1. Buy new cooker online. Take careful note of the terms and conditions, which state that unless your existing cooker is thoroughly disconnected at time of delivery, the delivery staff will neither take it away nor install the new one for you.
2. Spend an evening with your head in a cupboard disconnecting wires.
3. Await delivery of new cooker.
4. Receive phone call informing you that the delivery staff have accidentally dropped your new cooker, which is now in bits, and that it will take a week to procure a new one from the manufacturers. Explain angrily that there's no way you'll be able to reconnect the old cooker safely, and that this means you'll be spending a week preparing meals for two adults and a one-year-old using a camping stove.
5. Spend a week preparing meals for two adults and a one-year-old using a camping stove.
6. Await delivery of new cooker.
7. Welcome delivery staff. Listen in appalled horror as they inform you that you've been too thorough in disconnecting the old cooker, that they need to reattach some of the screws you took out from the junction box, and that this is utterly, completely infeasible without a magnetic screwdriver, which, oops, they happen not to have with them that day. Watch as delivery staff demonstrate that, look, they're trying their best but, ooh, it's really hard.
8. Watch as wife demands access to junction box and reattaches screws with brisk efficiency. Try very, very hard not to giggle.
9. Watch as delivery staff install new cooker, take away old cooker and leave.
10. Victory dance.
11. [Optional] Agree to throw in new cooker free if potential buyers agree to purchase your house. Repeat from 1.
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
19 April 2011
10 October 2010
Publicity (Self- and Other-)
1. Other-
Quite apart from not actually posting here for weeks, I've not done nearly enough to publicise the fact that my brother Nick has self-published a novel which seems to be gaining some approving reviews among fans of the kind of novel it is.
I don't really enjoy the idea of zombies, in the usually understood modern sense. I've no problem (other than credibility, obviously) with the idea of a vodou bokor raising the dead to act as his or her slave -- that kind of zombi I'm perfectly at ease with. It's the contagion-and-pandemic model of contemporary zombiedom which frankly gives me the screaming willies. I've always had a phobia of plague, and the idea of a horde of unwitting, pathetic carriers who don't realise how a pathogen has modified their behaviour terrifies me far more than any mere cadaver risen from the grave.
(Oddly enough, I'm perfectly at ease with the contagion model of vampirism. Indeed, I've happily written about it. Vampires are usually highly selective about whom they recruit to their ranks, however, which leads me to suspect that it's epidemics and pandemics which really terrify me, and not disease per se.)
All of which means I haven't actually read Breaking News: An Autozombiography. I should have, but I almost certainly never will. However, as I say, people who have read it seem to have liked it, so if you're less squeamish than I am about the whole concept you may well like it too. I'm sorry not to be able to provide a less pusillanimous endorsement.
2. Self-
I've just sent off a final submitted draft of my 10,000-word epic short story, "A Hundred Words from a Civil War", to be published in Obverse Books's forthcoming Faction Paradox anthology Faction Paradox: A Romance in Twelve Parts. It is, as you may by now have gathered, a full-on sequel to my Faction Paradox novel Of the City of the Saved..., and I'm immoderately pleased with it.
For reasons which may eventually become clear, I've written eleven additional drabbles which won't form part of the final drabbleplex, but which I will be putting up on my website. I may as well post them here too, as occasional teasers from now until the book's eventual publication date. Meet Mnaea Marla:
The book's out in February, supposedly. I'll try to post the other ten drabbles by then. It should force me to blog something every so often, at least.
3. Oh, and...
...There are, incidentally, zombies in "A Hundred Words from a Civil War". But not contagious ones.
Quite apart from not actually posting here for weeks, I've not done nearly enough to publicise the fact that my brother Nick has self-published a novel which seems to be gaining some approving reviews among fans of the kind of novel it is.
I don't really enjoy the idea of zombies, in the usually understood modern sense. I've no problem (other than credibility, obviously) with the idea of a vodou bokor raising the dead to act as his or her slave -- that kind of zombi I'm perfectly at ease with. It's the contagion-and-pandemic model of contemporary zombiedom which frankly gives me the screaming willies. I've always had a phobia of plague, and the idea of a horde of unwitting, pathetic carriers who don't realise how a pathogen has modified their behaviour terrifies me far more than any mere cadaver risen from the grave.
(Oddly enough, I'm perfectly at ease with the contagion model of vampirism. Indeed, I've happily written about it. Vampires are usually highly selective about whom they recruit to their ranks, however, which leads me to suspect that it's epidemics and pandemics which really terrify me, and not disease per se.)
All of which means I haven't actually read Breaking News: An Autozombiography. I should have, but I almost certainly never will. However, as I say, people who have read it seem to have liked it, so if you're less squeamish than I am about the whole concept you may well like it too. I'm sorry not to be able to provide a less pusillanimous endorsement.
2. Self-
I've just sent off a final submitted draft of my 10,000-word epic short story, "A Hundred Words from a Civil War", to be published in Obverse Books's forthcoming Faction Paradox anthology Faction Paradox: A Romance in Twelve Parts. It is, as you may by now have gathered, a full-on sequel to my Faction Paradox novel Of the City of the Saved..., and I'm immoderately pleased with it.
For reasons which may eventually become clear, I've written eleven additional drabbles which won't form part of the final drabbleplex, but which I will be putting up on my website. I may as well post them here too, as occasional teasers from now until the book's eventual publication date. Meet Mnaea Marla:
Mnaea Marla lies beneath the rubble, clutching the grenade. The enemy are searching the building. It’s only a matter of time. Her left arm is a useless crumpled thing, and both her legs are broken.(These alternative / deleted scenes are all one-offs with no link to the main story, so you're not missing out by not having the context.)
Worst of all, her left head is dead, caved in bloodily under a falling brick. No surgeon can bring back that unique consciousness – her aggravating twin, her friend and lover, her conscience and tempter. They can never be together again now, except in death – death, and the hope of further resurrection.
The enemy are close now. Marla primes the grenade, kisses herself goodbye, and waits.
The book's out in February, supposedly. I'll try to post the other ten drabbles by then. It should force me to blog something every so often, at least.
3. Oh, and...
...There are, incidentally, zombies in "A Hundred Words from a Civil War". But not contagious ones.
06 December 2007
Bard Humbug
I've spent some of today writing a short story for B. and me to send out with our Christmas cards. I started this tradition in 2006, and last year's story (a midwinter fantasy called "Sol Invictus") should be appearing at my website at some point between now and Christmas itself. I may as well post it here as well.
If you need entertaining in the meantime, you can always read my latest column about dystopias at Surefish.
Today I've also been scouting out Christmas presents online, including the latest Arden Shakespeare for our goddaughter E.'s collection. We've been giving her a play every birthday and Christmas since she was born, making (Antony and Cleopatra) her thirteenth (and E. herself, of course, six). We calculate that, including the poems and sonnets, there's an adequate supply of Shakespeare to last her until her twentieth birthday, following which we can make the whole library redundant by giving her the Complete Shakespeare for Christmas 2021.
Obviously we're having to be judicious about this. On the one hand, we want to be able to give her some of the interesting plays when she's old enough to appreciate them. On the other hand, when she reaches an age to take an interest in a long-dead verse playwright, we don't want her to look through the selection she's got and realise that most of them are frankly rubbish.
With the best Will in the world (ho ho), not many teenagers these days read Timon of Athens or Pericles, Prince of Tyre for pleasure, and the few who do are probably as disturbed by the obsession with father-daughter incest as amused by Pericles' Pythonesque description of fish as "the finny subject of the sea".
So, we've been trying to alternate the interesting (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra) and less-interesting (Richard II, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV Parts One and Two, Pericles, The Comedy of Errors) plays, as well as keeping up a vaguely even balance of the genres.
We have two lists, of Good and Not Good plays, each title colour-coded according to whether it's a Tragedy, a Comedy, a History or the one of difficult-to-categorise Last Plays. (Identifying Good Histories has been a bit of a challenge, of course. Once you've done Henry V and Richard III you're a bit stuck.)
She may, of course, have to study some of the plays at school or college, which might mean we have to alter our plans. Some plays we're keeping back for specific life-stages: Hamlet is obviously an ideal gift for a moody teenager who hates their parents, while Titus Andronicus -- a cheerful tale of murder, rape, revenge, mutilation and cannibalism -- seems ideal for her Goth phase.
I wonder slightly whether I should be revealing future plans for presents on a blog which is archived indefinitely. While a six-year-old is unlikely to be browsing the web in search of people she knows, a sixteen-year-old might well be.
On the other hand, I rather suspect E. will have better things to do in 2017 than reading ten-year-old blog posts by her 46-year-old godfather. As for 415-year-old plays by a 450-year-old playwright... well, the jury's still out on that one.
If you need entertaining in the meantime, you can always read my latest column about dystopias at Surefish.
Today I've also been scouting out Christmas presents online, including the latest Arden Shakespeare for our goddaughter E.'s collection. We've been giving her a play every birthday and Christmas since she was born, making (Antony and Cleopatra) her thirteenth (and E. herself, of course, six). We calculate that, including the poems and sonnets, there's an adequate supply of Shakespeare to last her until her twentieth birthday, following which we can make the whole library redundant by giving her the Complete Shakespeare for Christmas 2021.
Obviously we're having to be judicious about this. On the one hand, we want to be able to give her some of the interesting plays when she's old enough to appreciate them. On the other hand, when she reaches an age to take an interest in a long-dead verse playwright, we don't want her to look through the selection she's got and realise that most of them are frankly rubbish.
With the best Will in the world (ho ho), not many teenagers these days read Timon of Athens or Pericles, Prince of Tyre for pleasure, and the few who do are probably as disturbed by the obsession with father-daughter incest as amused by Pericles' Pythonesque description of fish as "the finny subject of the sea".
So, we've been trying to alternate the interesting (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra) and less-interesting (Richard II, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV Parts One and Two, Pericles, The Comedy of Errors) plays, as well as keeping up a vaguely even balance of the genres.
We have two lists, of Good and Not Good plays, each title colour-coded according to whether it's a Tragedy, a Comedy, a History or the one of difficult-to-categorise Last Plays. (Identifying Good Histories has been a bit of a challenge, of course. Once you've done Henry V and Richard III you're a bit stuck.)
She may, of course, have to study some of the plays at school or college, which might mean we have to alter our plans. Some plays we're keeping back for specific life-stages: Hamlet is obviously an ideal gift for a moody teenager who hates their parents, while Titus Andronicus -- a cheerful tale of murder, rape, revenge, mutilation and cannibalism -- seems ideal for her Goth phase.
I wonder slightly whether I should be revealing future plans for presents on a blog which is archived indefinitely. While a six-year-old is unlikely to be browsing the web in search of people she knows, a sixteen-year-old might well be.
On the other hand, I rather suspect E. will have better things to do in 2017 than reading ten-year-old blog posts by her 46-year-old godfather. As for 415-year-old plays by a 450-year-old playwright... well, the jury's still out on that one.
17 January 2007
Höllering
Brief update today, to catch up on a busy weekend and a busier week.
After getting a few hundred whole words of my novella written during the last couple of days of last week, I disappeared to London with B. for Saturday and Sunday, to visit relatives (or in my case in-laws), attend a birthday party and appreciate the art at the Tate Modern.
After a pleasant lunch with B.'s granny, most of Saturday afternoon was wasted in dithering. The London "hotel" we'd booked online -- which had looked cheap and basic, but perfectly serviceable, in pixel form -- turned out to be a godawful dive of a pub on a rubbish-strewn sink estate, and not at all the sort of place where we'd have been happy walking, or even leaving a taxi, late at night. After much agonising over the possibilities, we eventually settled for the inconvenience (to her and us) of sleeping on B.'s sister's sofa instead. (It was kind and rather heroic of said sister to take us in, considering that she was already putting up her boyfriend and the aforementioned granny, and that her house isn't exactly vast.)
That decision made, we managed to enjoy ourselves on Carsten Höller's masterwork, which was appropriately spectacular and boundary-breaking, but may or may not count as actual art. I can't yet decide whether my considered response is:
We then proceeded to the party, which was great -- plenty of beer and interesting conversation, lots of hardcore dance music (which our hosts, at our drunken insistence, very patiently and painstakingly explained to us), three lovely velvety rats (pet ones who were meant to be there, rather than the less convivial kind we'd have been likely to find near our "hotel"), and several equally lovely velvety single malt whiskies. Mm.
The next morning I was feeling rather delicate, but was soon revived by brunch with other friends, somewhere in Clapham. At least, I think it was Clapham. I was too hungry to notice really. Then we drove back to Bristol in the afternoon, ate too much supper (possibly to line our stomachs retrospectively for the night before), and went to bed.
Since then I've been back at work, wading through acronyms until (as I discovered when trying to read a safety notice on the train home today) I genuinely can't see words printed in capitals without wondering what all the letters stand for.
Oh, and watching the first three episodes of Season Three of Battlestar Galactica, which is ace. More on that anon.
After getting a few hundred whole words of my novella written during the last couple of days of last week, I disappeared to London with B. for Saturday and Sunday, to visit relatives (or in my case in-laws), attend a birthday party and appreciate the art at the Tate Modern.
After a pleasant lunch with B.'s granny, most of Saturday afternoon was wasted in dithering. The London "hotel" we'd booked online -- which had looked cheap and basic, but perfectly serviceable, in pixel form -- turned out to be a godawful dive of a pub on a rubbish-strewn sink estate, and not at all the sort of place where we'd have been happy walking, or even leaving a taxi, late at night. After much agonising over the possibilities, we eventually settled for the inconvenience (to her and us) of sleeping on B.'s sister's sofa instead. (It was kind and rather heroic of said sister to take us in, considering that she was already putting up her boyfriend and the aforementioned granny, and that her house isn't exactly vast.)
That decision made, we managed to enjoy ourselves on Carsten Höller's masterwork, which was appropriately spectacular and boundary-breaking, but may or may not count as actual art. I can't yet decide whether my considered response is:
Höller's Test Site is a fascinating and vivid demonstration of the tendency of a limited loss of stability and control over one's environment to evoke the most visceral human emotional responses, and a witty and profound exploration of the boundaries between architecture, psychology and child's play.or:
I liked the Level Four slide best because of the steep bits which were scary! But the Level Five slide was best too because you get to go very very fast! WHEEEEEEEE!
We then proceeded to the party, which was great -- plenty of beer and interesting conversation, lots of hardcore dance music (which our hosts, at our drunken insistence, very patiently and painstakingly explained to us), three lovely velvety rats (pet ones who were meant to be there, rather than the less convivial kind we'd have been likely to find near our "hotel"), and several equally lovely velvety single malt whiskies. Mm.
The next morning I was feeling rather delicate, but was soon revived by brunch with other friends, somewhere in Clapham. At least, I think it was Clapham. I was too hungry to notice really. Then we drove back to Bristol in the afternoon, ate too much supper (possibly to line our stomachs retrospectively for the night before), and went to bed.
Since then I've been back at work, wading through acronyms until (as I discovered when trying to read a safety notice on the train home today) I genuinely can't see words printed in capitals without wondering what all the letters stand for.
Oh, and watching the first three episodes of Season Three of Battlestar Galactica, which is ace. More on that anon.
08 November 2006
Middle of the Road
Well, I've now more or less recovered from my 35th birthday party at the weekend, which celebrated the halfway point in my biblically mandated lifespan with appropriate gravity. I'm still rather pleased with the grim and forbidding invitation I designed for the occasion, so I've webbed it here for those of you who haven't seen it already.
In practice, of course, the day was happy, fun and thoroughly enjoyable. Lunch at Zerodegrees (in my case caramelised pear and gorgonzola pizza, accompanied by black lager and pale ale) was followed by a cake which B. had bought and iced for the occasion. We then led a party to Bristol Zoo to observe the various fine animals on display there.
It was the first time I'd visited the new Monkey Jungle, where red-ruffed lemurs scamper freely around the visitors' paths and handrails without intervening bars or glass. The lions, penguins and gorillas were as entertaining as ever, although for some reason the capybara were nowhere to be seen.
In the evening we went on to the Portwall Tavern, which had kindly reserved us all space and got a chef in specially to provide Pieminister pies. They sold us Doombar, Barnstormer and various other beers that I was having too good a time to pay sufficently close attention to.
B. had kindly ensured that it wouldn't matter if I got drunk and embarrassed myself by assembling an activity that would provide a whole different order of embarrassment: a pub quiz based on my life, which she'd compiled by consulting friends, relatives and, apparently, pretty much everyone I'd ever met.
Subjects ranged from my first words and reaction to the birth of my baby brother, to my recent writing and participation in mailing-list controversies. The final round looked like this (click for enlarged image):
and involved identifying the contents of my DVD and video shelves.
My wife's devotion, and her creativity, never cease to amaze me. I'm so very lucky to have her.
It was lovely to see the nearly 40 people from different eras and aspects of my life, including university contemporaries, fellow authors, sisters-in-law, friends' children including my goddaughter, and various teenage and childhood companions, including some who've known me getting on for three decades now.
Too many of these are people I don't see nearly often enough these days, so it was wonderful to catch up with so many of them. People drifted in and out during the different phases of the day, but still there were only a few who I didn't manage to chat to properly.
Thanks to the extreme generosity of family and friends, I now have altogether more new books than I'm likely to get around to reading, which is just the way I like it. Titles I was particularly happy to be given included:
Other rather splendid things from generous people included the DVDs of Mirrormask (from B. again) and the 3-disc edition of The Wicker Man, a case of fair trade wine and a similar number of bottles of exciting beer, and (from goddaughter E. and family) the adoption papers for a two-toed sloth.
It was the kind of weekend which leaves you replete, slightly hungover, full of love for humanity in general and your friends in particular, and mildly dazed by the sensory overload of it all. In short, utterly lovely.
It's just a shame I can't justify having another one until I'm halfway to 80.
In practice, of course, the day was happy, fun and thoroughly enjoyable. Lunch at Zerodegrees (in my case caramelised pear and gorgonzola pizza, accompanied by black lager and pale ale) was followed by a cake which B. had bought and iced for the occasion. We then led a party to Bristol Zoo to observe the various fine animals on display there.
It was the first time I'd visited the new Monkey Jungle, where red-ruffed lemurs scamper freely around the visitors' paths and handrails without intervening bars or glass. The lions, penguins and gorillas were as entertaining as ever, although for some reason the capybara were nowhere to be seen.
In the evening we went on to the Portwall Tavern, which had kindly reserved us all space and got a chef in specially to provide Pieminister pies. They sold us Doombar, Barnstormer and various other beers that I was having too good a time to pay sufficently close attention to.
B. had kindly ensured that it wouldn't matter if I got drunk and embarrassed myself by assembling an activity that would provide a whole different order of embarrassment: a pub quiz based on my life, which she'd compiled by consulting friends, relatives and, apparently, pretty much everyone I'd ever met.
Subjects ranged from my first words and reaction to the birth of my baby brother, to my recent writing and participation in mailing-list controversies. The final round looked like this (click for enlarged image):
and involved identifying the contents of my DVD and video shelves.
My wife's devotion, and her creativity, never cease to amaze me. I'm so very lucky to have her.
It was lovely to see the nearly 40 people from different eras and aspects of my life, including university contemporaries, fellow authors, sisters-in-law, friends' children including my goddaughter, and various teenage and childhood companions, including some who've known me getting on for three decades now.
Too many of these are people I don't see nearly often enough these days, so it was wonderful to catch up with so many of them. People drifted in and out during the different phases of the day, but still there were only a few who I didn't manage to chat to properly.
Thanks to the extreme generosity of family and friends, I now have altogether more new books than I'm likely to get around to reading, which is just the way I like it. Titles I was particularly happy to be given included:
- The Prisoner Scripts Volume 1 from B.;
- Fragile Things and Watching the English from the aforementioned baby brother and his wife;
- Persian Fire, Collapse and (tokenistically) Promethea Book 5 and King Rat from my parents-in-law;
- Never the Bride and Accelerando from other relatives, again through the magic of book tokens;
- and River of Gods, Iron Council, 100% and Dying Planet from various friends.
Other rather splendid things from generous people included the DVDs of Mirrormask (from B. again) and the 3-disc edition of The Wicker Man, a case of fair trade wine and a similar number of bottles of exciting beer, and (from goddaughter E. and family) the adoption papers for a two-toed sloth.
It was the kind of weekend which leaves you replete, slightly hungover, full of love for humanity in general and your friends in particular, and mildly dazed by the sensory overload of it all. In short, utterly lovely.
It's just a shame I can't justify having another one until I'm halfway to 80.
26 October 2006
How Cod Rot
I've been meaning for a while to do a full-scale media update here, giving my opinions on Ada or Ardor (which I finally finished), Children of Men (which B. and I went to see a couple of weeks ago), The Netherlands National Circus (who we took goddaughter E. to see the other weekend), Robin Hood (which, after three episodes, I've now seen as much of as I'll ever need to, thanks), and the like.
But I've got stuff to write. Specifically, this novel proposal I'm working on, and an article on Philip K. Dick (obviously) for Movement magazine. So it'll have to wait, or if we're unlucky possibly never happen.
I can't, though, let the first two episodes of the first ever Doctor Who spinoff series in T.V. form go past without some form of comment. Those of you who frequent the same mailing lists as me may have seen this in part already -- and those of you who, through digital disenfranchisement, haven't yet seen the episodes in question may wish to avert your eyes for fear of spoilers -- but...
For the first two episodes of a new SF series, I thought Torchwood was pretty damn good. Not up to the standard of Ultraviolet -- which to me has become the quality bar which all telefantasy, British or otherwise, should aim to match [1] -- but pretty damn good nonetheless.
I enjoyed the way that the early structure of the first episode, Everything Changes, closely echoed that of Rose before heading off in its own quite different direction after the halfway mark. I also enjoyed they way Captain Jack's words to Gwen in the second episode, Day One, echoed the Doctor's to Rose in that same episode -- except that Jack tells Gwen to go home and live her normal life in parallel with working at Torchwood. It was a nice way of establishing the similarities and differences from the parent programme.
The direct Who continuity, on the other hand -- references to recent alien invasions and to the Cybermen, and indeed the guest appearance of the Doctor's missing hand -- seemed annoyingly superfluous (and, as Andrew suggests, rather out of place). I'm assuming at this stage, from the coy references to "the right kind of Doctor" and the like, that Torchwood itself, rather than the parent series, won't see any direct payoff to these elements. This seems to be shortchanging Torchwood, which really needs to develop as its own entity.
Russell Davies' writing on Everything Changes was good, better than Chris Chibnall's on Day One (unfortunate, given that Chibnall seems to have written four episodes of the season and RTD just the one). There were some sharp dialogue and good jokes in both, though. The degree of horror is a big improvement on the sanitised kiddie-violence seen in New Who. I also welcome the shagging (not least because the character involved in most of it was rather cute), but feel that this element needs to become less self-consciously adult in order not to seem adolescent.
I also greatly enjoyed the twist at the end of the first episode -- coming out of nowhere but making perfect sense, as all the best twists do. I was less happy that it wrote out one of the supposed regular characters -- not just because it leaves the cast down one attractive woman, but also because I found her more interesting than any of the others except Jack [2].
I had a problem with Gwen in particular. The character's a waterfall -- nice to look at, but awfully wet. Eve Myles puts in the same performance as she did for Gwyneth the psychic maid in The Unquiet Dead, which doesn't work -- Gwen needs to be a lot more hard-edged (and it's difficult enough as it is to manage that in a lilting Welsh accent). As a viewpoint character she's going to need an awful lot of slapping into shape.
Toshiko, who first appeared (as a medic, at least purportedly -- now the character's a computer genius for no obvious reason) in Aliens of London, has yet to be as interesting as she was in those five minutes. Owen is obnoxious (and a borderline-rapist, but that's causing all kinds of "discussion" on various fansites and I don't want to go there), which is at least interesting, but the character has yet to do anything to layer that characteristic into three-dimensionality. Ianto is a little baffling -- the character seems to be written as Alfred to Jack's Batman, but the actor isn't playing him that way. The pterodactyl's great, though.
I wasn't keen on the suggestion that none of these people apart from Gwen have lives outside work -- it makes them much less interesting at a stroke. Given that we've already seen that what Owen and Suzie get up to outside Torchwood is as interesting as what happens within it, I'm hoping that this is going to be gradually exposed as a polite fiction (although that would make nonsense of Day One's already rather feeble "humanising the alien-hunters" theme).
Jack himself is, as ever, very very cool. I liked the way the first episode was themed around resurrection, and that his experiences in that area are shown to have changed him. (It may be awkward later on to have a hero who can't die, mind you, but that's superhero fiction for you.)
That said... I'm not so keen on the Angelic broody angst he was displaying. It's possibly true that "gung-ho omnisexual action hero" isn't a three-dimensional enough concept for a central character rather than a hero's foil... but I'd rather see him still acting gung-ho with hidden depths of despair (as per Christopher Eccleston's Doctor) than simply becoming more subdued, as he appears to have done. The whole appeal of the character is that he's larger than life, and his newfound status as a magical vessel of life should enhance that (as it did, rather halfheartedly, when he snogged the alien-sex-parasite-girl). I'd like to see more of that going on as the series progresses.
Overall... yes, it's very derivative, never more so than during the aerial shots of Jack brooding on rooftops while in the background Cardiff does its sporting best to look like Los Angeles. I did enjoy it massively, though... and if it follows the trajectories of a good many first seasons of telefantasy shows, it could end up being rather excellent. Watch this space [3].
[1] I'm told that there are personal reasons why Joe Ahearne, Ultraviolet's writer-director, has never written or directed Doctor Who (or indeed Torchwood) after directing several of the best episodes of Season One. I can't help wishing that the show-runners would sort them out, whatever they are, because he's surely needed.
[2] Come to think of it, this was one of the elements which recalled Ultraviolet rather strongly, along with the more obvious "policeperson becomes involved with supernatural covert ops group" plotline. If a late episode doesn't involve Jack being forced to revive Suzie with the technology he himself has interdicted, I shall be very surprised.
[3] Or rather, watch Parrinium Mines, where I'm crossposting this and where any further reviews of Torchwood probably ought to go.
But I've got stuff to write. Specifically, this novel proposal I'm working on, and an article on Philip K. Dick (obviously) for Movement magazine. So it'll have to wait, or if we're unlucky possibly never happen.
I can't, though, let the first two episodes of the first ever Doctor Who spinoff series in T.V. form go past without some form of comment. Those of you who frequent the same mailing lists as me may have seen this in part already -- and those of you who, through digital disenfranchisement, haven't yet seen the episodes in question may wish to avert your eyes for fear of spoilers -- but...
For the first two episodes of a new SF series, I thought Torchwood was pretty damn good. Not up to the standard of Ultraviolet -- which to me has become the quality bar which all telefantasy, British or otherwise, should aim to match [1] -- but pretty damn good nonetheless.
I enjoyed the way that the early structure of the first episode, Everything Changes, closely echoed that of Rose before heading off in its own quite different direction after the halfway mark. I also enjoyed they way Captain Jack's words to Gwen in the second episode, Day One, echoed the Doctor's to Rose in that same episode -- except that Jack tells Gwen to go home and live her normal life in parallel with working at Torchwood. It was a nice way of establishing the similarities and differences from the parent programme.
The direct Who continuity, on the other hand -- references to recent alien invasions and to the Cybermen, and indeed the guest appearance of the Doctor's missing hand -- seemed annoyingly superfluous (and, as Andrew suggests, rather out of place). I'm assuming at this stage, from the coy references to "the right kind of Doctor" and the like, that Torchwood itself, rather than the parent series, won't see any direct payoff to these elements. This seems to be shortchanging Torchwood, which really needs to develop as its own entity.
Russell Davies' writing on Everything Changes was good, better than Chris Chibnall's on Day One (unfortunate, given that Chibnall seems to have written four episodes of the season and RTD just the one). There were some sharp dialogue and good jokes in both, though. The degree of horror is a big improvement on the sanitised kiddie-violence seen in New Who. I also welcome the shagging (not least because the character involved in most of it was rather cute), but feel that this element needs to become less self-consciously adult in order not to seem adolescent.
I also greatly enjoyed the twist at the end of the first episode -- coming out of nowhere but making perfect sense, as all the best twists do. I was less happy that it wrote out one of the supposed regular characters -- not just because it leaves the cast down one attractive woman, but also because I found her more interesting than any of the others except Jack [2].
I had a problem with Gwen in particular. The character's a waterfall -- nice to look at, but awfully wet. Eve Myles puts in the same performance as she did for Gwyneth the psychic maid in The Unquiet Dead, which doesn't work -- Gwen needs to be a lot more hard-edged (and it's difficult enough as it is to manage that in a lilting Welsh accent). As a viewpoint character she's going to need an awful lot of slapping into shape.
Toshiko, who first appeared (as a medic, at least purportedly -- now the character's a computer genius for no obvious reason) in Aliens of London, has yet to be as interesting as she was in those five minutes. Owen is obnoxious (and a borderline-rapist, but that's causing all kinds of "discussion" on various fansites and I don't want to go there), which is at least interesting, but the character has yet to do anything to layer that characteristic into three-dimensionality. Ianto is a little baffling -- the character seems to be written as Alfred to Jack's Batman, but the actor isn't playing him that way. The pterodactyl's great, though.
I wasn't keen on the suggestion that none of these people apart from Gwen have lives outside work -- it makes them much less interesting at a stroke. Given that we've already seen that what Owen and Suzie get up to outside Torchwood is as interesting as what happens within it, I'm hoping that this is going to be gradually exposed as a polite fiction (although that would make nonsense of Day One's already rather feeble "humanising the alien-hunters" theme).
Jack himself is, as ever, very very cool. I liked the way the first episode was themed around resurrection, and that his experiences in that area are shown to have changed him. (It may be awkward later on to have a hero who can't die, mind you, but that's superhero fiction for you.)
That said... I'm not so keen on the Angelic broody angst he was displaying. It's possibly true that "gung-ho omnisexual action hero" isn't a three-dimensional enough concept for a central character rather than a hero's foil... but I'd rather see him still acting gung-ho with hidden depths of despair (as per Christopher Eccleston's Doctor) than simply becoming more subdued, as he appears to have done. The whole appeal of the character is that he's larger than life, and his newfound status as a magical vessel of life should enhance that (as it did, rather halfheartedly, when he snogged the alien-sex-parasite-girl). I'd like to see more of that going on as the series progresses.
Overall... yes, it's very derivative, never more so than during the aerial shots of Jack brooding on rooftops while in the background Cardiff does its sporting best to look like Los Angeles. I did enjoy it massively, though... and if it follows the trajectories of a good many first seasons of telefantasy shows, it could end up being rather excellent. Watch this space [3].
[1] I'm told that there are personal reasons why Joe Ahearne, Ultraviolet's writer-director, has never written or directed Doctor Who (or indeed Torchwood) after directing several of the best episodes of Season One. I can't help wishing that the show-runners would sort them out, whatever they are, because he's surely needed.
[2] Come to think of it, this was one of the elements which recalled Ultraviolet rather strongly, along with the more obvious "policeperson becomes involved with supernatural covert ops group" plotline. If a late episode doesn't involve Jack being forced to revive Suzie with the technology he himself has interdicted, I shall be very surprised.
[3] Or rather, watch Parrinium Mines, where I'm crossposting this and where any further reviews of Torchwood probably ought to go.
11 September 2006
Beer and Cards
I seem to end up saying this a lot, but I've been busy recently, despite having very little to show for it.
I've not achieved a great deal on the writing front -- I was rather pleased with the sentence "I am now more fully versed apropos oulipian increases", but that was in an email to a friend, so doesn't actually count. Certainly nobody's about to pay me for it.
The only thing I have been doing is going through the proofs of the rather splendid Collected Works -- more details of which should be appearing (both here and on my website) once Big Finish have announced the stories and the author lineup. It reads very nicely, though.
Otherwise, well...
The Organic Food Festival the Saturday before last was just as yummy as last year's, with the Harbourside entirely taken over by stallholders pressing their free samples of cheese, chocolate, wine, beer, bread, cake &cetera upon us in the hopes that we'd buy some of them. Which, in many cases, we did.
Last year I linked to all the products we'd bought. This year I've already forgotten some of the manufacturers, and for some reason the Soil Association aren't displaying their list of exhibitors as they did last year. But the deliciously creamy Daisy cheeses still succeeded in tempting us, along with cheeses from these and these lovely people. We also stocked up on chocolate and beer. (The Atlantic beers are nicer the darker they get -- the Blue is very tasty, but I wouldn't recommend the Gold unless you're a big fan of root ginger.)
One stallholder was selling zaatar, which we'd only seen / tasted previously on pizzas, at the splendid organic vegetarian pizza tent at Greenbelt. We bought some in order to conduct our own seasoning experiments: on the showing so far, you need to be surprisingly generous with the stuff to achieve the desired effect, but it's worth it. Mm.
We spent a very pleasant day at the festival, anyway, wandering around with our goddaughter E., her parents R. and M. and brother L., sampling food and watching a surreal bungee-dance performed by women in chicken costumes hiding in eggs suspended from a crane. (I think they were advertising eggs -- it wasn't particularly clear.) We headed back to their place (R. and M.'s, I mean, not the bungee chicken-women's) in the evening, for experimental pizza and good beer.
On Sunday B. and I experimented with the Settlers of Catan card game in an attempt to devise a way of simulating the Tournament game (which involves two players constructing their own decks out of the standard pack of cards and the five extension packs) without buying a full set of duplicates.
Obviously this involves randomising to some extent who has access to which cards, and a number of features (such as cards which can only be played by one of the two players) just don't crop up. Still, we managed a fairly satisfying game on that basis (B. won, as it happens, but we weren't playing "properly", so it doesn't count).
The technique needs fine-tuning, but it seems a reasonable substitute until such time as we feel it's worth buying a complete second set. Certainly, on the basis of what we were able to do on Sunday, the Tournament game has astonishingly wide-ranging and complex possibilities.
Other than that... it's mostly been annoying admin-type work, occasional free time to watch stuff on TV and read (see separate media update) and organising my birthday party for November. All frustratingly unproductive, although the party will be fun.
I've not achieved a great deal on the writing front -- I was rather pleased with the sentence "I am now more fully versed apropos oulipian increases", but that was in an email to a friend, so doesn't actually count. Certainly nobody's about to pay me for it.
The only thing I have been doing is going through the proofs of the rather splendid Collected Works -- more details of which should be appearing (both here and on my website) once Big Finish have announced the stories and the author lineup. It reads very nicely, though.
Otherwise, well...
The Organic Food Festival the Saturday before last was just as yummy as last year's, with the Harbourside entirely taken over by stallholders pressing their free samples of cheese, chocolate, wine, beer, bread, cake &cetera upon us in the hopes that we'd buy some of them. Which, in many cases, we did.
Last year I linked to all the products we'd bought. This year I've already forgotten some of the manufacturers, and for some reason the Soil Association aren't displaying their list of exhibitors as they did last year. But the deliciously creamy Daisy cheeses still succeeded in tempting us, along with cheeses from these and these lovely people. We also stocked up on chocolate and beer. (The Atlantic beers are nicer the darker they get -- the Blue is very tasty, but I wouldn't recommend the Gold unless you're a big fan of root ginger.)
One stallholder was selling zaatar, which we'd only seen / tasted previously on pizzas, at the splendid organic vegetarian pizza tent at Greenbelt. We bought some in order to conduct our own seasoning experiments: on the showing so far, you need to be surprisingly generous with the stuff to achieve the desired effect, but it's worth it. Mm.
We spent a very pleasant day at the festival, anyway, wandering around with our goddaughter E., her parents R. and M. and brother L., sampling food and watching a surreal bungee-dance performed by women in chicken costumes hiding in eggs suspended from a crane. (I think they were advertising eggs -- it wasn't particularly clear.) We headed back to their place (R. and M.'s, I mean, not the bungee chicken-women's) in the evening, for experimental pizza and good beer.
On Sunday B. and I experimented with the Settlers of Catan card game in an attempt to devise a way of simulating the Tournament game (which involves two players constructing their own decks out of the standard pack of cards and the five extension packs) without buying a full set of duplicates.
Obviously this involves randomising to some extent who has access to which cards, and a number of features (such as cards which can only be played by one of the two players) just don't crop up. Still, we managed a fairly satisfying game on that basis (B. won, as it happens, but we weren't playing "properly", so it doesn't count).
The technique needs fine-tuning, but it seems a reasonable substitute until such time as we feel it's worth buying a complete second set. Certainly, on the basis of what we were able to do on Sunday, the Tournament game has astonishingly wide-ranging and complex possibilities.
Other than that... it's mostly been annoying admin-type work, occasional free time to watch stuff on TV and read (see separate media update) and organising my birthday party for November. All frustratingly unproductive, although the party will be fun.
26 June 2006
South-West's Thesps in Vests on Nests
On Saturday B. and I went with young goddaughter E. to see Seussical the Musical at the Tobacco Factory. Despite the fantastic-sounding premise, it turned out to be a bit of a mess -- though E. thoroughly enjoyed it, which is obviously the main thing.
It was difficult to see quite who the script was pitched at. It was lengthy and slow-moving for a kids' show, with a tendency to make the liberal-humanist ethic underpinning most of Dr Seuss's work more overt than was absolutely necessary -- yet the rambling plot, free-associating seemingly at random between a score or more Seuss books, seemed altogether too incoherent for an adult attention span.
The lyrics themselves were obviously great, being mostly derived directly from the books, and the music was catchy enough. My favourite moment was the throwaway gag of having General Ghengis Khan Schmitz's platoon of conscript Whos use Green Eggs and Ham as a marching-chant, Full Metal Jacket style:
Script aside, though, this particular production had its own problems. It turned out to be mounted by drama students from the Bristol Academy of Performing Arts, which in itself is unexceptionable... but in this case seemed to have burdened the production with an overwhelmingly female-dominated cast, a minimal budget, some indifferent performances (including extremely variable American accents) and set-pieces geared a little too obviously towards conferring appropriate course credits on all the cast-members.
The biggest difficulty, sadly, was in actually hearing the lyrics -- some performers were better at projecting their voices than others, but all of them could have benefited from being miked up. The omission was particularly odd given that the band was already playing over a loudspeaker system from the lobby.
The other big letdown was the design work. The designers had decided that their best approach would be an all-white set with a handful of generic props and items of furniture (representing beds, nests and the like), and the cast in white boiler suits... rather than, say, making any effort to imitate Seuss's illustrations, which are surely around 50% of the books' appeal -- or, of course, 100%, in the event of the words being for some reason inaccessible. The only exceptions were the Cat in the Hat (dressed in black, with a tail and red-and-white striped hat and cuffs) and the bird characters (who were festooned with admittedly Seussian pink fluff. One of them had a feathered bra underneath her open-to-the-waist boiler suit, which I found strangely mesmerising.)
Perhaps there are separate licensing issues with respect to Seuss's illustrations and words, but it seems faintly insane for a production to use one but not the other.
Never mind. Young E. pronounced it "lovely", and that's what counts.
Anyway, inspired by this I've been doing some background reading on Theodore Seuss Geisel, and discovered somewhat to my surprise that he went to Lincoln College -- the alma mater of such other distinguished men of letters as Tom Paulin, John le Carré and John Wesley.
He was also a political cartoonist before he became a children's author, which is really weird. (His caricatures of Japanese people in particular are disturbingly of-their-time, although this one is grimly hilarious.)
And finally (and predictably)... we are, I'm sure, all long since familiar with this. My Doctor Who mailing-list compatriot John Seavey has come up with the shorter but equally clever this. And this and this go some way towards resolving a problem that's been troubling me for years.
It was difficult to see quite who the script was pitched at. It was lengthy and slow-moving for a kids' show, with a tendency to make the liberal-humanist ethic underpinning most of Dr Seuss's work more overt than was absolutely necessary -- yet the rambling plot, free-associating seemingly at random between a score or more Seuss books, seemed altogether too incoherent for an adult attention span.
The lyrics themselves were obviously great, being mostly derived directly from the books, and the music was catchy enough. My favourite moment was the throwaway gag of having General Ghengis Khan Schmitz's platoon of conscript Whos use Green Eggs and Ham as a marching-chant, Full Metal Jacket style:
"I do not like green eggs and ham..."Etc.
"I DO NOT LIKE GREEN EGGS AND HAM!"
"I do not like them, Sam-I-am..."
"I DO NOT LIKE THEM, SAM-I-AM!"
Script aside, though, this particular production had its own problems. It turned out to be mounted by drama students from the Bristol Academy of Performing Arts, which in itself is unexceptionable... but in this case seemed to have burdened the production with an overwhelmingly female-dominated cast, a minimal budget, some indifferent performances (including extremely variable American accents) and set-pieces geared a little too obviously towards conferring appropriate course credits on all the cast-members.
The biggest difficulty, sadly, was in actually hearing the lyrics -- some performers were better at projecting their voices than others, but all of them could have benefited from being miked up. The omission was particularly odd given that the band was already playing over a loudspeaker system from the lobby.
The other big letdown was the design work. The designers had decided that their best approach would be an all-white set with a handful of generic props and items of furniture (representing beds, nests and the like), and the cast in white boiler suits... rather than, say, making any effort to imitate Seuss's illustrations, which are surely around 50% of the books' appeal -- or, of course, 100%, in the event of the words being for some reason inaccessible. The only exceptions were the Cat in the Hat (dressed in black, with a tail and red-and-white striped hat and cuffs) and the bird characters (who were festooned with admittedly Seussian pink fluff. One of them had a feathered bra underneath her open-to-the-waist boiler suit, which I found strangely mesmerising.)
Perhaps there are separate licensing issues with respect to Seuss's illustrations and words, but it seems faintly insane for a production to use one but not the other.
Never mind. Young E. pronounced it "lovely", and that's what counts.
Anyway, inspired by this I've been doing some background reading on Theodore Seuss Geisel, and discovered somewhat to my surprise that he went to Lincoln College -- the alma mater of such other distinguished men of letters as Tom Paulin, John le Carré and John Wesley.
He was also a political cartoonist before he became a children's author, which is really weird. (His caricatures of Japanese people in particular are disturbingly of-their-time, although this one is grimly hilarious.)
And finally (and predictably)... we are, I'm sure, all long since familiar with this. My Doctor Who mailing-list compatriot John Seavey has come up with the shorter but equally clever this. And this and this go some way towards resolving a problem that's been troubling me for years.
12 June 2006
Postmanchester
Since our trip away, life's gone back to being very busy, as easily as if I'd never left Bristol. I've been training teachers at work -- if you see me offline, do feel free to ask me how much fun that was -- and doing post-submission work on the recent stories. This is rather more complicated than usual in the case of Collected Works, because of the need to keep straight my background material for the anthology as a whole. (Keen-eyed readers who are also familiar with the common themes in my work -- I'm looking at you, Stuart -- may be able to spot the elements I contributed in the blurb.)
Other than that, while B. was in London on Friday I spent a very hot evening in the pub with goddaughter E.'s parents R. and M. and brother L. (though not E. herself, as she was round at a friend's house), and discovered that in addition to Bath Ales, the Wellington fantastically now does heavenly Dark Budvar. Also a rather nice peppers-in-pastry thing, and chips. My post-Manchester diet didn't go so well that day.
Last night B. and I went round to said goddaughter's family and watched her doing her violin practice. This was lovely, touching and caused us both to swell with pride at her skill -- yet was also, oddly, as excruciating as listening to a five-year-old attempting to play the violin. Possibly a bit of cognitive dissonance going on there. We played a couple of rather interesting Italian games that R. and M. picked up in Verona, and investigated another -- Inkognito, about spies in Venice -- which looked terribly complicated.
Today I'm all sticky and sweaty, but not for any enjoyable reason. Never mind.
Other than that, while B. was in London on Friday I spent a very hot evening in the pub with goddaughter E.'s parents R. and M. and brother L. (though not E. herself, as she was round at a friend's house), and discovered that in addition to Bath Ales, the Wellington fantastically now does heavenly Dark Budvar. Also a rather nice peppers-in-pastry thing, and chips. My post-Manchester diet didn't go so well that day.
Last night B. and I went round to said goddaughter's family and watched her doing her violin practice. This was lovely, touching and caused us both to swell with pride at her skill -- yet was also, oddly, as excruciating as listening to a five-year-old attempting to play the violin. Possibly a bit of cognitive dissonance going on there. We played a couple of rather interesting Italian games that R. and M. picked up in Verona, and investigated another -- Inkognito, about spies in Venice -- which looked terribly complicated.
Today I'm all sticky and sweaty, but not for any enjoyable reason. Never mind.
Manchester
So at the end of half term B. and I went to Manchester for a three-day weekend, having settled on it as a city we hadn't visited before (or for about fifteen years, in my case) which looked as if it would bear exploration.
This turned out to be an excellent choice. The sunshine helped of course, but the city is gorgeous -- lots of old (mostly Victorian, but some older) architecture mixed in with really interesting modern stuff:
The vast glass pylon at the top there is apparently the tallest residential block in the U.K. Or possibly Europe. I forget.
OK, so there are presumably grotty bits of Manchester as well, but fortunately as tourists we weren't required to visit those. It's just a shame our (cheap) camera is quite so rubbish at colours when there's bright sunlight. Also that I can't take a straightforward photo without sticking my idiotic finger in the way.
But the city was great in so many ways -- frequent free buses, a tram service (no photos of the trams, but I think my friend Patsy may have been involved in designing them, unless I'm thinking of Sheffield), lots of open green areas and trees and exciting bits of waterway just lying about the place. Also a gigantic BBC-sponsored TV screen opposite the major shopping centre.
Our hotel was located close to Castlefield, a district which counts as an urban heritage park in its own right, and more excitingly featured in several episodes of Queer as Folk. It also contains the Industrial Museum, where we learned the fantastic fact that Manchester used to have a network of pipes which delivered high-pressure steam around the city for purposes of hydraulic power. Apparently they're now used for fibre-optic cable networking. We also got accidentally locked inside the Power Hall at closing time on the Friday, which was less diverting.
Most of Friday we spent exploring the city, scouting out interesting locations and sampling therather disappointing Samuel Smith's beer at Sinclair's Oyster Bar. Oh, and briefly meeting up with B.'s aunt, who was inexplicably in town at the time.
For a great deal of Saturday we were at the city Art Gallery, famous for its Pre-Raphaelites but also playing host to an exhibition of artwork from the Miffy books. Then some more wandering around before going out to a stunningly posh restaurant where we were served with gorgeous food (the sweet potato chips were particularly to die for) and some startlingly expensive wine. Which was wonderful, even though I had to curtail my sampling of the cheeseboard to head off to...
...a very peculiar piece of open-air "industrial theatre" called Insect, which involved gigantic animated sculptures of insects, men dressed as ants, crickets and what may have been dung-beetles, copious fireworks and a great big crane. This review gives rather more detail of the story than was apparent to those of us in the audience at the time -- and these photos show rather more of the action than B. and I could actually see. But it was thoroughly spectacular nevertheless.
Sunday was unusually packed, involving a visit to the cathedral (which was rather surprisingly hosting a display of morris men and owls) and to Urbis, the museum of city living which we found entirely fascinating. (B. in particular remained fascinated by the exhibition of design and advertising long after I wasn't, but fortunately there was lots to do elsewhere.) The building showcases modern urban architecture with its exciting funicular elevator and is full of almost indefinitely interactive displays and exhibits. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the subject.
Having discharged our intellectual duties, we placated our inner hedonists with a pub crawl, visiting a handful of the pubs recommended in the 2006 Good Beer Guide:
1. The Marble Arch, which we wanted to visit mainly because of its in-house vegan microbrewery. Its products we found very good, especially the Lagonda I.P.A., but rather too similar to one another to sustain our interest. Although they weren't doing the chocolate one, and we didn't dare risk the ginger.
2. The Salisbury -- not recommended by the Guide, but standing in for The Font, which at 7 in the evening we found to be: a) playing louder music than we could comfortably coexist with, and b) nevertheless closed. The Salisbury was a Goth pub (I've no idea why I seem to be gravitating to those recently), but made up for it with Deuchars I.P.A.
3. Peveril of the Peak, a pub which apparently inherited its peculiar name from an old coaching-run.
Apart from the quality, this photo doesn't do justice to the weirdness of finding the Peveril's authentically garish tile facade marooned in its tiny island of antiquity surrounded by office blocks. The interior was equally tiled and enjoyably twee; the atmosphere was friendly, if quiet; the beer was OK, but would have been more exciting if we hadn't already visited the Marble Arch, who had provided the guest ales.
4. The Knott Bar, our favourite of the ones we visited. Architecturally exciting, being located in a reclaimed railway arch, with delicious food, splendid beer and a very convivial atmosphere (except for a half hour when for some reason a bunch of wankers arrived, shouted obnoxiously then buggered off). I have to confess I'm not entirely sure what we drank here, but it was nice. I have a vague memory of the sunset over Stonehenge, but I think that was probably just the tap badge.
5. The Briton's Protection, which because of the extreme niceness of the Knott we only reached when we were already quite tired. The series of small bars were pleasantly cosy, but we found the barman offputting and unhelpful, and the beer so-so. After our first, we went home to bed instead.
Monday morning we came back to Bristol. It's particularly important, when staying at a hotel, to fill up on the breakfast for which you'll be paying anyway -- if necessary to the extent that you don't feel the need for lunch. Vegetarians in particular need to ensure that they get a fair share of the eggs, mushrooms, hash browns, waffles, pastries, toast, marmalade, honey, youghurt and juice as well as the cereal, so as not to end up subsidising the bacon, sausage, black pudding and kipper consumption of the other guests.
For this reason -- and the brace of pizzas on Friday, and the expensive meal out on Saturday night, and the beer complemented with regular helpings of chips on Sunday -- I did appear when I returned from Manchester to have put on half a stone. But God, it was worth it.
This turned out to be an excellent choice. The sunshine helped of course, but the city is gorgeous -- lots of old (mostly Victorian, but some older) architecture mixed in with really interesting modern stuff:
The vast glass pylon at the top there is apparently the tallest residential block in the U.K. Or possibly Europe. I forget.
OK, so there are presumably grotty bits of Manchester as well, but fortunately as tourists we weren't required to visit those. It's just a shame our (cheap) camera is quite so rubbish at colours when there's bright sunlight. Also that I can't take a straightforward photo without sticking my idiotic finger in the way.
But the city was great in so many ways -- frequent free buses, a tram service (no photos of the trams, but I think my friend Patsy may have been involved in designing them, unless I'm thinking of Sheffield), lots of open green areas and trees and exciting bits of waterway just lying about the place. Also a gigantic BBC-sponsored TV screen opposite the major shopping centre.
Our hotel was located close to Castlefield, a district which counts as an urban heritage park in its own right, and more excitingly featured in several episodes of Queer as Folk. It also contains the Industrial Museum, where we learned the fantastic fact that Manchester used to have a network of pipes which delivered high-pressure steam around the city for purposes of hydraulic power. Apparently they're now used for fibre-optic cable networking. We also got accidentally locked inside the Power Hall at closing time on the Friday, which was less diverting.
Most of Friday we spent exploring the city, scouting out interesting locations and sampling therather disappointing Samuel Smith's beer at Sinclair's Oyster Bar. Oh, and briefly meeting up with B.'s aunt, who was inexplicably in town at the time.
For a great deal of Saturday we were at the city Art Gallery, famous for its Pre-Raphaelites but also playing host to an exhibition of artwork from the Miffy books. Then some more wandering around before going out to a stunningly posh restaurant where we were served with gorgeous food (the sweet potato chips were particularly to die for) and some startlingly expensive wine. Which was wonderful, even though I had to curtail my sampling of the cheeseboard to head off to...
...a very peculiar piece of open-air "industrial theatre" called Insect, which involved gigantic animated sculptures of insects, men dressed as ants, crickets and what may have been dung-beetles, copious fireworks and a great big crane. This review gives rather more detail of the story than was apparent to those of us in the audience at the time -- and these photos show rather more of the action than B. and I could actually see. But it was thoroughly spectacular nevertheless.
Sunday was unusually packed, involving a visit to the cathedral (which was rather surprisingly hosting a display of morris men and owls) and to Urbis, the museum of city living which we found entirely fascinating. (B. in particular remained fascinated by the exhibition of design and advertising long after I wasn't, but fortunately there was lots to do elsewhere.) The building showcases modern urban architecture with its exciting funicular elevator and is full of almost indefinitely interactive displays and exhibits. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the subject.
Having discharged our intellectual duties, we placated our inner hedonists with a pub crawl, visiting a handful of the pubs recommended in the 2006 Good Beer Guide:
1. The Marble Arch, which we wanted to visit mainly because of its in-house vegan microbrewery. Its products we found very good, especially the Lagonda I.P.A., but rather too similar to one another to sustain our interest. Although they weren't doing the chocolate one, and we didn't dare risk the ginger.
2. The Salisbury -- not recommended by the Guide, but standing in for The Font, which at 7 in the evening we found to be: a) playing louder music than we could comfortably coexist with, and b) nevertheless closed. The Salisbury was a Goth pub (I've no idea why I seem to be gravitating to those recently), but made up for it with Deuchars I.P.A.
3. Peveril of the Peak, a pub which apparently inherited its peculiar name from an old coaching-run.
Apart from the quality, this photo doesn't do justice to the weirdness of finding the Peveril's authentically garish tile facade marooned in its tiny island of antiquity surrounded by office blocks. The interior was equally tiled and enjoyably twee; the atmosphere was friendly, if quiet; the beer was OK, but would have been more exciting if we hadn't already visited the Marble Arch, who had provided the guest ales.
4. The Knott Bar, our favourite of the ones we visited. Architecturally exciting, being located in a reclaimed railway arch, with delicious food, splendid beer and a very convivial atmosphere (except for a half hour when for some reason a bunch of wankers arrived, shouted obnoxiously then buggered off). I have to confess I'm not entirely sure what we drank here, but it was nice. I have a vague memory of the sunset over Stonehenge, but I think that was probably just the tap badge.
5. The Briton's Protection, which because of the extreme niceness of the Knott we only reached when we were already quite tired. The series of small bars were pleasantly cosy, but we found the barman offputting and unhelpful, and the beer so-so. After our first, we went home to bed instead.
Monday morning we came back to Bristol. It's particularly important, when staying at a hotel, to fill up on the breakfast for which you'll be paying anyway -- if necessary to the extent that you don't feel the need for lunch. Vegetarians in particular need to ensure that they get a fair share of the eggs, mushrooms, hash browns, waffles, pastries, toast, marmalade, honey, youghurt and juice as well as the cereal, so as not to end up subsidising the bacon, sausage, black pudding and kipper consumption of the other guests.
For this reason -- and the brace of pizzas on Friday, and the expensive meal out on Saturday night, and the beer complemented with regular helpings of chips on Sunday -- I did appear when I returned from Manchester to have put on half a stone. But God, it was worth it.
23 February 2006
Hiatus
I know, my dears, I know -- I've been neglecting you shamefully. Please do stay, though -- I'd miss you all terribly, if you left. I hope that one day soon I shall be able to make it up to you.
(Hmm. Sufficient contrition there, I wonder, or was I over-emoting? Oh, thank you. You were too. Mwah.)
Right, then. Last week, half term, was very nearly busier than termtime generally is, except that -- as I've now discovered, having been back at work so far this week -- somehow it actually wasn't. Hey ho.
I did manage to get a fair bit of writing done -- most of a proposal for that New Idea for a Doctor Who reference book that I was talking about the other week, in fact -- but still have a great deal to do. Fortunately, some of it is stuff I'm being paid for (I'm currently on promises of commissions for two short stories) so I have plenty of motivation.
I also had what I thought at the time was the one good business idea of my entire life -- one that was brilliant and mind-surfing and zeitgeist-catching, and was absolutely definitely going to make me at least moderately rich. I spent at least a day flapping about what I should do with it before discovering from somebody in the know that it was completely impractical with present-day technology. Buggeration.
Half term was madly busy for many other reasons, though, most of them people-related. The Saturday before last my little-sister-in-law was in town visiting her boyfriend, who's in Bristol to work on Casualty in a frighteningly he's-something-in-the-media sort of way. B. and I spent some of Saturday with l.-s.-i.-l. in the astoundingly hedonistic Bar Chocolat in Clifton. (The website refers to it as a "shop", but is in fact very much a café, which exists to ply the weak and easily tempted with gloriously rich hot chocolate and a wide variety of stunning chocolate cakes). We ended up at her boyfriend's friend's flat, getting annoyed with Trivial Pursuit and experiencing the apocalyptic sugar rush which seems to be a prerequisite for brilliant-yet-unworkable once-in-a-lifetime ideas.
Monday brought a visit from our old university friend S., who's now a political activist in her native Malaysia, campaigning on thoroughly vital and worthy stuff like environmental issues, women's rights and freedom of the press. It was entirely lovely to see her -- the constraints of geography have meant that it's been five or six years now -- and we ended up staying up till 2:30 and finishing the Caol Isla.
Malaysia is traditionally one of the most liberal of Islamic countries, and remains the exemplar which the U.S. and the rest of the West hold up to Muslims to show them How To Do Democracy And Get It Right. S. had some disturbing stories about ways in which the reality fails to match up to this perception, including some attempts at introducing frankly Handmaid's Tale pieces of legislation applying Qur'anic principles to women's lives in ludicrously misconceived ways.
Though we obviously try not to worry, the idea of our good friend (who, if she didn't precisely matchmake B. and me, did at least help to catalyse the relevant decision) doing high-profile work in such a political environment is unsettling, to say the least. Fortunately, she feels that her visibility, and her Oxford connections, will probably afford her some degree of protection... and for all its faults Malaysia's hardly Afghanistan, at least for now.
(I was also pleased to learn that she's working closely with liberal Muslim groups as well as leaders of minority faiths, as she used to be rather dismissive of religious believers as well as the religions themselves. It's only sensible under the circumstances, of course -- nobody ever broke open a closed mindset by pointing at it and laughing.)
Unfortunately the staying-up-till-2:30 aspect of Monday evening meant that B.'s and my Valentine's Day meal on Tuesday was rather more beset by tiredness than it ideally ought to have been. The food at Demuth's was as fantastic as ever, although the details of precisely what I ate appear to have fallen out of my head. (Oh, I do remember the hazelnut and praline ice cream. And I think my main course was pasta. It was all gorgeous, anyway.) We did get pissed off, in a tired and half-hearted sort of way, when the restaurant insisted on throwing us out after two hours so that they could cram the next couple in. We'd been given no warning that this was their intention, and had been enjoying what we thought was a leisurely and unpressured meal. Grr.
On Friday we looked after our four-year-old goddaughter E., and spent much of the day acting out bizarre imaginary stories involving dolphins who aged backwards and cuddly toys which turned into chocolate brownies. It was lovely spending the time with her, although her idea of collaborative play is to tell an adult exactly what scenario she wants performed and to correct them if they deviate from this in any way. She'll make an excellent auteur director one day. We also took her to the soft play area at the local MonstroPlex, but their policy of throwing the play area open to "children" up to the age of twelve resulted in some bruising and tears. Grr again, although of course E. was fine again very shortly afterwards.
And then on Saturday and Sunday we went to visit another old university friend in Staffordshire, within easy driving distance of a very splendid pub-cum-microbrewery. R.'s boyfriend J. is a splendid cook, and furthermore they have excellent, and extensively applied, taste in wine, so we ended up eating and drinking very well. Afterwards, we played Risk (using a free download and a giant P.C. wall-projector, which felt very Bond-villainesque), and R. -- the only one of us who'd never actually played before -- ended up conquering the world, the minx.
So. An unusually sociable week, highly hectic and with far less time for writing than the actual volume of writing warranted, hence my busyness and the concomitant lack of updates to this blogatorium. So, sorry about that.
I've been reading books and watching T.V., too, but I'll leave talking about those until the weekend.
(Hmm. Sufficient contrition there, I wonder, or was I over-emoting? Oh, thank you. You were too. Mwah.)
Right, then. Last week, half term, was very nearly busier than termtime generally is, except that -- as I've now discovered, having been back at work so far this week -- somehow it actually wasn't. Hey ho.
I did manage to get a fair bit of writing done -- most of a proposal for that New Idea for a Doctor Who reference book that I was talking about the other week, in fact -- but still have a great deal to do. Fortunately, some of it is stuff I'm being paid for (I'm currently on promises of commissions for two short stories) so I have plenty of motivation.
I also had what I thought at the time was the one good business idea of my entire life -- one that was brilliant and mind-surfing and zeitgeist-catching, and was absolutely definitely going to make me at least moderately rich. I spent at least a day flapping about what I should do with it before discovering from somebody in the know that it was completely impractical with present-day technology. Buggeration.
Half term was madly busy for many other reasons, though, most of them people-related. The Saturday before last my little-sister-in-law was in town visiting her boyfriend, who's in Bristol to work on Casualty in a frighteningly he's-something-in-the-media sort of way. B. and I spent some of Saturday with l.-s.-i.-l. in the astoundingly hedonistic Bar Chocolat in Clifton. (The website refers to it as a "shop", but is in fact very much a café, which exists to ply the weak and easily tempted with gloriously rich hot chocolate and a wide variety of stunning chocolate cakes). We ended up at her boyfriend's friend's flat, getting annoyed with Trivial Pursuit and experiencing the apocalyptic sugar rush which seems to be a prerequisite for brilliant-yet-unworkable once-in-a-lifetime ideas.
Monday brought a visit from our old university friend S., who's now a political activist in her native Malaysia, campaigning on thoroughly vital and worthy stuff like environmental issues, women's rights and freedom of the press. It was entirely lovely to see her -- the constraints of geography have meant that it's been five or six years now -- and we ended up staying up till 2:30 and finishing the Caol Isla.
Malaysia is traditionally one of the most liberal of Islamic countries, and remains the exemplar which the U.S. and the rest of the West hold up to Muslims to show them How To Do Democracy And Get It Right. S. had some disturbing stories about ways in which the reality fails to match up to this perception, including some attempts at introducing frankly Handmaid's Tale pieces of legislation applying Qur'anic principles to women's lives in ludicrously misconceived ways.
Though we obviously try not to worry, the idea of our good friend (who, if she didn't precisely matchmake B. and me, did at least help to catalyse the relevant decision) doing high-profile work in such a political environment is unsettling, to say the least. Fortunately, she feels that her visibility, and her Oxford connections, will probably afford her some degree of protection... and for all its faults Malaysia's hardly Afghanistan, at least for now.
(I was also pleased to learn that she's working closely with liberal Muslim groups as well as leaders of minority faiths, as she used to be rather dismissive of religious believers as well as the religions themselves. It's only sensible under the circumstances, of course -- nobody ever broke open a closed mindset by pointing at it and laughing.)
Unfortunately the staying-up-till-2:30 aspect of Monday evening meant that B.'s and my Valentine's Day meal on Tuesday was rather more beset by tiredness than it ideally ought to have been. The food at Demuth's was as fantastic as ever, although the details of precisely what I ate appear to have fallen out of my head. (Oh, I do remember the hazelnut and praline ice cream. And I think my main course was pasta. It was all gorgeous, anyway.) We did get pissed off, in a tired and half-hearted sort of way, when the restaurant insisted on throwing us out after two hours so that they could cram the next couple in. We'd been given no warning that this was their intention, and had been enjoying what we thought was a leisurely and unpressured meal. Grr.
On Friday we looked after our four-year-old goddaughter E., and spent much of the day acting out bizarre imaginary stories involving dolphins who aged backwards and cuddly toys which turned into chocolate brownies. It was lovely spending the time with her, although her idea of collaborative play is to tell an adult exactly what scenario she wants performed and to correct them if they deviate from this in any way. She'll make an excellent auteur director one day. We also took her to the soft play area at the local MonstroPlex, but their policy of throwing the play area open to "children" up to the age of twelve resulted in some bruising and tears. Grr again, although of course E. was fine again very shortly afterwards.
And then on Saturday and Sunday we went to visit another old university friend in Staffordshire, within easy driving distance of a very splendid pub-cum-microbrewery. R.'s boyfriend J. is a splendid cook, and furthermore they have excellent, and extensively applied, taste in wine, so we ended up eating and drinking very well. Afterwards, we played Risk (using a free download and a giant P.C. wall-projector, which felt very Bond-villainesque), and R. -- the only one of us who'd never actually played before -- ended up conquering the world, the minx.
So. An unusually sociable week, highly hectic and with far less time for writing than the actual volume of writing warranted, hence my busyness and the concomitant lack of updates to this blogatorium. So, sorry about that.
I've been reading books and watching T.V., too, but I'll leave talking about those until the weekend.
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