Et In Arcadia Ego

Today I attended the "Diversity Day" at Guy's campus. It's a taster session for many of the societies - choir, break dancing. When I arrived, I accidentally stumbled into JapanSoc - a girl in a gorgeous kimono met me at the door and, seeing that I was already holding origami in my hand, assumed I was in the right place. But she gave me directions to the LGBT room, up on floor two. I was there as Calypso's right-hand-person-of-non-specified-gender - she's the new Welfare Officer, which translates as bearer of cookies and hugs to me.

The concept of an LGBT taster session sounds a little on the odd side - "Are you gay? Have you ever thought about it? Come along and have a go!" - but when I arrived, I found an uncomfortable circle of eight people sitting on chairs and having nothing to talk about. That's the strange thing about the LGBT lot - they're not really bound by common interest in anything. It's little more than a dating service. Arguably, so is every society - most of the Geeksoc are dating someone else in the Geeksoc - but at least the Geeks have other things in common than what they would prefer to screw. Calypso was late, and then there was a power cut preventing anyone coming into the building. The President had a narrow escape - just before the cut, he was waiting for the lift. Apparently, the whole of the London Bridge area went down - runners were sent to check the tubes and everything. Seems like a rather drastic way of shutting down an innocent student meeting, but there you go. I voted for zombies or ninjas.

It felt rather like being in a hostage movie - another runner came up to tell us we were not allowed to leave the room because it was dangerous - but we kept in contact with Calypso down on the ground via text. She was being held at the door. T'was all a bit awkward, and we talked about where we had been on holiday. I also found out that LGBT is an activist group, not a society, because societies need to have an open membership. As an activist group, they don't have members and therefore can help anyone and everyone regardless of how "out" they are. Pretty sweet. Eventually they came to "rescue" us with torches, and guide us down the dark stairwell, to a waiting clump of people. The committee discussed the new logo for a bit - we came up with some ideas, including a green carnation and two little lovebirds. Our favourite is an multi-colour umbrella - it expresses a feeling of togetherness, a you-can-stand-under-my-ella-ella-ella sense of friendly helping out, is striking in black and white but utilises the rainbow if we print in colour.

I got a treat out of this - a leaflet from Jews for Jesus. It's styled as an "Atheist Awareness quiz". It's multiple choice questions such as "the most rewarding thing about being an atheist is..." or "after reading the Bible I discovered...". Then you send it back to "Stephen D--, Non-Atheist" for a free booklet. There's also a line with Atheist on one end, Agnostic in the middle and Believer on the other, so you can mark where you fall.

Now my collection of nutty religious ephemera has turned into a proper Collection, I've started a nice excel file for it. I'm sad to discover my records of what films I've seen this year are very incomplete - I've only got 40 written down. Typically, I watch 100 films in a year, so I know I must have missed some. Anyone remember watching something obscure or unremarkable with me, that I may have forgotten?

We also made friends with a fresher, who had a beautiful dragon pendant. Calypso has this new initiative to tell strangers when they are looking wonderful. Also, we fell in love on the tube home with a young chap who looked like Dorian. I snapped a photo of him on my camera phone, because that's not creepy at all, although drew the line at telling him he was adorable.

Then we watched Mullholland Drive. A mostly spoiler-free review is up on Cinecism.

Today, in Calypso's absence, me and Spirita did domestic. We're not using the dishwasher due to it's huge water consumption. Personally, I'm not sure what's the point, as water bill comes based on how much water they expect you will use. It's the water board as envisaged by Philip K. Dick! She brought her DVD collection down - ah! You never did see such a beautiful sight! I am proud to live in a house with that selection of films on the shelf, even if none of them are mine. Particularly looking forward to rewatching Brief Encounter and Heavenly Creatures (with much kleenex), and diving into Spirita's collection of kitch tat - including Tarantula!, Reefer Madness, Freaks and Brain of Blood. We talked bad movies for a bit - I think the new Taking of Pelham 123 is Tony Scott , from Spirita's description.

We watched Blake's 7, and discussed our contingency plan for - what else - the zombie apocalypse. I want to hide upstairs - I figure that zombies can't climb stairs. Too stupid, and they don't lift their feet high enough. Spirita was more in favour of funnelling them into the hall, and us killing them one at a time. We have a lot of spare kitchen knives and Spirita, who originates from Luton,claims she got a "GSCE in shanking"...other plans include:

• Molotov cocktails, using the huge surplus of nasty glasses left by previous occupants
• Using Vapilla as bait
• Using my rape alarm - to repel them, hopefully, but if the sound attracts them then we're gonna throw it next door
• Electrocuting them, using the dodgy connection in the kitchen. Spirita isn't sure this would kill them, just make them crazier. I hope it would give them intelligence, a la Frankenstein, and then we could reason with them.

As we're all girls, and zombie movies are rarely just about zombies, I've an urge to make a feminist zombie movie. Men turn them into soulless, brainless slaves! It's the ravening hoards of the patriarchy! I've a particularly nice image of zombies-in-Stepford, with these glammed up 60s housewives gnawing on bones and being attacked with baking trays and hair dryers.

In the reorganisation process, I found a nice jar for putting pens in. I plan to move this to my desk, if and when I get one, but for now it is in the lounge. I looked in it - clean enough - but at the bottom was something strange. It was a ring. The most beautiful ring I have ever seen, with a huge stone that shines blue from the inside. Fantasy novels - childhood, even - has set precedents for what to do on finding a magic ring, especially unnaturally gorgeous ones. I should really have buried it in the garden or something already - instead, I have strung it on a string and am wearing it in the hope it contains magic powers.

Spirita awoke with an urge to visit a museum, so this afternoon we trammed off to the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. We talked Jack the Ripper, Queen Anne and Robbie Ross on the tube. When we arrived, I insisted on visiting the Christian Bookshop across the road.

I have nothing against religion per se - although it often conflicts my prime directive of open mindedness, faith is a beautiful thing. But I do find religious literature very very funny, I was rewarded with a whole wall of leaflets. The first I chose for it's striking use of metaphor. "Is there a God within my reach?" asks a man on a cliff, looking down into the VOID of DEATH. Open it up, and the man is smiling - the CROSS has appeared between his cliff and God's cliff. Aw. I think, for now, I'll continue filling the void with "all kinds of temporary pleasures and suspect "spiritual" practices and theories".

On the topic of suspect theories, I capped this off with two mini-comic books entitled "There go the dinosaurs!" and "Big daddy?".The first starts innocently enough, with a bunch of Neanderthals killing a dinosaur to eat - though they call them "dragons", because they were only renamed dinosaurs in 1841. Nevermind the fact humans and dinosaurs never co-existed. Then Evil Atheist Scientist, who I'm naming Alan after Green Wing, comes up and tells us dinosaurs were killed by a meteor. Is this true, asks the pamphlet? At this point, I kinda hoped it would tell us that actually, it was the result of the Fifth Doctor smushing a Cyber-controlled freighter into prehistoric earth. But I quote:

"No! It is a story told by people who don't trust God. And God should know. After all, He was there. So what did God say happened? God created man, animals and plants - In the same week! They were created, not evolved. That includes the dinosaurs!"

This is capped by a rather charming picture of koalas, lions, peacocks, zebras and brontosauruses ambling about in the Garden of Eden. Then we see the dinosaurs joining the animals, two by two, on Noah's arc. Here follows an explanation of rock stratas:

"The storm hit, the earth went into convulsions, the underground water shattered the earth's surfaces, the canopy of water above the earth collapsed. Plants, animals and people were drowned and sandwiched with the dinosaurs into layers of mud and rock."

This still doesn't explain why there are no dinosaurs. But fret not! The millions of destroyed plants had made the air rich with oxygen, and big animals need lots of oxygen to survive. Without the plants, "it was harder to breathe - they got slower and easier to catch. And now you know how the dinosaurs really died. Because of sin, the Lord destroyed the earth by water. But the next time...IT WILL BE BY FIRE!"

My dinosaur-obsessed cousins could punch holes straight through it. What about the little dinosaurs? What about the big mammals? And then it decends into familiar religiosity, ending with the punchline "It's not about what happened to the dinosaurs. It's where YOU will go when you die."

"Big Daddy?" has a picture of a monkey on the front, and is even better. It consists of a dialogue between Alan the Evolution Teacher and a clean-cut Christian boy. Obviously, the Christian quickly demolishes Alan's every argument till Alan resigns, gets thrown out and presumably dies on the street.

The basis of the pamphlet may be correct. As my anthropologist sister explained just before I left, there are holes in Continental Drift big enough to row Gondwanaland through - scientists have tended to make the facts fit the popular theory, and not the other way around. When Christian boy claims only one of the six facets of evolution has been conclusively proved, the rest are taken on trust by the scientific establishment, I've half a mind to agree with him. But that doesn't excuse the genius histrionics in this book - including a chart of monkey evolution, and how all the stages have been proved incorrect. Cro Magnon man? "Equal in physique and brain capacity to modern man. So what's the differance?" Vestigal bones in humans and whales? "Isn't losing something the opposite of evolution?", a stupid statement if ever I heard one. Peter Gabriel's departure from Genesis was part of their evolution as a band - evolution merely means change, usually positive. Christian boy's trump statement is in bringing up "gluons", something invented by scientists to explain why the positive charges in the nucleus don't repel each other - when clearly, it's God holding it together instead. While Alan gets himself sacked, Christian boy gets chatting to some pleasantly 70s student. One, with a tash and a pullover, cries "then we didn't evolve! The system has been feeding us THE BIG LIE. We really do have souls!". It's a bit of a jump.

I also bought a pack of shiny Jesus stickers. In retrospect, I should have got the angry homophobic sticker reading "how can a moral wrong be a civil right? Read the Bible!" with directions to Leviticus 18. But it would have made me too angry having it about. At least believing the dinosaurs choked to death hurts no one.

Later, Spirita challenged me - if God was to suddenly appear on a cloud and say "You know, the gays are scum, and the place of women is under men, and all non-believers will fry", and I was given the option between recanting my beliefs or serving him, what would I choose? I said I'd convert - seems like a fairly simple option to me - though apparently Calypso said she'd rather burn. Heroic martyrdom is a little different when it's an all-powerful-fella on a cloud.

The Museum itself was amazing, though I imagine it must have been torment to a child. None of those items were meant to be in cages. They had a human sized one of those pin-boards, where you make an impression with your hand. Spirita tried doing the Han-Solo-In-Carbonite look - then we covered it in handprints, and signed our names at the bottom. There was a dolls cabinet, one of teddy bears, one of Meccano and Lego - one of sci fi, which inevitably contained the Moxx of Balhoon, but also a little Corgi Liberator. Very cute indeed. They had a lifesize killer Gollywog, a pink pedal-airplane, zoetropes, rocking horses, and a huge Venetian puppet theatre as tall as the roof. We found a huge magnetic-beard boards - I made my face look like the Master (80s), complete with eeevil eyebrows - Spirita turned hers into something closer to the Elephant Man. We also had great fun in the "sensory experience" - mirrors, lights, colours and New Age music. We attempted to communicate with dolphins and raise our heart chakras to eleventh level consciousness, though I didn't do too well for laughing so hard. We also played with the animal theatre, though the flashing lights made it seem a bit more nightclubesque - Watership Downtown - the tales of Farthing Ghetto. This was interspersed with art inspired by childhood. Imagine a see through rubix cube, about six squares by six, and place a room in each box - a lunar surface, a room with trains on the walls, stairs that lead nowhere et al. Marvellous!

We were both much inspired by the experience - we're gonna get a dolls house with a revolving bookcase, a Victorian paper theatre, and make a fairy in a jar, and also make some Edwardian alphabet blocks to decorate the house with. To start with.

In other news, I'm really enjoying The Four Feathers, and getting into Nick Cave. Particularly Red Right Hand - it's literally only a harmonica away from being the aural equivalent of Sergio Leone. Reminds me a lot of High Planes Drifter, for the scene with the paint among other things. When I get my piano back, I'm going to learn Curse of Millhaven - it's about a crazy girl who is slowly wiping everyone in her little town out. Now I read that back it sounds very incriminating...

This morning was spent on the move. First port of call was Acton library, to find some internet.

Acton has a really nice market on a Saturday - homemade cards, shawls. I particularly liked the
Nation of Islam stand. I really wanted to buy one of her leaflets, all about how Michael Jackson was set up - Calypso preferred the "DNA Conspiracy" CD - but I wasn't sure how to do it without seeming like I was mocking her. Which is exactly what I intended to do, but we were still making friends that day.

Calypso has a marvellous faculty for talking to, with or at virtually anyone, so it was a fun morning. I've always hated not being able to talk to strangers. We had lunch courtesy of Mr Singh again - he gave us some fantastic advice about staying young and being positive. Real fortune cookie movie mentor stuff, brightened my day no end. At the library, we met a little boy who was using his superpowers to open the automatic doors.

We also went around Asda. It's very good for bargains, but keep away from its own brand. Mostly foul tasting, certainly unethical, and never lists whether or not it can be recycled. It's fun paying £1 for everything when you know things normally cost £3 or more - paying £1 for something that's actually got £1 of goodness in it is a little more offputting.

My harmonica playing is getting better - I can play Frere Jaques, and am now working on Kids by MGMT. Bizzarely, the easiest thing I have succeeded in playing so far is Mozart's Clarinet Concerto: the most beautiful song in the world, still strangely beautiful even on my glorified kazoo. Disappointingly, I think my harmonica has the wrong range to play the song I bought it for. Still, it's £3 of fun and is tiding me over until I can get back to a piano. Most people think you've got to blow into harmonicas to make music - actually, it's a combo of blowing and sucking which requires a fiendish amount of breath control. When Magister and I comprised the recorder club, we tested who could hold breath for longer. She's fifty-something, noticeably overweight and a committed smoker. I'm hardly healthy, but still: she held her breath for almost twice as long as me. I still resent my singing teacher for not teaching me how to do it properly. Any hints?
We did a lot of stuff, and I've run out of time to blog it all - including veggie Chinese and a visit from Ajax. Spirita arrived this evening - and she's brought her DVDs...don't expect to hear from me ever again.

We spent today in Acton High Street. It's about the same distance the campus was from "other" Hampstead last year. Calypso and I took longer walking there because we were distracted by a great charity shop, at which I fufilled my long urge for a harmonica and a gentleman's evening scarf. I can almost play Once Upon A Time In The West on it. The harmonica, not the scarf. We also narrowly avoided a Rorschach hat.

Acton is a chaos of scuzzy ethnic food places. It's such a multi-cultural area - coming from Guernsey, where the teachers confused our year's two dark-skinned girls for the whole of seven years despite the fact one's parents were Egyptian and the other South American, it's something I really enjoy about being in England. All the same, I feel guilty for not being more in touch. For example a lot of places were selling "halal" meat. I know it's an important religious thingy, but what is it exactly? There were lots of religious buildings - we found Acton mosque, Acton Catholic church, Acton Baptist Church and many others. Acton has wool shop, a great mask shop, a 17th Century pub and only the most tacky brands - Macdonalds and 99p stores were the only ones I recognised. Marvellous! A particular treat was the local lamp shop - very beautiful, a chaotic flurry of tasteless glowing tat.

We lunched at Acton Market, at Mr Sing's Express Curry stand - he's a friendly fellow who wanted us to test-drive a meal he is intending to sell. For a pound, he gave us an aloo tika with spicy chickpeas, drizzled with tamarind chutney. Calypso and I are thinking of making a small portable guide to foreign food - for example, I like pasta but am often tripped up in restaurants if they don't explain exactly what "siciliana" or something means. Especially important now we're all vegitarian too.

We finally found Acton library - a puny little thing, but our membership gets into lots of surrounding libraries so I'm sure it'll be OK. Cool, but frustrating, there are huge non-English sections. I loathe non-English books - they always look far more interesting than anything one could read. Calypso made a girl laugh by badmouthing Twilight. We secured internet connections! Woo hoo! Disappointingly, we are too old to come to the library's Fairy Princess day.
Calypso got "The Good Giving Guide", the truth about charity and how best to help, a Terry Prachett book and a book about sustainable living - I carried off "Costume in Detail 1730 - 1930", a book of drawings of women's dresses; "The Four Feathers", a film I adored about gung-ho heroics and people with more honour than sense and "Save the Last Bullet", the memoirs of a mercenary from the Balkans and Somalia. I shouldn't really be indulging my love of angst and guts, but there wasn't any Alastair MacLean there. I feel a little bad - when it's the movies, I can sort of justify the kick I get out of violence; a factual book will make it seem far more like a dirty activity. Finally for my graphic novel fix, "Hellblazer: Roots of Coincidence". I still feel a certain debt to Constantine for getting me into comics, even though I've found them increasingly repetitive.

We also got some DVDs. There were about two there I would ever deign to watch - when in company, I seem to get snobbier about film. One of them was Mullholland Drive. Our last stop was the local Scope, where Calypso found a 30s dress and I got a cheap DVD with two episodes of Danger Man on it. So it was, in a way, an expensive day - but we now know our area better.

We are using one of the spare see-thru jars, and filling it with colourful origami stars made from the junk mail. Dinner was lentil bake - semi successful, but we'll know how to do better next time - and Kate Bush. Afterwards, we watched Queen Sized - a Lifetime movie starring Nikki Blonski about a fat-girl-turns-Homecoming-Queen. It wasn't as bad as it sounds. For example, I kinda expected Maggie to be dressed really unflatteringly throughout, before the inevitable makeover moment. Y'know, get a haircut and suddenly she's being played by Lindsay Lohan. The idea of an ugly woman is faintly ridiculous - ugliness or beauty is all about the way you present yourself, and any figure can be flattered with smart choices. But actually, she was glamourous and friendly all the way through - it was purely an issue of perception - and Hollywood did not require her to turn into a skinny bint and go on a diet. Little touches like this made the movie pleasingly non-patronising, to the extent I can't really take the rack out of it. Also, she was haunted by an invisible version of her mum. I know self-critical is hard to dramatise, but it added a really nice surreal edge.

I'd like to do a truth-beauty essay one day. Dorian Gray is ugly inside, but everyone believes he is good because he is beautiful. Frankenstein's monster is good inside, but becomes ugly because everyone believes he is. In Beauty and the Beast - clue is in the title - Belle is good because she can see through the Beast's ugliness, but her reward is him turning back into a handsome hunk. The Ugly Sisters are evil, while Cinderella hides her beauty in rags. And so on. There's a point to be made in here somewhere but I can't see it. It's the Beauty and the Beast one that strikes me as most strange.

Greetings, dear reader, from the Court of the Crimson King!

Calypso and I moved in a few days ago, and I've been blogging on my laptop. This means, until we aquire an internet connection, you'll be recieving sporadic flurries of updates, so save them and read them slowly.

Our first task was to sort out the bins. In Guernsey, you have one bin - if you want to recycle, you've got to drive it down to the plant yourself. Nothing could have prepared me for the English system of bins - one for dry recyclables, one for biochemical waste, one for radioactive deposits, one for bad books...it's clearly a better system than Guernsey (30% of Ealings recycle, according to the local paper), but is still requiring some time to get my head around.

This is all crippled by my crippled sense of smell. It's not like I don't have one - I can taste, obviously, and I do occasionally catch whiff of some things. In particular rotting celery and banana. Aside from that, I won't notice the smell of a smoker unless it's pointed out, I never notice perfume, and I definitely can't smell flowers. You don't miss what you've never had, and personally I think I'm better without it. People around me get so bothered by vomit or rotting lettice - I do, but only on an ideological level. Can't smell it, you see. Do I have a problem cleaning up vomit? No, not really. It's gross but according to Castellanne (Friend 3, at least, has a proper name now) the smell is the foulest part. I always figured I was just to lazy to smell, but Friend 4 has a clever theory. Sinesthesics have tangled neurons in their brains - so, for example, hearing a sound might be experienced as colour. What if my sense of smell is just being redirected, sent to the wrong area of the brain and therefore not interpreted? It makes a sort of sense.

In any case, Calypso is insisting on having the food waste outside - an act I'm not going to argue with, even though it smells fine to me. You've got to line it with newspaper paper, which proved a bit of a chore, so I'm adapting the traditional origami box so it fits more efficiently. I've also made thick origami newspaper "cones" for kitchen use, so you can put waste in them while cooking and then transfer it outside when done. According to Cherry Darling in Planet Terror, there's a time when every single one of your useless talents saves your life. I think origami has had its time.

By this time it was late and we were starving, so on the verge of death, we departed for Asda - the Domain Of Things What Are Only £1. I took great joy in finally dressing up again, and we went outside.

Can you remember the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, when there is a single house just waiting to be destroyed? Or in Neverending Story, when the nothingness is coming to get them? Or Utopia, where humanity are stranded on the last undestroyed planet and are trying to escape? Our row of houses looks all nice and suburban, like anywhere in London, but it juts out into the M1, into an industrial complex of huge warehouses and empty urban boxes. Horn Lane is marked with a London roadsign, like they sell in tourist shops - go one block left or right, and the street names are sponsered by some company or other. We are at the point London ceases to be London, like an island at the end of time.

Like Platform 1 or the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, being on the brink of annihilation has its aesthetic benefits. Look out of the front door or windows and the vista is huge - we get one row of houses then sky in all directions. We crossed the three huge roads that, one day, I am going to get killed on. Past Acton Cemetery - very pretty, particularly the church itself which was split in two by a huge arch through the centre. Past rows of garages, past a water-filled gravel pit which was screaming out for a climactic gunfight, complete with exploding water tower. I tend to see potential gunfights everywhere I go - a product of too much cinema - maybe I should move to America? Past Cullen Lane! Past the Tower of Light centre and next to it, Mountain of Fire ministries, in a huge building that reverberated like a keep-fit gym. We have to pass it every time we go shopping, so Calypso wisely pointed out we cannot bait and infiltrate them - but it's a shame, because they have free (religious) films night once a week, and also all-night prayer sessions. It wasn't terribly clear what religion they were even representing, though I bet on Logar, God of the Mountain of Fire in Planet of Fire. Acton: it's Trion's Australia.

About ten minutes away, Asda sits over the landscape like a sow with young - the queen of the industrial boxes. Everything costs a pound. Marvellous! By this time, Calypso and I had committed the ultimate wrong - gone food shopping while hungry, so a few strange things made their way into the trolley. How could we not when Divine dark chocolate is only 50p?! I remember my first weeks in Hampstead, as everyone else under the Auspices of the Dude reeled from the shock of how pricey London was. I was amazed by how cheap it was. My only severe extravagance was a small first aid kit, which I figured may just come in useful (and not merely because it resembled the med-kits off Blake's 7...) It cost one pound fifty. Oh man, breaking the bank already!

It was dark when we walked back, and far quicker too. From the back garden we get stars. I identified Jupiter and Wilwarin - sorry Casseopiea. The Quenya and Sindarin names for stars is pretty much the only Elven I remember. If you look right, we have a very picturesque row of brick houses, windows and washing lines. To the left, a building gutted by fire, and behind it a hotel seemingly made of lego blocks - bright red and bright white plastic bricks into the sky. I feel further from Central London here than in Hampstead, though possibly it's because I'm tired and don't feel like going anywhere.

We ate like students! Dinner was pasta plus tomato and spices. We haven't quite worked out how we are going to divide food costs fairly, though I imagine when uni starts again much less communal eating will be happening. After tea, we sorted out the junk mail. Non-junk was kept, junk was binned, serious junk we laughed at. Including a particularly pointless leaflet from Hungarian dentists inviting us to Hungary to have our teeth looked at, and a strange Conservative party leaflet bearing the slogan "vote for change". Ealing is a Conservative area, so we also got a copy of the Conservative newsletter.

We didn't get around to plugging in the telly. No television? No internet? We're going to go crazy and oestromaniac, and when they find us I'll be dead, Calypso will be incurably insane, Spirita will be found bricked in behind a wall (with a beard of cobwebs...) and both of Vapilla's legs will have been amputated. Instead, we are doing readings. I'm told Vapilla was working on her rhetoric last time she was here, and I am much looking forward to it. Calypso read me part of a short book written by feminist Socialists. It was a great little essay, complaining about how the sexual liberation movement has got it all wrong, and how wearing playboy tee-shirts or going to lap dancing clubs is not actually empowering. A phrase I particularly liked was:

"Commercial sex, whether it is porn or lap dancing, is like fast food. It is a
horrible soulless version of something good which capitalism sells back to us
after stripping us of the time and well being which would allow us enjoyment of
the real thing."

We need to find a better name for Kings Sexual Politics society. Effectively, it's the Kings Feminist society - but we don't want to put men off joining, as men can be feminists too and awesome ones at that. But Sexual Politics sounds like such a drag - we need something catchy, which also expresses what we do. I think that's get hot under the collar about oppression, and then do something about it. But also, Sexual Politics ran the lecture on transpeople. Any ideas?

We then had hot chocolates using the last of the chocolate powder I saved from last year, and it was all rather blissful.

This story concerns the bus driver who drove me home today. He was a real sweetie - most turn into robots, but he was evidently new because he had a laugh at something said over the intercom, and stopped to help a fellow bus-driver round a difficult corner. It was while we were stopped that the old man sitting next to me started mumbling. At first I didn't think it was directed at me - he was clearly too old to be on public transport on his own. But it was, and when I worked through the mumble he said:

"Ruddy foreigners" [the driver was black] "Why do we want foreigners driving our buses?"

I've never thought racism was a big problem before being in London - yeah, so shoot me - because it is something I have never encountered first hand. So I was a little shocked, but more peeved off at him making me a part of his bad attitude. It's hard not to feel that, by not disagreeing with someone, you are tacitly agreeing.

"Where you from?" he muttered conspiratorially.
"Here," I replied.
"Me too..." and he trailed off into dribbling again.

I got as far as turning back to him, to point out that the bus driver lives here too, before deciding to stay silent. It's all about choosing your battles, and I knew this was a pointless one. He was too old to change his ways, and probably too crazy as well. That's not what I regret.

All last term I lived in a liberal bubble - all my friends were gay, and black, and Jewish, and if they weren't, well they were working on it. It was a bit of a shock to come home and realise that actually, outside the student populace, the world is filled with judgemental bigots. Like discovering a forgotten sandwich that has turned into green fluff, somewhere you least expected it. Even though I knew the man was old, mad, and had no idea what he was talking about, it still really depressed me because his is a view shared by young sane people who should know better.

It reminded me a little of a a monestary we visited in Santorini. I picked up a leaflet in which the author explained why monks were not meant to help those in need, and why seclusion from the outside world was the best way of helping it. He drew a comparison to the radio operator in an army. Everyone else fights, which appears to be helpful - but if things get dire the radio operator can use his radio to summon air support. Now of course, if you're not a Christian - or indeed, not Greek Orthodox - this must strike you as useful as calling in your imaginary elephant friends to trample the enemy.

I'm still not convinced of the ethics - it suggests God is up there counting prayers, and when enough monks sing at the same time he deigns to intervene. A bit like Noel Edmond on Comic Relief night, sitting on his cloud with a big white beard and a big holy thermometer. Surely it would be better if the monks were out there doing good works instead of indirectly influencing things with the power of their minds. Though it does suggest that secretly, all monks are Timelords - refusing to interfere, but shaping the big curves of history.

That mad dude on the bus has really been the final straw. All summer, I've been looking forward to retreating back to my circle of pagan, Guardian reading, vegitarian, recycling, pro-everything reactionaries and shutting out the world. Guernsey is a nice place to have come from. But now I think of it, that's exactly what the monks have done. Instead of engaging with the world and actively helping, they are hiding away among their peers and not taking first-hand stock of its problems. It's making me wonder whether I've been wrong. Though it goes against everything I admire, instead of missing an atmosphere where everyone is happy and liberal, I should have been hammering people with my wit, knowledge and superior attitude until they were happy and liberal too.

I think I've discovered something beautiful, but daunting, about the world. You shouldn't try to find a better place - instead, you should be striving to make the place you are in a better place.


And that's it for me - tomorrow, I'm off. You might not hear from me for a while, as there is no internet at the new house yet. Two more ideas for house names: Castle Anthrax, and Traken. The latter is the chief planet in Doctor Who of a Union "held together by everyone being terribly nice to one another". It seems apt.

So. The rest is silence.

Today's issue: my aims before I return to uni, my sister's new website and a dream theory

Before leaving Londinium for Sarnia, there were two things I promised to do. The first thing was to finish the cuddly toy Rorschach-es which I offered to make for virtually everyone. I don't mind, but as soon as you have to do something it becomes a commitment - and I'm good at forgetting commitments. I've started planning cuddly Blakes'n'Avons, making ATCs to send to strangers, figuring out how to make the Liberator in origami and even got out my old Rosencrantz'n'Guildenstern costume project as a way of dodging this. They all have nicknames now - there's Fat!Rorschach, Leggy!Rorschach, Headless!Rorschach, and then there's one I actually rather like. Maybe I'll swap the coats around because currently, the better costumes are also on the better dolls. Hmmm...

The second was a movie I promised to watch. I'm a tad depressed abot the prospect, and it's entirely my own fault. It could be great, but if it doesn't float my boat I'm fairly sure I'll either lie blind to the recommender, or to myself until I do like it. I don't object to the morality of this in the slightest - recommending a movie or book to someone who then turns around and tells you they seriously hated it hurts. It's my own gullibility, that I can convince myself of liking pretty much anything depending on the circumstances. Most of the time I feel this is a handy character trait - I feel everything is on some level true, so being able to find the joy in any art/stance/person/whatever is like the ultimate act of open-mindedness. And having a flexible mind with no walls at all has helped me to find many arts/stances/people/whatever that otherwise I might have missed. It's just demoralising to know you are going to like something whether you like it or not. This movie has come to stand for several things I've been musing over anyway, about honesty, insincerity, the ethics of doormatting and the nature of friendship, and it's made me very reluctant to sit down and watch.

The third thing was a promise to myself - to finish my Doctor Who spinoff comic. I knew I wouldn't get all the way through, but I did mean to make headway. BBC screwed that one up because of Certain Announcements made about Christmastime. I know I'm writing something non-canonical, but I'm a total Canon Nazi. Though I am avoiding the word, what I am evidently producing is the Fic of Fans, and the only way I can justify it to myself is through being a complete angel when it comes to continuity. Now I have to wait until New Year to rewrite, and the new episodes will probably invalidate the five pages I have drawn and coloured.

This has all occurred to me now because the deadline has loomed close - the eagle will be flying out of the night on Wednesday morning for my return to Londinium. I have such an action packed day for tomorrow - trying to get more Doctor Who videos into my suitcases, meeting friends for lunch, indulging family at dinner, and on top of all that, two Rorschach coats, three Rorschach hats and one movie to fit in. Can she do it? Frankly, no - the Rorschach hats take about three sessions of fiddling on their own to turn them into something decent. And that's before I have the hugely ethical dilemma of whether to pack them, or more Doctor Who...I've even put more effort into teaching myself Greek than any of these other fun activities!


On a more positive note, it's time for some serious pimpage. My sister and her friend have started up their long-awaited television blogging-and-podcasts blog. Check it out:

http://www.theboxproductions.com/

The pair of them are very obsessed, but also very professional - to a frustrating extent, because I feel much of it lacks a personal touch. I know not everyone blogs like I do, but it needs some flair, some controversy, something that feels like a real opinion. Nevertheless, it's still a beautifully writen and run place, so do me a favour: go and read, and then leave comments. Even if you don't watch the shows or understand the topic under discussion, write something short and generic based on the article which makes it sound like you know what's going on.

Man, I'm getting cynical.

Finally, I'm getting close to a theory about dreams - mine at any rate. I feel the more I understand them, the better chance I have of triggering them. A dream can literally make or
break my day - if I've had a happy dream, I wake up refreshed and bubbly for the rest of the day. If I have a bad one, that's it - I wake up unhappy and under a cloud. So having good dreams is essential to my existance.

Despite missing out on the regular sorts, there are about four or five different genres of dream I recognise as familiar.

I have FandomCrazy dreams. It's part of the obsession process - I now recognise the stages, including the "attempt to make cuddly plushie" period. It's why Blake's 7 counts as a proper Obsession, while the A-Team, Brideshead Revisited or the Prisoner are merely programs I like very much - because I've had That Sort Of Dream for a while now. They come on for about a week minimum, and a month maximum - one every single evening regarding the new obsession. One of the reasons I miss London - don't laugh - is I think I dreamed Doctor Who every single night I was in Hampstead. I kinda hope that'll come back in Acton. They all feel sorta the same, as if they come from the same corner of my mind. I can't explain it - I know science has proved you have different "centres" of your brain, but I'm sure one shouldn't be able to sense that without complicated medical equipment. It's like even when I'm not thinking about it, on some level I still am.

I'm used to these, and cool with them. They're never uncomfortable, unless you count a Doctor Who/Watchmen crossover slash dream which I've still no idea where it came from...they're a symptom of my life, but they're still passive dreams, made up of spare ideas and background noise. My mum thinks dreams are the brain's way of taking out the trash, and I tend to agree.

When I'm not obsessed with something - rarer nowadays - I have endless dreams. They're my usual sort, dream default. The plot goes like this: I am in a strange place, one that doesn't exist in reality. I have to do something - deliver a letter, meet someone, go somewhere - but the dream drifts on without it being resolved. I think it says something about my state of mind. Also, I've a theory based on this that the way we write and the way we dream are closely linked. Situations which look gorgeous but in which nothing happens is my greatest authorial bane. I cannot do plots at all!

But then I have what I'll call healing dreams, and they definitely seem to originate from Somewhere Else in my head. While most dreams are passive noise, these seem like a gift from my brain, that someone has made an active decision. They genuinely feel like something else. For example, I don't feel emotion in dreams, except in these ones. One I particularly remember was at the end of a bad patch. I was sitting on a green hill overlooking a valley and chatting with Guildenstern about something. What I don't know, but I woke up feeling a very particular sort of relaxed and happy. I had another one a few days ago, and it was beautiful. The plan is to learn to trigger these dreams when I need them.

I feel I'm getting somewhere. I'll add more if I think of them.

In the absence of anything better to write, I have decided to share with you my recipe for egg fried rice. It's as easy as it sounds, but I'm still rather proud for working it out. You know it as a phrase in the same way TheEmpireStrikesBack or DireStraits become words in their own right. You don't really consider the fact that Star Wars V actually features the villainous Empire striking back at the goodies, no more than you stop to consider what a dire strait might have been before being a band name. Get what I'm driving at? So I regard the discovery that if you fry egg with rice you get egg fried rice as a personal epiphany.

If you select your brands carefully, it can be totally free from colouring and cruelty, and can be as packed with healthy stuff as you imagine. It's probably the healthiest egg fried rice you will ever eat. Depending on your brands (instant rice vs. proper rice) and the extras you add, this meal can take anything between 10 and 30 minutes to prepare. 20 is a good safe bet.

Due to the chaos factor in preparing the Osterman Fried Rice, I don't recommend you make it as a side dish unless lots of people are dining, and you have someone else helping in the kitchen. It's hard to prepare in small quantities, is very filling and tends to be temperamental. Or maybe I'm a lousy cooker.

Rice or noodles (referred to as "rice" throughout, but noodles work too)

Cruelty free Eggs (this recipe will self-destruct if used with battery farmed eggs...)

For 1 person use one or two eggs
Consider using three eggs if you are cooking for 4+ and are using an noticeably huge amount of rice.

Hoisin Stir-fry sauce. I use Sherwoods. I'm sure other flavours would taste good too.

Oil/stuff to fry in

Peas, chickpeas, sweetcorn, any other variety of bean or vegitable you have lying around

Grated cheese (for a mega-disgusting protein fix - this doesn't taste very nice, I warn you!)

Fake-meat chunks (But not fake-mince! Seriously, I've tried this with mince and it really fails.)

Spring onion, waterchestnut e.t.c. (for genuinely-Asian kudos)

Anything else fryable to add protien, iron, carbohydrate, vitamins, whatever


At least one saucepan

Strainer / method of getting water out of the pan while leaving the rice in.
Note: if Dr Manhattan is aiding you with your cookery, you will not need to find a strainer.

Frying pan

Wooden implement for stirring the fried egg with

A plate to serve onto (well this is student accomodation we're talking about! In dire straits, you could make a "trencher" as the Medievalists did - find a slice of bread, fresh or stale, and serve onto it.)



1. The basic recipie is rice + eggs + frying = egg fried rice. If you want to turn it into more of a meal, raid your cupboards for other stuff to stir in. Vegitables? Fake-meat chunks? Waterchestnuts?

The finished product is very creamy and filling, so while you are pre-planning consider putting on only half the amount of rice you would normally eat and serving something refreshing alongside it. Not being a natural cook, the best I could come up with was cucumber or celery sticks with maybe a sour cream or tzatsiki dip, and cool icey water drink.

I never bother with this, but I'm not a discerning eater - I just shovel it and ignore the taste. If you have distinguished tastebuds, consider a cooling counterpoint.

2. Using the time on the side of the packet for both the extras and rice, work out when each needs to be started to reach boiling point at the same time. Usually, the extras need to go on first. I tend to do this all in the same saucepan - it makes for less washing up.

If you are making cold extras - celery sticks, complicated cocktails, or laying the table poshly - now is the time to do it.

3. When the rice seems to be getting towards done, put some oil in the frying pan and heat it up. Strain the water out of the rice.

4.a if you want your the egg in the egg fried rice to come out in little lumps like it does at the Chinese, begin frying it before you add the rice. Use the wooden implement to break the yoke and scrape the bits around the pan till it is in pieces. Then, add the rice and stir it all together.

4.b if you want the egg and rice to all be in one big cream, pop the rice into the frying pan first then break the egg over the top, mixing it all together with the wooden implement.

If I'm frying two eggs, I generally do both - b. tastes more sickly to be sure, but is more eggy too. If I'm frying with meat-chunks, or something else "solid" that is the focus of the meal, you're probably best to stick with a.

5. If your "extras" were not in the pan with the rice, now is the time to add them, stirring as you go. I like it when it steams, because it somehow feels more authentic, but be prepared to turn down the cooker and turn on the extractor fan.

6. Add some hoisin sauce (or the sauce of your choice). I tend to do three splats-worth, covering about the area of a £20 note on top of the rice. Real scientific, this. Keep stirring so the sauce goes all the way through. Another rough measure - the meal should not turn brown after being sauicfied - the egg pieces should merely look a bit grubby

7. Keep stirring, and get ready. The moment this meal hits the plate it begins to go cold, so make you are ready to eat the moment it leaves the pan. Make all essentials are cleaned up (i.e. put the eggs back in the fridge) and safe while you're frying, and anything that needs to be prepared for the table (plates and drinks) is ready. If you have an accomplice, this is a great opportunity to make them do some work ^_^

8. Switch off the cooker and serve the egg fried rice. Abandon all washing up and tidying for afterwards.

"Dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond Unmutual's cooking"

PS - Sugarbabes. Aren't they just like a rip-off, sweet edition of the Spice Girls? Just noticed that...

I normally try to keep the intense Doctor Who rambles to my Doctor Who blog, Malcassairo. That's the only reason it exists - I'm not sure any DW fans read it - I merely use it to shunt over things I have to say which would be meaningless and dull for the rest of you.

This, however, has been written so a layperson could follow it if they wanted to - and at the same time, all my references are neatly recorded in case geeks fancy nitpicking. It may also contain very mild spoilers, which might just ruin the odd episode if ever you sit down to watch all 45 years of the show. In other words, it's clean and it's here for you to read if you can be bothered. No matter if you can't.

Friend 4 and developed this, quite by accident, in a very frenetic 15 minutes. As a canon Nazi, I'm not usually prone to developing new swathes of mythology all on my own, but this strikes me as justifiable on three counts:

a) Doctor Who is a huge beast, worked on for 45 years by thousands of people. Every actor, writer and director had their own things which they gave to the series. Inventing your own part is, then, quite a different affair to screwing around with Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, each of which had One Creator and one unified vision. Hell, nowadays the show is being run by the fanboys - you can look in back issues of Doctor Who Magazine to find fan-rants written by RTD, the Moff and the rest. Therefore, my contribution is no less valid than anyone else's. It wouldn't be the first time I've remoulded canon in my own image. I have not one but two of my own superior Valeyard origin theories, as well as a grisly theory about the fates of ex-companions and a private version of what happened to Turlough on Trion. Also, in my canon Caves of Androzani goes by its original name, Chain Reaction.

b) the area I'm covering has been deliberately not touched on - it's practically an invitation. It has only ever been explored in audios/novels (in Master and The Dark Path, and also in Lungbarrow and the rest), and therefore of questionable canonicity anyway.

c) And it's always been crappy. This makes far more sense.

Key: things in red and bold are canonical facts, accompanied by where they come from. Things in green are reasonable extrapolations based on facts, accompanied by square brackets and italics explaining things. Everything else is me, and statements not at all backed up by anything in the show are in blue. Colour scheme completely accidental, but a nice coincidence nontheless.

So it started from me asking how someone as fundamentally evil as the Master and as good as the Doctor could ever have seen eye to eye. It's well established that they used to be friends at the Academy, and it's clear from every on screen encounter that they get on really well when they are not facing their ideological differences [every time Delgado'n'Pertwee team up; also how pally the Doctor is with the Portreve (Castrovalva) and Yana (Utopia) when he doesn't realise their identity]. The chemistry is so there, but they can't help but argue when it comes to ethics.

However, when we first meet the Doctor he is not good or heroic, at least not how we expect. He kidnaps his first companions against their will, lies to them, and even attempts murder to get out of a tight spot. It's through contact with the humans Ian and Barbera that he learns the value of compassion and valiance, and with each successive companion he becomes more and more like the figure we recognise. Even the Third Doctor still has to be talked into heroics by UNIT - he'd much rather be back on a cosmic joyride. You don't really see the Doctor landing and attempting to help until the Fifth - it's not until his Sixth regeneration that he starts actively looking for trouble and thinking of himself as a Doer-Of-Good.

So we can suppose that the Doctor of Gallifrey was even less well behaved, at least in human terms. In other words, he was thinking like a Timelord - superior to everyone, not caring about lesser species [reasonable guess based on the first few episodes, and every Timelord we've ever met]. Yet there was one fundemental difference - he was not content to sit and just watch the universe go past. He wants to travel and he wants to get involved. [obvious, really, from his later behavior] Not necessarily "involved" as how you'd imagine the Doctor to get involved nowadays - saving people, hunting things - but still, he was thinking BIG. Every non-renegade Timelord we've ever seen has been completely tedious and law-abiding, so you can imagine how a rebellious Doctor would bond with the only other person in his class [probably] who also had big ideas. Loneliness does strange things to people ("Such a lonely little boy...", Girl in the Fireplace), so the Doctor's enthusiasm at meeting a fellow mind would naturally lead him to overlook the Master's flaws. The pair become completely wrapped up in one another* - they neglect their studies [numerous references to the Doctor failing his exams - Deadly Assassin and Ribos Operation are two], but have some very big plans of their own.

[*you've met people like that, right? Also, see later episodes - the Doctor and Master seem to care about only each other when they meet, and seem to regard one another on another plane of existance. Nothing else seems to matter. See: every time the Master abandons his meticulous plan, and instead chooses to reveal his identity so he can gloat, particularly Kings Demons. See the Doctor's refusal to bring the Master to justice, even when he should know better - letting him escape in Deadly Assassin despite an attempt to detonate a black hole at the heart of Gallifrey; letting him live in Castrovalva despite the fact he murdered Tegan's aunt, destroyed Nyssa's home planet and pinched her dead father's corpse, tortured Adric for a few days and accidently blew up a third of the universe. Do I really need to defend the statement that they have an unhealthy obsession with one another?]

Now comes the theorising. Together, they did something they secretly knew to be wrong, but were arrogant enough to assume the results would justify it. It starts small, but then it goes too far - and even though their aims seemed the same with the blindness of enthusiasm, when put to the test it turns out the Master's core motivation (power!) and the Doctor's (more hard to define at this point of his life) are quite different. They start to disagree about the basic nature of what they are doing, it gets completely out of hand, and then the Timelords catch up with them.

I hope that doesn't seem too much of a jump of logic. To my mind, it makes sense that their mutual desire for something would get larger and larger, especially because no one else would be invited to join their little friendship [see: obsession in every other Master episode ever]. Also that they wouldn't be content with merely theorising [later episodes; this is what sets them apart from other Timelords - action, change, actually putting things in motion], and they wouldn't be too worried about the consequences [later episodes]. Finally, this is when my question - "how someone as fundamentally evil as the Master and as good as the Doctor could ever have seen eye to eye" - gets answered. It is not until now they have realised that their basic aims are different.

Of course, the problem is of defining exactly what they were up to. At that point, the theory turns into pure invention. Both want to travel, to make change and to think outside the small-mindedness of the Timelords - I'll leave it at that. For non-fans, I want to make it absolutely clear - this "event" is never referred to on screen, on audio or in the books, there is no canonical substantiation for it except that it seems to make a lot of sense. So we have to ask ourselves what do the Timelords percieve as crime. The answer is interferance, along with non-conformity. It is clear, from Deadly Assassin and Trial of a Timelord, that the Timelords pretty much regard the Doctor and Master as as bad as one another. Neither want to stay on Gallifrey, both want to go out and change things. The distinction between one's "good" and the other's "evil" would be quite lost on them.

What happens is something like this: the Master is caught, and the Doctor isn't. Or possibly (but less likely IMO) the Doctor decides things have gone too far and hands the Master in, or even both get caught but the Doctor escapes. Infinite permutations of this exist - I like the first one best - but all are equally theoretical.

For this crime, both are stripped of their names.

[this is pure fabrication on my part, but seems to make sense. The Timelords are obviously into their ritual, and the Doctor obviously has a hangup about his. It is my belief that when a serious crime is comitted a Timelord no longer has any right to his name. Evidence? The renegade Timelords we meet are: the Doctor, the Master, the Rani, the Meddling Monk - also, if you accept them as Timelords, the Celestial Toymaker, the War Chief and the Valeyard. No exceptions, unless you count Omega - and he isn't strictly a renegade, merely a villain who happens to be Timelord. Also Morbius, but again that's complicated, and Drax - but I haven't seen his episode, so I can't come up with a smart answer. But everyone we meet on Gallifrey has a name - Borusa, Maxil, Flavia, Andred and so on. There are exceptions - the Inquisitor is one, so is the Castellan and Lord President - but those are all ceremonial Gallifreyan titles, so maybe there's a custom whereby you can surrender your name (therfore also your dynastic responsibilities) for the greater cause of Gallifrey itself.], and hence must choose new ones.

The Master is put on trial - the Doctor is not [in the interests of telling a good story, evidence for this follows]. But obviously, peeved about being abandoned, and also prone to panic as we see in later episodes, the Master has no qualms about revealing the Doctor's part in it. The gravity of what they have done not only endangers them, but also their families [reasonable guess - the Timelords are evidently very dynastic, and the the Doctor's family is all dead. We are presumably meant to think they are Time War references, but this works just as well] Instead of standing by his buddy and admitting to his part, the Doctor uses his freedom to rescue his family. Possibly arriving to find them all dead, possibly they have merely vanished and been imprisoned/exiled [based on half-garbled memories of Cold Fusion. Death seems violent and sudden for the Timelords - maybe imprisonment makes more sense, because pre-Doctor would not necessarily want to take the huge risk of a prison break. Perhaps the best answer is he simply cannot find them, and doesn't have time to risk Susan's life to save them all. Something tragic definitely has happened, even before the Time War - in Tomb of the Cybermen, he claims his grief about them "sleeps in his head" -but in Curse of Fenric he claims he doesn't know whether or not he has a family, suggesting maybe he never found out where they got to.]

In any case, he does find his granddaughter Susan [no time here to discuss whether she's actually his grandchild - I hate the Cartmel Masterplan, I don't know why collective Fandom has such a hernia about "the Menoptra and Vespiforms" and I don't know why it's necessary to invent a huge mythos about pre-Doctors, the Other and parallel timelines to explain away a simple fact like the Doctor having screwed someone once. While I like the idea that "Grandfather" could be a Gallifreyan term of respect, she is so obviously his that this whole argument is rendered null. Too cute to be anything but.] and the pair of them hastily escape in a stolen TARDIS. When we first meet Susan and the Doctor, they are definitely in danger and on the run. The way to make someone behave like a criminal is to treat him like one. The idea that Susan might be in danger also explains why he kidnaps Ian and Barbera - their knowledge might prove an anomaly which would alert the Timelords.

The Doctor is eventualy put on trial in The War Games - proof that he wasn't put on trial first time around, and evidence that only the Master was caught for whatever-it-was. His punishment is one forced regeneration - we can also presume that's what the Master got. As we have no idea what regeneration Delgado!Master is actually on, he could have recieved an even more severe penalty ["I have wasted all my lives on you!" - TV Movie], given that by the time the Second Doctor was put on trial he had saved the universe once or twice and maybe had some mitigating arguments. I haven't actually seen The War Games, which naturally hampers the argument, but I can't handle more than one regeneration in a year.

Here ends the theory: from now on, I'm merely justifying using Master episodes. The following is more spoilerific, if anyone actually cares, but not so much it'll spoil anyone's fun.


This non-canonical event is reflected in all the subsiquent meetings between the Master and the Doctor. In his first appearance in Terror of the Autons, the Timelords warn the Doctor that the Master is on the way - ergo their history is known, and the Timelords are keeping tabs on both of them. The Master's first action is to attempt to kill the Doctor, ergo he's still cross about something. But when he's not crazy with vengeance, the Master is really keen to team up with the Doctor. It happens automatically - even in Terror of the Autons, it takes only five words for the Master to have a complete change of heart, and for both to efficiently solve the problem and save the world. Ditto in Sea Devils, in Claws of Axos. Not only does the Master want him to help, he actually expects him to. On several occasions, he genuinely believes the Doctor is going to leave with him. It suggests they did once have a very healthy working relationship, and the Master expects that to still be there - not understanding that in the interim, the Doctor has become a Good Guy. It also explains why the Master has such LOLage at the Doctor's pretensions to goodness, because the Doctor he knew was far more flexible in the morality department.

[I'm no longer a fan of my Doctor/Master alien-concept-of-marriage theory, but those who like the idea may want to fner over Terror of the Autons working title: The Spray of Death.]

Similarly, the Doctor seems to feel he owes the Master something. It's more than the Doctor's regular refusal to let villains die - the Doctor is actually pretty flexible on that front. It does genuinely seem as if he has something to make up. The Sea Devils is a particular example of this, with him going to visit the Master in prison to check he's OK, and having fought extra hard to prevent the government from having him killed. It's a very telling episode - the moment the Doctor agrees to help the Master build his super-device to awaken the Sea Devils and Enslave The Universe, his guard just evaporates. He doesn't even suspect the Doctor will sabotage it - it's all "here are the blueprints, please rebuild it and lets conquer Earth together".

Of course by the time you get to the end of the Third Doctor's run, the Master is beginning to get the idea. The next time you see him is Deadly Assassin, where his plan involves sacrificing the Doctor - although it's a matter of survival, which is always of a slightly different priority for the Master.

[For the record, I rank the Master's motivation as 1) Survival, 2) Winding the Doctor Up and Attempting To Kill Him, In A Good Natured Fashion, 3) Universal Domination. I base this on what he is willing to abandon, i.e. he will always abandon a plan or the Doctor to save his life, but he will also always abandon a plan to save and/or annoy the Doctor.]

After that, Logopolis - and mk.2 Ainley!Master is a different kettle of gumblejacks. His actions are no longer governed by my Non Canonical Event, so much as events we've seen on screen. And he is very, very different. The chumminess goes away after Castrovalva. Five and the Master never once team up the way Three inevitably would. The Master still puts him in fatal scenarios which are deliberately easy to escape - it's like the unwritten rules of the game - but at the same time he genuinely wants to hurt him. Kings Demons - all of it - is my evidence. I think he's finally got the message.


So what do you think? Any plot holes? Any inconsistancies? I'd love a chance to defend and make my argument better. And look at me, all grown up: I've managed to write an essay about the Master without mentioning Planet of Fire once. Hurrah for me!

UPDATE: read on for an exciting development :)

This weekend I intend to become an Origami brown-belt.

I've always held it that, in art at least, you should not do anything except for yourself. There's no point to grades, praise or fame if you're not enjoying it. I've taught myself to draw, to fold, to play and while the adulation is nice, it's purely for my own joy. Generally I am not ambitious. But there always comes a point where I want to prove I'm good among my peers. Not real peers - you're not gonna catch me jetting off to Origami conventions just yet. Just to try and achieve something that I know, within the field, is very challenging. It's not like it means anything more, it's just for my own personal satisfaction.

With the piano, it was the point I started playing Beethoven. Never mind that I'd been playing Chopin for years, and that he is arguably far more challenging - I wanted to play Beethoven! It's an aim I still haven't quite completed - my arms are too weak to do a whole sonata. This is the one I want to play:



Also, I adore Evengy Kissin. I feel sure that I would be a better pianist if I had huge gingery hair that bopped as I played. I had made it Chopin's Fantasie Impromtu, but I am way way off being able to even touch it, so maybe that will be my next landmark.

I've been in an origami blitz for a few weeks now, and I have been impressing even myself. Despite that, I am not very good at it - I'm not neat or patient, and a lot of the things I fold would embarass other people who knew what they were talking about. Origami truly is an art that is less complicated than it looks - this, for example, was very simple to fold once I got my brain around what it was doing. Yes that's one piece of paper, and yes it does bounce like a spring if you pull the ends. So as my origami challenge, I thought I'd have a bash at making Robert Lang's cuckoo clock.

A little background. Before Robert Lang came along, origami models were rated from Simple to Complex. Afterwards they had to invent a whole new catagory - Supercomplex - just to accomodate the leaps he invented. He was the first Westerner ever to be invited to speak at the Japanese origami society, and he's helped out on space missions using his origami know-how. Part of the glee of all this was his mathematical approach - he's invented computer programs which help distribute the model across the paper. For example, if you want to fold a bird it has four points - a head, a tail and two wings. Conveniently, a piece of paper has four points too, so folding one is fairly simple. If you want to do a Samuri Helmet beetle with six legs and three prongy bits, working out how to do that is a little trickier. Nowadays it can be worked out theoretically by computer.

(While we're talking about the amount of points that can be got out of one piece of paper, take a look at my favourite origami piece of all time. And no, even with the crease pattern, I can't comprehend how he did it either. Fans of Studio Ghibli might also enjoy the Catbus, though I'm more mystified by the comment "base is not box pleated. I only learnt how to box pleat yesterday, and my first reaction was "Oh! It looks like the Catbus!". So how did he do it?)

So. All I have done for the last two days is fold. Here's a picture of the finished product.

They don't call it Super-Complex for nothing. Merely attempting it has blown my mind. As I mentioned, I've learnt a new technique - the box pleat - which is basically a way of making lots of legs out of a regular piece of paper. The Cuckoo Clock requires you to start with a minumum size of 160cm x 16 cm, though mine is a little larger than that. Pre-creasing - putting folds on a flat piece of paper so when you start folding properly, all the lines are in the right place and the paper does what you want it to do - took me two hours. I went to bed, thoroughly exhausted. When you are working with over a metre of paper, you actually have to move an awful lot. The next day I worked solid from 10 in the morning until about 7 at night. For the first time ever, I understood why Serious Origami Masters use pegs when they are working. AND I AM ONLY HALF WAY THROUGH. Though admittedly, realising I had to refold half of it because I'd done it the wrong way around was something of a blow - as was refolding the middle section three or four times as it fell to pieces (that's when I got the pegs...) Last night, I stopped at fold number 113 - there are 216 folds in all - and the room stunk of stress. So far I am on the right track, but I'll be so disappointed if it reaches a point where I get stuck. It does happen fairly often when I attempt serious folding

If I manage to do it? It looks like my clock will be the size of two matchboxes. So if I succeed, I'm gonna do another one for my room. Twice the size and in expensive red-and-white paper. Wish me luck folks.

UPDATE: And it is done! Ultimately, I think it took me 12 hours - which is pathetic when you consider the pinnacle of origami achievement was folded in only 40. I confess to cheating a little on the penultimate step. A section I had to continually refold ultimately turned out to be very important, and because I'd screwed up the flaps which attatched front to back didn't really work. So I used six spots of glue to do what my misshapen flaps couldn't, on the basis that this was the fold that would break the model if it didn't work. The thing is, I can do it. Not very well, but well enough to give it another bash in a week's time and attempt to produce some art.

Last night I dreamed about parties. One in a wooden hall, with bay windows overlooking a huge lake and the sea - one on a boat with my extended family - one in the backstreets of what might have been France. I don't usually dream about going to parties, so what is my brain trying to tell me? Freudian dream analysis in the comments please.


Finally, I've got my first partner for Swap-bot. She lives in Tokyo! She has a five month old daughter, hates Disney and loves dark chocolate. Rather intimidatingly, the person who is sending me an Art Card is the coordinator of the swap - from Missouri, a fan of good cinema, piano music and Josh Groban. So damn cool...

Finally, I've found my new home on the internet!

Some of my most treasured posessions are other people's junk. A particularly special one is three photographs I found in a second hand book. They are the creepiest things I've ever seen - a sunny day in a hotel garden, or maybe just a very nice cafe, with an assortment of old women smiling at the camera. I wonder who they are and where it was taken

It gave me the idea to start a website where you could trade the photos which just haven't worked with strangers, instead of cutting them up and binning them. Would make for an awesome collection. As it happens, I don't have the know how, but as I investigated the idea I ran across http://www.swap-bot.com/.

The basic principle is the same. You trade stuff with internet randomers all over the world. But the topics are much broader than merely second hand photos - sticker sets, postcards, gift-boxes, handmade crafts, basically fleur de lys (i.e. "whatever you desire..."). I don't know anyone who doesn't like getting exciting mail, ergo I don't know anyone to whom this idea would not appeal. I'm too skint to get properly involved. One of the exciting things is the international angle - your gift could end up in Venezuala, and in return you would recieve something from Budapest - but as partners are chosen at random, anything larger than a post-it note could potentially be pricey to post.

And then I came across Artist Trading Cards, and it was like The A-Team all over again: love at first sight. They are little works of art on a Pokemon-card-sized canvas. You make your own then trade them with others, for a completely unique collection. It's perfect in many ways. I have a mania for collection, but real trading cards have always depressed me for their crass commercialism. Suddenly, Panini decide that Master Regeneration is an Ultra-Rare card, so the unscrupulous can flog them for £25. In contrast, this is at once valueless and beyond value. Plus, I get so posessive over my art. I've made drawn presents for several people in the past, then been unable to give them away. Hopefully sending creations all over the globe will deal with this issue.

So I've spent a blissful week fufilling challeges set by the users on the site. I've already made four for four different themes: Water, Mascarade, City and, less pretentiously, Giraffes. I am particularly proud of the Giraffes, my favourite I've made so far. They are looking out over a sky of stars, inspired by Lewis Klahr's short film Altair which I watched for Film Studies last year. And if that sounds pretentious, well, you might as well call King Crimson pretentious. Seriously, though - I was merely ambushed by how much I love the imagery in that film while also thinking about Giraffes, and that combined to create a thing of small beauty.

My thinking is get making while I still have access to craft stuff and then posting in England, where the postage will be a bit cheaper. It's really nice having an prompt to art too. By Christmas, I should have a shiny new collection!


In other news? Variations on nothing. I'm elated that Janet Fielding has been asked to do new Doctor Who audio books, and that next year will see the first three Fifth Doctor + Tegan + Turlough + Nyssa adventures since 1982, but I'm sure you won't be. I'm feeling morose about the death of Roger Delgado. It was a nasty accident which happened some 30 years ago, cutting short his tenure as the Master, but fandom as a whole has never got over the shock of it. But I'm sure you won't be. I think I am going to make the origami cuckoo clock now...yours, fannishly.

Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable From Magic, said Arthur C. Clark.

I'm getting The Quote out the way first, because this debate cannot be held without it.
They are lumped together due to a similar audience of geek guys and girls without too much thought, but where does one end and the other begin?


Science fiction is the more popular genre, and I mean popular in its most strict sense. The lions of the fantasy genre have always been books - Lord of the Rings, Earthsea, Pern and Narnia. Though there are films as well, broadly speaking they have always been forgettable. If you think of genre as a set of cultural associations, i.e. Westerns = hats, horses, Clint Eastwood, harmonica music, the plate for SF is far richer because of cinema. There are books for the serious SF fans - Asimov, Clark, Dick and the rest - but then there is also Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, superhero shows, Blade Runner, alien invasions, alternate histories. Ask people in the street what fantasy was, I expect you would merely have the beginnings of a great D&D campaign - whereas Science Fiction would be better understood for it's scope.

I consider Fantasy a younger genre, yet to explore its possibilities. Lord of the Rings was its beginnings in serious cinema, whereas Science Fiction is far more established - to my mind, this means Fantasy's triumphs are still to come. Fantasy is seen as merely an exercise in pure escapism, whereas Science Fiction has always had a social duty. The Cylon occupation of New Caprica isn't just about robots subjugating humans - it's about the Americans in Iraq. Minority Report is about exploring humanity in the face of new technology, 2001: A Space Odyssey explores the nature of what it is to be alive. 1984 was written about 1948

There's no reason fantasy can't provide social commentary, it just doesn't. This is what I mean by associations - Science Fiction is expected to be philosophy first and escapism second, or at least to touch on those elements. Pilgrims Progress and the Narnia books are two Fantasy novels which do, but Fantasy isn't expected to in the same way. Lord of the Rings specifically recoils in horror at the idea it is allegory for real life. In other words, Fantasy has less associations, and this is why I call it younger.

Fantasy: set in unreal world in the past

Science Fiction: set in unreal world in the future, but ah! it's about the present.

Or to be crude, fantasy invents teleportation and uses it to destroy the Evil Wizard. Science Fiction invents teleportation, then meditates about whether it will destroy themselves.


Perhaps because Fantasy is seen as nothing more than a romp in robes, the Science Fiction fans are quick to dismiss it. Wikipedia reveals a third term: science fantasy, the snobbish way of dismissing any space opera without deep meaning. Star Wars is easily compared to yer Fantasy epic, complete with wizards, magic swords and princesses. More than one nerd on the internet makes this cruel division: the hyper-real elements of SF must be "scientifically rational within the rules of the world"; otherwise it is Fantasy.

This appears to make sense until you look at it closely, at which point it turns into bull. Harry Potter apparates, Blake'n'crew have teleport bracelets. As Dr Manhattan would say, "structurally there is no difference". Ah, but the teleport bracelets are created by science - in fact, the characters have a chat about what they think it's made out of - and therefore they are rational. This suggests that every time someone apparates, the other characters stand around shivering, calling on Buddah and predicting the apocalypse. Surely a world in which magic works is just as plausible as ones with a mineral which somehow enables teleportation, if the author says nice and clear from the get go MAGIC WORKS IN THIS WORLD.

My nemesis indicates a lack of explanation: "Fantasy, to me, exists in worlds where the rules can be entirely different, and be that way without any explanation other than "It's magic!" but science fiction has to at least try and make sense in the world we know of."

Because Blake saying "do you think they are using the made-up-for-the-show mineral Aquitar?", or the Doctor pulling some random scientific terms out of his rump suddenly makes it more valid than Harry Potter just waving a wand or Dorothy clicking her heels and thinking of home. In other words, this argument is grossly dismissive - well written Fantasy should and does outline the rules and extent of its differences from conteporary Earth, just as well written Sci Fi does. Just as lazy Sci Fi can invent things as they go along just as magically as Fantasy. The dismissal is extra sad because it's like stunting the genre's development - keeping smart authors out of the way, and preventing it from being challenged, growing up and becoming just as respected as SF.

Of course, this all takes place in the wider context of the genre debate. Sorting things into genre is hard and meaningless. If you allow Alien as science fiction - and most people do - then you open the definition to merely has to be set in the future. Frankenstein is SF, Dracula is Fantasy. The rationale? Frankenstein is created through science, whereas Dracula is a mythological beastie, whose powers are drawn from the Earth and other supernatural sources. This would suggest the gothic genre should come under the fantasy umbrella. Horror too - if "alien attacks stuff" is Sci Fi, then surely "zombie/ghost/vampire attacks stuff" is Fantasy.

You don't consider Charmed, Sabrina the Teenage Witch or Bewitched as Fantasy in the same way as superhero comics are put under the SF umbrella. You don't give modern vampire epics to fantasy authors. There are places for Fantasy to consicously go, almost mirroring Science Fiction's progress. I'm looking forward to it.

Final analysis? Science Fiction is just Fantasy with a paint job. When considered together, the only thing to define them is "stuff that is not real".