And we’re back on another Sunday night, for one of my favourite episodes of the season. So far, I’ve been sitting here becoming increasingly annoyed by partisan Olympic coverage (and by the emphasis given to the Olympics in the news bulletin). I realise that the coverage is certain to be as partisan (albeit with a different focus) in every other country that competes, but I still find it annoying.

Oh, well: Nick and I have been amusing ourselves by shouting, “That’s un-Australian!” at the television when any suitable opportunity offers itself. We didn’t stop when the Olympic coverage stopped, either.

We make our own fun.

But on a Doctor Who note, I completely forgot last week to upload my should-be-traditional picture of one of Nick’s items of memorabilia.

Let me make up for that now:

I realise that if you look closely, you’ll see that the sky is apparently upside down, but that’s because I had to flip the image. After all, there’s nothing quite so cool as a Dalek-themed oven glove.

And we’re back to images of the medal winners, so we must be close to the actual episode starting.

And, given the Agatha Christie angle, I don’t promise not the shout “book title!” if the opportunity arises. But, of course, none of you are actually in my living room, so the shouting won’t bother anyone but Nick. And he’s used to it.

Nick’s decided we need to watch Double the Fist purely because it has a brief appearance by Bruce Spence. Is that a good enough reason to watch it? I think not.

Hurray! English country house. And the Doctor pointing out that he can smell the 1920s. But Donna punctures his pretensions, again. I do love Donna.

Professor Peach? Why not just call him Professor Cannon Fodder. (Okay, that’s a spoiler, but not much of one). I’m with Donna; I’d like to go to a party in the 1920s.

Ooh, my favourite joke: “But why didn’t they ask . . . Heavens!”

Book title!

Last time I heard that joke, I laughed hysterically and ran off to get the book, so Nick could share the joke. As a result, I completely missed the giant wasp. I’ve missed it this time, too, because I was blogging. It reminds me that, no matter how many times I watch Twin Peaks, I’ve never actually seen the bit where Laura Palmer’s body is discovered.

Dear lord, Felicity Kendall looks good—she’s had some work done, I think. But she looks fabulous.

Oh, I think the son has an inappropriate relationship with the footman. Well, inappropriate for the period.

DONNA: All the decent men are on the other bus.
DOCTOR: Or Time Lords.

And Agatha Christie. She fooled the Doctor once . . . but it was a good once. I do like the image of the Doctor and Donna geeking out over Agatha Christie.

I said, when we heard that Agatha Christie was going to be in the programme, that I really hoped it was about that strange period when she disappeared. But I didn’t have high hopes, because the estate has always kept a tight lid on that time. It’s not mentioned in Christie’s autobiography (whoops, the Professor’s body has just been discovered) and her daughter kept a tight rein on treatments of those events—not surprising, especially since her father came under suspicion. But I’m pleased that they picked this angle on the episode.

Donna is the plucky young girl who helps you out, Doctor? Oh, dear.

Oh, there’s no Noddy? What a shame. I’d have liked to have met Noddy having tea with Big Ears.

The Doctor’s really playing with fire, the way he keeps telling Donna she’s plucky. And I like Agatha puncturing his pretensions; I found it a little disturbing how much fun he was having last week, while everyone was dying.

So the Reverend was in his room, and the son had a pre-arranged meeting with Davenport. The young girl whose name I’ve already forgotten was in her room with a gun, for no apparent reason, and Lady Eddison’s husband was reminiscing about the Can-Can. (I love that two-layer flashback.) Hey, the Colonel was in the theatre owner in Talons of Weng Chiang! Cool! Lady Eddison was drinking heavily and privately.

No alibis! Cool.

The Doctor went to Belgium to find Charlemagne after he’d been kidnapped by an insane computer? I’d love to see that episode. And David Tennant with a bow and arrow? I know a young Robin Hood fan who is probably enjoying this episode.

Nemesis? Book title!

I’m in awe of the sheer quantity of hair that Catherine Tate has. And the lovely colour.

So Lady Eddison had a mysterious illness after her return from India, did she? I wonder if that will prove relevant?

Ack! Giant wasp! I don’t blame Donna for screaming—I’m not good with insects myself, and this one is six-feet tall. But at least she scares it away—I do like Donna. I also like those recessed bookshelves in this room. I wish I had some of those.

Cat among the pigeons? Book title!

Dead man’s folly? Another book title!

Whoops, this housekeeper’s for the chop. Nick thinks she had time to get out of the way of that, but then Nick’s never had to escape from a gargoyle.

They do it with mirrors? Book title!

Of course, the Doctor would think that the giant psychotic wasp is wonderful. That’s the Doctor for you. (On that note, the scene where everyone opens their bedroom doors is one of my favourite scenes.)

Appointment with death? Book title!

Cards on the table? Book title!

Oh, poor Agatha. She’s so sort of beaten down in this episode, so lacking in self confidence. It shows a good sense of the period in her life, the fact that the dissolution of her marriage came at the same time as her mother’s death, when she had to pack up an enormous Victorian house alone and had a nervous breakdown. All that background permeates this episode.

That’s a neat toolkit. I’m not a jewel thief, but if I were, I’d have a kit like that. With the red-velvet lining and everything.

Whoops, the Doctor’s been poisoned. Nick tells me (Sparkling cyanide? Book title!) that people thought this was over the top, but no more so than the removal of radiation from his foot in “Smith and Jones”—and I liked it.

“Harvey Wallbanger? How is Harvey Wallbanger one word?”

“What’s that?”
“Salt.”
“Too salty.”

“Campdown Races?”

Love it. There’s always room in Doctor Who for a bit of farce.

Donna, the Doctor’s quite, quite mad, but I think he would have told you if he’d actually poisoned the soup. Or maybe not.

Oh, dear—Roger’s face down in his soup with a carving knife in his back. Poor Roger. And poor Davenport. On a lighter note, I love that sunburst mirror on the back wall, the copper one.

DOCTOR: I’ve been so caught up with giant wasps that I’d forgotten . . .

It’s the brilliance of Tennant in this role that he can pull of that line.

Endless night? Book title!

Aha! The accusing parlour. When I have a house of my own, I’m totally having an accusing parlour. I feel it would come in handy.

Crooked house? Book title!

Donna cracks me up in this scene: sitting in the background with a bowl of grapes, completely unable to guess the murderer even when almost all of the suspects have been eliminated. I’m not good at guessing the murderer, either—that’s how I judge a bad detective novel. It’s one in which I can spot the killer.

Is it just me, or is the Firestone rather ugly? I’m not sure I’d want to wear it every day.

So the girl whose name I’ve forgotten is a jewel thief, the Colonel can really walk, and Lady Eddison had an illegitimate child? Too many motives! Even with Roger dead.

The idea that a well-brought-up English girl would have an affair with a young man whom she knows is actually a giant wasp is . . . rather odd.

Taken at the flood? Book title!

Maybe it’s just because I’m not that keen on insects, but I’m not sure even a great, life-changing love would survive the revelation that he’s actually an enormous, metamorphic, alien insect. Does that make me shallow?

Doctor, you do have to be careful about saying things like “Donna Noble, it was you . . .” when everyone’s in the accusing parlour.

The moving finger? Book title!

Nick thinks that this episode is more dramatic than usual because it’s focalised through Donna’s perspective. But I’m not entirely convinced by that argument—especially since Donna isn’t in all the key scenes. But I’ll leave in there; we can debate that perspective in the comments thread, if you like.

So it was the Vicar? Typical. It’s always the vicar. Actually, was there ever an Agatha Christie novel in which the murderer was the vicar? I can’t recall one off the top of my head.

Honestly, the man’s been a giant wasp for three days, and he’s already calling us “you humans”. It seems that his inheritance came with a healthy dose of arrogance, didn’t it? And a touch of xenophobia.

I mentioned before how this episode seems to rely on a knowledge of Agatha Christie’s state of mind when her first marriage broke down, and that seems to come to the fore here, where she’s driving along muttering “It’s all my fault. It’s all my fault” and actively contemplating suicide. That all seems more plausible if you know what state she was in at the time, though the breakdown of the marriage is probably sufficient.

Death comes as the end? Book title!

(And my favourite joke of the episode?
DOCTOR: “Murder At The Vicar’s Rage.” Needs a bit of work.
I like the consciousness of playing with the book titles.)

Donna’s killing of the wasp and the Doctor’s perfunctory disapproval of it seems a little . . . odd, though. The Doctor’s made a point of having a no-kill policy, and it does seem as though there should have been more fallout from Donna’s actions. Not that I can see what else she could have done.

Agatha Christie the best-selling author of all time? Well, except for Daphne Farquitt.

And that’s “The Unicorn and the Wasp.”

Next week, “Silence in the Library.” Steven Moffat! Hooray!

I’ve been re-reading Terry Pratchett’s Jingo, recently. At one point, a Klatchian prince is given an honorary degree from Unseen University, a Doctorum Adamus cum Flabello Dulci, which he translates as “Doctor of Sweet Fanny Adams,” a slightly more obscure form of jingoism than that of the people shouting “towelhead” at him in the streets or assuming he’s going to attempt to buy their wives.

But last time I read this, it made me realise that I didn’t know the origin of the term “sweet Fanny Adams.” I knew that when people say “sweet F.A.” these days, they don’t usually mean Fanny Adams, but I didn’t know where the phrase had originated.

So I looked it up, in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, of course, and found one of the most disturbing etymologies I’ve ever come across.

In 1867, a young girl called Fanny Adams was assaulted, murdered, and dismembered in a hop garden in Hampshire. Someone was tried and hanged for the murder, a twenty-one-year-old solicitor’s clerk.

So far, fairly nasty. But then the Royal Navy adopted the term “sweet Fanny Adams” as a synonym for tinned mutton, with what Brewer’s describes as “grim humour.” (Do you think so, Brewer’s? I’m partial to black comedies myself, but that’s a little grim even for me.) It came to mean something worthless and then to mean “nothing at all.”

It’s worth repeating: that’s one of the most disturbing etymologies I’ve ever come across, including Elliot Engel’s argument about the origins of the phrase “break a leg.”

Brewer’s does note, though, that “F.A.” is now frequently assumed to expand into the kind of phrase that you wouldn’t use in front of your mother. But while the “four-letter words” aren’t often used in what is still known as polite society—fascinatingly, Brewer’s notes under “Four-letter Words” that the Oxford English Dictionary didn’t admit the two most objectionable of these words into their pages until 1972—they’re still preferable to the actual origins of “sweet Fanny Adams.”

They always disappoint me.

I had thought, back when I bewailed the unnecessary Nazis in At Bertram’s Hotel—173 days ago, apparently—that the Poirot adaptations were more accurate than the Miss Marple ones.

But now I’m watching After the Funeral, and I’m not so sure.

So far, they’ve already removed one of Richard Abernethy’s siblings, making the unreliable nephew George the son of Helen, instead of her nephew.

And they’ve disinherited him, for no reason.

They’ve removed another of Richard Abernethy’s siblings, making Susan (now Susanna) and Rosamund sisters instead of cousins.

And they’ve made Cora’s late husband an Italian instead of a Frenchman. She’s Mrs Gallachio (or something along those lines: I haven’t seen the actual spelling) rather than Mrs Lansqueset.

And they’ve introduced the theft of the deeds of Enderby, Abernethy’s house, making its sale impossible, which adds an apparently unnecessary sub-plot.

Oh, dear: now George has just woken up on a park bench being licked by a Labrador (not a euphemism) and Susanna is haranguing a congregation on the subject of foreign missions. I think I miss the Susan who was a keen businesswoman, planning on opening her own emporium to capitalise on her own and her husband’s strengths.

I don’t think I need to mark that as a spoiler, because I doubt this is going to follow the book’s plot too closely. Susanna, for example, is unmarried, and apparently both inappropriately involved with her cousin George and also planning on sailing to Africa to pursue her work with foreign missions.

So far the most interesting point in this adaptation., from my perspective, is the fact that George Abernethy is Michael Fassbender, who was a Spartan whose name I’ve forgotten in 300 and the fallen angel in Hex. But that’s not why I’m interested in seeing him. Rather, it’s because the name Fassbender has reminded me of Ruth Rendell’s Put On By Cunning, in which the plot turns on the fact that “fassbender” is, apparently, the German term for a cooper. (At least I think it was German; it sounds German. I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong.)

It’s made me think that at least I might be able to wile away the time during the programme thinking of slightly better crime fiction.

And yet Christie really is very good.

So why? Why on earth do they make these changes?

I would have thought that Christie’s plots were ideally designed for adaptation to the television. They’re cunning, but she prides herself on setting everything out for the reader, for all she may employ sleight of hand to draw the reader’s attention away from the main points.

So why these broad, sweeping changes? And, something that irritates me even more, the minor changes, like adjusting Mrs Lansqueset’s surname? It seems so unnecessary.

I once went to see Troy with Nick and a friend. I gave up on the film at the point at which (spoiler! but it’s a bad film) Menelaus died. But, after the film, I pointed out that Menelaus’s death was the point at which the whole thing became thoroughly absurd, but our friend disagreed, saying it was liberating: “You didn’t know what was going to happen next!”

I admire that kind of optimism. But I can’t put it into practice myself.

Why, oh why, if you must write plots involving Nazis, murderous nuns, or drunken, disinherited gamblers, do do you not present them as brand new mysteries? Why tell us it’s Christie, and get all our hopes up?

Oh, I know: saying that it’s Agatha Christie brings in a certain audience who, by the time they realise the plot’s gone haywire, are already committed to watching the rest of the programme.

But it disappoints me every, every time.

I was trying to get a closer look this morning of the pair of lovely birds that our ragamuffin batch of mynahs was harassing; I have no idea what type of birds they are—and my inept Googling for Queensland birds with green tails and bright blue eye markings brought me no useful results—but they normally restrict themselves to hanging out in the palm trees. This time, they were bailed up in the bushes outside my study window, and it was unusual to see them so close.

Mind, the selfish things were more concerned with not being attacked by the mynahs, who outnumbered them four to one, than they were with holding still for me to take a photograph, so I didn’t manage to snap them in the end.

I had to settle for taking a picture of the blue-tongue, when he emerged to sun himself.

Blue-tongues freak me out a little; I’m not actually scared of them, or of any lizards, though I have a healthy Australian fear of snakes—and that’s the problem, really. Blue-tongues look far more like snakes than any self-respecting lizard should, especially when all I see is the inappropriately orange tail disappearing behind a box in the laundry, and freak out slightly.

You can’t really blame me: Australia has how many of the world’s most poisonous snakes? Almost all of them?

But when the lizard is in the garden, I’m not scared of him.

In fact, I hope his return means that we’ll soon be joined for the summer by our awesome water dragons—who make my day by throwing themselves off the roof, or climbing down the mulberry tree and then throwing themselves down the yukka as though it were a slide, or coming and lying on the verandah at my feet when it’s raining, or haring across the garden on their back legs, or occasionally wandering into the living room looking for insects.

And our bearded dragon, who’s a little less interesting, because he’s slower and closer to the ground, but who’s still nice to have around.

And our geckos, who are the great joy of my life. I don’t think people who were raised in the North can actually appreciate how strange it is to a Southerner to have these little pink lizards running freely through the house. I adore them—and am grateful that the primary insect-killing role in the house is taken by them and not, as in N.S.W., but huntsmen spiders.

We’re a lizardy household. And better that than spiders the size of teacups.

I’ve been watching episodes of Monkey while waiting for Nick to get back from the concert. Monkey fills me with a deep sense of uncomplicated joy; I loved it as a child so deeply that it still makes me happy every time I watch it.

I like the way the programme is thoroughly relaxed about cross-dressing: Tripitaka is clearly a woman, and isn’t fooling anyone; Sandy’s just turned into a female form, meaning the actor is wearing a dress and heavy make-up; and the Boddhisatva who regularly turns up is often in her female incarnation, in which she’s the same actor, but in a dress.

I love the music.

I’ve even got a soft spot for Sandy, the chronically depressed water demon.

(I don’t like the second Pigsy, though—the first one was much better. I’m also not a big fan of the horse-dragon once he learns how to turn into a man; I find it makes the idea of using him as a horse a little . . . disturbing.)

I also find it hilarious, as in these quotes from an episode about a unicorn demon.

Tripitaka to Monkey: “You’re always hitting everybody too quickly.”

The Unicorn King to Pigsy: “You should take the form of a man, occasionally, as I do. You’d still be ugly, but I find people are more receptive.”

And after Pigsy’s transformation: “You really are . . . not quite so revolting now.”

Sandy’s self-image: “I won’t keep reminding you; I’m no eel! I hate the brutes; they’re all slimy.”

Pigsy flirting fairly ineptly, with the help of a flower: “The petals are a little droopy, but it made me think of you.”

Monkey: “Pigsy, you’ll regret this!”
Pigsy: “I know I will.”

And my absolute favourite quote of the episode:

The Unicorn King: “We unicorns could take over the entire world. It’s only because we’re mythical and nice that we don’t.”

Nick’s gone out to a concert with two friends—a concert in which I’m not slightly interested—so I’m home alone, learning the following important life lessons while watching Stardust.

It gets a little confused, because some of the lessons have to do with me and some with the film, but I’m sure they’ll all come in useful after a while.

1. Tristan’s true love is never going to be Sienna Miller. Obviously. Although she is strangely appealing in some parts of this film.

2. I’m far too nervous to spend many evenings on my own. I’m nervous enough during the day, but I’m especially nervous during the night, because I’m a little frightened of the dark, truth be told. Too many vampire and werewolf stories as a child, I think.

I say “nervous” because it’s a neat middle ground between Nick’s preferred word “jumpy” and my default term “highly strung”—except that if I describe myself as highly strung I suspect that I sound as though I’m trying to make myself seem interesting.

3. I’m always surprised when I realise that Rupert Everett is in this film. This is, I think, the third time I’ve seen this film, and every time I forget that Rupert Everett is in it.

4. I genuinely don’t know how to operate what I will call—for want of a better word—our “home entertainment system.” By which I mean, I can’t tell the television and the DVD player remote controls apart. Before I managed to start this movie, I spent ten minutes staring alternately at the menu on the screen and then at the television remote, looking for an “enter” button.

Seriously. Ten minutes.

But I don’t feel that bad—I once watched my mother try valiantly to manipulate the television with the aid of her cordless telephone.

5. Peter O’Toole is strangely good in this, despite having such a small role and not having to cry. He’s an excellent crier, Peter O’Toole—every time he cried in Russell T. Davies’s version of Casanova, he made me want to cry.

Though now I think about it, I don’t think I ever watched the end of Casanova.

6. It’s not just the interaction between the television and the DVD player that bother me, either. I can’t operate the television alone, either. After I found the “enter” button—by double checking which remote control I was using—I then spent another few minutes trying to change the way the picture was set up, from 14.3 (or some such ratio) to Movie, so I could see everything.

Apparently, the relevant button is called “Zoom.” Does that seem plausible to anyone else?

7. Dear lord, Michelle Pfeiffer is gorgeous. If she’s had surgery, whoever’s done it is a genius. She doesn’t look exactly as she did in Ladyhawke, but she still looks amazing.

And, by a process of association controlled only by what’s on the screen, I find Nathaniel Parker strangely appealing. Tommy Linley is an annoying character, but I like Parker. Claire Danes is very sweet and pretty in this, too.

8. I’d probably be a better person if I spent more time thinking about my own life and/or real life and less time thinking about fictional worlds.

Then again, I wouldn’t be as good at my job. So it’s a trade-off.

9. I’m really glad that, despite all the fairy-tale, folklore, and nursery-rhyme elements that didn’t translate from Gaiman’s story to this, they at least kept the idea of Babylon candles. When I first heard the term, the first thing I thought was “How many miles to Babylon?” Do people still recite that nursery rhyme?

10. My parents never forbade the reading of any books. But I almost wish they’d forbade me to read Virginia Andrews. I read all of the Flowers in the Attic series and My Sweet Audrina, and I’ve regretted it for some time.

I don’ t think it would have harmed me not to read them, but I sometimes think that reading them did harm me, a little.

11. I’m very tired for some reason. I don’t think I’m at my most coherent.

12. Perhaps I should just watch the film?

Because it’s just been that sort of day.

It seems that, despite the cold, the wistaria has decided to start blooming. It’s a small bush, and everything but this one spike is bare—I can see the budding leaves forming, but this is the only other trace of life on the entire plant.

I’m fond of wistaria; the house I grew up in (from age four to age twenty one, just before I moved up here) had an enormous wistaria clambering up over the back verandah, which seems, in retrospect, to have been always smothered in flowers. Even my mother—more an enthusiastic than a cautious pruner—never managed to kill the wistaria.

This little plant isn’t quite the same, but it’s still nice having that touch of pale purple in the garden, especially at the tail end of winter.

Just to balance the frustration of the last post.

At least having to go through Appendix C—the index to fiction in one of the Victorian periodicals my work addresses—has reminded me of some of the fabulous titles of these serials and single-episode tales.

I never read most of them: the index covers the journal between 1864 and 1881, so I was hard-pressed just to read the hundred-odd works by my core author. But I regret not reading some more than I regret others.

I do regret not reading “She Scorned His Love—And Yet She Loved Him.” I’m sure it’s fairly awful—but it’s a brilliant title. No room there for thinking, “Ooh, I wonder what that one’s about?”

I’m also partial to “Foiled by His Own Features,” a single-episode tale, for the opposite reason: I have no idea what this could be about. Foiled how? Doing what? And what is it about his features? Is he scarred or just really familiar? I’m sure it’s the usual girl-loves-boy, girl-pretends-she-doesn’t, girl-and-boy-get-married-anyway narrative, but the title makes it much more exciting.

But my favourite?

“How Daisy and Violet Paid The Rent.”

I haven’t read the story—but Nick and I have our own, thoroughly libelous opinions about how Daisy and Violet paid the rent.

Sometimes, when you’re indexing the fiction content for seventeen years of a Victorian penny weekly, you have to make your own fun.

I’m starting to become intensely frustrated with the process of turning the thesis into a university-specific PDF for submission.

It shouldn’t be so difficult.

Or, if it really needs to be so difficult, it shouldn’t be in the hands of the harassed postgraduate student whose thesis it is.

I’m entirely in favour of the electronic submission of the thesis; I think, in the long run, it will only help promulgate postgraduate research, once people aren’t committing to either travelling to the library in which the hard copy is held or paying a fortune to have the thesis copied onto microfilm.

But the process itself is showing more potholes than anticipated.

We started out this afternoon with a checklist of things to do.

Item 1: Set up an account at the printery, so I could download the PDF-conversion software. Easy. Slight problem in the fact that they didn’t tell me my password had to be limited to a certain form until after they’d rejected my first choice—which always annoys me slightly—but that’s a minor pothole in the road.

So I ticked that one off the list.

Item 2: Download and instal the software. Should be easy—until I get a message telling me that an error had prevented installation.

So I can’t even instal the necessary software.

Neither can Nick.

And we’re stuck on Item 2. It’s a public holiday, so I can’t even contact the printery—I did send them an e-mail, but I’m teaching tomorrow, so that’s another delay.

Oh, well—what can you do? Except deal with the other items on the checklist.

Because the really fun thing, the thing I didn’t realise at first, is that all images in the thesis have to be in TIFF format.

Mine are JPEG—but JPEG is unacceptable for the conversion process.

So that’s the sixteen images in the thesis itself that need to be deleted and replaced with TIFF versions.

(Of course, the images are on Nick’s computer, because he has the fancy editing tools, and so far he hasn’t been able to locate them all. I suggested they should all be in a folder labelled “Images for Treena’s PhD: VERY VERY IMPORTANT,” but apparently they’re, and I quote, “all over the place.”)

But, even more fun—if you have a particularly loose definition of “fun”—is Appendix A. Appendix A is over fifty pages long, and it’s all images. All in JPEG format.

Appendix A was built once in Word. But when I showed the final draft to my supervisors, they felt that some of the images—the photographs of holograph material—were too small to be legible, and had to be blown up.

So I re-built it, again in Word. But I failed to back it up before my computer exploded in February (I’d only finished it the day before) and it was lost in its entirety.

So we re-built it, in Pages this time, because I was desperately short of time, and Nick thought Pages was more efficient. That version got me through submission.

Then I copied it into Word again, so I could—theoretically, it seems now—turn it into a PDF for submission. And Word randomly changed font sizes and even fonts themselves in all the captions, so I had to go through and re-format all of those.

Now, it has to be re-built once again, just to turn those fifty-odd images into TIFF format.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I’m at the end of my tether. The corrections to the thesis themselves only took a couple of days, but this conversion process has been dragging on for weeks. In fact, I’m getting perilously close to the two-month deadline for submitting the corrected manuscript.

Surely the struggle with a Ph.D. should be in producing the thesis itself, and not in this process. I realise we’re the guinea pigs, with all that that entails.

But I think I used up all my energy to get this thesis submitted in the first place. I’m not sure how much I have left to deal with a document-conversion process that’s well outside my area of expertise, even if it weren’t constantly hitting potholes.

I’m nearing the end of Breaking Dawn, the final book in the Twilight series and I have a series of completely random thoughts on the subject.

Even though I’ve not quite finished the book, this will be spoilerific—if you haven’t read the books and want to, don’t keep reading.

I’ve also numbered my points to keep them straight, but there’s no underlying organising principle.

1. I’d never noticed before, even though this is the fourth book of hers I’ve read, that they’re all structured in exactly the same way: several hundred pages of emotional angst and trauma followed by a hundred pages of action.

That worked well—for me, anyway—in Twilight, but I’ve been a little bored with it in this book. Frankly, I was a little bored with it in New Moon, but I think that was largely to do with the fact that the emotional trauma was centred around Jacob; Jacob is just as objectionable as Edward, really, but once the author has made it clear that I’m supposed to see Edward as Bella’s true love, I get frustrated with the addition of a love triangle. It seems like a fairly cheap way of jerking the reader’s emotions around.

Actually, love triangles just irritate me, full stop. The only one I had any patience with was the one between Aeryn Sun and the clones of the original John Crichton, in Farscape—and even that wasn’t dragged out for too long.

2. I’m uncertain about the werewolf “imprinting”. As far as I can tell, it’s a “love at first sight” thing, but specific to werewolves: intenser, perhaps? Or tied to their pack nature? To be honest, I’m not quite certain, except that I am certain that the woman the werewolf imprints on (and the almost exclusively masculine natures of werewolves is another issue) is his future mate.

It’s the future part that bothers me, because one of the werewolves imprints on a two-year-old girl and one on a newborn baby.

Now, clearly Meyer isn’t suggesting that the attraction is sexual at this stage: she goes to some length to have her characters explain that, in fact, and the relationships between these werewolves and their future mates isn’t suggestive or disturbing.

Not sexually.

But the idea of these hyper-masculine creatures (did I mention that the packs are almost exclusively male?) closely overseeing the rearing, education, and development of their future wives . . . there’s something a little creepy in that. Especially combined with the fact that the gender politics of these books do tend to construct men as controlling (and that control as a good thing) and women as fragile.

3. The hyper-masculinity of werewolves in the novels has also come to irritate me, but only in this book. There’s one female werewolf, and in this book she explains something of how the change came about for her. For the male werewolves, the change (triggered by an ancient protective spirit and by the presence of the vampires) effectively stalls development: once they change the first time, they age and grow rapidly for a period—so that the adolescent boys who change become, physically, enormous men—but the natural aging process is stalled. (This is convenient for the two who “imprint” on much younger women.)

But for the female werewolf, Leah, it doesn’t work this way. Leah makes it clear that the woman’s role in the werewolf myth is simply to pass the gene on: to give birth to future generations of werewolves. But, she argues, she can’t do that: clearly, she doesn’t possess the correct gene (or whatever it is that triggers the change), despite her descent from one of the original three werewolves. If she did, she believes, the Alpha werewolf—her ex-boyfriend—would have imprinted on her and not her cousin.

So her change into the first female werewolf in the history of the pack is, she thinks, a corrupted act: a way of her body coping with her lineage in the absence of its appropriate, feminine, fertile response.

And the change triggers menopause. She’s a twenty-year-old woman, but—while the male members of the pack are trapped in permanent adolescence—she ceases to menstruate, describing herself as a “genetic dead-end.”

And the same is true for female vampires. When Bella becomes pregnant on her honeymoon, while she’s still human, she concludes that female vampires can’t become pregnant, because the vampiric change essentially freezes their body, rendering the necessary change of pregnancy impossible. But male vampires can impregnate human women, apparently because the former’s bodies don’t change.

And while I’m happy to acknowledge that men remain fertile much later into life than women, this seems oddly absurd to me. If their bodies don’t change, how does a century-old vampire still have the means to impregnate women?

It seems to me that it would be very easy to construct an argument that suggests Meyer is presenting powerful women as unwomanly: while men can change into werewolves and vampires without giving up their essential nature, women who shift into these powerful modes do so by giving up their fertility. In a novel whose world view presents—as I argued above—men as controlling and women as fragile, women are hyper-feminine, although that femininity might not take the form of an obsession with shoes. Their change makes them unwomanly.

In case it seems as though I’m over-reaching here, look at the three women whose origin stories we know. Esme is changed after she loses her infant son, goes mad, and tries to kill herself. The entire Carlisle coven grows up around her desire to recreate her thwarted maternal instincts. Rosalie is changed after she is almost killed in a vicious sexual assault—horribly disturbing, even if it isn’t described in detail—and is almost crippled by her desire for a normal human life, centred on a desire for children. And Bella—who has no trouble with the change, at all, despite the emphasis on how difficult it is to stop newborn vampires from killing people—has already borne a child, in a magically accelerated pregnancy. In fact, her early hours as a vampire, the hours in which she demonstrates unusual self control, are centred on her child, who keeps her sane.

Suddenly, the “powerful women are prevented from achieving the one thing that all women really want; power is merely a second-best option” reading doesn’t look quite so unlikely.

4. On a lesser note, the typography is driving me completely insane. There’s something odd about the formatting of the letters: the apostrophe is too highly set, or takes up too little space, or something that I can’t put my finger on. Either way, I keep reading “I’m” as “Im” and “I’ve” as “Ive,” which forces me to go back and re-read the sentence.

The book is also artificially bloated. If you have a copy of this and either Twilight or The Host, put them next to one another. The 750 pages of this book aren’t all densely packed story: the font is enormous and the lines widely spaced, to make the book look longer than it is.

That’s just annoying, frankly: had it been formatted along ordinary lines, it would be easier to hold and read.

The cover is pretty, though—as always.

5. Finally, Renesmee? Really? No, I’m not talking about the impossibility of a half-human, half-vampire child. I’m talking about the daft name. If you want to honour your mother and your mother-in-law, Bella, why not call the child Renee Esme? Or Esme Renee?

After all, when you thought the child was a boy, you planned on calling him Edward Jacob. Not Edcob. Or Jacward. Both of which are just as silly names as Renesmee. Really, you can’t complain when people nickname her Nessie. I know you do complain. Endlessly. But, really, you have no grounds for complaint. Moxie Crimefighter would have been a more sensible name.

Really, I have enjoyed these books, on a certain level. I don’t mean I’ve enjoyed them in a “these are trash reading, but I’ll save my real enjoyment for books with Penguins on the spine” sense, because I don’t think like that—as those of you who’ve seen the contents of my bookshelves will probably agree.

I mean I’ve enjoyed them as page-turners; I’ve been dragged along with the narrative, especially in the action-packed final pages of each volume.

But once I started noticing the gender imbalances in the books—which took me long enough—I couldn’t stop noticing them.

And I think that’s what I’m going to take away from these books: a vaguely disquieting sense that, ultimately, these books suggests that, except in the unique case of Bella, women can only achieve power at the cost of what the world of Twilight thinks should be their natural, feminine, maternal purpose.

Somewhere out there there’s a possum with a hacking cough and a fierce craving.

At some point during the night, an element of the local wildlife—possibly a fruitbat, I suppose, but it seems unlikely. I’m betting possum—made a mad dash for the packet of cigarettes I’d left on the sofa on the back verandah.

Not content with viciously ripping the packet apart, it also chewed the cigarettes themselves.

(Sadly, my first thought was, “Dammit, possum! I’m on a budget!”)

What I’m wondering now, though, is whether this possum was totally lacking a sense of smell?

Perhaps the packet itself looked appealing, but surely once it had torn that open, it couldn’t have found the cigarettes enticing? I know they’re dead plant matter, but do they smell appetising?

The whole thing seems distinctly odd.

I have had instances before now when I’ve emptied an ashtray, left the plastic bag on the verandah, and come back to find that an enthusiastic bush turkey has pecked holes in it and scattered the butts everywhere.

But I’ve always put that down to, firstly, the fact that the butts do look a little like grubs, I suppose, if we accept that, secondly, bush turkeys are fairly stupid.

But this possum with a fierce nicotine craving is new to me.

And here we are for an episode that proved controversial, at least in my living room.

If last week’s blogging was brought to you by wine and Nurofen, this one is brought to you by a lingering cold, slightly less wine, and an enormous pile of marking that I haven’t quite finished and need to get back to once this episode is over.

Sometimes I think I need to get out of my rut and back into the groove.

Then, I remember that I never was in the groove, and that I’ve worked damn hard to get into this “rut,” and I stop feeling sorry for myself.

Plus, not only did I not die in last night’s Dungeons and Dragons session, but I also have two kobold ears in my belt pouch. Good times.

I seem to have lost Nick, by the way, for those of you who look forward to his interruptions. I’m sure he was here a minute ago, but no doubt he’s snatched the opportunity to visit his shiny, white iMistress.

Hang on, he’s turned up again. But he is clutching his iPhone. In fact, that can be taken as a given; whenever I mention Nick, he’s clutching his iPhone.

And fiddling with the speakers, even though he knows that’s really irritating.

Why is an Australian gold medal more important, news-wise, than this burgeoning war between Russia and Georgia?

Ooh, snow. Pretty. But, as Nick points out, it is odd to see gum trees with snow on them.

Double the Fist? Apparently, it’s a new season. I’ve never heard of it. But I don’t think it’s my cup of tea, somehow.

And here we go! “The Doctor’s Daughter”!

And Martha—I know a lot of people don’t like her, but I love Martha.

So the Doctor’s not impossible; he’s just a bit unlikely? Seems about right to me.

Alien planet! We haven’t had enough alien planets in this new version of Doctor Who. Arm stuck in a great machine? That’s never going to be painless. People should know that from watching Flash Gordon. In fact, people should just watch Flash Gordon—it’s brilliant.

In the meantime, a pretty blonde girl completely dressed in leather pants, khaki T-shirt, and full make-up has just stepped out of a cloning machine and called the Doctor “Dad.”

What I want to know here is why Donna and Martha aren’t sampled. Is it just because the creepy (but strangely adorable) fish-people turn up at this point?

Okay, now Martha’s been kidnapped, and is on the wrong side of the tunnel they’ve just blown up. Oh, Martha. I thought you were better than that.

There’s something about this episode that reminds me of old-school Doctor Who, though.

NICK: When did David Tennant get his overcoat on again? I thought he didn’t have it on when he . . . oh, never mind.

Martha and the Hath soldier.

NICK: And here we have the most convincing inter-personal relationship in the entire episode.

I like the Hath—I don’t really know why. But they’re not as warlike as the humans, or they would simply have shot Martha when she put that chap’s shoulder back into the socket. And I like the make-up, and the strange, bubbly, green, tube-like thing they speak through. I can’t think of a better description.

Donna’s so down to earth—and I like that discussion about her friend Neris (Nerys? Don’t correct my spelling!) and the turkey baster. It reinforces the idea that humans shouldn’t be quite so uptight about the odd ways that aliens procreate.

NICK: I think Jenny’s the only one who gets hot pants.
ME: They’re not hot pants.
NICK: They’re just a bit . . . better fitted than the others’.
ME: That’s an understatement.

The scene with Martha being petted by the Hath is strangely charming, when it should be slightly creepy. That’s another reason why I like the Hath—they don’t seem to be natural soldiers.

I like the back story about “early colonists carving buildings out of the rock” they’ve built into the story to explain why they’re filming this in an old theatre of some kind. Lovely sets they are, though.

Ah! They do seem to be planning on breeding people from Donna as well as from the Doctor. I was wondering about that.

Oh, dear—the Doctor’s going to interfere with the map. The Doctor always interferes. Why, Doctor? This never goes well.

And, look: you’ve just increased the xenophobia and blood-thirstiness of the people.

DOCTOR: Look up “genocide,” You’ll see a little picture of me and the caption will read “Over my dead body.”
NICK: Or, “I do it better than you.”

It does seem a little hypocritical. Maybe the caption could read, “In future, over my dead body. In the past, meh.”

So this is the episode when the Doctor has to face his past as a soldier—I wonder how he’s going to deal with that.

I’m hoping something comes up here about the fact that the Doctor once had children. And grandchildren. And, if he’s the last of the Time Lords, they’re all dead. Presumably including Susan; I wonder whether she was recalled to Gallifrey for the Time War, as the Master was.

Oh, Donna—you’re by far the most practical companion we’ve ever had. I don’t think we’ve ever had one before who was so capable of cutting straight through the Doctor’s babbling and showing him that it wasn’t always that important.

Ooh, Jenny has two hearts? Does that make her a Time Lord? Interesting—but I’m not even going to think about re-creating the Time Lords with these two. That’s not right.

That Martha and this Hath can communicate so readily is intriguing, even with all the bubbling.

Martha—you wouldn’t let a little radiation put you off, would you? You were the only person to escape the burning of Japan!

Oh, Jenny—feminine wiles? That’s a little beneath you, isn’t it? (Although I’d like to see the Doctor try that, too.)

NICK: He’d just let Captain Jack do it.

Oh, Doctor—Donna has womanly wiles. Look at that lovely hair, for example!

A clockwork mouse? I bet that first belonged to the Fourth Doctor.

Hey, the Hath have a science-fiction battering ram!

NICK: You can tell it’s science fiction, because it has fluorescent lights in it. Which you’d think would be a little impractical for a battering ram.

Oooh, the surface is rather lovely. Hey, how does Martha know that that Hath was swearing? Is the TARDIS translation circuit still working? But, no: they were sitting right near the TARDIS when she put his arm back in the socket, and we didn’t get the impression that she could understand him then.

So Donna notices the numbers? And the Doctor just dismisses them? That’s interesting.

Now we see that the Doctor’s loving this—he’s brought chaos into this society, which was chaotic enough in the first place—and he’s grinning and loving it. I know he’s somewhat mad, but this seems a little too mad.

And Jenny’s having second thoughts about her profession? I’m not sure that’s even possible—wouldn’t she have been programmed entirely to fight? Why would they programme soldiers with free will?

Oh, dear—the Entrapment scene. Still, it gets Jenny a cuddle from her father. I’m surprised that hasn’t happened before; he’s such a cuddler, this Doctor.

This planet should have more than one moon.

Oh, whoops—Martha’s just fallen in a pit of quicksand. That was a little daft.

NICK: The writer’s last episode still had a bit of poignancy to it.
ME: So does this!
NICK: Well . . . convincing poignancy.

Well, Nick may have a heart of stone, but I think the death of that poor Hath in the quicksand pit rather distressing. I’d grown to rather like that Hath, even if he was a little interchangeable with the other Hath.

Jenny’s surprisingly perky—but now the Doctor’s not thrilled about all of this. Ah! Now he’s going to talk about his old family, isn’t he?

Yep.

He’s never really talked about this with any of his companions, has he? Not even Rose. Mind, I wouldn’t have mentioned a previous wife and children and grandchildren to Rose: she seemed the jealous type.

So they are dead, his family? Interesting. In the Time War, or earlier. I rather hope that that doesn’t include Susan. After all, she’s the only one we ever came to know.

Ooh, that shot of the building is a nice shot. There’s some lovely CGI in this episode, and it blends well with the location shooting.

Donna still knows that there’s something significant about those numbers, and the Doctor’s still ignoring her. Doctor, you know better than that.

NICK: That’s not a temple: it’s a space station!

Mind, we were just talking about Time Lords being the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy.

Doctor! Pay attention to Donna! She knows what these numbers mean. She’s not daft, Donna. For all she keeps talking about being “only a temp,” she keeps showing herself as highly skilled.

Seven days? Is that a religious reference? The idea of the world being created in seven days.

Each generation gets killed in the war? That’s wasteful.

NICK: Where do all the bodies go?

Bougainvillea don’t particularly have a scent, Doctor. Trust me: I live in Brisbane.

This scene, where they walked into Kew Gardens [damn! I’d forgotten that Donna made that joke. Now I look less clever], is when I started thinking that his episode reminded me of old-school Doctor Who. But I can’t put my finger on why—it could be the set-dressing—an alien world created with lots of potted ferns. But there’s something about it that reminds me of the Doctor Who I used to watch as a child.

NICK: It’s a good thing that smashing it is how it works. Which does seem a bit weird.

Nevertheless, the Doctor has managed to get the terraforming machine going, and everyone’s laid down their arms, except for General Cobb.

But Jenny’s thrown herself in front of the Doctor. She must be unusually dense in substance, or why didn’t the bullet go straight through her and kill the Doctor, as well.

I’m not entirely in favour of giving the Doctor a new daughter and forcing him to acknowledge her, only to kill her. It seems a little . . . cheap. Even though Tennant does look suitably horrified.

How does Martha know that the Doctor regenerates? Or, more to the point, how does she know what the signs look like? She’s never seen the Doctor regenerate, although he may have told her about the process.

NICK: That General Cobb character is pure cardboard.

I suppose he’s a veteran, though—he must be three or four generations old.

DOCTOR: Make the foundation of this society a man who never would.
ME: Well, the society isn’t going to last long, then, is it, Doctor? Unless you qualify “never would.”

Oh, bloody paradoxes. Those things always irritate me.

That scene with Jenny on the bier—and I would be sadder, but, really, she had “cannon fodder” written all over her, from the start—looks as though it were filmed in a local Scouts hall.

And now Martha’s leaving, again. Bye, Martha! Maybe we’ll see you again, some time?

Back to Jenny—three guesses what happens here.

(Why does the machine put all that eye make-up on? It doesn’t work as camouflage, so why do female soldiers need eye make-up? If this were the original series, then the men would be wearing eye make-up, as well.)

And Jenny’s off! I wonder if she’ll turn up again?

Next week: Agatha Christie! Woo hoo!

(Wait, the DVDs are out already? That’s always seems as though it would cut down on viewing figures. But then we watch them anyway.)

I’ve mentioned before, I think, how much I’m enjoying Burn Notice. It surprised me—in fact, I think it even surprised the network. They’ve certainly been advertising it as “the surprise hit of last summer.” Of course, it was treated badly on Australian television, which has only just got around to airing last season’s finale.

It’s light and fun, Burn Notice, especially for a spy programme. In fact, that’s one of the things I enjoy most about it; we’ve had at least two episodes dealing with the Russian mafia, but you can be sure that no one’s getting an electric drill to the kneecaps.

But as far as spy programmes go, Burn Notice is essentially a cross between Alias and Lovejoy. Does anyone remember Lovejoy? The books drove me nuts fairly quickly, because I have no patience with men who have no compunction about slapping women around to get their way, but the television series was fun. But the most interesting thing about Lovejoy was the way the books gave hints about how to fake antiques.

Burn Notice does the same thing, but with spy techniques and equipment, most of which can apparently be created with equipment available at a local Harvey Norman (or the American equivalent). I don’t know how accurate their spy tips are, but I’m certainly keeping them in mind, in case I need to impress people at parties (or, at a pinch, escape from the Russian mafia).

But one of the things I enjoy the most is Fiona, the main character’s former IRA ex-girlfriend.

I have a soft spot for Gabrielle Anwar anyway, reaching back to when she was Sam, the bitchy head of graphics at the Junior Gazette. She’s looking slightly too thin, these days, is curiously orange, and seems to have done something to her upper lip. (And, honestly? Leave the upper lip alone. I don’t care how good plastic surgery is getting these days, there’s no way to plump the upper lip without ending up looking rather like a duck.) But still: she’s Gabrielle Anwar and she’s lovely.

But Fi—Fi is fun. And Fi subverts a lot of the conventions that normally shackle the protagonist’s girlfriend. When Fi puts on a apron, it’s usually a sign she’s cooking up a batch of C4. And the fact that she does it in an apron makes me think that they’re playing with these conventions deliberately.

Add to this Sharon Gless—who’s fabulous as always, and has a glorious, over-the-top house that hasn’t been redecorated since the early 1970s and which I covet—and Bruce Campbell—who is, essentially, Bruce Campbell—and you have something that’s always going to be fun to watch.

I certainly don’t think it’s the greatest television programme ever made: it’s not Dexter or Deadwood, by any stretch.

But then neither Dexter nor Deadwood had Bruce Campbell in them.

Life’s all about these little trade-offs.

(Apart from having to blow your nose all the time.)

1. Inability to regulate your body temperature. I’m sitting here in direct sunlight wearing tracksuit pants, a knee-length cardigan, and truly enormous socks, and I can’t tell if I’m still freezing or I’m over-heating.

2. The wacky dreams. I think they’re a function of the symptom suppressants. Last night, I dreamt first that I had a talking mynah bird. Then I think my subconscious became bored, because my late lamented dog turned up in the dream out of nowhere, and ate the bird in a single gulp. At least that behaviour was consistent with her behaviour in life.

Then I had a dream that included, in no particular order, Stephen Fry, Oscar Wilde (no real leap there), someone whose significance to the dream’s narrative was uncertain but who was repeatedly and insistently identified as Abyssinian, some rather lovely oak-veneer bedroom furniture, and rice pudding. I think someone died, too. I’m assuming there was a story connecting all these things, but I can’t remember it.

3. The constant desire, which must be repressed, to one-up people. People keep saying, “Eeh, I’ve had an annoying day,” and it takes all my self-control not to reply, “Yeah? Well, at least you haven’t got a cold!”

Being sick makes me very selfish, apparently.

4. Forgetfulness. I’ve not noticed this specific problem previously but, for some reason, I keep forgetting today that you don’t hyphenate compound adjectives when they follow the noun, only when they precede it. So I keep having to erase things on my marking.

It seems an unusually specific symptom, but I’m blaming the cold regardless.

5. Inability to resist symptom suppressants. They really are marvellous, but I do try and take them sparingly. And then my nose starts up again, and the pressure builds in my sinuses, and I take another tablet. It’s only then that I start thinking, “Hey, that’s right. These are the things they used to make meth-amphetamines out of. Now I remember. I think I might lie down for a while.”

6. General lassitude. I’ve even run out of interesting things to add to this list, and today’s marking has been a long, slow exercise in stubbornness. (Stubbornly pushing myself through it, that is.)

Still, it could be worse. At lest I’ve finally come to acknowledge that this is a cold, not the plague, so it probably won’t be fatal.

Probably.

Lego Indiana Jones depends on collecting two types of things: studs (which double as money) and artifacts.

Now I’ve finished all the levels, I’m looking back through the game to find the artifacts that I’m missed, which I assume are hidden in cunning places.

The problem is that I’m not very good at it.

ME: I’m just running around now randomly throwing myself off cliffs, hoping there’s a hidden ledge. I’ve died so often that when I did once land on a hidden ledge with an artifact on it, I nearly fell off the edge from shock.
NICK: But if they want you to throw yourself off a cliff, there’s probably some sort of subtle clue.
ME: Well, they do sometimes have big arrows made up of studs, leading off the edge of the cliff.
NICK: Well, there you are then.
ME: Yes, but when I see those I tend to think, “Ooh, I might just leave those studs where they are. Otherwise, I might fall off the cliff.”

(I only wish we’d had this conversation after I’d taken the cold medication, and not before.)