NICK: I’m going to eat a chocolate bunny and play video games.
ME: We don’t have any chocolate bunnies.
NICK: “Chocolate bunny” is more of a metaphor.
ME: No, it’s not.
NICK: Bugger. Well, I’ll just have to have something else.
ME: You can have a chocolate egg. We have chocolate eggs coming out the wazoo. And that is a metaphor.

Checking out the blisters where Nick burnt himself with a splatter of hot oil:

NICK: And there was a packet of tomatoes next to the stove, and I noticed the packaging had been burnt through by splatter.
ME: Well, that’s why you shouldn’t cook without a shirt on. Also, your pans are too hot.
NICK: My what?
ME: Pans.
NICK: Oh, pans. I thought you said my pants were too hot.
ME: No, your pants aren’t too hot.
NICK: Really? Oh.
ME (sighing): They’re exactly hot enough.
NICK: Woohoo!

Debating the lack of coffee:

ME: Whose fault was that, then? Hmm?
NICK: Society.
ME: The society of Nick.
NICK: Well, that is my definition of society, yes.

(Remember when I got distracted by the fact that King Arthur’s spear was called “Ron,” while his sword and shield had cool names such as “Excalibur” and “Pridwen”? You don’t remember that? Well, this is a great deal like that time. I’m warning you for your own good.)

I’ve actually been researching Alabama in the 1930s today, for work on a study guide on To Kill a Mockingbird, and that’s been fascinating enough.

But in the course of my wandering across the Internet—actually, while I was trying to track down an authoritative source on the history of “boy” as a derogatory term for an African-American man—I found out that Prince Rupert of the Rhine had a notorious white hunting poodle who was said to be imbued with magical powers.

No, it’s true.

The poodle, who was called Boye, was given to Rupert when he was imprisoned during the Thirty Years’ War, to keep him company. After that, he accompanied Rupert during the English Civil War, or at least from 1642 to 1644, when he was killed at the Battle of Marston Moor.

Rupert, who was a Royalist, featured heavily (though not positively) in Parliamentarian propaganda, in which Boye was featured as a witch’s familiar or as the Devil in the form of, well, a white poodle.

In Royalist parodies of the Parliamentarian propaganda, Boye was said to be a “Lapland lady” in disguise as a white poodle. It’s certainly more plausible that a woman from a region that exists largely within the Arctic Circle would choose the form of a poodle than it is plausible for the Devil to do, since he’s traditionally from more temperate climes. (I’m thinking here of how we have to shave our poodle several times a summer: I think the Devil would find that an affront to his dignity. If he has any.)

Boye was said to be invulnerable to harm, as well as possessing the ability to find treasure, to catch bullets in his mouth, and to prophesy.

And, in answer to a brief but spirited debate on Twitter, I think it’s probable that Boye could make a damn fine cup of coffee.

Only one thing bothers me about Prince Rupert of the Rhine’s magical white poodle: why is he not the hero of his own comic book?

(What follows contains what you might call mild spoilers, if you’ve seen no photographs of the new companion. It contains no discussion whatsoever of the plot of the forthcoming episode, but does briefly discuss the character’s back story—which has already been discussed extensively online.)

Nick—as those of you who follow him on Twitter will already know—found this brief article in MX Brisbane, a free street newspaper, a copy of which he picked up off the bus seat next to him:

It’s all right: you take the time to wipe whatever you were just drinking off the computer screen. I can wait.

The “slut” in question is Amy Pond, the new companion. She’s played, as you can see from the photograph, by a beautiful redhead, whose Scottish accent, I’m reliably informed by people of my acquaintance, makes her even sexier.

Amy Pond is, by profession, a kissogram, which led to the following discussion with Nick.

ME: So she’s a tall, gorgeous woman who works on—no, you wouldn’t even call that the fringes of the sex industry.
NICK: Affection industry at best, I’d have thought.

Yes, she spends part of the first episode in a policewoman’s outfit. Yes, that policewoman’s outfit has a mini-skirt. Wearing a mini-skirt somehow qualifies you for the pejorative term “slut,” now, does it? What is this, Derby Day at Flemington race course in 1965?

Or maybe it’s the fact that she’s a kissogram that qualifies her for this, let’s face it, grotesquely exaggerated and offensive insult. I don’t see why, but then I didn’t decide to write an article called “Who is the slut?”

According to this article, there’ve been a “flood of complaints”. Too much to expect that they cite any? Oh, yes. But it seems the real complaint is from The Daily Mail‘s Allison Pearson, who in an article here, says

Since when was Doctor Who’s assistant supposed to be sexy? They’re meant to be one of the boys, running around saving distant worlds. Is it too much to ask that family TV remains the one universe yet to be invaded by nuts magazine?

As the commenters on this article astutely point out, not only have there been plenty of sexy companions in the past (if Jo wasn’t sexy, why did Terry Walsh spend so much time climbing ladders in mini skirts? And what about Nyssa? Peri and her low-cut tops? Mary Tamm as Romana? Leela? Liz Shaw, whom Nick still idolises?), but if the companions were meant to be “one of the boys,” then why did they scream so much and sprain their ankles?

As Nick says, MX Brisbane has taken an article from The Daily Mail and made it nastier. That itself is an achievement, I suppose.

Oh, and the “critic” whom they cite as saying “They’ve completely demeaned Doctor Who by replacing good stories with slutty girls”? You can find the whole ugly comment, edited for the piece above, quoted here, in a forum discussion that rightly questions how the Daily Mail managed to make an entire news story out of a couple of anonymous comments on an online forum.

Anonymous comments do not a critic make, MX.

But it doesn’t matter where the “flood of complaints” vaguely referenced in the article come from. It doesn’t matter if some viewers think wearing a mini-skirt (with, I might add, an enormous jumper) is analogous to the type of outfits normally adopted while posing for a lad’s mag. It really doesn’t.

What matters is that the writer of this article thought “Who is the slut?” is an appropriate way of introducing the fact that the new companion has pretty legs and wears short skirts.

I would suggest what I think is an appropriate rebuttal to that attitude, but I’m sure you’ve all reached the same conclusion.

And to think some people say we don’t need feminism any more, because women have already gained equality. I would weep, but I think I’ll just have another drink instead.

DUNGEON MASTER: You look through the door and see a scene torn from the abyss. Stone platforms rise from a lake of blood.
PARTY OF ADVENTURERS: Ewww!

Then I fell in the lake of blood. Hands up who saw that coming?

At least, if I had travelled back in time, bought a Polaroid camera, photographed my home (which, for the purposes of this argument, is furnished exactly the same way in the 1960s as it is in the twenty-first century), and then left the Polaroids in an album for forty years, I imagine they’d look quite like this now.

Especially if the album got damp at some point.

In fact, I was just playing with Hipstamatic on the iPhone, but you have to admit the original story was much more interesting than the truth.