ME: On a scale of one to ten, how much like a pineapple do I look?
NICK: Zero.
ME: Really?
NICK: You look fine.
ME: You know I’m talking about my hair, right? Because you seem to be looking at my shoes.

NICK: Sweet!
ME: What now?
NICK: I just levelled up!
ME: Oh, good. Now my life is complete.
NICK: Is it? Oh dear.
ME: Well, I assume you now have special powers with which you can make my life easier.
NICK: I may have some, yes.
ME: Such as?
NICK: Well, nothing, really.

NICK: A watched pot never boils.
ME: Yes, it does. It’s a simple chemical reaction.
NICK: It’s a physical reaction. There’s no chemistry involved.
ME: Physical. Chemical. Whatever.
MY FATHER: It’s a physical reaction. Nothing to do with chemistry.
ME: Be quiet. Both of you. My point is that a watched pot will boil as long as heat is applied.
MY FATHER: Not necessarily.
ME: As long as sufficient heat is applied. As long as sufficient heat is applied, a watched pot will boil.
MY FATHER: Oh, yes.
NICK: Well, as long as you’re at sea level.
ME: Go to hell. Seriously.

ME: Honey, you should try not to tread on your Transformers quilt. It’s getting a bit old for that.
NICK: It’s been a faithful man-servant.
ME: That quilt is a faithful man-servant?
NICK: Yes.
ME: For the past three months, I’ve been sleeping under a faithful man-servant?
NICK: Well, when in Rome …
ME: We’re not in Rome.
NICK: True. I can’t really back that up.

ME: I want my parcel to arrive!
NICK: I know! It should be soon.
ME: You say that, but it could be any time.
NICK: Yes, but it’s more likely than not to be soon. This morning, anyway.
ME: You don’t know that. You’re never home for deliveries.
NICK: I know, but I track them on my phone!

I’ve been debating about whether or not to write this blog post, for a variety of reasons.

Partly because this is yet another in my intermittent series of “why I haven’t blogged lately” posts, and I’m sure there’s a saturation point to be reached in those.

But more than that, I just haven’t been sure I’ve wanted to talk about why I haven’t been blogging.

Don’t worry: it’s not as bad as I just made it sound. Though each time I’ve said to someone in person, “I should tell you this, but I don’t want to talk about it”, they say, “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

I’m not pregnant.

But I have quit smoking.

Big deal, right? I’ve done that before, and never successfully. But this time, it’s a bit different:

That’s the number of days since I last had a cigarette. Sort of: I’m over onto the next leaf of the calendar now. (And yes: that’s a Doctor Who calendar with a Dungeons & Dragons character sheet stuck under it, but that can’t come as a shock.)

So: three weeks. Nearly. Nearly three weeks.

And if I’d known that I’d feel this awful, I don’t think I could have ever done it, even though it was entirely my choice.

Luckily, and against all advice, I quit at a moment when I was insanely busy. So what with the nearly three-hundred first years whose final exams I had to either mark or moderate, the final grades for those students, and the Animal Farm manuscript (which came back from the structural edit right at the moment the exam was being sat), it wasn’t until last Thursday that I had a moment to notice the symptoms.

Oh, I noticed that I was a bit short-tempered and craving cigarettes. But I had no idea what a plethora of symptoms the quitting process would bring.

I can’t regulate my body temperature, so I’m either flushed or shaking uncontrollably, regardless of what I’m wearing or what the ambient temperature is.

Because I can’t control my body temperature, I can’t sleep through the night. I wake up boiling hot, but can’t throw off the bed clothes because it’s 3 am and freezing. So I can’t get back to sleep, and I lie there and fret.

And fretting has a whole new meaning, since quitting smoking messes with your adrenaline and cortisol levels, so my anxiety levels are through the roof, and I can’t control them.

My appetite has changed radically, and not in the direction I intended: I was expecting to be eating more, but instead I can force myself to eat during the day, but can’t stomach anything after about 6pm.

(Of course, it’s not as though missing a few meals would do me any harm. Quite the contrary.)

And—and this is the relevant one—I can’t concentrate.

I can’t concentrate on anything.

I can’t even read. After about half a page, I just can’t concentrate any more, even if it’s a book I’ve read before.

Can you imagine what not being able to read does to someone like me? Not to mention that I certainly can’t work, when I can’t even re-read a Charlaine Harris novel.

And one of the casualties of not being able to concentrate on anything for more than about five minutes at a time is this blog.

Before this blog post starts to sound like a particularly dangerous public-service announcement, I should say that I don’t regret quitting and I have no intention of starting again. My breathing is easier, even now. And my skin is brighter, too, even though I do look like a ghost. I’m sure it’s only going to get easier from this point.

It can’t get harder.

At least, I hope not.

But until I can get my brain (and body) back under control, I don’t think the blog will be updated as often as I like.

As I said to Nick, it’s like living at high altitude for fifteen years, and then coming down into an oxygen-rich environment. I just have to stop and sit down until my head stops spinning.

ME: Is this Mental As Anything?
NICK: Yep.
ME: Didn’t we once accidentally see them play in Queen Street Mall?
NICK: Did we?
ME: Yeah. But we didn’t hang around.
NICK: I’ve always regretted that. I like Mental As Anything.
ME: How can you have always regretted it? You didn’t even remember it until I reminded you just now.
NICK: It was a sudden explosive regret.
ME: Is that even possible?
NICK: You don’t know it’s not.

ME: Did I just hear the sound of someone putting their headphones on to block out the sound of their girlfriend talking?
NICK: Who? No! I’ve had them on for a while! Before you started talking! And I can still hear you!
ME: You’re protesting too much, dear.
NICK: What? Protesting too much! Well, I never! I don’t know what you mean!

ME: I don’t feel I’m really getting the support here that I need.
NICK: Sorry, honey. I need to respond to something on the Internet. Someone is wrong on it.

A week! An entire week without updating you about my lovely, lovely Lifeline BookFest purchases! what an unforgivably slack blogger I am.

But, end of semester being what it is, these have just been piled up on a corner of my desk (on top of two books about George Orwell, a glossary of literary terms, two notebooks, an exam, two draft journal articles, and a critical work on Victorian thing theory) for a week, waiting for me to find the time to photograph them.

The collection this time is, as it’s been for a while, rather heavy on the young-adult speculative fiction:

Well, excluding the Kurt Vonnegut essays, of course.

The Sisters Grimm book on the top there I bought because it’s the first volume and I already own volumes two and three. I haven’t read them, of course, but I do own them.

And another Diana Wynne Jones that I don’t already have! Not as successful as January’s sale in that respect, but, hey: a new Diana Wynne Jones is a new Diana Wynne Jones.

The book on the bottom is the real excitement in this pile, though:

Admittedly, I already own at least two other copies of the Brothers Grimm household tales: one a complete set and one a Victorian translation with only the more popular tales in it. But neither of them is a version of the household tales illustrated by Mervyn Peake.

I couldn’t have turned that down.

The other pile is also young-adult speculative-fiction heavy:

I’m keen on reading that Gail Carson Levine (even if it is prominently marked “Ages 9-12”), because I’ve a bit of a soft spot for her after reading Ella Enchanted and realising it wasn’t at all what I expected. She’s not in the Diana Wynne Jones camp for me, though: I’m not interested in all Levine’s books, just the odd one that takes my fancy.

The real joy here, though—the single best find of the entire sale, one that would have made the trip worthwhile even if I’d bought nothing else—is on the top of the pile:

No, not the Doctor Who short stories. Believe it or not, I bought those for research purposes.

No, really.

No, honest: I’m writing a journal article.

No, it’s the George MacDonald short fantasy fiction. I mean, how utterly, utterly beautiful are these?

They’re ’80s reprints, but they’re absolutely gorgeous.

And, what’s more, they’re an entire box full of MacDonald’s fantasy. Definitely and completely worth getting up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday and trawling through millions of books before breakfast.

NICK: I fancy doing one of those rolled chicken roasts tonight.
ME: And I fancy becoming queen of all the monkeys, but that’s not going to happen either.
NICK: Mine still seems quite probable.

In this cold little side dimension in which Doctor Who doesn’t clash with a birthday party, Nick and I and our entire peanut gallery are all set to live-blog the last episode of Doctor Who for this mini-season.

Heather’s doing an Izzy Stradlin-style guitar solo at the moment, without the guitar. But we’ll start, shall we?

HEATHER: Are we going to have that really [redacted] intro? Because I hate that.

Previously, Amy is not Amy. That’s really the only important thing.

Elsewhere, at Demon’s Run, Amy has an adorable baby girl, called Melody Pond. She tells Melody that this isn’t a time for lies.

HEATHER: It’s a time for breastfeeding.

Amy tells Melody to be very very brave, but not as brave as they’ll need to be, because there’s someone coming.

Elsewhere, the Cybermen are not happy.

AMY: There’s a man who’s never going to let us down. And not even an army can get in his way.

But an army comes for Melody right then.

The Cybermen are still not happy.

AMY: He’s the last of his kind. He looks young, but he’s lived for hundreds and hundreds of years. And whereever they take you, Melody, however scared you are, I promise you, you won’t ever be alone. Because this man is your father. He has a name, but the people of our world know him better as the Last Centurion.

Rory confronts the Cybermen, saying he has a message from the Doctor and a question from him.

The question?

RORY: Where is my wife?

The Cybermen want to know what the Doctor’s message is, and some cyber-ships blow up.

RORY: Do you want me to repeat the question?
HEATHER: He’s a little bit sexy when he does that.
ME: So it’s not just me!
HEATHER: Oh no. Lesbian peanut gallery gives the thumbs up to Rory.

Elsewhere, two members of the waiting army are praising the Doctor and wondering about the creepy headless monks. A cute girl Marine from the Gamma forests can explain that, though. Apparently, the monks believe the head is the seat of doubt and the heart is the seat of faith, so they follow their hearts. That’s all “headless” means.

The Marines all introduce themselves.

MARINE: We’re the thin-fat, gay-married Anglican Marines. Why would we need names as well?

The fat Marine has to head off for his conversion training with the monks, while the thin Marine asks how the Gamma-girl Marine knew the Doctor already.

FAT MARINE: What’s in the little boxes?

The boxes are about the right side for a head.

MICHELLE: No!
HEATHER: He’s gay, honey. He has to die.
MICHELLE: The gay ones always die.

Elsewhere (again), we’re in Victorian London, where someone has just killed Jack the Ripper.

MAID: How did you find him?
SILURIAN: Stringy. But tasty all the same. I won’t be needing dinner.

Silurian-Victorian female detective? Awesome.

Of course, she has a TARDIS in her drawing room, which doesn’t come as the shock to her it would be to me. Then again, I don’t have a drawing room.

Elsewhere elsewhere, there’s a Sontaran nurse (a nurse? Really?) helping in the American Revolutionary War of the future.

Or something.

Apparently, his working as a nurse is a penance imposed by the Doctor. So when the TARDIS arrives, he leaves happily.

In Stormcage, River is coming back to her cell, in what looks like Victorian dress. She tells them to turn off the alarm, because she’s breaking back in. And then Rory turns up.

River says it’s her birthday, and the Doctor has taken her ice-skating on the Thames in 1814. (But that’s not particularly Regency dress. Looks like they raided the Charles Dickens adaptation wardrobe again.)

Rory says he’s come from the Doctor, too.

RIVER: Yes, but from a different point in time.
RORY: Unless there’s two of them.
RIVER: No, that’s a whole different birthday.

Rory wants River to come with him, but she says she can’t. She can’t be with the Doctor at the battle of Demon’s Run until the very end, because this is the day he finds out who she really is.

MICHELLE: Who is she?

Elsewhere elsewhere elsewhere, the blue chappie who sold River Song her time-wrist-thingy is closing up business, knowing what’s coming. The eye-patch woman says that they’ve waited a month and the Doctor’s done nothing. But the blue chappie says that the Doctor’s been calling in favours. And god help them. And the people who owe the Doctor favours.

He asks if they know why their asteroid is called Demon’s Run.

BLUE CHAPPIE: A very old saying. The oldest. “Demons run when a good man goes to war.”

And then the Doctor comes for the blue chappie, despite his protests.

The cynical army chappie whose name I don’t know is rousing his troops, while Amy watches from her prison window. As she watches, the Gamma-girl Marine comes in. She should be at the parade, but she’s brought Amy a prayer leaf, on which she’s embroidered Melody’s name.

AMY: Can I borrow your gun?
GIRL MARINE: Why?
AMY: Because I’ve got a feeling you’re going to keep talking.

They compare Doctor memories, and Amy tell the Gamma girl to make sure she’s on the right side when the Doctor gets here. Not for Amy’s sake: for the Gamma girl’s sake.

The Marines are doing that “Boo-yah!” thing that Marines do.

Their commander says that the Marines should wonder why the headless monks are called “headless.” He says it’s time to see what they’ve sacrificed for faith.

MICHELLE: Their heads?
ME: Yes, but you’re not supposed to know that.

Sure enough, they don’t have heads. That’s foul.

Except for the last one, because he’s the Doctor.

DOCTOR: Hello, everyone. Guess who? Please. Point a gun at me if it helps you relax. You’re only human.

The commander tells the Doctor to relax and the Doctor starts counting down.

DOCTOR: Amelia Pond! Get your coat!

The Doctor’s disappeared at some point while I wasn’t paying attention, and the panicked Marines start shooting the monks, who start shooting back.

The eye-patch woman thinks that this is a good time to leave.

The Silurian detective and her maidservant (Jenny) are taking control of the station’s communications.

MAIDSERVANT: Clever, isn’t he?
SILURIAN: And rather attractive.
MAIDSERVANT: You do realise he’s a man, don’t you?
SILURIAN: Mammals. They all look alike.

The commander is still trying to bring his troops under control.

COLONEL: I’m discharging my weapon pack.
HEATHER: Is that what you call it?

Meanwhile, the Marines (they’re the Clerics, actually, from the earlier episode with the stone angels, but I didn’t have time to note that) are chanting, “We are not fools.”

The Gamma-girl goes running off, only to find the Doctor’s discarded robe.

HEATHER: Oh. I was hoping she’d turn out to be the lesbian.

The jets (they’re not jets, I know) from the Winston Churchill episode turn up and shoot the asteroid. We all groan, because we hated that the first time. Then Rory stops the eye-patch woman from getting on her ship (with the help of some eighteenth-century pirates), the Gamma-girl Marine shrugs off her weapons pack, and the Doctor tells the commander to give the order to run away.

He wants people to call the commander “Colonel Runaway”, so that people know what happens when they try to get to the Doctor through the people he loves.

The eye-patch woman, escorted in by Silurians, says that the anger of good men is not a worry, because good men have too many rules.

DOCTOR: Good men don’t need rules. Today’s not the day to find out why I have so many.

Elsewhere (elsewhere elsewhere elsewhere), Rory turns up to rescue Amy, and he’s holding Melody.

Amy’s happy to see a crying Roman carrying a baby.

DOCTOR: Hello, Melody Pond.
RORY: Melody Williams.
AMY: Melody Williams is a geography teacher. Melody Pond, now she’s a super-hero.

There’s gratuitous hugging.

DOCTOR: Really, you should call her “Mummy” and not “Big Milk Thing.”
AMY: What are you doing?
DOCTOR: I speak baby.
AMY: No, you don’t.

Everyone’s happily reunited at the TARDIS, except Melody who won’t stop crying. (There’s some nice dialogue from Amy there that I didn’t have time to transcribe.)

After the Sontaran claims to produce impressive amounts of breast milk, thanks to gene splicing, the Doctor comes out with an old cradle, and Amy tries to get him to talk about his own family.

During some impressive hugging, the Doctor explains that Amy must have been taken some time before America, and that she’s been simultaneously on the TARDIS and at Demon’s Run.

After a bad fake-out about the Doctor being Melody’s father (when he means that the cradle is his old cradle), the Doctor heads off to find out what they’ve found in the computer systems.

The Silurian wants to know if Melody is human, because she has Time Lord DNA. That’s what they’ve found in the computer systems.

The Gamma-girl, who’s been captured by the Sontaran, is trying to convince them all that this is genuinely a trap.

The Doctor is surprised that Melody has Time Lord DNA, but the Silurian says that Time Lords became Time Lords after billions and billions of years’ exposure to the Time Vortex.

MICHELLE: This is so, like, queer, and polyamorous, and stuff.

The Silurian wants to know if Melody could have been conceived in flight.

DOCTOR: No, no: impossible. It’s all running-about sexy-fish-vampire stuff.

Then he remembers that the first time these two were together on the TARDIS (when Rory wasn’t dead, plastic, or in another reality) was on their wedding night.

I can’t really follow all the stuff about DNA, the Doctor, cooking your own Time Lord, and so forth. Let’s discuss it in the comments, shall we?

The eye-patch woman, coming up on the comms to speak to the Doctor from a distance, says that the child is hope: hope in the long, bitter war against the Doctor.

Did I mention that the headless monks don’t register as life-forms, so they’ve stayed behind to spring a trap?

They’re singing the “attack prayer”.

HEATHER: See, they are Enigma!

Melody and Amy go into hiding, while centurion-Rory heads out to fight. The blue chappie thinks he can talk some reason into the headless monks, but that noise definitely sounded like someone’s head being struck off with a sword.

The Doctor, still speaking to the eye-patch woman, says that he’ll never let her get near Melody again.

But the eye-patch woman says that fooling the Doctor once was a joy, but fooling him twice, in exactly the same way, is a privilege.

Over a furious battle, River’s voice recounts the old proverb about Demon’s Run, and Melody collapses into flesh.

She was an avatar all along.

By the time the Doctor bursts in to reveal this, the battle is over, and not everyone is still standing. The Sontaran, for example, is dying.

SONTARAN: It’s all right. I had a good life. I’m nearly twelve.

Amy is nearly catatonic, and the Doctor has no idea how to apologise for this. Amy knows it’s not his fault, but she’s still devastated.

And elsewhere, the cute Gamma-girl Marine, Lorna (don’t correct my spelling: it was that Silurian’s pronunciation), is also dying.

The Doctor thanks her for helping his friends.

She sys they’ve met before, but he probably doesn’t remember.

DOCTOR: Of course I remember. I remember everyone. Hey: we ran. You and me. Didn’t we run, Lorna?

She dies.

DOCTOR: Who was she?
SILURIAN: I don’t know. But she was very brave.
DOCTOR: They’re always brave. They’re always brave.

And then River turns up.

But the Doctor is furious.

DOCTOR: Where the hell were you? Every time you’ve asked me for help, I was there. Where the hell were you today?

But River’s having none of it. She tells the Doctor that he’s become something that he should never have become. And she comes back to a nice point that I missed earlier, where Lorna could only understand the word “Doctor” to mean “mighty warrior.” It’s a good point.

(There’s also the question of whether this contradicts River’s rapturous description of “her” Doctor in her original two-parter, where she thought the Tenth Doctor was but a pale imitation. Or was that perhaps not quite so rapturous as I remember?)

But River comes back to the idea that all this is coming out of fear of the Doctor.

HEATHER: Everything’s so intense!
MICHELLE: And thanks for the info-dump. That was really useful.

River’s distracted by the cot, but the Doctor wants to know who she is. And she says she’s telling him, but we can’t see what she’s showing him. He seems quite delighted by it, though, in a gangly schoolboy way.

(Seriously, I can’t even imagine being married to the Doctor—as I assume River is—when he’s in this kind of mode. It would be like marrying a first-form Etonian schoolboy.)

He heads off in the TARDIS, telling River to get them all home.

And Amy’s furious to be kept out of the loop. She wants to know—at gunpoint, if necessary—what River told the Doctor.

River says that the TARDIS translation circuits take a while with written text, which is why we’re only now seeing that the prayer leaf reads, in the language of the Gamma Forest, “River Song.”

Because they don’t have a word for “pond.”

Because the only water in the forest is the river, just as the TARDIS told us back in “The Doctor’s Wife.”

And that’s it for three months. Have at it in the comments!

Last night, Nick and I watched the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode covering Project Moonbase, the 1953 film based on a short story by Robert Heinlein.

And, honestly, of all the many, many bad films we’ve watched in the course of our MST3K obsession, this was one of the less rubbish ones. They actually had some nice zero-gee effects, and Nick was delighted with the “Please Do Not Walk on the Walls” signs slathered all over the space station.

But the most important thing about the film was the important lessons it taught me about life in the distant future (1970, to be exact).

1. I really don’t like Heinlein, even when he’s being adapted by someone else.

2. Nick takes an odd delight in Heinlein. All through the film, he kept saying, “This is so Heinlein it’s killing me”. He also recommended that an enemy spy be thrown out an airlock, “because that’s what Heinlein would do” (and was immediately delighted when the second-in-command said, “Well, I could throw him out an airlock”).

3. Couples don’t have to agree on the value of Robert Heinlein to have a successful relationship.

4. In the future (1970), women will be allowed to have roles of supreme importance, like spaceship pilot (rank of colonel) or President of the United States of America.

5. Women in positions of power get uppity, so you need to balance gender equality in theory with extreme misogyny in practice. Therefore, women in power should be described to their subordinates as “spoiled brats” and, if necessary, be threatened with spanking by their superior officers. (No, really. This actually happened.)

6. Women should also have a good sense of their own weaknesses so that if, for example, they’re trapped on the dark side of the moon with no hope of rescue, they can offer an adequate apology for their behaviour. Something like “Sorry for coming over all female, Major” should do the trick.

7. All the above holds true even if the woman is a highly decorated Air-Force officer, the first pilot to achieve orbital flight, and the first pilot to successfully land a manned craft on the moon.

8. In fact, if she is the first pilot to achieve orbital flight, it’s probably due to tokenism. You should definitely tell her subordinates that, just before a vital mission. That won’t affect her authority, at all.

9. “Briteis” is a really stupid name for a woman, because no matter how much you emphasise that it’s pronounced Bry-TIES, people will still just call you “Bright Eyes.”

10. It’s important, if you wish to achieve orbit, that the weight in the cabin be minimised as far as possible. The first thing to go? All that unnecessary weight on your trousers. Hot pants for all!

11. If you end up having to make a forced landing on the moon, you might end up becoming a de facto moonbase. And if it’s just you and your co-pilot, and you’re different genders, NASA might make you marry each other, to stop the press writing scurrilous tales about the lax morals in the Air Force. Goodness knows what they’d make you do if you were the same gender …

12. An excellent wedding-present for your new husband is the rank of Brigadier General. Never mind that he’s only a major at present: you need to skip him up a good few ranks so that he safely outranks you. Nice gender politics there, Colonel Bright Eyes.

As with the end of season four, when we were all really cranky and wanted to talk about Donna’s lobotomy before the ABC aired the episode, I’m thinking a spoiler thread about the mid-season finale of season six might come in handy here.

It’s just an idea I had …

I think I might be right …

So, keep the spoilers in the comments below.

Anyone who’s keeping themselves free of spoilers, ‘ware the comments thread.