Prometheus

So, Prometheus. Well worth the evening out. Well acted and beautifully produced. Noomi Rapace has a great future: a Swedish Sigourney Weaver for the present day, who one day will get an international role that doesn't require wearing skin-tight suits. The ship Prometheus itself is a thing of beauty, to be added to the canon of all-time great starships. It doesn’t do much more than provide a vehicle and a habitable environment for the humans to have their adventure, but it still dominates its screen time like an extra character. The effects are astonishingly good: by which I mean CGI, where it happens, is made to look like superlatively good model work. I can think of no higher praise.

I was also very pleased to see the movie in 2D. 3D would have been entirely superfluous. Some shots would have looked impressive but added nothing to the story and would certainly not be worth the extra expense.

Yes, there were things wrong with it but not enough to negate the experience of having gone. Even so, the criticism will take a disproportionate amount of this blog up. Don’t take it personally.

Movies dealing with matters of faith really should get a consultant in who actually has some, rather than someone who has just been told about it. Credit to the writers, they at least are aware that people with faith don’t just chuck the faith in when faced with Science and Reason and apparent contradictions. What they don’t quite get is why this is so. Thus the plot keeps stumbling over Z-level theological conundra of mind-numbing inconsequentiality, which is as irritating as a driver inexplicably dropping into third gear from time to time when he could just cruise in fourth all the way.

Many reviews I’ve seen devote time to the plot holes. I actually think these were script holes, which I’ll come to. Mostly these alleged plot holes revolve around the apparent illogic of the Engineers’ actions. This didn’t bother me for a number of reasons.

 1. All we have to judge their actions against is Noomi’s drawn-from-thin-air assertion that they are our progenitors and have invited us. She might be wrong. In fact, I think she was. The engineers that we saw could sculpt a monument the size of Australia, giving a star map that could only be read from space, or at least leave a signature in a glacier somewhere. Rock scribblings of a consistent star map that are separated by thousands of miles and centuries are impressive, sure, but they do not constitute an invitation. (Oh yes, and deduct a further 10 points from the script writers for equating "galactic configuration", whatever one of those is, with what we lesser beings prefer to call "a solar system".)

2. Okay, assume it was invitation. Whatever the Engineers set up was done thousands of years ago. LV-233 might have been a paradise planet back then. Meanwhile factions rise and fall, policies change. Demanding consistency on that timescale would require a monolithic Star Trek-type civilisation where everyone thinks and acts in exactly the same way, for millennia. This is known technically as “bad science fiction (example of)”.

3. All we are seeing is a tiny slice of the Engineers' world. You couldn’t extrapolate 21st century global politics by excavating the Great Pyramid.

4. Maybe the invitation was misunderstood? I’m put in mind of a short story I read years ago, “Dark benediction” by Walter M. Miller, which dates from 1951 and must be one of the earliest zombie apocalypse tales. In this case the apocalypse is wrought by a meteorite that was cut open by scientists, revealing a kind of parasitic goo which starts to infect people. What they didn’t notice was that the meteorite contained many layers. It was in fact intended as a gift. The donors assumed Earth scientists would think as they did and cut the thing open layer by layer, releasing ever increasing levels of technology, each one helping them to understand the next, so that by the time they reached the core they would know exactly what they were handling.

Anyway. Noomi herself excuses any illogicality in the story by noticing it and resolving to resolve it. So there.

The more geeky reviews wonder why, as this is a prequel to Alien, the crew of Nostromo didn’t pick up traces of the earlier expedition or the Engineers’ artefacts? My answer is twofold. Geeky: Nostromo landed in the middle of a storm with visibility reduced to tens of metres, and all sensor data was being handled by Ash the Evil Android and the ship’s computer, which had been programmed to consider the crew expendable. Less geekily: Alien was made over 30 years ago and Ridley Scott had no idea he would one day be revisiting the story.

So that’s the plot holes. Now the script holes …

The actors were good, and could all convince me as being specialists in one area who were out of their depths in another: again, like the Nostromo crew. They get a heck of a lot more sympathy than the frankly incompetent marines of Aliens who deserved everything they got. Most of the time the characters act as they do because that is what normal people would do and they have no idea they’re in the prequel to Alien.

But then their characters are made to do silly things. The biologist doesn’t notice alien life forms literally manifesting beneath his feet. They establish that air is breathable, but don’t check what else might be in it before breathing it. Sans helmets, they open a door which might have unbreathable air behind it. Even the archaeologist acts surprised that their entry seems to have disturbed the equilibrium of somewhere that has lain undisturbed for millennia.

Oddest of all was when time seemed to stand still, or flow backwards, or something, onboard Prometheus. Violence occurs between characters, the ship’s procedures for preventing alien infiltration are blown to hell, and a woman is found wandering the corridors in her undies and covered in blood. No one even gives her a “‘Zup?” - they just carry on with the plot, including the people she has just beaten up who might at least cast her a dark glance.

Meanwhile, for no reason other than an additional 5 seconds of tension, an expensive item of medical equipment that has previously been firmly established to be the sole property and for the sole use of a female character is revealed to be configured for male bodies only.

Other things.

Why get a relatively young actor to play an older man when it entails swaddling him in layers of Star Trek latex? Why not save on at least a couple of layers by getting an older actor?

Why are axes standard issue in lifepods (apparently)?

And Ridley Scott’s sense of plausible timescales still irritates. It irritated me in Blade Runner, when I was expected to believe that a mere 40 years hence - 7 years hence, from where I’m now sitting - flying cars would be the norm and a character could plausibly bang on about attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Now I’m expected to believe we’ll have viable interstellar travel, albeit requiring two years in hibernation, by the 2090s.

Quibbles, quibbles. It's fun. Enjoy it.

And now some links.

Prometheus: an archaeological perspective (sort of) skewers it far more enjoyably than I can. Prometheus Unbound: What The Movie Was Actually About offers an alarmingly well thought out alternative reason for why everything went wrong, which is almost certainly not what Ridley Scott had in mind but makes perfect plot sense.

Res publica

I read several articles over the weekend in various outlets in which former trendy lefty reporter columnist types admitted how their youthful republicanism was gradually turning into something suspiciously pro-monarchy, and all because of the current incumbent of the British throne. I will admit possibly to being one of them.

Tonight, Madness will perform ‘Our House’ on top of Buckingham Palace, all very post-Blair, post-Cool Britannia and democratic, and I’m delighted. But it still can’t beat the sight of a rain-drenched chorus from the London Philharmonic singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Rule Britannia’ and the national anthem in the middle of the Thames, while an old lady of 86 stands, as she has stood for four hours, in the pouring rain, because she knows she owes it to the many who have come to pay their respects to her.

I am equally pleased that a short distance away, near City Hall, the ‘biggest republican protest in living memory’ was under way and getting all the TV time it deserved under the circumstances, which is to say, none. Even John Barrowman on the belfry barge, putting the camp into campanology, got more time than they did.

From Republic’s own web site: ‘Earlier this month Republic published a new pamphlet – 60 Inglorious Years – which argues that the Queen’s reign has been characterised by “personal enrichment, feeble leadership and an obstinate refusal to allow real scrutiny of her role”.’

Oh Get Over Yourself You Big Tart.

Don’t get me wrong. There is absolutely no doubt that in principle, in cold, rational theory, on paper, a republic is the most just and appropriate form of government for our time. In my own trendy student days (I had a few) I remember the republican cause frequently being put down by “two words: President Thatcher”, which was a fatuous argument that convinced absolutely no one who actually knew anything about politics. A republic does not have to have the same presidential system as the United States. In the event of this country ever becoming a republic at all, it will almost certainly be a parliamentary republic, with two Houses of Parliament and a Prime Minister recognisably similar to what we already have (though both Houses will be elected; possibly a subject of another post) and the President simply taking on the Queen’s current figurehead executive role. President Thatcher would be as important as President Whoever who is currently in charge of Germany.

(Anyway, Thatcher would never consent to such a role. She was too much of a snob, the figurehead of the arriviste Margo Leadbetter class who need, indeed, require a monarchy above them to emphasise their own branch of the tree.)

But the republic, if/when it comes, should be the grandest achievement of our history, the final emergence from the dark ages into the age of the post-Enlightenment. It should not be characterised by the petulant whine of a five year old complaining that it’s not fair.

And there is one other thing a republic needs. Giants. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Mary Robinson, even Jed Bartlet – in fact, it needs a steady succession of them as presidential terms expire and new holders take up the position. What could be a grander, prouder title to bear than President of the Republic? A republic could even get by quite comfortably with the present generation of political pygmies in all the legislative roles, as they currently are, so long as the executive was a step above.

I see no giants.

Short of an actual revolution – never going to happen – I see one way the republic could happen, and it would be a good way, and who knows, it might even give us the right sort of presidential material. The monarchy needs to attack itself from within. Charles waits until his mother has decently passed on, then announces that he will be the last monarch of Great Britain, and that he is now going to set the movement towards a republic in motion. The power of the monarchy is gradually phased out in favour of a president, possibly taking decades to do it, and a thousand years of generally glorious history comes peacefully and inevitably to an end.

It has happened before, and quite recently, in Spain. In that case it was the transition from dictatorship to constitutional monarchy, rather than constitutional monarchy to republic, but the same processes could apply. The king personally supervised the transition and grew immensely in stature as a result.

Maybe it will never happen. In fact, probably not. So this is my challenge to Republic: stop whining and give us the giants. Give us someone else of the same stature as that 86-year-old lady in the rain and then maybe you’ll get your wish.

Where I’m at

Once upon a time there was a young man with the twin ambitions, not incompatible, of making it big in publishing and becoming a successful writer. How did he do?

Well, the publishing happened, for a good few years. It didn’t take him long to discover that the bits he enjoyed most were editorial work and hands-on production. The bits that are actually more necessary, from a business model point of view – acquisitions, marketing, royalties, accounts in general, strategy – tended to leave him cold. His ambition to grease his way up any of those particular poles was therefore limited from the start, which led to a career of middling editorial sort of work – books, journals, more books, more journals, more books and oh, a magazine –culminating in the creation and liquidation of his own company. After that he rather felt he had had his fun in publishing and looked around for something with a compatible skillset requirement. Thus he found himself working in communications for a large computer network, which via a stroke-of-the-pen-change to marketing lasted for seven years – the longest this once aspiring publisher had held down any job. Redundancy struck – for the first time in a nearly quarter of a century career, which face it, isn’t bad – and cast him out into the world as an aspiring freelance technical writer, with the understanding that his former employers would be providing about a quarter of his work. No one told that to the marketing drone who replaced him and he was chronically underused, so more by chance than anything else he found himself employed fulltime once more as technical author for a firm that manufactures scientific instruments. His job title is now Communications Executive and to his huge surprise he has ended up in charge of advertisements, amongst other stuff, despite never having bought anything based on an advertisement in his life.

No, it isn’t where he saw himself 25 years ago. But it pays the bills and it leaves time for the other.

Stop sniggering, I do of course mean the writing. What happened there?

Well, it all went swimmingly at first. The writing was very specifically science fiction – okay, and fantasy if pushed, but sf most of all. That was 90% of his reading so it was going to be his writing too. Stories were sprayed at Interzone and other outlets - but mostly Interzone - until a few stuck. An agent was acquired, novels were written and even sold. Four in total. And then?

Well, that company that I, I mean he … I … he … oh, okay, I (you’d guessed, hadn’t you?) founded. It published science fiction. What else was this life-long sf fan going to publish? And it broke the subject. I’ve never been able to work out why. Maybe I looked too closely at what goes on behind the scenes – I saw the wooden supports that hold up the sets and suddenly could no longer suspend the disbelief. I can still read it but the drive to write it had just gone.

There again it’s possible I had just told all the stories that were bubbling inside me. I wrote a few more pieces, using up the last of the ideas bubbling away in the background, and they continue to bubble on slushpiles on either side of the Atlantic. If a publisher shows interest then I have no doubt my own interest will rekindle. But life is too short for writing on spec, and unless they do get taken up then there won’t be any more like them written for the foreseeable.

And I was introduced to Other Stuff. For a while I became Sebastian Rook, writing the first three of the Vampire Plagues series – Mayan vampires in Victorian London, for readers aged <=12. That was fun, and I could use my genre experience (though I say it myself) to deliver that little extra to the plots. The plot for book 1 came ready made; I made some suggestions that were retrofitted into the series background; I was consulted heavily on the plot for book 2; and for book 3 we all sat down in a room together and hacked the plot out from scratch.

That led – same editor, different publisher – into ghostwriting for a Real Life TV Celebrity, not genre at all. At least, not my usual genre. But genre of a sort, and nicely paying too. Rather like a series of H-bomb tests causing something ancient and terrible beneath the Pacific to stir, this caught the attention of my agent, who had not had a lot to do with my career in the intervening years but whose attention I badly needed to catch.

At his suggestion we are now working on a series of historical adventures, and fingers are crossed as to its success. I have come to the conclusion that every historical writer should be an sf writer first. No one knows they are living in the past. As a rule, everyone lives in the most present and up to date world they have ever known, even if it has standards and mores that are utterly alien to cultures that actually come later. For them this is normality and it must be presented as such, with all the important differences signalled to the reader via some means other than an “As you know, Bob” speech every couple of pages. A 32-gun frigate may seem quaint to us but it’s as exciting as a starship to a young man from the late eighteenth century.

And so that is where I am. By a series of utterly logical steps I am a publisher and science fiction writer who is not currently working in publishing or writing science fiction, and has a lurking suspicion that this is How It Is Meant to Be. At least for now. And really quite happy about it.

Keep watching.

Benology

This is another one of those posts that are more for honour's sake than anything else. Otherwise April 2012 would be an unrecorded blank. Two deaths, one funeral and sundry other factors have made it a quite ridiculously busy month - though not so much that I couldn't get 15,000 words of the WIP wrote.

So for something to do, here's one of those quizzes that were all the rage a few years ago. You hardly see them nowadays because probably everyone's gone over to Facebook. Without further ado, pinched from far too many places on the internet to attribute the source:


***********FOODOLOGY***************

1. What is your salad dressing of choice?
Fresh air

2. What is your favourite sit-down restaurant?
Kitsons

3. What food could you eat every day for two weeks and not get sick of?
Cold roast chicken

4. What are your pizza toppings of choice?
Ham, pepperoni, mushrooms

5. What do you like to put on your toast?
Marmelade

***********TECHNOLOGY***************

1. How many televisions are in your house?
One

2. What colour cell phone do you have?
Black, and we call them mobiles over here.

3. How many computers are in your house?
Two desktops, one very old laptop

4. Have any idea how many Megahertz your computer has?
Not a clue

***************BIOLOGY******************

1. Are you right-handed or left-handed?
Right

2. Have you ever had anything removed from your body?
My adenoids. They adenoid me.

3. What is the last heavy item you lifted?
A suitcase

4. Have you ever been knocked unconscious?
No

************BULLCRAPOLOGY**************

1. If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die?
As little warning as possible, thanks. Though plenty of warning to fellow road users or anyone else who might be around at the time would be nice.

2. If you could change your name, what would you change it to?
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I would however like to be able to communicate the correct spelling of my surname by some form of telepathy whenever I say it out loud.

3. Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1000?
Depends how badly I needed $1000 (right now the answer is not very).

************DUMBOLOGY******************

1. How many pairs of flip flops do you own?
None

2. Last time you had a run-in with the cops?
More like they had a run-in with me - the time about 10 years ago when a drunk guy got into my car at some traffic lights late at night, plastered enough to be extremely polite but unable to remember where he lived and under the impression I was a taxi. Took him to Abingdon nick, which was deserted and locked; a phone at the door put me through to Wantage, where the work experience temp (I presume, from the quality of her advice) advised me just to turn him out again so he could get into someone else's car, or possibly cause a fatal accident. Not impressed.

3. Last person you talked to?
The senior technical sales executive

4. Last person you hugged?
Beloved

**************FAVOURITOLOGY****************

1. Season?
Depends on the country.

2. Holiday?
USA, September 2002

3. Day of the week?
Saturday

4. Month?
They all have their plusses.

***********CURRENTOLOGY*****************

1. Missing someone?
Yes

2. Mood?
Tranquilly post prandial

3. What are you listening to?
Nothing much

4. Watching?
My monitor, would you believe?

***************RANDOMOLOGY*****************

1. First place you went this morning?
Bathroom

2. What's the last movie you saw?
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

3. Do you smile often?
Yes

***************OTHER-OLOGY*****************

1. Do you always answer your phone?
At work, yes. At home, rarely if I don't recognise the number, never if the number starts 016something because it will be someone trying to persuade me I was mis-sold PPI. And if I answer anyway and it's one of those calls where I've been autodialled and I have to wait five seconds before someone with a foreign accent notices and hesitantly asks to speak to Mr Jipis, I wait for that slight indrawn breath prior to their speaking and hang up.

2. Its four in the morning and you get a text message, who is it?
I'll let you know when I wake up at a sensible hour and read it.

3. If you could change your eye colour what would it be?
If it ain't broke ...

4. What flavour do you add to your drink at Sonic?
What/where is Sonic?

5. Do you own a digital camera?
Yes

6. Have you ever had a pet fish?
Yes - I think I got through a few goldfish when I was younger

7. Favourite Christmas song(s):
Sans Day Carol

8. What's on your wish list for your birthday?
Peace on Earth and gender parity for convention panels.

9. Can you do push ups?
Not well

10. Can you do a chin up?
Never tried, not starting.

11. Does the future make you more nervous or excited?
Oh, excited

12. Do you have any saved texts?
I saved the one Bonusbarn sent the morning after our wedding ... until the phone died.

13. Ever been in a car wreck?
Crash, yes. Wreck, no.

14. Do you have an accent?
Gallifreyan.

15. What is the last song to make you cry?
In the name of the Father

16. Plans tonight?
PCC, then sleep. Ideally this will be consecutive but I can't promise.

17. Have you ever felt like you hit rock bottom?
Yes

18. Name 3 things you bought yesterday?
Nothing.

19. Have you ever been given roses?
Yes

20. Current worry?
Will the WIP be a success?

21. Current hate right now?
The usual. Spammers. Mediocrity. Fundamentalists. Etc.

22. Met someone who changed your life?
Yes

23. How will you bring in the New Year?
I expect by waking up and remembering it's the New year.

24. What song represents you?
QE2 by Mike Oldfield.

25. Name three people who might complete this?
No way.

26. Would you go back in time if you were given the chance?
As long as I could blend in and get back again

27. Have you ever dated someone longer than a year?
Yes

28. Does anyone love you?
Yes

29. Ever had someone sing to you?
Yes

30. When did you last cry?
That is far too raw a question.

31. Do you like to cuddle?
Yes

32. Have you held hands with anyone today?
Not yet

33. Are most of the friends in your life new or old?
Age is relative.

34. Do you like pulpy orange juice?
Yes

35. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
In my dreams, the author of enough successful series that I can go full-time ...

Putting my back into it

Anyone remember the case of British Chiropractic Association vs Simon Singh? The former were suing the latter because they alleged his critique of the claims they made for chiropractic had crossed the line into defamation. Personally I was for Simon Singh, on the grounds that (a) the plaintiffs were big enough to take it and (b) science is not determined by running to the courts boo-hooing because the nasty man said something rude. If you’re rich enough to hire enough lawyers to sue the other guy into the ground, that’s probably a good sign that you don’t actually need to.

Let me be clear that I also dismiss some of chiropractic’s more outlandish claims, and I’m not alone. But in so far as the clear and obvious benefit of having your internal support structure correctly positioned so that all the wear and tear on your body is distributed evenly goes, I’ve no doubt about it at all, and I speak from experience.

This weekend was a significant anniversary for me. On 17 March 2002 I took the train down to London to visit the London Book Fair at Olympia. I only remember the exact date because it was a friend’s birthday. I took the Tube from Paddington to Earls Court and then Earls Court to Olympia. We came to a halt, the doors opened, I stood up.

I felt something snap painlessly at the base of my spine – it was as if someone had twanged my belt for a laugh. And then – oh dear Lord, then the pain struck.

I’d had bad backs before, on and off, always set off by small things, usually picking something up. They would last no more than a day, maybe two, and I could get through them. This was worse than any of those, but precisely because I’d got through them before, I did the worst thing possible – I went on with my intended business at the book fair. That wouldn't have been so bad if I could have just got into a decent stride for a decent time to stretch those twanging muscles. At the London Book fair, one does not stride. And so it got worse and worse and worse.

By the end of the day, when I was back at Paddington and asking the assistant in the health shop there if she had anything that could possibly help – any kind of ointment to rub on – I was almost in tears. I came even closer to tears when she admitted that no, she didn’t. On the train back home I found that if I screwed my coat up into a ball, wedged it into the small of my back and leaned against, it, it gave me a modicum of support that made life a little more bearable. Somehow I got home and lay as flat as I could for the next few days. Costing myself money, because at the time I was freelancing and being paid by the hour.

Finally I went to a chiropractor. He prodded, poked, massaged and jumped up and down on me to make things go creak and crack. He xrayed me and I could barely believe what I saw. My whole pelvis was visibly out of alignment, and had been for years. Thank you so bloody much, ten years of playing compulsory rugby every winter term. Thank you so much, second row. Thank you so much, everyone who didn’t believe me when I told them about my aches and pains!

I’ve been going back at regular intervals ever since and life is so much better. There have been recurrences of back ache, though never quite so bad as the Big One and usually when I really should have known better – picking something up at an awkward angle and twisting at the same time, or (most embarrassingly) within thirty seconds of starting a game of squash with my stepson-to-be. At 10a.m. one Saturday morning, thus writing off the entire weekend at Center Parcs. Other aches and pains, though, seem to have been banished forever. One that I frequently got throughout my teens was a grinding feeling in one hip or another, like something was slicing into the joint whenever I walked. Maybe something was. That’s gone, and I’ve never again got backache simply by standing around, which also had always been a problem.

No, chiropractic won't cure my hayfever, grant me the power of telekinesis or enable me to time travel, and anyone who finds those harsh facts offensive is welcome to sue. Fortunately my chiropractor is one of the sane ones who makes no such claims, and when faced with something beyond his expertise - e.g. the strained muscle in my arm that just won't get better - he has no hesitation in telling me to talk to a GP. But I owe him 10 considerably less painful years than I might otherwise have had and I look forward to plenty more.

The Economist meets evangelicals

The Economist has published an article titled Hot and bothered: The rise of evangelicalism is shaking up the established church. It's evenly reported and balanced yet still begs the question: "um, why now?", because not a single thing in it is new or in any way newsworthy.

But still, as it's here ...

For all the impression it gives that the reporter might have picked up an old Alpha leaflet and decided to write the story as though it's breaking news, it is absolutely not a scare-mongering "look out, the Christian Right are coming!" article. Nor is it the kind of Radio 4 report you get, warning that our dearly beloved traditional CofE that no one actually believes in but everyone values as part of our national heritage will wither away and die in the face of these horrible people who actually believe what they preach and want to make it accessible and relevant to everyone else. You know, the kind of thinking that goes "We may gain souls but we'll lose the Book of Common Prayer, and that's not a trade-off worth making".

No, it's not like that at all. I say, well done The Economist for actually presenting a balanced article on this topic. Albeit one that's a few years behind the times.

What I have issues with are some of the facts reported in it, which sadly I have no reason to doubt.

1. "Of the 515 people accepted as candidates for ordination in 2010, fully 108 were under 30, up from 74 the previous year." No doubt true, but I'm agin it. I don't want children being ordained. I want a clergy who have been soured and stained by real life and can bring some real-world thinking to their job. Not that clergy under the age of 30 can't do this, of course, and of course they can always get soured and stained on the job, as it were. But. Still.

2. "Many of the rising generation of keen young clerics already make it clear they wish to work in large evangelical churches, ripe for American-style mission, rather than in slums or charming villages where social views are relaxed and doctrinal purity is not prized." Oh, now here is where I just give a big T.S. to the whinging brats. You go where you're needed, mate, and it may be you're needed just as much in Dibley or St Mary Mead as in St Shiny's Church Plant, Newtown. In fact, probably more so. Get used to it.

Okay, rant over, get on with your lives.

Bill

There are probably two main reasons a guy might go to his old housemaster’s memorial service. One would be to make sure they really did nail the coffin lid down before burning him. I’m very glad to say I went for the other reason – to say goodbye and pay my respects to a man who made a huge impression in my life. To judge from the packed abbey last Saturday, he did that in a lot of other lives too.

Bill Cooper was housemaster of Westcott House, Sherborne School, from 1966-1981, meaning he stood down at the end of my O-level year. As a young man he was a gifted athlete and sportsman, a Cambridge Blue indeed, and a promising engineer, until at the age of 21, as a Lieutenant with R.E.M.E. serving in India, he was struck down by polio and spent the rest of his life with his leg in a brace. Rather than bemoan his lot he quietly changed his aspirations, retrained as a geographer and went into academia, all apparently with the uncomplaining, quiet optimism that I remember from meeting him over 30 years later. As one of the tribute-givers explained, he believed in original sin – he knew the world wasn’t perfect, never would be, and learned not to be too taken aback when things turned out other than he would have wanted.

That’s just as well for all sorts of reasons, not least for the future happiness of the teenage Ben, because he never lost one jot of his interest in sport. Westcott lived and breathed it. I strongly suspect he was more than a little taken aback by the difference between what he thought he was getting in me and what actually turned out. The six-foot son of an SAS veteran ... He wasn’t the first to make the erroneous assumption that I must ipso facto (a) be good at rugby and (b) want to be. Neither were ever remotely the case – though having heard, on Saturday, precisely what kind of career the polio nipped in the bud, for the first time I could almost feel ashamed of it. Almost.

So it’s fair to say that while he was always friendly and encouraging, he plainly didn’t know what to do with me. His report at the end of my first term said that I obviously had my own furrow to plough. (Years later, I was delighted to read that the equally unsporty – though, unlike me, very athletic – Alan Turing’s housemaster had said exactly the same thing about him – and Alan Turing had also been in Westcott, 50 years earlier.) But he was wise enough to spot the reality very early on and he never leaned on me – it must be that original sin thing, again – and that made my school years a lot happier than they could have been.

Because, you see, there was so much more to him than just the sport. Occasionally a boy who hadn’t met him before would mistake slow of body for slow of mind, but very rarely twice. You could talk to him about anything, and he would talk knowledgeably back. He was a gifted and cultured man – a talented amateur artist in his own right, a connoisseur of the arts generally. Around 1990 I went to a party he was hosting in London to mark his retirement from teaching: it had to be in London because he and his wife were sitting through the entirety of the Ring Cycle at Covent Garden over the space of a few nights. He learnt early on that I was a voracious reader and gave me all the encouragement he could. If he had known I also harboured literary aspirations, I’m sure he would have been just as encouraging in that too: he was delighted to learn that I had become a published author.

He knew exactly what was going on, and where, and when, and wasn’t fooled for a moment by, say, those oddly tobacco-like smells drifting on the breeze from the nooks and crannies of Westcott that his disability barred him from. He was also aware, as he once put it, that with Sherborne Girls School a five minute walk away, “Life at Westcott was never entirely … monastic.” Another of the speakers spoke of his glee at actually catching boys misbehaving – it wasn’t malicious, it was just the sportsman acknowledging that he had fairly won this round. The shuffling sound of his progress around the house – which now I come to think of it, had an inordinate number of steep and long staircases, which must have been an ordeal he never let on about – could strike fear into the hearts of the guilty. He was like those two old ladies in Ankh-Morpork (I forget which book) who never break out of a slow shuffle but who are deeply feared because they will always, inevitably, catch up with their victim.

The last time I saw him was 10 years ago at a friend’s wedding, where I was an usher. Said friend was a relative of Bill’s, so had also been in Westcott. By this time Bill was mostly confined to a wheelchair, and at one point I and the other usher had to help him out of it. We were doing our best, which wasn’t very, until Bill told me bluntly (but with that gleeful grin, again) “You’ll have to get your hands under my thighs.” I muttered to my friend later that I never expected (a) to be fondling my housemaster’s backside, (b) at his request, and (c) to be thanked for it.

RIP, Bill. To quote the epitaph by Robert Burns, read out by his nephew:

“If there’s another world, he lives in bliss;

If there is none, he made the best of this.”

The Bens 2012

I really must blog more. A time-, soul- and hope-consuming freelance project is drawing thankfully to an end so hopefully there’ll be more time after that …

Meanwhile, the Bens 2012 have been announced, for various classes of movie watched by Ben in 2011. The motto of the Ben Academy is it’s not what it’s about, it’s how it’s about it (or as Google Translates assures me, circa quod non est suus, suus est de modo.

Best movie:

• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
• The King's Speech
• The Social Network

And the winner has to be The Girl. The entire Millennium trilogy was energetic, atmospheric, well acted and generally fun, dammit. It didn’t help the others on the short list that I already knew their story in advance, whereas in the Girl movies you honestly feel almost anything could happen. And it very often does.

Best actor:

• Bob Hoskins
• Colin Firth
• Wall-E

And the winner is Bob Hoskins, for The Long Good Friday, of which you will be seeing more of in these awards. Colin Firth played George VI very well (despite being almost the age George was when he died) and, like Wall-E, manages to tug on the heartstrings by sheer power of performance. Hoskins on the other hand does everything in his power to be horrible, yet in the famous ending you still can’t help but feel sorry for him. A little. The emotion and unspoken, facial acting of those last two minutes is astonishing.

Most unexpectedly good:

• Despicable Me
• Keeping Mum
• Shrek Forever After

These are the movies I didn’t have very high hopes of, but ended up watching for various reasons not worth going into. Despicable Me is an enjoyable Pixar-clone. Shrek gets a mention for finally pulling the series out of the third movie’s slough of despond, but honestly guys, enough is enough.

And the winner is Keeping Mum, a film I’d not heard of before and wasn’t too hopeful about when I did: Rowan Atkinson has a vicar? Okay-y-y-y … Yet not only is his character very sympathetic and not at all a clown-vicar, he actually comes up with a couple of quite deep Christian insights. He is admittedly helped out by Maggie Smith as a dotty, loveable serial killer.

Least predictably ‘meh’ sequel:

• The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
• Tron: Legacy
• Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Quite an easy one here. Dawn Treader had its moments – I liked the way they continue to link the real-world sections to the War, and managed to get the other kids in too with quite acceptable plot jiggery pokery, but otherwise it just continues the series’ slide into computer gamery. Tron was a noble effort and also had its moments, but the improved graphics paradoxically work against it – the charm of the old wireframes, or whatever they were, is lost in a faithful CGI rendition. But Wall Street actually pulls some surprises out of its hat.

Best film where the actors are clearly loving every minute, and so is the audience:

• The Long Good Friday
• The Men Who Stare at Goats
• Red

It can only be The Long Good Friday. It is helped by the fact that the other two contenders, while good and fun, are essentially star vehicles, whereas none of the stars of TLGF (Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, whosit from Casualty, Piers Brosnan as First Irishman) were famous. No one could have quite known then who would go on to be Oscar-winning Hollywood superstars and who would continue to be whosit from Casualty for the rest of their natural.

Best movie with Jeff Bridges:

• Jagged Edge
• The Men Who Stare at Goats
• Tron: Legacy
• True Grit

He is an actor of considerable range: all five performances (Tron has two) are quite different from each other, even if his character in Goats does recycle the Dude – a role he plays extremely well. But Jagged Edge wins for the did he/didn’t he plot and the eloquent, deadly charm of his character.

Best old friend, watched again:

• The Ipcress File
• The Long Good Friday
• The Talented Mr Ripley
• Runaway Jury

Winner: once again, after long deliberation, The Long Good Friday (see above) with The Ipcress File a very close second: a wonderful low budget, very sixties, non-Bond spy drama. Apart from the minor detail that Gordon Jackson’s character dies, it’s easy to believe this is from the early, pre-CI5 career of George Cowley.

Most unexpected underage male teen nudity that I bet wouldn’t be allowed on screen nowadays:

• Kes

Nuff said. Seriously, I am astonished it was legal then and presumably continues to be now - like, I was able to buy the DVD and there's no warnings on the case. Possibly in case it becomes a collector's item for the wrong type of viewer.

Funniest football scene:

• Kes

Also. Sport is a subject I find very hard to find funny, but see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP66T8ktiTA if you don’t believe me for Brian Glover's finest moment (and no nudity at all, thankfully).

Read and watched in 2011

For the record ...

Read:

• Snuff, Terry Pratchett


• Ark Royal, Mike Rossiter


• The Cyberiad, Stanislaw Lem


• The Crow Road, Iain Banks


• The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale


• On Writing, Stephen King


• Pig's Progress, Jeanette Sears


• Peace and War, Joe Haldeman


• Time Riders, Alex Scarrow


• A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin


• Cryoburn, Lois McMaster Bujold


• Death of the Scharnhorst, John Winton


• The Recollection, Gareth L. Powell


• Margrave of the Marshes, John Peel


• The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins


• Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Patrick Süskind


• The Fry Chronicles, Stephen Fry


• Whitehall: The Street that Shaped a Nation, Colin Brown


• Tarzan: The Greystoke Legacy, Andy Briggs


• The Deserter, Peadar Ó Guilín


• The Death of Dalziel, Reginald Hill


• David, Mary Hoffman


• Young Sherlock Holmes: Black Ice, Andrew Lane


• Midwinter of the Spirit, Phil Rickman


• The Reader, Bernhard Schlink


• A Good Hanging and Other Stories, Ian Rankin


• Blood Fever, Charlie Higson


• Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson


• An April Shroud, Reginald Hill


• A Clubbable Woman, Reginald Hill


• The Book Thief, Markus Zusak


• The Woodcutter, Reginald Hill


• Lob, Linda Newbery


• Degrees of Freedom, Simon Morden


• Reave the Just and Other Tales, Stephen Donaldson


• Scorpia Rising, Anthony Horowitz


• Theories of Flight, Simon Morden


• Equations of Life, Simon Morden


• The Mammoth Book of Life Before the Mast: Firsthand Accounts of Naval Warfare from the Age of Nelson and Fighting Sail, ed. Jon E. Lewis


• The Vivero Letter, Desmond Bagley


• Scrimgeour's Scribbling Diary: The Truly Astonishing Diary and Letters of an Edwardian Gentleman, Naval Officer, Boy and Son, Alexander Scrimgeour


• The City and the City, China Miéville


• The Man Who Was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton


• Iron Tears: America's Battle for Freedom, Britain's Quagmire: 1775-1783, Stanley Weintraub


• I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett


• The Black Arrow, Robert Louis Stevenson


• Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde and Weir of Hermiston, Robert Louis Stevenson


• Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, Claire Harman


• Mr Golightly's Holiday, Salley Vickers

Gave up on:

• Wormwood, G.P. Taylor

Watched:

• The Eagle Has Landed


• There Will Be Blood


• Alvin & the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked


• Jagged Edge


• Taken


• The Next Three Days


• The Eagle


• Source Code


• Runaway Jury


• The Long Good Friday


• The Duchess


• The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader


• The Ipcress File


• Consenting Adults


• The Great Buck Howard


• Tron: Legacy


• The Hound of the Baskervilles


• The American


• The Good German


• Made in Dagenham


• Arachnophobia


• Pan's Labyrinth


• Kes


• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest


• Breakfast at Tiffany's


• The Social Network


• Despicable Me


• Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps


• True Grit


• Walk the Line


• Red


• Wall-E


• Jaws


• Keeping Mum


• Wall Street


• Shrek Forever After


• The Girl Who Played with Fire


• The Talented Mr Ripley


• The Men Who Stare at Goats


• The King's Speech

Seeing off the year

I realised that if I didn’t write something today then there wouldn’t be an entry for December 2011, which would be a shame. What has happened to this blog, once a goldmine of every kind of creative outpouring?

I blame Facebook. This blog used to have everything from single-line pensées to longer pieces like this. Nowadays the shorter stuff goes on to Facebook, which is where most of its likely readers are anyway (those who aren’t, get over there; chances are good that I know (of) you so I’ll accept Friend requests) and it’s much easier to share and interact and generally carry on the conversation. Of course I could put it here and stick a link in Facebook – but even then, all the carry-on and carry-over stuff would probably stay on Facebook. So there it goes.

Don’t get me started on Google +.

So anyway. 2011.

The downs immediately come to mind, but there were ups too. A couple of very enjoyable holidays in Vence, Provence, France and in Sweden; singing in Messiah; a nicely lucrative slice of ghostwriting; and Bonusbarn finally entered the wonderful world of higher education. Of course, being Bonusbarn, he couldn’t do this the easy way, i.e. embrace the system that is there to help him, No, no. Of his first two choices he put the one he actually wanted second; and when he got offers from both of them, he declined the first one when he should have asked them to reject him, which meant he automatically went into clearing and officially had no offers at all. Ho hum. But it all worked out.

The biggest downs of 2011 are that I started the year having no friends with cancer and ended with two. More accurately, I suppose, they both probably had it a year ago but it was only diagnosed in the intervening months. No further reports to add on this – consider it a work in progress, and as one of them so eloquently expresses it, “poo to Mr Crab”.

What made the biggest impact on me was being made redundant halfway through the year. Previously I had been quite enthusiastic about the new marketing regime but I underestimated their desire to sweep clean. I wasn’t the target and was merely caught by the edge of the broom, as shown by the fact that they wanted to keep me on as a freelance provider. There was no malice involved; it’s just that being marketing types with no grasp of the small details, minds too full of the big picture, it was handled so ineptly that I had to think very hard about whether I really wanted to stay. I should have remembered my previous conviction that marketing is like the church and the military: you want it on your side but it should never ever be given power.

The redundancy offer was statutory but still generous, so the pressure to find work immediately was off. This also coincided with the start of the ghostwriting, which got me the equivalent of a novel advance for a month’s work. So I gave the old place the benefit of the doubt and signed a contract that would guarantee five days work a month; more important, it guaranteed I would be paid for five days a month. If I didn’t do five days, well, I could owe them a bit more work the next month.

All well and good, until they insisted on me billing them for July, in which month I had had a two hour meeting and that was all. At one stroke, I owed them nearly a month’s work, and they carried on persistently not using me. I had seven years’ experience that could have helped in so many ways, but no, I was the tool kept on the shelf for when they wanted some scribbling, or for when a job was too boring to waste the salaried staff on it.

Outside of the old place, I honestly intended to give the freelance life a workout, but external factors conspired to convince me that it isn’t for me. I had several leads, all given to me by people I trust and who had proven experience that these leads should work … but this is Austerity Britain and No One is Hiring. Not one of those leads actually led to anything. Sure, I could have done more – actively tout my CV around the numerous science parks that dot our landscape in this part of the world – and perhaps I would have if I really had no choice. But the thought of doing that for the rest of my life … no. Just, no. At the old place I was doing more than just writing: I was engaged on many levels; I was contributing to an enterprise I really believed in. I wanted that back.

The most enthusiastic proponents of the freelance life – the two people I was reporting to at the old place, both of whom coincidentally had well-paid fulltime jobs – tried to assure me that freelancing is wonderful and rewarding, you can choose how much work to do … well, maybe on the fees they get, but at my level you need to keep working regardless. You might also think, might you not, that with all this free time on my hands, the extracurricular writing career would burgeon? Well, no, not really, because I don’t currently have any work under contract. It’s all on spec at the moment, and when you’re writing on spec, you’re not earning. So, no. The writing suffered too.

I know successful freelancing is possible, even in my sort of field, because I know people who do it and enjoy it; but none of them as far as I know had it thrust on them at a moment's notice. I lacked the patience and the willpower to tighten the belt for the next few years to make something happen.

And then, out of the blue, along came the dreamed-for job ad – a maker of scientific instruments that required someone with just about my full skill set. Sent off the CV, got a call that same evening inviting me to an interview, got sent an editing test, got invited to a second interview, came away convinced I’d blown it and then got invited back. Terminating my freelance contract requires two months’ notice, so for the time being I’m on three days a week until I can go fulltime at the end of February. The old place should squeeze one more newsletter out of me, and quite probably a quarterly report too, if they have any sense.

So, I finish the year in an unexpectedly different place to where I started it, but no hard feelings. I have a student stepson, an added arrow to my writing bow that wasn’t there before, and my wife is lovely as ever. Happy new year, and poo to Mr Crab.

A dream fulfilled

At the age of 13 I vowed never to sing again in a choir, which was a bit unfair to the choir I was actually in for four years. It was quite fun and it had its advantages. Choir practice occurred during the long midday break, so we got an extra half hour added onto our bedtimes by way of compensation. Or, in the summer term when everyone got the extra half hour, we got an extra sweet ration. We had a good choirmaster, and we learned a good mix of religious and secular songs. We often got the day off to go and sing at weddings, for which some form of edible recompense was usually available. I remember us all being invited to the reception, once, where I learned that caviar tastes exactly like you would expect fish eggs to taste. There were occasional ventures to singing festivals or competitions in the area and I remember being part of a multi-choir festival thing singing ‘Carmina Burana’ to a packed house.

But it was also all a bit too much like hard work for something that was meant to be enjoyable, and after the mandatory term in the choir decreed at my next school for all new boys who could sing, I exercised my right to leave for good. I still know how to sing in tune, keep a beat and hit my notes - all useful skills.

As an adult I’ve toyed with the idea of joining up again, here and there, now and then – a local choral society, maybe, or something G&S – but again the thought of all those rehearsals to be any good just seems too time consuming where I could be doing something else. But when your local church advertises the chance to do Messiah, rehearsals and performance in one day only - experienced soloists and orchestra, otherwise no experience required - what’s to lose?

And so I was one of about 100 volunteers of varying experience – knowing every note backwards down to complete debutantes – who turned up at Christ Church on Saturday morning. I was ahead of some in that I had actually sung in a choir before, albeit 33 years earlier. The church was arranged landscape format to accommodate choir and a small orchestra, and we were left to self-sort into soprano, alto, tenor or bass. I guessed I would probably be bass and this turned out to be correct.

I presume that anyone who was totally, irredeemably, awfully flat (and I know for a fact they exist in our congregation) would have been gently turned away, but that didn’t seem to happen. There again the organisers may have adopted the Florence Foster Jennings philosophy - “they can say I can't sing but they can never say I didn't sing.”

As a final shakedown we ran through scales and phrases, with the advice that “if you can’t sing this then you’re a [whatever comes next down]”, right up to the point where bats fall out of the sky as the Hallelujah Chorus’s “King of kings” gets ever higher and higher. And then we started.

I had vaguely assumed different workshops for different voices but no, we worked through the whole thing together, chorus by chorus and learning to put the right emphasis on “Wonderful counsellor”, the right scorn and disgust into “iniquities” (say it like you’re Michael Howard, is the answer to that one), the right sarcasm into “he trusted in God”.

The assumption was that everyone who came at least vaguely knew the piece already, which is a dangerous assumption because when you have to sing a specific voice you come to the sudden realisation that you don’t actually know the tune. You know “the tune”, i.e. the bit you could whistle or hum if you listened to a recording, but you don’t know the specific notes you ought to be singing which sometimes are completely not the notes you thought you knew. Fortunately I was sitting next to one of the knows-it-backwards crowd (whose friend was a Doctor Who fan, I discovered by virtue of wearing my TARDIS cufflinks), and I can read music well enough to tell how many beats each note should last and approximately how further up or down the next one is than the last one, so all in all I got by.

My school choir only had one voice – unbroken boyish treble, and if you had the nerve to start adolescing in the run-up to some concert or other big do then the choir master’s disapproval was made plain – so I had never really appreciated what it is to sing in parts. You’re much more aware of feeding in to a greater whole; you feel much more part of the organism that is the choir. Team work! And over a gap of 33 years all the old habits came flooding back – how to stand, how to hold the score, how to keep an eye on the conductor – so, no problems there. Actually, at school I would have got told off for closing my score with a satisfied snap after the final ‘Amen’, but I make allowances for myself.

And what a thing it is to sing, eh? A cunning selection of Bible verses that take you from the bright and bubbly “And the glory of the Lord” through to the lowest points of the Suffering Servant and then onwards into Heaven where everyone is praising God. For ever. And ever. And ever. Hallelujah. At the end you can almost believe that’s where you are, until you go out into the cold, dark car park and think, “okay, still a little way to yet.”

For the last two years on this weekend we've been to Salisbury cathedral's candlelight Advent service to kick off the season. No candles this year, but otherwise a fully satisfactory substitute.

Japes joy

My short story collection Jeapes Japes has been reviewed, which is nice; favourably, which is even better; and it’s the first time my entire body of short fiction has come under the critical spotlight, which is absolutely wonderful. Though I say it myself, I appear to be quite good. Or maybe I should say that I appear to have been quite good, as I haven’t written short fiction now for over a decade. By the time my last piece appeared (“Go with the flow”, Interzone, 1999) I was into novel writing mode and life is too short for both, sadly. At least, mine is.

The line I found most interesting was this:

“The stories contained in the collection generally find the characters tending to merely support the novum of the story, rather than being the centrepiece of the tale. The tales therefore better present ideas rather than uniquely interesting characters, and after each the reader dwells more on the notion presented than the personalities.”

Yup, I’ll agree with that. (And while I’m here, may I add that the reviewer is quite fond of the word ‘novum’ – it turns up once or twice later on too.) I strongly suspect it’s the influence of too much Asimov in my youth, and it’s very nice of the reviewer to make a strength out of what I would still regard as a weakness. A beginning writer will usually write about nothing but the idea, and the story either grinds to a halt or turns out not very good because you need – gasp! – characters, who are interesting enough to make you care what happens to them, and another couple of ideas to make it into a proper story. I got the hang of that, but the originating idea always dominated. In novels, this was not such a problem because the originating idea inspired lots of other stuff and eventually it could just merge into the background. In short fiction I never had enough room for that to happen.

This is actually something I am trying hard to shake off, because I would love to be able to write just good ol’ adventures, pure and simple. Someone gets out of bed one morning and pow! Things start happening in their life. Some writers can do that as easily as breathing. I’m working on it.

I’m very glad the reviewer considers “Pages out of order” (F&SF, 1997) to be the stand-out story, because so do I: it’s one of the most personal contributions and also one I would really like to expand into a novel, if I can just do all the necessary working out. It might not be the only time travel story set in an English public school – though no others come to mind at present – but I’d bet good money it’s the only one ever published by F&SF. “Crush” (Interzone, 1993) was also quite a personal one to write, getting a lot of stuff off my chest, but I had no idea I had done it well enough for it to be described as a “rather chilling tale of obsession … Jealousy, obsession and incarnate rage are all wonderfully snippeted in this brief tale”. Cor.

So, what are you waiting for: buy from the publisher Wizard’s Tower or, if you’re one of those people who absolutely insist on patronising evil empires, from Amazon. Let’s give the reviewer the final word so you know what you’re getting:

“The stories leap sporadically from one genre to another, without flow or warning and yet they still somehow all work so well together. A reader gets far more from the ideas and suggestions each story creates, than from the characters themselves which are never really explored to much depth. This augments Jeapes Japes as the classic SF short story writing that gives each tale a striking novum and characters far more incidental to that central idea. Indeed it is not the characters that stay with you when you put the book down, but the rich and exciting ideas that burst from this collective library of short stories.”

Everything I know about banks, I learned from Paddington

That was a good weekend, that was. Friday was a performance by the Osiligi Maasai Warrior Dance Troupe at Christ Church in Warminster: 90 minutes of hypnotic close harmony singing and chanting and dancing and jumping. They do it to raise money for their community back home and very good they are too. Like a low-budget Peter Gabriel concert but even better.

The Saturday was BristolCon, which I enjoyed more this year than last probably because the discussions seemed more book-themed than media-themed. Also I wasn’t spending the sessions beaming ineffective telepathic death signals at the prune from SFX who gave The New World Order such a braindead review. And I got to meet Philip Reeve.

And in the 45 minute train journey from Warminster to Bristol I read a brand new copy of Paddington Abroad, which I found in my parents’ spare room. Apparently it was a freebie giveaway by the Daily Telegraph. I even remembered bits of it from when I was 5 or 6, though my reading speed may have improved since then. It's one of the first books I remember.

The gist of it – what we would nowadays call the story arc, I suppose – is unsurprisingly that Paddington and the Browns go abroad, on holiday to France. This was in the days when you drove your car onto a plane, which dates it a bit. I remembered bits of it, like Paddington going to see a fortune teller, who tells him to cross her palm with silver. He obligingly does so. She explains that he’s meant to stop halfway and let the coin go. She is then puzzled by his very long lifeline, which turns out to be a chunk of marmalade.

I also remembered the cheerfully Francophobic scene where the Browns tuck into a delicious dish of escargots, prepared by Paddington, before reacting like any smugly complacently ignorant middle class Brit would when learning what escargots are.

I had forgotten the pictures – the wonderful line drawings by Peggy Fortnum who manages to catch everything that is so earnest and loveable about our hero bear in just a few lines. There was one that made me laugh for a good five minutes. Paddington is invited to play the bass drum in a French marching band, but because the drum restricts his view he doesn’t realise when the band have turned round so he keeps on going. The picture stretches across the top of both pages. At top right is the band, just very small silhouetted stickmen, marching off the page in one direction. At top left is a very small silhouetted bear marching off the page in the other, still earnestly beating his drum.

I’ve very glad that the statue of Paddington at Paddington is based on the Fortnum version, rather than the TV puppet.

But the real gem which has stuck with me all these years is the second chapter, where Paddington goes to the bank to take out some money for the trip. I remember my father explaining the jokes to me.

The bank is called Floyds. I learned there is a bank called Lloyds.

First he learns that his savings have accrued about 10p of interest, which he doesn’t find very interesting. I learned about interest.

He is shocked to find that the number on the note he is given is not the same as the number on the note that he handed in. In fact, the coins are different too – different dates and not highly polished like his were. I learned about the fungibility of money, though probably not the word "fungibility".

The cashier also explains that his old notes has probably been burned by now. I learned … well, in short I got a pretty good idea of how banks work. For a 5 year old.

Paddington complains that his note had a promise to pay bear the sum of five pounds on demand. The cashier explains that the word was bearer.

Of course, this being Paddington it all ends in chaos, with him convinced that his savings have all gone up in smoke and the emergency services being called in. Quite prescient, really.

Eventually all is smoothed out and he is offered a nice new bank note to make up for it all. He prefers to keep the old one as he now has so little faith in the banks he would rather have a note that’s been tested.

With that off my chest here are the Osiligi Maasai warriors again, singing in a church somewhere (not ours). This was a more restrained performance, possibly because it is apparently a hymn they are singing.

The nest empties

If you're sending your only (step)child off to university, you ought to make an occasion of it. There's no reason you can't spin the weekend out a bit, so we did.

Departure time was set by mutual pre-arrangement for 10.00, Saturday morning. At 05.00 he finally rolled in from saying goodbye to his friends. At 09.20 he was finally persuaded that if he wanted to make the journey washed and fed, now would be a good time to get up. At 09.45 he was saying, "look, can we speed this up a bit?"

An uneventual journey, apart from learning that Pease Pottage actually exists - or at least, motorway services of that name do. Luggage unloaded, new housemates met, and his mother allowed to make his bed, after which we were politely but firmly shown the door. And quite right too. I think I went through similar with my own mother in October 1984, apart from the making the bed thing.

So. Beloved had never been to Brighton before, so into town we went, me pointing out the church that actually features (though not by name) in The New World Order. Parking charges and crowds of no less than a couple of thousand put us off cultural activities like looking around the Pavilion. We edged our way along the sea front for a bit, then retrieved the car and drove along the coast from Brighton to Eastbourne - not least because Sandi Toksvig did exactly the same journey in a bus on Excess Baggage a couple of weeks ago and it sounded nice. Every now and then we would utter something wistful, like "I am so glad he got a house in Brighton and not Eastbourne, like the university were advising him to." It's a beautiful 20-mile trip, but a very long 20 miles.

More positively: a beautiful landscape of rolling downs, sparking sea, quaint villages, Roedean looking like a cross between Hogwarts and an HM penitentiary clinging to a cliff, Beachy Head, and just one man urinating at a bus stop while his fellow future passengers showed resolute Englishness by queuing in the opposite direction and ignoring him. Cream tea in the Victorian Tearooms on Eastbourne pier, then a cross-country trip through more lovely rolling downs bathed in sunlight to stay the night with an old school friend who lives in the vicinity.

Sunday morning: exploration of Horsham and then, finding it unexpectedly close, Guildford Cathedral. We wanted to go somewhere to kneel and say a brief prayer of thanks for the boy finally entering higher education, and where better than a place firmly associated with the Antichrist?

So it was perhaps ironic that the place was full of several hundred Masons, all in full aprons, medals and other forms of togs, gathered together for an annual service of thanksgiving. Seats were reserved for men with titles like "Provincial Grand Steward", which frankly I think is setting your sights too low. If I was going to be a Grand Steward, no way would I settle for being merely Provincial. Fortunately we still had about an hour before the service began so could explore in relative peace, if not quite the quiet we were hoping for. I stood next to one of the gents in the Gents, and found jokes about funny handshakes filling my mind. I'm quite glad none of them slipped out.

Then home, finally, to a strangely empty flat. You'd think that if we just shut his door and drew his curtains then for the rest of the flat it would be just like him still being there, but no, apparently not. I took the opportunity to hoover his room and could have sworn the carpet screamed: "stop! What is this strange thing you are doing to me?"

Followed by: "Hmm, actually that's quite nice."

And then: "Oh yeah, baby, more."

At which point I stopped.

Five years ago he couldn't wait to move in. Five years later he couldn't wait to move out. The mind and the spirit left some time before the body. This is life, and it is good. And now we see with no small level of interest what happens next.

Bits and pieces

Someone has built a 2-metre Imperial Star Destroyer out of Lego. The 10-year-old Ben would have enthused. The 46-year-old article merely ventures, ‘meh’.

First of all, what can you do with a 2-metre Imperial Star Destroyer? You can hardly hold it in your hands and make it swoop and soar, which is the object of any Lego-created offensive weapon. You could leave it on its table and buzz it with handheld fighters – though very small, undetailed fighters if we’re talking the same scale – which would be a reasonably faithful reproduction of various key scenes from the movies but not much more. And it would be a right bugger to rebuild after the required climactic explosion, which would surely be the point of any attack scenario.

Second, what’s the fun of building it in the first place? From the pictures, it’s obviously a 2-metre Imperial Star Destroyer kit. There are pieces here that could not be meant for anything else. If it had been cobbled together out of standard parts – now, that would be worth noting. But this? Meh again.

In my youth I would often be given a Lego kit for birthday or Christmas. Rarely anything very exciting, at first glance. I would dutifully build whatever appeared on the front of the box, for form’s sake. But then. Ah, then. The name of the game was cannibalisation.

Sure, I would try to model my favourite spaceships and other such machinery. That’s only to be expected. The joy, the triumph was in bending the set pieces to my will. Those 45-degree fins at the front of Fireball XL5? Four-blob roof bricks. They gave the fins a slightly more stepped appearance than Derek Meddings would have recognised but my model was clearly a superior variant.

I think the only model I ever had with one-use only pieces was an air liner. This had two blue, flat, roughly triangular pieces that could only be wings – well, control surfaces of some description. Wings of a small plane, tailplanes of a larger one; maybe the fins of a Stingray-derived submersible. The fuselage of the air liner, being long and thin as such things are, was two or three 8-piece blobs with four windows painted on either side. Now you’re talking! Air liner windows, Pah! They could so easily be the openings of gun barrels, or rocket exhausts, or some kind of grill or just a bit of detail added to make a model look that bit more interesting.

Actually, I did have an electric motor, which very soon failed because I lost the wires that connected it the battery section and then lost the battery section anyway. It was a quite distinct, idiosyncratic shape, not easily adapted to other uses – but on the other hand, it was solid and heavy and so served as the base or chassis for all kinds of construction requiring a solid anchoring.

The standard 8-blob hinge pieces could be retractable landing gear, or supply the elevation to guns, or be landing ramps or hatches or … or anything requiring a hinge. The circular 12-blog turntables could be the attachments for helicopter rotors or gun turrets or a handy twirlable control knob on some gadget of my own devising (possibly a tricorder). There were some designs I never could quite crack – I never did quite master gullwing doors, for instance – and I will admit I sometimes wished they could have made backward-sloping roof bricks, i.e. with the smooth part on the inside. But the joy was in the trying.

It would be fun to cannibalise the many parts that went into the 2-metre Imperial Star Destroyer. It would even be fun, I suppose, to build it once as seen. But that’s all.

And anyway, a Battlestar could whup an Imperial Star Destroyer, any time.

9/11 thoughts and memories

I suppose it was my generation's defining "Where were you when ..." moment, like Kennedy for an earlier generation, trumping even when Thatcher resigned and Diana was killed. (Funny how all but one of those spawned conspiracy theories.) I was waiting at the Frilford traffic lights en route to work in Witney when the Classic FM news announced preliminary reports that a plane had hit one of the WTC towers. Like everyone from George W. Bush down, I assumed it was a small propeller plane that had got off course.

Over the afternoon, further reports began to come in, but I was working in an office with very restricted bandwidth and no radio and so we couldn't really keep up. I only got the full brunt of it on the drive back home, listening to the car radio.

I had set the video at home to record Channel 4's showing of That Hamilton Woman starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. During one ad break, Peter Sissons popped up to break the news; at the next ad break, the film was put on hold and it became non-stop New York footage. I had to wait for Channel 4 to repeat it months later to learn how it ended (though I had a shrewd suspicion).

The next day, Classic FM had suspended its usual programme and was just playing appropriate requests. Someone requested "Lacrimosa" from Priesner's Requiem for a Friend, and that was the point my eyes filled with tears and I almost had to pull over.

This wasn't how we wanted 2001 to be, was it? We wanted a thriving moonbase and orbital colony and all the petty affairs of mankind put behind us. Instead, apparently, exactly one American was off-world at the time, up in the ISS and all this was going on below. In the unlikely event of an alien intelligence monitoring us from the Moon, I think the gist of the report home would have been, "avoid." But to be quite honest, that describes most days before and since.

Personally I think 9/11 was also a Titanic moment - a foreseeable, avoidable tragedy that nonetheless saved thousands more lives than were lost. After the Titanic, ships carried enough lifeboats. Before 9/11 you could have got an elephant through US customs but not after; 9/11 may well have prevented the Great Al Qaeda Nuclear Strike of 2015. As part of the package we also got less than fond memories of George W. Bush, an extremely dodgy war in Iraq, the Department of Homeland Security ... but to be quite frank, if we hadn't had those then we would have had something else. We've never lived in a paradise and, this side of the end of time and space, we never will.

Sometime after 9/11 we heard in the office that Sarah Ferguson had apparently had a meeting scheduled in the WTC for later that day. There was a moment's thoughtful silence among all of us, and then the boss exclaimed, "Shame on you for what you were just thinking!"

Fame and fortune and everything that goes with it

Along with the usual random collections of invitations to bid to write someone's medical research paper or biographical squibs for a website featuring nude Bollywood stars (I know, I wish I was making this up too), this morning's inbox delivers the following treat.

"Dear Ben

This is $SCAMMING_COW from $SCAMMING_COWS_INC. [Names changed not to protect the innocent – as if – but because I have no intention of publicising their scamming set-up.] We are a full service media relations company that works with authors, speakers, thought-leaders, coaches, internet marketers, business experts, health and wellness leaders, etc. to secure media exposure for them and their businesses. We've taken specific interest in you and your business as someone we'd like to represent and would like to further discuss the possibility of representing you."

Well, I do have an agent, y'know, but okay, I'll read further. Nice to know someone thinks I could be a thought-leader, or even a thought leader.

My eye is caught further down by a very promising list of prices. If these people can get me these, I'll be laughing.

• Online radio: $60 per booking
• Terrestrial radio: $100 per show per market (for example, If a show is syndicated into Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago that appearance would be $240)
• Television: $150 for local, $500 for national
• $1000 for major network shows
• Print media: $750 per placement
• Blog features: $50 per appearance
• Webinars-hosting and inviting attendees -$250

(Incidentally, are you picking up the vibe that these people think I'm American?)

Except that I then read the bit just before:

"We also now offer pay as you go PR. Experts can join the PR company and pay per booking that we get them."

So … you want me to pay you $100 to get me on a radio show? In fact:

"Our media relations representation packages start at just $500 per month and guarantee a minimum of 5 engagements per month!"

So I'm paying you $500 a month. My incentive is presumably the carrot you dangle in front of me of fame, fortune and media exposure. What exactly is yours? You're getting $500 a month, and I'm also paying you for the extra promotion. Why do you want to do anything at all on top of that?

Answer, you don't. Children, if you get anything like this, it's a scam. Genuine PR agents take a cut of your earnings: that's standard and accepted and it's what makes them tick. No earnings, no cut. That's how the big wide world works. Sadly, it is a feature of the same big wide world that there are people like $SCAMMING_COWS_INC. out there always ready to prey on the needy.

Like all good scams it finished with a morsel of truth.

"All of the MEGA best-sellers were born in the mass media (Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Tipping Point, Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Success Principles, etc.) here's your chance to do it in a very cost effective manner."

Well, yes, they grew big through the mass media – but I promise you, their authors did not pay $500 a month for a minimum of 5 engagements. Or even:

"Reputation Management $250 a month -in which we control the search engine to overtake any negative reputation harming search entries and articles."

Oh, and on the credit card authorisation form that they so helpfully send, they manage to say "Public Relaitons" instead of "Public Relations".

Back to the attempts to earn an honest living {sighs}.

Quarterly report

Well, it's been three months since the Morning of the Long Knives. How's the freelancing going?

It ... goes. I think.

To recap: summoned to a meeting early at work, told the department was being restructured, warned I was at risk of redundancy, sent home for a week (which turned into three weeks) to think things over. On the understanding that I would be retained to work for the old place for 5 days a month, I took the redundancy and became a freelance technical writer.

Later on the same day as the Morning, I went into London to meet some nice people who wanted me to do 36,000 words of ghost-writing. That was fun, and lucrative, and it kept my mind off worrying what to do next. Sadly that's now over.

In the meantime I was signing up with various agencies who handle people like me. They were all saying essentially "work's always thin on the ground at this time of year but it picks up in September". It's now September so I'll be holding them to that.

And meantime - oh, dear - meantime I signed up to websites like freelancer.co.uk and ifreelance.com. I helpfully get sent daily lists of jobs being offered that I am invite to bid on. At first this was almost suicidally depressing; now I just keep getting the alerts as incentive - a dreadful insight into what could be.

Example, in today's post:

"I will need 500 articles of 100 word length as soon as possible ... All writers will be given a list of keywords to write at. You MUST be able to do at least 20-30 short articles a day ... My budget is $30 for each set of 100 short articles (100 Words Each)."

So, $30 for 10,000 words.

The only thing more depressing than the tenders is that there are people who still make bids, with persuasive notes such as:

"Respected Sir, I want to establish long term business relations with you because I can do your project and it will help us to develop healthy business relations.Sir, I will provide you high quality work under dead line."

On the bright side, the 5 days a month at the old place pays the mortgage and fuel bills, so at least I can starve in the warm and dry.

To be blunt, I miss working in a team that I got on with doing work that I valued. I miss my friends and I would much rather have a full time job. However I don't want one so badly that I'll just take anything, and I don't want to have to take a step back: hence, no real desire to return to journal publishing, for instance. I'm a realist and I know that beggars can't be choosers - but I'm not yet a beggar, and shouldn't be for some time to come.

And now, if you'll excuse me, it's September and I have stuff to do ...

Cake or death?

Interesting item on this morning's Today programme, and on the BBC site, about the baptism of hundreds of Jewish children in Vienna in 1938, so that they could have baptism certificates which would help them get out of the Reich.

Not everyone is for it, which looking back does seem a little odd, but you do have to recall where these people are coming from. It is a sad fact that over the last 2000 years forced baptism has been offered as the only alternative to torture and death, both options very often carried out by the same people.

I would not say that this is the same thing. If I believed in any kind of God (and, oh look, I do) then to be worth believing in, he would be quite capable of looking into the heart of the lucky convert and knowing exactly what is going on. Anything else just reduces the baptism ceremony to the level of magic. "Sorry, mate, you've had the water treatment. You're now a Christian for ever and ever and ever, whether you like it or not, ha ha ha ha ha!"

Not everyone agrees with my enlightened insight, not even clever people like Jewish historian Professor David Cesarani of Royal Holloway, University of London, who

"... is appalled by what appears to him like a crass recruitment exercise of vulnerable people by a proselytising church.

"Any Christians who took advantage of the pressure on Jews to baptise them were doing just that. They were using leverage of the most terrible sort.[1]

"There were many other ways that members of the Christian clergy could have helped Jews - offering hiding places, false papers and other kinds of assistance.[2]"

[1] Well, yes and no, yes and no. If they were being expected to renounce their religion and their heritage for all time, else be shepherded into a waiting room from which the Gestapo could come and collect them, that would be one thing. If on the other hand the Revds Hugh Grimes and Fred Collard, who performed the ceremonies, knew that they were just doing this for show and had no expectation of the baptismees ever actually becoming Christian - so what? I repeat: this is not magic. God knows what's going on in your heart and that is what counts.

[2] Well, that may be so and it would make a great movie. Alternatively, for five minutes of your time and a bit of water, you get a Get Out of the Holocaust Free card. Why is that such a big deal? Let's see. Trickle of water on the head vs an expenses-paid sojourn to Auschwitz ... hmm, tough one. Let me think about it.

So with the hugest respect to Prof Ceserani, whilst humbling acknowledging and not in the least belittling the centuries of genuine Christian persecution of the Jewish people, I do have to say (as the ancients might have put it if they had Google Translate), transire ipse, te magnum crustum.

Memories of a godfather

The only thing that stops me being smug about having a godfather who was in the SAS is that I actually have two of them. Or had. Now down to one, Uncle P having died a couple of weeks ago.

I was at the thanksgiving service, though I hadn't seen him since (I think) I was a teenager. I was told by his second wife, who I'd never met at all, that he often said he could have been a better godfather. When I became a godfather myself I vowed I would stay in touch with the boys for as long as was possible and they wanted: to be fair, they're still boys (okay, young men) and staying in touch is quite easy as they tend to be, more or less, in the same place as their parents. And we have Facebook. Not when I was a lad, we didn't, and anyway, I honestly can't see my father or Uncle P embracing that particular technology. So it's quite possible he stayed in touch for just as long as a not particularly religious godfather could reasonably be expected to. He certainly came to my Confirmation.

Two things I learned about him that made me wish I had known him better. One is that he was at the famous Farnborough airshow where a plane crashed, killing 27 spectators, almost including him. Fortunately his military training had taught him to duck.

The other was when P and a friend were having a late night drink in P's flat and it became obvious from noises off that in the flat below a man was beating up a woman. P went downstairs, kicked the door in, and informed the man that he thoroughly disapproved and the lady was to be allowed to go home now. Which she did. The next day the man crept upstairs and tentatively asked if he could borrow a screwdriver.

In a film of his life, of course, kicking down the door would have just been the overture to some lavishly depicted surgical violence, and everyone would be cheering. Real life is so much better. Kicking in the door released P's aggression, and indicated the violence he could have unleashed if the man didn't stop. Against that kind of backdrop the implication of violence is so much more effective, and gentlemanly, and self-controlled; anyway, P had to continue with this guy as a neighbour.

Definitely my kind of godfather.