The Wine-Dark Sea, by Robert Aickman

First published in 2014, this is a collection of eight longish short stories — each comprising more than 50 pages. It’s the first Aickman I’ve read, after lots of recommendations. And days after finishing this collection, I’m still trying to make sense of what I might think of it all.

In titular story “The Wine-Dark Sea”, an Englishman called Grigg is on holiday in Greece, where he becomes intrigued by a small island that the locals say is off limits. Grigg steals a boat to see the place for himself, and there falls under the spell of three women, a modern take on sirens.

I’d been expecting something in the vein of MR James, and there’s a similar slowly dawning disquiet. But Aickman’s protagonists are ordinary, relatable people rather than James’ bookish academics. There’s also a strong sexual element, very unlike James. In “The Wine-Dark Sea”, Grigg has sex with these sirens; in other stories here, the sexuality is less certain — we’re not always sure if characters are being predatory, or if actions speak of deep-felt desire. But part of the effect is that we’re put on our guard.

That’s a big element of “The Trains”, in which two young woman, Margaret and Mimi, are out rambling and get caught in a storm. They seek shelter in a strange old house overlooking a railway line, and find it a museum to the construction of that same railway. Mimi is enchanted by the owner of the house, Wendley Roper, but Margaret is more sceptical. And yet Mimi is scandalised and Margaret more matter of fact when Roper’s “tall, muscular” servant, a gothic figure called Beech, walks in them while they’re getting changed and Margaret is “absurdly naked”. Was it an accident? As the story progresses, there’s an every growing sense of threat.

In “Your Tiny Hand is Frozen”, lonely Edmund St Jude (landline) phone keeps ringing. Initially, he hears, odd ghostly voices or gets people trying to reach a particular business. And then he strikes up a friendship with a woman who seems keen to reach him in person… This reminded me a lot of Nigel Kneale’s 1952 radio play “You Must Listen”, which I saw a live performance of last year. Both are supernatural stories about technology that was then cutting edge and which people all had in their homes; an encroachment of the strange into the very familiar and everyday.

The best of the bunch here, I think, is “Growing Boys”, about a mild-mannered middle-class woman, Millie, whose sons are fast becoming something monstrous, though their school won’t spell out exactly why they’re being expelled. It’s a comedy of manners and yet brilliantly disturbing.

At one point, Millie tries (again) to talk to her husband Phineas, but he’s too caught up in his own aspirations to stand as a Liberal. Besides, he’s also teetotal.

“If only one could give him a proper drink before one attempted to talk seriously with him; that is, to talk about oneself.

‘It’s the boys, Phineas. You don’t know what it’s like being at home with them all day.’

‘The holidays won’t last for ever.’

‘After only a week, I’m almost insane.’ She tried to rivet his attention. ‘I mean it, Phineas.’

Millie knew extremely well that she herself would be far more eloquent and convincing if Phineas’s absence had not years ago deprived her too, though with never the hint of an express prohibition, but rather the contrary. When she was reading, she had learned of the Saxons never taking action unless the matter had been considered by the council, first when sober and then when drunk. It was the approach that was needed now.

‘What’s the matter with the boys this time?’ asked Phineas.

Millie twitched. ‘They’re far too tall and big. How long is it since you looked at them, Phineas?’

‘Being tall’s hardly their fault. I’m tall myself and I’m their father.’

‘You’re tall in a different way. You’re willowy. They’re like two great red bulls in the house.’

‘I’m afraid we have to look at your family for that aspect of it. Consider your Uncle Nero, if I may venture to mention him.’” (pp. 153-154) 

We get here Millie’s despair, hints of the monstrosity of her sons which we then conjure for ourselves, and the way Phineas undermines her — and puts the blame on her, too. Later, when Millie moves in with her Uncle Stephen, he carries her to bed and then, later, welcomes her into his own bed where he can “look after” and “protect” her (p. 192). The sense is of something more brooding and sexual going on, another monstrous something in the family. What’s more, when Millie consults a psychic, she spots other women she knows seeking their own advice — as if the whole community is beset with unsettling strangeness.

In “The Fetch” a man is haunted by a ghostly spectre who carries off his loved ones. Again, the story is as much about the man’s strange marriage to a friend’s ex-wife, and her relationship with her maid, with hints of something sapphic. 

“The Inner Room” is about a doll’s house that turns out to have a peculiar real-life counterpart. “Never Visit Venice” sees a traveller give himself up to the spectres of the city. And then there’s “Into the Wood”, about an English woman whose husband is employed to work on road construction in Sweden. While he is busy in this boring line of work, she checks herself into a beguiling hotel, which turns out to be a sanatorium for people who cannot sleep. At first, she seems unaffected… But the title is not about what happens to Margaret Sawyer, but what she will have to do next, beyond the end of the story as told. 

Some stories here end decisively, revealing exactly what’s been going on. Others end more opaquely, leaving us to puzzle out their prospective meanings. They’re all very odd, the main thread of plot peppered with other strangeness in passing. And yet they’re also grounded in real details. Aickman is clearly well-read, the stories full of specific detail.

“[‘Orm’ meaning ‘serpent’] was one of the few Swedish words Margaret felt more or less able to manage. The high tessitura in which the language is spoken, the combination of breath and altitude in the vowel sounds, were quite beyond her.” (pp. 375-376)

Or there’s Margaret Sawyers ’s reference to her own Manchester home in the “Cheshire subtopia” (p. 378). That last word is the coinage of Ian Nairn, railing against the nightmare of post-war British architecture, where all urban space looked the same so you could might never know where you were. I think that’s what makes these stories so effective. Aickman isn’t so much adding new strangeness into the recognisable, everyday world; he’s teasing out and showing us what’s already there. 

See also: me on Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson

Athens

View from our hotel

Back from a nice week in hot, sunny Athens. As the Dr said, it's been fascinating to see what the kids made of the place and how different it is when seen through their eyes. They were wowed by the Acropolis and the Acropolis Museum. A morning on a nice beach or somewhere shady to run around was as big a win as the culture. Trying a new fizzy drink - Loux Sour Cherry - or the delighted response from waiters when, unbidden, they said "thank you" in Greek, was all part of the adventure.

Highlights of the trip for me were the things that engaged them. That includes staff at Manchester Airport spotting my son's sunflower lanyard and quietly, conscientiously making things a little easier for us all. Aegean Airlines were incredibly accommodating with families, such as ensuring that children on the flights got fed first and providing colouring books and card games. 

Really, there was only one sour note to the trip. The Acropolis was very crowded and the narrow path up to it a bit of an ordeal, with many other tourists not behaving well - shoving past my daughter, standing on my feet so often I had to wash blood from my sandals, and ignoring ropes and signs closing off various bits of the site. It may just be that our pre-booked, mid-morning slot coincided with all the coach trips.

Other sites - the Temple of Olympian Zeus, Hadrian's library, the Greek Agora and its Roman counterpart - were bustling but less of a scrum. In contrast, we ducked into the Museum of Modern Greek Culture to escape from the sun and had the place pretty much to ourselves. It was a revelation, the various themed exhibits holding the children's attention for two hours.

I was wowed by the Acropolis Museum, where me and Lady Vader completed a treasure hunt of different representations of Athena and then had various games and activities. For the latter, we found a quiet corner on the second floor, where there's the awe-inspiring recreation of the Parthenon frieze and other ornamentation made up from original stonework and casts of the purloined pieces. 

As we sat there, passing tourists kept voicing the same thought: once you see this incredible display, with the windows looking out on the Acropolis itself, it's hard to fathom how the British Museum can possibly object to sending its own bits of the Parthenon home.

(The Lord of Chaos was much taken by the Lego version of the Acropolis on display on the floor below, where a pith-helmeted Lord Elgin can be seen nicking some of the sculptures - boo, hiss). 

For all we explored the ancient past, we were also tracing more recent history - the corner of Syntagma Square where, in 2000, I first met the Dr's aunt and uncle (then residents of Athens, now sadly deceased), the bit of Monastiraki where in 2007 we whiled away an afternoon with my parents in a bar overlooking the Agora. I first went to Athens on a fancy school trip in 1989, when I was the same age as my son is now. Our trip to the Museum of Modern Greek Culture made me especially sensitive, I think, to that idea of interwoven, personal history.

At the same time, the coach-loads of tourists from America, Australia, Japan and wherever else make a different case. The Acropolis Museum focuses on the Greek history and the birthplace of democracy but there's little on why so many modern states trace a line back to this city, and how the ideas originated in Athens have been adapted. Uncivilised by Subhadra Das points out that ancient Athenians wouldn't recognise our modern political systems as "democratic"; I'd have liked to have seen more of the present in reading the past.

House of Simon

But the future was also on my mind. As we wandered the Agora looking for the House of Simon, in the shelter of the gnarled olive trees stood individual staff members on duty. Several had fire extinguishers with them. At the end of May, it was a knackering 30℃ and the full heat of the summer is still to come. 

A history at once personal, universal and so very fragile.

Doctor Who Magazine #581

Bit late on this as I've been away, but the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine boasts an extraordinary cover by Oliver Arkinstall-Jones, and a lovely tribute to Bernard Cribbins by Russell T Davies. How lovely, too, to see my former colleague Mark Wyman back in the pages of DWM.

There are a couple of things in this issue by me, too. First, me and Rhys Williams detail the studio sets used for Episodes 1 and 2 of The Abominable Snowmen, recorded on 15 and 16 September 1967 - the latter the day on which my mum and dad got married. Rhys and Iz Skinner have then recreated this set-up in CGI. Truly, the set designers made those old TV studios bigger on the inside.

Then, to accompany the series of articles by Lucas Testro on writer Donald Cotton, including his original, hand-written drafts for 1965 story The Myth Makers, my latest "Insufficient Data" infographic is the Trojan horse as designed by the First Doctor. Ben Morris' illustration, of an outline scratched into an ostracon, is a delight - and more real history than myth.

A Thousand Ships, by Natalie Haynes

"This was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them. A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we?" (p. 339)

I've taken my time over this excellent retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of the women involved, not least because it's at times a gruelling read, full of cruelty and loss.  There's a sequence in which Andromache begs for the life of her baby son, Astyanax, who the Greeks fear will grow up wishing vengeance for the death of his father Hector. Andromache ventures one means after another by which to avoid her baby being hurled from the walls of the city - she will bring him up with no knowledge of his history, or to hate his late father, or she will kill him herself - all to no avail. Or there's Iphigenia. Or Cassandra. Or the dignity of Penelope when, even after the war is over, her husband fails to come home.

There are so many women and perspectives we cover a great deal of ground, piecing together the war, its causes and aftermath, as the Greek survivors stagger home to their various fates. Haynes says some of this is based on surviving ancient texts, some her own invention, and having enjoyed it as a novel I'd now like to reread it as historiography, with extensive footnotes on sources. 

It's also interesting to read this relatively soon after Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, which did something similar but largely from one female gaze. Here, we're in the heads of goddesses, royals and servants - in some cases royals who are then enslaved. It all adds to the richness of the story, and the overpowering sense of horror in what befalls these myriad people.

As Haynes says in her afterword, we tend to think of the Age of Heroes as referring to men, but the women are no less heroic. She makes a good argument against claims that heroes must fight, given that Achilles is no less a hero for spending most of the Trojan War in a sulk. It's got me thinking about the way stories are framed and told more widely. So often the domestic and the epic are treated as if they're opposites; Haynes ably demonstrates how they intertwine. 

The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker

This account of the final year of the Trojan war is largely from the perspective of princess-turned-slave Briseis, although there are also a few chapters told from the point of view of Patroclus and Achilles.

"What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times [in the future, i.e. us]? One thing I do know: they won't want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won't want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won't want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they'll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers are.
His story. His, not mine. It ends at his grave." (p. 324)

It's a violent story, but much of the menace comes from the constant threat of violence. For example, Briseis is hounded by the thought that Achilles - or Agamemnon - will tire of her and pass her over to the common soldiery. We follow the politics, the gamesmanship, of the women in surviving. It's haunting, oppressive and compelling.

It's a book full of complexity and nuance, enriching the familiar story. The men have the power and yet they are clearly trapped, too, on that beach in sight of Troy: trapped by their own pride, obstinacy, petty in-fighting. Barker makes it all vivid and fresh, but I found myself back in my secondary school classroom in the weeks after weeks that our classics teacher recounted, from memory, the Iliad and Odyssey. His speciality, I think, was in oral storytelling; those weeks felt at the time like we were getting away with not doing real work, and yet it all went in. I recall those lessons, that story, more vividly than pretty much any other moment of that school. It was, looking back on it, an ideal adventure for an all-boys' school: Odysseus the wily nerd besting the jocks of the Greek army.

But that meant the women played only minor roles. I've since read, years ago now, Elizabeth Cook's Achilles - recommended to me by a friend from that same school - but I haven't yet got to Margaret Attwood's The Penelopiad or Madeleine Miller's The Song of Achilles. There's clearly a movement to redress the relative silence of women in the archetypal myth of Troy. Here, as in so many versions, the irony of Cassandra is that even those who know of the curse that means her (true) prophecies are not heeded still don't listen to her anyway. But she's only one of the many unheeded women, their lives defined - and curtailed - by men.

Women & Power - A Manifesto, by Mary Beard

This is a timely publication of two lectures by Mary Beard, one on "The Public Voice of Women" and the efforts to silence them, and the other on "Women in Power." I've long been impressed by the eminent professor's extraordinary patience in dealing with online abuse, from the obscene to the vexatious. Here, she's characteristically considered and considerate in laying out her case that,

"When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice."
Mary Beard, Women and Power - A Manifesto (2017), p. xi.

Concisely and engagingly, she covers a lot of ground, with references from Penelope in The Odyssey to Professor Holly in Pokemon Farm. Images inform the text, in part because these were originally delivered as lectures but also because Beard has always used non-textual sources to add depth and detail to her examination of history.

Some of her more academic books I've found hard to keep up with, but this book is very accessible. That's not to say it's all put very simply - she embraces the complexities and nuances involved. Elizabeth I's speech at Tilbury and Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" would both advance her case, but Beard doubts either woman really spoke the words attributed. She won't take the easy path.

There's much to mull over, whether in relation to politics and public discourse, or applied to my own attitudes and behaviour. Following this example, being more considered and considerate, is not a bad place to start.

But if this is a manifesto, what is the call to action? In her second lecture, she identifies the problem as one of elites holding power over the powerless. Now, various people in the news have been calling out elites for some time, but the danger - especially when wealthy, well-connected politicians claim to be anti-elitist - is that it's about replacing one group in power with another. The system isn't changed and the inequities continue.

Beard concludes her second lecture with the wish to rethink power not as a possession to be fought over, but as a verb, "to power".

"What I have in mind is the ability to be effective, to make a difference in the world, and the right to be taken seriously, together as much as individually. It is power in that sense that many women feel they don't have - and that they want. Why the popular resonance of 'mansplaining' (despite the intense dislike of the term felt by many men?) It hits home for us because it points straight to what it feels like not to be taken seriously: a bit like when I get lectured on Roman history on Twitter."
Ibid., p. 87.

The King Must Die by Mary Renault

"By classical times the Theseus legend ... had so fabulous a garnish that it has sometimes been dismissed as pure fairy-tale, or, after Frazer, as religious myth. This briskness was not shared by those who had observed the remarkable durability of Greek tradition; and the rationalists had their first setback when Sir Arthur Evans uncovered the Palace of Knossos, with its labyrinthine complexity, eponymous sacred axes, numerous representations of youths and girls performing the Bull Dance, and seal-carvings of the bull-headed Minotaur. The most fantastic-seeming part of the story having thus been linked to fact, it becomes tempting to guess where else a fairy-tale gloss may have disguised human actualities."

Mary Renault, "Author's note", The King Must Die (1958 [1986]), p. 373.

I first read The King Must Die when I was 11 or 12. I was loaned a copy by my grandmother (who died when I was 14), I think because I'd been enthusing about the Cretan Chronicles role-playing books which were popular in my last year at primary school.

At the time, I was thrilled by the tale of high adventure in a richly drawn ancient world. I especially loved the brilliant conceit: using archaeological evidence to tell the "real" story behind the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur. It clearly influenced me when I pulled the same trick (and about the same moment in history) for my Doctor Who book The Slitheen Excursion, and I'm writing something now that's along the same lines but set in a different period. (Far better than my lowly efforts, it's the trick pulled in Philip Reeve's amazing Here Lies Arthur.)

The book is extraordinary in its rich, convincing portrait of the ancient world - where different tribes and groups of people are distinctly drawn. I was also impressed by how much Renault confronted the sexual mores of the time - Theseus does not partake in but does not mind the frequent moments of gay sex. For a bestselling book written in the 1950s, that seemed especially extraordinary - though I've now read up a bit more about Renault and her work.

Renault's author's note at the end of the novel spells out  over two and a half pages her logical methods in making the legend "real". It's great that she performs the trick, then tells us how it's done and invites us to reread the legend (provided after the author's note) to judge how she's done. A select bibliography of learned tomes further adds to the chutzpah: she's challenging us to fault her. I also wonder how much these scholarly credentials dare us to question all the gay bits. I shall add David Sweetman's biography to my reading list in the hope of finding out.

And yet, reading the book again, I think there's a fundamental flaw: the palace of Knossos is destroyed by chance - the eruption of Kalliste is a force majeure. Renault works into the story that this is the Gods' response to Theseus' actions, but if the whole book is about undercutting myth with reality, this doesn't quite ring true. The defeat of the Minoans would have happened anyway, whatever our hero might have done.

Crossing the Rubicon

On 10 January, 49 BC, Julius Caesar marched his army south over a small river called the Rubicon - and the world changed. It was not the size of the river that mattered but that it was a border. Caesar was breaking a sacred law by taking an army into Rome - that single act is often seen as the pivotal moment in the collapse of the Roman Republic.

Tom Holland's Rubicon (2003) is excellent at explaining why, and charting a hundred years of history to give us the full context. Comprehensive, insightful, dryly witty and full of telling detail, its an excellent book - I only wish I'd sooner heeded all those who told me to read it.

I already knew a lot of the story from studying Asterix books and Shakespeare's plays, and watching I, Claudius and Rome. More recently, I loved Imperium and Lustrum, Robert Harris' excellent Cicero novels, as told by his slave Tiro (who invented shorthand and in some ways the parliamentary reporting job I do now).

There's a reason the fall of the Republic is so well known. Partly, it's because so much of the legal and political systems of Western civilisation are based on those of Rome. That's why the books and TV dramas still resonate so strongly. Harris, for example, makes Cicero's political wheeler-dealing feel entirely modern.

But it's more than that. The fall of the Republic is a tragedy about a system established for the common good being undone by personal gain. It serves as a warning to the liberal minded and a benchmark for the greedy. It's almost too easy to link the fall of Caesar to that of the last of his namesakes, the Csars, in Russia less than a century ago; or to link the fall of the Republic to what happened in Germany in the 1930s. The Royal Shakespeare Company's current production of Julius Caesar "finds dark contemporary echoes in modern Africa". Or we might liken the fall of the Republic to what's happening now to the welfare state or NHS, or even press regulation - as the Prime Minister did.

Holland doesn't make those pat analogies, thank heavens, concentrating instead on the personalities and culture. He's especially good at conjuring the worldview of the time.

"As ever, [Caesar] loved to dazzle, to overawe. The building and levelling of a bridge across the Rhine had served only to whet his appetite for even more spectacular exploits. So it was that no sooner had Caesar crossed his men back into Gaul than he was marching northwards, towards the Channel coast and the the encircling Ocean.

Set within its icy waters waited the fabulous island of Britain. It was as drenched in mystery as in rain and fog. Back in Rome people doubted whether it existed at all. Even traders and merchants, Caesar's usual sources of information, could provide only the sketchiest details. Their resistance to travel widely through the island was hardly surprising. It was well known that barbarians became more savage the further north one travelled, indulging in any number of unspeakable habits, such as cannibalism, and even - repellently - the drinking of milk. To teach them respect for the name of the Republic would be an achievement of Homeric proportions. For Caesar, who never let anyone forget that he could trace his ancestry back to the time of the Trojan War, the temptation was irresistible. 

... It was indeed to prove a journey back in time. Waiting for the invaders on the Kentish cliffs was a scene straight out of legend: warriors careering up and down in chariots, just as Hector and Achilles had done on the plain of Troy. To add to the exotic nature of it all, the Britons wore peculiar facial hair and were painted blue."

Tom Holland, Rubicon - The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic, pp. 274-5.

As a result, we get a sense of why the Romans found Caesar so extraordinary. His "invasion" of Britain was hardly a success, and yet:

"Even the lack of plunder did little to dampen the general mood of wild enthusiasm ... In their impact on the waiting public Caesar's expeditions to Britain have been aptly compared to the moon landings: 'they were an imagination-defying epic, an achievement at once technical and straight out of an adventure story'."

Ibid., p. 276 (the quotation from Goudineau, César, p. 335).

I had some sense of the brutal power of the Roman war machine having read Mortimer Wheeler's The Siege of Maiden Castle, England - read it; it's a brilliant reconstruction based on the archaeology, and informed by Wheeler's own hellish experience of World War One. With similar ghoulish delight, Holland describes over five pages (pp. 277-81) Caesar's siege of Alesia (near modern Paris), where he was vastly outnumbered and facing an implacable foe in the Gaulish leader Vercingetorex.

At one point, with the town starving, Vercingetorex sent the women and children out of the town, trusting that Caesar's army would not kill them. They did not; but nor did they let them pass, and the women and children were left to starve to death outside the town walls, Caesar shaming Vercingetorex in the most appalling way. Yet it's hard not to admire Caesar at this point.

"Outnumbered by the army he was besieging, and vastly outnumbered by the army that had been besieging him in turn, Caesar defeated both. It was the greatest, most astonishing victory of his career."

Ibid., p. 280.

He ought to be a monster, and yet somehow he's a hero. Though that's not quite how the story was depicted in Asterix:

Incidentally, I have a pet theory that Asterix's blacksmith, Fulliautomatix (Cétautomatix in the French original) is based on the famous sculpture "The Dying Gaul":

The Dying Gaul, photo by Jean-Christophe Benoist

The Dr tells me that nineteenth century classicists had much fun pointing out the likeness between the statue and the eminent archaeologist, Adolf Furtwängler...

Anyhow, we were talking about Caesar. The one thing I'd never quite understood was why Caesar decided to break the rules of the Republic, so sacred for centuries, and make himself dictator - effectively a king. Holland shows how previous bully-boys such as Sulla ended up, and suggests that Caesar was more than merely yet another Roman gangster.

He also shows us how shrewd an operator and gambler Caesar could be, playing the system to advance to the top. And he suggests that Caesar's sex life was not wanting. In readings of Shakespeare, and in the series Rome, Egypt is the decadent fallen empire, the temptations depraved and libidinous. It had strategic value because it supplied grain to the Roman empire - so anyone who ruled Egypt had a leash round the throat of Rome. But for all that, I never quite got why Caesar fell for it so completely.

And then Holland opens a chapter with a glorious bit of scene-setting:

"The coastline of the Nile Delta had always been treacherous. Low-lying and featureless, it offered nothing to help a sailor find his way. Even so, navigators who approached Egypt were not entirely bereft of guidance. At night, far distant from its shore, a dot of light flickered low in the southern sky. By day it could be seen for what it was: not a star, but a great lantern, set upon a tower, visible from miles out to sea. This was the Pharos, not only the tallest building ever built by the Greeks, but also, thanks to its endless recycling on tourist trinkets, the most instantly recognisable. A triumph of vision and engineering, the great lighthouse served as the perfect symbol for what it advertised: megalopolis - the most stupendous place on Earth. 

Even Roman visitors had to acknowledge that Alexandria was something special. When Caesar, three days after Pompey's murder, sailed past the island on which the Pharos stood, he was arriving at a city larger, more cosmopolitan and certainly far more beautiful than his own. If Rome, shabby labyrinthine, stood as a monument to the rugged virtues of the Republic, then Alexandria bore witness to what a king could achieve."

Ibid., p. 325.

And it all clicked into place.

I've concentrated on Caesar here, but Holland's book is dense with characters, strangeness and wonder - a history to be savoured, then pored over again.

Three Footnotes from Cosmos

Thanks to lovely Abebooks, I'm now the proud owner of a battered paperback of Carl Sagan's Cosmos and a battered hardback (without dust jacket) of James Burke's Connections – and both for less than a fiver, including P&P. Bargain.

I've been working my way through the TV version of Connections on Youtube and will blog about it more when I get to the end (at my current rate, sometime towards the end of the century). But for a flavour of its style and confidence, you can't beat this extraordinary piece to camera:



I've not seen all the TV version of Cosmos but a lot of the material was covered in my astronomy GCSE, so reading the book has been a bit of a refresher course. It's a history of science, similar to The Ascent of Man, but focusing on our knowledge of astronomy.

It's striking how much has been learned and achieved in the 30 years since the book came out. Sagan details Voyager's exciting new discoveries about the Galilean moons but can only guess at the nature of Titan. He enthuses about the possibility of sending roving machines to explore Mars. He speculates on the causes of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event (which wiped out the dinosaurs), but doesn't mention the possibility of a large meteorite hitting the Earth. That's especially odd given that elsewhere he talks about the probabilities of large meteorite impacts, such as in Tunguska in 1908.

Sagan packs in fascinating titbits and detail, such as Kepler's efforts to save his mum from being tried as a witch. Excitingly, it's got footnotes instead of endnotes (and an index – so top marks all round), which means plenty of extra nuggets of fact to explode your brain.

For example, Sagan talks at one point about the scale of the Solar System, reminding us that, in terms of our ability to traverse it, the Earth was once a much bigger place. And then he drops in another striking analogy:

“In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries you could travel from Holland to China in a year or two, the time it has taken Voyager to travel from Earth to Jupiter.* 

* Or, to make a different comparison, a fertilized egg takes as long to wander from the Fallopian tubes and implant itself in the uterus as Apollo 11 took to journey to the Moon; and as long to develop into a full-term infant as Viking took on its trip to Mars. The normal human lifetime is longer than Voyager will take to venture beyond the orbit of Pluto.”

Carl Sagan, Cosmos, p. 159. 

Like James Burke, Sagan is good at making a connection between two apparently disparate things to create a sense of wonder. But I like how the last sentence of the following footnote so lightly declines to impose or invent a reason:

“The sixth century B.C. was a time of remarkable intellectual and spiritual ferment across the planet. Not only was it the time of Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras and others in Ionia, but also the time of the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho who caused Africa to be circumnavigated, of Zoroaster in Persia, Confucius and Lao-tse in China, the Jewish prophets in Israel, Egypt and Babylon, and Gautama Buddha in India. It is hard to think these activities altogether unrelated.”  

Ibid., p. 206.

And, again like Burke, Sagan is good at accounting for chance and circumstance in the slow, steady progress of science through the ages. He uses a Tlingit (Native American) account of meeting the French explorer Count of La Pérouse when he “discovered” Alaska in the 1780s to discuss what first contact with an alien culture might be like. But, explaining that La Pérouse and all but one of his crew died in the South Pacific in 1788, Sagan notes:

“When La Pérouse was mustering the ship's company in France, there were many bright and eager young men who applied but were turned down. One of them was a Corsican artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte. It was an interesting branch point in the history of the world. If La Pérouse had accepted Bonaparte, the Rosetta stone might never have been found, Champollion might never have decrypted Egyptian hieroglyphics, and in many more important respects our recent history might have changed significantly.” 

Ibid. p 334. 

Three short asides, additional to the main narrative, and you could base a science-fiction novel on each of them. Yet the thing that's stayed with me most since I finished the book earlier this week is his reference to the 1975 paper “Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence” by James W Prescott:

“The neuropsychologist James W. Prescott has performed a startling cross-cultural statistical analysis of 400 preindustrial societies and found that cultures that lavish physical affection on infants tend to be disinclined to violence ... Prescott believes that cultures with a predisposition for violence are composed of individuals who have been deprived – during at least one or two critical stages in life, infancy and adolescence – of the pleasures of the body. Where physical affection is encouraged, theft, organized religion and invidious displays of wealth are inconspicuous; where infants are physically punished, there tends to be slavery, frequent killing, torturing and mutilation of enemies, a devotion to the inferiority of women, and a belief in one or more supernatural beings who intervene in daily life.” 

Ibid., p. 360.

I'm fascinated by this, but can't help wondering if that conclusion isn't too much what we'd like to believe to be true. There's something chilling, too, in the lightness with which he seems to suggest that organised religion is a symptom of childhood neglect.

Dream the myth onwards

Here's the introduction I wrote to the book of academic papers, The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who (2010) - available as a paperback and on Kindle and things.

Dream the myth onwards
Simon Guerrier

Do stories matter if we know they're not true?

That seems to be central to the idea of myth. They are stories that matter. Ken Dowden, in his book The Uses of Greek Mythology, argues that “myths are believed, but not in the same way that history is”(1). If they were true they would be history. But stories still illuminate the truth.

The father of psychoanalysis certainly thought so. Sigmund Freud used the stories of ancient mythology to illuminate aspects of the human condition. Most famously, he named a group of unconscious and repressed desires after the mythical king of Thebes, Oedipus.

The story of Oedipus has been retold since at least the 5th Century BC. By linking to it, Freud suggested that the desires he'd uncovered were not new or localised. They were universal.

Freud was clearly fascinated by myth. His former home in London – now a museum – contains nearly 2,000 antiquities illustrating myths from the Near East, Egypt, Greece, Rome and China, many lined up on the desk where he worked. He argued that psychoanalysis could be applied to more than just a patient's dreams, but to “products of ethnic imagination such as myths and fairy tales” (2).

But, as Dowden points out, you can only psychoanalyse where there is a psyche. Who are we analysing when we probe ancient myths – which have been retold for thousands of years? Do we examine a myth as the dream of an original, single author, or of the culture that author belonged to? Dowden argues that “psychoanalytic interpretation of myth can only work if it reveals prevalent, or even universal, deep concerns of a larger cultural group”(3).

He also quotes Carl Jung, who developed the idea of the “collective unconscious”, a series of archetypal images that we all share in the preconscious psyche and which, as a result, appear regularly in our myths. Jung warned against efforts to interpret the meanings of these images: “the most we can do is dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress”(4).

That seems to me what Doctor Who does, retelling old stories in new ways, surprising us with the familiar. The archetypes of Doctor Who – the invasion, the base under siege, the person taken over by an alien force, regeneration – have been embedded for decades. Yet the series keeps finding new ways to present them, and new perspectives and insights along the way.

That's also true of this book, probing the Doctor's adventures for new perspectives and insights. The essays contained here don't take Doctor Who as the dream of one single author whose unconscious desires can now be exposed. Instead, it probes our shared mythology as Doctor Who fans – of which the TV show is just a part – to explore our own cultural unconscious.

“Myth” means many things in this book. It's any fiction with a ring of truth. It's any story with cultural of psychological value. It's any work with staying power, whose themes and ideas are still relevant generations after the first telling. It's the established, fictional history of characters and worlds, the “continuity” so often complex and contradictory. It's the moment at which a character becomes a hero or even a god. It's anything we want it to be.

And that is why it's so revealing.

(1) Dowden, Ken, The Uses of Greek Mythology, London: Routledge 2000 [1992], p. 3.
(2) Freud, Sigmund, Totem and Taboo, Leipzig and Vienna: 1913, English translation ed. J Strachey London 1955. Cited in Dowden, p. 30.
(3) Dowden, p. 31
(4) Jung, Carl and Kerényi, C, Science of Mythology: Essays on the myth of the divine child and the mysteries of Eleusis, 1949, English translation, cited in Dowden, p. 32

Thanks to editor Anthony S Burdge and Anne Petty at Kitsune Books for permission to post it here. I landed the Doctor in ancient Greece in my book, The Slitheen Excursion - where he met what might be the real people who inspired the myths of Athena, Noah and the Medusa, amongst others.

Doctor Who - The Age of Heroes

Here, for your entertainment and delight, is my first outline for what became the Doctor Who book The Slitheen Excursion. Big boss Justin Richards had asked me for something featuring the Slitheen and set in Earth's past.

We knocked this back and forth between us for a few days before agreeing a final outline, but this still contains spoilers if you've not read the book or heard the audio version read by Debbie Chazen.

Doctor Who – The Age of Heroes
Simon Guerrier
27 March 2008

June is 17 and not very confident about her forthcoming A-levels. She’s on a college trip to the Palace of Westminster (not, she has learnt that morning, the “Houses of Parliament”) when she spots the Doctor. He must be important because he doesn’t have a security pass – not even the pastel-coloured stickers that they give to the tourists – and yet the policemen with machine guns let him go where he likes.

June dares to follow him and saves his life when a monster jumps out on him. The Doctor stops the monster by talking nonsense. It feeds on nonsense and illogic – so the Palace is like a restaurant. The Doctor owes June a favour and she asks if he can help with her essay. She’s got to write about the history of democracy.

Chapter 1
The Doctor says he knows a thing or two about history. Seeing history live – touching it, smelling it, getting your fingers dirty – is more exciting than dusty old books. But as they set the coordinates for the golden age of ancient Athens, he picks up a signal from an alien spaceship that’s got into trouble. They’re going to have to make a quick detour.

They arrive in Athens, 1687 AD. The Venetians are at war with the Turks. There’s a Turkish garrison in the temple up on the rock overlooking the town – the Parthenon is pretty much complete and looking good for its 2,000 years. For a brief moment June and the Doctor are separated and June realises she could be stranded in the primitive past. There’s something odd about the war though; both sides accusing the other of using strange and magical weapons.

The Doctor and June are reunited. They get away from the fighting Turks and Venetians and investigate the distress signal. They soon discover a party of Slitheen.

Chapter 2
But it emerges that they’re not there to muck up the war. They just want to keep everyone away from a grotto of stalactites and stalagmites which they’re using for some nefarious purpose.

The Slitheen are, though, fascinated by the Doctor and June – who must, they think, be using some kind of warp-core technology to journey back in time. And even schoolkids know that warp-cores are dangerously unstable. So the Doctor finds himself arrested as a dangerous maniac, when that’s what he normally accuses the Slitheen of.

June helps the Doctor escape, but rather than running away the Doctor insists they find out what the Slitheen are up to. It turns out the stalactites are calcified Slitheen – these Slitheen’s ancestors who were on Earth thousands of years ago.

Chapter 3
As they get older, Slitheen suffer from hardening of their soft tissues – a bit like we suffer from hardening of the arteries. They slowly lose the moisture inside themselves, and mineral deposits build up until they can’t move. The early affects are like Calciphylaxis, with brittle skin etc. And then they harden out entirely and become like statues.

At first the Doctor assumes it is some kind of rescue operation. But the young Slitheen want to know what happened to all the loot they never inherited. When the older Slitheen won’t tell them, they throw tantrums and blow things up.

Chapter 4
The Doctor has to intercede. The Slitheen spaceship, hidden on the top of the Acropolis, explodes. This blows up the Parthenon – history will assume the Venetians did it.

Chapter 5
The ancient Slitheen will not survive long. But they recognise the Doctor and June, having met them thousands of years before. They’re dying, and realise the Doctor hasn’t met them yet. They say he’ll understand what happened to the loot when he goes back to meet them. And they die. June is upset by this, and the Doctor admits he’s not used to feeling sorry for Slitheen. They’re a very strange family.

But now it seems he and June have to go back in time to meet these Slitheen in the first place.

The Doctor looks through history for the Slitheen signals. He finds them – roughly the same place but about 3,000 years before. And that’s worrying because mankind is quite impressionable back then. Sophisticated, space-faring aliens mucking around with the ancient Greeks could do terrible things to the development of human history.

Having landed in about 1,500 BC, the Doctor does a scan for aliens. And there are nearly 2,000 of them in the area. They step out into a world where aliens are living amongst the humans quite openly. Spaceships and high technology can be seen everywhere.

Chapter 6
There’s a great tourist industry running to the place, all kinds of aliens getting to mix with humanity when it hasn’t even sussed out basic architectural stuff like the arch. These aliens aren’t changing history. They’ve always been there – they’re the Gods and monsters of Ancient Myth.

At first it seems fun, but June is horrified by how the aliens pretend to be Gods to the locals. And some aliens are very badly behaved, frying the humans with laser guns just for a bit of a laugh.

The Doctor just runs off. June tries to stop some aliens picking on the humans. The aliens turn on her. She is going to be fried.

Chapter 7
The Doctor arrives dragging some Slitheen with him, insisting he and his friend didn’t pay for their tickets expecting to get fried. He waves his psychic paper around and people assume he’s a tourist, too. And the Slitheen intercede: it’s not done to fry fellow holiday-makers.

June recognises these Slitheen. The ancient Slitheen they met in 1687 turn out to be running the tourism. They are young and sprightly hucksters, and don’t take kindly to the Doctor and June interfering.

They invite the Doctor and June back to their office for a glass of something to make up for the inconvenience. The Doctor is keen to find out more of what they’re up to so agrees to go along. On the way, the Slitheen explain the terrible complexities of this project – how they use accelerators to grow food very fast to feed the demands of the tourists, how the bookings system keeps breaking down… all the rigours of a small business.

But the invitation to drinks is really a trap. The Slitheen know psychic paper when they see it. And they assume the Doctor is some kind of anti-time-travel protestor, and the one who has been causing all the earthquakes. For the sake of saving humanity, the Slitheen will now execute him and June.

Chapter 8
The Doctor and June escape death at the hands of the Slitheen when a half-man, half-snake called Cecrops comes to complain about how some of the other tourists are treating the locals. The Slitheen insist they’ve got a contract with the local kings that strictly agrees the terms of tourists’ behaviour.

Humans are to be respected. The Doctor uses this point of law to get himself and June released. The Slitheen get very nervous the moment anyone mentions lawyers.

Cecrops is very embarrassed about the tourist trade. He is a real humanophile, though his enthusiasm for how the little ape people slowly puzzle out problems doesn’t go down very well with June who finds him patronising.

The Doctor asks about these anti-time-travel protests, which people assume are some sort of politically correct statement that humans should be left alone to develop. Cecrops explains that he’s got problems with that ethos, too – the humans’ lives are nasty, brutal and short. June is surprised to discover she would be considered in late middle-age by being 17.

But anyway, Cecrops hasn’t seen and sabotage. He’s seen natural phenonema – earthquakes and things. It’s just the earthquakes have been really bad recently. And, as if on cue, there’s a terrible earthquake.

Chapter 9
The Doctor, June and Cecrops try to help people. But the Doctor insists this isn’t any ordinary earthquake. It’s a warp shift; the side effect of unstable warp core technology. June remembers the seventeenth-century Slitheen saying even children knew that was dangerous.

They investigate. Yes, the Slitheen here are using some dodgily acquired warp core technology to bring their tourists here. And they’ve been greedy; the system is exhausted and sagging at the edges. There are earthquakes and other strange phenomena. The Doctor tries to fix things, but the Slitheen catch him and it’s them trying to stop him that pulls the plug on everything. There’s not an explosion; instead the whole world seems to be falling apart.

Chapter 10
A widescreen disaster movie. The huge explosion causes a massive flood right across the Mediterranean. As described in the Greek legend of Deucalion, the rivers swell over the coastal plains and engulf the foothills, washing everything clean (the legend might also be the same route as that of Noah and Utnapishtim, but we’ll skirt round saying so explicitly). From the Acropolis they watch the great tidal wave coming in, and thousands are killed.

(I’ll probably expand this action stuff; have June separated from the Doctor and having to be a bit of a heroine. Have the Slitheen show that, though they’re greedy and dangerous, they don’t actually mean any harm.)

Chapter 11
The floods pass; the climate and timeline just diffusing the kinks in the system. The warp core technology is wrecked so all the alien holiday makers who’ve survived now find that they are stranded. Facing this mob, and the thought of insurance claims etc., the surviving Slitheen throw themselves off the Acropolis into the receding waters – ostensibly to their deaths.

June can’t believe they wouldn’t have had an emergency escape plan, and the Doctor is delighted. He leads the aliens to the cave where, in 2,000 years, there’ll be Slitheen-shaped stalagmites. There is a small vortex pod hidden at the back of the cave. The Doctor messes with its dimensions until it’s big enough to carry everyone.

But Cecrops is one of a few aliens who want to stay. If they don’t help clear up some of this mess, he says, the humans here are all going to die.

Chapter 12
June is suspicious of the Doctor – he seems happy to let the aliens believe that if they don’t take the vortex pod they’ll be stranded here forever. Why won’t he mention the TARDIS? But she has come to know him and she supposes he must have a good reason. Anyway, it looks like the aliens could do these humans some good.

Cecrops adopts the daughters of the dead Athenian king Actaeus. (In legend, the half-man, half-fish Cecrops, first King of Athens, taught the Athenians marriage, reading, writing and ceremonial burial.)

But with the waters all round the Acropolis, how are humans going to survive? The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to draw water from the rocks – a spring of not very pleasant-tasting water, but water all the same. And June has seen how the Slitheen provided food for the tourists. She points their accelerator at the rock and up springs an olive tree. It’s not quite what she had in mind to feed everybody, but the olives will serve as an appetizer. (This makes the Doctor Poseidon and June Athene, I think.)

There’s a party later that evening. It looks like things are going to work out. With the loss of the aliens and creatures, a new age begins. One not of Gods and monsters but of extraordinary human beings. The age of heroes.

But the Doctor is still not content. He’s not sure history is quite on course as it should be. And anyway he promised June he’d show her real democracy at work.

Chapter 13
The TARDIS arrives in 480 BC to see the Parthenon being built and the golden age of Athens in full swing. June is appalled to discover that 17 is still considered quite old here. And that women aren’t going to get the vote until 1952 AD.

The Doctor and June soon get separated, but June has learnt a lot in her adventures thus far and is okay now to explore on her own. It seems the Gods and monsters are remembered as legends. But the town isn’t known as Athens – it’s called Cecropia.

She thinks the Doctor will make for the Acropolis to see the building work going on. And she’s curious to see the view of Cecropia up there. At first the male builders don’t see what business it is of hers, but their old, fat foreman seems pleased by June’s interest and offers to show her around.

But as soon as they’re on their own, the fat old man unzips his forehead. Creaky and old folk, it’s the last of the huckstering Slitheen – stranded on Earth for 1,000 years.

Chapter 14
The Slitheen have been hidden on Earth for 1,000 years. They had tried to get rescued at first, and then they’d seen the difference Cecrops was making with the primitive humans. They helped out – not pushing them or inventing anything for them, but getting them to write things down so the things humans learnt could be passed on. They’ve got people telling stories, sharing ideas.

And it’s hard work because humans keep having wars and things. The Parthenon is being built on the ruins of a previous one razed to the ground just a few years ago. And the Slitheen are running out of time. They’re calcifying, becoming the stalagmites June has seen in the future. If they could reach their people there are possible cures, but they’re just going to dry out.

June knows it has to be like this because she’s seen what happens. But the Slitheen are glad to have played their part, to have written themselves into history even if no one will ever know. They’re glad that June knows.

She leaves the grotto of dying Slitheen to find the Doctor waiting for her. He left her to discover the truth for herself – just as the aliens had let humans develop their own way. Now the lesson is over and its time for June to go back home.

The Doctor takes her back to the Palace of Westminster the same moment that she left. But she’s a different person now; better and wiser for what she’s seen.

Only when the Doctor’s gone does she realise she can’t use any of what she’s seen in her essay. She hurries off to rejoin her college mates.

Wheeler

“Archaeologist and Man of Action” says the back cover of Still Digging, the 1955 autobiography by archaeologist, soldier and “acclaimed Television Personality of the Year”, Mortimer Wheeler. Wheeler's something of a hero – Indiana Jones as played by Terry-Thomas, with moustache and twinkling mischief. This illustrated 2'6 paperback has been a joy to read.

Wheeler himself calls the book,

“an average life in one of the great formative periods of history”.

Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Still Digging – Adventures in Archaeology (1958 [55]), p 9.

He deftly brings to life service in two World Wars and the violence of the partitioning of India up close – there's a thrilling account of him rescuing a Muslim colleague's family from a siege only for them to tick him off for not bringing their luggage, too. All in all, it's a rather chappish rollick through his life, with excerpts from diaries and correspondence to add vivid contemporary detail. It's generally fun and good-humoured, with an eye for the absurd character or moment. At the same time, he's forthright in his opinions.

“The British Museum I abjured [as a young man] as I abjure it today, a place that suffers from a sort of spiritual cataract and out-stares the visitor with unseeing eyes.”

My 1958 edition adds a footnote to this view:

“I regret this remark. It was written before I became a Trustee of the British Museum and, had truth permitted, I should have deleted it.”

Ibid., p. 24.

That forthrightness is matched by an unapologetic vocabulary when speaking of other nations. There's plenty, for example, on the habits of “the Hun”. Yet for all the racial terminology, he's also strikingly tolerant for his time. The following passage is a typical mix:

“I have in mind the sixty-one students who flocked to me from the universities of India and from the archaeological departments of the Indian states: swarthy Muslims from the North-West Frontier and the Punjab, little round-faced talkative Bengalis, quick-witted Madrasis, dark southerners from Cochin and Travancore. Also, today – only a few years later – such an assemblage of races, tongues and creeds would no longer be feasible. Religious and political barriers have split asunder those who in 1944 worked together with single purpose and common understanding.”

Ibid., p. 174.

It's not just that he wished other races would bally well get along with one another. He's an enthusiastic participant in World War Two, but when the Eighth Army pushes the Germans out of Libya, he's happy to work with Italian – that is, enemy – and Libyan archaeologists, freely acknowledging their superior skill and expertise. He also readily credits the many women archaeologists he's worked with over the years, and is carefully to cite both their unmarried and married names. Foreigners, natives and ladies are treated as equals – all that matters is that they're up to the job.

Wheeler delights in archaeology as a proper, bona fide science, describing particularly fine discoveries or developments in method, and reporting with special glee when some new piece of evidence torpedoes a long-standing theory. He's surprisingly modest about his own contributions to the field – such as dividing digs into grids. Acutely aware that so many of his peers had been killed in the First World War, he concludes that his eminence in the profession,

“was the outcome of circumstance, not merit”.

Ibid., p. 206.

There's a shadow over much of his otherwise jolly outlook. As well as the wars, there's the death of Wheeler's first wife, Tessa, in 1936. Wheeler was away on a dig at the time. His account of learning the news while heading back to England and seeing it in the paper is told with exemplary restraint, which makes it all the more haunting.

He's quick to credit Tessa's contributions to several of his digs. But there's just a single, brief mention (on page 183) of Margaret, his wife at the time of writing, and no mention at all of the wife in between.

As I posted a few weeks back, Mavis was drawn and bedded by Augustus John – before and perhaps after her marriage to Wheeler. Wheeler divorced her in 1942 having caught her with another lover and excised her completely from his memoirs. John, though, gets a mention several times – and even gave the book it's title. (There's no mention of the duel.)

Wheeler is otherwise cagey on the subject of girls. Apart from Tessa, the only romantic entanglement is a newly liberated Italian contessa, who calls him “the General” before he escapes her advances. He's such an old rascal otherwise I suspect his private life might not have been nearly so tame as the book implies.

There are plenty of vignettes about the celebrities he encountered – such as eminent archaeologists Pitt-Rivers and Petrie. But Wheeler was also clearly interested in everyone, no matter their origin or status. The appeal here is as much his perspective as what he did or who he met. As an archaeologist and war-veteran, he takes the long view and sees his own insignificance in history.

“At its best, this book will be little more than a scrapbook: probably few lives are otherwise, save those of the very successful or the very humdrum.”

But there's also a compelling philosophy behind these rag-tag adventures. On the same page, he says,

“I do not believe in much except hard work, which serves as an antidote to disillusion and a substitute for faith.”
Ibid., p. 9.

He says, but for John and his publishers, he'd have called his book “Twenty Years Asleep” - based on the line in Don Juan that we miss a whole third of our lives. Wheeler is a fidget, too eager to get out and explore all the fascinating stuff. His enthusiasm engaged generations of young archaeologists all around the world, and then the TV-viewing public. That delight in rigorous investigation, and the wry, self-mocking twinkle in his eye, is just as arresting today.

“Whilst adoring luxury I abhor waste, and am firmly of the view that most of us are unconscionably wasteful in this matter of sleep. It must at the same time be added that I have been made aware of other opinions.”

Ibid., p. 205.

Jaunt

Had a nice couple of days' escape from London before our building work starts in earnest. Went to Ely for the afternoon, mooched round the cathedral and Cromwell's House (I was there in 2007, too), then fell into a pub.


Spent the evening in Cambridge eating pizza at Torchwood, and next morning did the Sedgwick -


- and Fitzwilliam museums.


The Dr loved the newly redesigned Greek and Roman bits, and I found some beautiful Augustus John landscapes and even a sculpture by Eric Gill. So that was nice.

Thence lunch with A. and A. and a trip to the Polar Museum, with its ceiling maps of the poles by Gill's brother MacDonald. The museum is mostly now about the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, but there's plenty of material on polar exploration by Europeans, and the story of Scott's ill-fated mission still packs one hell of a punch.

Spent the afternoon punting and pottering (I found the alleyway from Shada / The Five Doctors). The Fort St George pub has carved ladies behind the bar that seem to be slightly naughtier versions of the caryatids.


Then went to dinner at Cotto which was, frankly, amazing.

Next day we schlepped back to London and mooched round the Out of this World exhibition at the British Library, which is packed with detail. Rather pleased I'd read the majority of the key texts, though think it misses a trick by not addressing issues of race and class that are often so implicit in ideas of the "alien". And it still seems strange to see a sci-fi exhibition feature lots of Doctor Who but no Star Trek (though my teenage self would have cheered).

Looked through the windows of the Gilbert Scott restaurant which the Dr would like a trip to for her birthday. Instead we had a drink in the bar at St Pancras, where the service was immaculate. Went for a pee, though, to find this lady staring down at me.



Home to feed the cats and then out to dinner with @classicdw to tweet all about Robot - Tom Baker's first story as Doctor Who. Lovely tea afterwards and then home. Done some rewrites this morning and now off to a birthday party, with a long week of typing and building work to come.

Salonica

Spent a long weekend in Thessaloniki (also known as Salonica) in northern Greece with the Dr and my parents. Traipsed through a fair few museums and old churches and ate a lot of nice food.

I managed the first 200 pages of Mark Mazower's Salonica, which is brilliantly rich and well researched but a bit heavy for holiday reading. He charts the complex, multi-ethnic history of the city under Ottoman rule, comparing the different customs, manners and superstitions:

"Holy water helped Christians, Bulgarians were fond of salt; others used the heads of small, salted fish mixed in water, while everyone believed in the power of spitting in the face of a pretty child."

Mark Mazower, Salonica - City of Ghosts, p. 85.

He also speaks of the power of pentagrams to Muslims, "for keeping babies in good health", and on the next page,

"Against the fear of infertility, ill health, envy or bad luck, the barriers between faiths quickly crumbled."

Ibid., p. 86.

The Dr's chief interest was the classical history. The Archaeological Museum has a new digitisation project, Macedonia: From Fragment to Pixels, and we had fun spotting Gods in an interactive wordsearch and making information pop up on maps. We were also wowed by the Myrtis exhibition, where different scientific methods help bring back to life a small girl who died in the 5th century BC.

Sadly, a lot of the main museum was closed while we were there, but what we did mooch round was beautifully displayed and interpreted. The Dr especially liked seeing a Roman-period dining table recreated 'live' from a contemporary illustration and using real artefacts.

The Museum of Byzantine Culture was free and quick to look round, with some nicely displayed bits of fresco. We tried several attempts to get into the open-air Roman forum, but always managed to find it closed so took pictures from the edges.


On our second full day, the Dr expertly guided us out by bus to the bus station (always well out of town in Greek cities), and thence onto a bus to Vergina and the tumulus tomb where Alexander the Great buried his dad, Phillip II. It took a bit of wandering through the drizzle to find, and then it didn't look much - a bit of grassy hillock.



But inside was something else entirely: the most amazing museum of all the spectacular riches discovered in the tombs, right next to the tomb doorways in situ. The low-light only enhanced the splendor of the gold, but it was the simple, practical and perfectly preserved cups and pots that impressed - it was hard to believe they were 250 let alone 2,500 years old.

The haul included organic relics - so rare in archaeology of this age. There was a purple cloth with gold thread design, carvings in wood and ivory.

The tomb doorway showed a rare example of ancient Greek fresco painting, showing a hunting scene. On the tops of the doors were still vivid, bright highlights of orange and blue - again, a small detail that makes this ancient, strange civilisation so tangible.

If there was one slight off note, it was the insistence of some of the labels to explain that the finds showed that this ancient civilisation was characteristially Greek - a political claim as much to do with Macedonia's recent history as the past. The god-king buried here in such finery would have sat uncomfortably with the hellenic Spartans and Athenians - who so famously managed without monarchy. It was telling, not showing, forcing an opinion rather than letting us interpret the facts.

But otherwise, it was an extraordinary place and we dawdled round at the end, not really wanting to leave. (It was also all a bit The Daemons - an iconic image of Alexander even showed him with horns.)

The next day we tried Pella, Phillip's capital city and the birthplace of Alexander. This time, our bus efforts were less successful. First we ended up in Giannitsa because our bus driver forgot to drop us off in the right place, despite the Dr asking him specifically beforehand and his nodding as she pointed at the word 'Pella' on our ticket. In Giannitsa he only shook his head - we should have called out to stop the bus when we wanted to get off, what with our psychic knowledge of Macedonia having not visited before, and ignoring the fact that (as we discovered on the bus back again) that he'd not taken the Pella road in the first place.

And we'd been watching very carefully, too - because all along the route there were impressive tumulus tombs in the otherwise flat plains of farmland, all of them cool and alluring, and none of them labelled in big letters so you could identify them from the road.

The bus back deposited us in the pouring rain at a lowly bus stop with a big sign declaring 'Pella' and a map of where things might be.

This solitary map was some way out of town, so we schlepped up through the lashing rain away from it and wandered round and round the town, stopping to take photos of our sodden holiday at the ankles of a big statue of Alexander.


At last, we discovered the new Archaeological Museums of Pella on the outskirts. A large sign outside explained the vast sum spent by the EU on the impressive new building - so new its website is still under construction, though the place has been open since 2009. It seemed a lot of money for a place that had made it so hard to get to, and the small, narrow car park didn't exactly suggest it sees much traffic from cars and coaches. There were more staff than visitors, who followed us round like wardens, telling us we were allowed to take photos without a flash, and then telling us off if we did so.

Again, the actual artefacts were very impressive - some huge and well-preserved mosaics with lots of willy on show, all sorts of domestic and funerary bits and pieces that gave a glimpse of real people's lives. Photographs showed us just how far the archaeological site extended - the outline of a vast city still there because, after it was destroyed in an earthquake, the locals rebuilt their town further along the hill.

Again, the labels insisted that the dialects in the writing and the artistic styles linked these objects entirely and unquestionably to hellenic traditions, so that (the implication was ladled on) 2,500 years later Macedonia can't be anything other than Greek. I think you could probably make the same case for anywhere else Alexander conquered - Egypt, Iran or India.

There was no shop to buy books or postcards, and we could not visit any part of the huge archaeological site - which the old museum had been right in the heart of. It all felt a bit cold and unwelcoming for such a new and expensive place. We tramped back to the bus stop and sulked until a bus came.

Though it sometimes lacked in presentation, don't get me wrong: the sites and artefacts are amazing and it was mostly a great joy to plod about looking at stuff. The churches were all very welcoming, and often contained beautiful frescos. I felt a bit awkward being welcomed inside to look round during the middle of a service. Even when things were quiet, you feel a bit intrusive stood there gawping while devout local people slink to kiss the icons.

There were fun bits of Mediterranea, too, the little differences that remind you you're abroad. D gleefully ignored the no smoking signs in restaurants (one old chap in one restuarant at least made an effort to hide his fag below the edge of the table). The crossword and puzzle books on sale at all the kiosks had bikinied lovelies on their covers - what with that correlation between glamour* and wordsearches.

(* - that is, soft porn but with clothes on.)

The Greek alphabet also kept me childishly amused:


& Toot! - and with a cone of meat. And this logo for telecommunications was everywhere:


But the chief highlight was seeing the Dr relax, grinning round the museums and churches, not thinking about all the stressy house-buying stuff and, er, throwing herself into some shameless cat-adultery...