Must keep control

“In any month in the USA, more people are killed than on 9/11 … In any year in Israel, more than 10 times more deaths will occur from road traffic accidents than in the worst year of suicide bombings during this recent intifada—a terrible statistic. With this sort of record, it might be argued that a sign of development in a country is its number of road traffic accidents.”

Baroness Tonge, Official Report, House of Lords, 15 May 2006, Col. 92.

Some advice I had when learning to drive, a frightening number of years ago: everyone else is a homicidal maniac who wants you to crash into them.

That’s not just other drivers. When passing parked cars, look out for the dimwit opening his door into you. Expect horses and bicycles to weave out into the road, even when they know you’re overtaking. And pedestrians will leap out from any cover at all, just for the look on your face.

It’s this paranoia that makes driving hard work, but also keeps you safe. It’s got nothing to do with how coolly you drive at 120 mph. It’s about how elegantly you cope when things all go wrong.

It’s not how brilliant a driver you are, but how horrifying everyone else is.

This is actually the real skill in anything. A chef is not just someone who can follow a recipe, it’s someone who can manage a kitchen and deal with stuff going whoops. No, that doesn’t mean just swearing at skivvies.

The trick, even when the cooker’s blown up, the food’s been trodden into the floor and you’ve forgotten to stock up on cornflower, is for the dining person not even to be aware that anything’s other than peachy.

The skilful surgeon can sort out sudden gushing. The manager can deal with deadlines being brought forward. The passengers of a skilful driver won’t even notice the changing of gears.

It’s about care and planning and experience. It’s about being in control whatever’s hurled your way.

Tradespersons will often give you some sense of authority by offering options to choose from. “I can use sticky tape for free,” a plumber might tell you, “but it’ll leak poo again soon enough. I can unblock the pipe for about fifty quid, but it’s still gonna stink in the summer. Or, for the cost of a van and deposit, you could move house to somewhere not built above the intercept sewer.”

This specialist knowledge comes from actually doing the job. A doctor will know more about your sore throat than you could look up in five minutes’ googling. A chef will know the best way to cut asparagus (cutting with the back end of the knife, keeping the point always on the chopping board and acting like a pivot).

I know more about grammar from four years of freelancing than from four years of reading English at universities. Writing is a similar skill. It’s not just that you can plonk words down on a page (no, really). You have to be selfless enough to heed editorial criticism and self-confident enough to know when it’s wrong. You have to be in control of your stuff.

You don’t go to a plumber or dentist because they’ll tell you what you want to hear, nor because they look good in photos. You want someone with the skill, integrity, experience and ability who can sort the shit out.

Politics, though, is doing its own thing. Politics, though, is Not The Same. You should vote not for the prettiest or funniest option, but for the one you trust to best make the difficult decisions.

Yet an unfortunate side effect of the democratic process is that it can make voting a popularity contest. Which means even the biggest politicians aren’t actually in control.

Professional politicians are keen not to say anything unpopular. So they’re keen on environmental issues so long as they keep their posh cars. Anyway, when we don’t keep buying new cars, lots of people lose their jobs.

They’re keen on renewable energies, but nuclear power stations are less costly to invest in. They like tough new laws on terror, but nuclear power stations are also an obvious target.

These are difficult, complex issues which can’t be summed up in a soundbite. Any decision has far-reaching consequences for all kinds of different groups.

One thing politicians like to do is show “strength”. Someone’s bothering our islands of sheep? We’ll have won a war with them in a fortnight. We’ve lost thousands of people we should have deported? Well now we’ll deport every one of them, even if that means sending them to their deaths.

A chicken’s got the sniffles in Norfolk? Exterminate all poultry everywhere!

It’s like smacking a leaky pipe or a sore tooth with a mallet, just to be seen to be doing something.

Strength is not the same as control, no matter what dictators tell you. Being strong on crime or refugees isn’t a solution, it’s a reaction. It’s attacking the symptoms not the cause. The system of releasing foreign prisoners needs fixing, not just to be ignored.

When you’re in the driving seat you want to put your foot down. It’s a thrill to wield that power, and it’s what they do in movies.

But giving into that temptation is not good driving. It’s not merely reckless, it kills.

My squid

This was originally a fanzine article, back when that was the only way to foist my blatherings on anyone. Then it went on my old site. And now, a bit rewritten, it be here. But Scottie did ask.

The Dr has a thing about Darth Vader. She cries at the end of Return of the Jedi when he [spoiler] dies – and actually starts crying midway through the Ewok battle, just because she knows what’s coming. Quite freaked me the first time that happened. She ran away from meeting Dave Prowse once, too.

The thing about Vader is he’s tall, dressed in black and you impose your own emotions on his blank mask of a face. The Star Wars prequels have entirely changed what we thought was going on in there. The moody stares he gives in the original movies now suggest less “I’m very cross!” as “I’m very conflicted…”

There’s also his voice. Of all the fret about casting for the prequels, one thing was made clear - James Earl Jones’s husky, gravely tones would be back. How could it not be him?

It's staggering that Jones was a last-minute casting back in 1977. Originally, Orson Welles was front-runner to do all that heavy breathing. He was a name of the same generation as Dr Peter Cushing and smiley Alec Guinness, and there'd then be three established “names” to support newcomers Ford, Fisher and Hamill.

Now there’s two stories why Welles got dropped. One goes that his voice was just too recognisable. Which is odd, because that’d surely be the same for both Cushing and Guinness.

Alternatively, there’s the rise in racial consciousness that had led to the boycotting of films in the mid 1970s which failed to feature - let alone represent - black actors and/or characters. Writer/director George Lucas was in post-production on a film with an entirely white cast.

Vader, therefore, got voiced by a black actor. An established, award-winning actor with a fantastic voice. And, in time for the sequels, Han's rogueish but redeemable chum, Lando, was cobbled together.

(Orson Welles later did voices for other hokey sci-fi. His last film role was as the voice of a, er, planet in the Transformers movie.)

So what's this got to do with Ackbar - fishy fellow from Return of the Jedi? (That answer your question, Scottie?) Well, the reasoning behind the boycotting was that cinema was pretty much ignoring black people. Sure, Poitier was working, and there were no end of bit parts as noble savages and hoodlums going. But that wasn’t really good enough.

Science-fiction, for all its claims of being a progressive, thought-evolving, looking-to-the-better-future-earnestly happening, was just as guilty as everyone else of excluding and misrepresenting racial groups. And since SF was making all the pious claims about visions of the future, the continual prejudice was all the less forgivable.

2001 - A Space Odyssey, for example, may well be a hugely impressive, convincingly “realistic” (whatever that might mean when you're talking about fiction, let alone SF) bit of cinema. Yet, now the real year 2001 is old history, one of the most jarring things they got “wrong” is that it's not only the space programme that’s exclusively populated by whites. So, it seems, is the whole Earth.

There were efforts made: the Planet of the Apes films have been seen by many as dealing with civil rights, and in Soylent Green Charlton Heston works for a black man.

Star Trek's Uhura might now seem a mini-skirted honey who answered the white man's telephone, but for the late '60s her position of “equality” was terribly broad-minded. Her character and position wasn't seen as sexist or demeaning - she was a black character with a role to play. She was a role model. Even Martin Luther King said so.

(She snogs Kirk at one point, the first inter-racial kiss on US television. It was so shocking it wasn’t shown in the UK for decades.)

But despite these small steps, the consensus in SF had always been that SF heroes are white, Beautiful People, governed by white Beautiful People - albeit older and beardier ones. Ugliness, off-whiteness and anything that even vaguely hints at “the foreign” is not merely relegated to the status of alien, but is seen to be determinedly “evil alien”. Just ask that Ming The Merciless – Darth Vader's cultural forefather. (He had a bolshy daughter that pirates fell in love with, too.)

So when a bright scarlet fish-person with boggly great eyes takes the role of highest serving officer in the rebel fleet, things are pretty bloody cool.

Ackbar gets his name from the 16th century mogul, a dynamic military leader. “Allah akbar” means “God is great”, and since “Allah” is the God bit, Ackbar then is great. This is another example of Lucas’s anthropologically mythic resonance. Or his riding rough-shod over other people’s cultures.

So Ackbar is the man. Sure, an old bloke with a beard and some whiney woman in a cape (the hallmarks of any civilised authority) may have talked us through the plan, but it's Ackbar who takes the troops out. It’s him who must make the most difficult decision in the whole series of films - whether to run the trap that they all end up in, or run away never to return.

Beard and whiney woman wouldn't have stood a chance, but Ackbar does the rebel alliance proud.

And who pilots the Millennium Falcon while our regular cast of Beautiful people are playing with the teddy bears? It's our pal Lando, and accompanied by some really frightening looker of a co-pilot. Oh, and the evil Emperor's a white guy.

Further reading

• Admiral Ackbar on Starwars.com
• Ackbar for President!
• Admiral Ackbar on Wikipedia
• There's also discussion of the racial prejudices in Return of the Jedi in Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy

Elephant graveyard

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

Anatomy of memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's something seriously wrong about doctors.

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

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

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

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

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

Who watches the custard?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holistic interconnectedness of all things

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

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

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

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

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

Shoulder to shoulder

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

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

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

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

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

Cats, axes and man-noise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Am I... ginger?

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

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

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

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

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

“There was no help anywhere”

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

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

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

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

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

Have you met the French?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right, back to my Benny homework.

Proper doctors

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isn't salacious...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schoolboy errors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This old body of mine is wearing a bit thin

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

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

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

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

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

CUT TO:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More schoolboy errors tomorrow.

Easy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bisy Backson

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

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

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

Oblong post

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

A clod … washed away by the sea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some top facts for any aliens reading this:

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

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

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

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

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

Is it secret, is it safe?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grow up, 007

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

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

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

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

More spies tomorrow, if you're lucky.

OMITTED

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

Then, darkness. Quiet. It's over.

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

CUT TO:

But we only have 14 hours to save the Earth

You know that poor Greek fella doomed to spend eternity pushing some great bouler up a hill, only to have it roll back down to the bottom again just as he's nearly done? He does not even know the meaning of frustration. I could also teach him one or two good swears.

Technically, I'm a writer and animator. It says so on my tax things, so it really ought to be true.

And yes, I have been known to en-soul the inanimate. As well as silly Dr Who cartoons, I used to make banners and buttons for websites and whizzy-looking emails for people on a professional basis. But it has been rather a while...

What I thought would be a quick assignment has taken me most of today. I'd forgotten how simple you have to make things if you want to keep the filesize down. I'd also forgotten that cutting a cartoon down actually makes it bigger - you're better starting from scratch. And I'd forgotten all my Actionscript, even when Flash tries valiantly to write it all for you.

Flash is about planning and preparation, and lots of it. Care and discipline are also involved, and - a bit like in The Invaders - there just aren't the shortcuts you think. Which is largely why the second half of that Droo cartoon is only at the storyboard stage, and why I think of myself as just a writer these days.

Though there's nothing just about being a writer, arf arf. (That's a clue to what I've been up to, by the way.)

Anyway. We got somewhere in the end, and if my masters like the pretty pictures I made, you may even get a look at 'em and all. How extremely exciting for you.

Proportionality...

... gets spoken of lots at one of my works. It means "a sense of proportion" - that is, knowing what are the important, big things, and what are less-important, small things. And planning and responding accordingly.

Today, the Queen noses ahead to be 51 years older than me. She enjoys this privilege for two months and three days each year, and we both try to keep it low-key. Happy birthday, dear.

I wonder if it's a coincidence that the Queen's great-grandmother meets Dr Who this week of all weeks. And I hope that the fan-girl got one of these new remote-control K9s from someone. Saw one last night and they move like buttered lightening. At £16.99, they've got to be the best Droo merchandise I've ever seen. Yes, even better than the whoopee cushion and Sarah Jane with a Dalek up her bum.

Now those who really, really, really love the Windsors (like Nimbos) may think I'm being a bit irreverent. For a change.

But it's not just me, honest. Take this morning's press briefing with our Prime Minister's spokes-dude. What did our clever newspeople ask? Well let's see:

• Woman has birthday
  Did Tony get the Queen a nice present, and did everyone chip in?
• Woman has haircut
  Does Tony like his wife's new do, and isn't it funny what birds will spend on a blow-dry?
• Other news
  Not-a-one difficult question about looming fisticuffs over gas and oil, or how all Iraq has gone a bit wrong (not that it has anything to do with the looming fisticuffs over gas and oil, of course). We now return you to pictures of the Queen thumbing through her post and/or meeting disc jockeys.

Yes, I know it's easy to have a pop at the papers, but I thought you put the daft and heartwarming "And finally..." at the end. It's not quite what CJ fends off on the West Wing, is it? (Yes, I know she's not Press Lady any more, but she was the last time I was watching.)

I also appreciate that both the birthday and haircut stories are getting at much the same thing: our beloved Government and its handling of cash. Detectives apparently unpick murder investigations by following the money. The press seems to be doing something similar, but so as to commit the killing themselves.

Still, that makes them sound like they're cunningly hounding the villain, like they're Columbo or Carole Smiley's dad. But actually it comes across like they're just not bothered about the serious stuff, because that involves more work - thinking and researching and explaining. And anyway, most newspapers just want to while away the time while you're on the way to work or a poo-poo.

But maybe our beloved Government would be less tempted to piss about like no one cares were investigative journalists not to do likewise. You won't get intelligent answers without asking intelligent stuff first.

Or does that just come across like a narky teenager?

Millennium Elephant also has some concerns about the "News", delivered with his customary wit and insight. I wish my brains were full of fluff and not of orange goo.

Don't be hasty

Who knew that the police were like photocopiers, then?

Having done a fair load of temping in my youth, I know my way round photocopiers like a surgeon knows his way round a wine shop. Temping is a lot like freelancing, in that you're given the jobs people think too tedious to do themselves and are useful to blame when things snafu - but at least freelancers get asked their names.

My temping CV had two things going for it: that I knew how to work Lotus Amipro as well as Word, and that I could unjam paper in a flash. I owe this great skill from months of photocopying IT training manuals for Hampshire's social workers, and from having long spindly fingers that can reach.

Just as wild animals (and pretty women) can smell fear, photocopiers and their printer brethren know a rush when they sniff one. Want to copy some high-larious fax that some wag in accounts just sent over? No problemo. Got a Dead Important Presentation to put together in no minutes, on pain of immediate loss-of-job? That's something different.

"Ah..." says the little help screen by the button for "Get on with it", as the machine notes the sweat on your brow.

"Ah?" you smile, all ingratiatingly.

"Ah," says the little help screen. "This will be a Problem Number 06."

"Oh right," you say. "And what the blithering jibbert might that be?"

"Problem #06," explains the very-little-help screen: "On the natural philosophy of toner..."

Today and on Tuesday I am working at somewhere of heightened security. I'd left myself ample time to get into the place this morning, but passing through the security gates my pass got a red light, not a green. This sometimes happens, so I tried it a few more times. Nada. Then I noticed the burly policeman with the machine gun coming over.

It eventually turns out that the nice people who gave me my shiny new pass on Tuesday hadn't done the thing to turn it on.

"This won't take a moment," said the policeman all obligingly, as I followed him into a small room.

"Can I just let my boss know where I am?" I said. You try to be courteous when the man's got a big gun.

"This won't take a moment," he said.

"I'm needed for 11, you see." It was now creeping towards quarter to.

"This won't take a moment," he said. But it did.

Obscurum per obscurius

Projects of various flavours proceed gradually onward. (You can't really proceed any other way, can you?) This is then an aide-memoire sort of post (rather than an oubliette), for me to look back on in future days and recall all that I was about.

• I've had a bit of a rethink about a script after chums got to see the first third.
• Am pretty much there on the extended synopsis for something else (the only one of five pitches that they wanted to see more of), and now need to throw together sample prose.
• Got some wind in the sails of an on-spec thing which has stalled since last autumn
• Also come up with a wheeze for a completely new project which would involve a fair bit of researching, and be something of a departure from whatever else I've ever done.
• Have two shortish stories to write too, and a whopper of something else to pull together, but they're all rather dependent on other people sending me stuff so I can't really start work on 'em yet.

At the same time, my myriad bitches have been in touch to ask questions and suggest cleverness for the things that they're writing me. Somewhere in the murk damn cool stuff is forming limbs... Had to check whether one thing was all right by it's creator, and have just been told:

"That's absolutely wonderful. You go ahead!"

Which is especially gratifying 'cos it's not my idea at all.

Also had some beer with someone last night who I spent years desperately trying to work for (and who, technically and a bit weirdly, I've since employed). Much discussion of the strange places writing can get you to. What dark, damaged recess of my mind, for example, could come up with old men having their feet cut off?

Probably best you don't answer.

Rotters

For heinous crimes committed in former lives, I studied the Reform Acts for A-level, and manage to keep unmuddled the names, arguments and outcomes of the debates in '32, '67 and '84 long enough to sit my exams. Now it's all something of a hodge-podge in my mind.

For about a year, Edward Pearce's "Reform! - the fight for the 1832 Reform Act" has been sat by the computer where it has been of some use to the Dr. (It gets a mention on page 138 of History of Christmas, on the basis of being at hand.) I've started it a couple of times, and yesterday got to page 156 before deciding to read something else.

For one thing, as my History A-level showed, the British nineteenth century is not nearly so exciting as Europe's. There were no revolutions, just lots of serious talking in the Houses of Parliament.

Secondly, the book mostly paraphrases Hansard, so there's a lot on how many columns each MP spoke for, and how the interruptions were transcribed. Pearce does throw in some good anecdotes and insight from other sources, but often he's repeating stuff we've already heard before (that Spencer Perceval's killing was not politically motivated, or how Mrs Arbuthnot fitted in).

While there are some fun characters and nice gags, the book runs the danger of being as longwinded and pompous as its subjects, and the last straw was losing an entire thread of argument by not understanding a cricketing metaphor. For a book about the opening up of the franchise, it's a pretty unaccessible text. Anyway, what's said in the House always requires some judicious pruning, as any Hansard hack will tell you.

It is, though, full of lovely details about the thoroughly rotten system of government developed from Magna Carta:

"In corrupt Cornwall [...], grotesquely overrepresented and blissfully rotten, largely because medieval kings, owning tracts of Cornwall personally by way of the Duchy, took care to enfranchise pelting villages of few fish and fewer people because they would readily comply. In consequence, Cornwall acquired early most of its forty-eight seats in Parliament, eighteen of them within 'a stretch 28 miles long by twelve miles deep around Liskeard'."

Edward Pearce, "Reform! - the fight for the 1832 Reform Act", pp. 32-3.

Centuries of tyrant-bolstering over-representation at the expense of the rest of the nation, I feel, should be remembered when considering the case for rydhsys rag Kernow lemmyn. (Hee hee.)

O brother, where art thou?

Just heard from my wee brother, a month in to his five-month trek across northern Australia, riding wild horses that his stars trained themselves.

While still solely directing/producing on the road and making a bit over 40km a day, he's been able to edit together the first trailer, and get a couple of pics up on to the Croc John site. He's a bit bloody clever, our kid.

New new new new new new etc.

The Dr and I are in sunny Winchester, stuffing our faces with my dad's rather marvellous home-made croissants, and gearing up for the traditional Easter Egg hunt round the garden.

Yesterday, for the first time in 16-and-a-bit years, I watched Dr Who with my folks. Also watching was a cousin from South Africa who is 16-and-a-bit, and so had no idea what was going on. "He's not like Jon Pertwee," explained by auntie, helpfully.

Well, that was all a bit wild and exciting, wasn't it? May speak of it more when I've had a chance to watch it again and calm down somewhat.

Afterwards, we joined some chums in the pub where I may have been quite full of beer. Saw my sister for the first time in two years (she is over from Oz), and nattered about houses and writing with chums. One of them is struggling through Time Travellers, looking for the bit where he's killed. At least he bought a copy, I guess.

The Dr had to take me for a walk yesterday afternoon because I was just too exciteable. I showed her the bits of river we used to dare each other to jump across, and the bit of nature reserve round the art college where the bodies were always found in Inspector Wexford. She was, of course, fascinated.

Faithless

My father-in-law sent me a copy of last week’s Church Times, with Droo on the cover in his jim-jams and a two-page feature on how the Doctor’s just like Jesus. The feature, “Time Lord or Messiah?”, is written by Steve Couch, one of the authors of Back in time: a thinking fan’s guide to Doctor Who, and I have one or two objections.

As my friend Phil did in his (very interesting) Greenbelt lecture, “The Spirituality of Doctor Who” last year, Couch tries to reconcile Christianity with the avowedly atheist credentials of New Show’s chief writer, and what I’d call the humanist bent to the actual episodes.

Of course, as Phil says, “science fiction, like any text, can be read in ways which the authors didn’t intend the readers to read it.” I certainly don’t object to anyone finding something in New Show just for them.

• Hooray for New Show being loved by young girls with their own plaster dragons (like on this afternoon’s Totally Droo)!
• Hooray for grumpy old birds getting in a twist about what grumpy old birds might like about New Show!
  (And then admitting they got it a bit wrong.)
• Hooray for the kids down the road comparing versions of the Howell theme tune on their phones!

You Jonny-come-latelys are most welcome to join in the fun…

What rather bothers me is the idea that the show sports specifically Christian virtues, as if the argument boils down to something like:

"Because Dr Who is not an arsehole, therefore he must be a sort of Christian."

The church doesn’t have a monopoly on what’s right and wrong, those are just virtues.

Couch’s argument rests on Dr Who being a “drama of reassurance”, and our being taken on “a journey of horror, fear and successful resolution”.

“The universe of Doctor Who, where evil exists, but where good ultimately triumphs, alludes to a world-view Christians would have no difficulty in embracing. Paradoxically, a scientific rationalist would be unable to offer any such guarantee…”

Steve Couch, “Time Lord or Messiah?”, Church Times #7465 (7 April 2006), p. 18.

Of course, there are many who’d argue that a belief in God is not necessarily incompatible with a belief in rational science. I also don’t agree that the Doctor always wins - and he certainly never wins easily.

People die around him all the time, which you could put rather brutally as the terrible cost of his doing what’s right. Rose is constantly in danger, and the Doctor’s adventures are littered with the corpses of surrogate Roses – Jabe, Gwyneth and Lynda-with-a-Y. That’s not reassuring, that’s actually a bit twisted for a kids’ show.

We see Rose’s relationships suffer – with her mum, with her boyfriend – because she even travels with the Doctor, and that makes ideas about “good” and “evil” complicated. Is how she treats Mickey “good”?

Dr Who, by confronting the strange and the scary, lets us take nothing for granted. It’s precisely the opposite of reassuring. Ethical values – in the case of the “good” Dalek, or the companion, Adam, who was “bad” – are complex and need thinking about.

The Doctor’s at his most angry when people act blindly from fear or from selfishness, not seeing (or caring about) the consequences of their actions. That’s not just true of the villains, it’s true of Rose saving her dad’s life, or Harriet Jones blowing up the aliens who killed people in front of her. We can understand why both women acted as they did, but it’s still not right.

As Couch says, the Doctor sees the good and the bad in humanity – snapping at Harriet that he should have warned the rest of the galaxy about “the monsters”, yet taking delight in a Christmas dinner with crackers.

But I’d argue that it’s not about “sin” – temptation to do witting wrong – but about knowledge and empathy. The Doctor encourages people to face facts, to confront difficult, brutal truths. There’s the teenage mother in 1941 having to face up to her son, and the journalist who comes to realise that her own news organisation needs investigating… In both cases, he's challenging the social norms of the time.

It’s been said that there’s a spiritualist slant when he meets Dickens, whose closed, scientific mind can’t see the ghosts right in front of him. But the Doctor’s beef is that Dickens won’t believe the evidence of his own eyes. By the end of the story, and with the Doctor’s help, Dickens’s rational science – an understanding of the properties of gas – defeats the lying spirits.

The Doctor, then, is an essentially humanist hero. He wants humanity to achieve its best, and celebrates the achievements that survive mortal men. Dickens’s books will live on forever, though the man himself has less than a year. And when the Earth explodes, the Doctor’s there to see it, dancing to (the surviving) Soft Cell and Britney.

I agree that the stories act as an ethical framework, challenging us to think about what we believe and how we act. That’s nothing new – in his very first story back in 63, the Dr has to learn to help a wounded enemy rather than just run away. His new human travelling companions teach him what’s right, and when his own people catch up with him six years later, he argues in the Time Lord courtroom that it’s wrong not to help. And they begrudgingly concede the point.

So was it right that the Doctor destroyed his own people?

It’s important that he’s now the last of the Time Lords. It undoes the determinism of time, the reassuring safeguards that prevent damage being done even to history. The Doctor makes his stand against the monsters, and encourages those he meets to help him, because no one else will. Like the killing of God at the end of Second Coming (written and performed by the same men, of course), it means we mere mortals must now fend for ourselves.

There is no higher authority out there to save us. It’s a bleak and brutal fact, but it needs to be confronted.

Since they were building the place

Went for drinkies at the Dr's work on Monday to celebrate 150 years of the Dr's work. Well, not her's specifically, but as an institution.

Mingled with celebs, chums, colleagues and former colleagues, and drank too much of the free vino. Also seemed to swallow a plate.

Then, yesterday being our wedding anniversary, we dared subsidence and miserable weather to go see Arundel Castle. It's a bit damn top as castles go, with enough of the original fortifications to keep me happy (and, er, it's another genuine Dr Who location*), and lots of emancipated-Catholic Victoriana for the Dr. She went a bit class-traitor over tea, though, and will consider a spaniel should we ever have a garden.

The Pugin-designed bits of the castle lodgings are very reminiscent of bits inside the Palace of Westminster, but lighter and airier, and with more room for kids to run round. The very helpful and knowledgeable staff were able to answer the Dr's various questions about which bits had been nicked from Venice and who the paintings were by, and I had a chat with a nice lady about how difficult the different medieval weapons were to use. She told a nice story about some visiting toxophiles, and a three-year-old boy who could shoot in a longbow while still having a dummy in his mouth.

Got entirely soaked heading home, but curled up in front of some romantic goth movies (Edward Scissorhands and Belle et le Bette) and had booze. Naw.

* Well, genuine in so far as it is doubling for Windsor, because you can only film factual documentaries there. 

Dandy-lion holocaust

Speaking of memes, Millennium Elephant's daddy Richard shares his birthday with Henry Tulip. This fact reminded me to look up exactly where the princes in the tower fit into the Wars of the Roses, in good time for listening to my friend Nev's The Kingmaker.

Ooh look, Henry Tulip's granny was the French bird Henry V married after his European Cup win at Agincourt. Top fact about that: Henry had been wounded 12 years before in the longbow-on-longbow action at Shrewsbury. An arrow hit him in the face, leaving him noticeably scarred. This detail is not included in the best-selling biography by W. Shakespeare.

I think I'm right in saying that the name "wars of the roses" was a contrivance of Shakespeare's, too - it certainly wasn't used at the time the wars were actually going on (1455-1485, or 1487 if you're a pedant). Shakey's plays show those decades of war to be miserably brutal and bleak (until, er, his patron's granddad took control after the Battle of Bosworth Field), so the title's meant to be ironic. Like there being a "buttercup massacre" or a "dandy-lion holocaust".

(Yes that's an archaic spelling, before you write in.)

The ironic title is not just a pretty bit of word-play; it's useful in differentiating from the other civil war. Which is often referred to as two civil wars anyway, because silly King Chuck surrendered and then started fighting again. Yes, that does seem like nit-picking, but this was not 'Nam, there were rules...

Anyway, wars can't be civil either. The civility-bit is a "treaty". It’s always the diplomats and peacemakers who have to clear up the mess, as a wise Time Lord might remark someday soon.

(We also tend not to call the squabbling between the boss-eyed King Stephen and his big sister a civil war, because, er, we tend to forget about it anyway. Oh, and if Henry IV hadn't jumped the queue, we might have had a King Roger.)

This kind of semantic stuff appeals to me anyway (I've always loved the Master's self-contradicting line in Dr Who and half of all the Drs Who, as the Cybermen point menacing guns at him: "I am the Master, and your loyal servant.").

I've also spent a morning beefing up metadata, gathering all the synonyms, homonyms and Houyhnhnms I can think of, which may explain why brain has gone wandering...

Memes don't work

There's a comic strip I remember from years ago, a typical one-off with a twist. A bloke explains how he's been cursed for years (with nightmares about snakes eating him, I think), and it's all because he was told a story.

Telling the story passes the curse on, and whoever hears it takes on the curse. The bloke points out the small native boy he's just told the story to. But aaaaah!, he explains, the native boy is deaf.

This 'ere blog - and my notebooks - serve a similar purpose, letting me get shot of the stupider-arse rubbish clogging my head worse than ear wax. (Updates on ear wax soon; been to A&E who didn't have the right machines but prescribed olive oil...)

Anyway. This has been tinkering through my head for the last few days, as unshakeable as the Muppets' "Mahna Mahna":

"Our kestrel-man hoovering the duck."

Hopefully now I can be free. Don't have nightmares.

"You'd look daft in bermuda shorts"

It's only a couple of months late for the daffodils to be out, but it seems like spring has now sprung. Well done the weather, there.

Instead of being out playing in the sunshine, I have been stuck indoors writing about people playing in the sunshine. I'm quite pleased with the bit where one character tells another that it's a bit like syrup. More on what I'm talking about when I can...

Also got me act together for the Writer's Inc competition, and have two whole stories to send in. Mr J. Lidster was kind enough to send extensive notes on the one of them I sent him, but seems not to have understood the main gag. Some hasty tweaking should prevent me from now looking like a doofus.

Looking more like a doofus.

The Dr has been down to the shops and I now have an early anniversary present - it will be two years on Tuesday since we stood in a genuine Dr Who location and said, "Go on, then."

My Schott's Original Miscellany tells me (on page 55) that second wedding anniversaries should be celebrated with paper, cotton or china. It depends on whether you're British, American or Modern - I like that those are distinct categories.

No mention is made of walkie-talkies though, whether or not they're Slitheen. The hope is, though, to cut down on yelling at each from the far ends of the flat. Now the old Doctor Who can tell me my dinner's ready.

Now off to buy booze to accompany the roast chicken the Dr is making me. She is a good wife, and her anniversary present will be light.

New adventures

Spent a happy day yesterday waiting for a delivery, muttering about the great feat of inconvenience involved in said delivery, taking out my frustrations in the gym and then, finally, writing. Evil Overlord Ian rang about tea-time to check a few things, and said how much he'd enjoyed The Settling.

What-ho, I thought. Which was a bit Wodehousian.

Promptly invited myself round to Dr Darlington's house to beg my own copy, then hurried back home for a listen. You'll all have to wait a month till it's back from being pressed, but I'm really, really pleased with it. Hooray!

Also got to see a copy of the first Dr Who Adventures, which is tremendously exciting and fun. Like most kids' comics these days, it ejects body copy in favour of lots of splash and dazzle - so it's not dull and fusty like Dr Who Monthly used to be, with so much brain-bludgeoning text it made your eyes bleed.

Despite a devotion to the series I never got into the magazine until I was in my late teens. Didn't give a stuff about who directed what in 1968, or whether the Doctor was not 'generating but rejuvenating.

I just wanted Top Facts like in the superb Droo Monster Book and to feel part of the gang, not inferior. I wanted thrills and strangeness and jokes-I-was-probably-too-young-for, just like in real Dr Who.

Then Philip MacDonald's piece on Season 18 and entropy really caught my imagination. Insightful, concise and about the bit of Droo I'd first come in on, it made me want to write loftily about spaceships. And I did.

(Have since explained this to Phil - now a good chum - and bought him the corresponding booze.)

The new comic has lots of big pictures and activities, as well as stuff on old Doctors Who and a plug for the grown-up's mag. The strip has got cliffhangers, and issue 2's free gift is - as another kid's mag I knew would have put it - sliced genius.

I want to be 8 again. Can someone arrange it?

The Marian conspiracy

Last week one of the Dr's prized acolytes left for pastures new, though not without a knees-up and presents. While a fellow acolyte got a big bottle of booze, the Dr got the first series of Maid Marian on DVD. This says quite a bit about the level of respect and seriousness with which the Dr is served by her underlings.

The Dr was very excited about a rewatch, though I'd only seen a couple of episodes when it first went out last millennia because of not getting home from school until late. (I also missed all of Press Gang and have still not seen a bit of it. This, I feel, is a grevious oversight on the part of those who lend me Things To See.)

We laughed a lot, which is the main thing. As Robinson points out in the commentary, he was trying to put into practice all he'd learnt from Richard Curtis while playing Baldrick (and looking at the date, I realise Maid Marian overlapped with Blackadder, and also when-it-was-still-good Red Dwarf).

He also points out that every episode is based on a hoodie legend. I like how it plays with our ideas about history, with plenty of gags on things Yet To Be Invented (hot water bottles, rubber bands, ball billiards...). More implicitly, there's the central wheeze of Joe Public remembering Robin as the brains of the operation when really it was all down to a girl. In a single one-liner, Kate Lonergan says more about the treatment of women in history than any worthy degree courses in herstory ever could.

"Valentine Harries, whose book The Truth about Robin Hood examines with devotion and determination all possible clues, concludes that the legendary hero existed, first as a robber in Barnsdale, gradually acquiring a reputation for good deeds and remarkable skill with the longbow; that in 1324 he was found as a valet or yeoman of the chamber to Edward II, who was lenient over the question of his poaching and, being attracted to him -"

No sniggering at the back -

"took him into service; and that he died at Kirkless, possibly murdered by the Prioress there and one Roger de Doncaster, to be buried under Robert Hode's Stone in Barnsdale."

Robert Hardy, Longbow - a social and military history, p. 40.

Hardy's excellent book (which I obviously thieved The Immortals from) explains that, in a time when everybody had to practice their archering for the sake of national security, a working-class pretty boy with any talent would swiftly do well for himself. Hood was the David Beckham of his day then, rather than the Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen as Tony Robinson has it.

As well as the historical stuff, Maid Marian also gets in gags about the media versions of Robin, with Clannad-style sighing for the Whiteish Knight and a nice riff on Errol Flynn's horny anthem. I note from a programme guide that later seasons also shows gags about Costner. Was this first batch before even that? Gosh, that is a whole lifetime ago...

Of course, there's new hoodie stuff coming soon, with Droo's Paul Cornell even writing one and Droo's grandson Sam up to Much. Same timeslot and promise of rollicking family fare as Droo, too. I remember back even before Maid Marian being on mutterings that Droo would be better more like Robin of Sherwood. How things have turned all about.

But look at that picture; that bain't be a longbow! I'm with Cornelius Fudge on this one:

"If Robin Hood did not draw six foot of good English yew, then he ought to have done."

Ibid., p. 38.

Looking for Jake

Read China Mievillie’s “Looking for Jake” over the weekend, having adored the New Crobuzon novels (stop by Perdido Street Station if you haven’t already been).

One of the best stories in the anthology is “The Ball Room” – not at all what I’d expected from the title, and which at one point gave me goosebumps. Am sitting on my hands as I type so as not to give anything away, though I will say that it’s one of only a handful of stories to name the narrator / protagonist – and that only comes some way in.

“An end to hunger” is not alone in letting Mieville (who stood at the 2001 General Election for the Socialist Alliance) rave about something political, challenging some comforting ideas about what the Internet can do. Like “The Ball Room”, it’s implicitly about how companies really work – succeeding by winning us over. I also love the idea of a “hide engine” to disappear Jack Straw.

“Tis the season” is another fun political one, a satire on the commercialism of Christmas, with the kind of wheeze and wild violence of a one-off Judge Dredd. A reversal with a singing Messiah took me nicely by surprise.

“Foundation”, about the structural integrity of buildings, is also about real abuses by “our” military in Iraq – as Mieville’s keen to point out in the acknowledgements. “Go Between” is perhaps the most explicit about our having to take responsibility for things happening in front of us, asking how we are complicit.

“Reports of certain events in London” is told by Mieville himself, caught up in a strange-but-true tale like Paul Auster often is. It’s a collection of documents about an odd kind of streetfighting, though that only becomes clear some way through. The glimpses of a squabbling enclave of enthusiasts works very well – Mieville can play it funny as well as freakish.

“Jack” takes us back to New Crobuzon to explain what happened to the famous bandit referred to in other books. Must admit my brain has muddled Jack Half-A-Prayer with Neal Stephenson’s similar Jack Half-A-Cock, so I probably missed some of the effect. But it’s a good story, again with insight into the politics of the mob.

The other stories are all good, too. The comic strip needs close attention to follow (I think, but then I am dim), and I felt again what I did when I first read the novella “The Tain” as a small-press paperback (which I think I’ve gone and leant someone ‘cos I can’t find it again now) – that I’d get more from it were I better read. It does rely on knowing some Borges, being all a bit unfathomable until that quotation at the end.

Though the stories range in subject and scope, they all have a similar, dark feel. Though often about everyday, recognisable things and people, they’re all full of strange, vivid imagery and a growing sense of disquiet. And then he’ll drop something downright nasty on you, in a flash.

The tone is a bit too samey across the anthology; more a book to dip into than read in one go. That said, it’s a very strong collection, with plenty to change how you see some things.

He’s also not one for spoon-feeding answers, and several of the stories end leaving you on tenterhooks, wondering how events played out. You're never quite sure if the author wants you to suss it out for yourself, or just can't be bothered.

(I got criticised for exactly that in my own "An overture too early", but one day I might explain all. Maybe. Conceivably. If you're lucky...)

Castellations

After a long day's meeting on Saturday, I hurried down to Selling in Kent to meet the Dr, C. and S. in the pub. The ladies had booked us two nights in a converted hop-picker's cottage with a real fire and plenty of logs. Which was nice.

Yesterday, after getting up not too early, we made our way to Count Grendel's castle in Leeds. It's a very pretty place with plenty to do, though £13.50 each is a bit steep - even if we can all use our tickets for the rest of the year.

The castle itself is more decorative than it is defensive, the insides decked out in pastel colours and 30s stylings very like we've seen in Eltham Palace. We felt it all a bit corporate and for those-as-can-afford it, and the Dr railed against its claim to be a "living museum". The picturesque views across the Great Water were somewhat spoiled by the inevitable golf course.

We admired the birds (and a boy-duck waddling nonchalantly around after a girl-duck in the hope he'd wear her down eventually), got lost in the maze and the Dr was upset by the beautiful birds of prey all tied to the ground and looking miserable in the cold weather.

Then it was home to roast lamb from the Dr and Trivial Pursuits that I won. Hurrah!

Today we were out of the place by 10, and dropped the Dr at Rochester station before heading into the cathedral and castle. The castle is much more my period, in a commanding position on the Medway and clearly built with defence in mind. Only £4 to get in, and so much more satisfying. Got a good view of the damage done by King John in 1215 - there's a great big arch that just stops abruptly where one whole corner was rebuilt.

Basically, John lay seige to the place after having been bullied by some not-exactly-democratic landowners into signing a piece of paper letting them do what they liked. This Magna Carta, though, proved not to be worth much; as soon as the rebel lords had gone home, John ran round after them and beat them up.

Rochester castle held out against his army, though, until it was literally undermined. Sir Hubert de Burgh provided a whole bunch of pigs...

"Once the mine was finished, it would have been stuffed with brushwood, straw and kindling to feed a great fire. How the pig fat was introduced is a matter of debate. An older generation of more imaginative historians envisaged the forty-strong herd being driven into the tunnels while still alive, burning torches tied to their tails. Sadly, modern military experts now think this unlikely; the idea of live pigs running around with firebrands attached is just too farcical, even for King John. It is now believed that the pigs were slaughtered and rendered down for their fat, which was subsequently poured into barrels and rolled into the mine.

With or without an accompaniement of squealing pigs, the scene that followed must have been both horrifying and spectacular. Torches were introduced to the tunnels. Deep underground, the kindling caught and the pig fat crackled. Flames started to lick the fatty wooden props and, as the fire grew to a roar, the props started to snap. Suddenly, the ground above the mine fell away. The great keep shuddered and split. With a final deafening roar, a quarter of the building came crashing down."

Marc Morris, Castle, p. 88.

After stopping off in a tea-shop (and, er, what's apparently the biggest second-hand bookshop in the country), we headed to the more modern Upnor, just up the river.

This is a very different sort of castle - and not really a castle at all what with not having had a lord or been a residence. This is a military fort. And not a brilliant one either; we watched an exciting, low-budget diorama explain how the Dutch had rolled up, sunk a few good English ships and stolen some others in 1667, all under the nose of Sam Pepys.

But there was lots of rooms to explore and steps to climb around, and S. and C. enjoyed themselves. They then dropped me back at Rochester station just in time for a train back home. Just time to write this up before the one with the maggots.