Books Update: Detectives, Outlaws, Archaeologists and Druids

Aargh. Blogger just swallowed my entire post, like the gigantic devouring worm at the heart of the world. I'll do my best to retype it while it's relatively fresh in my mind.

So. You were probably expecting me to say this, but I haven't had a great deal of opportunity to read or write of late. In the ten weeks since B. and I successfully procreated, I've managed a handful of books and a bare few thousand words in those respective areas.

I'm generally less impressed than I expected to be by the first three books of Ian "definitely not Robert" Rankin's Rebus series[1]. The first of them, Knots and Crosses (which I happened to start in the hospital delivery suite) is probably the most interesting, but then it's a vaguely psychological novel whose protagonist is a policeman, rather than anything resembling a crime novel in the genre sense. Certainly its plot twists aren't the least expected I've seen: [SPOILERS] We learn early on that Rebus has a) an unidentified enemy who mysteriously seems to know him, b) repressed memories from a traumatic period in his past, and c) a brother who's a professional hypnotist. Goodness, I wonder how those elements might end up fitting together?

On its own terms, Knots and Crosses is a reasonably good story about the repression of guilt and the chaotic eruption of the same. As the first in a bestselling series of detective novels, it's distinctly peculiar. It doesn't give the impression that Rankin intended to write one sequel, let alone sixteen.

Hide and Seek covers similar ground: it's slightly more polished, but as a crime novel it noodles about aimlessly, conveying little sense that Rankin is interested in crime and police work rather than his psychologically aberrant characters.

Tooth and Nail is interesting primarily for its Scottish perspective on London -- and it takes an unholy delight in smashing the place up during the climax -- but the story depends on two huge cheats[2]. Rebus is losing his original personality at an alarming rate, while developing a habit of solving crimes by having the solution wander randomly into his lap. Inspector Morse he's not.

Now I have Strip Jack[3] sitting not six feet away, waiting for me to open it, and I'm not entirely sure I won't to return it to the library unread. Especially since I found a copy of Tales of the Dying Earth in a secondhand bookshop the other day, and that looks a lot more enticing right now.

I'm sure I read Roger Lancelyn Green's The Adventures of Robin Hood when I was a kid, but I remembered very few of the specifics apart from that deathbed bury-me-where-the-arrow-falls-twang-argh scene. It's fun, and does a good job of summarising what we know of the Robin Hood legend from the various literary sources. I found it very readable, but it's over five decades old, and I'm not sure how accessible it would be for a modern child. Hopefully the progeny will be able to enjoy it at some point, though. I'm also meaning to get around to rereading Geoffrey "not Henry Treece" Trease's unashamedly Marxist interpretation of the legend, Bows Against the Barons. Which should be fun.

I've mentioned Simon Guerrier's weighty reference book Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story here before. Now that I've read it, I can reveal that it's interesting in parts, but way too long. I did enjoy the history of Bernice during the Virgin era -- although to be honest I'd have been more interested in a history of those books which didn't focus quite so centrally on the one character, marvellous though she is. However, when Simon moves on to the Big Finish books and especially the plays, -- this being the area with which he's been personally involved and where he presumably has better access to the material -- the book becomes painfully bloated, padding out the interesting material with anecdotes about actors hanging around recording studios eating lunch. Much as I love Benny in all her guises, I'd have preferred a substantially shorter and more focussed work, which didn't appear quite so skewed towards her current publisher.

(I agonised about whether it was fair to Simon to write all this on my blog. Then I remembered the box-quote on p194[4], and realised that it would be terribly ironic if I didn't.)

And speaking of detectives, fantasy, British folklore and characters personally known to Mycroft Holmes... Druid's Blood by Esther M. Friesner is possibly the weirdest reinterpretation of the Sherlock Holmes mythos I've yet encountered, being set (supposedly -- see below) in an alternative history where British druidic magic has kept the island safe from invasion since Julius Caesar's time. It came recommended by Paul Magrs -- and I can see why he likes it, its joyous eclecticism being very reminiscent of his own more playful novels. Unfortunately I'm not convinced it's all that good -- it's certainly not up to the standard of Paul's own Brenda and Effie sequence.

The story's founded in a solid (if rather formulaic) fantasy plot, and it takes an interesting view of Holmes, Watson and the relationship between them. There's also a lot more shagging than one usually finds in Victorian pastiche, and it even makes a rather tentative attempt to tie Holmes the folk-hero in with the far more ancient tradition of the dying and resurrected god.

However, the book has a number of issues which I found very difficult to clamber over.

1. The worldbuilding. Personally, I like alternative histories which think through the logic of events in their reimagined timeline. This isn't one of those. We get some sense of what's been happening in Britain over the past eighteen or so centuries, but there's no attempt to explain how ancient British monarchs such as Bran the Blessed and Arthur have been succeeded by such later specimens as Richard III, Henry VII, Elizabeth I, Charles II, George IV and ultimately Victoria. Given that this world's Britons have remained ethnically distinct from the Welsh and Scots Picts, let alone the French, Germans and Dutch, for the royal bloodline to have thrown up these same individuals beggars belief.

2. The worldbuilding. Nor is there the slightest consistency to it. Consider: Oscar Wilde is real in this world, as are George and Ada Byron, all of whom are much as history remembers them (apart from another set of inconsistencies, which I'll come to shortly). Arthur Conan Doyle is real, but his name's Arthur Elric Boyle. H.G. Wells is real, and has a time machine. Jack the Ripper is real, but turns out to be the goddess Kali (who at least has the merit of being a previously unidentified suspect). John H. Watson is real, but his background's entirely different from Doyle's fictional character, and his surname's Weston. Bram Stoker's Renfield is real and runs an upmarket restaurant (which is quite a funny in-joke until Friesner starts labouring it). Sherlock Holmes is called Brihtric Donne, and is -- strictly speaking -- fictional, being an imposter who's taken his identity from Weston's (not Boyle's) stories in the Strand.

So -- is Friesner presenting a world where what we know as fiction is reality, as in Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Or one where fictional characters coexist with their creators, like Kim Newman's Anno Dracula? Or one where writers' own fantastical experiences infuse their fiction, like -- say -- most of the portrayals of authors in Doctor Who? Or a history that's meant to be vaguely plausible, including a mechanism whereby the fictional Holmes can appear? She doesn't seem to have a clue.

3. The worldbuilding. And she doesn't even know what period of history she's trying to cover! While we're clearly in a pastiche nineteenth century (never identified as such because Britain is, of course, pagan rather than christian[5]), the characters in Druid's Blood include Lords Wellington (1769-1852), Byron (1788-1824) and Kitchener (1850-1915), and the authors Dickens (1812-1870), Wilde (1854-1900) and Wells (1866-1948). You don't have to be a literary historian to work out what's wrong with this picture. Surely if something as contingent as the royal line of succession has stayed constant, most people would need to have the same dates of birth and death in Donne's world?

Admittedly the fantasy elements on display include magical longevity (the long-retired Charles II is also a character, for instance), as well as resurrection and time travel... but the few clear historical markers we're given (Victoria is a genuinely young woman, Dickens is working on, ahem, The Mystery of Edwin Druid, the Ripper is stalking the East End[6]) are equally contradictory.

Despite appearances, fantasy simply isn't a genre where anything goes. Any fantasy world needs its own rigorous rules -- rather more so, in fact, than fiction that's in closer contact with recognisable reality. It's setting those rules where the creativity of fantasy lies. Friesner just can't make up her mind what her rules are, and worse, she doesn't seem to feel it's particularly important. Consequently, the reader is left struggling to understand how this world works, and not altogether sure that he or she cares. Why should we, when the author can create new elements by fiat any time she wants to?

4. Cultural cringe. Although she's clearly read widely -- The Mabinogion, Caesar's Gallic Wars and possibly even The Golden Bough as well as the Holmes canon -- Friesner remains one of those charming anglophile Americans who doesn't know British culture nearly as well as she thinks she does, and isn't afraid to demonstrate it. Aside from getting a vague sense that Cornwall was located somewhere in Wales, itself possibly an island off the Devon coast, and that Stonehenge stands a short distance outside London, I kept wincing at her Vandykean attempts at local dialect and some startling uses of vocabulary.

Some examples, off the top of my head and without referring to the book: "tweeny" is used as a formal job title, "bobs" is used as the plural of "bob" (as in shilling), an aristocrat who shows no particular signs of being also a judge is addressed as "m'lud", and -- most wrongly of all -- "public school education" is used as if it refers to an education which members of the public might get at school. To be sure, this is a different world -- but the intent is clearly that it's the same as the real Victorian England except in certain identified respects. In that context, these errors are just embarrassing.

6. An earworm. Finally -- and, one might suggest, least importantly -- I had the New Vaudeville Band song "I Was Lord Kitchener's Valet" running through my head all the while I was reading it. Which was annoying.

Druid's Blood is interesting, and quite a lot of fun at times -- Friesner seems in general to write comedic fantasy, and although I wouldn't describe Druid's Blood that way, the fact does make rather more sense of its peculiarities.

I'd recommend it as a curiosity, though, rather than as a fantasy novel, an alternative history novel or a piece of the Holmes apocrypha.

[1] Usually referred to as the "Inspector Rebus" series, but in Knots and Crosses he's only a sergeant.
[2] SPOILERS: The serial killer turns out to be a walk-on character whom we met briefly in one scene... and due to some vague guff about schizophrenia isn't even the same gender as the viewpoint character in the murder scenes.
[3] He abandons the themed titles after the first three novels, which is a shame.
[4] "I have a somewhat robust attitude to criticising others' writing" -- Philip Purser-Hallard.
[5] In fact there's no mention whatsoever of christianity, even in discussion of the outside world's history. One might construct a chain of events whereby the repulsion of Claudius's invasion attempt eventually meant that, say, Constantine never adopted christianity as the imperial religion, but there's not a hint of such a thing here.
[6] These would be roughly the 1840s, the late 1860s, and 1888.

Intelligence Update

I'm predictably late in blogging the fact, but I feel we -- where "we" means cinema audiences -- have been almost unprecedentedly privileged this summer in having the opportunity to see two new pieces of intelligent, well-made SF drama.

I'm talking, of course, of Moon and District 9: set respectively in a cramped mining station on a relatively near-future Moon, and in a boderline-alternative history where South Africa became home to a population of extraterrestrial refugees in the late 1980s. Neither creates an original SF premise -- indeed, both are rather derivative, in ways I'll explore shortly -- but they do what the best of SF cinema does, using familiar tropes as springboards for clever, thought-provoking human stories with real intellectual significance.

Of the two, I prefer Moon, although I wouldn't argue with those who point out that District 9's the more important film. Moon is unexpectedly written and directed by Duncan Jones -- a man who evidently now rejects the only other fact I and the rest of the world knew about him, that his father had given him the name Zowie Bowie[1] -- and stars Sam Rockwell, who I only remember as Zaphod in the regrettable film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I went in without notably high expectations, and emerged raving. Moon is low-key, non-blockbustery SF drama reminiscent of the best examples of the genre before Star Wars ruined it for adults: Dark Star, for instance, Silent Running, or even the monolithic 2001: A Space Odyssey. (It also reminded me of Solaris, which is odd as I've somehow managed never to see either film version, or indeed read the novel.) Well-imagined, claustrophobic sets complement a small cast; although there's plentiful well-written dialogue, the central revelations are conveyed through almost-silent visual sequences. Although the special effects are excellent (and must have been very demanding to achieve), the script is such that most of the time I didn't even notice they were there.

Moon is definitely a film whose plot you want to avoid having spoiled, so I'm putting the rest of my comments in white (highlight the text to read it). Rockwell's role, whereby he needed to portray the clone protagonist and his clone antagonist / ally as essentially the same person after different life-experiences, must have been a daunting one, and he pulls it off brilliantly well. The other iterations of the character, in their brief appearances, are also distinguished in subtle shades. Purely from this point of view (and leaving aside the effects work which must have been involved in creating, for instance, the scene where Sam plays table-tennis against himself), the film's a tour de force.

It's also, of course, a clever meditation on the nature of human identity and where it resides -- while the Sam clones are unquestionably entitled to the same rights as the original Sam, and their callous exploitation at the hands of Lunar Industries is an atrocity, it's also clear that each of them is his own person, sharing a base personality and many memories but with a unique identity.

The one element of the film which doesn't quite fit the rest is the one which reminded me of Solaris: the soon-to-be-dying Sam's visions of the original Sam's daughter, appearing as the teenager she now is, despite being as far as he knows a toddler. This adds an odd, but appealing, edge of mysticism to an otherwise hard-edged piece of humanist storytelling.

Oh, and I loved the way Kevin Spacey's A.I. character subverted expectations by turning out noble in the end. I'm desperately hoping someone's going to get me the DVD for Christmas.

District 9 is a very different animal. You couldn't accuse it of being low-key, although the early exploration, through documentary and found footage, of its only slightly alternative world gives a pleasingly bleak and deceptively low-budget feel. The aliens are a generic underclass (the middle-class human characters being a significant though unremarked mixture of white and black), and our view of the slum from which they variously beg for drugs, thieve from humans, set fire to stuff and scrabble for a living on rubbish heaps, would dehumanise them quite effectively without the deliberately alienating insectoid design.

I'll spoiler-protect this one, too, although I think it needs it less -- if only because it's obvious from about 20 minutes in (if not before) that there's only one direction in which the story can go.

I was disappointed when this storytelling device was abandoned -- from the early scenes I'd been anticipating something more in the style of Cloverfield (except better, obviously -- perhaps I mean more like The Office, only with aliens). In fact the film falls broadly into three chapters, only the first of which uses the faux-documentary effect. The second is rather tedious gross-out body-horror (a genre I have little time for, to be honest, so I probably wasn't its best audience), and the third a less-dumb-than-usual action-movie climax.

I've had an interesting discussion with Not Invented Here about how these disparate styles are unified by the protagonist's journey. In the opening scenes Wikus van der Merwe is a corporate lackey, his worldview as objectifying as that of the documentary cameras. As a likeable and rather wet hero who acts as a willing instrument of fascism because it's his job and he doesn't want to fuck it up, he's one of the most effectively shocking portrayals of evil I've seen in film. Later, he descends into poverty as one of the underclass and becomes radicalised by the experience -- and as N.I.H. points out, the appropriation of these other SF subgenres, body-horror and schwarzeneggerish action, mirror that in metaphor rather nicely.

However, I felt that these three elements were insufficiently well married together, and in particular that they resulted in distressingly incoherent worldbuilding. The objectified, frankly disgusting aliens of the first third are humanised for us, not through subtle revelations, but through subtitling their dialogue to make it clear that their thought-processes are exactly like ours, and by giving one of them a cute big-eyed spielbergsque lobster-child. It's a copout, and compromises the integrity of the first part. Some of the differences can be rationalised by the fact that Wikus's alien friend and his son are clearly of the officer caste in the aliens' hive-system, but even so it's very tricky to reconcile the grim, shit-smeared arrival of the aliens in the opening montage (in which Close Encounters of the Third Kind is cleverly evoked in order to be scoffed at) with the disneyesque departure of their representatives at the end.

Nor does the central mcguffin have any logic behind it -- no matter how biological the enineering of the aliens' technology may allegedly be (and it all looks mechanical or electronic to me), it makes no sense that exposure to their fuel would mutate a human into one of them. As a method of alienating the protagonist, it's rather less sensible than the plan of the Nigerian gangster characters to take on the aliens' characteristics by eating their body-parts.

These elements felt as if they needed more thought -- which, in what was overall such a thoughtful film, seemed to me a bit of a letdown. Unlike Moon, which felt damn near perfect, I didn't feel it hung together completely as a narrative.

When District 9's most obviously about apartheid, and more generally about the casual subjugation of individuals whom society views as less than human, it's quite devastating. As Not Invented Here's also said, the significance of such a film coming out of South Africa itself (albeit with international money) can't be underestimated. It's just a shame that the film as a whole doesn't, or so I felt, follow through on that initial promise.

I'll still be getting it on DVD, I suspect.

[1] There's a "Moon Unit" joke in there somewhere, but I don't think I've got the willpower.

Not So Long Now

This year, for the first time since 2004, I didn't blog the Greenbelt festival (of faith, art, music, activism, food and stuff in general) for Surefish. Those of you who've been paying attention may be able to guess one reason, which is that Surefish haven't actually been paying for new content since a while ago now. The other is, of course, young master R., who rather restricted our attendance this year.

Nonetheless, we did manage to get from Bristol to Cheltenham for day trips on Saturday and Monday. At three weeks old R. remains something of an impediment, of course, and the one alternative worship session we managed to get to consisted largely of a breast-feeding, nappy-changing and baby-quietening marathon.

Still, we managed to attend and pay attention to a number of the events as well as generally appreciating the atmosphere.

This year's festival theme was "Standing in the Long Now", about which I was rather enthusiastic -- the long-term futurological thinking of these people being something I feel the world in general could do with very much more of. Sadly, aside some rather nice theming in the aforementioned worship session (which, of course, we hardly got the chance to see), the only evidence of the festival organisers drawing inspiration from this source was the slogan "Now is all we have" on a T-shirt (see illustration above).

A panel discussion on whether Doctor Who and its ilk should be frightening children (for both moral and aesthetic values of "should") benefitted hugely from the erudition of its panel, who included two Doctor Who authors and a vicar who used to draw Judge Dredd.

Kester Brewin's two talks on, respectively, "A Plea for Christian Piracy" and how physics might inform faith, were highly entertaining idea-play: the former reinterpreting 18th-century freebooters as revolutionary proto-anarchists, and the latter ranging through higher-dimensional spaces as an analogy for divine revelation and the many-world hypothesis as a justification for heaven, hell and immortality.

(Mind you, my question at the latter, about the alternative lives of Jesus and how they might knock the crucifixion from its central place in atonement theology, seemed to throw him rather. I might see if I can talk about something along those lines next year -- fortuitously themed "The Art of Looking Sideways" -- if a) I get time and b) they let me.)

Brewin also pointed out that "atom" and "individual" have the same root meaning, which had somehow never occurred to me before.

Aside from sessions with various friends at the Moroccan Pizza Tent, the Tiny Tea Tent, Nuts Wholefood Cafe and the Jesus' Arms pub tent (the last being a godawful letdown after the past two years, due to a change of franchisee -- we must give the organisers some feedback on that), the only other organised event we attended was a promotional gig by Jasper Fforde. Sadly, Fforde's overly high estimation of his own cleverness comes through in person as strongly as in his books, so we went away from that slightly irritated.

As ever, I appreciated the visual art as much as any of the talks, and was particularly impressed by these photos. I'd have liked to have seen more of these paintings as well, but unfortunately there was a guided tour in the way when we managed to make it there. Those we saw were great, though. We also managed to pick up a limited edition print of a rather incomprehensible artwork by Billy Childish.

Our partial attendance meant that we missed, among others, Robert Beckford, Michael Ward, Pete Rollins, Alister McGrath, Iain Sinclair and Gene Robinson, as well as any of the christian-muslim dialogue events (which the organisers depressingly felt the need to justify to their christian attendees in the programme). Any or all of these might also have been splendid, but circumstances weren't really on our side.

We had a fantastic time anyway, brief though it was, and look forward to managing longer next year.

Embroiderer of the Daleks

My God. Over the past few weeks we've had (by which I really mean that baby R. has had) some wonderfully thoughtful presents -- including clothes, toys, books, DVDs and various containment mechanisms -- from a vast array of people we know, love and / or are related to, most of whom we've completely failed to thank so far. (If that's you, then sorry -- things have been a little bit hectic.)

Lovely thought they are, though, none of the others have been quite as wonderful as this handmade baby quilt: I knew the friend in question had taken up quilting, but I hadn't realised the results looked this impressive. I hardly dare imagine the amount of work she's put into it.R. seems to appreciate it, anyway.(I know, I know -- this isn't supposed to be a baby blog. To be honest I've not had terribly much time for books, TV or, well, a life over the past few weeks. They say it'll settle down soon -- hopefully by 2027 or thereabouts, I'm told.)

Index and Contents

Things about fatherhood which are easier than I expected: Changing nappies[1]. Barely disgusting at all after the first half-dozen or so, and for reasons I won't trouble you with it gets less unpleasant still after the child's first week or so of digestion.


Things about fatherhood which are harder than I expected: The sleep deprivation. God, it's difficult. Still, if you haven't heard that before, you obviously haven't been hanging around enough new parents.


In other news... After a fortnight off, and four hours of sleep last night, I've managed to get back into writing in a small way today, so I'm no longer feeling as if that part of my life has been severed from me forever. Which is nice. It's just 500 words, but it's a start.

Another reason why I'm feeling like a writer again as well as a father is this substantial coffee-table book by my ex-editor Simon Guerrier, in which I'm one of many authors interviewed.

It's a history of the fiction featuring Bernice Summerfield -- a series character for whom you may recall I've written on four separate occasions, most recently in The Vampire Curse. Simon has assembled quotes from a truly huge number of authors who've contributed to Bernice's life story under three different publishers[2], and my name crops up -- according to the index, at least -- on 16 of the book's 310 pages. (Oh, hang on, there's the index page itself. 17 of 318, then.)

A lot of this material echoes stuff you can read on the Extras pages on my website, but you do get the (very out of date) inside scoop on why a couple of people apparently considered it mildly controversial for Big Finish to be commissioning me in the first place. Nine-and-a-half short stories and two novellas for them further on, this seems a touch academic... but if you're interested it's neatly summarised in a box-quote on p194. Enjoy.

[1] Diapers, if you will. And if you will, please be my guest.
[2] Yes, three -- Virgin, Big Finish and Marvel UK. (And in fact the Mad Norwegian press reprint of Dead Romance is mentioned briefly on p88, but of course Bernice isn't actually in that one.)

Stray Thoughts Scraped from the Brain of a Recent Father

I'm writing this at 1:30 in the morning, with my son strapped to my chest. He's breathing gently, and occasionally stirring slightly. I keep worrying that he's too hot, or too cold. He's five days, three hours and twenty minutes old.

I won't be identifying him by name here -- privacy is rare enough on the internet, and I'm not going to blow it for him by naming him on a public forum before he's old enough to consent to it. As far as this blog's concerned, he's R.

* * *

Being present at a birth is one of the most draining, traumatic, shocking and paradigm-shattering experiences imaginable. I honestly think, until I actually saw R. emerge from his mother, I'd never believed that this was genuinely how it happened. I remember very clearly thinking, "My God, it's actually true!". Lord knows what I'd been expecting to see -- some kind of stork, perhaps.

* * *

My respect for people who voluntarily go through this experience on a daily professional basis has rocketed through the ceiling. Forget soldiers and firefighters, midwives may very well be the closest thing we have to superheroes.

* * *

I want to write a story now about anti-gestationists who believe babies come into being at the moment of birth and reject all this so-called scientific propaganda about foetal development.

* * *

To a regular SF viewer, a newborn baby looks like a none-too-convincing special effect. It's greyish-purple, it moves strangely, it's connected to a human being via a disturbingly organic-looking conduit, and looks unlike anything you've ever seen before. I remember finding the birth sequence in Children of Men oddly unrealistic, and feeling that it let down the rest of the film. I've a suspicion it matched what I saw on Sunday evening, pretty much frame by frame.

* * *

Incredible though midwives are, maternity wards are horrible places, full of hormonal panic and routinely violated privacy. B. and R. were kept in until Wednesday to be given antibiotics for a potential (and, as it turned out, mythical) infection. I was leaving them at 9pm, spending hours sorting stuff out at home and snatching a few hours' sleep before returning, if I managed it, for 9am. B. was having things far worse. The night they came home was an enormous relief.

* * *

Newborn babies are tiny vortices of need. Insofar as they have a personality at all, it relates to how their very basic needs -- for food, for sleep, for cleanliness, for warmth, for comfort -- stack up against one another. R. is particularly fond of comfort. I'm currently giving thanks daily for the invention of baby slings. (Not that our were bought -- they're six-metre by half-metre rectangles of stretchy fabric tied in a pattern designed by a genius.) It's thanks to them that I still have hands to call my own.

* * *

Yesterday was my and B.'s tenth wedding anniversary. To my utter astonishment, we actually managed to drive to a (not terribly good) restaurant, swallow a (not terribly good) meal and make it back home without R. regaining consciousness. He was blissed out on breast milk, and sleeping like... well, a baby I suppose.

* * *

I realise, of course, that this must be terribly dull for you, dear reader, unless you a) care about the individuals concerned, or b) fall into that demographic bracket which hasn't yet been through all itself this but has an active interest in doing so one day.

I'm not intending to turn this into a baby blog, as that would be a massive gear-shift and I doubt I'd be very good at it. (The blogging, that is, although now you mention it I'm far from confident of being any good at fatherhood either.) It does seem likely that there won't be much space for other things in my mind for a while yet, though. When there is, I'll do my best to mention them.

Bullet Time

I'm told it's very dull to start so many of my posts here with an apology for not having updated for ages. So, if you've been checking here daily in the hope of new thoughts and insights from the mind of PPH, then, erm... ha ha, you're obviously some kind of loser. (Is this right?)

Since 12 June I've accomplished the following:

• Finally finished the absurd book project which I've been obscurely alluding to here for well over a year now. (Well, sent it off to the publishers, at any rate. There's a whole editing process to go through later.)
• Had a very nice meal out here, and another one here.
• Attended a seemingly endless sequence of, er, four National Childbirth Trust ante-natal classes, teaching me to usher B. through the whole birth-giving process and which way up to hold the baby afterwards. I never thought I'd find talk of breasts in a room full of attractive women quite so dull.
• Gone to a rather madder session on yoga and shiatsu massage in a childbirth context, where there was much talk of cervices opening like beautiful flowers.
• Undergone an intensive driving course, costing over £500 and consisting of three hour lessons nearly every day for a week and a half.
• Hilariously failed my driving test.
• Mostly enjoyed, but been ultimately disappointed by, Torchwood: Children of Earth. Which is nonetheless a nigh-unthinkable improvement on all earlier Torchwood.
• Uploaded lots more microfictional goodness to my webpage.
• Successfully rationalised our VHS, audio cassette and, most mastodontically, book collections to make space for various baby-related items of furniture and other possessions.
• Made a surprisingly large number of trips into the loft in pursuance of the above.
• Successfully completed various tasks at work which, even assuming you were interested in any of the above, you're not remotely interested in.

This afternoon I need to move some more furniture around, before possibly getting out to the pub for a spot of lunch. Preparing for a baby turns out to be harder work than anyone could possibly have predicted.

Still, he's due in a week and a bit, after which I'm sure everything will calm right down again.