Welcome, Intraloper, to the blog (otherwise the amber-shifted VR timecode for a portal to Hades II) of Vincent Marsden Hendrick, daydream navvy and insinceritist. Here, compressing unfeasible rage, I'll precipitate a meandrous downpour of wet thinking for the unparapluied.
The Twenty-Ninth of November Two Thousand and Twelve. Thursday.
People often ask me, 'Vin, how do you smell so lovely?'*
It's simple really. Let me take you on a short journey into the world of the gender politics of toiletries.
Being a man I always make sure I wash with blue soap.
If I ever decide to have a shower, I keep all my masculinity locked in with the fresh scent of blue shower gel.
And when my beard gets the better of me, I attack it with blue shaving foam.
But here's the trick.To ensure that I smell as fresh as a woman I cast aside convention and use pink deodorant!
(Hey everyone. Real Vin here. Obviously I'm making a pin-sharp satirical point here about the marketing of cheap cosmetics to pound shop hounds like me. But I'd hate for any of you to think I really use pink deodorant. No, I use sensible, unambiguous, gender-neutral red deodorant, me).
The Twenty-Eighth of November Two Thousand and Twelve. Wednesday.
Time travel is complete and utter bunkum.
No, really it is. Don't even try it. I did and something like this happened:
There is no way you can get it to work in the real world and I should know. I've attempted many different experiments with little effect (there was that one occasion I jumped back five seconds, but that only happened once and let's face it, what good is five seconds to anyone?)
No, time travel is a narrative device and nothing more. You stick a pin in a moment, usually with words, but it can be pictures or film or any other recorded medium. And then you stick another pin in a bit later but you say that that pin is from before the first pin. And depending on how well you've thought about those pins it either all adds up, goes round in circles, doesn't quite add up but you get away with it because it's very satisfying or doesn't add up at all and you cry foul even though even the most thoroughly considered time travel narrative doesn't really make sense.
Do you know, this won't help but it's been ages since I've done a graph so let me chuck this one in for no particular reason:
The nearest thing there is to time travel is synchronicity - when meaningful things seem to happen at the same time. This collision of the timelines of two or more objects following their normal path through spacetime is an entirely linear phenomenon but the effect of one timeline changing another ("Aunt Margaret! What are you doing here at this entirely unexpected hour? You're supposed to be in Australia") is a form of 'changing history'. Probably.
I went to see Looper again tonight, and for all its time travel nonsense it is actually very good and as a result qualifies as my Ninth Film Recommendation. As an exercise in world building it's brilliant - the detail of the future world the story takes place in is outstanding. The performances and the direction are fantastic too, but all the time travel stuff in it is completely bobbins. Mind you, I was experiencing my own time travel problems because I was attempting to listen to the Theatrical Commentary Track from director Rian Johnson that I had downloaded to my iPod Shuffle. The idea was to listen to the commentary while in the cinema. To synch it up Johnson suggested starting the track as the TriStar logo appeared. But there was no TriStar logo! I don't know if there was one on the American release, but I was lagging a short way behind from the start. With a careful bit of fast forwarding and then pausing I eventually got it to keep pace with the film, but it went a bit out again when the reels were changed at one point. I got most of it, though and synched up in plenty of time for the climax. Which I won't reveal here now, but in an act of paradoxical time travelling I will reveal it in exactly one year's time. I hope that's enough of a spoiler warning.
In fact, here's a little bit of time travelling for anyone who is kind enough to read this particular blogdule. I will attempt to rewrite the next sentence every day for as long as I can remember.
Exactly forty-four years ago to the day, in order to memorialise the brave deeds of that mysterious group, a statue of the Termagants, cast in the peculiar metal retrieved from the wreckage of their spaceship, was erected in Nova Square.
I accidentally deleted the wrong bit of this. It originally said something about how to time travel you must make sure you have had plenty of riboflavin.
The Twenty-Seventh of November Two Thousand and Twelve. Tuesday.
I have come back to tea. I’m trying to remember why exactly I left, but the memories (as always) are a little bit fuzzy.
I
know some of the contributing factors. Tea and cereal are about the
only things I use milk for, and breakfast is usually me chomping down a
bagel as I rush out the door on my way to work, so I’m lucky to get
through half a pint of milk before it goes off. Annndd, I like black
coffee so it becomes easier just to go with that and not bother getting
any milk
I do enjoy a bit of the old rooibos (and, as
the synchronicities that afflict this blog continue to unfold I have
just been brought a mug of redbush tea even as we speak. Spooky, huh?). That's pleasant enough to drink without milk too. In fact, now that I think about it I do remember one of the reasons I cut back on my tea consumption. After about your fifth cup - and believe me at work, sometimes it gets as far as that fifth cup - it does tend to churn your tum up quite a bit. But then again, the same can be said about coffee. And sometimes, redbush just doesn't have the 'kick' that's necessary to get you through the day.
So I'm back on the tea. Not that I was completely off it. Sometimes a mug would turn up with the occasional cooked breakfast and it would be impolite to turn one down when offered at a friend's house. When I was in charge of my own beverages I wouldn't bother though. Until one day, the oppressive weight of cultural expectation became too much and I gave in to the lure of Rosie Lee.
I think my recent reintroduction to The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was my gateway drug to the East India company's famous export (not opium - the other one. No, not indigo or saltpetre either. The other other one. Oh, for Glob's sake, the blogdule's about tea, it's tea, isn't it?). Douglas Adams liked his tea, didn't he? (I'm thinking here of the "one lump or two" joke in the unfinished Doctor Who story Shada, among others). Certainly the part of him that was a bit Arthur Dent did. In fact, up until not getting very far with a physics degree I thought Brownian motion was so called because the tea in which the Guide suggested you dangle the atomic vector plotters of a Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson brain to generate finite amounts of improbability was brown.
I am lucky enough to live just around the corner from Scarborough's charming Francis tea rooms. There they serve loose tea - pots, strainer and all - which is all very good on occasion but I firmly believe that teabag technology has advanced to such a point nowadays that the small amount of extra quality this affords is barely measurable. I do have one of those metal tea ball infuser things that I used with some caramel red bush I once bought (it's a bit too sweet, though. I'm weighing up whether to get some plain rooibos and mix it to make a less sickly blend) but for the most part it's bags in this house.
And some nice biscuits, preferably garibaldis.
Of course, the definitive work on tea is the essay A Nice Cup of Tea by George Orwell. I think if you follow the instructions contained therein you can't go wrong.
The Twenty-Third of November Two Thousand and Twelve. Friday.
Today is the Forty-Ninth anniversary of Doctor Who, which is basically my favourite thing in the history of everything, ever. It's an unwritten rule of this blog that I don't go on about it here, because (as anyone who has got me on the subject knows) I can go on for hours about it. So apart from the odd mention I try to cover other, more varied subjects like egg and chips and vacuum cleaners (actually, have I done vacs? Have to do some research for that one then).
Next year is the big Fiftieth bash, which I am looking forward to immensely (so no ruining that please, Mayan Apocalypse people), and the whole fabulous history of the show will duly be celebrated then. So I want to briefly focus on part of it that isn't always celebrated: the Seventh Doctor Era (and who other than Doctor Who fans throw around terms like 'era'!)
Sylvester McCoy is brilliant. Is he the best actor to play the Doctor? Well, I'm not attempting some perverse revisionist anlysis of the series. But he is a fantastic performer, if I can make that distinction. There's always something going on when he's on screen. I think part of the reason he seems to wander over his delivery is he's constantly going in several directions at once. Like the other 'Classic Series' Doctors, he's continued to adventure through Big Finish's audio adventures, which you would think would not be his ideal medium. But recently I got to hear him say one of my favourite speeches twenty years after he didn't say it the first time.
Back in the 90s there was no Who on TV, but there were New Adventures for the Doctor in novel form. Some of the best of these were written by Paul Cornell, who later went on to write for the new series, penning Father's Day, and an adaptation of another of his novels, Human Nature (which if I were you I'd just pop off and read right now - here's a link to it. As brilliant as the TV version is, this is even better. Yes, really). In his second novel, Love and War he introduces the character of Bernice Summerfield, who is still going strong in adventures of her own to this very day. But he also writes a version of the Seventh Doctor that explored the emotional potential of the character in a way that did a lot of the groundwork for when the TV series returned. It's this book that Steven Moffat quotes from in The Girl in the Fireplace when the Doctor claims to be 'what monsters have nightmares about'. But here he qualifies that, sadly: 'But everyone's a monster sometimes...'
As part of the twentieth anniversary celebrations of the character of Bernice, Big Finish made an audio version of Love and War with that particular speech intact.I loved reading that all that time ago, and a couple of weeks ago hearing Sylvester say those lines, effortlessly shifting from impish bravado to sorrow, was a real treat. Some of my favourite Doctor Who.
So today I'm specifically celebrating the Seventh Doctor. Here's a little bit of fiction to do just that. Fans will remember the Doctor's confrontation with Fenric - the embodiment of 'evil since the dawn of time'. A very strange chess puzzle helped bring about Fenric's downfall.
Well, here he gets another chance to get the better of his Time Lord enemy...
Seven
Square
It was one
of those dimensions – branes, I think they're calling them nowadays
– where the laws of physics were simpler than we're used to.
Weirder than we're used to too, although if you were an abstract
distillation of ultimate evil you probably wouldn't particularly
notice the difference from our world. It could have been Washington
Square Park in New York City, but it was empty.
Time certainly had no
meaning.
'You're late,' said
Fenric, on this occasion occupying the form of an unfortunate warp
speleologist whose corpse had finished up here after an accident
while exploring a wormhole. He looked like a disgruntled ifrit.
The Time Lord known as
the Doctor doffed his hat apologetically, though it went unseen.
'I didn't think you'd
mind waiting. Considering what I'm offering you.'
The Doctor's feet
crunched on the gravel of the path that led up to a stone table where
Fenric sat. The two old enemies refused to catch the other's gaze,
even when the Doctor took the seat opposite Fenric and propped his
umbrella – topped by a handle the shape of a battered red question
mark – against the table.
Between them lay a
chessboard, its pieces in place before the first move had been made.
The Doctor gestured toward the board.
'This is what you
wanted, isn't it?' he said.
Fenric's bright red
face snarled.
'This is what I'm due!
A proper match – not some nonsensical puzzle that flouts the rules
of the game.'
The Doctor tutted.
'You agreed to the
conditions of my challenge. You can't cry foul just because things
didn't turn out so well for you.'
'You forget – I
solved your perfidious test. Yet even then your arrogance prevented
you from conceding the victory that was mine.' The words sizzled upon
Fenric's bloodless lips.
'Yes, well, you're not
alone in holding that opinion.' The Doctor glanced upward as if he
was aware there was another – unseen – audience for his words.
'Apparently even unspeakable evil is entitled to the right of
appeal.' Again, he gestured to the board. 'Here is your game.'
Fenric finally looked
at the Doctor directly. A less confident man might have withered
under the contempt of that gaze, but the Doctor continued to smile
amicably.
'You still insist on
wearing that ridiculous form,' said Fenric.
'You're a fine one to
talk,' replied the Doctor.
'At least you have
refined your apparel.'
The Doctor pointed to
his burgundy waistcoat, his eyebrows raised in mock surprise. 'This?'
'I did not care for
that hideous pullover of yours,' continued Fenric. 'It was not worthy
of a being of your standing.'
The Doctor puffed out
his cheeks.
'I just thought it was
funny,' he replied. 'Nothing worth getting in a tizz about.' He
immediately changed the subject. 'Shall we play? I'm keen to get this
over and done with. The uneven way time flows in this place is making
the back of my knees itch. I only called the game to this lower-lying
brane as a courtesy to you. I thought it might be easier for you to
access after your banishment.'
Fenric eyed his
opponent suspiciously.
'With your record that
seems uncharacteristically sporting of you.'
'Don't thank me yet,'
said the Doctor. 'There are some spatial anomalies that come hand in
hand with a bargain basement dimension like this. I do hope they
don't put you off your game.'
Fenric began to reply.
'What do you mea-?'
At last he noticed it.
His face twisted with rage.
'There are only
forty-nine squares on this board!'
The Twenty-Second of November Two Thousand and Twelve. Thursday.
Scarborough has fallen out of love with Jimmy Savile - understandably so. The man who was laid to rest here at an angle so that he could see the sea was celebrated for his connections with this town. For example, it was he that arranged for the QM2 AND QE2 cruise liners to perform a sail past of the towns bays. Apparently, a tribute cruise performed by the new Queen Elizabeth was due to take place next year, including another sail past of Scarborough in August, but this has since been cancelled in light of the revelations about the man.
As well as an elaborate headstone on his grave, various tributes in the form of plaques and paths named after him were put in place only recently.
Before...
And even more recently they have been removed.
...After
There have been rumours about Savile for years but it's astonishing how quickly the official version of who he was has been superseded by a newer repulsive version. And all celebration of that 'official' version has been swiftly discarded as upsetting and inappropriate.
More and more about Savile is being uncovered, a lot of it simply incredible. This blog contains some bizarre details about his life and career. It's astonishing nothing (or any weight) was brought to bear against the man while he was alive. But then to most he merely seemed eccentric rather than dangerous.
That was true enough on the one occasion I crossed his path. One of the things Savile was well-known for in the 70s was his series of adverts promoting British Rail. On top of any financial rewards he received for this he also got a gold pass that allowed him unlimited travel on the railway. With Scarborough being one of his favourite haunts, it was only a matter of time before I came across him at the station.
It was fairly early on in my career there - I couldn't remember the exact year. All I can recall was that I was in the ticket office one Sunday morning. Sundays are always rife with engineering work somewhere on the network and on this day there were no trains coming in or out of Scarborough at all. Coaches were taking passengers between Scarborough, York and Leeds.
The familiar figure, dressed in his trademark tracksuit and sporting all his jewelery approached the ticket window. He exchanged some words with the supervisor, who had met him before. Then he asked me how to get to 'String of Beads' which he quickly explained was some sort of peculiar of rhyming slang for 'Leeds'
I explained to him about the Rail Replacement Bus Service. This didn't faze him at all and I commented that he was taking it very well (I had already had several other customers that morning who were thoroughly PO'd about the whole affair). He replied that taking a coach was not really a problem. Things could be much worse, he opined. We could all be living in Kosovo (I guess that reference helps to tie down the period this all took place in, a little...), he said. And with that he went and boarded the coach.
It was a strange little encounter, but I've remembered it all this time.
The Twenty-First of November Two Thousand and Twelve. Wednesday.
I'm trying to think when the last time I wore an earring must have been. I think it was on one of the work's Christmas dos, but as to which one it was - how long ago it was - I can't say. I think I feel a bit too old and sensible to wear one now. Although Indiana Jones doesn't seem to think it's a problem
And yet, and yet...
It's nice to have the option. I've never been one for dressing up. I can see the appeal of cosplay, of fancy dress, indeed I admire people with the courage, craft and skill to role play in any way, whether it's a bit of fun at a party or a full-on convention appearance. But I've always had difficulties with clothing and fashion, even on a day-to-day basis. Nevertheless, as a teenager I went and had my ear pierced.
It's odd - there are lots of details I can't remember about that time but the chain of events that led to me having my ear pierced are still there. Maybe not the details. For example, I can't remember the reason we were all round at Karen Hurst's house. But I do remember talking to her dad. He had his ear pierced and for some reason it was seeing him that made me want to follow suit.
I remember the day I set off to get it done. My friend and neighbour, Nick, was outside just as I left the house. I told him where I was going and he didn't believe I was going to do it. In fact, so convinced was he he offered to pay half the price of it if I went ahead and did it. I was going to do it anyway, but to his credit he paid up when I returned with that first stud in my ear.
Nearly thirty years ago, dear me. I've had studs and sleepers, dangly ones and jewelled ones since then. I've never really fancied getting any other part of my anatomy pierced (although I do enjoy referring to the James Bond actor as Pierced Brosnan). Pretty much the only jewelery I've ever worn. Well, with one notable exception.
So, not being particularly fashion conscious I'm not sure why I started wearing an earring. Even more peculiarly, I'm not sure why I stopped. I don't think it's something I would like to do every day now. For some reason that seems like a different person. But it's just popped into my head as something I'd like to revisit at least for a little while.
I'll think I'll pop to the market and get a new sleeper tomorrow.
The Twentieth of November Two Thousand and Twelve. Tuesday.
Just a quick Telly Recommendation tonight, Ls and Gs. It was first brought to my attention when someone mentioned that there was this American comedy - the first series of which was shown on Viva over here, but that was as far as it went - that occasionally rolled out a spoof of Doctor Who.
All good fun, but what about the show itself?
Well, I splashed out for the DVD of the first series (season? series?) and I am four eps in and loving it. It's called Community and it is mos def my Nineteenth Telly Recommendation.
It's got Chevy Chase in it, but don't let that put you off. Honestly, google it, then buy it. It's v good.
Erm, that's it really. Just an advert for some cockamanie TV show. Boy, I need some sleep.
The Nineteenth of November Two Thousand and Twelve. Monday.
I don't write enough. Probably part of the reason for that is I don't read enough. And probably part of the reason for that is books are just too darn long.
Well, they're not really, are they? But for some reason, unless I am completely and utterly gripped by a book I seem to find it difficult to get to the end these days. I think it's yet more evidence of my dwindling powers of concentration as I approach my dotage (ah, there it is just across the square. I can see it now).
The more pragmatic among you may wish to point to the invention of something called the 'short story', but these have a troubling tendency to turn up in collections. I feel the same disappointment in having read four out of ten stories in a short story collection as I do in getting only barely halfway through a novel. Yes, those might be complete and self-contained tales, but like listening to half an album (remember those, o generation of downloaders?) it still feels like a job not completed.
(Actually, I don't know why I'm being all snotty to downloaders. The whole thrust of this blogdule (is that what individual blog entries are called? Is it? IS IT?) is about downloading stuff.)
So thank goodness something has come along that means you no longer have to read a whole book.
What am I talking about?
Kindle samples!
I don't have an actual Kindle - although if they actually sold the 8.9 inch screen Kindle Fire in this country (what is that all about? Why do they region lock US Kindles? Let's just assume here that DRM and region locking is a dumb idea and move on) I might consider getting one to read my comics on - but I do have the app on me iPhone. Even on that tiny screen, it's easy enough to read. And, as I have mentioned elsewhere, as space becomes a premium in my tiny non-dimensionally transcendental flat I am embracing the digit-all age with all digits (bit of a stretch that, but I couldn't resist). So I have downloaded the odd virtual novel or two but they do have the nasty habit of costing actual money.
Actually, in struggling to come up with a punny title for this blogdule (that doesn't really work, does it? And yet I can tell - even now - that I am going to continue to use it) it occurs to me that the idea of book burning does seem implicit in the name Kindle. Is that deliberate? It seems a fairly obvious connection. Interesting that there isn't a copy of Fahrenheit 451 in the Kindle store.
In an amazing piece of metatextuality here, the reason these sentences don't make sense is I am listening to an edition of Just a Minute from 28 May rather than concentrating on what I'm writing. They mentioned Tristram Shandy, which, after enjoying Michael Winterbottom's film A Cock and Bull Story, inspired me to immediately download a free Kindle edition of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a book famous for its constant digressions.
When the radio recording had finished, the recorder reverted to the last channel it was on. In this case ITV3, and Doc Martin featuring Caroline Catz was on. Now I'll admit to having a bit of a crush on the lovely Caroline so I had a quick look on Wikipedia to see what she's up to at the moment, whereupon I discovered she is married to Michael Higgs, who I had been watching as the dad on Wizards vs Aliens earlier. Why is it when I start writing this blog thing I can constantly get distracted by the fundamental interconnectedness of things?
Anyway, I invoke the works of Douglas Adams (on a bit of an Adams kick at the mo - finally bought the DVD of the TV Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, which, let's be honest, has got to be myEighteenth Telly Recommendation) because he is responsible for my latest addiction: Kindle samples.
Kindle samples are great. They're free and as they only make up the first few pages of a book you can polish them off in no time and not worry about how the rest of the book turns out. Where they are particularly effective is when they release a new edition of a book you already have but it features a brand new introduction. This is where Hitch Hiker comes into it, cos a few years back they brought out new editions of the books with intros by the likes of Russell T Davies and Neil Gaiman - yours for free. In fact, it's only just occurred to me that they've done the same with rereleases of a dozen of the Target Doctor Who novelisations, and I have just cracked on and downloaded the new intros to those while enjoying a slightly stale chocolate eclair.
Obviously, the idea is to entice you into buying the whole thing. And there are samples in my Kindle library that I might just do that with. But for now I am enjoying completing the incompletness of books by Tina Fey, Tim Key, Stewart Lee, Haruki Murakami, Caitlin Moran and Mark Kermode. Biographies and factual books are great because not knowing how the book ends doesn't really affect the bits you're reading. I'm getting very clued up on the early childhood of an awful lot of people.
