I’m very new to Twitter: I’ve not been using it for much more than a week. And, like many people, I was driven to it by Facebook.

Not by the new Twitterised Facebook design that so many Facebook users are denigrating, but by the fact that I really enjoy writing my Facebook status update. I started worrying that I was changing my status too often, and that this wasn’t giving people a chance to comment—and the ability to comment on status updates is one of the better changes Facebook has made in the time I’ve been using it.

Twitter seemed like a useful alternative: I could minimise my rewriting of my status update and yet still indulge my desire to frequently describe what I was doing in 140 characters or fewer.

That’s what delights me about both Facebook status updates and Twitter: that severe restriction of the word limit. I’ve worked with restricted word limits before—almost everything I write has some kind of word limit. But never, ever as restricted as this.

And I love the challenge. I love the way it forces me to sharpen my syntax, to think of synonyms that are equally effective but shorter, to make my point clear while removing all the pronouns from a sentence.

Oh, I’ve seen the arguments against Twitter, but that challenge is why I’m enjoying it—like my live-blogging over the last year, it’s a form of writing like no other I’ve ever done. With live-blogging, I have to be able to write quickly but succinctly, to be accurate and descriptive but also to provide commentary, to be able to keep the shape of the plot in place, to decide immediately what can be omitted without losing the reader. With Twitter, I’m forced to think constantly about the shape of what I’m writing, to compress it to a smaller, neater form.

But what’s an argument without examples? Since I’ve been writing on Twitter more often today than usual, here are today’s tweets in chronological order, earliest first:

Wondering what the “remember me” button on Twitter log-in page does? (Except for reminding me of Futurama episode.) It’s not remembering me.

Forced by presence of giant moth in garage to climb into car through passenger side. Hand brake really inconveniently placed, in my opinion.

Then nearly hit garage door on way out, because was for some reason obsessively checking whether moth moved, even though was secure in car.

Couldn’t get parked at uni, and had to drive home frantically and try to catch a bus that would get me in for my AFS hours. Success!

But had to leave car in driveway because of running late. If anyone drives though fence, may implode like Jagoroth ship in “City of Death.”

Then sat on bus behind teenage boy who had exactly the same haircut as I do—only it may have looked better on him. Strange day.

No students have come to see me. Such odd work, this: hours of frantic marking activity followed by stretches of silence and self-doubt.

But at least I’m not pursuing either a real or metaphorical Minotaur through stretches of labyrinthine programming code beyond my ken.

Nearly sideswiped by red Mazda with “That’s so sexual!” decal. Feel presence of such a decal cannot but cheapen my tragic, untimely death.

None of this is great literature, of course. No immortal thoughts. No “Eureka!” moments. Just anecdotes about my day in 140 characters or fewer, each one a tiny, unique writing challenge.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but a comment on an earlier post reminded me.

A number of people keep coming across this site while Googling for answers to puzzles in Professor Layton and the Curious Village—most often, but not exclusively, the solution to the puzzle about moving two matchsticks to make a live dog into a dead dog, and the solution to the puzzle about dividing seven pigs into their own pens with only three ropes.

They must be very disappointed, these frustrated people, to find only my complaining posts about how the game is doing my head in.

So, since blogs can be forces for good on the Internet, here is a link to the Professor Layton and the Curious Village walkthrough that I used when I was insanely frustrated by a puzzle.

It’s from Wiki Cheats, and I found it excellent.

So if you’re Googling “separate the seven prize pigs with three ropes,” or “matchstick dog hit by car,” or “move matchsticks to make dog look the other way” hopefully you’ll end up on this page.

I didn’t use it for every puzzle, but I think I certainly used it for the dead dog one. And for almost every problem involving probability.

A direct sequel:

ME: Oh, you have nothing to complain about. I blog about how mean I am to you all the time!
NICK: Really?
ME: Yes! In fact, I just blogged about how mean I was to you!
NICK: Did you? I shall go read it. No, I won’t—we’re spending time together. I shall read it on my iPhone.
ME: No!
NICK: What?
ME: That is actually worse.
NICK: I don’t get you.

You see, I just don’t have much sympathy left after a seriously horrible day like today, especially when I’ve carved out some time for just relaxing . . .

NICK (bangs his knee on the desk while getting up to spend time with me): Oh, god—ow! Nick have hurty pain death!
ME: Well, it wasn’t really death, was it?
NICK: Well, no. Not really.
ME: And the pain was a bit deserved . . .
NICK: What?
ME: For cutting into my time.
NICK: What?!
ME: My leisure time.
NICK: Oh. Well, fair enough.

He’s far too nice for me, sometimes—bless him.

(And no comments along the lines of “Well, yes,” thank you!)

I’m only aware that it is Ada Lovelace Day thanks to The Memes of Production, but there’s not much I can contribute to a discussion of women in technology.

Women in literature, sure. But technology and I don’t talk much these days, not since I bought my Mac and stopped going to technology singles bars to chat to—really tortured metaphors.

Sorry about that.

I do know a little about Ada Lovelace, though—only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron. And that’s how I know her, really: I know a little of her contribution to mathematics and science, but I mainly know her in the shadow of the famous father whom she herself didn’t know.

And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.

This has never been a link blog but here are some links about the woman herself for Ada Lovelace Day:

• her biography from the fascinating Biographies of Women Mathematicians.

• her page from Women in Science at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

• her Wikipedia page, if only because I admire a woman who can programme computers and look gorgeous in silver satin.

• a page on the Analytical Engine, with Ada’s own notes.

• and, for further reading (if you have access to a scholarly databases, anyway), why not throw Ada’s mother Annabella Milbanke into the mix, in Judith S. Lewis’s examination of mathematics and gender in the nineteenth-century British aristocracy.

Happy Day, Ada. I’m sorry I don’t know more about you and I haven’t followed in your footsteps, but, if it helps, I always thought your dad was a bit of a prat.

A strange conversation that is more a strange monologue:

At half-past four this afternoon, Nick sent me the following message via instant messaging:

Just realised i had a clothes peg still stuck to my shorts

That man is a source of constant delight to me.

ME: Being irritated with people for no reason seems to be my default at the moment.
NICK: For you, you mean?
ME: Yes, darling, for me. Hence the possessive pronoun. That “my” tends to tell you who owns the default.
NICK: Yes, I see what you mean.

Nick’s default, on the other hand, seems to be “taking his life in his hands.”

NICK: Looks like there’s a Mac version of BioShock coming out.
ME: You should get that. (Pause) Is that the one with the things?
NICK: Pardon:
ME: The things. The . . you know (vague hand gestures, with a hint of sinuosity in the wrist). You go through the things from the place and you come out at the other place. You know. (Increasingly frantic vague hand gestures.)
NICK: Oh, no: that’s Portal.
ME: Ah, Portal. With the portals. Obviously.
NICK: Well, yes.

ME: Honey, why is there a Chris Foss book under the armchair?
NICK: Well, I was looking for somewhere to put it.
ME: So you put it under the armchair?
NICK: Yes.
ME: I mean, you deliberately put it under the armchair?
NICK: Yes.
ME: Why didn’t you just put it back where you got it from?
(Pause)
NICK: Um . . .

ME: You’re not listening to me, are you?
NICK: The thing is, Treen, the voice you use for holding conversations with yourself and the one you use for talking to me—they’re identical! I can’t tell the difference!
ME: Has it ever occurred to you, honey, that maybe they’re not conversations with myself? That they’re conversations with you that you’re not listening to?
NICK (pause): No.

I shall start with a disclaimer: I am actually really enjoying what I’ve read (some three chapters) of P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job For A Woman, which I’ve never read before, despite the fact that it was published in 1972 and I’m a big fan of certain sorts of detective fiction.

(I’ll be honest: I think part of what I like about it is that Cordelia dislikes Adam Dalgliesh as much as I do. Of course, she hasn’t met him, so that might change, but I do hope not.)

But what really fascinated me about the character so far is that when Cordelia is asked what her father did, she replies, “He was an itinerant Marxist poet and an amateur revolutionary.”

Really? Because that’s a complicated back story for a character who is dead before the book starts. It’s not that implausible: Cordelia’s twenty-two in 1971, so while her father may be too young to remember the rise to influence of the Fabian Society in the Edwardian period, he is certainly old enough to have been permanently inspired by the participation of some English left-wing sympathisers in the Spanish Civil War.

Or, you know, he could just have strong left-wing sympathies because he read Das Kapital at an impressionable age.

There’s just something about this that made me think, “Well, what a complex back story for a character who, as far as I can tell, is never going to appear in the book.” (If this is P. D. James’s foray into zombie fiction, don’t tell me. I want to be surprised.)

So, just in case I ever write a novel, I’ve come up with some pick-and-mix sentences that I can drop in to the narrative when someone asks my protagonist what her father does for a living.

• He was a chiropodist, but it was really just a way for him to get paid for being a foot fetishist.

• He provided freelance flower illustrations for amateur gardening magazines and on weekends scoured antique shops to try and improve his collection of Victorian apostle spoons.

• He tried working as a waiter once, but apparently he had some kind of phobic response to damask.

• He was a turtle fancier by inclination, but my mother talked him into becoming a chartered accountant on the grounds that the work was less seasonal.

• He mostly subsisted on the loose change he found down the back of friends’ sofa cushions.

• He shouted at the managers of struggling suburban theatre companies until they agreed to stage one of his series of five-act tragedies about Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine.

• He had a shoe-shine stand near the station until he developed an unshakeable conviction that it was possible to buff suede. Actually, we don’t really like to talk about it.

• He’s actually a highly paid mercenary in a war as old as time itself, fought across the dimensions and in the shadows of planets, bringing humanity and every other species in the universe to the brink of destruction without their knowledge or understanding—but we used to tell people that he managed a strip-club so they wouldn’t ask too many questions.

• He claims he’s a steward on the Titanic, so we’re not actually quite sure what he’s been doing for a living since 1912. Really? It’s never seemed that implausible to us.

Nick plays Bejeweled 2 on his iPhone:

NICK: You’d think, when you exploded more than one Power Gem, that it would set off a massive explosion.
ME: Sometimes it does.
NICK: But this was four, all together!
ME: And it didn’t?
NICK: No.
ME: Oh, well. These things happen.
NICK: True.
ME: But you should still feel bad.
NICK: Really?

This live-blogging brought to you by the fact that I’m desperately waiting for coffee—which I’m sure will turn up very soon. I can smell it. I could make it myself, but Nick’s sorted that out.

Also, I’m still not finding this Jack Dee comedy terribly funny. Am I missing something? Maybe it’s because I’m only watching the last ten minutes or so of each episode? I just don’t see anything appealing about the character, at all. I don’t mind a character who is a little bit of a bastard (case in point, almost everyone in Green Wing), but this character is just out-and-out awful. I haven’t seen a single redeeming characteristic.

It’s becoming something of an obsession with me, how much I dislike this programme. Am I mad? Or is he genuinely horrible?

No, actually. I’m not mad. He is horrible. Of course, I’m not a great fan of unadulterated comedy of embarrassment. A little bit leavened with other forms of humour? Sure. (Case in point, Green Wing.) But not a show that’s nothing but comedy of embarrassment.

I’m sure Doctor Who will start soon.

Nick and I are now united in how much we despise this character and see no redeeming characteristics in him, at all. I mean, Guy Secretan slept with his own mother (accidentally) and we still wanted to give him a bit of a cuddle.

Shouldn’t Doctor Who have started by now?

Wait, what? Lost Cities of the Ancients in Doctor Who time?

Oh, we’ll deal with that later. Because here’s the episode.

A woman, on a television set. And a man fretting about his overdraft, insisting that he needs a miracle, as the sounds of “God Save the Queen” swell behind him.

Now another house: a family sitting around a wireless, with the mother sewing on a treadle machine, the grandmother sitting reading the paper, the father heading out covered in medals, and the son insisting they should have a television. The father says, perhaps. For the coronation, perhaps.

Now back to Mr Magpie, the man with the overdraft. Now the woman on the television is speaking to him—and sucking his face towards the screen. All thanks, it seems, to a lucky lightning strike.

Credits.

Now here comes Rose in pink stilettos and headband—and, in between, a pink skirt and a denim jacket. And the Doctor has a moped: they’re off the see Elvis at the Ed Sullivan TV studios. The Doctor hasn’t noticed that this clearly is not New York: given the double-decker buses and the red post boxes (instituted by Anthony Trollope).

Now back to the family from the pre-credit sequence. Mother, father, and son are there—but grandmother is not, and the mother is fretting about what happened to her. “That face! That horrible face!” The father doesn’t understand why they’re worried about this.

Rose is wondering why so many people have television—everyone has an aerial, whereas Rose remembers Jackie saying they were so rare, people had to pile into one room.

Rose and the Doctor see a man being taken away with a sack over his head—his wife is weeping and begging, but no one listens. Tommy, the young boy from before, says to the Doctor that it’s happening all over: people are turning into monsters.

The Doctor and Rose try to chase the car, but it’s a well-practiced maneouver, and they lose it behind some fake doors.

ROSE: Maybe we should go and ask the neighbours?
DOCTOR: That’s what I like about you: the domestic approach.
ROSE: Thank you. Wait, was that an insult?

Mr Magpie is speaking to the woman in the telly again, and she’s creepier than she was.

Now Tommy is trying to see his grandmother, but the domestic tyrant that is his father creeps up and stops him. Nick starts muttering and complaining—he can’t cope with this father character, stereotype that he is.

I like the flying ducks, though.

Rose and the Doctor are on the doorstep, fulsomely greeting the Connellys and claiming to be representatives of Queen and Country.

I can’t get over the Doctor’s hair. It’s always been . . . odd. But that pompadour?

I’ve skipped the bit where the Doctor banters with Mr Connelly about his gender politics, because it doesn’t really change anything. And having one character address the fact doesn’t really change the fact that the character is a stereotype.

DOCTOR: Union flag?
ROSE: Mum went out with a sailor.
DOCTOR AND EVERYONE WATCHING THE ABC, SIMULTANEOUSLY: Of course she did.

Things go slightly odd, as I lose my wireless Internet connection for a moment, there.

Basically, the Doctor bullies Mr Connelly into letting him talk to the grandmother—whose face has completely gone. That is rather creepy. But Mr Connelly has rung the strange men in black who took the man earlier, and they grab Gran, after punching the Doctor in the face and pushing Mrs Connelly over.

The Doctor, of course, legs it straight out of the house without looking, but Rose sees that there’s something going on with the television.

Nevertheless, the Doctor is in time this time around to see the ruse with the fake doors and the sweeping men.

NICK: Terrific lighting in this episode.

So the Doctor breaks in to where the men in black have been taking their prisoners—only to find people standing randomly in cages, none of whom have any faces, but all of whom have at least a basic survival instinct, since they bunch their fists and circle him menacingly.

Rose, meanwhile, has gone to Mr Magpie’s television shop—actually, that’s not a denim jacket. It’s some kind of dark-blue nylon—pretending to buy a television. Mr Magpie is trying to push her out, but Rose is over-extending herself a little, here. She can’t see how terrified he is—she’s pushing as though he’s the villain, not seeing his desperation.

Still, I do like to see Rose striking out on her own.

The woman on the television—identifying herself as “The Wire”—speaks directly to Rose, claiming to be hungry, and then eats Rose’s face. That’s blunter than it should be, but that’s what happens: Rose’s face is sucked off.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is being interrogated by a detective inspector, and being as glib and fluent as always. And taunting the poor old inspector. Doctor, of course he’s out of his depth. Don’t taunt the poor man.

And here’s someone else (sans visage, the inspector says, which I love) being brought in with a bag over their head—and of course it’s Rose. The Doctor is furious because they left her in the street, but I suppose that’s an advantage to the narrative, because now the Doctor’s acting all American-movie action-hero macho, which is thoroughly out of character and annoys me.

Back to the family with the stereotypical father, who is now terrorising his wife in a way we haven’t seen before. And the son is fuming quietly. But this seems not in keeping with the first scene, where mother, son, and grandmother seemed content enough, and to have a non-confrontational relationship with the father. And that was a scene that took place exclusively in the home, so why would he have been dissembling then? Perhaps he was in an unusually good mood? But we haven’t seen him in a good mood since?

Hmm. I’m having to over-think this. That’s not a good sign.

The sentence earlier where I mentioned that the father ratted Gran out to the men in black? Apparently, that was a spoiler. But it did seem quite obvious, from the way he had his hands around their shoulders.

But this scene with Rita Connelly and her husband and son? I’m not sure I buy this. Is he a typical 1950s’ father? In which case, where does the mother’s sudden fury come from? She’d be conditioned into a complementary state of mind.

Oh, look: I’m missing plot.

Tommy tells the Doctor and the inspector that his grandmother was watching telly when she changed, so they go to Mr Magpie’s shop—where they find the faces of the missing people staring out of and screaming out of the televisions around the store. Rose is screaming “Doctor!” over and over again, but she doesn’t seem to be able to interact with the Doctor, to see or hear him.

Ack! Colour television! In fact, it’s a sign of The Wire’s increasing (but fluctuating) strength. Apparently, she was executed by her people, but fled across the universe in this form. She needs corporeal form, and she’s exploiting the coronation—the first time, the Doctor says, that millions of people gathered around televisions—to get the energy she needs.

Meanwhile, she attacks the inspector, Tommy, and the Doctor, but the Doctor manages to get his sonic screwdriver in between him and the screen. He and the others are knocked out, but The Wire transfers herself to a smaller, bakelite television set.

All this frantic action is intercut with scenes from the coronation, in grainy black and white.

The inspector’s face is gone, but Tommy and the Doctor are fine. The Doctor, suddenly realising they are in Muswell Hill, recognises the TV transmitter nearby—to which Mr Magpie is frantically driving The Wire—and grabs a selection of material from the shop.

Mr Magpie is taking The Wire to the top of the TV transmitter tower: he tries to back out of their arrangement, but she’s insistent. The Doctor gets past security by apparently pretending to be the King of Belgium.

Leaving Tommy’ behind, the Doctor races up the transmitter tower, trailing copper wire behind him.

Mr Magpie is higher, though, and he plugs The Wire in, allowing her to start sucking the faces off everyone watching the coronation.

I suspect, if it weren’t such an exciting part of the episode, I could have thought of a better way of putting that.

THE WIRE: You can’t stop The Wire!
NICK: Well, it did end after five seasons.

While I was repeating that anecdote, The Wire kills Magpie. And the Doctor grabs the small television—but his plan has backfired somewhere. I’m not sure where, because electronics confuse me. Thankfully, he has left Tommy downstairs, and Tommy fixes it, so everyone’s faces snap back into place, and they’re left slightly disorientated.

And The Wire is, apparently, destroyed. She can’t have been destroyed, though? Nope: she’s trapped in a video cassette. Beta, too. Well, that’ll be obsolete soon enough. And Tommy and the Doctor watch the coronation together.

And then Gran has her face back, and Rose, too.

And Mrs Connelly is kicking her husband out, because apparently the house is in her mother’s name? I still think this sub-plot needs a bit more work.

Meanwhile, we’re at a coronation street party—where Rose and the Doctor debate, briefly, about where history takes place, and decide that it’s in the domestic sphere, not the public sphere.

(The Doctor says he’s going to tape over The Wire. That doesn’t seem like the Doctor, but then this episode is a little like that.)

Mr Connelly is walking away, but Rose convinces Tommy to go after him.

NICK: Oh, Rose! Don’t work out your daddy issues with someone else.

And—scene.

“That was the final of Doctor Who for now?” What!? Why!? How shall I finish my live-blogging? This is just odd.

So . . . I suppose that it’s for season two of Doctor Who. For now. Definitely ending with a whimper, that.