Normal Service...

...certainly isn't going to be resumed tonight. But it should be later in the week, with any luck.

Apologies to all my regular readers for the relentlessly God-bothering tone of this blog as of late. As you'll have gathered, the Greenbelt christian arts festival has been rather occupying my attention: now that I'm back this shouldn't be the case for much longer, at least until August next year. If you want to know what I did and how it was, then follow the links below -- but if you do, then you probably already have.

(For those of you who can't be bothered, the talk went very well. It was crowded out, in fact, with some 260 attendees. Doctor Who is a very big draw this year. [Edit: Full transcripts should be going up on the web at some point, and with luck Greenbelt will eventually be selling recordings of the event itself.])

I will at some point be producing a post about the festival generally, saying the things I couldn't really say whilst writing on behalf of surefish.co.uk -- but otherwise Peculiar Times should shortly be returning to its regular round of political and philosophical rumination, literary and televisual criticism, random autobiographical maunderings, unhealthy speculation about Nicole Kidman and gratuitous plugs for my books. How lucky you all are.

I have (at least) one reading-related post in particular which I really must write at some point soon, covering among other things The Time Traveler's Wife, Einstein's Dreams and the first quarter of The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction.

It's going to have to wait, though, because currently I am, quite honestly, absolutely bloody knackered. And I'm enrolling students again tomorrow morning.