No one would have believed, in the early years of the 21st century ...

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA is a 360 degree panorama from the Spirit rover on Mars. It's been up there five years, trundling around doing its stuff. Five years! Those rocks and sedimentary layers and grains of sand have been unobserved for millions of years, but now Wall-E's distant ancestor is rolling around up there and taking it all in. It fills me with almost as much wonder as the thought that America now has a black president.

Making the picture even more fun is spotting the number of features named after science fiction people or ideas. There's Arthur C. Clarke, Roger Zelazny, Jack Williamson and Frederic Brown, not to mention Monolith, Martian Chronicles and Malacandra. Someone at NASA is reading far too much of exactly the right stuff.

Sew and sew

During our pre-marital compression and elimination of surplus material goods, Best Beloved somehow managed to get rid of her sewing box, and has been pining for a new one ever since. But no longer, because after months of trawling eBay and second-hand shops we finally found this ...


... a solid oak sewing stool from Chissock Woodcraft. This is in the grounds of Yeldall Manor, a rehabilitation centre for drug and alcohol addicts, which teaches them useful craft skills to help them get back into the community. So, we get a nice stool and we support an excellent cause as well.

The place is south of Henley, down one of those nice bits of the Thames valley where the sides are steep and wooded and the road winds roughly along the 10' contour. Sharp rise and screamingly expensive houses on one side, river on the other. On this, the first decently warm and sunny (if windy) Saturday of the year, it was a lovely drive, apart from those heartstopping moments where the southbound road disappears into a white glare in the low noon-time sun and there's a bus coming round a tight corner towards you.

We had lunch in Henley itself and wandered around, making the first time I've had a chance to look at the town properly rather than just drive through it as a congestion-busting shortcut to or from the M4. I was delighted to see that although it has the usual high street names it's also heaving with small, independent specialist shops. After Abingdon's monoculture of opticians and second-hand shops, it was a nice change. But then we remembered that this place too is screamingly expensive - I mean, Heseltine and then Johnson were the MP, remember? - and the denizens are probably used to paying an extra penny or two for good service.

So, anyway, the sewing box is installed, all the other furniture has moved along one space and the item at the end of the row has disappeared into a space-time anomaly which is the only way to make room. Now we just need to sew something. One step at a time, eh?

Bonus Bonusbarn

Work has had a desktop calendar printed for customers and clients, advertising a different service for each month of the year. January's is for educational videoconferencing content and features the face of a schoolchild reflected in an astronaut's visor as he peers in.

I don't know who the astronaut is but the schoolkid who posed for the picture is none other than my stepson, the one and only Bonusbarn. Except that he's no longer one and only, we had 1000 of the things printed. All my close-by colleagues have one on their desks. I walk around the office and I see him everywhere. Please, roll on February.

At least I'm not at the BETT show this week, where our stand includes a 10ft high image of the same glowering down at the public. [Shudders]

Please deselect this man now

"A Labour MP has claimed dyslexia is a myth invented by education chiefs to cover up poor teaching methods.

Backbencher Graham Stringer, MP for Blackley, describes the condition as a "cruel fiction" that should be consigned to the "dustbin of history". (The full Beeb report)"

Never mind that the condition was first identified over 100 years ago. Never mind all the verifiable scientific research that has been done since. Never mind that it pops up all over the globe. Why let facts spoil a good dose of prejudice?

And the amazing thing is - this guy isn't even a Conservative.

Prat.

It's a Mac trap, and we've been caught

There are occasional advantages to IT Support's geological speed of response. It's been a full four months since I was forced to submit a request for a Mac. Now it's arrived, it took me a full four minutes to decide we weren't going to get on. My gay trill of laughter when it looked like my email files (a) hadn't transferred to the new system and (b) wouldn't be compatible if they did made the windows rattle. (My recent discovery that, even though I can still use Firefox to compose this, the keystroke on my PC that made the cursor jump between words here just closes the tab has had a similar result.)

Fortunately that little giggle seems to have been resolved. After a morning's acquaintance I have decided we can have a relationship, as long as I can go home at the end of each day and tell my PC at home all about it.

The "genie" effect, whereby a minimised application seems to be sucked into the dock, made me queasy and I've replaced it with the good old shrink effect that Windows uses (which, I know, it got off Apple). The fact that there's only one toolbar regardless of the application is an annoyance but I'll get over it. What fool thought it would be neat to swap the " and @ keys around, and why, I will never guess.

Sadly, my biggest and loudest complaint about the Mac isn't actually Apple's fault. This one is all Microsoft's. In using Word 2008 for Mac I've regressed over a decade. Ever since I switched to PCs from my old Amstrad, ever since, I've recorded a macro to swap two misplaced letters around. The commonest spelling mistake, as you may recall me saying before. On early PCs I used the Windows macro recorder. Then Word grew up enough to record its own macros and so I used that instead. Every time I have moved to a new computer or got a new verison of Word, that is the first change I've made.

No more. Word 2008 for Mac doesn't let you record macros. I am flabbergasted. What do they think they're doing?

(Answer, courtesy of my manager: they know exactly what they're doing. They grudgingly admit that there are Microsoft users who use Apples, and they cater for the market, but they don't make it easy in the hope that said users will see the light and switch to PCs. Easy)

You can still assign keystrokes to existing menu commands. All is not lost. And in some ways, the return to the classic Word interface after months of struggling with Office 2007 [spit] is a relief. Maybe we'll call this a draw.

I'll try to be positive. The overall look of the Mac is nice. I will gladly bow to Apple's ability to make technology attractive; to slip into your life and be part of it, rather than a beast growling in the corner. The downside is of course that you do it Apple's way or not at all. To make my point I've changed the wallpaper to <geek>a screen shot of the TARDIS console room</geek> (<ubergeek>specifically the secondary console room as used in series 14</ubergeek>), that being the ultimate machine where the user's requirements are paramount.

Most satisfying of all is that once you've got your head back on you notice a certain strange sense of familiarity. The CMD+Tab combination to cycle through applications, which is almost like ALT+Tab ... oh, and the keyboard. The keyboards of early Macs were truly alien beasts. This has a forward-delete key; the funny Apple key is labelled ALT; there's a CTRL key too. The overall effect is ... Windows-like. Okay, so it's about as convincing as Del-Boy's attempts to appear classy by speaking French, but you recognise that it's trying.

Note this well. The two systems did not meet halfway. They came to us.

Hah.

But no Turkish Delight

Boar's Hill on a subzero January day does a passable imitation of Narnia towards the end of the Witch's reign.


Look close and you see that everything is picked out in lines of frost. It's like the setting on Adobe Illustrator where you can reduce a picture down to a line drawing.




At one point we crossed over a small stream trickling down between two of these exquisitely outlined frosty banks, leading me (sorry) to start gibbering "Aslan is coming! Aslan is coming!"

The event: friend DW, who I must have known for a good decade or more (as opposed to DW, who I've known since about 2001 or DW who I've known since about 2004) has a birthday at this time of year and always organises a birthday walk with friends drawn from all walks of his life. Ten years ago the group was exclusively adult but suddenly babies started happening, all mysteriously at the same time, leading to a group of kids all about the same age (and mostly male, for some reason).


DW isn't actually giving them communion, just chocolate coins which are of course renowned for their warming effect.

From the Fox, through some fields and frosty woods that are still primeval Oxfordshire and where wolves really ought to prowl, up to Jarn Mound to look at what would have been quite a view if the mist hadn't been there, then back to the Fox for a warming luncheon. Hardier souls continued with part 2 of the walk, less hardy or those with some serious blogging to do peeled off and headed home.

It just wouldn't have been the same without the frost, but now we've done that, we can have the warm weather now, thanks.

Indigestible

A distant memory stirs like some sluggish primeval beast. It's been so long that for a couple of seconds I was even taken in by the envelope: "72-hour notice of document delivery".

"Wow," I thought, "this must be important ..."

... plus (half a second later) "so why not just send the important document now ..."

... plus (finally) recognition. "It's them. They're back."

I am one of the 2% of households in Abingdon invited to take part in the Reader's Digest prize draw. I could shortly be the winner of £250,000! The envelope came complete with a certificate that a total of £300,000 has been deposited at the NatWest to cover all the prizes. First prize: £250,000. Number of prizes: 2058. Do the maths to get the average runner up prize.

If past form is anything to go by, they will send me six personal numbers which might just might be eligible for entry into the draw. I have a sneaking suspicion they will be eligible. It would be an awful lot of bother to go to just to send me a load of duff numbers.

There's a picture of the large orange envelope that will fall through the letterbox. It has all the usual seals and barcodes on it to make it seem Very Important. (What exactly are we to make of "This communication to be delivered to named addressee only"? Who else is it likely to be delivered to? Is a busy postman expected to ring the bell and wait, shivering on the doorstep to press it into my eager hands?) The envelope will positively shriek that if just one of those numbers wins then £250,000 could be mine. Much the same way as I could walk down the road where I live and heave a brick through each window. "Could" does not equal "probably will". In fact the brick-through-window scenario has a greater chance of happening and I like to think I'm a model neighbour.

Even in the unlikely chance of my not winning anything, I will probably be invited – just because it's me, you understand, and they like me so much – to purchase one of RD's publications at a knock-down rate. In the past I've purchased their road atlas and maybe a couple of other things, knowing this would just make me a mark for further top priority hands-only mailshots. I have always declined their offers of Reader's Digest Condensed Novels. They would have more luck offering Jamie Oliver a supersize cheeseburger with extra fries, cheap.

Back in my day the prize draw manager was the improbably named Tom Champagne. Nowadays it's the slightly more plausible, blokey Nick Shelley. There's even a brief paragraph assuring us he does exist. At least he has a likely-sounding name.

Oh, balls, it's all so bloody Daily Mail. It's Hyacinth Bucket. It's a relic of a time when the middle classes were busting out like never before and craved respectability. The intent was to fool them into thinking they had it. How better to seem respectable than to have rows of condensed classic works of literature lined up on your stone clad bookcase, gleaming in their leather binding with gold embossed text? Sniggering at us? Who's sniggering?

And they're still doing it.

The last time I got one of these, I think, I had never heard of (or indeed received) a Nigerian spam. Now it finally dawns on me that these wastes of treeware are Nigerian spam's only slightly better good twin. Okay, they're not invitations to criminal activity but they are equally insulting in their own way. Not by a blithe assumption that a large enough sum will induce me to participate in serious fraud; just by thinking that all the bells, whistles, seals, certificates of authenticity, strident letters assuring me I'm through two out of three stages but could fall at the third so don't delay, act now and the general good simulation of personal attention will actually make me take them one atom more seriously.

Spam makes it money by costing only pennies to hook in one sucker every few million. It's all they need. I don't doubt that Reader's Digest is actually legal and genuine; someone somewhere will be winning that £250,000. But to fund that, and to pay the considerably higher overheads, they must have to sell a lot of condensed novels, and that's the most depressing thought of all.

American presidents

The last movie watched in 2008 was The American President, which I first saw about 10 years ago and wanted to see again because it was a kind of dry run for The West Wing and now that I'm familiar with the latter I wanted to see how it held up. Same warm heart, same creator, a lot of the same cast, same attitude, a lot of the same lines and unashamedly Democrat.

And it does hold up, because like TWW its two greatest strengths are: (1) it actually uses real-world issues to drive its drama, and the result isn't always a happy one, and good people are forced to do bad things because not doing them would be even worse; and (2) it loves the presidency. Not for what it's become but for what it should be. It should attract people of the highest calibre. It should be such a power for good. To be addressed as "Mr President" should be the greatest honour a country can bestow, and it should only be bestowed on people who are utterly worthy of it. Presidents Shepherd in The American President and Bartlet in The West Wing - and indeed the future President Santos in the same - are such people. You can't help respecting and liking them. Why can't we get them in real life?

Also over the holiday period we reached the end of series 6 of The West Wing - one more to go, even if I do know roughly how it ends. Series 6 ended with the battle lines being drawn up - the end of the presidency in sight, the two new presidential candidates confirmed. And true to form and its own internal guidelines, it doesn't make the Republican guy a cipher who will easily be beaten. He's just as good and honest a man as Bartlet, who is well aware his own party can only produce slimeballs and second-raters and is actively worried that they can't find someone to stand against him. Until the underdog Congressman Santos enters the fray, of course, but some conventions of drama have to stand.

It got me wondering: when was the last time a Democrat president handed over to another Democrat? (Not counting Clinton who should have handed over to Gore, but that's history ...) A quick check isn't encouraging for the future. The last two Democrat successions both came about by the incumbent dying - Kennedy and Johnson, and before that Roosevelt and Truman. In both cases the former VP then won a single term in his own right but was followed by a Republican. The last time a living, breathing and compos mentis Democrat president was followed by another Democrat was Franklin Pierce in 1857, who was pro-slavery and had been disowned by his own party after a single term. The last two-term Democrat to hand over to another Democrat (though Clinton had two terms ...) was Andrew Jackson in 1837.

So, fingers crossed for Mr Obama in 2016, eh? He's already broken a couple of records; another one or two shouldn't be a problem.

Nation and other books

One of the best books I read in 2008, I just managed to squeeze into the year. I finished it about five minutes before the bongs, on the same day its author's knighthood was announced.

Nation by (Sir) Terry Pratchett could have been a Discworld novel but it wouldn't pack half the punch it does. It's more or less set in our world's nineteenth century, with just enough variance for Pratchett to have fun. But the underlying premise simply isn't funny and he doesn't try to pretend it is: the Nation is a Pacific island (one of the Mothering Sunday islands, which are an extension of the Bank Holiday Monday group) whose population is wiped out by a tsunami following a volcanic eruption. Mau is the sole survivor. On the island he meets Daphne (née Ermintrude, but in Pratchett style she chooses a name that better reflects her personality), scion of the aristocracy and related more closely than she realises to royalty, who is the sole survivor of a shipwreck caused by the same tsunami. They both have a great deal of pain to get through. Being Pratchett heroes, of course, they manage; and then you remember the author's own recent personal tsunami, his diagnosis with Alzheimer's, and you realise this is Pratchett's Book of Job.

I hadn't realised before how well Job works for non-believers as well as believers. I remember Pratchett saying in an interview that he's a humanist, and therefore an atheist, and either way that unfortunately means he can't get angry with God because he doesn't believe in him. Job, and Nation, show that you can still scream WHY? at whoever you do or don't believe in, and either way you get the same answer: "Because. Who's asking?"

After all that, don't get the idea it's heavy going, because it isn't. Pratchettism abounds. When you hear a sentence like "it only needs 138 people to die and your father will be King!" then it's just asking for trouble - the humour equivalent of the gun on the mantelpiece. The platonic love story - Mau and Daphne are still children - is funny and moving, and there are sideways views of science and religion and civilisation and wonderful turns of phrase left, right and centre. One of my favourites was a description of Daphne's great-great-aunt: "apparently a young man had smiled at her on her twenty-first birthday and she's gone straight to bed with an attack of the vapours, and stayed there, still gently vaporizing ..."

It's great fun, and it's also one of the few books I actually feel honoured to have read.

And here's everything else I read in 2008. In summary, with last year's figures in brackets:

total: 53 (60)
science fiction/fantasy: 30 (30)
translated from Swedish: 4 (4)
gave up reading: 2

In full:

• Nation, Terry Pratchett
  
• Black & Blue, Ian Rankin
  
• The Turing Test, Chris Beckett
  
• Enigma, Robert Harris
  
• The Big Over Easy, Jasper Fforde
  
• Fool Moon, Jim Butcher
  
• Storm Front, Jim Butcher
  
• Halting State, Charles Stross
  
• Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman
  
• Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
  
• The Locked Room, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
  
• Marooned in Real Time, Vernor Vinge
  
• The Peace War, Vernor Vinge
  
• Jingo, Terry Pratchett
  
• Invasive Procedures, Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston
  
• The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
  
• Smoke & Mirrors, Neil Gaiman
  
• His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik
  
• Coyote Frontier, Allen Steele
  
• Coyote Rising, Allen Steele
  
• Empire, Orson Scott Card
  
• Notes from a Big Country, Bill Bryson
  
• The First Rumpole Omnibus, John Mortimer
  
• Pied Piper, Nevil Shute
  
• Imperium, Robert Harris
  
• Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett
  
• Saturn's Children, Charles Stross
  
• Keeper of Dreams, Orson Scott Card
  
• A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge
  
• Wife to Charles II, Hilda Lewis
  
• Round Ireland with a Fridge, Tony Hawks
  
• I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
  
• Ireland: Awakening, by Edward Rutherfurd
  
• The Great Siege: Malta 1565, Ernle Bradford
  
• Snakehead, Anthony Horowitz
  
• The Digital Plague, Jeff Somers
  
• Simon and the Oaks, Marianne Fredriksson
  
• Then and Now, W. Somerset Maugham
  
• Leviathan Rising, Jonathan Green
  
• Stardust, Neil Gaiman
  
• Let the Right One In, John Ajvide Lindqvist
  
• Mister Monday, Garth Nix
  
• Looking for Jake & Other Stories, China Miéville
  
• Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge
  
• Causing Chaos with Jeremy James, David Henry Wilson
  
• The Queen's Tiara, CJL Almqvist
  
• The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman
  
• The Subtle Knife, Philip Pullman
  
• Frankenstein Unbound, Brian Aldiss
  
• The Dilbert Future, Scott Adams
  
• Galileo's Daughter, Dava Sobel
  
• My Booky Wook, Russell Brand
  
• The Twinkling of an Eye, Brian Aldiss
  

Woolies

It's like watching a grand old liner going down.

This isn't any decapitated woman

This is a Marks & Spencer decapitated woman, presumably advertising the new Queen of Scots range.

Still a little creepy to come across in the aisle, though.

Christmas 08

Some or all of these were highlights. You guess, or decide. In no particular order:

• A big family meal at Frankies in Putney to celebrate a significant decade-changing birthday within the family.
• Three-year-old niece spotting the bloke at the next table who played Prince Charming when she went to see Cinderella last week, and insisting on going up to him and saying hello. Probably our family's only ever encounter with Gareth Gates.
• Getting round the giant non-roundabout that is Hammersmith and successfully ending up driving down Fulham Palace Road.
• A halfway decent Dr Who Christmas special. Though it would have had a struggle to top last year's for sheer awfulness.
• Through a miracle of logistics, (a) getting Bonusbarn onto the Oxford Tube this morning so he could come down to have lunch in London and (b) finding him at Victoria.
• Meeting 7 week old nephew for the first time. Low on conversation, but I interpreted his drool onto my shoulder as love.
  

Happy rest of the year, everyone.

I have sung the Hallelujah Chorus!

Most of it, anyway. It was the grand finale to Sunday's carol service, and a pretty good service it was too. An excellent, well rehearsed and conducted choir; mostly trad carols played on the organ; an equally well rehearsed trio of piano, bass and drums for the rest. Everything sung at a decent speed and not too many verses. The proceedings kicked off with "the 12 Days of Christmas", arr. John Rutter, sung by the choir and finished - as I say - with a bit of Handel. The choir sung it properly and drowned out the crude vocal fumblings from the congregation, but it's still pretty satisfying to be growling out "And he shall reign forever and e-e-ver" at the right pace and with all the right ups and downs. (Singing in the choir in your youth does pay off, children.) With the umpteenth repetition of "King of Kings and Lord of Lords" from the sopranos, each one an octave higher than before, your ears begin to ache and small glass objects start to vibrate alarmingly, so it's as well it ended when it did.

Another treat was having Canon David Winter of Thought for the Day fame as the preacher. He sat in the very front row, immediately behind the choir conductor, who was on a little podium. He isn't tall - think Ronnie Corbett with a beard, grey jacket and clerical collar - and so seemed to spend most of the carols with his nose pressed into the conductor's armpit. But he praught well.

And so, as Christmas looms, I start to think of all the seasonal favourites I haven't sung, or heard sung, and at this stage probably won't for another year. Depending on how many I can find on YouTube, I thought I'd share some with you.

The Sans Day Carol is similar in content to "the Holly and the Ivy", but finds a better balance of theological and botanical accuracy, and has a better tune anyway. "The Holly and the Ivy" teases us with its chorus - "the rising of the sun and the running of the deer ..." and makes me want to shout, "WHAT ABOUT THEM??"



The Shepherd's Pipe Carol: like the above, an annual favourite of my school carol service at which yours truly was a cherubic treble. This isn't saying much, as in a boys' school where the maximum age is 13 everyone is either a cherubic treble or has recently acquired a voice like a concrete mixer and isn't singing anything.

Its carols like this that I like the most - taking an event of cosmic importance and bringing it down to a personal level. "Going through the hills on a night all starry, I heard this shepherd boy playing his pipes, see, and ..." (lyrics paraphrased).



Actually it has just occurred to me from the last verse that this could be a cunning ruse by King Herod, having failed with the Wise Men:

"May I come with you, shepherd boy piping merrily,
Come with you to Bethlehem?
Pay my homage too at the new King's cradle,
Is it far to Bethlehem?"

So I'll move quickly on.

And now some old traditionals, though not necessarily done traditionally.

Joys Seven. Aren't the little kids cute? This one wins the Tim Rice Award for Forced Rhymes:

"The next good joy that Mary had,
It was the joy of two;
To see her own Son Jesus Christ,
Making the lame to go(o) ..."

Gaudete. Last year I linked to Steeleye Span so this year you get Angel Voices. Watch for the little blond kid who bobs his head with the music.



And of course Mike Oldfield's version of "In dulci jubilo". This was playing in Tesco the other day. I started whistling along to it, then realised someone else in the same aisle was doing likewise. Another few bars and we would have been in a TV ad, with everyday shoppers suddenly breaking into dance, so I forced myself to stop.



And finally, it is of course Rutting Season, i.e. the time you're most likely to hear something by John Rutter (d'you see what I did there?).

The Candelight Carol comes back to the theme of bringing Christmas home.

"Shepherds and wisemen will kneel and adore him,
Seraphim round him their vigil will keep;
Nations proclaim him their Lord and their Saviour,
but Mary will hold him and sing him to sleep."

And the Angel's Carol. This is Christmas, encapsulated. No more need be said. Merry Christmas, everyone.

"Have you hear the sounds of the angel voices
ringing out so sweetly, ringing out so clear?
Have you seen the star shining out so brightly
as a sign from God that Christ the Lord is here?
Have you heard the news that they bring from heaven
to the humble shepherds who have waited long?
Gloria in excelsis Deo! Gloria in excelsis Deo!
Hear the angels sing their joyful song.

He is come in peace in the winter's stillness,
like a snowfall in the gentle night.
He is come in joy, like the sun at morning,
filling all the world with radiance and with light.
He is come in love as the child of Mary.
In a simple stable we have seen his birth.
Gloria in excelsis Deo! Gloria in excelsis Deo!
Hear the angels singing 'Peace on earth'.

He will bring new light to a world in darkness,
like a bright star shining in the skies above.
He will bring new hope to the waiting nations
When he comes to reign in purity and love.
Let the earth rejoice at the Saviour's coming.
Let the heavens answer with the joyful morn:
Gloria in excelsis Deo! Gloria in excelsis Deo!
Hear the angels singing, 'Christ is born'."

Rites and wrongs

I came across this link on Liz Williams's Diary of a Witchcraft Shop in Avalon (i.e. Glastonbury): "Dysfunctional Behaviour and the Pagan Scene". I'd like to be able to quote from it here, in a number of places, but the owner specifically asks that people ask permission before quoting and hasn't replied to my request. So I'll just have to recommend you look at it, and make the following points. The author says (my interpretation):

1. People too often join a pagan circle hoping to find it full of superior types rather than normal, doing-their-best types just like them. Depending on the level of dysfunctionality of the circle and/or the newcomers, at best this can lead to disillusion, at worst to active abuse.
2. By a strange paradox, dysfunctional groups don't have to try as hard as functional ones to succeed and therefore last longer. By being permanently in crisis and not having to work hard to ride out storms, deal with conflict etc. they survive where much better groups fail.
3. Newcomers are drawn in by a misunderstanding of what is on offer. They want a love spell but don't want to be more loveable. They want a spell to make them rich without having to work harder or be better at their work.
4. The right (or rather, wrong) mentality can quite easily take a good, healthy proposition like "Love your neighbour" and corrupt it – vide the Inquisition. Thus even the positive, life affirming ideals of a good pagan circle can be twisted to justify obnoxious, anti-social behaviour.

... and it strikes me that all of these can apply just as much to churches. Just do a find-and-replace on the terminology and it matches. In fact it quite possibly fits even more belief systems than just our two but these are the two I'll concentrate on at the moment. Unrealistic expectations on both sides, unwillingness to take the rough with the smooth ...

Let's just say they're problems to look out for.

One area where we see completely eye to eye is the notion that to do it properly it must have meaning. It must be relevant to your life. That also means you must be free to ask questions and you must accept that just because person X does thing Y in way Z, that doesn't mean everyone does, or should. You can be trapped in the form and the ritual.

There are several testimonies on this site from young pagans who were raised as Christians, or at least contemplated it, but found what they were getting in church couldn't hold a candle to what they got from a simple walk in the woods. In many cases that could be because the church was in fact doing it properly, and good for it: they wanted power and all the church could offer was humility, so they went somewhere with comforting rituals that at least give the impression of being in charge. See point 3 above. But I've also been in some churches which have as much to offer the modern world as King Herod had to offer the youth ministry, when they should be able to offer so much more. Could it be, I dare ask myself, that they're trapped in their own rituals and therefore don't have anything to offer a genuine seeker? It's not just the pagans who have rituals, y'know. A ritual may be jumping naked backwards over a bonfire while the moon shines above the Eye Stone or it may be singing a chorus in a key that makes dogs in nearby villages bark, and then shifts after the bridge to a key that actively knocks bats out of the sky, and that's before you even reach the fifth repetition.

Nor does it help if the automatic response of the church in question is to threaten such notions with eternal punishment in Hell ...

Just saying.

A tale so free from every doubt

I'd like to be able to report that I now know the plot of The Gondoliers, which is the last big Gilbert & Sullivan I have yet to see. But I can't. The Kennington & District United Church Choirs Gilbert & Sullivan society has become a victim of its own success. Its performances are unticketed, free and, in the case of last Friday's, full up. Memo to selves – get there sooner next time.

The gist of the plot I know simply from one song. A young prince, in his infancy, was wed to a young princess. Later the same prince was abducted by the Grand Inquisitor – the latest in a line of G&S officials with far too much power and self-importance and far too little ability – to save the kingdom from falling into the hands of fundamentalist Wesleyan Methodism. The child was fostered with a highly respectable gondolier who raised the boy side by side with his own son. However-

Owing, I'm much disposed to fear,
To his terrible taste for tippling,
That highly respectable gondolier
Could never declare with a mind sincere
Which of the two was his offspring dear
And which the Royal stripling.

The highly respectable gondolier then goes and dies with the identity of the child still unresolved. The Inquisitor goes on to explain to the now grown-up princess:

The children followed his old career
(This statement can't be parried)
Of a highly respectable gondolier.
Well, one of the two who will soon be here
— But which of the two is not quite clear —
Is the Royal Prince you married!

I only blog this non-achievement now because the chance to play with W.S. Gilbert's lyrics is always too good to resist. Somewhere in the story Giuseppe and Marco, the two gondolieri (but that's a vagary, it's quite honorary) are taught how to deport themselves as befits a (possible) member of the royalty:

I am a courtier grave and serious
Who is about to kiss your hand,
Try to combine a pose imperious
With a demeanour nobly bland ...

And somewhere we meet that renowned warrior the Duke of Plaza-Toro:

In enterprise of martial kind
When there was any fighting
He led his regiment from behind,
He found it less exciting.
But when away his regiment ran
His place was at the fore-oh,
That celebrated cultivated underrated nobleman
The Duke of Plaza-Toro!

So there you have it, and there I must leave it until finally I get to see the show. One day I’ll know how it all works out. Or just look it up on Wikipedia, but where’s the fun in that?

Ten glorious years

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, humans and other, on behalf of Captain Michael Gilmore RSF and the crew of HMSS Ark Royal may I wish you all a happy tenth anniversary of the publication of His Majesty's Starship.

Or, more succinctly, YAY!

Its star sign was Sagittarius, its birthstone was Blue Topaz or Turquoise and it was born in the Chinese year of the Tiger. The no. 1 song in the charts was Cher with "Believe".

Yes, it was 11 December 1998 that His Majesty's Starship hit the bookshelves with the force of a reticent snowflake. And what a ten years it's been. Three more novels have followed it, and that's just under my own name, and don't get me started on other projects started and sometimes finished. The little boys to whom it was dedicated, aged 3 and 1, are now 13 and 11 respectively. Who'd have thought it? I've been fired, set up my own company, gone broke, been gainfully re-employed, got married and acquired a teenage stepson. All once, though not all at once.

Back then we had no Weakest Link or Big Brother or I'm An Idiot, Get Me On TV. I had a personal website but had never heard of blogs. All HTML coding was manual.

I still have and even occasionally use the laptop I bought with the proceeds. It were an IBM Thinkpad, it were.

I used to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, type out an entire trilogy on a typewriter with no keys that were always sticking, eat the paper for breakfast and pay an editor to reject it. And I was lucky.

I continue to believe that publication constituted 50% fulfilment of a prophecy.

It would have been interesting to have written down a list of hopes for the next ten years back then so that I could compare and contrast. Obviously, I hoped the book would take the world by storm and herald the arrival of a new hard SF writer on the scene. It didn't, which is really just as well because in the intervening decade I've managed to go quite off hard SF. I don't even especially consider myself a science fiction writer anymore, just a writer whose oeuvre can most accurately be described – for the time being – as science fiction. That may seem a very picky difference but it's an important one, to me at least. What it means is that I enjoy writing stuff that is mostly science fiction, and I make no bones about it, but am quietly resigned to being officially a young adult writer virtually unheard of within the science fiction field. I don't complain because that gives me much more room to manoeuvre than if I was best known for one kind of thing. If I felt inclined to write it then I could probably turn in a novel about fluffy bunnies and elves to my usual editor and still have a chance at publication. Charlie Stross or Alastair Reynolds probably couldn't.

Back to HMSS. I got a very short-lived thrill when Blackwells got in touch to say it was selling like hot cakes, they'd ordered in a couple of boxfuls and did I want to come in and sign them? Well, I could make a window in my busy schedule ... Turned out to be my housegroup leader buying up a single load as Christmas presents for friends and family. But I still went and signed the couple of boxfuls and I presume they sold too. I certainly hope so, because Blackwells couldn't have returned them after some idiot went and scribbled in them.

My author copies didn't arrive until just before Christmas; I wasn't in, the couriers left a card, and to make sure I got the copies before Christmas I had to drive to the depot to collect them. On the way back home Classic FM played the third movement of Vaughan Williams' English Folk Song Suite, which includes a triumphant trumpet fanfare (around 1m26s on the video below), and then the news announced that Peter Mandelson had resigned (only for the first time but we weren't to know that then). And it was Christmas and I was officially on holiday. That was a good day.

Today I threw my wedding ring away

Oops.

Honestly, all I did was dry my hands with the paper towels provided in the gents, giving them a good rub all over. Then I used a second towel to clear up residual damp patches, and realised how light and airy my left-hand ring finger felt.

I peered into the bin of crumpled up damp paper towels and something gleamed back at me, so it wasn't too hard to retrieve. Must be more careful in future.

I thought fingers got gnarled and knobbly with increasing age. Mine seem to be slimming down.

Hasten, Lord, the gen'ral doom!

To St Andrews church in North Oxford last night for the Wycliffe Hall Advent Service. An interesting and pleasant time with only one severe attack of giggles narrowly avoided ...

Format was a reading, and a modern chorus played by a band, and a verse of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" bashed out on the organ on full blast to restore order. Then repeat. It was a curiously effective way of doing it that appealed to young whippersnappers and old crustaceans alike. The modern songs ranged from the mighty "In Christ Alone", easily the best chorus to come out of the last twenty years, to something unknown, unsingable and about five minutes old but it seemed a good idea when they planned the service.

The grand finale was "Lo! he comes with clouds descending", old style on the organ with every stop pulled out and the building vibrating. Great stuff!

But ...

It began to dawn on me after a week or so of the last song that there were an awful lot of verses and we were singing them very slowly. Each verse took about a minute to wade through. I yield to few in my admiration for Charles Wesley but this was not one of his finest hours. I had an image of him sitting in his study, rocking back on two legs of his chair, maybe tapping his teeth with a pencil and trying hard to come up with inspiration. It's a writing technique I have often used and it always shows.

The same problem seemed to occur to the band's keyboard player. About a month into the song he sensed us flagging and started trying to accompany the organ with a few melodies here and there, but it didn't really work. The organ was just swamping him. The rest of the band had the sense to stay out of it.

Except for the drummer. Ah, the drummer! That's the spirit. He came crashing in round about verse 497, not just tapping out the rhythm but actively using the entire kit, every drum and cymbal and wall and radiator and anything else in striking distance, giving us rolls and fibrillating syncopation that could more than hold its own against the organ. It didn't speed things up but it suddenly felt a lot faster. The rest of the band finally joined in too and we all joyfully went into the final straight with the church gently vibrating its way up into heaven. Fantastic!

But the giggles? Oh yes. Wesley was definitely off his meds when he wrote that last song, but here's the verse where he was really chewing the carpet. Honestly, you try and sing this in a cheerful, upbeat manner with a straight face:

Answer thine own bride and Spirit
Hasten, Lord, the gen'ral doom!
The new heav'n and earth t'inherit
Take thy pining exiles home.
All creation x 3
Travails! Groans! And bids thee come!

Elsewhere in Oxford Maddy Prior was playing, apparently. I bet she never sings about gen'ral doom. There again, we got mulled wine and mince pies. Call it a draw.

The CIA is hiring!

And I don't mean the Church in Abingdon.

According to their vacancies page, "This includes Clandestine Service Officers to be on the front line of human intelligence." Along with people like Einstein and Hawking? These will be recruited into the National Clandestine Service, the service so clandestine it - um - has a name with "clandestine" in the title. In this field they're basically looking for people to recruit traitors in other countries, but strangely they feel the need for a sexier sounding job title.

Open Source Officer (Foreign Media Analyst) looks fun, but on closer inspection they have a different understanding to "open source". I could reasonably go for Publications Officer, Librarian or Graphic Designer. I have a certificate to say that I successfully completed the LRQA Internal QMS Auditor Course but, even so, Contract Auditor would just be too scary - all depends on what you mean by contracts, eh, nudge nudge wink wink?

Of course, this all leaves aside the needlessly picky requirement of being a US citizen. I bet I know more American history than most Americans, and if Hollywood is anything to be (and has it ever let you down?) the CIA can employ both Brian Cox (Scottish) and Russell Crowe (Australian) so I could probably swing it.

You're a star, superstar

In 1572 a new star blazed out in the sky, so bright it could be seen during the day. The astronomer Tycho Brahe described it in his book De Stella Nova, giving us a word we use even today to describe a crappy little Vauxhall. Apparently he caused ripples by proving it lay quite a way beyond the orbit of the moon, which wasn't officially possible - though even he might have been surprised to know quite how far away it was.

Now, the BBC tells us, astronomers around the world are seeing it again, because light that shot off in the opposite direction is reflecting off clouds of interstellar dust particles and coming back at us.

Is this not utterly astonishing and utterly cool? What an amazing universe we live in.

Another year, another Children's Authors Christmas Party

Well, in chronological order, I first met up with my agent for the first time in the 13 years he's represented me, which was nice. And I'm glad to say we get on well. Discussed various possible projects. Intriguing. All good.

Then on to Berkeley Square for the do. Chatted to various names and faces, authors and illuminati of Random House: some not what I'd expected at all, some exactly as I expected because I met them last year and even the year before. The waiters bearing trays of nibbles retain their extraordinary ability to walk through a room packed to the gills with people and still not quite come near enough to offer food to anyone. Fortunately the wine waiters haven't mastered this art, though I told myself I was only feeling light headed because it was very hot and I had given blood 24 hours earlier.

Retrieving my bag from the cloakroom wasn't as straightforward as you might expect, as the numbered ticket had come loose and was sticking to a woman's handbag. Cloakroom lady took some convincing it wasn't mine. I identified my own bag visually, and to prove my ownership I told the lady that if she looked in it, the first thing she would find was a blue jumper.

She opened the bag. She pulled out the jumper.

"It's black," she said sceptically. The cloakroom was quite dim.

"No, it's definitely blue in the right light," I assured her. She remained sceptical as though I had made a not quite lucky guess. I can only assume the cloakroom was full of bags stuffed with jumpers removed by their owners in advance because they knew how hot the party gets (actually, that could be true). I performed a further feat of clairvoyance by naming the book I was about to pull out of the bag before I had actually looked at the cover. She remained sceptical, possibly suspecting braille, but in the end she let me take it.

I could have pointed out that it was probably the only bag present emblazoned with "Networkshop 36, 8-10 April 2008, The University of Strathclyde" but I was too taken with my own cleverness and I really wasn't thinking very clearly by this point.

The only name I will drop is John Dickinson, who writes very worth reading grown-up kids' fantasy. He sought my views on our mutual publisher's intended new science fiction line but got away before I could complain that his father was responsible for giving me nightmares when I was 10. He might get that a lot.

The feminine side of Ben

... is hidden on my official homepage, apparently, at least according to Gender Analyzer. This site takes a URL entered by you, the user, and (a) applies sophisticated semantic analytical techniques to work out the likely gender of the author or (b) takes a lucky guess with remarkable consistency.

For the record:

• my homepage - 80% likely to be a woman. To rub it in Google Ads kindly offer an ad for "Understanding Men"
• this blog - 62% likely male. Obviously because I belch and scratch myself as I type, or possibly because I talk about subjects other than myself ... Google Ad: "Beautiful Chinese ladies seek men for love and marriage. Join free!"
• work (out of interest) - they guess man (51%), "however it's quite gender neutral". Which is as it should be so my manager was pleased. Google Ad: "Inside A Boyfriend's Mind – 10 Free Secrets On Men & Commitment To Keep Relationships & Love Alive"

I then tried it on the sites of various friends and it guessed them all correctly, except one, the most feminist of them all who comes across as 65% man. Snigger.

Is thermoregulation different for teenagers?

Put it this way. You're sitting having your breakfast in the living room of a clear December morning and you feel a little cold. You're wearing just a t-shirt on top. Do you put on:

• a) another layer?
• b) a scarf?

If you just answered (b) then experience suggests you may be a teenager. Or at least a teenager with half-Swedish blood.

So that's Thanksgiving

Mashed potatoes with turkey? I know, shocking.

We have an American vicar, for reasons I've never quite gathered. (I know why we have a vicar, because we're that kind of church, and I know why he's American because you don't really get a choice in that when your parents are American and you're born in Pittsburgh. I've just not yet quite understood how he ended up here, but I'm very glad he did because he's a great guy.)

Last night we commorated the fact with an American-style Thanksgiving dinner: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, corn bread, peas and sweetcorn. All ingredients genuinely American, acquired somehow from a US airforce base. And the menu ...

The vicar explained beforehand that American palates are not quite the same as British ones. They don't draw the same distinctions between sweet and savoury. And how! The corn bread is essentially dry Victoria sponge. It could have served with the sweet potato casserole as our dessert - except of course that dessert was pumpkin pie and pecan pie. (I was surprised to hear how many people present had never had pumpkin pie - I've had it often thanks to my mother's cooking at home. Never had pecan pie, though.) I think the Americans must have invented cranberry sauce in a desperate attempt to drag it at least a little over to the savoury side of the taste spectrum.

But I quibble. This was my first Thanksgiving dinner and very nice it was too. It certainly whetted my appetite for the real thing in 25 days time ...

Ofsted, 16th century style

We popped into the Guildhall to buy our annual load of charity Christmas cards. They were being sold in a room adjacent to the Roysse Room, which of course has a certain interest to us as it was the site of the original Abingdon School. (Oh, yes, and we got married there.)

In the lobby outside you can read the rules of the original John Roysse School. They knew their stuff in those days.

The children shall come to school at 6am in the summer and leave at 5pm. In winter school will start at 7am at the discretion of the Mayor and headmaster.

And ...

The headmaster will not allow the children to play for more than four days a year. If he lets them play for more he shall pay three shillings and four pence to go into the school funds.

And (my favourite):

Every six months the Mayor and Principal Burgesses shall visit the school to make sure that all these rules are being kept. The second time they find things not in order the headmaster shall be expelled, especially if he is not doing prayers.

Fraudulent slip

We have very excitingly triggered the first ever investigation into fraudulent activity on the family credit card.

It's that time of year when we book tickets for next year's annual Sweden holiday. Usually we book so far in advance that our carrier of choice, Ryanair, will take us at 2 shillings and sixpence if we promise to strap-hang at the back, plus a small mortgage's worth of airport taxes. This year we've left it late enough that Ryanair is actually slightly more expensive than SAS, so that's who we will be going with, with the concomitant advantage of flying out of Heathrow rather than Stansted and landing at a proper airport at the other end rather than a converted airforce base.

Anyway, I came home this evening to what sounded suspiciously like a phishing scam on the answerphone from the card company. "This a message for-" (change tone) "Ben" (change back again) "-concerning possible fraudulent activity on your card. Please press any button on your phone now ..."

It turned out to be a genuine query and I set their minds at rest. For some reason the ticket purchase had tweaked their antennae and they wanted to verify it. But it's not the first time I've spent a sum like that and previously it's always gone through without a quibble.

"Obviously," I said to Best Beloved as I hung up, "they've got us down as Ryanair customers ..."

Musical movements

A colleague at works likes to sing on the toilet. I discovered this fact today. I didn't recognise the voice or the song, but singing it was.

It wasn't the guy who likes to make mobile phone calls from the same place. His accent is distinctive and Scottish. I'd have recognised him. Today's singer was more generically middle England and there's a lot of us about.

I thought of sending back a few bars of the first song that came to mind, but didn't, (a) because he might regard it as a challenge and (b) because the first song to come to mind was John Rutter's The Angel's Carol, and it would be ironic if he ended up thinking I'm the weird one. There could be a blog out there saying something like "guess what, I work with a guy who likes to sing carols in the toilet ..."

The fourth horseman

I'm pleased to see the Survivors have picked somewhere with an Aga. That will be handy when the cold sets in (assuming they have a continued supply of gas or oil) but is also a subconscious link to the original series. That one was flawed by the fratefully naice middle classness of it all. Our Survivors for a new generation are mixed in race, colour and class ... but they still end up in a house with an Aga.

Anyway.

I vaguely remember the original 70s series, though I didn't see much as it was on after my bedtime. Possibly the main attraction for 10-year-old me was that it was devised by Terry Nation and he invented the Daleks. I finally got to see the first series on video about ten years ago and found it pretty superior fare. The first episode remained the best, starting as the remake did with the virus already in full sway but few realising the danger they were in. The remake pinched the scene of Abby staggering through her home town, finding nothing but dead bodies and pleading, "please God, don’t let me be the only one!"

Then, as now, groups of survivors band together; some get it, some don't. Anyone clinging to the old ways, or claiming authority based on who they were before the plague, doesn't get it. Abby does, mostly thanks to a lecture from a surviving teacher at her son's prep school (who here has transformed into an instructor at an outward-bound adventure school; a nice way of keeping a theme of the original plot, Abby searching for her son, in a way a modern audience can relate to). She says she can find an axe in a hardware store. Yes, but what happens when the last axe head breaks? Could you repair it? Could you smelt the ore to make a new one? Because that's how long things are going to take to get better.

Eventually Abby's group settle down somewhere nice and secluded with large grounds (specifically, this place) for growing crops, keeping animals, accreting more survivors, and dealing with ethical issues like how do you deal with a sex offender in a world without courts (especially when you realise you've got it wrong – bummer).

Our new group has already found somewhere nice and large, though not very secluded – it seems to be a mansion in the suburbs of Manchester, which can't be very pleasant on a hot sunny day when the heat gets to the bodies. Some flaws of the original series seem to have been dealt with, others not. The original class homogeneity has been diversified into a precisely calculated group of mixed men and women. They seem to be dressed a bit more practically, but who knows – maybe their outfits will be as laughable in 30 years time as the costumes sported with pride by our original heroes. The one exception to the original niceness was the almost offensively stereotyped cowardly rat-faced Welshman who was of course the villain, Tom Price; Tom now seems to have a lot more going for him. On the down side, our survivors still manage to keep amazingly clean and there are very few hints indeed that they are surrounded by millions of decaying corpses. I was hoping for something grittier.

Almost 100% of the first episode matched its original series equivalent. Last night borrowed about 50% (see? and this one ...) To judge by the trailers, next week will use about 25%. Zeno's Paradox suggests that the series will never be entirely original but the last few minutes of the last episode will come pretty close.

The definitive post-virus text is of course George Stewart’s Earth Abides which doesn't pull any punches as to the likely consequences of a worldwide plague. Think rats, think insects, populations exploding overnight and then collapsing Malthus-style as their, ahem, food supply gets used up. Significantly, the book doesn't have a happy ending in terms of civilisation restarting, but at least we no longer worry for the future of the human race. By the end of it the children of the survivors have grown up, unfettered by memories of what once was, and they can start a new hunter-gatherer society with the instinctive ease of kids picking up any new talent.

Knowledge of the original Survivors affected me more than I might have realised. Ever since, I've thought – just every now and then, you understand – in terms of what would happen if a worldwide plague came. Frankly, I'd be quite happy with option A which would be dying and making the surviving someone else's problem. But if by some perversity I survived ...

Well, it would be very convenient if the plague could strike while we're on holiday at my father in law's farm in Sweden. Failing that, there is at a specific location in our fair land a house that I know of that was originally designed to be kept warm without central heating, and which contains a gun locker with a hunting rifle and (I think) a shot gun, and I know where the keys are kept. I think I would go there. Bonusbarn points out that if I just want weaponry, RAF Benson is a lot closer and Dalton Barracks practically on the doorstep; well, yes, true, but other plus points may not apply. Salisbury Plain is on the doorstep of the house I'm thinking of. Neolithic man thrived there once; we can do it again. My bible would probably be Bear Grylls: Born Survivor. And the house I'm thinking of has an Aga.

Beenip loses another member

Thanks to Major Clanger for alerting me (via a story in the Times) to the concept of the Hitler Tantrum Mashup. Not something I'd encountered before. The rules are very simple: take the above scene from the excellent Downfall, and insert your own subtitles.

On the Times story linked above you can also get others including "Banned from World of Warcraft" and "Windows Vista problems". You can't (as I write) get this one.



And for the fun of it, here's the one where Hitler twigs someone is re-subtitling him.

Buran

Yesterday was the tenth birthday of the International Space Station, measured from the first module being fired up into orbit. Last Saturday (thanks for the up to the minute coverage, Beeb) was the twentieth anniversary of something even more exciting – the one and only flight of Buran, the Soviet Space Shuttle.

Buran was cool and it wasn't just a steal from the US version, unlike the Soviet's version of Concorde; there's only so many shapes something designed to be a space shuttle can be. The Shuttle is a bodge, the rump remnant of a much more ambitious space programme left over from the sixties; Buran did exactly what it was designed to do, and did it well. The Shuttle is inferior technology bolstered up by the politics of the richest nation on Earth; Buran was superior technology let down by a state that couldn't afford it. The Shuttle has to include its own engines to assist in lift-off, and once it ceases its burn those engines are just dead weight until the next time it takes off. Buran left all the taking-off business to its Energia booster, so every ounce and cubic inch on board could be dedicated to being a nifty piece of space kit.

It was also better designed generally. I hadn't realised, until reading the BBC link, that apparently on its test flight it landed within 3 metres of the centre line of the runway, in winds that would have made the Shuttle cancel altogether. And this was under remote control.

Another key difference between the two was that Buran could fly. But it had no engines, I hear you cry! No, but in good Soviet make-and-mend fashion it could. For its test flights, you could strap on some jet engines with some sellotape and string, and it could take off like an aeroplane ...

Basically, the Soviets watched far too much Gerry Anderson.



Of course, this is how a space launch should look.

No computers for the kids, though

This 1969 vision of the computer-enabled household is surprisingly close, in some areas. There's still the occasional gem ...

"What the wife selects at her console will be paid for by the husband at his counterpart console." (We see husband shaking his head dolefully as he survives the wife's expenditure ...)

Beenip and Sergeant

My responses to two items of recent news:

1. Clearly John Sergeant should be the next Doctor Who. Saturday evenings reclaimed – problem solved.

2. The BNP membership list ... oh dear. One of the weaknesses of the McCain/Palin ticket was that it could potentially put the world's most powerful nuclear arsenal into the hands of a woman who couldn't protect her Yahoo email account. Similar thoughts come to mind here. They didn't even have the decency to leave it on a bus, like Labour do with their sensitive information.

Without going into detail I'll admit I have seen a copy (hint: don't use Google, try p2p). What makes it art isn't so much the names as the margin notes. "Owns 13th & 14th century suit of armour. Can do jousting at rallies." "Lives mostly in Spain so opts for overseas membership rate" (yay, clinging to your principles FTW!) And apparently someone was suspended for having "an inappropriate tattoo". Black Power? Luv U Mum? The mind boggles.

A distressing number – i.e. any number greater than 0 – live in Abingdon, including one in Alexander Close, which I had always thought was the heartland of moral middleclass respectability, not to mention a Christian ghetto. (Of the right kind of Christian, not like the Revd Robert West of the Apostolic Church in Holbeach, Lincolnshire.) So, if you live in Alexander Close and your skin is of anything less than snow white perfection, be sure to greet your neighbours with an enormous hug. If you can ham up a fake Jamaican or Indian accent, that would be even better.

The Register kindly provides a link to a nationalist blog where you can entertain yourself reading the howls of BNP outrage. (And doubtless there are plenty more like it.) The image that comes to mind is of cockroaches scurrying for cover when the light goes on.

Disproving the old adage that my enemy's enemy is my friend, Christian Voice also attacks the BNP for being, amongst other things, racist, white supremacist, paganist, volkist, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and ... um ... evolutionist. All quite clearly agendas with equal space on Satan's to-do list. The very next sentence on their site reads "Angry, chippy and defensive are words which characterise a website lacking in Christian humanity"; they probably mean the BNP but you can't be certain.

Not quick enough

With a heavy heart I must consign another book to the "Life's too short" category. And I so wanted to like it.

The last, and first, to suffer this fate was The Dice Man back in January. That one went with much rejoicing and lightness of heart because it was truly quite pants. The latest, tragically, is Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver.

Neal Stephenson wrote two of the greatest SF novels of the nineties. Snow Crash made cyberpunk hip and enjoyable and compulsive reading - something William Gibson, who only invented the genre, could never quite manage - and The Diamond Age is the perfect primer for life in a future, post-national, post-scarcity society. And then the new century was ushered in with Cryptonomicon, which defies categorisation and tragically sows the seeds for The Baroque Cycle, of which Quicksilver is the first volume.

Y'see, each of the above books was getting longer. It wasn't hard to plot ahead of the curve and see that sooner or later Stephenson was bound to turn in a 380,000 word opus and that his editor would let him get away with it. Sadly said editor didn't bother editing.

Quicksilver, which is set around the dawn of the modern scientific age and the Restoration in the late seventeenth century, could have been such fun and is so boring. Pages and pages (and pages and pages) of people talking to one another for no reason than to convey all the research Stephenson has done. I knew the book consisted of three smaller (for a given value of "smaller") books and vowed I would at least get through the first one; then I'd see how the second was going. And it started well ... until two characters spend six (six!) pages riding across Europe to a destination they could have reached in a paragraph if they weren't so intent on telling each other what they already know, or didn't but have no reason to either, for no reason than to give us more of the author's Research.

Life is too short.

Stephenson has a lovely dry way of writing that makes the fun bits a real pleasure to read. Here is lapsed Puritan Daniel unable to shake off his upbringing as he finally has sexual intercourse for the first time with the crucial aid of a sheepgut condom:

"Does this mean it is not actually coitus?" Daniel asked hopefully. "Since I am not really touching you?" Actually he was touching her in a lot of places, and vice versa. But where it counted he was touching nothing but sheepgut.

"It is very common for men of your religion to say so," Tess said. "Almost as common as this irksome habit of talking while you are doing it."

"And what do you say?"

"I say that we are not touching, and not having sex*, if it makes you feel better," Tess said. "Though, when it is all finished, you shall have to explain to your Maker why you are at this moment buggering a dead sheep."

(*an irritating and deliberate stylistic touch is to combine seventeenth century spellings and styles with slap bang modern idioms.)

Or this, about life on the Isle of Dogs in 1665:

"The Irish worked as porters and dockers and coal-haulers during the winter, and trudged off to the countryside in hay-making months. They went to their Papist churches every chance they got and frittered away their silver paying for the services of scribes, who would transform their sentiments into the magical code that could be sent across countries and seas to be read, by a priest, or another scrivener, to dear old Ma in Limerick.

In Mother Shaftoe's part of town, that kind of willingness to do a day's hard work for bread and money was taken as proof that the Irish race lacked dignity and shrewdness. And this did not even take into account their religious practices and all that flowed from them, e.g. the obstinate chastity of their women, and the willingness of the males to tolerate it."

More of that, and less drop-of-the-hat extemporising about the sociopolitical state of Europe and inter-relationships of the various royal families, and Quicksilver would really be quite readable. It is one of the few books where a Readers' Digest condensed version would actually be a good idea, and I don't often say that.

The One with the Silly Title

Quantum of Solace isn't the worst Bond but it's far from being the best. It's far from being as good as Casino Royale. That one rightly won praise for re-inventing Bond. This one is ... more of the same, really. The first one gave us mean, moody hurtin' Bond. This comes perilously close to giving us Bond the Big Baby. Oh get over it, you want to cry out.

Let's not be too negative; let's talk strengths. Daniel Craig is still flippin' good. Judi Dench is even better. Bond is just so beautifully irritating to the baddies. The bad guy isn't a world-dominating ogre, just a well-acted bad guy; and like most bad guys, it wouldn't actually make that much difference to the greater good of the greater whole if he won. But you're glad he loses.

We get tantalising hints of the new Big Bad, Quantum, which might just might just possibly might be a SPECTRE for the twenty first century. And it will be interesting to see how well this films in Bolivia – or maybe they'll dub the name of another country. Not many people want to be told their homeland is a corrupt coup-prone rat infested banana republic. Even if it's true.

The fact that Bond doesn't go to bed with Bond girl gives their relationship a sense of plausibility. Sadly said Bond girl has to be one of the densest of the lot, and frankly that's pretty dense. Having ascertained that her boyfriend has sent an assassin after her, she twice confronts him in a situation that he completely controls and where he could quite easily have her killed without anyone batting an eyelid, and then acts surprised when – um – he tries to kill her. Pattern recognition not her strongest point.

And then there's the fighting. Oh dear, the fighting.

Remember the fight between Sean Connery and Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love? It was gripping, brutal and to the death. 007 was up against someone who was at least his equal and you could believe (and you cared) that he might not make it (apart from the obvious given that he would make it – but it was fun to see how). Every blow, every shot counted. The camera often stayed stationary for seconds at a time. You could tell what was happening.

Three, four, five times QoS gives us an action scene so fast, furious and blurry you can’t (a) tell or (b) give a toss what's happening. It's a case of wake me up when Bond's won and we'll get on with the movie. At least one of the chases I could swear I've already seen, in the last Jason Bourne movie. Run across rooftops, check. Jump through windows, check. Perhaps the producer got confused.

Please will the producers and directors of thriller movies start trusting the intelligence of the audience again and give us scenes we can follow and care about. Thank you.

Here's how fight scenes should be done.

If you're in a hole, stop digging

Best Beloved served up some really quite nice rice pudding for dessert. I went to boarding school: "nice" and "rice pudding" have never belonged together in the same sentence. This was hot and creamy with a hint of cinnamon.

Quoth Bonusbarn: "it's a bit like phlegm, isn't it?"

[Transfixed by twin glares]

"I mean, good phlegm, obviously."

[Glares do little in the way of abating]

"The kind that's out, not still in and making you feel unwell."

I think we then talked about the weather.

The Face of the Other

So there I was idly reinforcing my insecurity complex by Googling my own name when my eye is snagged by one of the search results: "Ben Jeapes is on Facebook".

To which Ben Jeapes's immediate reaction was "no he flaming well isn't, for reasons chronicled elsewhere but revolving around having a life." Then I looked a bit closer and I thought, oh, so that's him.

For there are in fact two of us, as I discovered a couple of years ago. There's little danger of our being confused as Junior is, so far as I can gather, a pupil at Gravesend Grammar School. And he seems to be quite good at sport, which is why his name gets onto the school website and hence Google in the first place. I wish him well in life; I only ask that if he goes into writing, please could he use a different name. Unless he becomes wildly successful and attracts millions of devoted fans who will buy anything with that name on the cover, in which case please use the name you have with my blessing.

And now I know what he looks like, and if I had a good memory I could name his friends. This all happened yesterday. Recreating the search conditions today fails to get the Facebook link back. Did Facebook release it into the public domain by accident? I've tried going to Facebook with the intention of searching, but they expect me to sign up even to do that much. So take my word for it, he seems a sound, outstanding fella as befits anyone with such an illustrious name.

On a COMPLETELY different topic - except that it relates to online privacy, which isn't completely tangential to the subject at hand - see this page from the ACLU for proof (if it were needed) that you can have too much information.

Dulce et decorum est

I've never had to fight for my country and would be surprised if I ever do. I still like to think that if the need arose then I would answer my country's call. Then I would be so big, clumsy and easily confused that I would be shot during my first taste of combat and the average competence of the army I was serving would go up slightly. So, some good would come of it.

I always took some solace, growing up during the Cold War, that my country's call would be worth answering. I emphatically don't think "my country, right or wrong"; some wars, like the American War of Independence (okay, not a recent example) I am very glad indeed that we lost. We were incompetent and deserved it. But it's not like the Middle Ages: like doesn't go to war with like anymore just because King A's distant ancestor had a claim on territory currently held by King B. When we go to war nowadays it is – mostly – over way of life, and for all the many faults of the western world, I prefer our way of life to any other.

WW1 served no directly useful purpose at all. It broke the age of empires – but that was an unintended side effect. The empires slugging it out considered themselves unbreakable and were as surprised as everyone else when it all went to pieces. Sometimes I treacherously wonder how bad it would have been if we’d lost. Would we have produced some home-grown hate-filled little corporal who would rise to dictatorship and start another world war? Possibly. It's unknowable. What happened is what happened, so let's start from there. I would say that, with the grip of the aristocracy broken, other unintended side effects could come crawling out of the woodwork that include feminism, civil rights for non-whites and much more representative democracy than before. It took time, but it happened. I would rather live in a world that has these things, and the unfortunate legacy of WW1 to look back on, than a world still trundling along under the smugly patrician tug-yer-forelock outlook of the early twentieth century. The war taught us new and modern ways of killing people but it taught us to be better in new and modern ways as well.

Of course, even in the justest war ever (whichever that was), in the bloody heat of combat no one ever thinks about the issues. It comes down to: that person's trying to kill me, better kill him first. We have the advantage of being able to look back.

So, I honour the memory of those who died and I was glad to take a couple of minutes out at 11am to think of them. I don't honour their memory because what they did was in any way glorious or heroic. (They certainly didn't think so.) I honour them because they laid the foundations of the era in which I was born and grew up; and because of them, even though we still go to war from time to time, since 1918 we have put more effort into preserving peace than in starting a new fight. It doesn't always work, and when it fails it fails spectacularly, but it works more often than not. That may be as good as it gets.

How can you not buy this book?

I'm honoured (genuinely) to announce that Time's Chariot will be a Junior Library Guild Premier Selection in the US in January. They've sent me a copy of the January JLG Monthly in which the book is listed, from which I see I'm rubbing shoulders inter alia with Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. Told you I was honoured.

Each book gets a breakdown of topics listed. Some of these I will gladly admit were in my mind when I wrote it; some I have to say were just brought in to make sense of particular paragraphs. But anyway, for Time's Chariot we have:

Falling. Murder. Anti-gravity. Time. Time travel. Martial arts. Genetic engineering. Knowledge of the past. Codes of ethics. Making powerful enemies. Scientific expeditions. Respect for others. Official reprimands. Class structures. Apologies. Abuse of an official position. Parties. Beatings. Social conditioning. Technology. Prison. Witchcraft. Guns. Illegal activities. Investigative services. Artificial intelligence. Security services. The elite class. Blackmail. Going home. Escapes. Interrogation. Revenge. Trials. Reunions. Choices.

It reminds me of the old joke that Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms sounds like one heck of a fun party ...

But as I say, how can you not buy this book!?

People of America!

You have done good.

I will now hand over to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

The things old people say

Lunch today was with my grandmother in the communal dining room at the Home for Aged Retired Empire Matriarchs. During the starter course I was surprised to think I heard a particular phrase drift over from the gaggle of little old ladies on the next table.

"Did that old lady just say something about exposed canine genitalia?" I asked my mother.

"Maybe," she replied. We listened carefully. A few moments later, there it was again. It rhymes with bogs rowlocks.

"Yes, she did," she confirmed.

Forensic analysis of what we could hear suggests the lady was talking about QI and Stephen Fry's explanation of where the term comes from. I think I could have guessed. I mean, if you've ever seen a dog that hasn't been Done then the reason stands out like ... well, something very standing out.

But, even so. The standard of little old lady that you get today is just shocking.

Shortly after we heard a conversation starting "Of course, when my husband was at HQ UKLF ..." and we felt we were back on familiar ground.

When her husband was at HQ UKLF, I wonder if he was positively vetted?