CHANGE IT HAS TO COME

An email from the "Powers That Be" at work recently announced that, after two years of less than robust service, our old personal teffalones were all going to be replaced with shiny new ones in the very near future, which prompted much chunnering from yours truly because, as you are no doubt fully aware, I'm really not good with change.

So, I fretted and I worried, because I can't remember all of the various passwords and addresses that I used two years ago to get the current one working, and I fretted some more and said strange things like "Can't they just leave us with these ones because I almost know how it works now...?" words not really designed to inspire confidence in my ability to seize the future and keep up with the white heat of new technology, I'll grant you.

But then I've always been rather perverse when it comes to blowing my old trumpet and will have a noisy meltdown whilst quietly and efficiently finding that I will get the thing to work fairly rapidly, despite a basic incompatibility between the two styles of devices meaning that the data transfer process is slightly more tricky than it might otherwise be.

Anyway, that's for the future.

In the meantime I had the rather strange and nostalgic experience of dragging my old data from within its circuits and, despite the fact that I seldom use it for that purpose, I found that my life over the last couple of years had been ever-so-slightly mapped out in a hundred or so photographs of things I'd largely forgotten because sometimes a "moment" will happen when you have no other camera equipment on you at the time and grabbing the phone to capture it is sometimes the only option.

So, amongst all of the strange pictures of knees and steering wheels which have been taken as I have pulled my phone from my pocket and hit the camera button whilst handing it to the Beloved when it's unexpectedly gone off in the car, or those pictures of elbows and knees when I think that it's switched off and accidentally catch that same button again, and all of the pictures of documents which I've had to photograph and then email to someone when the scanner has been playing up, there is a strangely eclectic mixture of moments from my life which had been stored upon it.

There are the "official" ones I take of our products as aids to the memory when we have to attend things like the annual trade show, and a picture of a rooftop taken when I was trying to work out how the camera function actually worked whilst I had an idle few moments to stand around and wait whilst we were at a Farmers' Market a couple of years ago, and odd little pictures which were obviously meant to inspire blog postings about thoughts which I then forgot about and never got back to.

There are, amongst others, also some strangely pointless pictures of tiles which I took because I was convinced I saw a face in one of them, a picture of the excitable (and usually quite friendly) dog that some former neighbours used to have which nipped at me one morning, demonstrations of lousy local parking, a vintage clothing fair I'd forgotten going to, several rainbows and clouds, the aftermath of the robbery at the office, and the reference picture I took of the replacement computers which then also got stolen a year later.

There are also images from an opening night at Manchester Museum (including that unexpected sight of the demolition of the BBC building on Oxford Road), various pictures taken in the hospital last year, some IKEA wardrobes which we wanted to remember the look of when we got home, several pictures of snow, Darth Vader with a banana, an apple, some things in shops which I needed to remember later, and, perhaps most poignant of all, a blurry picture of my late mother sitting in her chair in her flat.

Quite a bizarre selection of images, I think you'll agree, and all of which brought back a memory the instant I saw it which is, of course, almost incontrovertible evidence that life is indeed what happens when you're busy making other plans...

WHO'S HAPPY...?

Here are just a few of the things which made me feel happier than I normally am for a few moments this week during those "Doctor Who" 50th anniversary celebrations...

That "CAPALDI!!!" moment...

The... MIGHTY... TOM!!!...

"The Five(ish) Doctors" - almost certainly destined to become
a cult classic...
(track it down if you can, it's well worth it)

Coming soon...

This turned out to be someone's "unofficial" vision
of the future, but...
What the hell, it looks damned classy...

STUFF I GOT

You could argue - quite rightly - that far, far too many of my recent posts could be clustered under the sub-genre of "stuff I've bought" and, in these cash-strapped times, blathering on about forking out cash I don't have spare for stuff I don't really need is tantamount to rubbing the nose of the entire world in it.

Sadly, of course, this is what I do... It's what my life has been reduced to...

So I apologise profusely for going on about things in a "Ooh! Look what I bought!" kind of a way, because it's tactless in the extreme and really doesn't do anything to further the life experience of any of us, no matter how much any of us going out on a little shopping spree might allegedly (if you believe all those economists and, to be frank, why would anyone do that?) boost the economy and apparently potentially lift up the lifestyles of every single one of us...

No, don't thank me yet.

Perhaps I ought to give some thought to the topic of "Retail Therapy" especially as it tends to be one of those things which a lot of people do, perhaps at a time when they can least afford to do so, and Chrimbletide is that time of the year when there's the most pressure to splurge, even when the splurger hasn't got anything to splurge with, and justify it to themselves with a pragmatic and weary "Well, it is Christmas..."

But even when it isn't, during that increasingly tiny "non-festive" window each year, the desire to make yourself feel "better" by buying yourself a little something, before feeling much worse because you couldn't really afford to buy yourself a little something, is one of the constant pressures of living in a consumerist and capitalism-led economy because the adverts are constantly persuading us that our lives are not quite perfect and would be better if only we had this, that, or the other, of the many available pointless nick-nacks in them.

Interestingly, it's often the people who've got the most stuff and are the envy of all their circle of acquaintances who turn out to be the most miserable, but I digress because it's always easier to be miserable with a few quid in the bank than when you haven't got a pot to piss in.

And yet that strange notion that buying ourselves more stuff will make us happy is one which persists and even pops up daily on various websites with the simple message "Get yourself a little something" with that strange, unsaid subtext of "...because you're worth it..."

Why shouldn't we try and buy ourselves a few precious moments of artificial happiness....? If it's the stuff we have which defines us and makes us happy, why the hell not...? After all, it's not as if it's going to turn out to be so much worthless junk that we're leaving behind ourselves after we've gone is it...?

"You can say one thing about Auntie... She had good taste in mobile phones..." [Sighs] "Just chuck it in the bin bag with all the other junk...!"

Meanwhile, another of those ghastly "non-words" (alongside the brainlessness of a moronic "here-today, gone tomorrow" pop word like "selfie") which has apparently finally sneaked its way into the O.E.D. is "showrooming" which is the process by which we go out, look at the stuff on sale in a High Street store, find out whether we like it, and then go away and buy it cheaper online.

Because that kind of thing really helps the economy when all of those local shops go out of business, doesn't it...?

You can understand why it happens though.

Only an idiot forks out all of the extra money that they can ill-afford, just to make a point of principle, and why should you spend the that extra fiver that you haven't got simply to help them out. It's easy enough to have principles when it comes down to what other people are spending their money on, but when it comes to our own, well... That's another matter entirely.

I could, of course, tell you an outright lie now and claim that all of those posts about my shopping were all leading up to something like this posting, as if I had some kind of a long-term master plan to discuss basic economics with you, but, sadly, that's not the case. I'm just a sad, gullible wretch who's trying to make some sort of sense of his own compulsions and obsessive behaviour when it comes to the pointless acquisition of stuff.

That said, the great and the good who lurk inside the Temples dedicated to Mammon such as John Lewis don't seem to have any issues with paying far over the odds for something just because they can, whilst the rest of us try to decide whether to fork out the extra for  a better class of  sausage, because, when you look around yourself in an outlet like that, you very quickly realise that it is still the wealthiest who are running the place and ensuring that they can keep that wealth at the expense of the rest of us.

After all, if you're just going to assume that anyone who claims any kind of benefit at all is the lowest common denominator and must, by assumption, be trying to cheat the rest of us, before going out and paying out enough money for that one extra ham that you didn't really need (but you want to have in "just in case") to feed another family for a week, it seems less that charitable to then refer to them as parasites over your next over-priced Latte in the coffee shop afterwards.

Such people will quibble about an over-payment of about a fiver that made someone able to eat for a couple more days and then go out and blow hundreds of pounds on the makings of a Christmas Dinner that the bloody Ritz Hotel might have considered far too lavish for its customers, and try to salve their consciences by putting an extra quid in the Sally Army collection box as if somehow that will put the entire world to rights.

'Tis the season, my friends... 'Tis the season...

EXECUTOR FAILURE

It's very, very early on a cold November morning and once again I have woken up and found myself wondering whether it's actually possible to be a failure as an Executor...

After all, it's now over six weeks since mum slipped away into that long, dark night after which we spent the subsequent days in a kind of a daze running around registering this and telephoning that and having various meetings explaining - or not - how things were likely to proceed.

Certain pieces of paperwork have - with a lot of assistance from people far less intimidated by such things than I am - been filled in and sent, and returned with yet more forms, of which none can be sent back because I don't have the "official" recognition that is required due to, I'm beginning to think, a lack of foresight on someone's part which might, eventually, turn out to be me.

You see, the Executor of my Mum's Estate was supposed to be my long-deceased Dad and, in the event of his predeceasing her, then that duty fell to the family solicitor. During our initial meeting with him, he told us that, because it would simplify matters, he would transfer that duty upon myself and ever since then we've been waiting to hear about whether that's actually happening, is about to happen, or won't be allowed to happen.

In the meantime, because of all the telephone calls we made, letters are starting to appear making demands of the Executors which, because I am not actually the proverbial "it" in that game of tag yet, I have to ignore in the expectation of a shit-storm of final demands and bailiffs demanding recompense no doubt with interest.

Because, in the understanding that in a relatively short period of time I would be, we've told them all that I am the Executor, and whilst that will no doubt turn out to be true eventually, for the moment it's not quite as accurate a description as we expected it to be.

I find myself wondering whether, in genuine good faith, we've gone about things in a decidedly wrong manner, but then there doesn't appear to be anyone who's prepared to tell me precisely what the right way ought to have been, and my various emails to the solicitors don't ever seem to get replies which either means that things are progressing as they ought to be, or they've somehow gone astray again and the whole situation remains in a kind of limbo with both sides wondering what the hell is going on.

And all the time that old phrase "Ignorance of the Law is no defence" and all those disclaimers about making false declarations which plaster those many wodges of paperwork swim across the back of my mind like so many accusations and I wonder whether I'm going to end up bankrupting myself or the Estate by simply continuing on like this, and it is, quite frankly, still scaring me rigid.

And that kind of fear, of course, like being a rabbit caught in the headlamps, can make me even less capable of dealing with it all...

In the meantime, I find myself wondering what I should be doing because there's no real guidebook for situations like this when they drop unexpectedly into your life, and I don't like owing people money, and some of those letters come across as quite intimidating, and time ticks slowly by, and the weeks and months start to pass, and it's not really all that easy to make the necessary telephone calls in an office environment and, in the end, I simply do not know what I should be doing...

If anything…

((By lunchtime that same day, of course, the emails had been replied to and the appointments made and the entire process was back on track, but that doesn't detract from that overnight anxiety and, of course, means that the "fun" is only just beginning…))

BAD DAY

On Friday night, I was, quite simply not having a good evening.

The spirits fell, the mood crashed and I found myself feeling simply bereft for quite while, sleepwalking around the house and finding it very hard to engage with anything very much, show any interest in anything, or convince myself that anything I have ever achieved in my life had any merit or worth.

Everything, basically, just felt utterly and totally pointless, and I was beginning to think that absolutely anything I had ever tried to do ever had any actual value at all.

The timing was lousy.

After all, it's not just about my writing, but this mood crash coincided with the day's announcement of the Bruntwood prize winners amongst whose number I was never going to feature, and, in the spirit of the times, we finally got around to watching the "National Theatre 50" programme which we'd recorded at the start of the month and two-and-a-half hours of watching actors actually looking as if they were acting (it's not their fault - dashing on and doing a "bit" can't really help with getting to the reality of the moment) whilst performing some of the very best writing ever written for the stage is never going to help me to feel any better about my own humble and pathetic efforts.

In the midst of all this, I was suddenly reminded of having my mum missing from my life.

And I felt just so very, very tired...

I can't... I can't... I just can't...

It's the kind of fatigue which feels not dissimilar to screaming depression followed by a total inability to function and that sense that you can't even be bothered to walk around because it takes far too much effort, which happens alongside everything else which also feels like far too much effort. Enthusiasm feels miles away, and beyond a mountain range which looks far too difficult to attempt to traverse.

So you simply decide not to bother.

What happened last month has, perhaps not surprisingly, made me think about my own life a lot, especially as I'm still rapidly skydiving towards fifty...

By this point in my life I feel that I ought to have added up to so much more, to be something that I've never managed to become, but so many opportunities have slipped away and I've got to a point where I'm no longer sure where the me in all of this is any more...

I do sometimes think that those long, wasted years of the decade of the 1990s did more damage than I realised.

So what are the solutions?

I wonder sometimes whether I ought to rejoin the theatre group which I once used to involve myself in the peripheries of...? After all, I had some little purpose for a time when I was there, but then, like most things I've ever involved myself with, it also conspired to annoy me so regularly that it still might not be a good idea. I suspect that I'd only be rejoining at all because I couldn't think of any better options, but then I've seldom been the sort of person who wants to join things, no matter how many Book Groups or Creative Writing Groups I feel that I might have missed out on over the years.

The fear of not being good enough is almost as crippling as the mind-shattering shyness has been.

I know that there are so many lapsed friendships to be worked on even though I also know that I've let things slide for far too long, although I need to accept that it wasn't all one-sided, because their priorities changed too...

Perhaps I'm just not very good at this living mularkey...?

Of course, I know that all of this recent excitement over the recent telly and shopping stuff which I've been blathering about in my recent posts is just a classic substitution for whatever the void I perceive as being in my life is... If you want to believe in that sort of homespun simplistic self-analytical psychology anyway.

And yet...

You see...

There's a thing about not wanting to anticipate stuff too much in case it turns out to be absolutely awful... and despite the fact that I can be trying my very best to remain non-committal and as pragmatic as possible about whatever the something of the moment happens to be, at the same time I so-o-o-o much don't want to actively dislike the thing which leads to an almost bipolar need to protect myself from disappointment.

I'm in a delicate place emotionally.

I'm really not very good at the moment at dealing with disappointments...

Or even potential disappointments...

And that's symptomatic of my relationship with the wider world.

Better to hide under a rock and not engage rather than finding out how disappointing the world, the people in it, and your own self can actually be.

After all, if the world was all that bothered by my continuing absence, surely it would have come looking for me by now, wouldn't it...?

Thought not.

HOLMES UPDATE

I was explaining recently about the difficulties that I was likely to have completing my Audiobook collection of Sherlock Holmes stories (as read by Sir Derek Jacobi), given that the company producing the range which I had found that I particularly liked had "gone under" in that unfortunate way that businesses have of doing so nowadays.

I had, of course, only discovered them far later than the rest of the world seemed to have and had been "treating" myself to one a month for about three months when the hammer fell and it became apparent that I would have to gorge upon them in order to acquire the remaining ones which I might have wanted.

Well, despite my fears, my Audio CD collection has already become far more complete than I really deserved, having clicked on a few orders that very day and then been left wondering whether they would actually be able to be fulfilled.

"A Study in Scarlet" arrived first, having been despatched within the day, and despite it being one of those tales about which I wasn't quite as fussed about hearing. It was almost as if they had mountains of them in the warehouse, but, given that my other orders remained steadfastly at the status of "Not Yet Dispatched" I began to suspect that the rest would remain in that perilous state for a while until I received the inevitable "We are sorry but we are unable to fulfil your order" email...

Still, I would inevitably check my outstanding orders regularly, clinging on to the sliver of hope that Amazon (the UK version) might just be in close enough contact with Amazon (the US version) to get some supplies from them shipped over to complete any orders that they had. Actually, realising that they even had that connection saved me from hours of internet drudgery and despair, at least for the time being.

In the meantime, I took a punt on ordering a copy of the "Casebook" from a Marketplace seller who described the copy that they had as being "new" but with a ripped cover, and that was swiftly sent to me, with the "ripped cover" turning out to be little more than a tear in the shrink-wrap wrapping which I would be throwing away anyway.

Of course, on one level I had already decided that I wasn't completely bothered if I actually acquired the supposedly rather lacklustre "Casebook" anyway, but I was happy that it actually showed up.

Meanwhile, the "Not Yet Dispatched" status of "The Sign of Four" mysteriously changed to "Preparing For Dispatch" and I did a little mental jig when later on that day it changed again to "Dispatching Now" and, to my eternal surprise, "The Valley of Fear" went through much the same transformation a couple of days later and both are now "In Transit" although, given the strange tale of how I had to order the "Adventures" twice back in September because they were "unable to deliver it" (???), I'm not counting either of those chickens yet.

Sadly, the "Return" remains, as it has for over a week now, at the status of "Not Yet Dispatched" which is, of course, fairly typical, as it was the one which I was most keen to listen to, given that Mr Sherlock Holmes had just plummeted to his apparent doom whilst grappling to the death with the fiendish Professor James Moriarty.

I know, of course, that I could just read the books myself but, given the current circumstances, that really just is not the same thing at all.

Which brings us to the knotty problem of "His Last Bow", a collection which seems to always be rather over-priced for the eight stories which it contains, and yet which includes "The Bruce-Partington Plans" and, given that the rest of my plans work out for the best, the gap will stick out like a missing tooth when all of the rest sit upon my groaning shelves.

I've not yet ordered a copy, having already decided that the later "lesser" works from the canon enclosed within both "His Last Bow" and the "Casebook" were not quite as "essential" as all of the others, but then, you see, I did get hold of the "Casebook" despite myself.

Decisions, decisions...

What would Holmes do...?

Well, of course, I am in the unique position of knowing precisely what this particular Holmes is likely to do, but I am trying my best to learn that I don't actually have to be a completist...

Or do I...?

Well, of course, you know that I do. That gap-toothed smile on the shelf was always going to be more than I could bear, but I will justify my final purchase on the grounds that Sir Derek could have just read out Sir Arthur's old shopping lists and make them sound entertaining and exciting, even if most of those "adventures" seem to take place mostly from an armchair situated next to a blazing log fire.

Actually, that sounds like a perfectly acceptable way of going about things to me...

Still, in the grand tradition of the Victorian adventure story, we'll end upon a note of purest false jeopardy. After all, there are still no guarantees that the necessary volumes to fill those gaps will actually ever turn up, are there...?

Which does of course mean that the useful expression "And with one bound, Holmes was free..." may yet not prove appropriate...

THE DAY OF THE DOCTOR

You know, I really, really didn't want to go to a cinema to see the Doctor Who fiftieth anniversary special. For me, watching the telly is an intimate experience best enjoyed with your nearest and dearest, whom you can ask to "shush!" without risking the glaring stares of the kind of complete strangers who can attend these things with a sense of entitlement that they can leave their mobile phones on, rustle their popcorn, indulge their little "darlings" and generally prattle on when I'm trying to actually listen and watch…

Maybe that's unusual.

Maybe it means that I'm not a "proper" fan…

I do have the Target books, the videos, the DVDs, more than twenty sad old scrapbooks of cuttings compiled during the seventies and eighties, a thirty six year membership of the Appreciation Society, and a stack of editions of Celestial Toyroom dating back almost as far as that with which I could dispute the assertion, of course, but because I'm not prepared to wrap myself in a stupidly long scarf and be seen in the company of other similarly-minded non-individuals, if that makes me not be a "proper" fan, then so be it.

After all… I can't be, can I?

Especially as I don't appear to have a book out at the moment...

Perversely, you see, there is a snag. As the programme itself has become something more akin to a "Global Phenomenon", I've actually found that I like it less. Oh, I'll still sit myself down and watch it, of course, but somehow all of the prattle and excitement of all of the people in the cyberverse makes me feel less like it's my thing and just makes me feel like I've transformed into one of the herd, instead of having a private, unique joy which nobody else really understands.

This is why, I think, that, whilst I am prepared to prattle on about it endlessly in these pages, I'm less inclined to involve myself in any form of discussion about it, especially amongst the insane, the grate, and the not-so-good of the interweb, and those who'll most probably move on just as soon as the series' "trendiness" begins to fade.

William Hartnell's Doctor could take the plot of an entire 25-minute episode to just get himself out of a room, whereas these modern Doctors just wave a magic wand and are out in a couple of seconds, but somehow I still find the former far more fascinating to watch over and over again, and indeed have done so many times in the past.

This is why, I think, that, to be honest, I'd been far more looking forward to the nostalgia-fest written by Mark Gatiss, "An Adventure in Space and Time" than this particular programme anyway. I generally tend to prefer my drama more cerebral than to be full of all of that running, jumping and shouting, which is, incidentally, why I adore the six-hour version of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" even though it takes almost three times longer than the already languid film version to tell exactly the same story.

Anyway, we had our own little "Day of the Doctor" at home, listening to Graham Norton broadcasting live from the "Celebration" at ExCel, watching the very first story, "An Unearthly Child" in its entirety, and watching the last episode from the latest series, "The Name of the Doctor" and the Mini-episode "The Night of the Doctor" before settling down for what some were still insisting upon calling "Event TV", otherwise known as "The Day of the Doctor..."

So…

What did I think of last night's extravaganza, seeing as I saw it for free on a normal sized television screen in glorious 2-D with the phone unplugged and little in the way of potential distractions…?

Well...

It was alright I suppose... ;-)

Aw...

C'mon...

CAPALDI!!!

THE MIGHTY TOM!!!

What wasn't there for me to like...?

:-)

THOSE 12 RT COVERS IN FULL

A cynical marketing ploy it may very well be, but for the week of the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary, that venerable old organ of programme listings publications, the Radio Times, printed twelve distinct and separate covers to "celebrate" the TV show in question on the presumption that sad little completists like myself would dash out and buy all twelve so that we could leave them rotting in boxes in our attics and basements until they become "worth something" even though, given that the RT remains Britain's biggest-selling weekly magazine, there are likely to be one or two about to keep the value low.

Or maybe they'll be gathering them up to sell to gullible foreign fans whose access to such merely national treasures is more limited than our own, and seeing them as a bit of an investment opportunity.

But I kid you not. A quick glance on eBay shows that a recent edition bearing a "Poirot" cover is for sale for thirty quid a mere two weeks after it came out, although just because it's on sale at that price doesn't mean that anyone will actually pay it.

That said, the editions from the 1960s, those old black and white "newsprint" editions featuring Daleks or William Hartnell or Patrick Troughton can actually fetch hundreds of pounds, so who knows what this week's bunch will go for if you've got another fifty years or so to wait...

That's the thing about collectors of ephemera, though. They know full well that most ordinary sane readers chuck the thing into the recycling at the end of the relevant week, and the "rarity" value immediately increases accordingly. Tales of people coming home from school and finding that there mum had thrown out all of their old "Eagle" comics find grown(ish) men weeping in corners, whilst the reality of the situation is that copies of editions lying in those stacks of old "Empire" magazines which still take up far, far too much space in our tiny little house, are still selling for £0.00 each (with no bidders) and are effectively worthless, as the Beloved keeps reminding me...

Ah but, you see...

A couple of months after my mum moved out of her house and into the flat which she spent the last decade of her life living in, I went to a Film Fair and noticed a stall completely full of old Radio Times editions selling at around six quid a copy and seethed quietly at the realisation that I'd just thrown several years worth into big bags and taken them to the tip as I'd been clearing my "old rubbish" out of mum's garage.

Mind you, whether I could have been bothered trying to actually find a buyer for them is a completely different thing and is, presumably, what marks out the person who seizes an opportunity from the rest of us. The truth is that I probably wouldn't have done anything about it even if I'd known about it, because it would have seemed like far, far too much trouble and, of course, the pragmatist has to understand that there's no point in fretting about something that you've already let go.

Meanwhile, and before you ask, no.

I did not go out and buy myself all twelve of these... Although I may have got myself more than one before I recognised that that was indeed the way madness lies.

Other past "Radio Times" covers can currently be seen at:
http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2013-11-18/partners-in-time-50-years-of-doctor-who-radio-times-covers
and all artwork is of course (c) covered by their copyright - although I'll be claiming that they're in the public domain if anyone asks...

DW50

Happy Birthday, Doctor... and many more of them.

AN ADVENTURE IN SPACE AND TIME

I imagine that most of the country were tuned in to "I'm a Non-Entity" (or whatever it is called) at nine o'clock last Thursday evening, and if they were, well, (at least as far as this admittedly old fannish obsessive was concerned) they missed a bit of a dramatic treat by not switching over to BBC2.

I would be the first to admit that a telly drama that was about telly (and creaky old S-F telly at that), wouldn't necessarily be everyone's cup of tea (I've had enough years of my own little enjoyments playing second fiddle to the more mainstream and popular Goliaths to know that), but this drama, "An Adventure in Space and Time" with a script by Mark Gatiss which appears to have been written as a "love letter" to the origins of a long-running drama that he (and a few others) grew up to absolutely adore, was, quite simply, a far more perfect gift to the fans of "Doctor Who" that we could really have hoped for amongst the blitzkrieg of other celebratory programmes which are being broadcast around the time of this 50th anniversary.

The 3-D episode of the series proper, scheduled for the actual Saturday of the anniversary itself, might be the more "high profile" of the programmes available, but all of that shouting and exposition and running about is going to have to go a very long way to outdo the charm and emotion on display in this dramatic insight into the slightly tragic later life of the original (you might say), a certain character actor by the name of Mr William Hartnell as portrayed by the sublime Mr David Bradley.

Given that Mr Hartnell's career had not turned out quite as he had hoped, "Doctor Who" came along just at the right time to offer him a kind of redemption of sorts, although the twin cruelties of both the industry and his own failing health managed to conspire to make it a simultaneously very special and yet very difficult period of his life, albeit one for which he will always be remembered, and the moment when he breaks down at his own fireplace will resonate anyone who remembers David Tennant's last few moments as the Doctor during his original run, and possibly never let them see that scene in quite the same way again.

Of course, even to people my age, Mr Hartnell was always a bit of a "half-forgotten" figure too in that we knew that he played the first Doctor but, in those pre-home video days, the performance was so unfamiliar to most of us that he was the one Doctor who could be portrayed by another actor during the twentieth anniversary programme without there being all that many eyelids batted, which now, of course, seems rather unbelievable, especially as this film managed to get across more about the man himself in ninety minutes than forty-odd years of articles in books and magazines have really been able to.

But this was also the story of television itself, in those bright, early and hopeful days at the newly opened Television Centre, when sexism and racism were rife amongst the buffers of the old guard, and bright young things like Verity Lambert and Waris Hussain came along and blew the wind of change through those endlessly curving corridors.

I'm not going to rattle through or spoil the plot for you here, but basically, against all the odds, a piece of television magic managed to get made, and its leading man became someone who was not quite as irreplaceable as he believed he was, and somehow this story managed to move me in ways that completely surprised me, and I will admit to having a moistness around the eyeballs a couple of times during the broadcast, not least when, on the brink of being cancelled, those viewing figures of ten million came along and saved the day.

And I will admit that, for this old nostalgia junkie, seeing oh-so-familiar those old sets and scenes so lovingly recreated, as well as spotting one or two very familiar faces around the periphery, felt very special indeed and I can only take my hat off to the care and attention to detail that was put into the entire production.

As far as I'm concerned, if it came down to a straight choice, you could keep your Saturday nonsense… because "An Adventure in Space and Time", (a title, incidentally, based upon the subtitle to its Radio Times listing during the early years of the programme), was simply beautiful…

But, of course, in these days when the programme has so much popularity, we are lucky enough to actually have both.

Such riches indeed…!

And from such humble beginnings, too...

ASHES MORNINGS (1)

Thursday, November 21st

Given what the anticipation normally does to my already erratic sleep patterns, I actually slept surprisingly well, and, as usual, I got up at 4.45am and staggered around the bathroom for a while before heading downstairs and making a cup of tea with which to take my morning pills with, whilst also knocking up a couple of sandwiches for my packed lunch as I waited for the kettle to boil.

This is a fairly typical morning, although today I was also able click on the radio to find out quite how the first two sessions of the latest Ashes series had gone. Aggers was talking "down the line" to some hardy souls who had spent the night in the Ashes Museum at Lords, and there was some mention that the people there might have been much sleepier if the Australians hadn't been six down but instead had been "two hundred and fifty for one or something like that..."

"Hmm..." I muttered to myself as the sound of the kettle drowned out my tiny analogue LW radio, "perhaps things are going better than I expected..."

After an interview with Graham Swann promoting another series of his Ashes Diaries and telling the world how good it is for the world to see the "fun" side of James Anderson, eventually I staggered up to the keyboard and was able to find out that, at tea on the first day at the Gabba, Brisbane, Australia were 153 for 6.

Naturally.

England (and Wales) always play far better when I'm not listening.

Typically, Brad Haddin clobbered a six almost immediately - on his way to the first fifty of the series - as I tuned in and this resurgence of Australia's fortunes was at least checked by the seemingly quite lengthy departure of TMS for my first shipping forecast of the Ashes winter... and it wasn't until six o'clock that I got my first DRS debate of the series, and the first appearance in my day of the sainted Geoffrey... which was, of course, accompanied by the kind of good Australian batting that I have traditionally always had to listen to.

Told you it was my fault.

Still, listening to either Aggers or Victor again is like meeting up with an old friend, and it brings with it a real sense that all is right with the world, which is good, really, given the waves of melancholia which can overwhelm me just before the dawn.

I really need this sort of "comfort listening" when things seem otherwise to be so bleak...

It's very calming, very soothing, and afterwards I can look forward getting to listen to most of the final session of the day's play before I head off to work, and might, just might, even get a little bit of play to listen to in the car given the slowness of the over rate.

So, for once, Sir Derek Jacobi will have to wait for the return journey in the evening before he gets to tell me any more about that notorious "Study in Scarlet…"

I had an almightily vexing commute with idiots abroad to delay me and delay me again, especially as I had to make both supermarket and petrol stops on the way, but the day ended (and the working day began) with Australia on 273/8 with Stuart Broad having frustrated his critics in the local Australian press by taking 5 for 65.

Meanwhile, the thing that I was most looking forward to that day is the film written by Mark Gatiss and called "An Adventure in Space and Time" which was likely to keep me up late enough to not want to also stay up all night for day two of the first test match, and so I couldn't really expect tomorrow morning's overnight news to be quite as good as today's, given that it will most probably involve England batting, which always makes me tense because they do seem to have collapsed a lot over the years, and the prospect of that is far more likely to have me waking up in the middle of the night and tuning in "just to see how things are going…" because you can't really judge the state of the game until both teams have batted...

God help us...

GIDDY

I keep thinking that, despite recent claims that I had rediscovered my – obviously short-lived - enthusiasm, I ought to suspend the blog writing for a short while. After all, as those of you who still regularly visit these pages will already have realised, I’m likely to get a little distracted and perhaps a tiny bit giddy over the course of the next few days, and I’m sure you’ll know why…

Meanwhile, I really am finding it hard to actually DO anything at the moment… it could be down to the exhaustion, or it could be down to the anxiety (which seems to be persisting), but days and entire weekends seem to slide way from me without me feeling as if I’ve actually got anything done.

This is possibly because I’m not actually doing anything, but just thinking about the things which I ought to be doing instead, but little gets achieved.

It doesn’t help that the steam-powered computer (which I have to constantly remind myself isn’t actually mine anyway) upon which I attempt to work on is conspiring against me too now. On a good day it can take a mind-wrenching twenty minutes to approach something like a usable condition, and even after all of that, the keyboard can constantly take a dislike to the letter “T” which means constant, endless checking, and as for the mice (or is that mouses…?), well mine’s taken on a life of its own and refuses to talk to the keyboard for at least six minutes out of every five.

I suspect that they’ve had a falling out… either that or they’re just getting old and taking each other for granted like many couples have been known to after a long time together, but I do worry that if that rackety old keyboard runs off with a younger, shinier mouse, it’ll just turn into yet another middle-aged cliché which would, I suppose, at least be appropriate, given all of the words it’s being asked to churn out.

The fact that during November, the number of visitors dropped off a metaphorical cliff would tend to imply that the world might very well agree with me over this, and perhaps, in the run-up to Chrimbletide, such unremitting bleakness is not what the world is quite looking for…

Meanwhile, it seems that all of the electronic devices have taken against me now. Well, not all, obviously. The toaster still sort of works and the kettle is at least boiling water, even though its knob fell off. But the nasty, selfish little television recording device decided that the last ever “Poirot” was not something that it wanted us to see, a fact which I only found out when I sat down to watch it as yet another excuse for procrastination was required. Of course it was devious enough to record the first fifty-seven minutes, which was just long enough to lull you into a false sense of security, before letting the hammer-blow fall.

Perhaps it just doesn’t like endings. After all, it did exactly the same thing with the last ever “Lewis” too...

Oh well, another non-post drifts silently out into the ether. Maybe it will be found and adopted, or maybe, like an abandoned old mouse, it will somehow stagger along until it finds the inevitable scrapheap to lie down on.

Some days it’s just so very hard to work out where any of our destinies lie.

THE ASHES: PART TWO

And so, after the less than emphatic shenanigans of the summer contest, which ended on that rather sour note of the England team quite literally taking the piss, before you even know it, the second round of this year's two back-to-back Ashes series begins, this time being played in Australia.

I don't know, but it feels different this time... and not just because it's in Australia, either. After all, we've been here before. Well, you know what I mean. I, of course, have not been there before or, indeed, even now... Perhaps I should start again.

It's "The Ashes: Part Two" but somehow the anticipation, for me at least, is somewhat lacking this time around.

Perhaps it's due to the fact that other, more personal issues have made it difficult to enjoy anything all that much, or maybe it's just too soon after the last battle finished and a kind of "Ashes Fatigue" is creeping in, something that I never thought would happen.

Still one good old "Up and at 'em" rant from Geoffrey Boycott should set those juices stirring again at least, and that "tactful" old so-and-so isn't shy when it comes to poking at a beehive, even when he's not in his own backyard any more, and the beehive is full of alligators.

I do wonder whether this lacklustre feeling I have is because the summer's contest actually seemed to fall rather flat in the end after all of the build up, especially as it all seemed so much less of a contest and more of a muddle as the season rolled along. The margin between defeat and victory seemed definitely so much tighter than expected, giving a feeling of "surviving by the skin of our teeth" rather than an outright win, and maybe it's because you know, you just know, that things are so less likely to go "our" way this time around and that there's the very likely prospect of the England Cricket Team returning home having lost their grip on that little urn, so my own pessimism seems to be seeping into my sense of anticipation for this second half of the contest.

After all, you're not really expected to win the away series, really, are you...?

I know that I don't enjoy the taste of defeat any more than I enjoy the smug triumphant look of other's sense of victory getting in my face, (although I don't like it when "our" side do that sort of thing either, to be honest... must be something to do with my own lack of competitiveness...) but the nail-biting anxiety of "not yet knowing" has returned, this time with the added difficulty of a twelve or thirteen hour time difference to deal with meaning that I'll be getting up in the middle of the night to hear more bad news, or "just to find out how it's going", and that I won't be able to sleep and so instead I'll be tuning in at a time when I really, really ought to be sleeping soundly and trying to catch up with my own levels of exhaustion.

Damn it's hard work sometimes being an obsessive and no doubt I'm going to be "difficult" to be around again as I stagger through the mornings after the nights before...

Still, it is something that I can look forward to, at any rate, which is a nice thing to have again, even if bits of it aren't actually all that nice at all.

FLEMING SIX

In his lifetime, Ian Fleming published twelve “James Bond” books, and another two were published posthumously after his lifestyle finally caught up with him and finished him off in 1964 at the grand old age of fifty-six.

Obviously, the character he created has long outlived him and, like many a chap my age, I have been aware of the character for most of my life and yet, whilst the cinematic “icon” has become more than familiar to us, I am not as well acquainted with the character as Fleming wrote him as I am with the character as seen in the many films.

I did read “Live and Let Die” when I was at school during one of those “book exchange” exercises which seemed so prevalent then, and I may have also read “The Man with the Golden Gun” at that time too, and I can well remember a friend of mine introducing me to the more salacious paragraphs from “Casino Royale” when I was at a most impressionable age, but, on the whole I read more of the John Gardner “relaunch” novels of the 1980s than I did of the original Fleming, as well as the Kingsley Amis (writing under the pseudonym of Robert Markham) “Colonel Sun” which I seem to remember finding quite diverting.

I did have all of the books, you see. All of them paperback editions which were mostly film “tie-in” editions which I picked up from various market stalls in the late 1970s and 1980s, but I never got around to reading any of the others, perhaps because they seemed too “different” from the films which I was enjoying watching so regularly on ITV, and perhaps because the idea that they were “full of” sadism, sexism and racism didn’t quite gel with the more “educated” version of myself that I grew into, the same person who would later also deny that they “quite enjoyed” such things when he was trying very hard to impress someone who loathed the entire “wretched” franchise.

Well, that didn’t work out, and yet, despite such antipathy, Bond prevailed, even if, in truth, my own interest did actually wane quite a lot once I’d acquired all of the DVDs and found that I never seemed to actually get around to watching any of them any more, and the “new, improved” films began to appear to general acclaim, even though I didn’t find them quite as enjoyable as quite a few people seemed to.

Recently, however, and due in no small part to a quirk of timing, I found myself in a remainder book shop when they were selling off an audiobook version of “Doctor No” quite cheaply and, because I had already toyed with buying one or two of them online, but decided that they were far too expensive for something that I wasn’t all that bothered about really, I thought that I would snap up this bargain just to see how well (or otherwise) they’d been done, and it’s always a lot easier to find the time to listen to those books which you’ve never got around to reading when you’ve got a daily commute to entertain yourself during, rather than chewing up your precious evenings and weekends with the actual books themselves, I find.

Anyway, having bought the one, I decided that I had, in fact, rather enjoyed it, especially if I was able to gloss over the snobbery, casual racism and sexism and put it down to being very much “of its time” in much the same way that Victorian adventure novels can be. Looking beyond those unfortunate and distasteful aspects (of which there were actually surprisingly few) there was actually a cracking little adventure yarn in there which was remarkably well written.

So I ordered myself another one and, after I had enjoyed that one so much, yet another. Oddly enough, I knew that my strange “completist” tendencies were unlikely to be triggered by this particular series, but there were definitely five (eventually becoming six) that I would really like to hear.

DOCTOR NO - Of course, I’d already listened to, and, even though it wouldn’t necessarily have made the cut if I’d been starting out from scratch, it turned out to be rather good and, more importantly, good enough to trigger my interest in all of the others.

ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE – My favourite of the films so it was obvious that I might like to finally find out how “different” it was from the film version. Later on, I would also justify it to myself still further because it’s the middle part of a loose trilogy of sorts, and you can’t really listen to a trilogy without hearing the middle bit, can you...?

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE – allegedly one of the very best of the books, and it certainly led to one of my favourites from the film series. It is, however, structurally very different, and “our hero” doesn’t actually turn up for quite a while within the narrative. It’s also the book in which Fleming first tried to end the life of his literary creation, finishing on the kind of cliffhanger which would have had you tearing the wrapper off the next book, “Doctor No” back in the 1950s when it first appeared, and might have had that effect on me too, if I hadn’t already listened to it and hadn’t had an entire lifetime to know that it turns out alright in the end.

MOONRAKER – Very, very different from the film, but the book had quite a reputation despite being one of the earlier books and shorter than any of the ones which I had so far listened to, and Hugo Drax really is the most terrible of adversaries for post-war Britain’s best secret agent to come up against. It had the added advantage of being read by Bill Nighy which possibly made it sound far more classy than it might otherwise have done.

THUNDERBALL – The opening of the so-called “Blofeld Trilogy” includes an utterly hilarious rant about “women drivers” which you really, really could not get away with today, but, on the whole, given that it was the source of all those lawsuits because it was based upon a film treatment, as a book it fairly rattles along, even though lots of it feel very familiar indeed.

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE - Well, if you’re going to listen to parts one and two of a loose “trilogy”, you may as well get yourself the final part, I thought, and, even though this has always been described to me as being a rather “odd” book, it does at least bring the whole series to a rather satisfying conclusion of sorts, and, given that most of the rest of Fleming’s work was published posthumously, and some of it given a final polish by other hands, this could also be considered the “proper” end to the story of the literary James Bond. It’s also read by that stalwart of the audiobook world, Martin Jarvis, and I really could not resist that particular combination.

We should, I suppose, consider the ones which I chose not to buy, and, perhaps more importantly, why. Well, I say we should, but why should we...? The only reason that I can think of is that I don’t have a Book Group to go to so this is turning into my own substitute for a Book Group and so I suppose that I can say what I like about whatever books I choose to write to you about...

Anyway, my reasons, however fatuous they might appear to be to the aficionado, were as follows...

CASINO ROYALE - I don’t why I’m so averse to this one, actually, given that I’m usually a big fan of the origin story. After all, I’ve got myself “A Study In Scarlet” and I don’t think all that much of it as a novel either. Perhaps I had a dull experience of the novel - and the tiresomely long card game sequences in the film, too - so it just doesn’t appeal to me...

LIVE AND LET DIE – I really, really couldn’t bear the idea of a white actor trying to mimic all of those Harlem accents, no matter how well done they might be. I do remember both enjoying and being disappointed by the book as a teenager, so maybe those memories are just cut too deeply for me to be objective. Perhaps I'll revisit my paperback sometime and try to gloss over the worst bits...

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER - I don’t know, really, but this always struck me as being a “lesser work” somehow, perhaps because diamond smuggling and hearing about some gangsters called the Spang brothers really doesn’t appeal at all.

GOLDFINGER - Possibly one of the better known titles, and certainly one of the most fondly remembered of the films, but I think that this book’s reputation precedes it, and I really didn’t feel like listening to some of the more “controversial” of Fleming’s ideas being read out to me, especially as I’m told that the plot’s a bit “iffy” too.

THE SPY WHO LOVED ME - Hearing a book Fleming wrote from a “woman’s point of view” is likely to either be hysterically funny, or induce such sharp intakes of breath that I might swerve into a lamp-post, so I decided that it was probably best avoided despite reviews promising that Rosamund Pike’s voice is “silky smooth” to listen to.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN - Branagh reading the (mercifully short) first draft of Fleming’s final James Bond novel, what’s not to love? Only I just don’t fancy this one at all.

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY - Short stories. After “The Hound of the Baskervilles” I thought that the Sherlock Holmes short stories might seem rather slight in comparison, but I’ve really been enjoying them. I’m not convinced that the same might be true of Fleming though, so I’m not even going to try, given that if I did actually like them, I’d also be suckered into getting the other short story collection, OCTOPUSSY and THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS too, and we really wouldn’t want that now, would we...?