Et In Arcadia Ego

1. At long last, I have resurrected Cinecism. New layout, and as of now, new posts as well. I am very proud of my new theory.

2. Don't you hate cliche one-word reviews? They're the modern equivalent of Homeric epithets: Athena of the flashing eyes, wily Odysseus, pious Aeneas, thoughtful Telemachus. There's never been an L.A. Confidential review that hasn't referred to it as "labyrinthine", to the extent that I now do it all the time in conscious parody. People writing about Horace append "detatched" and "wry", while Propertius and Ovid share "ironic". I'm also rather sick of people referring to the final episode of Blake's 7 as "climactic" - not only is it overused, it's also damned obvious. "Climactic" being, like a climax. Frankly, I'd be shocked if it wasn't climactic, it being the climax and and all...TITANS WILL CLASH.

The point is, words like this become meaningless through overuse. If you always refer to Aeneas as "pius Aeneas" then his name effectively becomes Pius Aeneas, and you adopt the epithet as part of a whole - like when referring to Sherlock as "Holmes", you don't forget his first name is Sherlock. Either stop pointing out obvious things, or find an interesting way to do them.

3. Did I just have vegitarianism!fail? I found a great local coffee bar that does dirt-cheap porridge with fruit, and have eagerly planned to eat there every day for the rest of my life. But while chomping, it occured to me: doesn't porridge include whey powder, or ground-up pigs teeth, or rabbit intestine or something? It certainly looks like it might, with its zombie-flesh glumpiness.

4. Nutjob movie of the week: Poltergay.

"Emma and Marc move into a house which has been uninhabited for thirty years. What they don't know is that in 1979, in a cave under the house, there was a gay disco , which burned down.. Today, the house is haunted by five gay ghosts."

5. Interesting combo of the week: Act One, a filmmaker college who "train writers of faith for careers in mainstream film and television. Act One equips writers with the professional and spiritual tools necessary to live a life of faith in Hollywood and sustain a career." I shouldn't scoff, as I study Classics and Film - at least Hollywood and Christianity have coexisted in the same century - and it makes sense too, but I feel it's still worth linking to.

6. Today I noticed that Fifi the rat has a question mark on her back. I'm thinking of taking a photo for Fortean Times - they've a section for people who've found Richard Nixon on toast and the rest.

7. Keyboard! Keyboard! Spirita has at long last brought her keyboard down for the house. I found a chest of drawers in the garage to prop it on, and behind it I've wedged the ironing board (which no one has ever used; Spirita assures me that, in an emergency, she is skilled at ironing on the bed!), for my laptop and sheet music. Voila! Music station. A moment of panic came when I plugged in my sustain pedal which I'd brought from home. When you press down on the pedal, the notes continue to play even if you take your fingers off the keys and play with sockpuppets, until you take your foot off the pedal. Or it's supposed to - what I found was it had reversed, and I had to do the opposite foot movements. Luckily, it's back to normal now.

Tis a fine, fine keyboard - it has a pitch bend; basically, a big prog-lever which makes notes go woooooeeer up and down in pitch, for instant 80s cred. Enough notes for me to play Firth of Fifth without cramping; big enough that I can play most of the Chopin without too much trouble. Of course, a keyboard is very different to a piano but I'll get used to it. Me and Calypso have been singing, and it's marvellous fun. We do a very good Broadway Hotel (Al Stewart), and also Where the Wild Roses Grow (Nick Cave).

In between, I'm trying to explain how to play - a nightmare, as my grasp of musical theory is dead shakey. How do you explain a key to someone anyway? I know how to watch television, how to make television and at a push know how to plug one in and identify a SCART cable - that doesn't mean I could build one from scratch, if you get my analogy, nor do I understand how or why it works.

8. I spent a marvellous afternoon with Rosencrantz, which resulted in a curious bet. I have given her my name and my oldest username - she gave me her name and an old email address. Our task: to make a "secret dossier" with everything we can discover on the web. She's at a natural advantage twice over - she's rather more experienced, and of course, she's always been extra-cagey about the sort of information on her on the internet. I kept bumping into dead ends, but have managed to turn the one email address into two old usernames, and a second email address - about six hours work. Part of the deal was that neither of us could do anything illegal, but I bet that two emails go a long way with nefarious means. I also have her GSCE results, her poetry, her fanfiction, everything I need to know about her reading habits and music taste, photos of her house, as well as a bit of information which could probably see her jailed. Definitely enough for blackmail, flirting or conning. Horrifies me what stuff of mine is still out there. As soon as she returns with my dossier, I am going to go and do a serious damn web-purge.

9. Fanmixes. Inherently nuts, and work because the human brain is so associative not because they make sense. I am increasingly convinced that all of Queen's "A Kind of Magic" fits Blake's 7 -admittedly, often in an ironic way - but that is almost certainly because I'm a case (having said that, I have nevertheless looked up the dates, and yes they do fit...) I'm usually too lazy to see them through, so I've got lots of odd songs lying around which would suit a mix, if only I could find another eight songs or so. I've even got a Spotify playlists for ones on their own. Which is great, but I've started forgetting what some of them are. In particular:

a-ha – Take On Me and Frank Sinatra – Good-Bye

Any ideas? Do they remind you of anything? Because goodness knows, they don't me!!

10. Removing myself from the internet is harder than I thought. Remember my distress over the Geocities information vanishing? I've become that person. Even with it backed up, it's still horrible to see it go.

I've had it.

I just don't like the internet. It's too much science fiction, but still...

Tyler Durden would be appalled. The internet is a tool: you use it, not the other way around, but it's somehow transformed itself into a Lestat-like sucker entity that hangs on your back like a Time Beetle and drains everything. Blake, Winston, Number 6 and the rest would scarecly be less impressed at a network which controls so much information.

And while none of them are sane individuals by any reasonable definition, the internet backlash is going to happen eventually and soon, and I want to be a part of it. Maybe it'll be when all the teens of our generation mature into adults and discover that fifteen years of their Farmville scores, IMDb reviews, Livejournal porn, music tastes, illicit youtube-video-watching, forum trolling rising from the grave to meet them. The internet keeps better account of my teenage years than even my diaries. For example, do you know what I had for lunch on the 4th March 2005? Search Ninquelosse here. It's also got an entry for the 2nd July 2004.

One of the big things today is "connectivity": the ability to link and syncronise your Spotify profile, Twitter account and baked bean collection via your iPhone or whatever and have everything in one place, but no one is stopping to thing that connectivity is an evil evil thing. I got halfway through making a beautiful, elegant website which linked to all my internet accounts and activities before thinking no, why the hell is connectivity a desired attribute? It's creating dangerous monopolies. There is now a function on Youtube which will automatically update Twitter, Facebook and Google everytime you sneeze on their site. And most sites have something similar.

The internet's benefits are so many, that no one is paying any attention to any number of dangers. I am getting out while I still can.

Take a look at the following

Net Neutrality
We have an intrinsic belief that the internet is a communal creation, equally supported by all: the ultimate Socialist project, if you like, where fools can rise, all are equal and information is not controlled. This assumes that the services we use are all as committed to neutrality as us.

"Net Neutrality means that Internet service providers may not discriminate between different kinds of content and applications online. It guarantees a level playing field for all Web sites and Internet technologies."

In other words, relies on Big Business playing fair. And Jack the Ripper was the Loch Ness Monster:

The nation's largest telephone and cable companies -- including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable -- want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won't load at all. They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. And they want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services and streaming video -- while slowing down or blocking services offered by their competitors[...]The big phone and cable companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to gut Net Neutrality, putting the future of the Internet at risk.

Read more: http://www.savetheinternet.com/

Some things we didn't tell you upfront...

Most websites we use rely on our belief that they are intrinsically good - see Big Business above. For example, when you sign up to a Facebook application you must also agree to let them view your personal information - they always cite profile picture and friend data - so the app works. But when you click yes, it can see all of it - even though it doesn't necessarily need it. But you know how popular Facebook applications spread like influenza, and increasingly, "fun" applications are being designed exactly to syphon off your information to ad companies and the like. It's a rather fine sacrifice to make merely to bat some pixels around the screen - it'd be like giving the Disney Corp. all your personal details before being allowed to visit their parks.

My evidence is here

Illusions of innocence
There's increasing evidence that Facebook staff - who can look at anyone's profile and browsing habits - have been doing so. Now, while none of this can be conclusively proved, ask yourself this: if you were a Facebook employee, and you had this power at your disposal and knew you wouldn't get caught and prosecuted because it would damage the company's reputation, what would you do? Right then...

My evidence is here

Memory: part I
The internet seems safe. It isn't, and I'm not just talking about the Paedogeddon. Few people realise quite how fragile it is, so solid the presence of Hotmail in the morning. Here are a few examples.

From 1995 - basically the dawn of the internet - until 2007, Outpost Gallifrey was the home of Doctor Who on the web, and thus the combined geek opinion since that year, including the run up to the reboot, was all documented there. The owner decided to stop running it in 2007, and everything transferred to Gallifrey Base - basically the same website and forum. No loss - except he also pulled the plug on the server. It's no longer accessable, basically winked out of existance - and the Internet Wayback machine can't really help, it being a forum and all.

This could be libellous - so correct me if I'm wrong - but this was how things stood last time I investigated it. And I don't want to investigate too far, even if there is a way of finding it again, because the destruction of information really upsets me.

The decision did not lie in all 20,000 members, but with a single man. Well, that's very Doctor Who, but you can see why I am skittish?

Item two: Geocities. Another website there since the dawn of the web, and a repository for crap and bad graphics. It wasn't good, but it was a historical document of sorts - and for billions of readers and creators, it was their space after all. In 2009, Yahoo decided to get rid of it and that was that. I discovered this through a rather personal blow - the loss of the Genesis Tab Archive, which I had always visited via the site and never made my own copies of. Luckily, much of it was restored by Reocities - a project which has rescued as much as it can. It also has a blow-by-blow account of the week Geocities went down, which starts off as dull techhy stuff as the author configures his sub-etheric-ming-mongs to copy off as much as he can, but ends with real heart-in-mouth sorrow. The appointed hour comes when everything gets switched off, but GeoCities takes time to die and the crawlers keep going for a few hours finding less and less until it just shuts off and there's nothing any more. Reminds me a bit of HAL, and a bit of Miss Evangelista ghosting in Silence in the Library, and I actually get choked up re-reading it. Although the death of information is a touchy spot for me.

This isn't going to stop. More and more things we take for granted will evaporate, and we will never have the power to save them.

Memory part 2
Till now, this has been reasonable substantiated worries. The following is rather more hypothetical, but I still think it has validity.

Because ignoring Geocities, the internet has come to replace the "collective memory" of societies gone past. Now like never before, we can find half-forgotten childhood shows, photos of events we didn't record, transcriptions and records and bootlegs and the rest. This also relies on our belief that it is faithful.

Who decides what is recorded into the collective memory? Wikipedia itself acnowledges that there is likely to be more information on tiny American cities than important figures from abroad. The importance of information is incorrectly weighted on the internet, giving some a higher apparent value. This alone distorts it. A very good example would be any fandom wiki, say the Harry Potter ones, which are huge and meticulous.

It's also not necessarily correct, which is a problem when it is your memory. Much like you find memories of weddings resembling the wedding photos, and remembering being at events you weren't at - we know the memory is fallible and easily moulded. Why rely on a resource so easily moulded? We're talking of the collective memories of an entire generation. For example, I looked up Incredible Games - and it lists all the rounds I know so well, apart from the final round in the penthouse. I don't remember hunting for keys at all - but now I think about it, maybe I do? I can visualise it. But perhaps I think I should? I'd love to find out, but it'd be a bad idea to google "incredible games penthouse"...

My argument is, the internet doesn't just store memory - it also creates it.

Part 3
In a world where internet presence defines identity, what if someone had you deleted? So far, so sci-fi - but think about it.

If someone had the power to, say, remove Lady Gaga from the internet - and one day, someone will - it would effectively be like deleting her. You could certainly destroy a career or too, maybe of smaller people. I am particularly concerned that, in the future, the past could be controlled in this way. They do it in 1984, and the idea of them editing old papers and stuff sounded exessive; but the internet gives the means to very easily. After all, the truth doesn't matter - as long as the mass of people believe it to be the truth.

Advertising
Is there anything wrong with targeted advertising? On principle, if nothing else! Google accounts have a separate opt-out cookie you can download, to stop them using the information you get from their records of your searches; you can also see what other companies have tabs on you.

Everyone is fallible
I actually believe that Google's heart is in the right place. I shouldn't. The internet, a human system, is human imperfect. I do not believe that Google would ever maliciously release my information, but it could if it wanted to. Considering some of the things in my Google accounts, that is a pretty scary if...(PS - how many days do emails count as a "protected communication" under US law? 180. After that, Google has to hand it over to men with warrants. And how long can Google keep information on your searches? Until 2038.)

The "Tracy's face" test
The film Manhattan ends with the comment "sometimes, you've just got to have a little faith in people". And you do have to have faith, or go blind, to use the internet at all. Have faith that Google isn't recording what you search for, for example. Have faith that the security companies don't also create viruses to make their products necessary. Have faith that Facebook's new policy of making everything public by default isn't an attempt to attract traffic. Incidentally, go to account settings, go to privacy settings and then go to "search" - to prevent Facebook making all your personal information searchable via search engines. Shameless. Did you know that your Facebook photo albums are now able to view by everyone by default unless you go change it?

It's a bit like the raunch culture debate. Broadly speaking, is it Feminist or anti-Feminist to be slutty? Now, it is Feminist because it's taking advantage of free choice - but it is anti-Feminist because it encourages objectification, no matter why you're doing it. The answer is tougher than a simple yes or no. Women have the choice to be as tarty as they like, but they only have that choice because of women in the past - and their behaviour today influences the women of the future. It's selfishness verses selfishness, individual vs. crowd. Same with the coming out argument - we are only in a world where revealing or not revealing our sexual identities, whatever they may be, is a choice because people in the past have been open and confront-y about them.

Similarly, on a man-by-man basis it doesn't matter if you vote Charlie the Unicorn five stars on youtube, before commenting on your friend's music poll and updating your online film list. It'll probably never make a difference to you personally. But it's adding to the mass of information (as the two examples add to the mass of prejudice) which is already raked over by major companies. For example, you can sync now your GPS and Googlemaps - and this chap excitedly claims he used it to find an excellent BBQ place he had forgotten -which is a small, selfish decision for self-serving purposes. But it's part of an application which, if I've got this right, tracks your exact movements and then records them.

I am overreacting. There are a billion brilliant things about the web - like politics or religion it can be beneficial or baneful, and prone to the fallibilites of humans who put it to use. But I have to overreact, to make up for the sheer volume of people who are not thinking this through properly. And none of the points I have made are unreasonable, especially Facebook sharing your information.

You are perfectly safe so long as no one, in Google's words, decides to "be evil". In the very unlikely case that someone does want to be evil, though...

I want out.

I'm systematically deleting everything. Things I can't live without, I am creating with myriads of new identities which cannot be linked to one another. If you want to keep reading my blog: email me, and I'll give you the access code before I lock it to outsiders. You know who you are, you beautiful people. Goodbye, internet!

Ever been to the 10 Downing Street petitions site? As a committed liberal-lily-heart, I should be gleefully inking the "open petitions" tab. But alas! How much more interesting is the list of rejected petitions, such as this one:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to just go now.

Submitted by Guido Fawkes of The Gunpowder Plotters

Again with the pointlessly emotive projects.

I'm writing a novel, mostly as a writing exercise, based on something I bought in Camden. I found a card from 1944, inviting "R. A. C. Cooper" to the Royal Air Force Unit dance. The dance took place in the Garrison Theatre, 24th November 1944 at 7.30pm. The back of the card is written in Afrikaans, and copies the same information.

How irresistable! Time for some research.

Garrison Theatre, Diest

I start by sticking Diest into Wikipedia. Turns out it's not in Africa - damn, there goes my Oscar possibilites - but in Flanders, which means the back of the card is in Dutch. Makes sense - November 1944 is post-D-Day, so they could certainly be based in Europe.

R.A.C. Cooper

According to the IWM, the best database of fighting men is actually the Commonweath War Graves Commission. It's like walking over my grave. We visited the CWGC during the Canada debacle. It's reasonable, I thought, that Cooper might be dead - so with a bit of trepidation try their database:

http://www.cwgc.org/search/SearchResults.aspx?surname=cooper&initials=R+A&war=2&yearfrom=1900&yearto=2000&force=Air&nationality=6&send.x=48&send.y=15

I was relieved to note that this casualty report comes from an entire year before the dance. It also occured to me that R.A.C. wasn't necessarily initials - Royal Air Commander? Sounds a bit grand, but the alternative is that he has three initials and the Commanding Officer felt the need to use all three of them. The Roll of veterans that have died since have plenty of Coopers, so I need to do some narrowing down.

409 R.S.U.

The RAF website has a handy site for searching historic squadrons, but it doesn't look like they had the 400s. But Wikipedia turns up a Canadian Squadron which were formed in 1941, that were in France and Germany in 1944. That's more or less the right place. Oh my, if he's a Canadian it would be uncanny. The Canadian RAF site has information on them too - same with Lincolnshire. But the best site I found is this one, which confirms that not only were they in Europe, they were in Belgium - score!

Incidentally, this would be easier if I knew anything about WWII history, so please pitch in if you are a military expert.

If this is the one, then it is a night-fighting squadron - with a rather charming Latin motto "Media Nox Meridies Noster" and badge. Cooper would have been flying the Mosquito MkXIII at this point - Mosquitos are made of plywood, Did You Know - and between June 1944 and May 1945, was the top-scoring night-fighter unit in the RAF.

The card reads "The Commanding Officer of 490 R.S.U. requests...", and this website lists "commanders". If that's the same as Commanding Office - don't laugh, I'm muddying around in someone else's field - then the invite came from W/C J.D. Somerville. I can also scratch the databases of medals and awards from my search, as I'm sure this page would have listed it if he'd won something special. Having snooped around the In Memoram sections of that site, I am increasingly sure that my Cooper survived the war. But there is a "S.D. Cooper" listed in the roll of more recent deaths. I also found a photo of the squadron, although it's from 1956.

With all this in mind, I try the CWGC again - searching Canadians, instead of Brits. No results. No wait, I spelt Cooper wrong. Lots of results. I can rule out everyone who died before November 1944, and checking through the ones who died after none are in the right regiment. He made it! Sweet. I feel better already.

R.A.C. Cooper (II)

I've been bashing my head against a wall for a while now. Understandably, war records aren't on the web. The military are secretive and don't release full lists of who was where. And the archivists don't want to release service information for anyone still living. And until I can find either of those, there's no way I can discover Cooper's first name or service number, and thus get any further.

I have found a book on the squadron, but the only copy amazon has is $150. A military research site gives an address to write to:

RAF Disclosures, Room 221B, Trenchard Hall, RAF Cranwell, Sleaford, Lincs, NG34 8HB

And from wikipedia's page on the Canadian Air Force, it doesn't look like RAC is an abbreviation for a rank. My case disintigrates further as I realise that an invite to the 409 Squadron ball isn't the same as being a member of the squadron. In fact, doesn't suggest the opposite? At the same time, if they were inviting non-military folk I assume they would be quite posh or important, indicating a proper letter instead of a formal card; plus, it's been written on the English side not the Dutch one.

Until now, I'd been hunting around the Imperial War Museum website - but now it was time to hop over to the Musee Canadien de la Guerre. Another place I visited on the Trip That Shall Not Be Named. Totally useless, unless I'm able to physically go and root around in their libraries.

I finally approach our National Archives to see what can be done. They have a page all about what can be searched viz the Air Force. They keep saying, variations on nothing at all. They do have some ways of getting around, however - one is looking up Combat Reports. No luck there! They admit not all are online, but it might be worth visiting in person.

And that's all I can do for now! Any of my military-minded readers have anything to add?



That's not the only thing I picked up. I also have a certificate written to Miss Gladys Rees, thanking her for a year of war-service in the British Red Cross. It's lovelier than the dance card but, because I have deep-rooted misogyny I've yet to stamp out, it seems far less interesting. And the Red Cross won't release their records either.

Collecting ephemera is a nasty little hobby, and one I intend to plunge headfirst at. Like my other collections, it's giving things of no value at all a value. It's not expensive if you don't do it too seriously, and yet the amount of joy you can get from this household crap is considerable. "Ephemera" in collectors terms is anything too mundane to have genuine value - labels, telegrams, old cards, Victorian scraps, bookmarks - the turn-of-the-century equivalent of those ad-cards you get pockets stuffed with after a trip to Camden.

My obsession has been cemented by a local antiquarian book fair which Vapilla and I attended over the weekend. The books were a long way out of anyone's price range; and most of them looked better in context of shelves of gorgeous leather than they would have on my desk at home. But lots of the stalls were appended by ephemera boxes, and diving through them was great fun. I would put photos of my finds up, but I'm lazy. Of course, it wasn't all cheap. I would have got a vintage Tube map, if it had been reasonably priced. And I still rue a heavy packet of old love letters which I had to leave behind - I figured there were probably at least 50 more worthy uses of £50, but I'm regretful all the same.

In the end, I only spent a fiver - two beautiful Victorian Christmas cards, written inside. A very colourful label for a product I'm not sure of, with a Red Injun on a horse. And a postcard, which I'm keeping wrapped in paper and have filed under "questionable taste". I was diving through stacks of sheets when I found it, and exclaimed loudly enough that the bibliophiles around me frowned. Vapilla and I were the youngest there, and though we got talking with some sellers who thought it was cool, others glared at us. One man was very friendly - he specialised in childrens books with gorgeous covers, some of which were real gold leaf. He said that it would be too expensive to produce books of that level of beauty nowadays, and that no one would buy them. Probably true.

But back to the postcard. I think the volume of my cry was justified. It's a yellowing thing, with space for a stamp e.t.c. confirming what it is, but there are no words to date it, place it or -goodness knows - explain it. The front image is all in brown, and - I'm not sure how best to say this, so I'll just say it - it appears to be a genuine photo of a Holocaust victim staring at the camera, and I think trying to eat something. I've no idea where it's from - it's not necessarily from a Nazi camp, could be from any place where the inmates weren't clothed or fed for months on end - but it's bloody nasty. Legs shouldn't bend like that. And I just don't understand who would want to either send or recieve it, and in what context it was produced, and whoever thought it was a good idea - although I'm pretty sure I know what happened to the subject. For 50p, I had to buy it, just to assure myself that it had ever existed. And I don't regret that, although I confess I don't like having it around - even double-wrapped in paper bags at the bottom of one of my junk boxes it makes me a little uncomfortable every time I remember it.

So. Anyone who has ideas about who Cooper might have been, or for how I can come closer to finding him - or who can shed any light on what that thing in the bottom of my wardrobe is - please comment away.

I have begun writing my essay! I have so much to say that I am starting early, because it's going to take some serious refinement to give it some depth and not get lost in the broadness of my enthusiasm. How to cut down? I don't know: give me dissertation time please!

So, I apologise in advance, because from now onwards my one-track mind is going to get even more focused, and I know you're sick of this already

I've a strange thought of using a time machine to go back and findout who Mr Jack really was, only to discover that it really was the very "gentleman with a cape and a top hat" that I am attempting to disprove in my essay. Perhaps finding out that it was Prince Edward, or William Gull, or one of the lunatic ideas of suspects that I sneer at. I mean, I wouldn't because the very attempt to do so would land me in an ethical dilemma that no one should have to face. But it's still a funny thought that maybe, unlikely as it seems, that Hollywood is right.

On the same theme, I had a dream while househunting. I dreamt that my gang were all Victorian gentlemen, and our hunt for a new lodger was actually a cover-story to disguise the fact we were hunting Jack the Ripper. That's the problem with the whole damn affair, the lack of solution. That's the reason why people can't let it rest (I use the word "people" because, obviously, it has no reference at all to myself...). It's like, one minute you've got three children sleeping quietly in a hotel room, then you come back from dinner and you've only got two. She's just gone. That situation is vile beyond human comprehension, but there's a level at which it's not morbid speculation, or fear, or sympathy that keeps us interested - it's frustrated curiosity at the process of turning from a person of three dimensions into a fuzzy police photo which sums up your entire existance. Life's little cliffhangers. As if JJ Abrams and Carlton Cuse were the world's Watchmaker. The absence of closure is a big hole punched through lives, in big ways or little, and it doesn't really go away: Madeline won't be a popular girls' name for a good four decades now. Fiction has ill-prepared us for existance without answers or endings.


Its why Picnic at Hanging Rock is such an enduringly creepy film. 20 girls go on a picnic to Hanging Rock. Nothing much happens, only then three of them don't come back. Nothing much happens. We are given clues about what happened, but never enough to form into a complete picture, and the more we learn the more intangible it gets.

Having studied them all, I want to make a Ripper movie. I keep thinking about how I would do it differently. It would be the background to another narrative - no detectives, no suspects, no promise of a solution. It would be about fear. I might focus on one murder, or maybe two, and instead of showing murders, my characters would spend their final scene in the midst of their daily life. And when, say, she left her last recorded conversation the camera would linger on her back as she walked away for as long as I could handle, with the rest of life going on oblivious in the foreground. And just vanish. In fact, exactly like Picnic at Hanging Rock; I just feel I should add a film to this field which isn't obsessed with fog and slippery cobbles. I am increasingly convinced that there has never been a good Jack the Ripper film. Either as cinema, or as a fair representation of what happened.

In a way, I do regret choosing such an emotive subject to write about - I've always liked the idea of academia and art as essentially cold and amoral, even while I have never believed it. But I didn't know it would ultimately have this effect on me when I began looking into it as an offshoot of my Doctor Who reading last year. I suppose I should have guessed, though, that in setting out to write an essay about how strangely distorted and fictionalised a period of history is, that there be historical realities underneath. I mean, last year London was my oyster*; and then last autumn, you couldn't have dragged me to Whitechapel for anything; and now - can you believe this? - I think it is important for me to actually go and pay visits and be Respectful, because after all this studying fake versions, I want something to make it real to me again. Short of looking at the post-mortem photography.

Who are you, and what have you done with my Emily?! This doesn't even sound like me.

*have I just inadvertantly worked out why Oyster cards are named after shellfish?