So, there are only two episodes left after this one. And I’m really not in the mood for this episode; I found it intensely difficult to watch the first time around. So depressing. And after a weekend of marking and being horribly ill, I’m in the mood for a more light-hearted episode.

I know!

I could live-blog the Agatha Christie episode. How about that?

No?

Okay. I’ll stick to “Turn Left.”

I mentioned this episode to my mother last week, when we talking about “Midnight” and what a good episode it was. Mam is not at all sure about an episode that is largely devoted to Donna and with very little Doctor. But I liked this one: I’ve come to increasingly like Donna over the course of the season, and she develops in a fascinating fashion here.

But it’s one of the episodes I really . . . well, “enjoyed” isn’t quite the right word, but it will do for now.

(I’ve just had a quick phone conversation with my brother that included the lines (on my part) “How do you walk into a soccer-boot emporium and come out with a new car?” and “How on earth can you not be sure whether you still have that cockatoo skeleton under the seat in your car?” He also reminded me of the time the power cables fell on top of his car while he was innocently driving along, and then told me that the same car was repeatedly kicked by a man who was apparently bleeding very heavily. It’s not every day you have a conversation like that.)

Wow, even the Doctor Who promos sound depressed at the thought of this episode.

Yet another reason to love the ABC (apart from the fact that that was the only station I was allowed to watch, growing up): is anyone else covering the Paraolympics?

Hey, we’ve wandered into Firefly!

NICK: Hey, it’s crude ethnic stereotype planet.

Apparently, this irritated a lot of people. I know the accent on this fortune teller—who played the insect woman in the Master episodes—irritated a lot of people in my living room.

Oh, Donna! You idiot! Why do you keep wandering away from the Doctor. That is never, ever, ever a good idea. And this fortune teller is creepy—and can’t keep her eyes on Donna’s face, even though she’s clearly not supposed to be looking at that chittering sound behind Donna.

Donna, you’re feeling woozy. Shouldn’t this be a hint that you should leg it out of this tent? Even before you start hearing the chittering sound?

Oh, dear: it’s Donna’s horrible mother. And why is this fortune teller so keen on pushing Donna to the point where she turns left instead of right?

Damn, that’s cold: when Donna’s mother tells her that all city men need temps for is practise. Oh, she’s an awful woman. Truly awful.

Okay, this object on Donna’s back doesn’t look that convincing, but I hate insects so much that it frightens me anyway.

Don’t turn right, Donna!

Oh, she turned right. That’s not going to end well.

That’s got to be the longest trailer we’ve ever had on this programme. And Billie Piper’s in the credits! I feel I should be more excited about that.

Christmas! I love Christmas! But which Christmas is this? Is it the Runaway Bride Christmas? I suppose we’re about to find out.

And Donna’s friend can see something on her back—that’s creepy.

A Christmas star? Then it is the Runaway Bride Christmas. Ken Livingstone spends money on Christmas decorations? Red Ken? Surely not! And now the Rachnos ship is starting to shoot everyone. But Donna’s friend can now see what’s on her back, and it’s freaking her out. It’s freaking Donna out a little, as well.

The army brings the star down, but what’s this? UNIT is there. And an ambulance—and a body? A body with a sonic screwdriver? Oh, damn! The Doctor’s dead! (I think that’s Sergeant Dead Meat! Or was that Private Cannon Fodder?)

Rose! Hang on, what’s happened to Billie Piper’s diction? She sounds as though her mouth is too full of teeth—and she seems to have lost the accent, as well. Rose can see what’s on Donna’s back—but she vanished before Donna can challenge her.

And the Doctor’s dead! Damn!

Now Donna’s been sacked—because the Thames has been closed off after the Doctor’s behaviour in the Rachnos episode.

Oops, it’s “Smith and Jones,” now—the hospital disappears while Donna is stripping her desk and insulting the staff: “Cliff, I’d leave you the mouse mat, but I’m afraid you’d cut yourself.”

The hospital is back, but with one survivor—and it’s not Martha. Damn, Martha’s dead, too? No! Yep: she sacrificed herself to save Oliver. Oh, dammit: the Doctor and Martha.

Bernard Cribbens’s right, though, Donna: it is getting worse. (And I see they’ve written Donna’s father’s death into the script.)

Sarah Jane Smith’s body was recovered from the hospital? Oh, dammit! Sarah Jane can’t be dead!

This is the point where I jumped off the sofa and sat half a metre in front of the television for the last part of the episode, hoping everyone would come back to life.

Here’s Rose again—stepping out of an alleyway in a mysterious blue light. I’m not sure why, but I have a sense there’s a mystery here. (Dramatic understatement.) Now why is Rose suggesting that Donna might want to leave the city for next Christmas? And how does she know about that raffle ticket? I don’t blame Donna for not trusting her. I wouldn’t trust her, either.

But Donna does use the ticket, and here she is with her mother and grandfather—and Bernard Cribbens has reindeer antlers on his head. I love you, Bernard Cribbens! (Donna’s father has died at some point before this episode.)

(Is Donna’s mother sharing that bed with her daughter? In that red satin nightie? I’d go for flannel under those circumstances.)

The chambermaid at the hotel can see something on Donna’s back—and she enables Donna to see it. And now the Titanic is falling out of the sky onto central London. Into Buckingham Palace. And the television goes dead just before they feel the impact of the shock.

Damn—a mushroom cloud is rising over London, from the effect of the Titanic’s engines. It’s a beautiful shot, but I’m old enough to get the shivers from the sight of a mushroom cloud.

Refugees flooding out of the south of London, to escape the radiation: Donna and her family are billeted into a house in Leeds.

And this is my favourite bit of the episode: the neighbour woman complaining that a perfectly nice family, who missed one mortgage payment, have been kicked out in favour of southern billets, and Donna descending into northern stereotypes about whippets. Not only does it bring the southern/northern dichotomy sharply to the forefront, but it’s such a complicated exchange: there’s so much going on behind that, about the impact on the south of London and the fact that this will have a devastating effect on the rest of the country.

And the Adiposians take their product into the U.S. since England is no longer available? Dear lord, the bodycount in this episode is high!

Donna’s mother almost breaks my heart in this scene, lying on her campbed, in her coat, in the kitchen of an overcrowded billet, thinking of more people that she knows who are now dead.

The fact that she insists “we’re refugees; we don’t count”—that ties in with the slap last episode from Mrs Cane about the Doctor being an “immigrant.” And perhaps also the tensions about Polish workers that Nick suggested were present in the ATMOS episodes. Man, there’s some complicated stuff coming to the surface in this episode.

And now, speaking of ATMOS, the cars are starting to go mad now, but Britain’s lack of petrol is helping. A soldier has seen the object on Donna’s back, and is threatening to shoot her.

So when Rose turns up in the middle of this, it’s to point out that Gwen and Ianto from Torchwood are dead, and Captain Jack has transported to the Sontaran homeworld. Is he dead, too?

As Nick pointed out earlier, they’ve killed off every spin-off, in this one episode.

The Doctor’s hair isn’t that great, Rose.

So Donna saved the Doctor’s life? I think that’s true—and in more ways than one. That scene with the Rachnos devastated me when I first saw it; that Doctor was implacable. Horribly so. We’ve seen that subsequently—notably in the Family of Blood two-parter—but that was the first time I saw it, and it broke my heart.

The darkness is coming? Damn.

Oh, Donna. Why do you always think that people are mocking you when they tell you how awesome you are?

Nick’s just reminded me that I’m so busy trying to cover everything in this episode that I haven’t been hitting the update button.

England for the English? Labour camps? Oh, shit! I saw what was coming here long before Donna did. And it’s giving me goosebumps, watching it again. Donna’s grandfather knows, too—but he remembers the camps the first time around, too. As he’s just said.

And now he’s weeping, and Donna finally realises what’s happening. Oh, shit—this is awful.

And it gets harder to watch, with Donna’s mother. She’s completely shut down, now. I don’t really blame her: she’s had a hell of a year, when you factor in the death of her husband. But when Donna says she supposes she’s always been a disappointment, and Donna’s mother just says, “Yeah.” Totally flat. Oh, damn—no wonder Donna has no confidence in herself.

That’s an interesting shot, that one, too: as Nick points out, they’d normally do it in deep focus, so that both actresses are in focus. But having Donna blurry behind her mother pulls up all those ideas about Donna losing her sense of self and her world, and the way in which her mother strips her of everything, even confidence, so she’s left with only a brassy aggression that covers a lack of confidence.

And now the stars are going out—so Donna is ready to go with Rose, to UNIT. And Rose has some standing here, though it’s unclear what, since they don’t even know her name.

And there’s the TARDIS! Salvaged from under the Thames—and a shade of the old Donna, laughing delightedly at the idea that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than the outside.

The music’s dropped away here, which gives the scene a kind of dead feeling—though the music comes back when the TARDIS comes briefly to life. It’s dying, in the absence of the Doctor—and I mean “dead feeling” in a good way. It feels static, much as Donna is in this new world.

Rose strikes me as a little unsympathetic in this scene: it’s not the ruthlessness with which she pursues her plans with respect to Donna. I can understand that. But she’s from the same time and the same world as Donna: shouldn’t she be able to see how shell-shocked Donna is by the events of the past year or so? But she’s not really interacting with Donna, not soothing her or even answering her questions. She doesn’t even really seem to see how close Donna is to a breakdown, here.

So the thing on Donna’s back feeds off time? It’s like the blind angels in “Blink,” I suppose. And it’s found a good host in Donna. It makes sense to me that these kind of creatures are attracted to time travellers.

The Doctor and Donna are needed together to stop the stars going out.

GENERAL: This is to combat dehydration.

I love that line. And I love the music in this scene. I don’t know what it is about it that I love, but I love it.

So Donna’s going back in time with equipment cannibalised from the TARDIS. And she thinks this will save her, that travelling back in time will help her avoid Rose’s promise that she will die if she does this. But Rose can’t promise that. And, to give her credit, she doesn’t even try.

So Donna will travel in time, even if she never meets the Doctor.

And here she is in London in the past, before the bomb blast. But she’s half a mile away from where she needs to be in four minutes time. I couldn’t run half a mile in four minutes.

And we’re back to original Donna, arguing in the car with her mother, coming to the junction where she needs to turn left and her mother is bullying her to turn right. And past Donna is running and running, but she’s not going to make it in time.

So she stops. And she thinks. And while original Donna’s mother is haranguing her into turning right, past Donna steps out into the road in front of a garbage truck, causing the traffic to back up, blocking the right-hand turn.

And Rose turns up, and whispers two words in Donna’s ear as she dies.

And original Donna turns left—and time turns back into its original position.

Back on the planet of ethnic stereotypes, the creature falls off Donna’s back and the fortune teller is terrified by Donna’s ability to resist the creature’s abilities.

And, of course, the Doctor turns up then, not being certain that anything has happened, and looking like a puppy seeking out a new friend.

The Doctor does point out at this point that there’s a lot of coincidence around Donna—including more than one parallel world created around her, which is a good point.

Now Donna remembers the messages that Rose has told her to pass on to the Doctor. And the Doctor suspects: he suspects it’s Rose.

The two words? Bad wolf.

Now that’s not good. And now “Bad wolf” is plastered everywhere, presumably a residual effect of the time that Rose spread them through the universe.

The Cloister Bell! Damn! I’ve been waiting twenty years to hear that noise again. That’s a bad noise.

And next week, the first of the two-part finale—with everyone. And a mysteriously familiar-sounding evil chuckle.

And that’s “Turn Left.” Wow, that was tiring. I’m for a cigarette.

While I futilely try to get Nick to make me a cup of coffee so I can finish my marking, while he instead fusses around with his new battery charger (and doesn’t that just sum up our lives):

NICK (eventually): I am here to cater to your every whim.
ME: Well, I’m sure that’s what the manual said.
NICK: Now, now, what have we said about you treating me as though I were a robot?
ME: That I should do it all the time?
NICK: Because that would be cool! Yeah, I think I did say that.

But there’s a different reason this time. Nick arrived home this afternoon—where I was lying on the sofa finishing off Diana Wynne Jones’s Conrad’s Fate, which I’ve owned for three years but hadn’t read before, and generally feeling sorry for myself, with this cold—with a shiny new camera.

He’s been dropping hints about this for weeks; it’s a gift for completing my Ph.D. successfully. (I have a nagging sense of guilt that I’d bullied him into a present by being rather cranky when I found out he hadn’t even told his parents about the thesis reports coming in.)

But it’s an awesome camera:

Significantly better than my old one, as the macro shots of flowers show most effectively:

So I spent the evening, before the unexpected storm came roaring in, anyway, running around the garden photographing as many flowers as I could find. I used to love taking macro photographs of flowers, and this macro function is a thousand times better than the one on the old camera.

So I’m rather afraid there are going be more photographs on the blog from now on. But at least they’ll mostly be photographs of flowers and other interesting objects, and not self-portraits.

That’s one thing I can promise: it’s highly unlikely there’ll ever be a self-portrait on this blog.

Geek conversations are much funnier when they’re uncontextualised:

NICK: I’ve figured out Defamer’s “Shirley Manson as a urinal” reference.
ME: Right.
NICK: She’s a terminator.
ME: Okay.
NICK: Who finds a creative way of getting rid of a suspicious underling.
ME: So at some point someone urinates on Shirley Manson?
NICK: Or intends to, anyway.

In the absence of a proper update, I’m offering some photographs of the larger of the two water dragons we currently have in the garden:

Nick and I love the water dragons: in fact, with the water dragons, the bearded dragon who wanders around occasionally, the blue tongue, and the geckos, we have a thoroughly lizardy house.

Sometimes the water dragons wander into the house, and perch themselves on the living-room windowsill looking for insects. Chasing them out is one of my main summer activities. On one occasion, I was working quite innocently in the study, heard a mysterious scrabbling, and thought, “Hmm, that sounds rather like a water dragon becoming stuck in the box of fresh vegetables that was delivered this morning.” Which it was.

My favourite, though, was the enormous dragon who was completely unafraid of people and used to come and lie on the verandah in the sun even when I was sitting out there having a cigarette. During the summer storms, he used to saunter over to the far corner of the back verandah, the bit that gets sun all day, and flatten himself out as far as possible: he’d lie there with his legs stretched out and his belly pressed to the hot concrete and let the rain pour down on him.

That always looked fun.

Then there was the one who used to climb up into the frangipani, stretch himself out at full length, and pretend to be a dragon. At least I assume that’s what he was doing: he used to adopt a sort of noble, far-away look.

And the one that used to climb up the mulberry, scrabble along the guttering, and then throw himself down onto the concrete path, with no apparent ill effects.

This one’s not so tame. But he’s a feisty lizard, and won’t let the smaller dragon come near him. All day, we can hear the scrabbling that means he’s chasing the little one away from the insects.

But he also likes the sun on the back verandah.

And he’s a beauty.

I seem to have come down with yet another cold. This is my second cold this semester, which is frustrating me, because I’m rarely ill and this one is weird: I don’t have many normal cold symptoms, but I ache all over and my skin is highly sensitive, which makes sitting or lying down painful and is interrupting my sleep. Frankly, I’d rather just have a runny nose or a cough.

Plus, now is not a good time: I have first-year and second-year assessment to mark—over seventy assignments in total—as well as a journal article that I need to finish by Friday if I’m going to submit it in time.

I doubt it’s going to be a very good journal article, but I’m doing my best.

I’m also still struggling with the Ph.D. submission process, since the proof came out with some fairly annoying formatting issues. These are my fault, rather than the printery’s, and I’m annoyed that I let myself become so frustrated with the process that I didn’t pick them up first time. Now I’m wondering whether it’s possible to cancel the whole process and start again with a new version of the file.

Essentially, I’m a bit beaten down right now and would like a holiday. Even mid-semester break would be nice, but that’s not until after week ten, a full fortnight away.

In the interim, I shall work on thinking up amusing blog posts.

And finishing my journal article, of course.

And the slightly belated results for this round of Humiliation are in. Finally, I am the most humiliated!

Catriona, Dune: 4 points
Tim, Little Women: 3 points
Leigh, The Wind in the Willows: 3 points
Nick, The Eyre Affair: 3 points
Wendy, Vanity Fair: 2 points
Matt, Gulliver’s Travels: 2 points
John, The Grapes of Wrath: 1 point (hardly humiliated at all, really)

I would like to take this opportunity, though, to point out that everyone who has any interest in books at all should read The Eyre Affair, because it’s awesome.

So far this weekend, I’ve run errands, done the grocery shopping, hung a print in the bedroom after collecting it from the framer’s, baked a chocolate cheesecake, helped kill a dragon (and some kobolds), tidied the house, done three loads of washing, and prepared and hosted a high tea for Nick’s dad.

I didn’t manage to get any more marking done, alas.

I’m a little tired, now.

And I’m not sure I’m in the mood for this episode, which wasn’t easy to watch last time around.

So this is “Midnight,” the first of two episodes that concentrate largely on one of the two characters: this one focuses on the Doctor and next week’s (also so difficult to watch) focuses on Donna. My understanding is that they wanted to film the two simultaneously, and this was their solution. It’s certainly an interesting notion.

Ooh, a gorgeous shot, but Nick says spot the green screen when it turns up.

Finally, the Doctor succeeds in taking his companion on vacation, after all those promises that they’ll go to the beach.

Oh, there’s the green screen! Behind his head when he hangs up the phone! Well, it wouldn’t be Doctor Who if the sets weren’t a little wobbly. So to speak.

And both the Doctor and Donna do need a holiday, after the last two episode.

David Troughton! Last seen as the king in “The Curse of Peladon,” a Jon Pertwee episode.

I would absolutely go on this trip, if I had the opportunity. A waterfall made of sapphires? Awesome.

I like this hostess, too: she’s so weary and mechanical, as though she’s done everything, even told those jokes, over and over again. And there’s the Doctor’s reiteration of allons-y: I mentioned back in “Voyage of the Damned” that that would pay off in an interesting way—this is the episode.

He’s like a puppy, this Doctor, especially in this episode: look at him wondering who he can make friends with.

The Lost Moon of Poosh, eh? (Don’t correct my spelling!) I wonder if that will become relevant later in the season.

(Apparently, and this is interesting, the fact that the long-term relationship that this woman just ended was with another woman is an example of Russell T. Davis’s gay agenda, which frequently drives some on-line Doctor Who fans—the nutters—to slavering fury. As far as I can tell, Davies’s gay agenda rests on revealing that, apparently, some people are gay. I would add “how dare he?” but sarcasm doesn’t come across well in print.)

NICK: I wish they’d called it a leisure hive.

DOCTOR: Sorry, I’m the Doctor—I’m very clever.

Pay attention to that line.

Of course the Doctor wants to look outside. He’s the Doctor. And of course he convinces Driver Joe and Engineer (trainee) Claude to look outside. And the scenery is amazing.

Wait, Claude looks freaked out. He see something. I see nothing, and I’ve seen this episode before.

NICK: I’m trying to look, and I’m not sure I can see anything.

We’re geeks: we want to know what’s going on.

So, while things are settling down to wait for the rescue ship, I can run back to cover something I wanted to mention before: the passengers. We have the crusty professor and his put-upon research assistant Deedee who wants to do her own research; the middle-class tourist couple and their Gothy, surly son; and the hard-boiled businesswoman with a broken relationship. And the stewardess.

And they’re all turning on each other already, even before we get this: the knocking on the outside of the carriage.

Ooh, I don’t like this sort of thing. This, and inanimate objects moving on their own, really freaks me out.

Ha! The Doctor’s got his stethoscope out—I’ve always wondered why he’s carrying one of those. But then he also carries a clockwork mouse in his pocket, so a stethoscope isn’t such a stretch, really.

Ah, now the businesswoman is freaking out. She says, “she said she’d get me” and “it’s coming for me.” Now, that’s interesting: what on earth is the backstory to the breakdown of her relationship, that she freaks out this intensely, far more than the other passengers, and that it involved threats (Rose on the viewscreens, again!) of vengeance. That’s far more than the standard “She said she needed her space” that the woman—her name is Skye, by the way—mentioned to the Doctor when they were talking.

While I’ve been typing that, something has ripped into the ship, throwing them all around and killing both Driver Joe and Claude. Poor trainee Claude.

There’s something wrong with Skye, though.

Now Jethro, the surly teenager, is already starting to frighten people with the idea that whatever was outside is inside now.

And, judging from Skye’s face now she’s turned around, he’s right. This actress is fabulous—she looks completely different in this scene than in the previous ones.

So, even the Doctor finds it irritating when people mimic him. And yet he apparently had children—and all children find at some point that that drives people mad, and do it for as long as they can get away with.

So, she’s not just repeating: she seems to be ripping the words straight from the speaker’s brain.

Ah! And now she’s not just repeating any more. Now she’s speaking at exactly the same time as the speaker. Oh, Jethro: that’s not just weird. That’s horribly creepy. But, as Nick points out, the technical side of this episode is extraordinary.

And, of course, the Doctor would test her with the word “Bananas.”

This is disturbing: this episode is showing the Doctor in his most basic form. A new life form, it seems: one that has taken Skye over entirely. And, of course, he doesn’t approve of that. But he’s fascinated, and he can’t help that. He’s the Doctor.

He’s also, though, at his most arrogant in this episode, and that’s a problem.

Ah! And now the passengers turn. Mrs Cane—Jethro’s mother—wants to throw Skye out of the vehicle. And now we see the shift. Already there was the casual cruelty that Jethro—in an unthinking fashion—was applying, using the stricken Skye as a puppet, to make her say, “My name is Jethro” and “666.”

And now we have this: calculated murder.

I don’t know that I blame them. I hope—I hope sincerely—that I wouldn’t behave this way under these circumstances. I hope that my crippling fear that this might happen one day would stop me from going along with this kind of mob behaviour. But I can’t be sure. Of course, I can’t be sure.

And now they all turn on the Doctor. And, for once, his ambiguous nature—and, and I like this point, the joy he takes in this type of chaos—is being used against him. As when he says he’s a traveller and Mrs Cane responds, “Like an emigrant?”

Damn, this is hard to watch. But I admit, the fact that he takes joy in this chaos is something that has been worrying me for a couple of seasons.

And now Skye’s stopped mimicking everyone—everyone except the Doctor.

Oh, dear.

The fact that they’re not just saying “She’s stopped” but keep insisting “She’s let me go” is fascinating: they’re terrified. Of course they are. She’s been mimicking them as they speak: she’s been inside their heads. And I think we can all understand how insanely terrifying that concept is.

Oh, damn!

Now she’s speaking first.

NICK: On “Do we have a deal?” So she breaks the deal straighaway. Or refuses it.

Now all the passengers see the Doctor as the one repeating. They assume that whatever it is has passed into the Doctor.

And yet, Skye still doesn’t look the same as she did in the beginning of the episode. This actress (Nick tells me she’s one of Davies’s favourites) is brilliant: without shifting clothes, or hairstyle, or make-up, she’s created three different characters in the space of about forty minutes.

Ah, Deedee knows what’s happening. She doesn’t trust the argument that it’s passed into the Doctor and that Skye is safe.

Oh, I don’t like to see the Doctor immobilised like that, helpless, unable to act. It’s not natural.

Ah, and the hostess isn’t certain about the majority opinion. Deedee argues that Skye is using the Doctor’s voice, but that she’s still the one possessed. And she’ll be right, as she was right about the mechanical problems and the hydraulics.

But now Skye is suggesting that the creature—she says the Doctor—is creating this chaos, this violence, by messing with their emotions.

And now they are moving—now they are intending to throw the Doctor out of the vehicle, and they talked about doing with Skye. Even Jethro gets involved, conflicted as he looks.

Until he tricks Skye into saying “allons-y”—and then the hostess knows. And she throws herself out the door into the fatal extonic sunlight, clutching Skye.

Damn.

The passengers are breaking, now—especially Jethro and the professor, both of whom were the most conflicted about the idea of throwing the Doctor out of the ship. Even Mrs Cane shows remorse; I suppose, at least, that that’s what her “I said it was her” is supposed to show. But the Doctor quite rightly greets that with nothing but flat scorn.

(Frankly, given that the driver, the engineer, and the hostess are all dead, I’m surprised the passengers aren’t all up on murder charges.)

Oh, damn; the Doctor’s so traumatised (gorgeous music, at this point) that he can’t even bring himself to return Donna’s hug for a moment. That’s bad, for this Doctor.

And that’s “Midnight.” That was a laugh a minute.

(The actress who played Skye was Lesley Sharp, by the way.)

Next week, “Turn Left,” the largely Doctor-free episode. Don’t let that put you off. Seriously.

Nick and I discussing the things that scare us:

ME: Bloody J-Horror.
NICK: It could be worse. It could be J.Lo. horror: the story of Jennifer Lopez’s career!
ME: Where’d you get that joke from, honey?
NICK: I made it up.
ME: Just now?
NICK: Yep. That’s just the way I roll.

Apologies for the lateness of this posting. But now I’ve helped slay the dragon, this seems like the logical next step.

The nominations for this round are as follows:

I have never read Frank Herbert’s Dune.
John has never read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Tim has never read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
Wendy has never read William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.
Leigh has never read Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows.
Nick has never read Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair.
Matt has never read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

Voting, as always in the comments thread below.

I’m not normally a big fan of in-jokes on blogs, but I couldn’t resist this one:

Saeana entered a square room. Each stone tile in the floor was carved with an ancient symbol, and the walls were covered in murals depicting the rise of a great king. In the center of the room, on an ornate pedestal, sat a golden idol.

Saeana made an Intelligence check with a difficulty of 20 . . . and rolled 13

Saeana wove a deliberate path on the stone tiles to reach the pedestal. She grabbed the idol and raised it above her head in triumph. A grinding sound made her look down at the pedestal to see it slowly rising, no longer held down by the weight of the idol. A much louder grinding sound made Saeana look up again in time to see a giant boulder rolling into the room — and straight for her! Saeana was able to run, jump, and dive to safety, but not without accumulating some minor injuries along the way. Too bad the idol had been damaged in the commotion.

Saeana took 19 damage.

Apparently, the fault lies with me, not poor dead Gurdis.

I’ve been a little worried about my Elf, as my previous posts have shown. In fact, the most recent adventure threw up this encounter:

Saeana quickly realized the depths of Nyx’s insanity and decided to embrace his madness. Saeana fell on her knee, proclaimed her utter devotion to Nyx, and extolled his power, his handsomeness, and his brilliance. Nyx was delighted to find a soulmate in his quest for fiendish tyranny, and proclaimed Saeana his consort. Nyx’s moment of paradisal bliss was tragically cut short as Saeana plunged a dagger in his heart. Nyx looked at Saeana with surprise and sadness. “My love?” burbled from his lips before he died. Saeana destroyed the dimensional portal apparatus and ascended from the castle dungeon.

Knowing my Elf as I do, I’m naturally a little worried about exactly when during the proceedings she stabbed the insane Tiefling wizard.

But then I came across this encounter:

Saeana noticed a typical prince calling for help from the top of a very tall tower. Seeing no other route to the top, she started climbing up the cobblestone exterior. It was pretty easy going at first, but all that climbing got tiring after a while . . .

Saeana made a Constitution check with a difficulty of 19 . . . and rolled 12

Saeana was about halfway up, when the prince started shouting down additional demands that Saeana bring up food, water, hair products, and so forth. Saeana climbed back down ostensibly to get these supplies but, weighing the risk versus reward, just took off instead.

Sure, I actually failed the Constitution roll. I do that a lot: my equipment is all focused on Strength and Dexterity.

And I would probably be rewarded for reaching the top of the tower. (If I know my Elf, I would be rewarded afterwards.)

(Apparently, if you succeed in this adventure, you find that the prince has disturbingly small hands and feet, and have to throw him over your shoulder before climbing down. It’s a very odd game.)

But I’m still proud of my Elf for just sodding off. If reading Fables has taught me anything, it’s to never trust Prince Charming.

And, after all, my upbringing, if not my Elf’s, is best summed up by a conversation that I’ve never forgotten:

MY SISTER: Are you worried at all that Catriona and I aren’t married with children?
MY MOTHER: Well, I raised you girls to be feminists.
MY FATHER: What? Behind my back!

A couple of days ago, I had to do a brisk clean-out of the pantry in the search for a squeezy container of honey that both Nick and I are sure we bought recently. (We didn’t find it.)

I threw a number of things out but I was simultaneously holding a phone conversation with my Mam about books she’d bought on my advice for my brother’s birthday—Glen Cook and Steven Brust—so I wasn’t paying attention when I handed Nick a packet of lavash crisps we’d opened two months ago.

He dropped them.

These things happen.

He then swept them out the back door onto the grass.

I wasn’t so impressed by this.

But I’ve just been sitting on the back steps in the rain having a cigarette:

ME: One good thing: all that rain has completely dissolved those lavash crisps.
NICK: That’s good.
ME: That can’t have been your intention when you swept them out there.
NICK: Waiting for rain is one of my standard contingency plans.
ME: You couldn’t have forseen the rain we had yesterday.
NICK: Forseen? No. Hoped? Yes.

Mind, this is the man who dealt with a forgotten (long forgotten—oh, the horror!) container of silken tofu that we found at the back of the fridge by, surprisingly, throwing it onto the back lawn—and we didn’t even have rain that time.

Thanks to Laura, who commented on this post about Jane Austen sequels, I’ve now found out about this:

Lost in Austen.

According to Wikipedia—and why wouldn’t we believe what Wikipedia says?—it’s a four-part series about an Austen fan who switches places with Elizabeth Bennet via a magical door in the former’s bathroom.

Oooh-er.

I honestly don’t think my life could have been complete had I never found out about this. Sure, I may have had professional success, perhaps children, a successful personal relationship, many joys—but there would have been an aching hole and, since this scenario depends on me never finding out about Lost in Austen, I would never have known why that hole was there.

Okay, that was marking-induced, semi-hysterical hyperbole. (And let that be a lesson to you, Nick: he tried to claim earlier that “I don’t like cushions” was hyperbole, instead of a negative comment on my decorating abilities.)

But, hyperbole aside, I would very much like to see this programme.

I mentioned it to Nick, and his response was “That looks as though it would be rather fun”—whereupon I stared at him incredulously for about five minutes before exclaiming, “Have you seen my Jasper Fforde novels?”

It also stars Jemima Rooper, whom Nick and I always refer to as “the lesbian ghost,” which I’m sure is so discriminatory a comment that we could be sued in a number of countries. But, though we’ve seen her in a few things—and, unexpectedly, saw her topless in the second part of Perfect Day recently—we always remember her as Cassie’s dead girlfriend in Hex.

I’ll be honest: I don’t know much more about this programme than that the general synopsis hits some primal, geeky, nineteenth-century fiction and fantasy-freak fan-girl button at the base of my spine, making it impossible for me not to watch it.

(I’m also mildly surprised that everyone is thinking “Pride and Prejudice meets Life on Mars“ when I’m thinking “Wasn’t there a sub-plot in a later Thursday Next novel where they ran Pride and Prejudice as a Big-Brother-style reality-TV show?”)

But if you want the opinions of people who know much more about both Austen and the programme than I do, the Austen Blog has been keeping an eye on it, and the fabulous John Sutherland has a piece in the equally wonderful Guardian.

I’m going to watch it regardless.

Disinterested commentary:

ME: I don’t know why people complain that there are too many blogs on the Internet. It doesn’t really hurt anyone if every man and his dog wants to keep one.
NICK: It’s like complaining about animation generally because of Japanese tentacle porn.
ME: Yes . . . except Japanese tentacle porn is wrong.