ME: Today, I learnt that [Nick] has made our set-up so complicated that I literally cannot watch TV or a DVD unless he’s in the house.
NICK: But it’s actually less complex than before! … It’s just harder to turn the TV on.

Oh, Lifeline Bookfest. How I look forward to you every year. Well, twice a year, actually. And yet … and yet.

This year, I found the January sales just a wee bit disappointing. I suspect a big part of that was sheer exhaustion: my first full week (which isn’t a full week, for me) back at work after the Christmas season and seasonal chest infection, and I woke up with a splitting headache. So I wasn’t in a truly pro-Bookfest state of mind.

They’d also made what was, to me, a fairly significant change in the structure. The Bookfest has three sections: high quality, priced, and unpriced. Often, the unpriced section is fascinating: I have, in the past, found fabulous girls’ boarding-school stories there, because they’re not usually the types of the books that attract a high price tag. But the books in that section are also usually a bit grubby and often in poor condition. So, in recent years, I’ve stuck to the priced section while Nick winnows his way through the high-quality section.

And, as a cursory glance through my past posts will show, I tend to focus my attention on the children’s books, and then have a quick run through literature and paperback fiction.

(I only look at sci-fi and fantasy if I fancy being elbowed repeatedly.)

But this year, they’d stripped all the children’s books out of the priced section: they were only stacked in the high-quality and unpriced sections.

I should, of course, have gone straight to the high-quality section once I realised that, but I spent some dispiriting time in the unpriced section before I realised I really wasn’t going to find anything I could be bothered queuing up for. Then I went through the high-quality section.

As a result, I bought much less than I usually would.

I also resisted the urge to buy no fewer than three different versions of the Robin Hood stories, because they were all annoying in different ways. (Especially Roger Lancelyn Green’s version, in which Marian explained to her father that, yes, she considered herself promised to Robin and she was planning on going to live with him in Sherwood if her father continued to be a prat, but that she intended to remain Maid Marian until Robin’s lands and title were restored, which led me to assume that Marian was marrying Robin for the money and prestige. I don’t want to think that of Marian!)

As usual, the books are all children’s and young-adult fantasy, not least because I was exhausted by this point and couldn’t be bothered looking at the literature tables:

I really must get around to actually reading those Carole Wilkinson books at some point: I own three now (fortuitously, they’re the first three in the series, which is better luck than I usually manage), so I really do’t have any further excuse.

I’m also quite pleased about that Margaret Mahy: I’ll happily read pretty much anything by Mahy, and this one (“In a time not far from our own, a colourful group of travellers brave the twisting, tricksy landscape of the Remaking, after Chaos ripped the world apart. They are the magicians, clowns, trapeze artists and musicians of Maddigan’s Fantasia, healing the injured land with their gifts of wonder and laughter”) sounds delightful.

I’m also rather ashamed that I didn’t know it was based on a television series (whose concept Mahy developed), especially since spec-fic film and television is actually the focus of my current research.

Bad, bad researcher.

I have a sneaking memory, somewhere in the back of my head, that tells me I’d come across the Patrick Rothfuss somewhere before (an online review, or Amazon entry, or some such) and decided it didn’t appeal to me. But that vague memory only surfaced after I’d read the back, decided it did appeal to me, and bought it. I’m stuck with deciding for myself now, I suppose.

Still, to balance that, there’s always the Ursula Le Guin at the bottom, about a world in which reading, writing, and scholarship are punishable by death. Let’s face it: you can’t really go wrong with Ursula Le Guin.

This pretty much sums up my relationship:

NICK: You can giving your lecture on the word “hippopotamus” now. I’m really just being silly.
ME: And this is how I cope with you being silly. I go into lecture mode.
NICK: See? It calms you down and I learn something.
ME: Calms me down? What do you mean, calms me down?
NICK: Well, you’re obviously quite irritated.
ME: You think this is me being irritated?
NICK: I mean, you’re obviously quite irritated now.
ME: Well, of course I’m bloody well irritated now!

ME: Why is your computer screen yellow?
NICK: It’s a program. It analyses the light in the room and matches your computer screen to it. So you don’t go to bed after staring at the screen for hours and have sore eyes.
ME: How interesting. Of course, now you have a girlfriend, you don’t have to stare at your computer screen for hours before going to bed.
NICK: Yeah!
ME: Of course, you’ve had a girlfriend for eleven years and that’s never occurred to you yet.
NICK: I love you?
ME: Of course you do, sweetheart. Just not as much as you love your computer.
(Pause)
ME: You can deny that any time.
(Pause)
ME: Any time.
(Pause)
ME: Absolutely any time you like.
NICK (turning from the computer): Sorry, were you saying something? I wasn’t paying attention.

Discussing finally watching season three of Slings and Arrows:

ME: But it doesn’t have either Rachel McAdams or Joanne Kelly in it. I need another cute Canadian girl!
NICK: I know exactly how you feel.

ME: I have a headache.
NICK: Do you want to take something for it?
ME: No.
NICK: Do you want to watch Murray Gold play “I Am The Doctor” on his piano on YouTube?
ME: No.
(Pause)
ME: Could you stop tapping the Doctor’s theme out on my arm, please?
NICK: Sorry.

MY FATHER: My first new years’ resolution is to expand my repertoire of menus.
ME: Can you say “repertoire of menus”?
MY FATHER: I just did.
ME: That’s not really the point, though.
MY MOTHER: I don’t think you can.
MY FATHER: It’s just like saying “menu repertoire”.
MY MOTHER: No, it isn’t. You’re using “menu” as an adjective.
ME: When?
MY MOTHER: In “menu repertoire”.
ME: Oh yes.
MY MOTHER: But if you say “repertoire of menus”, you’re using two nouns. It’s repetitive.
MY FATHER: It’s not.
MY MOTHER: Well, it’s a bit clumsy.
ME: I think you mean “recipes”, anyway.
MY FATHER: It doesn’t really matter.
ME: So, in the new year, you’re expanding your repertoire?
MY FATHER: My repertoire of menus, yes.

Watching George Gently with my parents:

MY FATHER: That’s the kiss of death!
ME: Nah.
MY FATHER: It is.
ME: T’isn’t. The kiss of death is on the lips.
MY FATHER: Are you sure?
ME: Every kiss of death I’ve ever seen has been on the lips.
MY FATHER: That kiss of death my old boss gave your mother wasn’t on the lips.
ME: Well, your old boss wasn’t in the Mafia.
MY FATHER: So you reckon the chicken-industry kiss of death is different?
ME: Yeah, the chicken-industry kiss of death is probably on the cheek.

Watching Wallander with my parents:

MY FATHER: So did Svedberg kill himself?
ME: Well, it was a pistol shot from three metres away, so …
MY MOTHER: Unless he had rubber arms.
ME: Or it was a complicated plot to make it look like a suicide. Possibly involving a complex system of counterweights.
MY FATHER: A simple “yes” or “no” would have sufficed.

Christmas Eve:

Christmas Day:

Visiting the Archibald Prize exhibition at the Casula Powerhouse:

Chest infection:

So here’s experiment one in new ways to talk about Doctor Who. I’m still calling it a live-blogging, but to be honest, there’s not much live about this one. So, in addition to any talk about the actual episode, I’m also interested in opinions about how this new model works for you. I’m not committed to it myself, so I’ll still try some other experiments with the new season.

But for now, on to “The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe”.

This live-blogging brought to you by the sound of a small dog voluptuously chewing his own foot and about to be spoken to firmly.

Synopsis

The Doctor, having foolishly blown up a spaceship without ensuring that he had ready access to the TARDIS, finds himself plummeting to Earth in a spacesuit, which he somewhat improbably manages to climb into while free-falling from orbit. This sparks a spirited debate in the living room about why this doesn’t immediately smoosh him when his fourth regeneration dies after a sixty-foot fall from a radio telescope, but it turns out the spacesuit is magic. He manages to find himself a nice woman who’s an appalling driver (cue cliche number one), who takes him back to his TARDIS, which is on Earth, despite the fact that he just blew up a spaceship in orbit while he was still on said spaceship, and despite the fact that he couldn’t possibly have controlled his free-fall from orbit enough to land within driving distance of the TARDIS.

Three years later, in 1941, the poor woman finds herself widowed when her husband is lost in his bomber over the English Channel. This sparks spirited debate number two, as my parents argue over whether or not he’s a bit old for military service, especially before they became desperate for men, and especially in 1941, before the bombers were called into really heavy service in Europe. Either way, he’s dead. And she chooses not to tell her children, but instead to make a wish (as the Doctor told her to do if she needed him) and to take the children to stay with their mad uncle.

Surprising no one, the mad uncle is missing, but the Doctor is posing as his caretaker, and has set the house up as a Christmas wonderland for the children. One thing he’s provided is a dimensional portal of some sort, disguised as a Christmas present.

I didn’t receive a single dimensional portal for Christmas this year.

Naturally, a small child crawls through the portal too early and, less naturally, finds himself in a winter wonderland of sentient trees. Soon enough, everyone ends up following him, only to find that the forest is about to be melted down (by Bill Bailey, of all people) by acid rain, and the trees are trying to evacuate their life force. The Doctor’s too “weak” to transport them in his mind, as is young Cyril. His sister Lily is “strong” but not strong enough. Luckily, their mother is sufficiently strong, apparently because she’s a mother (cue cliche number two). Seemingly, “weak” and “strong” are synonyms, in the language of these sentient trees, for “male” and “female”, even though I’m just going to go out on a limb (see what I did there) and state categorically that trees don’t see the world that way.

Either way, she manages to fly a giant golfball through the time vortex with the power of her mind.

Sadly, during this process, she inadvertently lets the children know that their father is dead. Luckily, they don’t have much of a chance to grieve for him, because she manages to travel back in time to the moment when his plane was lost, and draw him with her to Great Uncle Digby’s house. Then the Doctor heads off to have Christmas dinner with Amy and Rory.

What didn’t work for me in this episode

The Narnia angle. Let’s be honest: there really wasn’t one. The wardrobe wasn’t a wardrobe at all. Okay, there was this bit:

LILY: Why have you got a phone box in your room?
DOCTOR: It’s not a phone box. It’s my … wardrobe. I’ve just painted it to look like a phone box.

But that’s really the only attempt they’ve made to shoe-horn a Narnia theme into the episode. And while I admit I like the acknowledgement that the TARDIS is the spiritual descendant of that wardrobe the Pevensie children climbed into, I was expecting something a little closer to the original text, especially given last year’s rather effective Christmas Carol redux.

(I really don’t consider a World War II timeline and a winter wonderland setting to be intrinsically Narnian.)

The dimensional portal itself was nicely done, but I’m still not sure why the episode couldn’t have either used an actual wardrobe, had a stronger Narnia angle, or have dropped the (ultimately illusory) Narnia theme altogether.

The characterisation also didn’t work much for me. The children rather defaulted to cliches, and I couldn’t really feel much for the grieving widow (despite Claire Skinner being lovely), since we didn’t get much sense of her life with or love for her husband: we barely met him before he was dead, and everything else about their relationship was retrospective.

In fact, their relationship lead to this conversation:

MADGE: He said he’d keep on following me until I married him.
MY FATHER: Isn’t that called stalking?
NICK: Not in the 1920s.

Claire Skinner did really sell her heartbreak in that scene, albeit with a bit too much gasping for my liking, but without any narrative grounding up to that point, I wasn’t really committed to it.

And, on a similar note, I found the gender politics a little odd in this episode. Doctor Who has always been a rich source of discussion about gender politics (cue reference to easily sprained ankles here, or even to Helen Mirren saying she wants to be the Doctor, not his sidekick), but this episode seemed to default rather to unreconstructed and monolithic categories (women = strong and men = weak, for example), which just reinforced my sense that the story floated along on a fairly shallow pool of story-telling cliches.

What worked for me

Disclaimer: I’m not a good target for Christmas specials, because schmaltz tends to make me groan rather than make me feel happy about the universe and my place in it.

Not a whole lot worked for me in this episode, to be honest. As you might have gathered from the synopsis, I thought the plot was a wee bit cliched, as well as being rather thin and a little bit silly in places.

I admit to being delighted by the idea that Amy was attacking carollers with a water pistol. I can sympathise with that. I also did like the Doctor’s slightly stunned realisation that he was crying at the end, but that’s exclusively down to Matt Smith, whom I adore.

ME: So what did we like about this?
NICK: Oh, the first twenty minutes or so. Very much. Once it gets to the snow planet, I think it loses some complexity. I mean, there’s a mystery there, but it’s not the most exciting they’ve ever done.

That about sums this up for me. It was rather a thin episode, and some points that were picked up weren’t explored in any real detail or even with a strong degree of consistency. For example, why were the trees growing Christmas baubles? Why didn’t all the baubles hatch? Why were there two sentient wooden giants but every other life-form on the planet was a Christmas trees? Why didn’t the Doctor know that these sentient life-forms were being harvested for fuel? Why wasn’t he more outraged about that?

NICK: It was certainly visually very striking throughout. Um …

That about sums it up for me, too. It was no “End of Time”, of course, but neither was it “Blink” or “Vincent and the Doctor”.

Merry Christmas, lovely readers.

A brief update, for your delectation and elucidation.

I mentioned last year that I was finding the process of live-blogging rather heavy going, after all these years. I don’t want to abandon the process, but I do need to streamline it or shift it in some fashion, because I find I simply can’t keep up with it any more.

Tonight, I’m going to trial one method of streamlining the live-blogging. If it doesn’t work for you, let me know in the comments, and I’ll trial something else.

So tonight’s live-blogging won’t be going up live, as it used to. Instead, it’ll be up and available for comment within twenty-four hours. I’ll see if giving myself a bit of time to think about the episode revitalises the process for both me and for you.

After giving Nick the condensed milk can from which to eat the scrapings, as I make rumballs:

ME: I saved the can for you.
NICK: You’re the best.
ME: I know. Also? You’ll die of a heart attack.
NICK: Stop saying that!
ME: It’s all right for me. I’ll get me a hot new man.
NICK: If you can catch him, he’s all yours.

Fifteen minutes later, he was still saying, “I don’t know what you thought was so objectionable about that comment!”

A fortnight ago, on both Twitter and Facebook, I went completely Christmas mad, insisting on updating everyone every five minutes about my seemingly futile attempts to find napkins, Christmas crackers, and place mats that matched the fabulous purple Indian tablecloth and lime-green beaded coasters that my mother-in-law had bought me for my birthday.

Because these were a gift and because the Christmas dinner was for that side of the family (Nick’s immediate family), I wanted to make the tablecloth and coasters the basis of the dinner table, which necessitated (in my mind, at least), a purple and green colour scheme that was not, perhaps, in keeping with a traditional Christmas table.

But seemingly, purple and lime green were not popular Christmas colours this year. I scoured dozens of shops looking for matching crackers and napkins, getting increasingly frustrated. I was also attempting to find beer glasses that would take an entire bottle of beer, which was even more frustrating.

I worry quite often about being an unsatisfactory daughter-in-law, and Christmas dinner (since it’s the only Christmas dinner that Nick’s entire family attends) tips me right over into the kind of domestic insanity that leads to me vacuuming the living-room floor with that little brush you use to do the upholstery.

Luckily, since the advent of social networking, there’s an outlet for such things. So any and all of you who also follow me on Twitter or are a Facebook friend suffered update after update about my increasingly downward spiral into full-blown Christmas psychosis.

In the end, we won at Christmas, which is the main thing. But it seems to me you might like to have some reward for your patience. And if looking at pictures of a garishly decorated Christmas table counts as a reward, today is your lucky day!

(You might notice that I ended up panicking about the owl-themed silver crackers with purple and lime-green accents that I’d eventually settled on, and bought an additional set of purple and green crackers at Woolworths that very morning, when I was meant to be buying fresh fruit, wine, and flowers. So everyone got two crackers, and I spent an hour the next day picking up bits of cardboard from my living-room carpet. On the upside, the Woolworths crackers had the best paper hats ever.)

Sadly, hosting eight people for dinner in a six-room cottage with no dining room necessitates shoving the furniture anywhere it’ll go, so you can put two tables together right in the middle of the living room. Luckily, tinsel tends to smooth over any unorthodox seating arrangements.

Just to make everything even more Christmassy, I also insisted—much to Nick’s initial annoyance—in buying additional baubles and garlands, and sticking them to all the bookcases.

After all, who says GI Joe, Space Marines, and Decepticons don’t also want to celebrate Christmas?

(Actually, maybe not the Space Marines. The God Emperor probably doesn’t like Christmas. Then again, I don’t know his life.)

Just in case I don’t update again before the full madness of actual Christmas, Merry Christmas, lovely readers! See you all for the Doctor Who Christmas special!

ME: Remember how we said you weren’t going to play Skyrim all day?
NICK: What will be the consequences if I do?
ME: A total cessation of all romantic entanglement.
NICK: That doesn’t sound good at all!
ME: It’ll be good for me. I can get me a hot new man.
NICK: You mean a brand new sucker.
ME: I beg your pardon?
NICK: It’s a song! I’m quoting!