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 Twentieth of February Two Thousand and Thirteen. Wednesday.
I can't remember when I first heard the voice. It sounded like Adele on a loop - you know, that enticing but slightly irritating pub singer enunciation - echoing inside my head. I was sure it was someone speaking or singing but any words were indistinct. At first I thought it was some sort of fluid in me eardrum deal. But there comes a moment when any person is confronted with the impossible that they have to put aside their protestations and just accept that something is real.
Yeah, try and explain that with your precious science, Professor Brian Cox.
It was then that I conducted a series of triangulation tests in order to determine the exact location of the voice's source. By standing with a bucket on my head in Heaton Park and on top of the Trafford Centre I was able to calculate from where these mysterious words were emanating.
Imagine my surprise to discover it was from an active volcano halfway between Manchester and Liverpool!
Mount St Helens, which last erupted in 1980, is situated just off the M62 (Junc. 7). Bizarrely, during that eruption an enormous statue of a head emerged from the Earth's crust. My in-depth research revealed that it was this mystery head that was responsible for the voices that were haunting me. So on Monday I went to visit it to see what it was on about.
I gingerly tip-toed my way through the ash and pumice and obsidian and whatever else it is that comes from volcanos (volcanoes? vol-canoes? What? Canoes?) And there I confronted this monstrous boat race and raised my fist, challenging it to speak again.
Only now it remained silent. "What would you have me do, o head?" I implored once more.
Again, silence.
I remained there for about another hour and a half (that's how long the podcast about narrow boats I was listening to lasted). And still, all I got was this:
Well, that was enough for me. I don't like being jerked around, even if it is by a giant head on top of a volcano. I poured the last of my luke warm tea out of my tartan thermos and set about heading home.
And that is when the monolith spoke. I don't know how many people heard its words - to me it seemed as if the sounds were still coming from inside my head. Maybe its message was for me and me alone. At any rate I feel a desperate need to share those words with you now.
As I stood there, teetering at the crater's edge, the head finally passed what it had been trying to say to me all this time:
"Near a tree, by a river, there's a hole in the ground where an old man of Aran goes around and around..."
The Ninth of December Two Thousand and Twelve. Sunday.
Has this ever happened to you?
I was in York today, looking in shops for stuff that I can give to people to appease the gods of Midwinter. Of course a side effect of that is that I see lots of nice things that I want for myself. The shops had almost shut before I remembered that one of the reasons I wanted to go all the way to York was to have a look at the Cath Kidston shop they have there. Yes, I know it might be considered a bit effeminate, but I'm all about the challenging of the gender stereotypes, me, as you know. It's just when I thought I'd enjoy a case for me iPhone -
I saw the price tag (£25!) and thought better of it. They are nice though, so if anybody does want to buy me one consider this an opportunity to do so.
It's nice to have a day out, isn't it? Yes, I was supposed to be shopping. But surely there was room for me to have a look at class A4 locomotive Dwight D Eisenhower while it was on holiday in England for a couple of years? (He (she?) lives at the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin, but is over here temporarily for next year's celebration of the 75th anniversary of Mallard's steam speed record. The six remaining A4s will be brought together).
Was a bit tricky to see him (her?) while he (are ships with male names still female too? Not sure of the convention here, although I know that naval vessels and locomotives don't bother with 'the' in front of names, i.e., it's just Flying Scotsman, not The Flying Scotsman, just as you don't say The Ark Royal, you only say Ark Royal) was at the back of the workshop but still a thrill to see this engine some fifty or so years after the last time it was in York.
I did a bit of exploring too. I've always wondered about the the streets that border the railway line from Scarborough on the approach into York station, especially as I could see they were named Scarborough Terrace and Filey Terrace so I had a bit of a mooch around there, finally discovering the whereabouts of York City FC's ground. All very good.
But it was at the end of the day that a dilemma of sorts unfolded. After making my relevant purchases (and yes, I did buy myself a comic or two) I pondered the possibility of going to the cinema to see Seven Psychopaths. I had greatly enjoyed writer-director Martin McDonagh's In Bruges (to the point of making it my Tenth Film Recommendation (slight warning, it's a bit gruesome, that link)) and so was looking forward to his next 'joint'. But it would mean getting back to Scarborough a bit later in the evening than I really wanted too, so I thought I'd check the review on the Mayo and Kermode Film Podcast thingy from Radio 5 Live. I stuck it on my headphones, but it was a fairly long programme so I had some lemon cheesecake to put me on before I went to the loo at the City Screen cinema fully intending to see the film as I had not heard anything contrariwise to that notion up until that point.
With only two minute to go until the advertised start time of the film, as I sat there on the throne in contemplation, Mark Kermode finally got round to giving a somewhat lukewarm review. And in that moment I decided I'd go home instead and watch it at some later time and spend my evening writing about it instead.
In fact I watched two episodes of The Killing III and had some Frosty French Fancies so it all worked out well in the end anyway.
The Second of December Two Thousand and Twelve. Monday.
What sort of title is that? Surely you mean 'Nowhere'?
Sometimes there are forces at work that are beyond our comprehension. Things that undeniably occur but can in no way be explained.
Until now...
Tell me this: if it costs £18.60 peak and £17.10 off-peak for a single ticket from Scarborough to York -
- then why does it only cost £15.80 for a Scarborough to Howden ticket that takes you through York?
I've wondered that meself. And when I looked into it more closely, I found there was a very simple explanation.
Howden is a hotbed of UFO activity!
These peculiar fare anomalies have existed ever since a jet was shot down by a UFO over Howden in 1997 (no, really. The Truth is Out There.) I knew there would be a rational explanation for it all.
And now there are various warehouses dotted about the country that contain remnants of crashed UFOs. Here is a picture of the almost mythical Area 17, sometimes known as Space Sector 17.
So is it any coincidence that the word 'Howden' is almost an anagram of the word 'Nowhere'?
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!'
