and important character of a powerful engine of civilization; capable of performing a distinguished part in the great work of National education, but rendered feeble and inefficient by erroneous financial arrangements.”

Rowland Hill, “Post-office reform: its importance and practicability” (1937), p. 7.

Admittedly, Hill argued that the system would probably be better administered in private hands:

“There cannot be a doubt that if the law did not interpose its prohibition, the transmission of letters would be gladly overtaken by capitalists, and conducted on the ordinary commercial principles, with all that economy, attention to the wants of their customers, and skilful adaptation of means to the desired end, which is usually practised by those whose interests are involved in their success.”

Ibid.

But, since there is a monopoly, he argued, the state had a duty to make the system work, to make it work well, and to maximise revenues. And, because it had a monopoly, the costs would be easily spread across the whole country. In fact, if you had a national network anyway, the difference in cost of sending a letter 100 miles rather than 10 was almost negligible; either way, it was still even less than a penny.

So Hill rather brilliantly argued that you would raise revenues by at least quartering the price of postage (from the usual 4d) – and paying the fare in advance of posting, to avoid people cheating the system.

“I therefore propose –
That the charge for primary distribution, that is to say, the postage on all letters received in a post-town, and delivered in the same, or any other post-town in this British Isles, shall be at the uniform rate of one penny per ounce ; – all letters and other papers, whether single or multiple, forming one packet, and not weighing more than one ounce, being charged one penny ; and heavier packets, to any convenient limit (say one pound,) being charged an additional half penny for each additional half ounce.”

Ibid., pp. 33-34.

While Hill also called for a “great increase” in the number of receiving houses, he argued that a uniform rate of postage would make their job easier and more efficient: letters would either be paid for or not, so they’d just need distributing. It’s not dissimilar to recent discussions of micropayments: if there’s a system of handling them cheaply and efficiently, then there’ll be enough of them to make it pay.

And Hill’s brilliant system worked.

“In 1839 on average each person in the UK received just 4 letters a year. That figure doubled in 1840 to 8; in 1871 it was 32; by 1900 it had almost doubled again to 60.”

Simon Eliot, “Aspects of the Victorian Book – The Economic and Social Background to Victorian Print Culture: postal system”.

(See the graph at the foot of the page for the extraordinary scale of that…)

The Penny Black, the world’s first postage stamp, was issued on 6 May 1840. Soon there were wildly exciting technological developments like envelopes and, in 1843, Hill’s mate (and something of a hero of mine) Henry Cole invented the Christmas card. Hill, still the radical pioneer, was suggesting outlandish things like people having letter shaped holes in their front doors to make delivering post that much easier.

“Reducing the cost of mail would be a boost to literacy and democratise the use of the post,” says the British Postal Museum and Archive – arguing that Hill’s changes to the system were a deliberate social reform. But cheaper postage (and speedier services when post got sent my rail and, in London, it’s own private underground train) benefited everyone: the workings of business, of Empire, of news and thought and science were all given a great push.

As a result, and with Hill’s reforms being quickly adopted abroad, the world became a smaller place; our conversations became more widespread, diverse and quicker.

It’s no wonder that many commentators feel Hill’s postal system has been undone by the Internet – which, since 1990, has had just as huge an impact on worldwide work and natter. But the Internet is not the guilty party; the killer has been choking Hill’s system since long before 1990. Hill argued that the system would work because Royal Mail had its monopoly, and it is whittling away that monopoly that is causing the harm.

Telegrams, phonecalls and later faxes and pagers all competed with old-fashioned post; the speed and convenience of modern technology making many kinds of letter redundant. No longer would a courting couple arrange their dates by post; instead they’d enrage their parents by spending all night saying nothing down the phone.

But until (relatively) recently these technologies were no threat to Hill’s system because they too were part of Royal Mail’s monopoly. With its Victorian communication network set up, Royal Mail was inevitably in the best place to nurture the nascent technologies of telegraph and phone. Telegrams were sent and received from the local Post Office, and via cables that swam from Porthcurno in Cornwall, they reached the whole of the world. Britain’s telephone network was run by the General Post Office until 1980 – when British Telecom was created.

Now I’m not arguing that the telephone lines be renationalised. (But I can see an argument for making letters and parcels part of BT’s licence, that they’re as much “telecommunications” as telephone lines and broadband.) I’m just making the point.

But where the Royal Mail really was screwed was by being split into three. They separated the businesses of delivering letters, delivering parcels and operating post offices in 1986.

Oddly, Rowland Hill might have approved of this split. Having outlined his proposals for the fee of “an additional half penny for each additional half ounce” on parcels, he conceded his own doubts:

“The charge for weights exceeding one ounce should not, perhaps, in strict fairness, increase at so great a rate ; but strict fairness may be advantageously sacrificed to simplicity ; and it is perhaps not desirable that the Post Office should be encumbered with parcels.”

Hill, p. 34.

And yet, I’d argue that the parcels – and post that needs signing for – is the profitable bit. It’s the service you pay a premium on, and it’s the bit phone, fax and email can’t do. Tellingly, Parcelforce doesn’t have a monopoly on this stuff and – as Hill did sort of predicted (see above) – capitalists have skilfully, economically made parcels big business. There are expensive, elaborate advertisements for why one courier’s that millisecond quicker or how you can follow the progression of what you’ve sent to the square quantum particle.

And it’s simple to see why: the transmission of abstract ideas can be done in the electronic ether, as fast and free as available technology; but you’re always going to need someone to shift physical stuff.

And the Internet, I’d argue, has increased the postage of physical stuff. People shop online and then have their wares sent to them from all over the country and even from abroad. They swap stuff, they auction stuff, they send gifts to the people and communities they met online. All the stuff you can’t just do by talking, that needs someone getting off their arse.

It’s difficult to quote any numbers when the infrastructure is in bits, but without competing couriers paying for lavish advertisements, or even paying separately and on top of each other for their networks to have the same reach, surely it’d be cheaper for all of us to send stuff. And, on Hill’s model, that means we’d do it more.

Dividing the postal system up ever further is just slash and burn economics; you strip out the bits of an ecosystem that will yield short term returns, but you do so at the expense of that system having a future.