Retro Monday #3: A guest post on writing by my friend, Matt

Welcome to the third in my new Retro Mondays series. The third most popular post on my blog is not by me, but by a friend who is a writer! So journey back to the heady days of summer 2013 and enjoy his words. :)

Bob Dylan

I am pretty bewildered that people keep getting enraged about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Earlier I saw that the Grauniad was angry because Bob is a straight white male. It's difficult to cohere how I feel about such an accusation being levelled against a chap of Jewish ancestry, who changed his name to be accepted, and who later became an evangelical Christian.

However, I thrive on minutiae. So while the Guardian condemns for being insufficiently unusual, the Daily Telegraph scorns him for not being a dreadful writer. The prize should have gone to Philip Roth or Doris Lessing. Apparently. Because they are both so much better than Bob.

I remember Lessing being included in my GCSE English or perhaps A-level General Studies. She wrote something about pigeons. I bought a Roth book some years ago. He wrote masterfully; he described in detail a tedious situation. It was so dull, so lacking in interest, so bereft of any spark of value that I didn't even finish the first chapter. It's either sitting unread on my shelf or I gave it away. Sorry, recipient, I should have given you some Homer.

I am being unfair. The Telegraph actually says that "A culture that gives Bob Dylan a literature prize is a culture that nominates Donald Trump for president. It is a culture uninterested in qualifications and concerned only with satisfying raw emotional need."

The Daily Telegraph has said stupider things before. Anyone who read it back in 1997, and hasn't pretended to have forgotten, will remember their lie that all or most of the foxhounds in the UK would be slain when Tony Blair's piss-weak anti-hunting bill went through. That's a long time ago, though. Surely they have supported a cause recently which has blown up in their faces!

I write this from the United Kingdom, which was the fifth largest economy in the world before the recent Brexit vote. After the vote the UK became the sixth largest economy.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/13/a-world-that-gives-bob-dylan-a-nobel-prize-is-a-world-that-nomin/

Remembrance

This post should have gone up earlier today, but something seems to have gone awry.

I picked up the Great War boardgame the other week, and have just got the BEF ready in time for 11th November. The Germans are still being painted. A few pictures are below. If you look closely, you can see I have mislaid one of the members of the HMG teams. Not too bothered, as I plan to pick up some more of these chaps. Lovely to paint, these little fellows. Setting gaming aside, this is a day to remember the loss of those who died. Wilfred Owen reminds us of the tragedy that was that Great War.

Dulce et Decorum Est

By Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Will we know our next Shakespeare?

English is a funny old bird, and tricky to master. Shakespeare was a dab hand at it, and one way we know this is that he seemed to have a comprehensive knowledge of it. He didn't just type "dee-dum-dee-dum-dee-dum-dee-dum", but coined a large number of new words, which we employ to this day. There was no small number of authors in Bill's day, and since then the number has grown.

Writers are multitudinous today, and nobody employs neologisms like old Bill did. Nor does any writer expect their text to be scoured like Bill's. He is a figure very nearly of mythology. Tastes are broader. So will we know our next Bard? I know I won't.

Book Review - Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire: A Short Story Collection

Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire: A Short Story Collection

First, a disclaimer: several years ago I met the author on the alternate history website he mentions in some of his introductory pieces, and later in person. He's a nice chap.

The book comprises ten short stories, each around 20-40 pages in length. They cover a wide range of topics: alternative history (or alternate history), horror, science fiction and fantasy, often in combination. Two of the stories (Coil Gun and Picking up Plans in Palma) are set in an alternative world in which a racist Boer empire takes the place of our history's Soviet Union in opposition to the United States. They are quite different in tone, as one is adventure-filled and surprisingly romantic, with a clear villain, while in the other the prevailing feeling is that both sets of protagonists are real people faced with terrifying choices.

Lord Giovanni's Daughter is a rip-roaring yarn in the mould of Robert E. Howard's Conan adventures, featuring a barbarian hero who comically subverts expectation by planning to buy a library with the money he aims to get for rescuing the beautiful princess from the villainous snake-men. Two of the stories (Nicor and I am the Wendigo) deal with the two different perspectives of monsters feasting on men - the men it hunts in Nicor and the beast itself. The protagonist in Nicor has a disturbingly close-to-the-bone epiphany, which echoes in one's head as one finishes the latter story. I recommend reading the two in sequence to get the full force of it. Melon Heads takes urban legends and runs with the idea for a story that is truly disturbing on several levels, while making you wonder whether the humans are as bad as or worse than the monsters.

Illegal Alien and Westernmost Throne deal in different ways with protagonists in circumstances beyond their control, who are still trying to master their bleak situations. Both have to make hard choices to survive. Lord of the Dolorous Tower is a delightful story about two young adventurers exploring an ancient warlord's ruined tomb, and getting rather out of their depth. The Beast of the Bosporus is a fun and creepy homage to the Lovecraftian canon in an oft-ignored historical setting. There are some very telling depictions of human character in these tales, particularly in Coil Gun, but Matthew's main strength is in zippy, entertaining - and often rather alarming - tales. I heartily recommend this work. It's available here on Amazon, in both paperback and in electronic format for the Kindle.

Guest post: Things I’ve Learned about Writing Research by M. W. Quinn

Ahoy, folks. This is the second of two guest posts by my friend Matthew W. Quinn.

One of the most important aspects of writing is research. If an error throws the reader out of the story or provokes them to throw the book against the wall, you have failed.

For my unpublished (thus far) novel Battle for the Wastelands, its companion novella Son of Grendel, and the quarter-finished second novel Escape from the Wastelands, I had to do a lot of research on Civil War battles and weapons. Both Wikipedia and YouTube proved quite useful, as I could quickly find out about different guns, then go to YouTube to watch them being fired.

However, a hard science fiction project I’ve been working on will require even more. There are plenty of books about the Civil War that won’t be hard to find, but finding a book from the 1980s about the Strategic Defense Initiative and in particular a proposed nuke-pumped laser is harder. Furthermore, it’s set in a future space-based United States Navy, so there’s an extra layer of research that simply Must Get Done if I want to sell to military and former military people.

My most helpful resource has been the public library system. Although you can get a lot of superficial information from the Internet, books are what’ll help you go deep. When I lived on the South Side of Atlanta, the statewide PINES library system was extremely helpful in getting me the information I needed. When I moved to the North Side, the Atlanta-Fulton library system and the Cobb County library system became my new mainstay. Libraries often have books that bookstores don’t. One of my big research sources for Battle for the Wastelands was the series Daily Life In…, in particular the ones about Victorian England, the United States during the Civil War, and the 19^th Century American frontier. Those books were apparently fairly limited in terms of press run, since the Amazon price for each one is around $50. They’re especially valuable because although many history books cover big-picture items like wars and the reasons behind economic shake-ups, they won’t go into detail about how people lived, what they ate, etc.

Writing groups are another source. Different group members often know a lot about particular topics. For example, a member of one of my writing groups knows a lot about firearms. During a critique of Son of Grendel, he pointed out that I should depict insurgents firing modern assault rifles on full auto reloading, since this goes through bullets VERY fast. Although I’d depicted them having to fight the guns dragging upward, I’d forgotten about that even though it’s fairly common sense. Another group member is a retired Army sergeant who’s been quite helpful in areas of military protocol and tactics, including a scene in Son of Grendel where a colonel is directing soldiers during a firefight while on horseback — he might as well be wearing a sign that says “Kill Me” — and a scene in Battle for the Wastelands in which a sergeant oversees shooting drills.

Meanwhile, at least three members of my other writing group are retired military. One provided some good advice on portraying a military policewoman’s reaction to being hit on in a bar (probably not a good one), while another — a retired Navy submarine petty officer — provided a lot of material about Navy culture and protocol. He also informed me of the “one crew one screw” rule in which collective punishments are used to give all members of a unit incentive to keep troublemakers under control. I was sure to use this in Battle when a sergeant makes all members of a squad do “gaspers” (what I describe as “an unholy mix of squatting, push-ups, and jumping to their feet”) when three members get into an argument.

However, you’ve got to make sure you’re using quality material for your research. I remember (hopefully incorrectly) a history of Anglo-Saxon England I read in high school implied the Normans imposed the infamous “first night” on England after their conquest, but the historical evidence for this “right” even existing is rather spotty. If something seems weird, I would recommend looking for corroboration in other sources.

Matthew W. Quinn is a published writer of short stories and an aspiring novelist. Several independently-published short stories of his are available on Amazon. His blog is The World According To Quinn.

Guest Post: My Career as a Kindle Direct Author, Thus Far

Today's post is a guest post from an author and mate of mine, Matthew Quinn. He's a grand fella, and so without further ado, I turn you over to him!

Hey everybody. My name is Matthew W. Quinn. Pete graciously allowed me to make his blog a stop on my blog tour promoting my newest Kindle-published stories — the alternate history spy tale “Picking Up Plans In Palma” and the supervillain protagonist tales “Ubermensch” and “Needs Must.”

 I’ve been writing short fiction and trying to sell it to magazines since 2001. 2006, when I was a senior at the University of Georgia, brought my first sale — “I am the Wendigo,” sold to the now-defunct webzine Chimaera Serials. A few more sales followed— the college tales “Nicor” and “Lord Giovanni’s Daughter” to the print magazine Flashing Swords in 2008, my licensed BattleTech tale “Skirmish at the Vale’s Edge” to BattleCorps in 2009, “Coil Gun” to Digital Science Fiction in 2011, and most recently, “Nicor” to Heroic Fantasy Quarterly in 2012.

(Flashing Swords paid me for both stories but went on hiatus before they could be printed.)

However, I still had many I wasn’t able to sell. I used feedback from the markets that rejected them and commentary from online groups like Critters and my two real-life groups to improve each version of the story, but as the markets for short fiction declined, I soon ran out of acceptable places to submit.

So I decided to self-publish. The first was my horror tale “Melon Heads,” which I started writing in 2004 after coming across an urban legends website in college. “Wendigo” came next, a glorious resurrection requiring e-mailing an Internet forum someone posted the text on to get them to remove it. My last two were also college stories, the Ottoman-era Lovecraftian tale “The Beast of the Bosporus” and the science fiction “Illegal Alien.” I decided to self- publish three more after figuring I wasn’t likely to find a paying home for my supervillain stories (subject matter) and “Palma” (length).

Here are some lessons I’ve learned, some the hard way:

*Social media advertising for short stories is not worth it. Buying Facebook ads and paying to promote the posts announcing new publications may have gotten me a lot of Facebook followers and a few sales, but they were a net loss. And my attempt to use Google ads to promote “Melon Heads” failed miserably. I made no “Melon Heads” sales at all while the Google ad was active.

*Internet message-boards, though time-consuming, are a better option. I had a review for “Palma” from a fellow member of my alternate-history forum within a day, while a former member and I have swapped reviews for each other’s work. And I made a couple sales of “Palma” within days of posting a publication announcement on the forum. The message-board also got me in contact with Alex Claw, who has provided excellent covers for most of my stories, as well as loyal reviewers Sean C.W. Korsgaard and Matthew Stienberg.

*Twitter can be useful. Author Saladin Ahmed is a proponent of increasing diversity in speculative fiction and when I tweeted him the announcements for “Ubermensch” and “Needs Must”—stories whose protagonist is an irreligious half-Indian biomedical engineer—he re-tweeted it to his many thousands of followers. I don’t know how many sales resulted, but I’m fairly certain I acquired a few Twitter followers.

*Don’t expect rivers of cash from short fiction alone. I’ve made more money Kindle-publishing the first four stories than I would have made from non-paying or many token markets, but my Kindle revenues combined are less than the penny a word Flashing Swords paid me for “Nicor” or “Lord Giovanni’s Daughter” individually. I’m thinking the money will come long term, once I have published books drawing people to my Amazon author page. William Meikle has Kindle-published many short stories he’s sold to dead magazines and anthologies and considering how he has many novels in print, I imagine he’s doing well. Of course, that presupposes I’ll sell one or more novels and we all know about not counting chickens.

*Elaborate cover art doesn’t guarantee sales. “Illegal Alien” has a beautiful cover, but at this rate it will be years before it sells enough copies to pay for it. “Melon Heads” and “I am Wendigo” have simple covers I got for free and they’ve sold far better. If you’re going to invest in a fancy cover, do it for a book, not a short story.

Matthew W. Quinn is a freelance writer and editor from Marietta, GA. Those interested in finding out more about him can visit his blog, The World According To Quinn.

Read readily, rapaciously, ravenously.

I mentioned the other day that my friend Bruno Lombardi had written a book called Snake Oil, which is available online here from Amazon and here from Smashwords. Those of you who enjoyed it - or who are enjoying it - will be pleased to learn that Bruno has his own authorial page on Facebook. He is one hell of a guy, and I urge you all to go take a look at that page now. If you haven't bought the e-book, I urge you very strongly to do that, too. You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you were one of the first to read his splendid work!

Recommended Reading: Snake Oil by Bruno Lombardi

You should read this excellent book. Really, you should. Remember the film Independence Day. Giant, incredibly advanced alien ships have appeared above the major cities of Earth. They appeared swiftly. There was no warning. Nobody knows what to expect. The Earth is thrown into a state of alarm. From the heavens descends a single craft, landing on the White House lawn. Out steps the mysterious alien visitor, and demands the presence of the newly-elected American President. "Have I got a deal for you, Mr President!"

The aliens are selling advanced technology. But they are selling it, not giving it away. Why? For what price - now and later? To learn that you will need to read the very funny début novel of the awesome Bruno Lombardi, Snake Oil. It's available from Amazon here. it's available from Smashwords here.

He also has a short story out in this collection here: A Thursday Night at Doctor What’s Time and Relative Dimensional Space Bar and Grill.

If you like the short story, you will love the novel. Bruno is an excellent writer and observer of the human condition. Check them both out, folks, because I promise you that you will laugh your socks off!

The sick did what they could, and the living suffered what they must

Book II.
47. Of such a kind were the funerals conducted in the winter, the end of which closed the first year of the war. The subsequent summer beheld the Peloponnesians and their allies, Archidamus of Sparta as before leading two thirds of their soldiery, invade and ravage Attica. However, before many days had passed the plague began to appear among the people of Athens. It is recorded to have broken out elsewhere, in Lemnos, for one, but no disease ever recorded was so virulent and deadly to humankind as this plague. No doctors could treat the sickness. Indeed, their rate of mortality was all the higher for being exposed to the sufferers, who became gradually more violent, and in the end filled with blood-lust, mordantly attacking those who wished to help them. Appeals to the gods were of no avail, and in time these were abandoned, the erstwhile suppliants crushed by the gravity of their misfortune.

48. The disease is said to have originated beyond Egypt, in Ethiopia, and to have fallen upon Egypt and the rest of North Africa, and then the majority of the Persian Empire. It then fell with destructive swiftness on the Athenians, first polluting those who lived and worked in the Peiraeus. At first there was suspicion that the Spartans had polluted the waterways, but when it reached the city proper and the number of deaths grew, this notion was disproved. Now, anyone, doctor or no, may describe the origin and causes he suspects led to this disaster, so different from natural death. I myself will describe the symptoms, serving as a precautionary and salutary guide to those who are unfortunate witnesses to any future outbreak. For I myself very nearly was carried off by the disease, narrowly avoiding death at the hands of one of its sufferers, and I saw a great many of those who had to be slain to preserve Athens.

49. All agree that insofar as other sicknesses are concerned, the year was remarkably healthy; although anyone who was already sick, being hampered in flight, was necessarily captured by the new sufferers and added to the swelling number of the sick. In several cases, healthy men were first seized with a feeling of burning within their heads, and suffered inflammations around their eyes and within and around their mouths, their breath becoming a foul stench. These signs were followed by sneezing and a hoarseness of the voice, which descended to the chest, leading to fits of coughing. Thereafter it descended to the belly, generating vomiting of every sort of bile known to medicine, combined with great distress. When the sufferers had no more to vomit up, they would wretch emptily, convulsing violently. These convulsions would sometimes end swiftly and again would on occasion continue for a while.

The body itself was cool to the touch, and in colour pale, with the skin in some areas breaking down as though the sufferer was already dead. However, just as with a fever, the infected felt such a burning heat they could not bear to have even a light sheet cover them, and many threw themselves into the water tanks, and attempted to quench the burning with copious drafts of water. It was all the same whether they drank much or little.

They could not rest, nor could they sleep. The body was wasted by the disease to a degree, but the sufferers' strength did not leave them. By the sixth or seventh day, in almost every case, the disease took their reason, although some of them persisted as long as nine days before they were no longer men but animals. For the disease, having destroyed man's capacity to reason, and his ability to love, left untouched his cupidity and hunger, leaving him with an unthinking desire to fill his belly, even with the flesh of other men. He became insensible to many kinds of pain. For often could one observe a sufferer dragging himself toward one, having lost a leg, yet still intent on feeding his brutish appetites.

50. The nature of the disease was so unprecedented as to baffle description, and the violent change so introduced did break the spirits of many who were even unaffected. It was remarkable in one way, as whereas birds and animals would feed on dead bodies, in this instance they would avoid them, or if they did feed on them, themselves perished gradually in a similar fashion. This is demonstrated by the scarcity of the birds at that time, and in the case of dogs, this could be more closely observed as they dwell among men.

51. These were the general characteristics of the disease. I pass over many uncommon symptoms, as one man would suffer this and another man that oddity. During the reign of the sickness, there were no other ailments, or if there were, they would be ended by this disease. For once the disease was contracted, very few passed through the sickness and recovered. In many cases, when the sick began to attack their doctors and families and friends, they were restrained. But if this proved ineffectual, as it did in almost every case, the only remaining recourse was to kill the sufferer, who now had but the mind of a mad dog, before he slew those whom he once had loved. The most terrible spectacles to behold was when a woman or child suffered from this malady, as they too would leave behind their kindly and passive natures, becoming violent, and hurling themselves even onto outstretched spear-points in a mad attempt to bite and feed.

For when the disease had felled many hundreds of Athenians, it became necessary to arm the citizenry and to fight against the sick, as they would otherwise have imperilled every person in Athens. The police first attempted to employ their arrows against the sick, but it became apparent that the resistance of the infected to pain demanded harsher measures. For this reason every man took up weapons, while the elderly men and women and children locked themselves up in houses. The heavy infantry and skirmishers were much engaged in the bloody business of cutting down the sick. This was not just a horrible business to behold, but on account of the bestiality of the sick, wounds that were normally mortal very frequently did not slay them. The only certain measure was to crush the head or cut it from the torso. This was both sickening and also heavy work. If one of the sick got too close, and bit one of the soldiers, he then knew he would become sick. Many men who fought in the battle-line would grow sick, and some would suddenly turn against their fellows in battle, precipitating a general flight, leading to more men joining the ranks of the savage sick.

52. The troubles of the Athenians were greatly worsened as the city was crowded with refugees from the countryside, who has crowded into the city to escape the Peloponnesians. No houses having been available to house them, they had lived in ramshackle huts, which were indefensible when the sick fell upon them, tearing them to pieces. Many took refuge from the sickness in the temples, and the temples to Aesculapius were often filled with the sick, so when they fell to savagery, the suppliants were among the first to suffer as a result of their piety. The normal funerary customs could no longer be observed, so overwhelmed was the city by the disaster, and when slain, the sick were heaped up in piles, some being buried, and others burned. Lacking the material for their own pyres, some would steal wood from the piles of others, and others would throw corpses onto an already-burning heap of wood, and flee.

53. The plague was also instrumental in introducing much thievery and immorality into the city. Whereas men had heretofore been restrained by shame and custom from indulging their desires, the threat of imminent death stripped away their restraints, leaving a careless audacity. They beheld the sudden changes of fortune, both in the prosperous who fell sick, and in the poor who inherited the property of the dead. They therefore decided to steal every pleasure from life in the short span that might be left them, gratifying their lusts, condemning as worthless their bodies and wealth.

None concerned himself with matters of honour, everyone fearing he would lose his life before he could attain it, and so instant pleasure came to be seen as honourable and expedient. They beheld the demise of all, and felt that piety and impiety were alike ineffectual, while believing he would not live to be called to account in the law courts. Instead they believed that they had already been condemned to die, and so resolved to take pleasure in what life remained to them.

After this, there is a lacuna in the text, but we know from scholiasts and other historians, notably Plutarch and Xenophon, that the Peloponnesians retreated from the siege when they began to suffer the effects of the plague. The Athenians may have lost as much as one in three of their population, and Thucydides recounts that the city, which was to suffer two further recurrences of plague in the next several years, one of which carried off Pericles, did not recover until it mounted the Sicilian Expedition a decade and a half later. It is more reasonable to remark that with such a diminution of population at such an early stage of the war, that Athens never did truly recover from this disastrous plague. The disease has proved impossible to eradicate, and recurred many times in the ancient world, for instance in Rome in 293 BC and the Antonine Plague or Plague of Galen that lasted from 165-180 AD. As indicated by Jenner in his pioneering work of...

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Those of you wondering why I am ripping off Thucydides may be demanding an explanation. A friend of mine has suggested a little literary contest, which you can read more of here (please note that you have to be a member to access that part of the site). In short, to participate in this I have taken a historical event, the Plague of Athens, and very slightly altered Thucydides' words so that rather than fearing a disease, the Athenians are now having to slay zombies in order to survive. I dashed this off rather quickly, but I fancy it might be well-received for two reasons. First, it's getting some friendly comments on the two sites I have posted it on. Second, a lot of wargamers like fiddling about with zombies, and I have never heard of them being sent against hoplites before. I did read an amusing tale of zombies and Ancient Egyptians once, mind you. So there may be some scenario-fodder here for some of you. If you did enjoy the above, I really recommend to you the man whose work I am stealing. Thucydides is a wonderful read. If you thought it dreadful, all flaws are mine, and you should go read Thucydides!

The Dickin Medal

Ahoy, folks. A friend of mine has written a book about the Dickin Medal, and I am sure that some of you historically-minded people will be interested! Here's the write-up from Amazon.

"Sixty-three animals have won the Dickin Medal, the highest award for animal bravery. Their inspiring stories are told, for the first time in one book, The Animal Victoria Cross. Four types of animal have been honoured, dogs, horses, pigeons and one cat. Simon, the feline, is credited with saving an entire ship's crew. Canine breeds include Alsatians, Terriers, Collies and Spaniels. The majority of awards were related to war service and the conflicts include the Second World War, Korea, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. The Al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers as well as the Blitz saw great courage exhibited by animals such as Rip, the dog who saved many lives. In addition to British animals, there are American, Canadian, Australian and Egyptian winners of this unique award. This delightful book will be treasured by animal lovers everywhere. It is ideal to 'dip' into or read from cover to cover."

-- Peter Hawthorne is Head of History and Lecturer in Law at Stafford College. He lives near Telford, Shropshire.

English as she is spoke

English is a frightful language for me. It is my native tongue, but this does not mean that I know it as well as I like to think. For instance, no English teacher I had in my five years of secondary education gave me a comprehensive run-down of English tenses. Instead, I pieced together elements of Ancient Greek, Latin, French and German (and overheard once that Russian has a future pluperfect, which sounds delightfully over-the-top). None of those languages is English, and even the education I received in those languages failed to cover things properly. For instance, on learning Greek I was told that Greek's aorist tense was an element in had in common with English, as no other language could say "I did", instead requiring either the imperfect (I was doing, I began to do, I used to do) or the perfect (I have done). For years I believed this to be the case, and made quite a fool of myself when I ran into someone who knew better than I. If you want to read up on this sort of thing, it's one of those funny little areas where Wikipedia is quite reliable.

This is not simply a modern problem. It was my father who taught me Ancient Greek, and he was at school in the fifties and sixties. He clearly did not receive a comprehensive grounding in English grammar, either, and had to flesh out his understanding by way of other languages. I presume that there are tiny cliques of people at secretive schools who are inducted into the ways of English, perhaps abroad, and it is only through their efforts that English grammar can still be understood! Perhaps you think I am being unreasonable in being sorrowful that English teachers do not cover English in its entirety. After all, it has clearly not been demanded for decades.

I recall faintly what we did cover in secondary school. To quote Henry Reed, " Today we have naming of parts." We got out our little green English exercise books, and copied down definitions of what a verb was, a noun, a conjunction, an adjective, and all those other little ephemera. I remember too the catalogue of collective nouns: a murder of ravens, a pride of lions, a troop of monkeys. I really can only remember those three, as we never revisited collective nouns. We had spelling tests, which were usually so easy as to lull one into a false sense of security. These were based on whichever book we were reading at the time. In my first year, I had to read The Red Pony, which I found awfully depressing. There was no spark of hope anywhere in it, nor in my life at the time.* We also read Walkabout and Kpo the Leopard, neither of which made strong impressions on me at twelve, and which some of my contemporaries have wholly forgotten. I assume we did more things than this in the first year, but they have all rather slipped out of my mind, like the leaves of a badly bound book.

The remaining years are less fixed in my mind. We went to some plays (Macbeth, Death of A Salesman, Great Expectations) and read a variety of texts that often bored me rigid: Macbeth, Great Expectations, Julius Caesar, a selection of war poetry (Henry Reed above, for instance, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, &c), some Shakespearean sonnets, and a very disturbing book called The Collector, which I cannot recommend as reading material for teenagers of fourteen or fifteen. One of the less perverse things about that particular book was that it contained references to The Tempest, which our teacher had to painstakingly explain, as our Shakespeare play that year was Macbeth. Some elements of English were introduced to us: synecdoche, for instance. I usually found that I got a more comprehensive grounding in terminology from my Classics teachers. When it came to the metre of Shakespeare's plays, for instance, it was introduced as Iambic Pentameter, we were given a brief rundown on how it worked, and then we dashed off. I do not remember it coming up again. Introducing us to The Aeneid, our teacher took us through all the rules of hexameter, including all the oddities. When we studied Euripides' Medea, that teacher took us through the new meter found in the parts spoken by the characters.

I rather lost faith in English as a subject, and have yet to regain it. Maybe I am just being a naughty little naysayer, viewing the bad things and blindly ignoring that I did at least learn a few collective nouns, read a few good . . . no, I can't call any of those set texts good. Anyway, I did learn something about verse. It was not a complete waste of time. It is just a bit sad that I learned more about English from studying ancient languages, and even then I erred. Anyway, today is apparently Women's Day and Book Lover's Day, so I conclude by inviting you to go read a book that has women in it - which is fairly easy, I should think! I'm settling down to A Passage to India again.

* At the time I was being bullied, and my teacher (form teacher, English teacher and the man who chose the book) refused to help. It is hence that I can trace my earliest dislike of "classic literature". A depressing book, that is supposedly a classic, makes you want to kill yourself when you already want to kill yourself because you're being bullied.

You always become what you hate the most: Charles Dickens approaches with my doom in his hand

A quick recap of the situation to date. Our hero, that bloke wot writes this blog, had been turned off Literary Classics by the receipt and reading of some truly dull books at school in which nothing happened. These literary greats having compared terribly with Watership Down, The Prisoner of Zenda, Dracula, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and even the gentle Swallows and Amazons, our hero abandoned tedious literature in which nothing happened, his decision crowned by his first failure to finish a book: Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. Thus fortified in his beliefs, he set out into a world of sci-fi adventures, rabbiting rodents and Terry Pratchett. Now read on!

In the last couple of years I decided I would give "Classics of Literature" another blast. After all, I'm twice the age these days that I used to be, and many of my tastes and opinions have changed, so why not this one? When I was in hospital, about a year ago, Mum brought me The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney to read. I shan't lie. Some things do happen in it, and the characters also think. It is a melancholy work, I advise you, but I urge on you more strongly to read it. It contains incident and characters worthy of interest, which leads us back to my first paragraph and Great Expectations. Fans of Boz will doubtless have felt outrage at my characterisation of Great Expectations and similar as "tedious literature in which nothing happen[s]". Imagine you're a teenage boy and you have before you that work and, say, King Solomon's Mines.

The former has an escaped convict, a mad, love-ruined, broken-down old woman in a love-ruined, broken-down old house, a pretty girl who is insufferable, and a main character who does practically nothing. The latter book has an enthralling tale of lost treasure, a missing civilisation, great riches, peril as the heroes nearly die of thirst in a terrible desert, interesting (rather than boring) treachery, fights, guns - I'll stop now as my point is made. Great Expectations has thinky stuff and explains it slowly. Whereas an adventure story such as I mentioned actually captures one's interest and does not let it go. A reasonable (if not altogether fair) comparison might be between a romantic comedy film and something by Michael Bay, Lord of Explosions.

As one gets older, one does not necessarily lose one's taste for visceral things, although one's interpretation of them might be in a quite different light. When first I watched Predator, for instance, it was exciting and filled with incident. Nowadays, mind you, I enjoy remembering comic lines, amusing hyperbole, overblown acting and so on. I enjoy the same film for different reasons. I reread Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World last year, and it was as enjoyable as ever. Really, how can Dickens compare to dinosaurs in the mind of a teenage boy? Frankly, he can't compare to them these days in my mind. But I have to admit that he doesn't have to. Chocolate cake does not compare to curry. Even thinking of the two together makes one's brain lash out at the odd association.

I have lately been reading George Eliot's Middlemarch, in which, to be honest, nothing happens. There are no dinosaurs, lost tribes, spaceship battles, hideous or hilarious aliens, nor even so far (about six tenths of the way through) any great villains or heroes, harridans or heroines. It is a sedate and long-winded - if George Eliot can use fifty words when one would do, she will! - description of several love affairs and related circumstances in a small provincial English town around two hundred years ago. Despite the fact that "nothing happens", I am interested by the characters and their stories, and wondering what will happen next. There lies the title of this piece. Ever so slightly more happens in Great Expectations than happens in Middlemarch, so there's a pretty good chance, when I come to have another stab at the former in a few months' time, that I will enjoy it more than the latter. You see the terrible fate which approaches: I may be doomed to enjoy a book! Horribile dictu! Let us only hope that years of reading Clive Cussler have spared me the ability to enjoy a bit of that bearded Victorian!

On a related literary note, I have opened my eyes to the fact that I am none too bad at exposition - though reading Eliot has made me more verbose than even I usually am - and so have penned one short story and am considering another. The other will be suitable for mass consumption, so you may expect to see it here some time. Don't worry about length. I mean to make it just four paragraphs long. It will be an experiment to see how densely I can pack artifice into the available space. The short story will not be here. It deals with dark themes, and having written it last night, I found I couldn't sleep afterward. I don't intend to expose you, dear reader, to that sort of thing! Until next time: that's all, folks!

1, 2, 3, 4!

I read a report on the BBC website that left me aghast earlier. No, it wasn't the report in toto, as I rendered much of what was worrying about it irrelevant by mindful egocentricity. For instance, on reading this -

A YouGov poll for the charity suggests that while four out of five people would be embarrassed to confess to poor literacy skills, just over half would feel the same about admitting to poor maths skills.

- I was not unduly alarmed, as I don't rate my maths skills terribly highly. I have a friend who's a maths teacher at a secondary school, and another with a doctorate in the subject, so I have a Socratic consciousness of my inadequacies in the field. I'm not even up-to-date: I believe I remember finding out that Fermat's Last Theorem had been proved a year or two after the event. On the other hand, I'm quite happy with my literacy. I am prone to loquacity, as a glance at my over-long last blog entry shows, but I have a very reasonable vocabulary and can manage enough allusions to old books that I don't sound entirely dense. In fact, I was reading Middlemarch earlier - "Stop namedropping, Pete!" - hah! Nothing of the sort. I'm reading it because school put me off classics of literature, and something Dorothea says in Ch. XXI thus struck me personally. 'It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not to be able to see that it is fine - something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.' She is speaking of art rather than literature, but the parallel is exact.

So I know a few words and I have read a few books, but I found certain aspects of Maths GCSE ridiculously difficult. We had a piece of coursework for which we had to craft a formula to work out how many smaller triangles fitted inside a larger one. Three or four guys in the class worked it out, then everyone copied off them, as I remember. Tut-tut! Never my sort of thing, that. So I and one other guy in the class failed to find this impossible formula. I turned in two sides of head-scratching, baffled failure, and was pretty shocked when everyone else was turning in seventeen or eighteen sides of working of the proof. It makes an impression, that sort of affair!

Anyway, I never felt much kinship with figures. My brother has always been the more mathematically-minded one, taking more closely after Dad. He was in the first set for Maths at school, and so took his GCSE a year early, then did an AS-level. He may even have sat an A-level in the sixth form. I forget. Anyway, I'm the English one and he's the Maths one. So in my own family I have long been accustomed not to rate my mathematical abilities highly, and among my circle of friends I am a very long way from being the best! So I tend to be a bit amazed when something comes along like the test that accompanied that report. Here's the test.

TEST YOUR MATHS

The label instructs you to use 40mls of bleach in five litres of water. How much should you use in half a litre of water?
A) 2ml
B) 2.5ml
C) 4ml
D) 20ml
Were you right? Click below to find out.

Bear in mind that this is not some sort of test for primary school children. This is a test to see whether someone reading the BBC's website can do maths. It's by far the most shocking thing I have read recently. I simply cannot imagine how anyone could have such a poor understanding of maths that they could not answer that. OK, two exceptions: if the respondent were mentally handicapped or if the respondent were ignorant of metric measurements. Bear in mind that the UK half-heartedly switched over to the metric system some decades ago. Problematically, when I was at school neither system was taught in its entirety, so a lot of my knowledge is pieced together from some very strange sources.

I still cannot recall the area of a hectare, and so have to look it up. The approximation of a mile as 1.6 kilometres I owe to a Star Wars Technical Manual. That there are 1,760 yards in a mile I owe to looking it up in one of Dad's books when I was a teenager. That an inch is 25.4mm is fixed in my mind because I was trying to work out why an artillery piece was designated as 76.2mm. That 568ml is equal to a pint I know from seeing it on milk bottles. When it comes to weights, my understanding is that 454g is equal to a pound, but there I rather run out of steam. I know that gold has two fewer ounces  in its pounds than the regular pound, and I know that thanks to a Scooby Doo annual!

I can only hope that they do cover both systems properly these days, but this article suggests the system is far worse! How a system could be worse than a child having to learn rates of conversion from sci-fi and cartoons rather than getting taught them properly in school, I really don't know. But in a nation where the concept of dividing by ten is regarded as a test of mathematical fortitude, I can only weep for the future! Still, if mathematical knowledge is so very atrocious, I should perhaps put my apparent treasury of knowledge to use. I can recall SOHCAHTOA, πr²  and Pythagoras' Theorem. The last I even have occasion to use once in a while when knocking up a bit of scenery. Indeed, some years ago a group of friends and I were going to make a shed, and ran up some nifty calculations - only to be disappointed as pre-fabricated sheds cost less than the raw materials we wanted. Tsk! I even recall using it back when I used to 'game and one had to guess how far Basilisks could fire. We played some huge games back then, and the individual boards were 2' by 4', so it was a simple enough matter to translate that into inches, determine the difference on the x and y axes separating the gun and the target, then use Pythagoras' Theorem to drop a shell 5' 7" away and obliterate a Rhino or whatever! Amusing stuff, that! There you go, kids: a real world application of maths that you can't do any more, the rules having changed! :-D

Stolen away by the fairies

I haven't been doing a lot of modelling lately, because I have been diving headlong into reading. As I have remarked on many occasions, my secondary school did a bang-up job of putting me off "classics of literature", but even the sort of indoctrination schools can manage may be overcome! I'm currently engaged on The Three Musketeers, which I had for years believed I had read. School didn't manage to put me off "classics of literature" with swordfights and derring-do in, just ones where nothing much happens. I have been storming into the BBC's "100 books you must read so your educated friends don't think you're a weirdo" list. It might have a different name, and my mates all think I'm nuts anyway. Plenty of my friends refuse to accept that the film American Psycho was a dark comedy,* so I've lost before I've begun, really! Perhaps I read too much Juvenal as a teenager.

Anyway, while reading The Three Musketeers, I have also read The Remains of the Day, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, A Town Like Alice, and am currently a little way into Middlemarch.Slightly longer ago, I read Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, To Kill A Mockingbird and 1984, and on the more frivolous front that new Sherlock Holmes story, The House of Silk, and the utterly bonkers romp that is Decipher. It's been quite a good start to the year, reading-wise! Why all this reading, you may wonder? I don't know myself. I have always enjoyed reading, although it was generally restricted to sci-fi as a result of school. Anyway, I shan't bother to say much on them, as wiser heads than mine have uttered more valuable opinions. I felt Haddon's book didn't live up to the hype, but the other two were delightful. Middlemarch doesn't seem too frightening before, but Mum did worry me by saying she had never managed to drag herself through it, and that Eliot didn't even have Dickens' gift for humour to alleviate her work. A terrifying admonition, if you recall my dislike of Great Expectations!

Fear not, wargaming fans, for yesterday I found, by way of Col Shofer's blog, which collects all sorts of gaming and modelling blogs, an excellent work by an Antipodean wargamer, Terrain for Hippos. It's engaging, full of useful advice and quite inspirational. So I fancy I shall get out the old polystyrene and glue again shortly and stick myself to my bedroom carpet. I should really work elsewhere, but it's so convenient. I did have an unfortunate accident with some mud I was applying to tanks one day. A dark brown concoction of paints, water, sand, weathering powders and glue really does not come easily out of a pale grey carpet. I think I rearranged my furniture and put a bookshelf atop that mess once it was dry! I have newspapers down now, for what good they may do. Come to think of it, I know why I have been reading more. It's because I have very nearly run out of films to watch. Having run out of films, I have nothing to distract me as I sit at my desk, which is why I haven't been doing any painting. Mm, Sherlock Holmes would have worked that out a lot sooner. Right, farewell for now, and I'll try to get some scenery up soon!

* From Wikipedia's article on the film: "Though predominantly a psychological thriller, the film also blends elements of horror, satire, and black comedy."

The procrastinatory impulse

It's funny that I apparently consider time-wasting associated with an impulse. It would perhaps be more sensible to say that such dilatory behaviour is associated with a lack of drive. Nonetheless, it feels rather like that at the minute. I fancied I'd do some work on the trench about now, but I can't gee myself up to it. I could earlier have gone out and seen what Macclesfield's Games Workshop is like of a Thursday night. I have been meaning to go for some weeks now, but I keep putting it off - there's always a reason, and it's usually a poor one. The irony here is that I don't fancy working on the trench right now because I want to be out somewhere, seeing friends, having a chat with them. Had I gone out, I might have made friends. Having stayed in, I now wish I had gone! I can't go out now, mind, as nobody I know is likely to take kindly to me turning up just before midnight for a chin-wag.

Tomorrow I shall be out, just like last week, in Newcastle. That's the Stoke one, not the one anybody has heard of. Last week, when I was out on Saturday in Congleton, the two young ladies I spoke with were a bit nonplussed at my referring to my friends as hailing from Newcastle. My friends were wrapped up against the cold, so even the most amateur Sherlock my see a discrepancy! Anyway, last week I had a disastrous time out, as I related. Let us hope that tomorrow will be an improvement. If it ain't, I might be moved to bowdlerise my language. I fancy I shall have something to say, anyway, as last night (well, this morning, a glance at my computer's clock assures me) I finished Wuthering Heights and thought it exceptionally good. Technical skill was married to a very sophisticated handling of the reader's emotions, and the tale itself was very absorbing. It has gone a long way to destroying my former distaste for "classic literature". I am even minded to re-read Great Expectations . . . some day . . . but I have a good twenty classics to get through before that sinister tome looms portentously from my bedside table. Don't expect me to reconsider Dickens soon!

I am currently engaged on The Great Gatsby for the following reasons: it is on this list of classics, and it is ridiculously short. This tiny paperback before me reaches its demise at page 163, but the blessed thing doesn't even start till page 19. I do worry that this list I have resolved to read is ridiculously downbeat. There seem very few comedies on it. That seems also to be the same with a few lists of films I am poking at. Earlier tonight BBC2 showed an episode of the quiz show Pointless, in which one question "gave a hundred people a hundred seconds" to name as many of Mel Brooks' films as they could. Richard, the clever chap who sits at a desk with a computer, told us that one of these, The Producers, had received an Oscar (or somesuch) for the script. That reminded me that I hadn't really liked that film. It didn't amuse me nearly so much as Blazing Saddles or Spaceballs or Young Frankenstein. Maybe I am just a philistine, incapable of self-improvement - although having just read Wuthering Heights (which deals in part with illiteracy and the perception of illiterates by the literate),* and being engaged in watching classic films and reading classic literature, I doubt that.

I shall be awake a few hours yet, as my sleeping pattern has gone awry again. Do not fear that I shall waste that whole time, even though the trench will be untouched until tomorrow. It dwells in the attic above my parents' room, and my heavy tread on the Victorian floorboards is not conducive to Mum's rest. Dad wouldn't notice a thing, I fancy! I have some bits and pieces to distract me down here, and I might even get a good ol' wargaming (well, terrain which might possibly be used for 'gaming) post up tomorrow. Until then, fare thee well.

* My apologies for all that repetition. My vocabulary here is not up to what it was at the start of this blog! I shan't discuss the tale at this juncture because I have that thoroughly illogical feeling that possesses me on reading a book I have not read: that I should hem and haw around it, no matter that it be a few thousand years old (less than two centuries in this case, of course). I'll need a bit to get over it.

The Autodidact

Isn't that a great word? The very first time I heard that, God knows when, I thought it sounded imposing and impressive. It means someone who is self-taught, so it has connotations good and bad. Even before my (not-quite-) year-old new lease of life, I have always associated the good with it. I think of the girl who, immersed in a Francophone community, learns French, or the impoverished student who spends his every waking hour in the library, studying an original text. It is an inspirational word for me, and that is why I like it so much.

A year or few ago the BBC released a list of five score books, of which list they opined an average Briton would have read half a dozen. Some I knew to be good, others I knew were awful, a handful carried their reputations before them like standards - not always to their benefit. At school I was introduced to a series of dull books (or perhaps books I wasn't ready for), which quite put me of so-called "Classics of Literature". Luckily, this list contained a few books I had read, as well as some I had given up on, and some few books of foreign origin. The BBC decided not to have too many of these, lest they terrify Britons reading the list. We Angles can be trusted to distrust extraordinary writings as easily as we distrust the European Union. Happily, school had taught me to fear "Classics of English Literature", and so I dived into One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was superlative.

Having thus been exposed ever so slightly to the chance that "Classics of Literature" might perhaps be ok, and that "Classics of English Literature" could just possibly be readable, too, I embarked on a slippery slope. I tried Pride and Prejudice, but was too filled with pride to overcome my prejudice against the work. Or was I too weighed down with sensibilities to let my sense incline me to like Sense and Sensibility? Something Austen was my bugbear a year or two ago in Greece. I had always liked Orwell, as Animal Farm was one of the few tiny tomes that schooling did not ruin for me. So I recently trundled into 1984. It would be mad to say that it was a delight, but it was a great piece of work. To Kill A Mockingbird recently reared its head, and I partly enjoyed it, too, despite finding it horribly dated in parts. I suspect anything from that era, pertaining to race-relations and set in the Deep South would make most people gasp today.

Tonight I was filled with pleasure at having finished Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which was acclaimed a joy when I was still a child. So I decided to pluck out one book, and then another, and then a vast collection from the shelves of the house. I enlisted the rest of the family in locating what we have in the house, and my brother, who nobly volunteers at a local charity shop, also noted down several volumes which I might purchase thence. I have read sixty pages of the 333 pages of my mother's youthful copy of Wuthering Heights. I am not aghast at the turgid prose. I am not bored out of my wits at the senseless blather of the characters. I am honestly interested in how the story will progress. Of course, we all know the general scheme, but every Athenian knew the legend of Medea, and still they turned up at Euripides' tragedy. the telling is as vital as the tale.

I have about a dozen gaily-decorated convocations of paper to get through, and then another several from my brother's shop or that he has located about the house. After all of that I might push my way to having completed half of this BBC list of a hundred books. I shall never complete it all. It contains The Da Vinci Code, The Lord of the Rings, Great Expectations and a few other books I would rather flee at than read. But I shall do my best to raise the number as high as I can - without funding The Da Vinci Code. ;-)

Terrain: Rocks and ruins, watertower and wire

I pulled my finger out last night, thanks to the film Aliens. I find it a joy to work to. So I popped that on in the background and got down to work. I had knocked up some asteroids from polystyrene foam ages ago, and now I finally painted them (Figs.1&5). There are three basic shades: ruddy iron ore, grey rock and brownish dust. Then I set to work on a big ruin that I found in the attic the other day (figs.2&3). I put it up there ages ago, because I had no sand, and quite forgot all about it. I've dabbed it with side and roof hatches, and sprinkled some sand on there, but I need to get some decorations to PVA onto the sides. Just a matter of looking through boxes of bits, that!

Next I made flesh an idea I had while working on my WWI/40K barbed wire the other week. I shan't link to Wikipedia to back this up, because they're down for the day, protesting some tyrannical American legislation (Come back, Colonies, all is forgiven. ;-) ). Erm, seriously, though, as I understand it barbed wire turns up in the American West, used to fence in large areas cheaply. So I fancied I'd turn my hand to replicating that kind of barbed wire, rather than the defensive structures of WWI. I had a spare piece about, into which I had long ago secured wood and foam. So I got some of the plastic mesh, and wound it round the bits of dowel at two heights, and once on either side (Figs.4&6). Whether this is strictly historically accurate or no, it gives a reasonable impression of the sort of barbed wire I see hereabouts. Having done so, I found a water tower I had delayed work on for want of PVA glue. I quickly fashioned some iron bindings for the wooden sides out of thin plasticard, glued on some rivets, and then secured some tissue paper atop the whole with diluted PVA (Fig.6). One of these days I must get back to painting a few figures rather than constantly making terrain!

Still, it's important to do what one loves. Speaking of which, I haven't been getting quite so much done of late, because I have been remedying my empty boxes of books by ticking off literary classics. Amazingly, some of these are turning out to be rather good in defiance of all the times I was ordered at school to enjoy a dull book! Then again, a thirty-one year old ain't the same as a teenager, so maybe my younger self was right at the time. No, that's unfair. I've read To Kill A Mockingbird, in which one character, Jem, is described thus, ""no tutorial system ever devised could stop him from getting at books". So let it be with Caesar, er, Pete! Delusions of grandeur. I have also begun Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which is - again - a rather good read thus far (about a hundred pages in of a total of 434).

It is a shame how certain didactic methods wreck reading for people. I've mentioned Mum's travails in school with The Wind in the Willows: having been told they would be reading it, she went home and read it, only to discover that they would spend the next term in an agony of slowly going through it. I was chatting to the lady at the Job Centre on Monday about it, and she confided in me how school had put her off Shakespeare. Hah! So it isn't just me who wanted to bash that Bard, I thought. I am no Jem, and some authors I am intensely wary of: John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, Austen, the Brontes and the peerless Dan Brown.

Tolkien I am just about scared of by now. I have attempted to read the snore-fest that is Lord of the Rings about a dozen times now, the last time even soliciting a passage I was assured by a fan was intensely exciting (I think it was the escape from the Ring Wraiths at Weathertop and Frodo's instalment in that Elven City). I managed not to fall asleep, but I am now too frightened to reread The Hobbit (which I enjoyed as a little boy) lest it turns out that it is unreadably dull. I have fragmentary memories that it, too, contains Hobbits singing at least once a chapter. If ever I were to become a terrorist (rather unlikely, but bear with me), the Americans could quite easily torture me by giving me only that as a book. The films were good, though, albeit a bit long. Anyway, I have probably enraged half the readership now by attacking Tolkien's abilities and another quarter by saying how dreadful I find Shakespeare, so I shall quit while I'm behind, relying on the pics to restore my good favour in your hearts, gentle readers. Until next time!

Sherlock: gone for another aeon!

The only complaint I can fairly lay against the BBC's modernised adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories is the fact that each series is but three episodes long. Granted, they are nice and long, but one has just three weeks of enjoyment followed by an age of waiting! OK, in honesty, I wasn't too keen on the second episode of the first series, feeling the idea of Chinese gangsters was a bit passé. This series has been delightful. In the first episode we were treated to a nice in-joke. The episode names have been known for a long time (A Scandal in Belgravia, The Hounds of Baskerville and The Reichenbach Fall), all plays on the titles of the original stories. So in the opening scene of Scandal we had a series of short comic scenes in which other adulterated names came up. My favourites were The Speckled Blonde (originally Band) and The Geek (originally Greek) Interpreter. It reveals both a delight in the original and a desire to delight other fans.

Of course, the show is not for everyone. My mother does not want to see an updated Holmes, so hasn't watched them. I know another few folks who aren't keen on the alterations made to the original tales. I shall always have a love for the Granada series with the late Jeremy Brett in the lead role, but I have another friend who finds his fluctuating weight (a result of his illness) too great a detriment to the whole. Ironically, given that Holmes' schtick is his excellent observational abilities, I had never noticed this at all. Others swear by the Russian adaptations, which won the actor playing Holmes an honorary OBE. I would that my Russian consisted of more than a scant few words, because I have been unable to enjoy (some kindly fellow's Youtube upload of) their adaptation of The Speckled Band on account of the modern language used in the subtitles. "Yeah" just seems a bit odd to be coming from a period Watson.

I admit it might seem perverse for me to praise a modern adulteration one second, then backhand a faithful adaptation the next. Tomorrow, perhaps, I shall go to see the Downey film. I greatly enjoyed the first one. Lest purists be screaming, I offer this explanation: I went to see it knowing full well that it would not be Holmes. Explosions, nudity and leaping out of windows into the Thames? Hah! I expected Hollywood silliness, and I received it in abundance. I don't doubt there will be more in this sequel. To be fair, Law's Watson struck me as very faithful to the spirit of the original character: a bizarre occurrence in a film that played so amusingly fast and loose with even basic common sense!

I have, it will surprise many to learn, been hard at work on 'gaming things this week, although I have yet to provide photographic evidence of this! I can't quite explain why I haven't been posting loads this week. Perhaps, like Holmes, it is because I had a fit of activity, then fell off a bit this week. Anyway, tomorrow I shall get some pictures up and restore the balance of the universe. Another distraction this week has been books, I confess. I have begun to reread Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, a childhood favourite, toyed with having another crack at Caleb Carr's Angel of Darkness (it is a good work, but I became distracted when I was reading it, so I shall have to start again. Much the same fault befell Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Come to think of it, has she written anything since?), lunged into Stel Pavlou's Decipher (why won't my italics work?), which is a thoroughly ridiculous novel. If you imagine that funny film, The Core (now they work?), in which the Earth's core stops spinning, you will have some idea of the science in this book: the sun's a secret pulsar, for instance.

Lastly, I have begun To Kill A Mockingbird. I had found and snapped up a DVD going cheap the other day, as it is on a list of films to watch. I was then pleased to discover a copy of the book, which is on a list of books I have to read, hiding in a bedroom on a bookshelf. Cunning devils, books: you never know where they'll be! It provided a double reminder of something I have mentioned on this blog in the past: that school put me off "classics of literature" and I have only recently been giving them their fair turn at the wheel after years of Star Wars novels and Terry Pratchett. Don't take that as a dig at either of those. Anyway, it's very readable, and I have been thoroughly absorbed by the milieu. I did give Jane Austen a try the September before last, but she still does nothing for me. I could see where the jokes were in the first chapter or two, but they bounced off my thick heid.* Perhaps in another five years I'll have another go. Speaking of going, I shall be back tomorrow with some pictures of the week's physical work. Adieu!

* I don't know that switching to Scots to allow me to suggest head and hide in one word was a good idea, but I'm leaving it in.

The Basilisk Company Returns!

Yeesh, running out of paint, needing varnish, having to do ten vehicles: I have a lot of excuses for the tardy progress of this project, but it's back on schedule now. Today will be dedicated to the application of transfers to these lads, and then securing the same with varnish. Tomorrow I should get on to painting and weathering, some of 'em, anyway. We are talking ten vehicles here, after all! On a cheery note, I was doing some tidying and turned up that missing Arachnid jaw, so I've now got the full set of a score of the creepy-crawlies. Good news there!

Right, what else have I been up to? Well, I'm working on making some mint juleps. The name appealed to me. I have no other reason. I assure you, dear reader, I'm off to no derbies in the American South. Literature-wise, I have gone mad. I had already begun Life of Pi, and then I started The Name of the Rose and Starfleet: Year One, as well as advancing to the second volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall. It's not so much the Romans who are bound for a fall as the fool with so many books on the go! I managed to restrain myself from beginning Brighton Rock, though, so, erm, I'm not so foolish as I would be had I begun it. Hm. I'm also feeling a bit less histrionic than I was yesterday about postal services - more grouchy than screechy today! Anyway, I'm going to bury my nose in Umberto Eco again now. No, not like that. You have a filthy mind. Au revoir, mes amis!