Good writing

This is one of those blog entries where, by putting down something here, I can stop boring the pants of every poor soul in real life. I seem, for example, to have had the same pitched battle about this some half-a-dozen times while in Swansea. So apologies if you have heard it before, and apologies if you feel your eyeballs being fried by red-hot rant and spittle.

(Yes, it’s also one I’ve written on before. But it’s not like you’re paying for this stuff anyway, is it?)

Also, this is something I have to consider daily, what with it being My Job. I am all too aware that the vast body of the human species giveth not a shit. If that’s you, you can go about your business. Move along. These are not the droids you’re looking for.

Bad writing is nothing to do with punctuation.
There, I have said it. And I am all too aware that many people disagree. I have met people – and even otherwise respect some of them – who think well of Lynn Truss’s “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”.

Ignoring its contradictions, its smug tone, its not having an index despite supposedly being a reference book for those involved in writing, the Big Sin of “Eats…” is that it assumes meaning is all in the apostrophes. It argues that if we don’t put our plurals and possessives in the right places, no one will get what we mean.

But the shop windows and market stalls that the book so hilariously points its gnarled and withered fingers at surely beg to differ. The meaning of “new potatoe’s” is clear enough to attract the shoppers, even if it’s not technically correct. The sky does not fall on our heads because of it, and the stall holders’ trade cannot be seen to suffer.

Bad punctuation can be annoying, but there are other, direr sins in the sphere of scribbling with which to get all angry.

Bad writing is not being understood.
As we have seen before, George Orwell wrote as far back as 1946 that in any of these grammatical, syntactic, punctuational quandaries, we should “let meaning choose”.

We should be clear, we should be concise and we should get our meaning across vividly. All other considerations follow, so long as we are understood.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t bother at all with apostrophes. As a professional scribbler, grammar is one of the things I have to Get Right. Inconsistency is distracting even if it doesn’t warp the meaning of a given clause.

What bothers me, though, is the special attention often given to this one, minor aspect of scribblin’.

Hung-up on a comma
As Truss herself admits, there are no hard and fast rules to this stuff anyway. Some nineteenth-century publications help us see how our conventions are governed by fashion. Truss gives the example of some nineteenth-century prose where every other word is followed by a comma. But there are books where colons and semi-colons are always preceded with a space, or where words like “bloke” and “gent” are italicised for their strangeness.

So while there are conventions of use (a comma is a pause not a breathing space, for example), these are not set in stone. Rather than Truss providing the rule for use, she presents a rule, based on her own personal bias.

In my work, the arguments about punctuation I’ve sat through are often less about something being more helpful or clear, as about defending someone’s grasp of the “rule”. If I had an Asterix book for every time someone said, “But I was taught….”, I’d probably be up to the Mansions of the Gods.

I don’t share some people’s delight in misplaced apostrophes, and the Facebook group damning those who use “you’re” instead of “your” beshudders me with fear (because I do that all the time, first draft). It’s ironic that Truss says punctuation is a matter of courtesy, since she then discourteously mocks all those lesser-schooled persons who so obviously get it wrong.

More importantly, the arguments I’ve witnessed have got so caught up in whether the singular possessive should be followed by an “s”, even when the word ends “s” or “z”, that they entirely ignore whether the average reader will understand what the sentence is getting at.

In this way, punctuation can all too be too attentive to small details, ignoring the important, bigger picture and so of no practical or moral value to anyone.

“What, like the Alpha Course?” some wags might say. Wholly unfairly, of course.

Clarity rules
Orwell argues for simplicity, concise construction and fresh lucidity of image. This plain style makes prose compelling and ensures against muddiness of thought – from the writer as well as the reader.

Likewise, the precise use of words can lend greater meaning to our writing. But too often readers do not need to worry about the difference between, for example, jealousy and envy.

(Strictly speaking, you are envious of something not in your possession, and guard jealously something that is. But the two are used pretty interchangeably.)

There are rules for clarity of writing – and ones we ought to learn at school. The Dangerous Book for Boys says there are nine kinds of word in any sentence: noun; verb; adverb; adjective; pronoun; conjunction; article; preposition; interjection. But it would be more useful to say that most sentences have one purpose.

Sentences describe where things are (in relation to one another)
Language tells us where things are and what they are doing – often in relation to one another. To get all technical, we might talk of an “object” that affects or defines a “subject”.

The simplest proper sentence in English is three letters long: “I am”. That tells us what an object (me) is doing. We can then add more detail to that statement: “I am male” (adjective), “I am writing” (verb), “I am writing nonsense” (verb, adverb), “I am writing nonsense but later, oh yes, I’ll be going to dinner across the river with my mum” (showing off now).

This is all a way of mapping our reality, making sense of all the noise and activity around us so that we can better make our way through it, and direct our neighbours, too.

Good writing shows us where to go. The best writing even takes us there.

Do they laugh?
You can’t fake comedy. You tell a joke and if it’s funny people laugh.

In a lot of ways, writing is like telling a joke. You can tell the same joke in different ways, embellishing it to suit the audience in question. You might change the details of the set-up, or change the pace or choice of words. And if you’re telling the joke in person, you watch the person you’re telling, adjusting your performance in time to their response. All this is done to achieve the pay-off: that they laugh at your punchline.

Good writing also has a pay-off, but it’s not necessarily that the audience laughs. You might want them to cry, or to remember some salient detail (“This supermarket sells good food”, “That man cannot be trusted”).

You also shape your writing based on your audience’s responses. Often, though, you’re shaping it in advance, pre-empting and guessing at their responses.

Just as a comedian might have some smaller, wryer laughs in the lead-up to a big woof, you structure your writing to engage and excite an audience. When you’re telling a joke in person, you can gauge an audience’s interest, and throw in details and asides to keep them hanging on your words. In prose, you can combat the flagging of the crowd with “reversals” (i.e. plot twists) and cliffhangers.

The memory doesn’t cheat
A former boss told me a good one. “There are two types of presentation,” he said. “There’s the ones done on PowerPoint and the ones you remember.”

PowerPoint is all too often used to present complex and cluttered information, where the presenter is more concerned about getting all the information down than that the audience retain any salient points. Likewise, in the examples of bad writing that Orwell cites, the reader may read all the words but does not retain their meaning.

Good writing can contain bad grammar and punctuation, just as the best comedians need not wear a suit and tie. You remember good writing. You remember vivid details, choice turns of phrase, even the plot twists that came out of nowhere.

As much as “let meaning choose”, the rule might be “will my writing stick?”

Why not make some coffee

Two years ago, as the country got to grips with Dr Who being a Good Thing, the Mirror caught up with former Dr Who girl Anneke Wills. From 1966-7, Anneke had played Polly, sexy blonde it-girl companion to the first and second Doctors. But, as she told Gill Swain in the interview, Anneke’s own life was just as exciting, wild and scary as her travels in the TARDIS.

Self Portrait is part one of a two-part autobiography, and covers the first 30 eventful years. We see Anneke escape from a houseboat, and an eccentric, boho mum with abusive boyfriends, for a scholarship at RADA. This leads to her mixing with all kinds of slebs just as the 60s get going, and there’s raucous parties in Chelsea and all kinds of the wildest clothes.

Always, there’s a breathless, wide-eyed joie de vivre, a delight in name-dropping friends like Peter Cook and Sammie Davies Jnr and all the fab nights out. She’s also surprisingly frank about her days thieving coffee and school uniform, and about clumsy first sexual experience.

As the book progresses, there’s an acknowledgement that being a pretty girl is not in all ways a blessing. There’s accounts of people who won’t take no for an answer, of a respected actor following her home one night, and even of a bloke wanking behind his paper on the train.

“Men in the street, men on the buses, in the tubes, men at work, women’s envious glances. All this had led me to feel very self-conscious. Being pretty can be a lonely place. The men do numbers around you and so do the women.”

Anneke Wills, Self Portrait, p. 298.

I’m rather hoping times have changed. And Anneke herself speaks of how her own perspective was changed by The Female Eunuch. But she’s also funny about Germaine Greer, who she sees storming off a croquet pitch, muttering about the proper rules.

The sparkling narrative style also extends to the more horrific incidents. She’s frank about her abortion and the mess Anthony Newley left her in, and vividly, concisely depicts the sudden anger in her husband Michael Gough, when he pushes her off a balcony.

It’d be wrong to say Anneke recounts these events fondly, but part of the appeal of the book is how at peace she seems now about the things that have befallen her. Mostly. One event – which I won’t spoil – is particularly striking, and Anneke’s sudden switch to the second person to address the person in question really gave me shivers.

The chief appeal, then, is how much it feels like Anneke addresses you directly, like you’re sat with her in a cosy pub, and the stories get wilder and more confessional the more you get through your drinks. It’s intimate, lively and fun so it’s like you’ve been best mates with her for years. Which is probably why I’m chummily calling her “Anneke” here, when I only spoke to her for moments as she scribbled in my book.

Droo fans may complain that the book only covers Droo in one chapter, but each of Polly’s stories gets a mention (though not that very fine short story where post-Doctor Polly goes for a new job). I think the book really benefits from putting that one role in the context of her other work and life.

Another criticism is the copy editing, or lack thereof. This is the first effort from the small-press Hirst Books, and it’s a beautiful production (fantastic cover, by the way) and packed full of exclusive photos. Yet it could really have done with someone agreeing a format for paragraphs and italics, and checking some of the spellings. Every now and then there were asides and paragraphs that could have been snipped out.

This, though, is a minor quibble because it’s such an engaging read. Far more important that it’s an engaging story than the n- and m-dashes are consistent. I hared through it on a train and then couldn’t put it down later that evening.

My chief complaint, then, is that the end comes so quickly, just as she seems to be turning her life around. I am very eager to hear more.

We all fall down

Just back from a weekend in Sheffield with family to find plenty of actual and potential offers of that there scribbling in by inbox. Which is good as on Thursday I learnt that the three-month gig that’s lasted nearly three whole years is finally coming to an end. At the same time, I’m well into my final production and editorial duties for Big Finish.

Spent Saturday and Sunday afternoons trekking up and down different bits of the Burbage valley and its environs, trampling bracken and weasling through the huge rocks. Nattered and climbed trees and braved a strange ginger cake called Parkin, and discovered we were just a short drive from the village of Eyam (pronounced “Eem”), which I’d been reading about on the train up.

Year of Wonders is based on the events in Eyam of 1665-6. When the first cases of bubonic plague are detected in the village, the local vicar Mompellion convinces the population not to flee. Instead of spreading the disease even further, they will wait it out. Those who agree to this are slowly picked off by the horrific symptoms – two thirds of them are to die. But for Anna Frith, young widow and household help to Mompellion, this terrible suffering and loss will also transform her life…

It’s a gripping page-turner, and Geraldine Brooks is good at supplying enough detail that readers can follow the development and spread of the disease through flea-infested clothing, while the characters never quite make that same connection. Like watching Casualty, we’re glued to finding out which of the characters we’ve just met are to meet grisly ends. Like Casualty, for all there’s a moral dimension to the suffering and social breakdown, there’s also a horrid randomness to the infection and death, which spares neither good nor innocents.

As well as the plague, there’s witch-hunts and the perils of lead-mining, as well as a gravedigger who starts burying those as yet not dead. This packing-in of incident can make the book feel overly contrived at times. And for all Brooks draws strong and memorable characters, and deftly convinces us of the intrigues and scandals of a small community, the cowardly toffs who flee for their lives are too obvious and uncomplicated villains.

Also felt the final section, after the plague, a little too extraordinary, with sudden revelations and reversals that didn’t really fit the cosy, claustrophobic catastrophe of the main part. “This book is a work of fiction inspired by the true story,” begins the author’s afterword, and I felt the novel maybe changed too much of the wondrous-enough reality to fit the convenience and structure of its plot. It’s an absorbing and well-constructed read, but less successful the more it is not true.

We visited the Church of St Lawrence, whose plague display inspired the novel, and passed the cottages that tell you which families lived in them and how many of them died. We poked our fingers into the round holes of the boundary stone, once filled with coin to pay for food from those beyond the quarantine line, the holes filled with vinegar to kill the plague seed that might be attached to the coin.

Home on the 2.27 today, passing the wonky, twisty spire at Chesterfield on the way back to the nearly-done space-age refit of St Pancras Station. Having swapped a plethora of top facts with cousin A. all weekend, was pleased to hear a fellow passenger explain to their spawn how Queen Boudicca and her Iceni pals had bitch-slapped the Romans right where we was shlepping.

Cat portents

Snot and sore throat since last Tuesday is not the only sign that the nights are drawing in. The air bites briskly on the way into work, and the cat leeches our warmth at night.

I’ve been reading, researching and writing these last few days, mostly for some on-spec projects that I’ve been meaning to get to for ages. The cold may also be my body reacting to the fact that for the first time in maybe as much as three years I don’t have a pressing deadline. What a giddily light and airy world it can be. However do any of you cope?

Yesterday, we met up with A. and her new beau J., who have been visiting from New Zealand. We lunched on burgers (in the kiwi style, with fried egg and beetroot), got a tour round the fun old stuff in the Petrie Museum (for which I’ve been doing some of this ‘ere research), and then fell into the Birkbeck student bar, where five drinks were less than ten quid.

The Dr was able to join us having reached a good point in her own book-writing efforts – I’ve chapters to edit on the train tomorrow, as I make my way to Swansea. Plan is not to be part of the official convention, but rather part of the fringe. That is, in the bar.

Have heard from the best mate, as he storms through the Russian railway, while a colleague heard I’ll be in Sheffield next week and tantalised me with talk of Eyam. So next week I shall be reading a book about it.

"Shooting history in the foot"

I’ve enjoyed Jon Snow’s often jokey Snowmail preludes to each evening’s Channel 4 News, which are often funnier, more insightful and more to the point than the various BBC journalists’ blogs. Then there’s Snow’s terrible taste in stripy, brightly coloured ties, his ever-present bike and the occasional scandalised tabloid front page. Usually because he’s beaten them to a salacious scoop.

But that was about all I knew about him, really. So I wasn’t sure what to expect of his memoirs, Shooting History. The paperback offers some intriguing pull-quotes. Denis MacShane of the Independent calls him,

“a modern-day George Orwell”

while Matthew Parris offers the rather back-handed compliment that,

“when it dawns on the reader how extremely anti-Establishment Jon Snow’s views are, one’s respect for his impartiality as a broadcaster only grows.”

The book starts with Snow’s comfortable childhood, the son of the head of a public school (and later Bishop of Whitby), and he’s a better chorister than scholar. He’s brief but surprisingly frank about near-abuse and early sexual encounters, but it’s his year as a VSO in Uganda that really makes an impact, followed by an anti-apartheid sit in at Liverpool Univeristy, flunking out of college and three years hard graft for a drugs shelter. There’s something of the radical zealot about this character-forming period, like having realised he’s been one of the privileged ones he’s desperate to make amends.

Snow rather comes to journalism by accident, but the political zeal is vital to the kind of journalist he becomes. There’s a terrific tension between the imperative to report objectively and professionally and his own deep-rooted desire to act. There are times meeting Idi Amin or other dictators when he’s aware he could physically attack them, even kill them… His horror at Europe and America’s various colonial and militaristic projects (for all his evident love of the countries and people) is born from the simple, evident proposition that they’re not playing fair.

In effect, Snow’s been right there in the midst of some of the key events and with the key people of recent decades, and this is an insightful modern history. But for all the big stuff about wars and world leaders, there’s plenty of telling small details. On pp. 74-5 his bicycle gets him to a scoop long before his stuck-in-traffic rivals, and later the bike astounds his colleagues in Washington DC. There’s mention of his influential friends – lawyers and politicians of the crusading bent – and the effect his thrill-seeking wanderlust has on his family life. These, too, are dealt with briefly and frankly, and I can see why the Independent might liken this plain style to Orwell.

There is, though, more good humour than in Orwell’s reportage, and a delight at the absurd.

“Geoffrey Howe, still Foreign Secretary, once told me how Mrs Thatcher, who rarely took a holiday, found herself, with her husband Denis, on a five-day break in a small town in Austria. By some ghastly coincidence, the Kohls were at a hotel nearby. She decided she’d best nip trouble in the bud, and sent word to the Chancellor suggesting a casual meeting. He replied that he could not possibly find time to see her, being too tied up with work commitments. That afternoon, she and Denis took a stroll, and there, three streets from their own hotel, was the substantial figure of Kohl sitting happily with his wife Hannelore and a solitary security guard in the sun outside a café, devouring a vast cream bun.”

Jon Snow, Shooting History, pp. 283-4.

The villainous Eliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies says that the most important question for a journalist to answer is why. Snow’s great achievement here is to interlink the wars and world leaders he’s encountered, joining up the dots to explain how we get where we are now. He shows how the mess made of Africa by withdrawing European colonial powers provided a breeding ground for terror. He was there on the ground in Grenada to see the Reagan administration wilfully ignoring the nonsensical elements of its intelligence to pursue a reckless, aggressive war.

“It was one of the very rare occasions on which America took not a single journalist into war with her. Ostensibly the aim of the invasion was to ‘rescue’ the American medical students from the annexe at the bottom of the runway. Five thousand US troops were sent on the mission. Instead of hitting the bunkers that didn’t exist, they attacked the wrong building, a mental hospital, killing patients. Resistance was almost non-existent, but that did not prevent three US Black Hawk helicopters from crashing into each other while they assaulted another building which turned out to be completely empty. At the end of it all, after a couple of hours of ‘fighting’, sixty Cuban workers, twenty-four Grenadians and nineteen American troops lay dead. Most of the medical students complained that that they didn’t want to be rescued at all.”

Ibid., p. 221.

In the final chapter, Snow draws these many threads together into a crusading manifesto – one aimed at the broadcast media as well as political leaders. He is angry at the media’s shrinking horizons and the failure of the North of the world to engage with and comprehend the concepts and imagery – and grievances – of the South.

“This is a time for nations and peoples to come together, a time to rekindle the United Nations dream and let it reflect more honestly a fairer new world order. But the national politicians don’t want to talk about it, and the media is relieved – for it is the stuff of boredom. If the fashion for war against a noun is with us, why not a ‘war against ignorance’? We have an obligation to our children and our children’s children to break out of our self-centred lethargy and to engage – not as we did before, extracting whatever we felt was worth taking – but in enabling everyone to share in whatever is productive and enriching for all of us. If we do not, assuredly the resentful and dispossessed will come for us with greater and greater ferocity. They will not come in an overwhelming Second World War kind of way, but in never-ending stabs that render our developed daily lives more and more insecure.”

Ibid., p. 378.

We must ask the difficult questions and face the difficult truths. As he says, the attacks of 9/11 were not, “just a band of disaffected educated Saudis. These people are emotionally succoured and backed by great numbers in the world who see no hope, who have nothing to lose, and who think ‘America had it coming’.”

It rests on us to ask why.

Keep it secret, keep it safe

“It’s like Allo! Allo!, but without the laughs,” said Monster Maker as he tried to explain to me Secret Army.

“Oh,’ I said. “So just like Allo! Allo!”

Secret Army (1977-79) was one of a number of highly acclaimed BBC telly dramas based on the Second World War. Thought up and produced by the same gang what did Colditz, this is about the adventures of the Belgian “Lifeline”, a top secret network that rescued crashed Allied airman and got them back to fighting Nazis again. For several wise people I know, it’s the best thing ever on telly.

In the first series, Jan Francis plays Lisa – codename Yvette – the brave young zealot running Lifeline. She works through Brussels café le Candide run by the charming Albert Fourier (Bernard Hepton). Albert’s crippled wife is bed-ridden, but aware that Albert’s carrying on an affair with waitress Monique (Angela Richards). Lifeline also gets help from teenage waitress Natalie (Juliet Hammond-Hill) and vegetable-seller / radio-operator Alain (Ron Pember), plus Doctor Keldermans (Valentine Dyall). There’s also English agents, old ladies and helpful peasants along the way.

It’s a brutal series where nobody is safe, the work of saving some 800 airman taking a terrible toll. As the Germans continually point out, an airman being captured goes becomes a prisoner of war, but anyone helping them escape will be shot. So there’s plenty of chases across roof-tops and through the country, and some occasional firefights and explosions.

Pretty much every actor of the time is in it, plus several young faces yet to be names. Matthew Sweet and I invented a game for watching it, where you get one point for naming an actor, two points for naming something else they’ve been in, and five points for their role in Doctor Who. The Black Guardian’s a regular, and so is Doctor Skagra, and there’s roles for the Security Chief from The War Games, Griffiths from Attack of the Cybermen and even the boss of the Krillitane.

It’s also odd to see Klinkerhoffen, von Strohm and Gruber from Allo! Allo! in it. But also odder to imagine anyone being sold “Let’s do Secret Army as a sitcom”. Did someone really respond, “Yes, that’s a good idea…”?

Like a lot of old drama (and maybe Casualty now) the pathos comes from watching people dashed on the rocks of ill-fortune. Yes, like Casualty, we can sometimes spot which characters are going to die from the moment they’re introduced. But other characters, like (muto) Stephen Yardley’s Max and (my friend) Paul Shelley’s Major Bradley, are both sudden and nasty surprises.

Likewise, Yvette is suddenly killed off in the first episode of season two, just as le Candide becomes a posh restaurant and changes the whole dynamic of the series. This means that it can cater for the occupying forces, so there’s more interaction between the goodies and the German villains. These are lead by Clifford Rose’s Kessler, head of the Gestapo, and Michael Culver’s Brandt as the firm-but-fair head of the Luftwaffe. The series also explores the Germans’ relationships, and offers a sympathetic view of the ordinary German soldiery, as separate from the Nazi sadists.

Which is odd, because Andy Priestner’s notes and the DVD extras tell us that Clifford Rose was the one the audience went for. Perhaps that’s because the ladies like a villain, or because even he is made sympathetic through his relationship with Hazel McBride’s Madelaine. She didn’t, though, continue into the dubious-sounding spin-off which sees us rooting for Kessler on the run.

In fact, a hell of a lot of the series is about the complexities of what’s often portrayed elsewhere as a simple war of good versus evil. Lifeline has to make tough decisions and sacrifice people, just to protect themselves, while the Germans are often kind and caring people, just as hurt by the ongoing war. The fact that the series can so ruthlessly, unexpectedly despatch its characters also adds to the sense that we don’t know what’s coming next.

Season Two also sees a lot of stock footage mixed in with the action, tying the events and characters of the drama into the real, historical record. I wondered how much more effective that would have been at the time, so soon after The World At War.

The second season ends with news of the Allied invasion, and the prospect of liberation. But this in fact causes more complications in Season Three, as it becomes harder to run Lifeline with the roads, trains and phones out of action, and with Terrence Hardiman’s Reinhardt breathing closer down their necks. What’s more, the communists see Albert as the enemy, and the rest of Brussels see him as a conspirator. It becomes a race against time: will Albert and his friends be lynched before the Allies can explain their efforts.

The four episodes leading up to the end (bar the final episode) take place on consecutive days as the Allies get into Brussels. There’s a sudden change of pace and loose ends get tied up very quickly. There are still some last-minute deaths for regular characters, but there’s also a sudden romance and rescue that I hadn’t seen coming at all. Calling the final episode “The Execution” had me thinking it would go a whole other way entirely. Good herring there, fellas!

I’d heard something of the events of the penultimate episode from my parents, who remembered the series fondly. The bit that stuck in their mind was Monique having her head shaved by the Brussels mob, for being an adultress and collaborator. Is it wrong to be disappointed that it’s only an extra who gets the grade 2 treatment? I felt that this rescue and Monique’s subsequent adventures were too contrived a happy ending – even if the final scene of the series plays again into the complexity of everyone’s relationships.

And then suddenly it’s all over. A never screened, never available final episode is described in the DVD notes, reuniting the characters in 1969, while Albert and Natalie had cameos in the spin-off Kessler. And there are details of a CD of singing on Andy Priestner’s website.

Is it the best thing ever, then? The structure’s a bit odd in places so that suddenly whole long plot lines are over. Sometimes it’s pretty hysterical (“Plague!!!”), and I’d have liked some more funny bits to balance the general misery. But it’s a gripping, intelligent series full of fantastic characters and detail, and really rather special.

There's so little else occupying my head

Devon drizzled with occasional sunshine. Salcombe conspired to have 45 degree slops whichever route you took, but is a pretty, posh-shopped little town. I drank a lot of the local Tinners and answered the same questions from friends-of-the-parents over and over again: living in south London; married for three years; yes, writing pays; no, we don’t have kids yet.

Met the brother of a film star – one I sort of interviewed once – who showed remarkable patience at being always introduced as this-is-Film-Star’s-brother. We bonded over a love of food, and how a bit of exercise keeps the gorging in balance.

Also saw some of an uncle and his family who I’d not seen in nearly 10 years. We have vowed to do better in future, and I hope to get up to see him next month. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite avoid telling my all-grown-up cousin that the last time I’d seen her she’d been toddling. Gather she got that a lot.

Ate and drank and chatted and drank. Then on Sunday to see some of the Dr’s family, who live either end of a steep hill in Cornwall. Ate five Cornish pasties, two lots of trifle and a couple of hefty saffron cake wedgess. Back to Devon for pub tea and more beer, but too knackered to make a bash at the big brother’s which started at about 10 pm.

Wended our way slowly home yesterday, with a brief stop at Totnes castle. It’s a fairly bare, round keep with commanding views over the town towards the curving river. Schoolkids dashed about and shouted, none of them very interested in how a round keep is harder to undermine, or in the politics England post-Hastings. Must admit the extant shell is not the most exciting castle I’ve ever been to.

Having left our nice B&B at 10 in the morning, we finally got home just gone six. Was meant to be eating sushi in town for seven to celebrate J’s latest birthday. Wussed out in favour of an early night… and so was around to help L when she turned up to heft her many boxes and bags from our attic.

Back to working today. Plenty to be caught up on – last niggles on the Inside Story and the boss’s notes on The Pirate Loop. Has been a fun and long-time-coming break, but I don’t half feel like I now need a holiday…

Run Simon Run

A long day of chasing about madly yesterday – and my limbs are still not recovered from wild disco at a wedding on Saturday. It has been too long since I last did “dancing” (in quotes ‘cos of my own unique “style”). But cor, it wasn’t half fun.

First off, an appointment at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, which has been confirmed as the venue of a special signing for the Benny Inside Story on Saturday 3 November.

I’ll be there, as will Lisa Bowerman (Benny), Rebecca Levene (editor of many of Benny’s books, and of the forthcoming Missing Adventures), Nicholas Briggs (my boss and the voice of the Daleks and Cybermen), plus Benny regulars Steven Wickham and (I hope) Sam Stevens. More details to come, but put 3 November in your diaries.

After a coffee and discussion with one of my bosses, I chased down to the station to have my picture taken by LB Photography. This is mostly for the back-flap of the Inside Story and partly just ‘cos I is vain. Sat under a hedge just out of the sunshine and did as I was told – leaning forward and raising my chin and other tricks of the trade. After, there was calzone, gossip and a search for other photos.

Then hauled myself up to what used to be a pub not far from one end of Mark Brunel’s famous tunnel. Worked with clever designer Alex Mallinson on amends to the Inside Story until 9 pm, by which time mine eyes were glazing over. Home by nearly ten to watch a draft music video Codename Moose had directed on Saturday. It features some pretty impressive fisticuffs, the same Alex Mallinson leaping over the bar in a pub (I expect he practices at home) and my friend O. being a bruiser.

Last proofing tomorrow; another long day. And then fleeing to Darkest Devon for my parents’ ruby wedding bash. They were of course married the same day as The Tomb of the Cybermen part 3.

"Simon? Oh - he's rubbish!"

The third issue of free Doctor Who fanzine Shooty Dog Thing is now online.

It's packed with all kind of Bernice Summerfield goodness. As well as interviews with Lisa Bowerman, Stephen Fewell and, er, me, you get a potted history of Benny's adventures, some reviews and all kinds of good stuff. And I love the cover.

Plenty more fun to come in honour of Benny's 15th birthday. Watch this space.

The philosophy of numbers

(For those keeping score at home, this is my 500th post.)

The Steep Approach to Garbadale, the almost-new book by Iain Banks, is like a comfy old pair of trainers, an effortlessly easy, lively, funny read for the train up to Blackpool. I’m somewhat relieved by this having read some mixed reviews – especially one in Private Eye which seemed to think this effortlessness not only easy but contemptible.

Alban McGill doesn’t want to be found by his family. But cousin Fielding tracks him down because he needs his help at their gran’s 80th birthday. The family’s made its fortune from a board game called Empire!, and the gathering will see a vote on whether or not to sell the game and family name to an American corporation…

The inside flap of the book calls this Banks’s “most compelling novel since The Crow Road” – as if that’s his Scary Monsters, and as if he’s not since produced anything good. It certainly has a lot of similarities to The Crow Road, as the black sheep of a large and eccentric Scottish family falls for the wrong, posh girl, delves into the family history and unearths a terrible secret. Structurally, this new book is perhaps a little stronger – I always felt The Crow Road’s murder mystery was a bit tacked on.

Yet I also spotted the main twist of this one well before halfway, and so found the ending a little anti-climactic. But importantly, like The Crow Road (and the Banks-thieving Dr Who and the Also People), the plot as such is more a distraction from the book’s real brilliance – exploring people’s lives as they meet up, have drinks, fall in love… It’s often at its best, and funniest and most insightful, when you don’t feel anything important is going on. Fielding trying to impress his elderly aunties with PowerPoint, or a night out on too many drugs. VG struggles to explain the philosophy of numbers.

There’s also lots of things that reminded me of other books by Banks. Games are models of morals and society as in Complicity and The Player of Games. Tango’s bad grammar as he narrates parts of the story are a bit like Bascule in Feersum Enjinn. Alban and cousin Haydn in Paris made me think of The State of the Art, while the suicide made me think of Look to Windward. This is not a criticism, rather an acknowledgment that Banks returns to certain themes; it wouldn’t be a criticism of John le Carre to say his new book’s about spies and big money.

Another Banks trait is the effort to get the zeitgeist. There’s mention of Live Aid, 9/11, Iraq and the Boxing Day Tsunami, and a sense of how these things – some experienced first hand, some experienced as news on the telly – affect and change people’s lives. It’s a way of blending the personal experiences of the characters with the broader experiences of the reader, making the characters more real and convincing.

This sort of thing’s at its best when it also shows us something about the characters. Alban split up with a girl over his (initial) support for the Iraq war. But too often there are glib bits of politics that come not from the mouths of the characters but feel like the author ranting.

"The USA, perhaps not surprisingly, proved reluctant to accept Empire!; sales were miserable. Henry tried a version of the game based on a map consisting only of the contiguous states of the US, but that did little better. Finally he bought up a small printing firm in Pittsburgh so that the box and board could each bear the legend Made in the USA, altered the map of the world on which Empire! was based so that the USA was centred – the boundaries of the board cutting through the heart of Asia – renamed the game Liberty!, changed nothing else and watched the dollars roll in."

Iain Banks, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, p. 130.

This is just one example; there’s also a history of the 20th century given in the names of different permutations of the game, and a thing about how being right-wing is a sign of a lack of imagination. This is a shame because it detracts from the richness of detail and character that makes the book so engaging.

In fact, some of Banks’s best work is where he tells a story from a point of view he doesn’t agree with. The utopian Culture of his sci-fi is often seen through the eyes of those it has not won over and – as I argued in my academic paper nearly a decade ago – most of the Culture stories contrast the Culture with other societies, showing aspects that are both better and worse. Complicity, likewise, has a main character who we empathise with yet never like.

This hectoring aside, there’s some great insights throughout the book. I especially liked the line about readers of science fiction not being taken in by sweeping statements like “the end of history”. It’s extremely good at evoking the embarrassment and thrill of first love and naughties, and the pressures and delights of a sprawling great family. For all it is funny and lively, it’s also quite a melancholic book, the potential sale of the family business a symbol of everything else that’s been lost.

I’d been nervous about the book based on other people’s reactions, but The Steep Approach to Garbadale was simply a pleasure to read. And now I am hopping with excitement about the forthcoming Matter.

"Had he said the right thing [...]? He'd tried to say what he felt, what he believed. He'd probably been too political, too self-indulgent, but when else was he going to get a chance to say stuff like that to an audience willing to listen?"

Ibid., p. 357.

Deliverance

So the badger-pirates have been delivered. I've heard the SFX mix of The Final Amendment and the pre-title sequence for The Wake, and yesterday unearthed a secret cachet of photos from early Benny recording sessions. Also been going through my logs for sketches and roughs and all sorts of oddments, so the Inside Story will have plenty of previously unseen stuff. And there is proofing of that and Missing Adventures, and something eventful in the works...

But damn knackered. Am away this weekend to the north. Can't remember when I last had two whole consecutive days off. Am planning on reading the not-quite-new Iain Banks. And catching up on sleep.

And then, and then... Well, there's some on-spec stuff I have been meaning to do forever. And How The Doctor Changed My Life to edit, in time for... er, sort of June 2008. Which means I might have time to blog again shortly. Sorry. But you must have know it couldn't last...

Expletive deleted

Long story short: buy product.

The Big Finish website now boasts the exciting cover artwork for Bernice Summerfield Jason Kane audio "The End of the World". It's meant to be out this month, but a vital member of the cast was only available right at the last minute, so it went to press this week. Due back early part of September.

Of course I'm going to think so, but golly it's worth waiting for.

Listened to the final version myself only last night, and am a bit dead chuffed. Dave Stone's script delivers exactly what I asked for - a definitive Jason Kane, the character first seen in the 1996 novel Death and Diplomacy and variously used and abused ever since. This one sees Jason grappling with both his past and future, and even though I'd read the script and been at the recording, it didn't half give me goosebumps.

Kudos to all the talented folks who made it happen: Lisa Bowerman directing, Stephen Fewell starring alongside an exemplary cast, and Matthew Cochrane making some really rather fabby music. I've just transferred the bonus Track 18 on to my bulging iTunes.

But it was weird to hear the story segue into trailers for the next two plays - The Final Amendment and The Wake. Because after that, for the first time in 15 plays, I'm not going to have been involved in What Benny Did Next...

Individuals and their families

The thing about reading and writing for a living is that it eats into reading for pleasure. At one time it was unthinkable to still be reading the same book two days in a row. I first read Excession with unheard of extravagance – and took almost a week.

Now the things that don’t have to be read or edited or proofed get carried around in my satchel for getting on for months. I’ve found niches for pleasurable reading, too, where work can be forgot. So I’ve got Tarzan in our bathroom and Bloody Foreigners for the train.

The latter is a quite incredible history of immigration to Britain, and is very recommended. Since people first stumbled upon this woody, rainy island they have fought with them that followed. Some groups have been more fought off than others, but as a general rule it’s the same depressing story as you get from the Princelet Street Museum; each generation of immigrants persecuted by the kids of the last lot.

Robert Winder’s story is engaging and full of facts and telling details. Often he follows the stories of specific individuals and their families, their struggles to do better and to provide for a future. But I think his real strength is in tying together so many different groups and details into a history we already know.

It doesn’t come as news, for example, that the UK has always been a mongrel nation. The first recorded black people in the UK were Roman soldiers, here to quell the savage natives.

Another one we should all know is that migration works two ways. Emigration not only balances out the numbers, but affects what it means to assimilate. British ex-pats in their second homes in Spain expect the food and booze and language just like it is at home.

Nor is it radical to note the positive effects of immigration: cheap labour in the first instance, but cultural and economic boons that have lasted centuries. Winder explains the beginnings of the vindaloo and Marks and Spencer, Bombay Mix and music. And this all adds weight to his argument that those prepared to give up their homes and go live somewhere else often have very pressing reasons to do so; that those with the get up and go to start up somewhere foreign are exactly the kind of ambitious lot we want. It occurred to me that Norman Tebbitt’s famous reply to the Brixton riots is a call for economic migration.

“I grew up in the 1930s with an unemployed father. He did not riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he went on looking until he found it.”

Norman Tebbit

Despite the many and varied successes, Bloody Foreigners is no comfort read. It’s rather a history of national stupidity and meanness. The horrific increase in violence and intolerance in the last hundred years is particularly disturbing. Events from the 70s and 80s are particularly appalling, with institutional racism effectively condoning the violence of the National Front. It is little solace that our record was better than much of Europe.

A few times I’ve tutted at generalisations. For all he critiques the “establishment” tarring a whole race with the behaviour of a few individuals, Winder does use his specific examples to make sweeping statements about large groups. I'm not sure how else you could tell a history like this, but there have been times when I felt him guilty of the same "them" and "us" mentality he otherwise pulls apart.

There’s also a couple of not-quite-right bits. He describes the Vikings as “the horn-helmeted tribe from across the Baltic” on p. 26. As well as the relativism of seeing the Vikings as barbaric pillagers, they also never wore horns.

But these are minor quibbles with an extremely engaging, insightful book. Winder draws few conclusions himself, rather letting the story tell itself. But there’s an implicit liberal agenda of compassion and tolerance, perhaps best put when he explains the word “xenophobia”:

“The word is mostly defined as a nationalistic hatred of anything foreign, but at its root is the Greek word xenos, meaning ‘guest’. So xenophobia is, literally, a fear of guests. This does indeed seem a distinctive national terror. Guests might eat all the food! They might outstay their welcome! For a people whose bungalows were their castles, the thought of unexpected visitors, the inconvenience of having to lay an extra place at supper, was enough to make anyone turn pale.”

Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners, pp. 326-7.

The aqueduct?

Because of the showbiz, may-fly lives we lead, the Dr and I rarely follow TV shows as they’re going out. We didn’t watch all of Droo live, for example, and sometimes were not even in the same country. There are come colleagues who think this behaviour desperately, dangerously wrong.

So, while the second series of Rome comes to an end on the telly, we have just got to the end of the first lot on DVD. And find ourselves bothered that we’ve got a whole three weeks before we can see the next bit.

The Roman republic is falling on its arse, because of soldier called Julius Caesar. He insists he’s only being a tyrant to get Rome back on its feet. At the same time as all the politics, we follow two lowly Roman soldiers, Titus Pollo and Lucius Vorenus, as they struggle with everyday life.

I’d watched the first episode and bits of some more when it was on the telly, but it had failed to win me over. The writing seemed all gruff and joyless, the attention on the look of the thing. Sudden and shocking naked bits and violence were less titillating as excluding. And I was probably working at the time, and not paying due attention to the story.

Some learned colleagues explain that the first telly episodes had been edited - the BBC favouring less talky explaining in favour of more stabbing and bums. And I also think it’s a series you need to stick with to get into.

This is also true of I, Claudius, the BBC’s series from the 1970s which we watched some time ago. With that, I felt it didn’t really get going until Master No. Five Derek Jakobi was appearing in the flashbacks as well (the first episode or two just set the scene, and Claudius appears as a nipper). Once he’s commenting on stuff we watch him do himself, critiquing and juxtaposing the story, it all becomes much more absorbing.

I, Claudius also had a lot of sudden, shocking violence and nude bits – though a telly generation more tame. And it also worked hard to get through all the big history while also keeping in all the gossip. The Dr provided commentary on both that and Rome, explaining the various sources. I found I came to Rome with a bit more knowledge of my own, too, having studied both Asterix and Shakespeare.

I noticed that the Gaulish leader Vercingeterox looks less like he does in the comic and much more like the mulletted Dying Gaul (the statue that’s the spitting image of nineteenth century classicist Adolf Furtwangler). And I’m sure that Caesar is meant to have been bald.

The Dr was horrified by the look of Egypt, which would have Edward Said spinning in his sarcophagus. She liked the way that rumours were started – for example why there are accounts Julius did it with Augustus. We also marvelled at the scale and excitement, and the clever way it mixed the epic story of the city and empire with everyday people’s lives.

Still think it could have been funnier, though. And some of the dialogue clanked.

Also, I can’t quite reconcile myself to the fact that Max Pirkis is playing the young Brian Blessed.

Three books at once

I have been busy with badger-faced pirates and so not mucking around here. It also doesn't help that my computer is acting up.

Sometimes it doesn't start up properly, and you just get a waiting blue screen. Sometimes it does start up, and then the keyboard doesn't work. Sometimes it starts up, the keyboard works, and then the Internet doesn't do anything. Oh it connects, and it says it is doing something, but then nothing webwise loads up. Lost three and a half hours to that today, though I got some pirates written on a laptop. Arg.

Nimbos suggests it might be something to do with USB ports, since the keyboard and Internet both come in from them. So I have something to investigate the next time it falls over. Joy oh joy oh joy.

"Or could it be," I suggested, daring to imply that I have any idea, "that I'm still running Windows Millennium Edition?"

Nimbos considered carefully before explaining that I live in the Dark Ages. Have not let on that my keyboard comes with rubber keys.

Otherwise things progress. Spent an hour at Deej's taking pictures of his books and rummaging through his magazines. This will greatly help Alex as he zips along in finishing the Inside Story of Benny.

Speaking of which, I had a fun leaving do on Sunday to mark the end of my regime (though I've still two books and two audios to deliver, as well as the ones being pressed and published now). Somehow, completely accidentally, I managed to drink some beer.

Well, not exactly "some". Text message to the Dr from 01.22 says:

"I love you. Sorry. But you are quite good. Phwoar."

Ho hum.

But she is quite good, and today has word that her book is going to be published. More news on that as and when it is appropriate, but we have reason for opening fizz. Just think, both of us will now be tearing out hair out and swearing, rather than just me.

My brain hurt like a warehouse

It is five years today since I left full-time employment to leap aboard the kayak of freelancing. The me then, with his hair and cappucine and basement flat in Greenwich, wasn’t entirely sure it would all work out. And the hair and basement flat really didn’t. But the kayak is still going and things are, you know, quite good.

Blimey.

The Dr, who has been successfully kayaking for a year herself, and I are celebrating tonight with fish and chips and fizz. And then booking hols to LA and Australia.

Received my copies of Snapshots this morning, which includes my story "There’s Something About Mary". It owes something to an idea I had for a Doctor Who novel, which I sent the BBC a few months short of five years ago. But it owes something more to The Iron Giant. And the pop video Mary watches, that’s Gail Ann Dorsey in Bowie’s Dead Man Walking.

I’ve also received a copy of Malcolm Hulke’s Writing for Television, having been prompted by m’colleague Peter on my post about Harry Potter 7.

“If it’s a kids’ show, and the story includes a ship sinking at sea, save the ship’s cat.”

Malcolm Hulke, Writing for Television (1982 edition), p. 243.

Like free admission to a library

M kindly plus-oned me into a screening of The Bourne Ultimatum yesterday morning – on the basis that he’d not seen the first two Bourne outings and I might help with any questions. I was a bit giddy with excitement as we arrived in Leicester Square. The following contains some minor spoilers, but won’t give the game away. But no, Ian, there weren’t any lions.

The film picks up immediately from the end of The Bourne Supremacy with ex-assassin-on-the-run Jason wounded and in Moscow, having just fessed up to a girl. The police are after him, he’s in bad shape and it’s all a bit exciting. The fast-cutting, low-fi, hand-held look is just as from before, as is the fantastic music.

For newbies like M, there are flashbacks early on to what has gone before and a CIA board meeting where people explain the plots of the last two films to gnarly boss Scott Glenn. His, “You couldn’t make this stuff up,” is a bit awkward and knowing, but any newcomers are quickly up to speed.

The hook for this one is that the Guardian have got hold of the story. Yes, really. There’s exciting scenes of the Guardian offices as they fight they good fight against conspiracies. M, what knows those offices himself, found this especially funny.

Soon Jason is chasing the story himself, racing to collect clues about what he used to be a part of, while baddies try to eliminate the evidence. We dash quickly all across Europe: Turin, London, Paris, Madrid, the CIA merrily ignoring local laws and civil liberties as they struggle to keep hold of their secrets.

It’s as brutal and fast-paced and thrilling and smart as its predecessors, with Matt Damon using his brains as much as he uses martial arts, one man against hopeless odds. There’s some fun gags as he calls the police on his pursuers or turns up where they’re not looking. I am struggling not to say more, but note how it’s the women who help him and act as his conscience and the boys who use too much brute force.

So if you like the last two, you’ll be very happy. What’s more, the film has enough similar shots and situations to make it feel like this isn’t just another add-on to the franchise but part of a cohesive whole. That’s most obvious in the final scenes: the last lines from Bourne and then what happens next.

M not seen any of the previous two (I leant him them on DVD) and loved it too, though in the drizzle outside after he felt unconvinced by it as satire. I suggested, though, that this “it’s not the institution that’s at fault but some rogue elements within it” is no different from James Bond. I suppose there’s an argument to be made that this genre is all adventures with extremists.

Speaking of Bond, there’d been some speak last year that Casino Royale owed a great deal to Jason Bourne (though I’ve argued that it owes more to 24). So how would Bourne respond: would it break its winning formula in trying to up its game? No, it offers more of the same, only faster and more intense and with some bigger set-ups. (I also thought the rooftop chase in Tangiers reminiscent of The Living Daylights, though M. thought of the political Battle of Tangiers).

There are a small number of tiny niggles, too. Where does Bourne get his money from? How does he break into what should be such secure places? The film works hard to give Julia Styles a reason to be there, but it’s still a huge coincidence that she happens to end up in Bourne’s way again. Especially given what we learn about her past: yes, she might have reasons to be there, but that’s why her bosses would ensure she couldn’t be.

There’s also the customary British actor playing the villainous big cheese. At first I thought the bloke glimpsed in the flashbacks was an excuse to bring back Brian Cox, and wonder if Albert Finney got cast entirely for that reason.

Filmed at Pinewood, the film makes use of London’s own American actors – Von Statten and the US President from Doctor Who are in it, though I felt cheated there was no Mac McDonald. (Only this weekend M and I devised a game for watching Secret Army, where it’s one point for naming an actor, two for naming another role they’ve had, and five for who they played in some form of Doctor Who).

But anyway. I was buzzing all day after seeing it and am already booking to go again.

Why I can't walk on water

To the horror of politely brought-up ladies everywhere, I have been wearing shorts. Rest assured, they are long enough to hide my especially knobbly knees. Yet great heavens! It might be a few months late but it looks like it might be the summer.

Summer means lots of different things: the smell of cut grass is the most potent one for me, a sure sign we’d soon be allowed on to the field at break times, back in primary school. These days it more often means people asking if I’m enjoying the sunshine when they know I’ve spent all day working on a thing.

Today, incidentally, has seen 5,000 good words and so can be considered a success.

Also, summer means blisters from the not-quite flip-flops that I bought in the States on my honeymoon. The Dr had long been aghast at my being content to wear shorts with shoes and socks, and plotted with my newest auntie in Livonia to find me something else. So you know it’s the start of summer ‘cos my plates look like I’ve been crucified.

“Hah!” I said to the Dr yesterday when showing off my weeping stigmata. But she was not to be convinced that this is another example of the all-evil wrongitude of shoes. No, it is an excuse to buy more of them.

She speaks in whisper of Birkenstock.

Proof positive

A nice chap called Brax interviewed me this morning for the autumn edition of his finely named freezine, Shooty Dog Thing. M'colleagues have already been interviewed in the issues currently and freely available. I've seen the cover for the next one, and it is delicious.

Have agreed a final version of Missing Adventures, and just need to make the necessary changes and then it can go to lay-out. Also dared to wear shorts when going down to the production office to collect the first lay-outs of the Inside Benny Story. Alex Mallinson has done wonders. There's still plenty to do, but it looks marvellous, in all its 288-page stonking glory.

As well as gazing with lust at these first-proof pages, I have been quite busy. Have spoken to my mum and tried to call Italy, have been to Homebase and to the bank, have played a bit of Scrabulous on Facebook and done the washing up. And I went to the gym.

Also worked away on The Pirate Loop doing valid work. Yet, despite all I've written, it seems to have fewer words than it did this time yesterday. No, I don't understand either.

Blog of a nobody

I am surely too old for acne. But I seem to have caught a blinder recently, and one prominent on the bulb of my nose. The Dr has been morbidly fascinated by this and keeps peering at me up close. This, after three years of wedded ennui, is something quite out of character.

The spot has been cleaned and burst and cleaned again, but is now a livid red “o” of raw skin. And itchy.

“Maybe it’s not a spot at all,” suggested a colleague. “Maybe it’s cancer. Or small pox.”

Disquieted by this suggestion, I spent my lunch hour in the queue at the Post Office. The teacher in front of me fretted about whether she’d properly filled in her passport form.

“I’ve been teaching people how to fill in the same forms for years,” she told me. “But I never looked at the questions before.”

Eventually got to weigh my letters with Cashier #10. Excitingly, my change included a brightly shiny 5p piece, the first 2007 coin I’ve seen.

Am off to the Portrait Gallery’s posh upstairs bar tonight for a colleague’s leaving do. Our gift was getting a portrait of him hung in the pub where we lunch.

Otherwise the scrawling continues. Done lots, and am reasonably happy with it. And there are several very exciting things maybe in the offing. But I cannot speak of them any more than vaguely, hence the pooterish post.

Prevention of cruelty to monsters

There are monsters down my road. No, really.

Well, strictly speaking, there are monsters down my road, over the railway bridge, right, left, right again, left again and then sort of diagonally left round the artificial lake. But, for monsters, that’s pretty close. And I do go to visit them often.

Until five years ago, the monsters looked a bit shabby and uncared for, but a recent programme of repair has done them some good, and repaired the exposed strata of rocks that helped explain them in context. Excitingly, as of two days ago, they are now monsters with Grade 1 listing.

(I started writing this post two days ago, but things keep getting in the way.)

Anyway, this is a good thing.

The monsters are made of brick and concrete – the Victorian equivalent of CGI. They are fat and cumbersome and the iguanodon is wearing his thumb on his nose. They’re not dinosaurs, because we know better now about what dinosaurs looked like: Victorian palaeontologists only had scant evidence to guess from, and we’ve got a bit more to go on now.

The information boards nearby helpfully explain the differences between what Richard Owen – who supervised the monsters’ construction, coined the word “dinosaur” and wasn’t terribly lovely – thought and what palaeontologists now think today. Dinosaurs were really quick and slender, and in fact they didn’t die out. Instead their descendents are those feathered things cluttering up the sky.

(I have this vision of an avian Quatermass and the Pit, with an owlish Andre Morell explaining to the masses that in fact, “We are the dinosaurs.”)

The monsters are then a folly, a bold statement of ultimately not-quite-right thought. Cumbersome and somewhat cuddly, you could clearly out-walk them. I find them especially endearing because of that. And I’m glad the powers that are have come to agree.

Beacuse they ahhhhr!

The BBC's official Doctor Who website has announced details of three thrilling new Doctor Who novels, due to be published on 27 December. One of 'em is by me.

Doctor Who and the Pirate Loop
by Simon Guerrier

The Doctor's been everywhere and everywhen in the whole of the universe and seems to know all the answers. But ask him what happened to the Starship Brilliant and he hasn't the first idea. Did it fall into a sun or black hole? Was it shot down in the first moments of the galactic war? And what's this about a secret experimental drive?

The Doctor is skittish. But if Martha is so keen to find out he'll land the TARDIS on the Brilliant, a few days before it vanishes. Then they can see for themselves...

Soon the Doctor learns the awful truth. And Martha learns that you need to be careful what you wish for. She certainly wasn't hoping for mayhem, death, and badger-faced space pirates.

You can pre-order the book from Amazon. And really, also, you should.

Swiss Army flip flops

I had rather woefully underestimated how much work might be involved in the Benny Inside Story bibliography. Thought it would take me a morning and it's taken all weekend (and there's still a couple of details to check).

Still, that and sourcing pull-quotes and quotations to start each chapter means I've read the book over for the first time in just more than a month. And I'm pretty happy with it. Just as well, as it's well into lay-out and there's no time to change too much.

As reward for all that endeavour yestereve, I gadded across Stockwell to R. and C.'s housecooling. Stood out on their roof terrance drinking much Pimms and generally learning cool stuff. R's colleague Jo showed off some particularly good flip-flops, which have a bottle-opener embedded in the sole. Truly, we live in the future.

Taxi home at some point late, where me and the Dr bickered - to the great amusement of the driver. Despite eating bellinis and wild boar sausages on sticks all night, was rather in need of food. So did bacon and cheese and mushroom crumpets.

Woo

I have some depressingly clever friends.

Spent yesterday morning fighting badger-faced pirates and the afternoon laying out Benny. Mr Alex also showed me his rather exciting Dalek movie and film of him stinging spikes up his nose (which he has also shown Sylvester McCoy, he said proudly). I have got him talking to Nimbos and Codename Moose. Shall see if we can't Think Up A Project.

Then ambled smokewards for the customary pub. On the way, I spotted Clemmo's new book looking big in a bookshop window. It's the Oxfam halfway between the British Museum and Forbidden Planet (as is Clemmo's writing, arf).

Managed not to see the person I'd gone to the pub to see (oops), but met some old chums and some new. There's even the glimmer of a hint of a vague possibility of some work off one of the latter.

We’ve regenerated!

M’colleague Mr Ainsworth has just made live the new-look Big Finish website. It is brighter, spanglier and some acres more dashing than previously, and includes updates on things of mine.

There’s the cover for this month’s Benny novella collection, Nobody’s Children –which went off to press today. You can also download the six-page contents list for the Inside Story of Benny (PDF 64kb) – off to a lay-out meeting tomorrow on that one. The new home page sports Mr X-Bam’s fine Flash banner of all Big Finish things new, and includes a sneak preview of the cover to this month’s Bernice Summerfield Jason Kane play, The End of the World.

More on that one next week.

This bath’s too hot

I wonder if Archimedes got distracted easily. He invented the water screw and the laser gun, and also sussed out how to measure the volume of irregularly shaped objects by the displacement of liquid. While getting in the bath, so the story goes.

I am equally involved in displacement activities, but to not quite such good effect.

Today I have been to the local hospital (only, er, 10 miles away) and to the gym, delivered materials and proofed amends, taken the Dr for lunch with my bosses and body-swerved some free theatre. Have tried to break a website, approved a cover and – but for some changes of typeface – the whole of a book, and chased the end of a CD. Have also discovered a whole cladge of old chums via Facebook, and am knee-deep in 10 years of their lives. And A. is sending me emails about his naked weekend.

This is not what I should be up to though, and there’s a great, hard edifice of granite ahead of me metaphorically, from which I must chip many words. Kind of happy with where it’s at right now, if I am still a little behind. It so far includes the words “chimpanzee”, “washing-up liquid” and “Mika”. And I have learnt from the old man about checking for concussion, and the clever tests that can reveal if someone’s bleeding inside their head. No, that’s actually part of it, and not me just wandering off.

Another cup of tea, I think.

Children of Tomorrow

M'colleagues at Big Finish inform me that the Stephen Gately song "Children of Tomorrow" is now available on iTunes for 79p.

It's the frankly barking track from Big Finish/BBC7 Doctor Who story The Horror of Glam Rock. Which featured Gately, Bernard Cribbin and Una Stubbs.

No Englishman is ever fairly beaten

Went with the Dr last night to see St Joan at the National. Met m’colleague R. outside just beforehand, who was queuing to see a circus of performing insects, who warned that Shaw was “hard work” and “worthy”. But I have weathered plays in their original ancient Greek, performed by not-brilliant students and with the subtitles not working. So three hours of worthy English held only small fear.

I need not have worried. Anne-Marie Duff, in an otherwise all-male play, was by turns funny, inspiring and not a little mad, which made for a captivating performance. The rest of the cast discussed, argued and fell in love with, and ultimately failed to save her.

The £3 programme speaks of Shaw’s current unpopularity among the “blogging classes” (which says a lot in itself; the vast range of blogs is pretty classless, while the audience of a play in the Olivier Theatre is not). The play does feature some very long scenes, though they’re deftly punctuated by clever choreography. It doesn’t sound much to tell, but the cast move and manipulate their chairs to suggest the passing and pausing of time, and to tie the action into the music. The chairs are bodies and munitions being dragged through the mud during the siege of Orleans. They are the pyre on which Joan is burnt, and they are the off-centre-stage jurors who heckle and condemn.

It was also far wittier than I’d expected, with some clever gags about English bigotry. But for the long scenes it feels very contemporary and not nearly 100 years old. Its care not to make anyone a villain and its vision of history repeating felt particularly modern.

The programme is full of good stuff and talks of modern martyrs / terrorists, the history of France and of Shaw. But it has little on the context of when the play was written (in 1923). Is it, for example, playing on events in Ireland at the time? Duff plays Joan with an Irish accent while the rest of the cast are English.

“France” and “England” are dangerous, nascent concepts in the play, which challenge the system of feudal lords, who have complete power over their lands and, despite nominal lip service, are equals to their kings.

Joan is dangerous, then, for challenging the social order. As a commoner in direct talks with the Dauphin, she cuts out the intercession of the feudal lords. As a commoner in direct talks with God and his angels, she cuts out the intercession of the Catholic Church. She is therefore accused of two heresies well ahead of their time: nationalism and Protestantism.

Shaw wrote the play shortly after the Catholics had canonised Joan, and referred to her himself as a “Protestant martyr”. Yet the play seems to conclude that she died more for her politics than for her religion, the Inquisitor (played by Oliver Ford-Davies) saying that innocents must always be sacrificed.

It is, then, a savage attack on political necessity, and a critique of the well-meaning piety of those who insist upon it. The soldiers and lords and priests beg Joan to consider that she might be wrong in her beliefs, but the villains are those of them who remain unswayed in theirs.

The Dr wondered if it asked more general questions about colonial power after World War One, citing the Amritsar massacre of 1919. I was a little reminded of Orwell’s sense on inadequacy in the governance of the foreign mob, as in his Shooting an Elephant.

Trolleyed

The younger, slimmer, beardier brother has youtubed the wee movie he made as his final project on South Bank University's special effects course.

As wet as a fish's wet bits

The deluge continues, and there are mad pictures of Reading, with the cinema I used to go to and shops where I'd buy milk now under feet of water.

The expected bank-bursting of the Thames last night seems, thankfully, not to have happened. M'colleague Matthew Sweet took the picture showing how the Evening Standard boldly and nobly takes such matters on the chin.

This reminds me of another billboard from when the London Underground was flooded with Yeti.

The press have had fun explaining why it's been so wet, and the new PM was live on telly in the gym yesterday talking tough about water and the causes the water. But he's pressing ahead with plans to build more houses on flood plains. Those who've suggested this might not be the wisest bit of genius ever - that flood plains are called flood plains because they, er, flood - are being accused of "playing politics". Not, you know, fulfilling a consititutional obligation to oppose the Government when they are silly.

Still, I suspect policy will be re-shaped anyway, not by the Government but by the money. There are estimates of claims to come of £2 billion, which could have the same knock-on effect on the economy as a whole as did the hurricanes and disasters of the late 80s. More importantly, it was the problems of insuring any workplace that allowed smoking (because of subsequent claims from workers on health grounds) that ultimately got smoking banned - where years of moral and medical lobbying had failed.

Am intrigued to see how the former Chancellor, with his reputation so tied to the health of the economy, weathers the ensuing financial storm.

All was well

Stayed up until half two this morning to see off Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which the Doctor read all of on Saturday (due to the rising tides making it impossible to get to Mr Cornell’s 40th birthday party). Some spoilertastic thoughts follow, so come back when you’ve got to the end.

  The

         spoiler space

             for

        this

       post

     is split

  seven ways...

For the first time, it’s not about another year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. With Harry now 17 and, as a grown-up, suddenly no longer protected by the safe-making magic of love, a whole world of baddies is out to get him – and anyone in the way.

It’s a gripping read, full of violence and excitement right from the beginning. In fact, two major characters are killed in the first action sequence and another is seriously wounded – a shocking, horrific start that sets up that no one is safe. I remember (but can’t attribute) a bit of writing advice that an audience will let you get away with killing all the people in a burning people so long as their pets escape… And the deaths and maimings keep coming.

It’s a brutal book with a high body count, and many of those killings are sudden and abrupt. Suddenly people we’ve come to know well over the last 10 years / seven books are just not there any more – but that’s true of the characters that survive, too. The ending is also rather abrupt, and bar the handful of classmates mentioned in the epilogue, we learn very little of what happens to people after the final battle. Presumably Hermione recalls her parents from Australia. Can we also assume that at some point in the 19 years Harry catches up with the Dursleys again?

This blunt despatch also means that you’re not always sure who you’ve just said goodbye to for good. When Hagrid is dragged off by spiders on page 520, I did think that was him done for – and hoist by his own hairy-legged petard.

In fact, a lot of the book is reported rather than seen, and even when there are big action sequences like Harry escaping Privet Drive or the Battle for Helms Deep Hogwarts, we follow Harry doing something else then later catch up on who didn’t survive. This means that while everybody else is fighting for their lives, we’re following Harry as he goes camping and looks for lucky charms. It’s not that these sequences don’t work, but it perhaps limits the book by having almost all of it told from Harry’s perspective, so that major events are given in reported speech as he catches up with friends.

It may also have to be like this is Harry’s not going to fight. The key thing about the book is that he doesn’t go to war while everyone else does, and it’s the fact that he won’t kill – that his trademark spell is to disarm not wound, that ultimately everything hinges on. It’s telling that he learns a lesson that, at his age, Dumbledore did not – that magical might is not right. After seven years at magical school, the most important thing Harry has learned is when not to use his powers.

Being the last one (and its ending makes that pretty definitive, too), Deathly Hallows revisits many of the characters and settings of previous books in one last farewell tour. We also visit for the first time the house where Harry’s parents were killed, and learn a great deal about the early lives of Dumbledore and Snape. The Dr was especially blubby about chapter 33, but then it was her favourite character being all noble and misunderstood. Which is all suitably goth.

Some of the things we’d predicted were right: about Snape, his real motivations, and Harry Potter’s mum; that R.A.B. was Sirius’s brother; that we’d see Ollivander again. Other things I was completely out on: I had the Hogwarts-hidden Horcrux as either Godric’s ruby-encrusted sword or the Mirror of Erised (artefacts set up in the first couple of books). I assumed either Ron or Hermione (or both) would die, while the Dr had Harry not making it to the last chapter. There were also wrong-feet as I read it: assuming Mad-Eye would return as a reanimated corpse, for example, and assuming we’d find out what that gateway from the end of Order of the Phoenix was all about.

There are some very good surprises – shock reveals of baddies and some major revelations about Harry and his world. It’s a while since I read anything that demanded I keep reading, especially at the end of chapters. There’s also some good closure to character and story arcs all the way along: Ron worrying about the plight of goblins; Mrs Weasley going to war; Neville being the hero.

Also key to the book as a whole is Harry now being an adult and standing on his own. By the end of the series, all the adults Harry once held in awe – his parents, his teachers, his enemies – are seen to be just as flawed and capable of great mistakes as he is.

I’m curious what kids will make of such a brutal and complex book, so lacking in the mad antics and laughs of Harry’s previous adventures.

And by my reckoning (though I’m sure many others have got there first), Harry’s from the class of ‘98, and the last chapter takes place in 2016.

Jehosophat, it is you!

At a little after noon the sky above Trafalgar Square is low and black and doomsday. A torrent of water heaves thick over the shoes of those daft enough to be out in it. Tourists stare balefully at what would clearly be the end of the world, if only it weren’t too dark to see.

(Funnily enough, only this morning I wrote the words “Intergalactic tourism was an unforgiving business.” And braved the Ragnarok weather to agree terms with the boss.)

Then, a minute later, there is sunshine and smiling and sausage sandwiches in the Harp. One colleague suggests that perhaps Mr Saxon had attempted to destroy all London (again), but not-his-brother must quickly have stopped him. I smile into my herbidaciously aromatic Lincolnshire.

And then, in one of those nice coincidences, my post-lunch work means I’m looking at this picture:

How to get rejected

The Guardian is carrying a story today about the author and the Austen plot that exposed publishers' pride and prejudice. Basically, David Lassman, whose own book keeps getting rejected then submitted to different publishers several works by Jane Austen with a few words swapped round. Funnily enough, no one wanted to publish them.

“David Baldock, director of the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, said he was amused and disheartened by the experiment. He added: ‘It's interesting that there are these filters that stop work getting through. Clearly clerks and office staff are rejecting these manuscripts offhand.’”

Steven Morris, The author and the Austen plot that exposed publishers' pride and prejudice, The Guardian, 19 July 2007.

This sort of experiment has been run before, and always with the same result. The conclusion seems to be that if the editorial staff can’t spot the great works of literature they shouldn’t be in their jobs. But having just read more than 1,000 2,500-word short stories for the How the Doctor changed my life competition, and with a great wealth of rejection letters of my own, I think this is hugely missing the point.

First, Lassman’s wheeze rather depends on editorial staff recognising the beginnings of classic novels. And while a devotee of Austen might know how each of them begins, it’s unfair to expect everyone to, just because they work in publishing. It’s not just presupposing that editorial staff have read particular books, but that also they recall specific passages from them.

Personally, I remember the gist of books and key moments in them. And the only first line I can think of right now is from The Dalek Invasion of Earth by Terrance Dicks. Rather than the beginnings, it’s incidents later on in great books that stay with me – stuff that happens to characters I’ve come to know and care for, drama and conflict that’s been earned as part of the story-telling process.

Lassman says he was prompted to test the publishers in this way by his own struggles to find a publisher for his own book. “I know it isn't a masterpiece,” he admits, “but I think it is publishable.”

Publishers aren’t looking for something publishable, they need to find books that will sell. And sell lots of copies. Publishing is an uneven and risky business, with great losses to be made. Even the largest houses can go under if they have a run of books that are merely “okay”. They depend for their survival on books that grab the attention, that surprise and excite the reader, stories that demand to be told.

It’s more likely, then, that the readers in Lassman’s case just went, “It’s a little familiar.” Indeed, Austen’s work has inspired and influenced books and other media for the last 200 years – Mills & Boon even have a line of Regency-period novels. So sending in something that’s reminiscent of Austen (because it is Austen) is going to seem very generic.

Publishing staff have got lots of unsolicited stuff to get through, as well as their work on commissioned and scheduled books. An editor might be tempted to check whether it’s not just copying-and-pasting from an original, but if you’ve already decided to reject it anyway, why would you even bother?

And it may be harsh to hear, “I’m not really bothered,” or “Haven’t we seen this before?” but in the end the editorial staff is not there to employ anyone with basic competence at scribbling. They’re there to pre-empt the response of readers – it’s the readers they serve, not the writers.

Friends and relations

We have been visited. First on Monday, J. arrived from Bath (and more usually the USA). She had not seen our flat before, nor our William Morris wallpaper and cat, and there was much catching up and gossip over good asparagus lunch. It was the first time J. had been so long away from her two year-old, so it was all quite something.

Once the Dr left with, I did washing up and working, and was on the phone with work things when I should have been collecting my South African cousin. N. and her friend S. are into the last leg of a European tour, and came to me having done Paris and Dijon and Venice and Rome (and also London and Cambridge). We did food and then, when their plans to meet up with other South Africans didn’t work out, took them to the Dolphin. We sat outside in the swish new garden, and pretended not to be freezing.

Yesterday was N’s 20th birthday, and I’d promised her and S. a tour. They’d already seen Buckingham Palace and Kensington Gardens, and we’d agreed we’d do museums if it got rainy but otherwise try to be outdoors. So…

Train to Victoria, tube to Embankment and then the Golden Jubilee pedestrian bridge (east side) over the river. Pointed out that the Embankment is a great big sewage pipe you can walk about on top of, and also Cleopatra’s Needle. By the time we reached the far side of the river, we were looking out for the Anthony Gormley figures stood iconically on rooftops.

Having pre-booked no-nonsense tickets, we were pretty quickly on to the London Eye, sharing our cabin with some very excited kids, keen to point out their estate. Tried to point out things of interest: Nelson’s Column and Downing Street, and the clock tower of St Pancras (made famous by H. Potter).

After that we followed the south bank past the new spangly Festival Hall, the National Film Theatre, the National Theatre and along past the shops and the Oxo Tower to the former Bankside Power Station. This is now Tate Modern, and we mooched around a free exhibition about Global Cities all round the world. N. got a bit weirded by a series of photos of her home town, just showing security warnings (see the Johannesburg section of Diversity).

Out into the sunshine again and across the Millennium Bridge and up the stairs to St Paul's cathedral. Didn’t get the Whispering Gallery to work, but we did clamber all the way to the top for some spectacular views. We were about as high up as we’d been on the Eye, only a lot more sweaty for it.

Had trouble making the low-ceilinged descent, and we moved pretty swiftly through the crypt and out to find a quick something for lunch. It threatened to rain as we ate, but the sun came out again as we headed down Cheapside. I pointed out the Church of St Mary le Bow, and explained about how it works with cockneys. Got sight of the Bank of England, then headed right to Cannon Street, passing the monument to the unknown wanker.

Made our way to the Monument commemorating the Great Fire of London in 1666, though the girls oddly declined the chance to climb to the top. Instead we carried on down river, weaving down between the old Billingsgate fish market and the old customs house, and then getting to walk round the perimeter of the Tower of London, getting up on to Tower Bridge and following it north to Tower Gateway station.

DLR’d through all the Docklands developments (passing the new Billingsgate before cutting through the inside of One Canada Square) to Island Gardens, a much more crowded journey than I’d expected to the girls didn’t get to sit at the front – which is the coolest thing. We looked out on the all the new high-rise developments with their expensive views of water, then got out at Island Gardens. Having enjoyed the view of Greenwich, south across the water, we took the foot tunnel (yes more steps), and emerged where the Cutty Sark isn’t.
Took them into the grounds of Wren’s old naval hospital (now the University of Greenwich), and to the bit of street used in Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility. We then headed across the road to the Maritime Museum, and had a look round the bits of the Queen’s House used in the same film, and the Orangery (where I got married). They had then had enough of climbing things, so we didn’t do the steep hill to the Royal Observatory, but crossed the line of longitude as we made our way to the pub. Took them to the Trafalgar (where I had my wedding reception). They drank Smirnoff Ice.

It was about four as we headed back along the river and got ourselves onto a slow boat back to Westminster. We sat out on deck, which was blowy but blue-skied. I pointed out the traffic-light tree just down from Westferry Circus, and good pubs like the Captain Kidd. From the stop at the Tower of London, one of the lightermen took over the commentary, explaining about bridges and buildings. I think my Top Facts were a little more accurate, but his jokes got bigger laughs.

Eventually got to Westminster Pier, and headed back down the Embankment where I got to point out one of my favourite statues: a pilot with broken angel’s wings, commemorating the Fleet Air Arm.

Took the western pedestrian bridge back over to Festival Hall, and met Nimbos for a couple of bottles of vino. Discussed options for the evening, and decided to head home for N. and S.’s first ever go at fish and chips, plus a call to parents. Ended up boozing and watching telly.

N. and S. left this morning – and sneakily left money to pay for yesterday, the minxes. I have washed and tidied but not entirely Dysoned. All in time for the Dr being back from speaking wisdom in Bristol tomorrow… And now, though it was reckoned we would finish work about half eight this evening, it looks like we’ll be here another hour at least… Ng.