So he was Captain Birdseye all the time!

Sir Arthur C Clarke, who died yesterday, is probably best remembered for getting his physics right. This is the bloke who, for a bit of a lark, worked out the height at which something in orbit above the Earth would match the planet’s speed of rotation. He did this long before there were such things as satellites, where being in what’s essentially a fixed position over the Earth is quite useful. And, rather sweetly, he worked it out as a fun mental exercise in a sci-fi magazine.

His Space Odyssey stories (2001; 2010; 2061; 3001) are also grounded in the latest discoveries from NASA’s missions into the void, accurately spelling out the time spent travelling between planets and describing the correct mineral constitution of moons. Many of the obituaries have stressed the link between his stories and his contributions to proper, real science.

Thing is, I’ve always preferred science-fiction to be more about the fiction. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that the science isn’t important (or just that I’m not very good at it). But sci-fi is period drama, only not set in the past. The props and costumes conjure an atmosphere and lend flavour to the story but it’s the story that’s got to be the focus.

Think about the period drama on telly. It doesn’t wholly matter if your stiff-collared actors don’t shout into their candlestick telephones, or if a set designer’s decided that those phones look nicer without thick cabling like an elephant’s trunk. You don’t actively try to get it wrong and you should do your research. But period drama can easily get bogged down in the tedious detail of etiquette and sci-fi is at its most ponderous when dumping information about how its world works. Much better to get back to the gun-shoots and explosions.

Sir Arthur’s stories are often actually very good at doing just that. Like the very best writers, you don’t always notice the research that’s gone in to the engaging story. His early novel, Childhood’s End, is better known amongst my peers by two of its best rip-offs – Quatermass and the Pit and Doctor Who and the Daemons. It takes the central conceit of Joseph Campbell’s rather sloppy The Hero With 1,000 Faces – that all mankind’s religions and cultures are off-shoots of the same basic stories – and adds a twist – because early man was mentored by an alien.

The book pre-empts a lot of sci-fi of the 60s and 70s (and songs by Pink Floyd and Bowie) with it’s dawning of a new age for the teenagers which the old folk cannot dig. But its real joy is what theorists of sci-fi have sometimes called the “conceptual breakthrough”. This is the jaw-dropping, gosh-wow bit in good sci-fi where the author has spun the whole story on a massive change in your perspective. Oh blimey, you realise, our 10,000 year-old ideologies are all based on a spaceman with horns.

It leaves the reader open-mouthed like the dupe at the end of an episode of TV’s Mission: Impossible, all the sound effects and scenery revealed as a clever conjuring trick. It’s those big-concept surprises that make sci-fi so addictive.

(There’s a similar phrase from Iain M Banks’ Excession which is not entirely the same thing. An “outside context problem” – like what the Spanish were to the Mayas with their exploding fire sticks – is more total bafflement. A conceptual breakthrough is, even if just to the reader, a momentous revelation.)

Some more examples of the best conceptual breakthroughs. There’s one at the end of Planet of the Apes when Charlton Heston finds a statue on a beach. There’s one at the end of Soylent Green when Charlton Heston finds out what the special foodstuff means to people. You can see the pattern – most top sci-fi hinges on one brilliant reveal.

The four in 2001: A Space Odyssey make up the structure of the film. An alien artefact teaches the apes; an alien artefact awaits us on the Moon; Dave’s beaten HAL and goes to meet the alien artefact; and, er, something about a huge space-baby. Everything else hangs off those freaky moments. It’s not just the physics that have been got right, either; the effects are amazing; the scale constantly enormous with tiny humans in the foreground. And, quite brilliantly, the humans twitter on about nothing in particular, minuscule and mundane. It is only the observing us that finds it wondrous.

But a really good example of the importance of gosh-wow over the numbers is a short story which, annoyingly, Neil Gaiman also linked to in his Clarke post. Unlike Neil, I didn’t meet Sir Arthur but I did once have his telephone number – and that was on a copy of The Nine Billion Names of God.

Spoilers follow so click the link, read the story and come back here after for my paltry thoughts.

Done that?

Right.

How’s that for a gosh-wow ending? Can’t you see Jim Phelps just escaping in his van, his props and costumes abandoned at your feet? And yet, when I first read it, a learned chum who was much more into sci-fi for the physics had a Different View.

For him, the great brilliance of the lack of fuss in that closing line was that that’s not how physics works. The stars are millions of billions of light years away – from us and from each other. It’s not just that you shout “Go!” and they wink off one by one. They’ll have been winking off for millions of years, all in a fiendishly complex and intricate order and just so that – to a computer programmer watching from the Earth – they seem to be extinguishing one by one.

The Clever Thing, said this learned colleague, was that the stars had been going out for millions of years, it just so happened that the time taken by the light of those destructions to register on Earth all rather neatly coincided – the implication being that it is not coincidence. So the programmer, his machine and its result have all been long-expected. This, he said, proved a mechanical universe operating like clockwork; the man-made computer just a machine in a machine. He didn’t agree with my gosh-wow reading at all, that the computer was rendered nothing to the magic truth of God. And we argued long into the night.

I’m not sure what this not-entirely-interesting anecdote might mean. But I’m rather sad I missed the chance to ever share it with Sir Arthur.

Spy Wednesday

Hooray! I was rather hoping for some James Bond news, today being today. Though I don't think Holy Week quite has MI6 in mind.

Darth Maul unto the breach

The Royal Shakespeare Company has posters all round London at the moment advertising their run of Histories - that is, the whole damn epic of the wars of the roses one after the other.

Is it just me, or is that Darth Maul on the right?

Some comfort

There’s 238 days until Quantum of Solace opens in the UK. There’ll probably be quite a lot more of this sort of thing before then. It includes spoilers for some of the James Bond novels.

I originally started reading James Bond when I was 11. I can vaguely recall trying to explain to a friend at my new secondary school that the last chapter of Dr No was a lot like Witness – which had been on telly round that time. I also remember calling it “Doctor Number” and my confusion, from a footnote saying ‘See the author’s previous one…’ that this wasn’t the first of the books when it had been the first film. (It’s possibly I gleaned even this fact from a feature on the forthcoming new one, which my wicked big brother kept insisting was called Daylight Saving Time.)

Working through the Bond canon again now (honestly, it is useful research) all manner of other things strike me. Bond is a prized cock at the best of times; the dialogue is always pretty abysmal, clunky, place-holding stuff; the racist undertones and outlook are far more obvious than the misogynistic; and the exotic props described in such pornographic, listy detail have not all worn terribly well.

“In a characteristic passage from Live and Let Die, Bond leaves a ‘bitter raw day … the dreary half-light of a London fog’ to go to New York, where his hotel serves him crabs and tartare sauce, ‘flat beef Hamburgers, medium-rare, from the charcoal grill, french-fried potatoes, broccoli, mixed salad with thousand-island dressing, ice cream with melted butterscotch’ and Liebfraumilch wine. That a burger-and-chips with Blue Nun menu, which would soon become common in suburban lounge bars across Britain, clearly seemed so mouth-wateringly exotic [to British readers] in 1954 is eloquent and, in its way, touching.”

Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain, p. 216.

Annoyingly, I thought that too as I reread Live and Let Die – about a week before I read Marr’s very excellent history. But you’ll just have to believe me that I didn’t pinch the insight. Again, what follows contains major spoilers for various Bond books.

After the events of Casino Royale (book) and the leave Bond gets granted at the end, he’s sent by BOAC to New York to help investigate some long-lost pirate gold that’s just resurfaced and is financing the communists. He and old pal Felix Lighter are soon on the heels of grey-faced black hoodlum, Mr Big. The old-skool Etonian spy naturally has Opinions:

“’I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a great negro criminal before,’ said Bond, ‘Chinamen, of course, the men behind the opium trade. There’ve been some big-time Japs, mostly in pearls and drugs. Plenty of negroes mixed up in diamonds and gold in Africa, but always in a small way. They don’t seem to take to business. Pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought except when they’ve drunk too much.’

‘Our man’s a bit of an exception,’ said M. ‘He’s not pure negro. Born in Haiti. Good dose of French blood. Trained in Moscow, too, as you’ll see from the file. And the negro races are just beginning to throw up geniuses in all the professions – scientists, doctors, writers. It’s about time they turned out a great criminal. After all, there are 250,000,000 of them in the world. Nearly a third of the white population. They’ve got plenty of brains and ability and guts. And now Moscow’s taught one of them the technique.’”

Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die, in Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, p. 153.

Mr Big could be meant to be some kind of emancipatory figure, because having a black baddie is a kind of equal rights. I’d almost have time for that line of argument if his use of voodoo – and just the way he and his men get described – didn’t plumb such blatant racial stereotypes. A dead giveaway is the painfully “authentic” bickering between a couple in a Harlem bar in the tastefully titled Chapter 5, “Nigger Heaven”.

Yes, it’s easy to wag a finger at the presumptions of another time. But what stands out here is just how old and far distant James Bond seems from now. Marr nicely links the spies, sex and establishment so much a part of novel-Bond to the spies, sex and establishment of the Profumo affair.

“The political scandal that happened at the fag-end of the Tory years was more highly coloured and more unlikely than much of what Ian Fleming poured into his early ‘shockers’.”

Marr, ibid.

The scandal hit in mid-1963, a year before Fleming died and just as a working-class milkman was making Bond his own. As I’ve said before, the film Bond changes quickly: becoming a force for détente when the Russians start buying the movies; or one minute slating the Beatles, the next they’re doing his theme tune. When David Niven – Fleming’s own choice – played the role just five years later, he’s an awkward, embarrassed fossil of another age.

The movies have continued to express tension about how of-the-moment to make Bond: is he a smoker, is he a dinosaur, does he do girls in their teens? Anyway, shouldn’t women know better? Even so, and taking us back to race, notice how Colin Salmon is the only person who works with Brosnan’s Bond who doesn’t at some point take the piss out of him.

Back to Live and Let Die. As with Casino Royale, the plot simply licks along. Bond soon meets Simone Latrelle, better known as Solitaire, who reads cards for Mr Big. She sees Bond as her way out of getting hitched to the villain, lies to save his life and then joins him on a train. Beautiful and 25, she’s never been with a man but – caught up in the adventure – shows everything to Bond. But she’s not foreseen the many eyes of Mr Big and gets herself recaptured before Bond can do his moves.

Bond and Leiter continue their investigations. Fleming is good at conjuring paranoid claustrophobia – the two agents don’t quite appreciate how closely they are watched. In fact, we take their predicament far more seriously than they do. Leiter rather recklessly goes to investigate the baddie’s hide-out all on his own one night. This allows for a shocking bit of savagery, the sequel to the bollock-whacking in the first book. As cobbled into the plot of Licence to Kill, Leiter gets himself fed to a shark.

That’s the gloves off; Bond finds the truth hidden beneath the poison fish, has a fight with an octopus and finally meets up again with Solitaire. They do the bit being dragged behind a boat like in the film For Your Eyes Only, but without the cheat of having an aqua-lung waiting. As is often the case with the films, you realise you’ve been well briefed on the thing that’s going to eat Mr Big at the end. Bond goes off for some ‘passionate leave’ [sic] with Solitaire, and is then back in London in time for his next assignment.

Which sees him playing another game of cards and then pootling round exotic Dover. Moonraker feels like a whole other series. The first chapters have a bored, restless Bond doing a bit of filing and dwelling on things to come.

“It was his ambition to have as little as possible in his banking account when he was killed, as, when he was depressed, he knew he would be, before the statutory age of forty-five. Eight years to go before he was automatically taken off the 00 list and given a staff job at Headquarters. At least eight tough assignments. Probably sixteen. Perhaps twenty-four. Too many.”

Fleming, Moonraker, in ibid., p. 328.

Which makes Bond 37 in a book first published in 1955, and possible set a bit earlier. He can't then be born any later than 1918. I'll come back to this age question another time, when I'm further into my rereading.

It’s a different kind of mission, this – initially a favour to M, then a secondment to MI5. It seems small and parochial, a threat to little England with no need for sexy clothes and locations. Bond worries about his secretary’s love-life and what people might think in the papers of Sir Hugo Drax. Drax is not French here, as in the movie, but one of Britain’s finest. Oh, I realised as I reread it, Drax is Toby Stephens.

There’s something funny with the British rocket programme that Drax is rather dashingly donating for the protection of the nation. Hmm… what could possibly go wrong? It maybe seems a bit obvious since we get told early on how the programme is using lots of former Nazis (who knew a thing about long-range rockets having worked on doodlebugs). I still love their brilliant disguises, as Drax ultimately explains:

“’You smelt a mouse, my dear Bond, where you ought to have smelt a rat. Those shaven heads and those moustaches we cultivated so assiduously. Just a precaution, my dear fellow. Try shaving your own head and growing a big black moustache. Even your mother wouldn’t recognize you. It’s the combination that counts. Just a tiny refinement. Precision, my dear fellow. Precision in every detail. That has been my watchword.’ He chuckled fatly and puffed away at his cigar.”

Ibid., p. 483.

There’s also the oddly erotic mix of awkward and sexy as Bond and Gala go for a swim in just their rubbish pants, and survive an explosion that blows up all their clothes. This is falling into parody – more Tara King than Ian Hendry. Yet there’s still plenty of thrilling writing, like the car chase on the A20 where a boy racer takes the fall for Bond. The live news report at the end of the penultimate chapter is also nicely done.

And I also loved that in this one Bond doesn’t get the girl. Policewoman Gala Brand (a less-rude name than Dr Holly Goodhead) is engaged to someone else and furious when Bond plants a kiss on her. The control freak fantasist has all sorts of plans for them once the adventure’s done, and she neatly tells him it’s not happening and walks out of his life.

A few people have said that the film producers should have followed Casino Royale (film) with a remake of Live of Let Die and then continued through the canon. But Moonraker really has only its title to recommend it. The rest feels low budget and ITC, too easily imagined with stock explosions and the exterior dialogue played against photographic flats.

The short story collection For Your Eyes Only also contains some very un-Bond-like Bond. The titular story is the springboard for a lot of the film of the same name, only it happens in Canada not Greece. The Havelocks in the story have lived in the same house in Jamaica for 300 years and their murder by Cuban gangsters might suggest Fleming’s own discomfort with the political context gathering round his home. It’s odd to see Bond being nominally on the side of Castro, but there’s not really any profound insight into post-colonial or ex-pat existence. Some rich friends of M are murdered and he asks Bond to take revenge.

The film also nicks and hellenifies bits from the story “Risico” (which is how the character Kristatos says “risk”), and neglects to have Bond dying himself with walnut stain until he looks “like a Red Indian with blue-grey eyes.” But the vengeful daughter, the crossbow and that cheesy line about first digging two graves is all in Fleming’s original.

“From a View to a Kill” (the short story has the word “from” in it) has Bond spotting the secret hide-out of some villains who shoot a messenger. The villains have an underground base in the forest and wear things like snow-shoes that stop them leaving footprints in the grass. It’s set in France and has ex-Nazis, but no airships, horses or microchips. “The Hildebrand Rarity” is the Krest bits of the plot of Licence to Kill, only not quite as exciting.

Rereading this stuff, I’ve been struck by how often the best bits of the films are always Fleming’s. Yet it's weird to realise that the worst of Bond on film - silly plotting, an overly serious Bond being dull about posh past-times and food, and sleazing his way into bed (in fact, A View To A Kill) - is not atypical Bond of the books.

The skill of the adapters is also to jettison his crapper stuff. They rename the women and make the set pieces bigger and in more striking locations. They make the words coming out of Bond’s mouth smart and witty and sparkly. They’ve got a broader, more inclusive view of the world and other people. And that’s what keeps Bond involving when he could easily have died with Fleming.

“Quantum of Solace” is really very odd; Bond is bored at a dinner party and doesn’t get on with his host. But a chance remark leads to the host telling a story about an affair that gives him a completely different perspective on the boring guests. Bond is, unlike the reader, gripped. Compared to them, he finally decides, his life isn’t that exciting.

Just what the flying flip?

An uncharitable reviewer might assume Fleming had shoehorned Bond into the framing of a non-James Bond story. Perhaps it’s meant to reinforce the idea of Bond as an outsider, cold in company but keen to know everyone’s secrets. But I think it’s just meant to play as it is; Bond is moved, has a revelation about people, because of hearing this story.

The title comes from the host’s own theory about what finally breaks up a couple. Bond can’t suck up enough.

“Bond said: ‘That’s a splendid name for it … I should say you’re absolutely right. Quantum of Solace – the amount of comfort. Yes, I suppose you could say that all love and friendship is based in the end on that. Human beings are very insecure. When the other person not only makes you feel insecure but actually seems to want to destroy you, it’s obviously the end. The Quantum of Solace stands at zero. You’ve got to get away to save yourself.’”

Fleming, Quantum of Solace, in For Your Eyes Only, p. 093.

So it’s a story about there being nothing left of a relationship. Which bleak view, it seems to me, is the complete opposite of what rumour says will be the basis for the film version. If the whispers are right, Bond can take some minuscule comfort from how things with Vesper turned out in that she’s led him to the baddest of the bad guys. And maybe – though they whispered it of the last one, too – that’ll be someone with the same initials as one of Fuller’s beers.

No, not London Pride.

James Bond will be return in Diamonds Are Forever (book), just as soon as I've reread it.

YKITS

The new issue of SFX includes a new interview with Russell T Davis and, according to the doctorwhonews.com,

"he confirms that UNIT, the fictional military organisation returning to the show in the new series, is now the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, and not the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce as it was previously known."

Apparently, the UN didn't approve of the fictional organisation that so effectively (if fictionally) has curbed alien invasions, weird diseases and mining operations. I wonder if they'd also be bothered by a re-make of North by Northwest.

Anyway, ages ago a bunch of like-minded writing types discussed what UNIT might stand for if not the United Nation's Intelligence Taskforce. My suggestion, which I'm still far too pleased with, was:

You Know It's Topsecret.

The first time Benny got lost

Here's an interesting (myabe) historical curio, the first outline for Bernice Summerfield and the Lost Museum.

Benny and the Lost Museum
Synopsis by Simon Guerrier, 12 September 2004

Benny and Bev are the first human civilians to enter the city of Aname for nearly forty years. They are here at the request of the Federation army, who’ve faced increasing criticism of their efforts to liberate the city. News reports have blamed the sacking of the Aname Museum on the army’s own gung-ho attitude. For PR reasons, they’re sparing no expense in getting the experts in to sort it all out.

Benny’s annoyed to be working for the military who have such a cynical attitude to the museum’s collections. Nor is she happy to be saddled with Bev – whose own attitude to art treasures leaves a lot to be desired. Benny visited the museum nearly a century ago, and can testify first-hand to the importance of its collection. The news report she saw showed one particularly fine sculpture, the Head of Someone, in a battered and unloved state. She’s full of righteous indignation.

Bev, however, takes a more pragmatic approach. They’re just here to make the best of a bad job. The Federation army has only just liberated the city from the former regime, and the regime’s militia are still staging assaults in the suburbs, and threatening a major attack on the city any moment. Soldiers are being targeted, and Benny and Bev are both assigned bodyguards.

Locals approach them, saying they have genuine artefacts from the museum to sell. Bev wants to follow these leads up, but Benny says they need to investigate the museum first.

The museum is a mess – it’s been looted and variously used as a barracks, squat and toilet. Benny is overcome. The new curator speaks no English, and even the translator machines have trouble getting through (though it may be that the curator is just being evasive). Bev tries to get an inventory from the curator – of what the museum should have. It’s not forthcoming. There are too many locked doors and misplaced keys. And some of the empty display cases have not been damaged – so whoever removed the artefacts had access to keys…

Bev gets impatient, shouting at the curator that they’re trying to help. Benny has a museum catalogue from her earlier visit, and this they use as a preliminary inventory. But when Benny wants to show Bev the Head of Someone – the sculpture they know survived the looting because Benny saw it on the news – it’s nowhere to be found. Are things still going missing?

The head of the Federation army is not surprised – he’s called in ‘the experts’ because he’s not been able to get any sensible answers from the locals. However, he’s less bothered about helping out because the city is under siege from the militia. It seems the army’s claims to have liberated the city are a little exaggerated… So. Benny and Bev try – mostly separately - to make sense of what’s happened at the museum. Are the current curators responsible for the looting? Did the militia do it? Why’s it so difficult to get answers? Benny and Bev have very different and clashing ideas about how to go about finding out, what the priorities are, etc. The looting seems to have been going on during the regime, as well as during the battles. And, even the locked rooms are full of neglected, damaged items. It’s as if the museum has never looked after its collections well… As they investigate, the militia makes attempts on their lives. During the attempt on her life (and daring escape), Benny loses her precious museum catalogue – the one document they have to tell them what the museum should possess. The militia invade the city. The Federation army is more interested in people’s lives than bits of old stone, so uses the museum building as a stronghold during the battle. Benny offers her services as a soldier… Finally, the fighting mostly over, Benny is able to see the former curator of the museum, in prison as a figurehead of the old regime. He’s not just unapologetic, he shrugs off Benny’s concerns. Everyone was stealing stuff – to protect it, or to get one in the eye of the regime, or because they fancied items, or for any number of reasons. The museum is a treasure hoard and who is Benny to dictate the terms of what is important and what is not? Benny tries to argue that the museum is the one thing that might unite the city’s people. It gives them a shared past, an identity. At the end, the museum building is pretty much a ruin. The situation with lost artefacts is far worse than when Benny and Bev arrived, and Benny can only do as Bev first suggested – make the best of a bad job. They begin to list the artefacts they * do * have. The Federation army will find them temporary home until a new museum can be built. And, as they go about their inventory, all sorts of people appear, dropping off bits of this and that, artefacts squirreled away. Bev is keen to stop these people, interrogate them about how they acquired these priceless artefacts, but Benny says they should stop asking questions.

Characters: Benny; Bev; head of the Federation army; new curator of the museum; old curator of the museum; Benny and Bev’s bodyguards; various locals and soldiers.

Mess-up-otamia

Some time ago in a comment on this blog, Liadnan recommended I base my understanding of Middle Eastern history on more than a rant from one old stand-up comic. He was even kind enough to supply a copy of David Fromkin’s “A Peace to End All Peace”, though it is such a hefty and serious-looking tome that I kept bravely putting off starting it…

It’s utterly compelling. Sadly, it’s compelling in the same way as a car crash. Or rather, like some impossibly intricate multiple pile-up, stretching out years and hundreds of miles. “How the Middle East ended up in such a godawful mess” was Liadnan’s own subtitle.

The book covers the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the foundation of the modern Middle East, so from the start of the First World War to the attempts at agreement that followed it, up until 1922. In large part, it’s told from the perspective of British interests, and often Fromkin seems to concentrate on two key figures – David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill.

This is in keeping with a particular kind of history that likes to pinpoint the Great Men Who Made Stuff Happen. Just like in Knight Rider, one man can make a difference. And yet the one man who really changes everyone’s fortunes is the bloke who single-handedly won the First World War. Bothersomely, he was French.

“Suddenly – and unexpectedly – an Allied breakthrough came in Bulgaria, where General Louis-Félix-François Franchet d’Esperey, the new French commander of the Allied forces in hitherto-neglected Salonika in Greece, launched a lightning offensive at the end of the summer. Bulgaria collapsed and, on 26 September 1918, asked for an armistice. The request should have been forwarded to the Supreme War Council of the Allies in Paris, but Franchet d’Esperey dared not chance the delay. He composed the terms of an armistice himself, and had it signed within a matter of days so that eh could turn immediately to mount a devastating offensive on the Danube against the Germans and Austrians, thus successfully executing the ‘Eastern’ strategy that Lloyd George had been advocating in vain ever since the war began.”

David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, p. 363.

Fromkin argues that this turned out to be a bit of a nuisance, as Lloyd George and US President Wilson weren’t quite ready with a plan for an armistice, at least not one that would hand them the best spoils. The war was suddenly over, and the West’s leaders were running to catch up with new powers in the Middle East.

It’s a monstrously complex mix of stories, plots and conspiracies, and Fromkin thankfully divides even his short chapters into sections. Yet I found I kept having to refer back to the index to remind myself who was who, and there’s just four maps with which to try and untangle the mess of various place names and people.

Though the grand narrative is rather hard work, Fromkin peppers it with tremendous and brilliant detail. He explains and critiques the self-mythology of TE Lawrence (who was blushingly caught at the Albert Hall, enjoying a sell-out performance of a film version of his own heroic endeavours). He gives context to the Tashkent adventures of Colonel Bailey, and even the misadventures of Enver Pasha are full of weird and lurid intrigue. British – and French and American – interests were, though, little troubled by any of this contemporary complexity.

European powers had famously seen the Ottoman Empire as that “sick old man” for a good century, but it served as a useful buffer between the imperial machinations of Britain and Russia. As the venerable Dr Challis argues in her published work, the Crimean War was just one example of the Ottomans’ relative weakness. For the next few decades, British warships patrolled her waters and British travellers helped themselves to her antiquities.

But Western assumptions about the East meant Britain massively underestimated the Ottoman position on the outbreak of war. Fromkin is good at following the various diplomatic intrigues – British, French, German and Russian – that saw the Ottomans joining the war and, rather to the surprise of those four powers, not tumbling out of it pretty much instantly.

The Middle East region was important to Britain as the link between its colonial riches in Africa and India, and much of Britain’s attempts at settlement hoped to create a safe trade route stretching from Cape Town to Australia. Fromkin is good at explaining the economics of this; that the European powers were parasitic of Africa and Asia, and that this to some extent justified the attention Lloyd George gave the Middle East while (as the Times argued at the time) ignoring important issues of welfare at home.

The economics is also important in explaining why Britain’s hold over these territories unravelled. The local populations only suffered such regimes because revolt was put down so brutally. As with Iraq after 2003, the new treaty agreements needed to be more than just words, but deploying lots of soldiers to keep the peace proved to have to high a price. It wasn’t just the money; the British people were exhausted by four years of appalling warfare, like nothing anyone had ever seen before.

“It has been estimated that the total of military and civilian casualties in all of Europe’s domestic and international conflicts in the 100 years between 1815 and 1915 was no greater than a single day’s combat losses in any of the great battles of 1916.”

Ibid., p. 232.

As a result, the domestic pressure for post-war demobilisation scuppered all Britian’s efforts, and at a time when Lloyd George had just expanded the territories over which Britain was keeping watch.

Where Fromkin disagrees with Rob Newman is in the role of oil before war broke out. Churchill was, Fromkin argues, unusual in seeing the importance of the region’s oil prior to 1914. The military importance of oil was generally recognised by 1918, but Churchill, arranging before the war,

“for the British government to purchase a majority shareholding in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, aroused a great deal of opposition, especially within the Government of India, from British officials who did not see the need for it.”

Ibid., p. 354.

That said, this doesn’t quite square with Fromkin’s own account that,

“a month before the outbreak of the Ottoman war in the autumn of 1914, London had ordered a standby force to be sent from India to the Persian Gulf to protect Britain’s oil supplies from Persia in case they should be threatened.”

Ibid., p. 200.

So if not about the oil, what was it all about? As Fromkin says, Britain’s concerns about Germany’s influence in the Middle East in the lead-up to the war were not about the well-being of the indigenous people. Rather they worried that, “Asia might be left as a vast slave colony in Germany’s possession, and its wealth and raw materials would fuel Germany industry and allow it to dominate the globe” (p. 357). Clearly that sort of thing should be left to the much more honourable British.

The Middle East was also important to the West for historical, cultural reasons. This was the land of the Bible, of the Iliad and the founding of civilisation as we know it. The names used for the regions in question – Syria, Mesopotamia, even Palestine – betrayed that the Western powers were some 2,000 years out of date with their local intelligence. Fromkin is good at showing what little concern there was for the contemporary, complex mix of languages, people and traditions. “The [Ottoman] empire was incoherent,” he says (p. 34).

“It was evident that London either was not aware of, or had given no thought to, the population mix of the Mesopotamian provinces. The antipathy between the minority of Moslems who were Sunnis and the majority who were Shi’ites, the rivalries of tribes and clans, the historic and geographic divisions of the provinces, and the commercial predominance of the Jewish community in the city of Baghdad made it difficult to achieve a single unified government that was at the same time representative, effective, and widely supported.”

Ibid., p. 307.

And the Western powers tried to untangle these disparate groups with little more than the stories they’d learned at school.

“Lloyd George, who kept demanding that Britain should rule Palestine from (in the Biblical phrase) Dan to Beersheba, did not know where Dan was. He searched for it in a nineteenth-century Biblical atlas, but it was not until nearly a year after the armistice that General Allenby was able to report to him that Dan had been located and, as it was not where the Prime Minister wanted it to be, Britain asked for a boundary further north.”

Ibid., p. 400.

US President Wilson had no better weight of local knowledge to support his lofty ideals for the territorial settlement. His “experts” based their assessments on old maps and one encyclopaedia.

“The Middle Eastern group, composed of ten scholars operating out of Princeton University, did not include any specialists in the contemporary Middle East; its chairman was a specialist of the Crusades. The chairman’s son, also a member, was a specialist in Latin American studies. Among other members were an expert on the American Indian, an engineer, and two professors who specialized in ancient Persian languages and literature.”

Ibid., p. 261.

It was this lack of detail that proved fatal – literally. The disastrous Gallipoli campaign was the result of the available maps being so out of date (as well as an atrocious lack of planning about what to do once the beach had been taken).

But the West didn’t acknowledge their own shortcomings, and just assumed they knew what was best for all these funny foreign people. There's a misguided belief, perhaps a Whig liberal idea, that the locals will be glad to see us wading in, even if we don't really speak the language. Wilson’s high principles were, to be put it mildly, not practical.

“The President’s program was vague and bound to arouse millennial expectations – which made it practically certain that any agreement achieved by politicians would disappoint.”

Ibid., p. 262.

The lack of local knowledge and insight inevitably led all too often to the achievement of entirely the opposite of what was wanted.

“Nothing, however, could have provided a better description of what was going to happen at the Peace Conference than [US President] Wilson’s speeches about what was not going to happen. Peoples and provinces were indeed ‘bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were chattels or pawns in a game’. It was not the case that every settlement was ‘made in the interest and for the benefit of the population concerned’; on the contrary such settlements were made (though Wilson said they would not be) in order to provide an ‘adjustment or compromise of claims among rival states’ seeking ‘exterior influence or mastery’. Not even his own country was prepared to follow the path that he had marked out.”

Ibid., p. 390.

There were also awful consequences for groups affiliated with the Allies, which again the Allies seem not to have considered at any point. The Turks avenged themselves on those groups they took to be helping the Allies – the Armenians and Christian minority groups, and (it seems strange now that they get just a footnote) the Kurds. Constantinople and the Dardanelles were effectively held hostage by the Greeks to ensure, “Turkey’s good behavior in such matters as the treatment of Christian minorities” (p. 411).

Fromkin is also damning of many of the promises made by the Allied powers. “This was sheer dishonesty,” he says at one point, “for the Arab Bureau officers did not believe that Arabs were capable of self-government” (p. 345).

It’s ironic, too, that Feisal and other leaders in the region were told to trust the Entente powers, when those powers couldn’t even trust each other. The language used at the time gives some idea of the suspicion and contempt for any kind of foreigner, even the ones on your side. The French referred to “the brutal rapacity of our allies” (p. 442), the British spoke of Transjordan as “partially inhabited by predatory savages” (p. 443).

All this meant trouble for the various communities caught up in the disputed lands – such as the Armenians, Kurds, Assyrian or Nestorian communities. But the book especially concentrates on the plight of – and problems caused by – Jewish groups.

“London’s policy of Zionism might have been expressly designed to stir up trouble, and must have been devised by far-off officials who did not have to live and deal with local conditions.”

Ibid., p. 445.

There’s a temptation to see all of Middle Eastern conflict as a war between Jews and Arabs. That is mistaking race for culture, that all Jews are the same, that all Arabs are the same. It would be as wrong to assume that all the Christian peoples of Europe had the same national identity, or could be controlled in the same way. Even as the British made their first woolly commitments to a Jewish state, Zionism was a contentious topic among much of the Jewish community. Edwin Montagu was not alone in his concerns that a Jewish Palestine would mean exile for British Jews.

“The second son of a successful financier who had been ennobled, Montagu saw Zionism as a threat to the position in British society that he and his family had so recently, and with so much exertion, attained. Judaism, he argued, was a religion, not a nationality, and to say otherwise was to say that he was less than 100 percent British.”

Ibid., p. 294.

Fromkin struggles to reconcile British Zionism with an implicit, institutionalised anti-Semitism. I think you can reconcile these two extremes by considering the Nazis’ later plans to make Madagascar the new Jewish nation; giving the Jews their own country meant they could be excised from yours.

Fromkin shows Britain to be rabidly anti-Semitic. British intelligence (or rather, stupidity) was fast joining up the dots between disaffected Jewish groups in Germany, Jewish designs for Palestine and Jewish members of the Bolshevik revolutionaries. This seems to have been helped along by the publication in London and Paris in 1920 of “The Jewish Peril”. This translated “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”, apparently the records of Jewish and Freemason meetings “in which they plotted to overthrow capitalism and Christianity and to establish a world state under joint rule” (p. 468).

The Protocols had first appeared in a Russian newspaper in 1903, but had really become something in 1917,

“when it was remarked that several Bolshevik leaders were Jews and the communist doctrine bore a certain resemblance to that described in the Protocols … As such, the Protocols explained – among other things – the mysterious revolts against Britain everywhere in the East.”

Ibid., p. 469.

They were, of course, a forgery and, like so many of these things, cut and pasted from earlier works (including a satire on Napoleon III and even a fantasy novel).

But British intelligence seems to have been blinded to the dodginess of this dossier by their own eagerness to believe the conspiracy. They even decided the Young Turks who’d revolted against the Sultan must be Jewish led, because one of them had a name a bit like a bloke in New York. Fromkin quotes the manic conspiracy theorising that opens John Buchan’s The 39 Steps, and then reminds us that Buchan “later became director of information services for Lloyd George’s government” (p. 247).

(It'd be easier to justify these rantings as the mad paranoia of a character in the book were the book then not to confirm the character's suspicions. Sherlock Holmes' Last Bow includes a similar cell of anarchists working to bring about war, so you could easily create a shocker plot without having to make the baddies such stereotypical Jews.)

This institutional anti-Semitism came with a high price in lives. The British refused to help arm Jabotinsky and other Jewish veterans of the British Army so that they could defend themselves from the violence that broke out in Jerusalem on 4 April 1920. No casualties were suffered where Jabotinsky's forces were (they had bought weapons from a gunrunner); all the Jewish casualties were in the Old City of Jerusalem,

“which British army units prevented Jabotinsky’s forces from entering. Adding an especially ominous tinge to the bloodletting in the Old City was the cry of the rioting mobs that ‘The Government is with us!’ That the mobs were not unjustified in their cry became evident when the British military authorities meted out punishment. Only a few rioters were punished by serious court sentences; but Jabotinsky and his colleagues were swiftly brought before a closed court martial, charged with distributing arms to the self-defense group, and sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour in the fortress-prison of Acre.”

Ibid., p. 447.

Richard Meinertzhagen, head of Military Intelligence in Cairo, was sent to Palestine to investiogate, where he discovered that the,

“British colonel who served as chief of staff of the administration was conspiring with the Arab Mufti of Jerusalem to foment new anti-Jewish riots.”

Ibid, p. 448.

This does not mean that the Jewish groups themselves were entirely innocent of all wrongs. Churchill was also prescient about problems inherent in the settlement of Palestine for the Jewish people, arguing as far back as October 1919 that the Jews “take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience” (p. 494).

Also, the West might have been wildly paranoid about the Bolsheviks and their influence. Yet Fromkin is quick to point out that “[Lenin’s] was a minority regime that had seized power by force and that held on to power by employing as many as a quarter of a million secret policemen” (pp. 476-7). There were good reasons to be paranoid.

But again and again it’s the West’s own wilful blindness, paternalistic assumptions and damnable pride that are the cause of so much of the horror inflicted on the region. Fromkin traces a line through a whole series of separate incidents, intrigues and revolts that the British believed had to be the work of a single and small group of conspirators. And then argues that that’s not wholly wrong.

“In fact there was there was an outside force linked to every one of the outbreaks of violence in the Middle East, but it was the one force whose presence remained invisible to British officialdom. It was Britain herself. In a region of the world whose inhabitants were known especially to dislike foreigners, and in a predominantly Moslem world which could abide being ruled by almost anybody except non-Moslems, a foreign Christian country ought to have expected to encounter hostility when it attempted to impose its own rule. The shadows that accompanied the British rulers wherever they went in the Middle East were in fact their own.”

Ibid., p.468.

The book explains how the Middle East we know today came into being. And I can’t help wondering if those same shadows accompany the British and Americans even now, only under a different name.

Days like crazy paving

On Thursday, as well as being in DWM, I sat through some debates relating to International Women's Day, and then went to the pub. Saw lots of lovely people, ate some nice Thai food, and had more to drink than is probably wise. There was hugging at the end of the evening.

On Friday, I meant to finish a great long blog post about David Fromkin's "A Peace to End All Peace". But I didn't. Instead, I went for a very amiable meeting about something I can't talk about, and came away with a free book full of thrilling pictures. And, I'm assured, a contract. Whee!

Calling the Dr to say it had gone well, there was terrible news. Her camera seems to have eaten all the pictures she took of our holiday. I bought that camera as a hooray for her finishing her PhD, and it has been well travelled and contributed much to the Dr's forthcoming book (of which she now has proofs). So the thought of a digital replacement is all a bit sad and emotional.

In the evening, I took the Dr to see Under the Eagle, which I'd seen as a reading back in October. The script has been polished and sharpened up, and is much more effective (though I did really like the first version). Afterwards, there was time for beer with various colleagues. And I got to meet Tom Baker's infamous friend.

Yesterday I tried to put some notes together for something I am pitching. The Dr returned from giving a lecture on the use of mummies in medicine (they get their name from mummia, the resin used in the mummification process, but the reason mummies were thought to have healing properties was cause they contained bitumen). We poddled down to Winchester to plot travels with my parents, and then went to hear the Waynflete Singers doing Bach's B Minor Mass rather well.

I like that mass. It is probably in my top five masses.

My recent globe-trotting had well-prepared me for the packedness of the seating. My knees were right against the plastic chair in front of me, and by one of those brilliant coincidences I was the one who got the bloke who kept pushing back on his chair. At one point he might as well have just been lying in my lap.

He was also amusingly flatulent, which may explain why he couldn't keep still.

Got home about half twelve, and then I was up this morning early to finish this pitching thing. Got a showbiz party this afternoon where I need to pick someone's brains, and then we are out with the neighbours for tea.

By the end of this week I need to have written a proper synopsis for something, and made a start on something else pressing. And I've got two days freelancing, and a night out with the brothers. And something to write for one of them. But it's al very exciting and lively, and I'm only just back from holiday so it's not like I can complain. But blimey, it's like we was never away.

Fromkin is going to have to wait.

Pick of the penguin

Hooray! For the third time ever, I am in the letters page of Dr Who's Magazine.

"ANIMAL CRACKERS
Doctor Who has had pig people, cat people, rhinoceros people, butterfly people, bird people (and, ahem, badger people) but I think we should get some octopus people. Octopuses have three hearts, blue blood and can regenerate their limbs. So they are probably related to Time Lords anyway.
          Simon Guerrier, email."

Galaxy Forum, DWM #393 (2 April 2008), p. 17.

The last leg

So where were we? Oh yes, I was blogging from our hotel in the Sydney Rocks, while the Dr was exploring the roof-top hot-tub. I went up to join her and we enjoyed the view, choosing to ignore the ominous low and dark cloud out to sea.

This proved to be a mistake as it meant that as we went out to meet Dr Who author Jonathan Blum for tea in Darling Harbour, I was only wearing Birkenstock flip-flops, shorts and tee-shirt. And so got soaked when the heavens opened. There was thunder. There was lightning. There was a river of water higher than the pavement. There was me and the Dr diving into a posh wine bar, looking like drowned and under-dressed rats, texting Jon to come join us.

He did, and when the sky had cleared he took us squelching for tea in Darling Harbour. I had a pizza and shared a bottle of fizz, and we talked a bit of shop and to Jon’s wife Kate Orman by phone, and then me and the Dr squelched back to our hotel, cold and damp but well-fed.

The next day was a bit over-cast, but we explored the Rocks and took pictures. Again we were struck by the Manchester-ness of the lower-tier architecture, with sparkly skyscrapers behind.

Not that I'm sure the photo right really shows that adequately. You'll just have to take my word for it.


We nosed round the observatory that’s so very like the one in Greenwich – though they call the time-keeping bollock on the roof a “time ball”.

Bought a postcard of the upside-down Moon.

Thence a long walk to Darling Harbour again for pancakes with Jon, followed by a trek round the Maritime Museum. The Dr dared suggest it’s better laid out and interpreted than the one she used to work at herself, with plenty of personal stories and artefacts to bring the Big Ships And Stuff to life.

Just time for a beer in Edinburgh Castle (a pub) before the train back to the airport, and we got back to Melbourne in time for me to grab a quick beer with the sister’s boyfriend.

On Thursday, I managed to cock-up the trams to Melbourne Zoo, but we got there eventually. Had a great afternoon of cooing at the creatures and taking photos. The highlight was probably seeing the smallish, cuddly-looking Sumatran tigers getting fed. The keepers poked a syringe of milk through the gaps in the fence, and the tigers lapped away like little kittens. They had to chase the syringe as the keepers moved it around, and they were then touching the tigers’ paws as they poked them through the fence. Just the game I play with the Dim Cat at home through the banisters.

Also good were the apes:

The zoo is laid out in regions, so the tigers and apes from East Asia are amongst Asian trees and buildings, while the marsupials are all in a bit that feels very outback. The koalas hid in the tree and it’s illegal in Victoria for people to handle them anyway, so I didn’t take any pictures. The wombats were all cuddled up in the dark, looking snug and comfy. Again I couldn’t get pictures of them.

Then we trammed back into town and made our way to the Ian Potter Centre. There were fun exhibits of aboriginal artworks and a thing on black in fashion which was very goth and the Dr. Then there was pizza, and we bumped into the sister’s boyfriend again by chance, who spared time for a chat as I accompanied him up to the bike shop.

In the evening, me and the English girls (the Dr, the sister and Erykah) descended en mass on poor old Ian and Mrs Mond for wine and clever bloody Joe Lister on the telly. Couldn’t have been a better last night in Oz, with splendid company and many laughs. Ian even showed us the Wicket T Warwick costume he’d been made to wear on his stag do.

Up early Friday for a very long flight to South Africa, where again I didn’t fit. My auntie met us at the airport, and explained the various things we were driving past on the way back to her house. She dealt very well with what were probably two zombies. I was much tickled, though, that they call traffic lights “robots” – and didn’t know that it’s the Czech word for serfdom.

On Saturday, the auntie and uncle laid on an extraordinary trip round Soweto, with local guide Ken Dalgliesh. No, not the one I used to have a poster of. He’s studied and written on the history of the collection of townships that now has a population of 4.9 million, and is also up to his eyeballs in projects to help and support the poorer bits.

So we went to the market opposite the Hani-Baragwnath hospital, biggest hospital in the southern hemisphere, and the Dr and I braved the protein-rich mopane caterpillars that are a local stable. Past the chicken stranglers and heaps of freshly butchered, fly-covered meat, we ventured into a shebeen (pub) to share a carton of the yeasty, frothy Jo’Burg beer which was home-brewed in the days of Apartheid, when the locals were not allowed the “white man’s” beers. It’s thick, heavy, low-alcohol stuff that reminded me a lot of freshly-squeezed milk. The locals seemed very interested in my hat.

We toured through the various areas of the townships. After the fall of Apartheid, the inhabitants were given the plots of land on which they had their small and basic shacks. In the posher bits, they’ve since extended and enhanced these basic facilities, so you’ll see lavish properties and exquisitely manicured gardens bolted on to the side of a crude oblong of breeze blocks. I assume this juxtaposition is better than demolishing such a reminder of their history, and also serves to show how far the inhabitants have come – and in such a short time.

The aunt and uncle were most surprised by the low walls and lack of armed guards and electric fences that are everywhere in their bit of town. Only recently one of their friends was bound, beaten and robbed by a gang described as “militant”. Incidents like that seem pretty regular, too – they and horrendous car crashes are talked about in the way we might talk of a bad morning on the Tube.

Perhaps Soweto is just a safer, happier place with less divide between the well-off and poor. Or perhaps it has always been self-policing, so that no one would dare risk being caught stealing or anything else. I assume we only saw the tourist-friendly bits of Soweto anyway.

But our tour did include the poorer bits, and we stopped off at a community centre (oddly, built by an American basketball charity) which our guide Ken was very involved with. The smiley, happy children hanging out there quickly threw together a performance of dancing and singing, and were keen to get us dancing too. It was all so impromptu and lively. We also met the old lady who has run the place since its most basic beginnings back in 1954. She’s still the one everyone goes to when approving any new developments or projects.

The main part of the tour, though, was following the route of the march on 16 June 1976, when schoolkids with an average age of 13 protested at having to be taught at least 50 percent in Afrikaans – a language they and many of their teachers did not even speak. The subjects chosen to be taught in Afrikaans were history, geography and mathematics, further disenfranchising the country’s black majority. The kids acted independently of their parents, who they saw as subsumed into the Apartheid regime because they accepted it. And in the Catholic church where many of the kids first assembled that morning, we counted the bullet holes in the ceiling and saw the broken edge of the altar where the camo-wearing South African police had tried to scare them off.

The kids were not scared off, and we followed the route to Vilkazi Street where the police dogs (or, some sources say, a single dog) were set on them. The dog was killed, and then the police started firing into the ranks of children…

One boy, Hector Pieterson, was shot in the back, and a photo of his wounded body being carried by another boy came to embody the massacre. The picture (see the last link) is a classic “pieta” in structure, a tragic emblem that fuelled a tide against the regime. But our guide, though understanding this focus, was keen to acknowledge the other 20 people who died that day – not all of them black – and to talk of the wider context.

We stopped at Vilkazi Street to see the memorial to Hector, and then to the larger memorial with a museum to one side. The museum was full of different perspectives and ideas, if a little text-heavy. It was an intensely moving, fascinating place – so much so that the Dr was quite quiet for the rest of the evening. Seeing it makes it all the more remarkable that the fall of Apartheid didn’t descend into a bloodbath. Those we spoke to all credited that to Nelson Mandela; and they expressed concern that there was still the risk of major violence. There was much discussion (not all of which I followed) about how the BEE policy, despite its best intentions, had widened, not helped, an epidemic skills gap in the country. They await the forthcoming elections with some anxiety.

In the evening we went out to a place near to where my aunt and uncle live for some food. And again it messed up our preconceptions and prejudices about the place. There was a mix of white and black people there, and me and the Dr were both struck by how much more integrated Johannesburg is than either Australia or LA, where the races seemed to much more stick to their own. Even the airport at Johannesburg had hefty tomes trying to reconcile the past (including a book by the Dr’s PhD supervisor); we saw no acknowledgement at all in LA or Australia of their own contributions to racial history. But then I also can’t see the UK producing anything so self-critical on, say, the history of Northern Ireland.

On Sunday, we had a two-hour trip to the 55,000-hectare Pilanesburg game reserve to the north of Johannesburg and spent the day spotting real, wild hippos, giraffes, impalas, zebras, wildebeests, warthogs and what could have been a crocodile but could have been a log. The aunt and uncle apologised for us not seeing rhino and elephant, but we were very happy.

I tried to explain the astonishing vastness of the landscape, like the horizon has been extended twice as far. Various people have told me that once you’ve lived in Africa it gets into your blood, and the mother-in-law still hankers for the continent some 30 years after she left Kenya. I can sympathise. There’s something rich and potent about the brick-red soil, the hugeness of space with its wealth of animals and under the soil in gold and platinum. I guess human beings evolved to best fit this landscape, this climate, this altitude and everything else. We’re already making plans to go back, to see more…

Odd thing. The toilets at the park all offered free condoms. The toilets at Melbourne Zoo had special boxes for disposing of needles. Not sure what this signifies.

My cousin G. took us to a bar in the evening, and made us feel old by not knowing that the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” was more her mother’s generation than mine. I managed three bottles of Castle beer before we were back to the house for a fantastic spread of spare ribs and some kind of sweetcorn bake.

A quiet day Monday, though we visited the barking mad shopping centre / casino of Montecasino. The whole place is made out like an Italian town, and even the trees and ducks in the river are fake. The ceiling is painted so that half of it’s in “daylight”, the rest at “night”, and I can see when it’s really hot outside it makes sense to hang out in a place like this. But with the constant piped pop music and everything a sell, I was wanting to break out after five minutes. My uncle said it was like the village in the Prisoner – like this was a good thing.

The dire warnings about not bringing your guns into the place, and the security check to get through the door, made me ask about guns in the country. Apparently it's a major problem - people getting shot for beeping bad driving or just for being in the wrong place. Driving is mad too - you don't step on the gas when the lights go green, you pause to let people jump the lights. And the taxi drivers have to be seen to be believed.

After a bit of shopping and chasing the dog round the garden, we made our way to the airport. Plane was two hours late because they’d loaded the wrong baggage on the plane. And then the holiday was all over.

In the taxi from Heathrow, as we got caught up in the tailback behind an accident in Chiswick, I thought how small and squished up the road signs and roads and horizon all seemed. And how pale and cold and unambitious the weather seemed. And how relieved I was to get home and to sleep.

Two degrees

Hello from sunny but cold London. Didn't sleep on the flight (but did watch No Country For Old Men, Michael Clayton and the 1966 version of Alfie). Will try to write up travel notes and post pictures tomorrow. Still wading though a world of email and stuff. Bah.

In the meantime, here's Nicole's write-up of a commentary I did in LA on my audio play "The Lost Museum". Yes, a commentary on an audio play. And picures of me looking strange.

Sydney rocks!

We are now in Sydney, and have had a nice time wandering about and looking at things. The Botanical Gardens (the green bit to the left of the bridge and opera house in the pics) is chock full of all kinds of different and exotic trees. And they are chock full of bats!

You'll have to wait till the Dr gets her film developed for pics as they were too far away for my mobile. But cor it was like the trees were ripe with fat, black and burnt fruits. And then they'd yawn and stretch their bin-bag-like wings. And they look all russet and hairy and would probably be nice to cuddle...

Then on to the Domain (the green bit behind the Botanical Gardens) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The building itself is a lot like the Art Gallery in Edinburgh, and housed some fun archaeologically-correct stuff by Alma-Tadema and his mates as well as some fun contemporary and aborginal artworks.

I was especially impressed with this fella in the entrance lobby, and asked special permission of one of the staff to take his picture. As te staff fella said, it was almost as if he'd been sculpted to have his picture taken on a mobile. And them whiskers are sure something to aspire to.

We meandered into Hyde Park, enjoyed the buses and signs to Lewisham, Sydenham, Croydon, Dulwich and Chiswick, and I suggested that a fountain-sculpture of Theseus presenting his meat and two-veg while about to stab the minotaur was all a bit Torchwood, being all blatant sex and monsters. The Dr days there's quite a lot of that in antiquity, and I now have visions of spin-off show Torchwood 2000 BC.

Down Market Street and along George Street, we stopped off to take a pic of the Dr in front of Challis House. Apparently this long-bearded bigwig bequethed lots of cash to local educational somethings. The Dr was rather pleased.

Like Melbourne, there's the same two-tier feel to the place; heavy, blocky Victorian and later building in the shadow of brand spanking new skyscrapers. The Dr kept thinking it looked like Manchester, and the colonies also look like Britain's trading posts in Bristol and Edinburgh and what of London wasn't bombed. You have to remember that it's not that Oz was built in the image of Britain, but that all these colonial towns and cities were influencing each other. Bristol and Edinburgh, London and Manchester are all a brick-and-mortar dialogue with the rest of the world.

Or maybe I have sunstruck myself.

Thence to the Museum of Contemporary Arts, just a stone's throw from our hotel. Lots of aboriginal bark paintings and some depressing documentaries about just how well the native population has been shafted by us Westerners in the last 200 years.

Yesterday we did a wine tour which was entirely splendid; with just me, the Dr, A. and J. being driven round by the helpful Neil, who chatted and advised and bent the whole day around our unhelpfully faffy whims. Started at the Chandon estate and drank fizz. I'd assumed that any French-owned wineries in the Yarra Valley would date from the nineteenth century, with refugees from the phylloxera epidemic that ate up European grapes. Turns out this place only opened in 1985, part of a general expansion into the southern hemisphere (Brazil etc.) and all related to demand.

Drove round a few places and tried all kids of lovely stuff. Many growers have been able to see the affects of climate change on what they're producing; atypical weather in recent years that's unheard of in a century of records. Last year's harvest was badly damaged by completely unexpected hale! It also means that some vineyards are having to rethink what grapes they grow.

The oldest vineyard in the Yarra Valley is a nineteenth century escapee of ignoble rot. Yaring had lots of nice stuff, but by that point we were rather well oiled and instead tried some Boules outside in the sun. I even managed to win one of the three games I played, no doubt due to the genetic heritage.


Oh, and one last pic. This is typical of the full-body horrors to be found on the packs of cigarettes over here. None of your big-type Helvetica, just screaming bloody nightmares.

You may need something nice to look at after that. And Brilliant-Looking by Candlelight has an all-squeeing post about The Pirate Loop, with fun pictures and joy and everything. Which is nice.

There's also exciting news from T. and I. back in Blighty. But I do't think we're meant to mention it yet until Everyone Has Been Told. So we have raised a glass of fizz to them but kept our lips firmly sealed...

Grey

It is a bit grey and cold here in Melbourne today. I am in an internet caff in St Kilda - and the locals queue up to tell you that there was no such person as St Kilda, so it's all a bit of a paradox.

On Friday we went to Melbourne Gaol, which is a pretty harrowing experience and devoid of happy endings. The gaol is based on the panoptic model of Pentonville (as are many of the older prisons in the UK), with the idea being a) securing the maximum number of prisoners with the minimum number of guards and b) breaking the prisoners down by means of isolation tactics. A lot of the time as an inmate, you're not sure if you're being watched - the same principle on which a lot of CCTV works.

We were delighted to find the anti-masturbation gloves that had apparently become a highlight of the tour after a Billy Connolly programme. But mostly each of the open cells described the girsly life and despatch of an executed inmate, usually with a cast of their dead bonce. Again and again the inmates were non-English speaking, and/or convicted on the most scrappy circumstantial evidence. Several of the convictions have since been over-turned.

Worse was realising that the prison's official flagellators and executioners were other inmates. Ned Kelly was hanged by a convict imprisoned for flooding a street with sewage and other public nuisances. This meant that the hangings could be rather botched; the whole point of hanging is, done right, it causes immediate death. Getting it wrong either leads to a slow garotting and asphixiation, or can tear the head clean off.

So was using inmates to do the dirty work a way of not getting your hands dirty, or a way of making the prisoners complicit in the system?

We then went on a tour of the jail cells used up until 1995, with a bolshy actress dressed up as a policeman being very strict. She divided us from people we were with, so we explored the cells with strangers. She called us "it" if we stepped out of line, and she alluded to all sorts of gruesome miseries that had happened in the cells. Again, it's all about authority breaking down the individual, but also you pick up very quickly how to play the game. Do as you're told, don't make yourself noticed, and you might survive...

Needed some beer after all this institutional stuff, and hooked up with some buddies later on. I have also done a lot of reading, which I shall write up another time. Pip pip.

Yet to see the upside-down moon

Hello from sunny Melbourne. It rained yesterday, which was good as I ended up having some urgent rewrites to do on something as yet unannounced.

What did get announced on Saturday was that I am writing for the new audio Blake's 7 series. Mine is about the adventures of Jenna Stannis prior to her meeting Blake. I sat on a panel with producer Andrew Sewell, new Blake actor Derek Riddell (from Ugly Betty and Dr Who versus ninjas and werewolves) and moderator Andrew Cartmel.

In fact Saturday was a VERY long day, with no end of panels and signings and just chat. The Dr was a bit impressed by how hard everyone works at these things, and she's already talking about how next year we'll go visit San Francisco, so I think she enjoyed herself too.

Met a whole bunch of people who I'd only spoken to on email, and am doing that again tonight. Ian Mond and Dave Hoskin are both Strains I have employed. Now it's their turn to buy me beer...

Off to the Museum of Immigration first, and have some other museums tomorrow. On Monday we are going up the Yarra Valley on a tour of wine. Mmm. Wine.

I have experimented with the sink and watched water swirl backwards. but still haven't seen the upside-down moon. Oh, and Australian money is brightly coloured and made of plastic.

Right. Off to have breakfast now...

LA la la

Hello from sunny but breezy LA, where I have a few minutes before my first showbix panel. Yesterday we went to Universal Studios, which was fun but rather heavy on selling Merchandise and Brand. The rides were exciting but mostly quite quick, and I don't think they'd have been worth long queues. Luckily, it was pretty quiet and uncrowded.

The Dr got chatted up by Donkey out of Shrek and had a cuddle with Scooby-Doo. Will try to load up some images soon. I was made to have my picture taken with SpongeBob, and went on plenty of rides. We couldn't peak down the street from Desperate Housewives becase it was being used, but the other sets and streets on the backlot were fascinating.

Met some old chums and plenty of new splendid people. The Dr's just back from a trip to the Getty Museum, wowed and excited about that. "I actually teared up," she says. "How sad is that?"

Kitsch 'n' sink

Hello again. It's been a while, hasn't it? I can tell by the length of your hair.

I am almost entirely out the other side of a very busy period, and 20 pages of script from my HOLIDAY. Having not been real for months and months, I'm now getting rather excited. I've not been south of the equator before (or, I think, any further down the planet than Egypt), so 10 nights in Australia and three in Johannesburg is really An Adventure. Connections depending, I shall keep you up to date with my movements.

I am bashing out these words on my funky new MSI PR210 notebook, which I bought specially for the trip. It's a sleek and disturbingly unheavy lovely, though I find I keep missing occasional keys. The compromise was between something small and light for trekking about, but with a keyboard that still fitted my fingers.

After much fangling about, I've also got the wireless wossnames to work. (The technique seems to be to restart your computer continually for two hours until all the wossnames have loaded.) And I'd thought the laptop would latch on to the wireless thing itself, but it needs drivers and a ZyXEL router thing that looks like a USB memory stick.

This means I'm now sat in our rooftop kitchen, the unexpected sunshine rather nice on my back. As well as what remains of the as-yet-unannounced script, I've also had a chance to look over the novel that I'm intending to write while I'm away. Or at least, to break the back of.

It's a thriller that's not a tie-in to anything else, and I gamble that if I mention it here, people will ask me about it. And that pressure will mean that rather than just thinking through the clever plot mechanations, I might actually get the thing done.

Along with the wireless wossname, I've also signed us up to Virgin Media, which has all been going swimmingly. The Dr and I took great delight in watching Ashes to Ashes last night via the Telly On Demand gizmo. Laughed like fool - and was terrified by the clown! What with Torchwood and that Dot episode of EastEnders last fortnight, didn't telly get all good?

We then continued the retro 80s vibe by watching the first episode of Survival. "Weird," concluded the Dr. Though she thought the scraggy black cat (that some friends of mine till insist is called Shomi) was so like our own that I must have chosen him on purpose. Honestly, no. But we do seem to have the only cat ever who really likes having his fur brushed in the wrong direction.

If Shomi is Shaggy, asked m'colleague Scott Andrews, "Does that make Sophie Aldred Velma or Daphne?"

I think Sylvester McCoy would be Velma.

Ándale! Ándale! Arriba!

The gringo who so often harangues me for not updating this thing has started his very own blog. Keep up with his adventures as he explores the dark continent and its pretty girls. And pester him for new posts.

I’m going to be here sporadically until I jet off to LA in the small hours of 13 February. So much work stuff to deliver before I go, and just two weeks’ sand left to drool through the narrow bit of the timer.

“How the Doctor Changed my Life” is about four-fifths signed-off and done. The 25 first-time authors have been doing themselves proud with conscientious rewrites. Most have argued with at least some of my suggestions, though no one has done any shouting. It’s been a really good process all told, and well worth all the effort. Trying to fathom the running order, I’m delighted how strong a collection this will be. Hooray!

Cover to come sometime soonish, I think. Plus news of the book’s bonus features.

Meanwhile, Bernice Summerfield – The Wake is just out, ending my run on 15 consecutive Bennies. A few nice people have said nice things, though I was a bit surprised by two people who thought What Happens to Doggles just comes out of nowhere. I thought I’d nicely set this up in his dinner date with Benny, and earlier in The End of the World’s final scene. Ah well…

I’m also well into writing something that cannot be spoken of, have begun something else that cannot be spoken of, have three short scripts to write up for Codename Moose, a script about carrots to be written by August for John S Drew, and have bought the book about something else top secret which I can pitch for when I’m back from my holiday.

Well, I say holiday; the plan is to take with me my funky new laptop and break the back of the standalone novel I’ve been meaning to write for some years. Have scooped up plenty of useful details for this from some recent reading: coal fires, smoking compartments and something for headaches called venganin…

Spent the weekend at what m’colleague M has described rather well as “a two-day pub quiz”. On Saturday night I thought my all-out blaspheming had led to a strange hallucination. No, apparently, Matt Lucas was not an apparition and saw me and Nimbos "hilariously" breaking some rules… Not sure this is actually better than the thought that my brain had invented him.

Also learnt how to eat hot-cross buns quickly; stuffing them into your mouth leads to dried-out gagging. The trick is to tear off small pieces, which can be swallowed more quickly. You get this top tip for free.

Flying man

Snapped here is James Butler's 2000 Fleet Air Arm Monument, which I think is haunting and beautiful. The not-brilliant photography maybe doesn't quite show what the pilot hangs dead beneath torn, broken wings.

According to the Dr's rather fab book on London's various statues,

"The Fleet Air Arm is that part of the Air Force that operates from aircraft carriers. During the Second World War it became the most important and effective part of the Royal Navy. This monument commemorates those who gave their lives in service of the Fleet Air Arm."

Andrew Kershman, London's Monuments, p. 150.

The statue is about halfway between Westminister and Hungerford Bridges, and if the dead man looked up he'd see right in front of him the Royal Air Force Memorial (1923) - the stone column with a sparkly bronze eagle on top of it, which is where the Doctor parked his TARDIS in "Rose".

Knight fall

How sad about Heath Ledger. No, I didn't know him or anything like that. I haven't even got a lame-o showbiz story about having been on the same bus... Although, my sister made his clothes for Ned Kelly and said he was one of the good ones.

The shocked obituaries have of course all mentioned his moody, sulky turn in Brokeback Mountain. And Channel 4's lunchtime news had a clip of him being the Joker which is all very wow. Yet the film for which I think he should be remembered is his nicely light dude hero of A Knight's Tale.

The Dr and I went to see it in the now-closed old-skool cinema in Catford on 12 September 2001. We both kind of needed a break from the reality of the day before, and that was the perfect thing. It's quite a hokey story about a working class boy done good, that might as well be about him playing good football as it is about his good jousting. Yet it manages to be far better than it really needs to be, the lively pop history in a clever script allowing plenty of fine comic performances.

The Dr quite liked the scowly Rufus Sewell, and there's a scowly James Purefoy in there too. And ooh look, there's him out of Firefly and that's Saturday's Dogberry).

Paul Bettany's wildly over-the-top Geoff Chaucer is a particular gem. And Laura Fraser is in it too, which is always good for warm, glowy feelings. I once oggled at her on a train at New Cross - which is exciting because that's where Chaucer really was mugged (as happens at the start of the film).

Ledger really ought to be invisible in the company of such sparkling sidekickery. He is, after all, being the usual kind of square-jawed, blond hero eye candy, too saintly to be of much interest. I can't imagine another actor being better in the role, embuing what's could be such a stereotype with such warmth and charisma and life.

So, no, I didn't know him or what went on in his real life. And yet it really is a shame. As the sister said, he was one of the good ones.

Mountains out of lady parts

Having spent the day trying to get words to work right on Saturday, the Dr took me out for the evening. We went for pizza and then Much Ado About Nothing at the National.

The prince's men stop off at a house on their way back from the wars. The prince's top man Claudio falls for pretty Hero, daughter of the house, and there is much rejoicing. The prince also decides he's going to trick ever-warring Benedict and Beatrice into declaring their love for each other. But the prince's bastard brother hates all this larking about, and plots to bring it all crashing down...

It's, as you'd expect, an energetic and sumptuous version, full of note-perfect performances from the impressive cast. Cassandra from Dr Who vies with the former King Arthur from Spamalot to the amusement of that bloke from Star Wars who says a communications malfunction can only mean invasion, and that bloke who used to run Brookside's neighbourhood watch.

High emotion is rung from the emotional scenes, and the funny stuff is played with great slapstick. There's people hiding in plain sight, an old man struggling to wield a sword twice his size, and some people falling over into... Oh, that would rather spoil it. Mark Addy and Trevor Peacock valiantly try to steal the show in their brief, Act-Two-only roles as Dogberry and Verges.

I especially liked how Zoe Wanamaker's Beatrice clearly always had a thing for Benedict. The Dr felt their bickering was not a million miles from our own. (I think we're more Rod Hull and Grotbags, myself, with Emu as the cat.) She also liked how it's clearly all the fault of the boys.

And we both giggled a lot at the programme's insight into the title of the play.

"But men make a fuss in another sense, for, as Elizabethan slang well knew, women are defined by having no 'thing', or, as Hamlet puts it, nothing is 'a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.' Men's inability to control what women do with their 'nothing' is frequently tormenting for them."

Peter Holland, 'Strange Misprision', in the National Theatre programme for Much Ado About Nothing.

Space-pirate badgers #3 and #4

Last post on this subject, I promise.

Went to Manchester yesterday to sign more copies of Dr Who and the Pirate Loop. It was more exclusive an event than maybe we'd expected, but congratulations to young fans Peter and James for winning the quiz. Me, Jim and Trev did readings of our best bits (Milky-Pink City; the Doctor walks into the bar; the Doctor in the bathroom) and then got to scrawling our names.

John Davies of Short Trips fame made it along, and I also got to meet Mike Amberry and Bernard O'Toole, who'll be in "How the Doctor changed my life" later this year. Both manfully resisted the urge to throttle me for the work I've made them do. Then it was on to beer and Chinese, and a contest for lame meets with celebrities.

My brother-in-law and his mate the Yemayan Ambassador (see page 91) worried we'd share the last train home with Manchester's finest drunks. Sadly, the trip back to Macclesfield was quiet and uneventful.

Amongst the Decemberists, there was much comparison of our various reviews and how can readers pick up or concentrate on the strangest of elements.

Anyway. Hooray, because I've managed to come out pick of the month of all knock-off product featured in this month's DWM, and am a bit dazzled to beat The Target Book, let alone my colleagues.

"The Pirate Loop is one of those rare things, a children's book that adults will adore. It's clever, funny, thoughtful and silly, and loads of other good words. But the one that sums it up best is this: brilliant."

Matt Michael, "The DWM Review", Doctor Who Magazine #391 (6 Feb 2008), p. 60.

SFX likes Jim's one best (though refers to it as "Peacekeeper"), and thought mine worth just 2.5 stars out of five. My own, it says, starts outrageously,

"and gets gradually camper from there ... It lurches between comic setpieces and frequent bursts of violence (including endless shootings and a couple of gratuitous stabbings), while the constant pressing of the temporal reset button quickly becomes wearying (even Martha admits she's "getting a bit bored by it all" at one point). It's also incredibly talky, and everyone knows that, if there's one thing guaranteed to turn the kids off, it's too much yakking."

Paul Kirkley, "SFXrated Books", SFX #166, February 2008, p112.

In fact, my book seems to have caused a bit of a stir, with some people tickled pick and others rather angry. "Omega's Chicken" on the Doctor Who forum thread for the book (you have to register to read it) seems especially cross, calling it "Absolutely terrible ... just childish, dull and banal." But on the whole people who deserve to continue to living (joke!) seem to enjoy it.

I don't think I can really count Millennium's lovely comments, much as they made me beam.

A few people at signings (some of them adults) have also asked about What Archie Did Next. Even the folks at my publishers seem taken with the little scamp - my editor even had cake with Lee Binding's Archie artwork printed on it. And I'm told people have done drawings...

But can you do better? I've set up an open Flickr group, "Archibald the space-pirate badger", in which YOU can submit your own drawings.

Intermission

This last week I have mostly been doing back flips through fiery hoops. But fiery hoops are my speciality, so you prepare the ground, put on your best shoes, make the most of whatever there is of a run up and Wheeeeeeeee!

Only then to be told, “Well yes, okay, but could you do it again, this time holding this glass of water…”

Excitingly, my efforts are now approved – and better for all those gauntlets of flaming hoops. The books that need reading are sitting in a heap by my computer, and though I’ve skimped on seeing friends (sorry O!) or going to some meetings (sorry P and J and M at Rob Shearman’s book launch tonight!), the freelance commitments have – I hope – not even noticed my raw-eyed, manic look.

This morning, I even managed to schedule a lie-in. And it seems to have finished off the last of my itchy cold. Now I’ve just a ton of things to get written and in before 13 February, when I’m off to tour the world. Which will be easy as…

Oh heck.

Hence, of course, the radio silence on here. But I have some notes to write up when I have a spare moment on such topics as The Wisdom of Crowds, Spamalot!, Last Chance To See... , what signings are like when you’re the one signing, the way people talk of “the market” like Ben Kenobi does “the Force”, Stewart Lee doing stand-up, and why the words “parallel” and “alternate” are Wrong. And I’m about halfway through A Peace To End All Peace, which has led to a lot of cross scribbling…

In the meantime, here is some music. (No, not really.)

Shut it!

Went to see a preview screening of Sweeney Todd! at the NFT last night, which included a surprise Q&A with director Tim Burton. Burton explained how he'd cut the three-hour stage version down for the film, losing the big numbers and concentrating on Sweeney's story, at the expense of Judge Turpin and - to a lesser extent - Mrs Lovett.

It's a typically macabre imagining, the 18th century story told in a mythic, Victoriana London sometime after the completion of Tower Bridge (1894, fact fans). Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter are magnificently grotesque, Depp getting very little dialogue and so playing big, expressive eyes in the manner of Peter Lorre. Mrs Lovett is a fantastically devious character, whose dream of a beach holiday is one of the film's many highlights.

The supporting cast - Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen and a number of newcomers - are also really good. The Dr was especially excited by a duet between Rickman and Depp on the subject of pretty women. I suspect that song is still playing in her head.

Yes, this is a musical. The songs help elevate the arch gothery of the thing (though Burton said he's not even sure what goth means). The actors, not known for their singing, are surprisingly accomplished, and for such an over-the-top film, there's an added realism to the way they act the songs rather than project them. Still, for all Sondheim's talents, I can't now recall any of the melodies - not even the one about London being a shithole.

The design is absolutely brilliant, and with the skinny, gaunt figures with shadowed, haunted eyes it's probably the film to look most like Burton's own sketches. The NFT lobby includes some of these drawings, as well as Depp and Bonham-Carter's skinny costumes.

Some people have commented on the bloody violence - which is odd considering it's a film about cannibals. But the lurid scarlet juice that squirts from people's necks is oppulent, Hollywood stuff. Even the Dr managed to cope, and she can be girlishly squeamish. It reminded her of the Technicolor gore of the classic Hammer horrors. It reminded me more of the delimbing of the Black Knight in Mønti Pythøn ik den Hølie Gräilenn. The most shocking death is the one not to be done by the razor.

It's not a film to tell you anything profound or to change the way you see things. It's not a film with a happy ending (Burton doesn't show us what happens to characters we can presume made their escape). But it's sumptuous, funny and gloriously peculiar, and well worth going to see. Bloody good show!

Bloop eater

Julio Angel Ortiz's quick interview with me is now up on his site. It includes a fetching portrait that's not the usual mugging, crazy ape. That Lisa Bowerman, she clever.

Also up online is Richard McGinley's review of The Pirate Loop. He seems to think I'm too junior to have got the gig, and concludes that it's "frivolous" but "enjoyable". But he's wrong in saying my reference to Trev's The Wishing Wall is me being a continuity monkey. That reference (and so the order of our books) was suggested by the chief. Anyway, I come out of the review, as do the other Decemberists, with a pretty good seven out of 10.

And also this afternoon, I got to meet Peter Duncan. Yes, only long enough to shake hands and say hello and then go our separate ways. But ha! to Nimbos, who should be all dead envious.

(And a little more of a tale than the time I met David Tennant and he said to me, er, "Thanks, mate." Lame-oh showbiz stories are me.)