I would love to fit more than three bookcases in the hallway but, alas, it’s only a thin hallway and a relatively short one. Odd, really: I would have thought the primary purpose of a hallway was for the storage of books. Well, that and to allow access to other rooms, I suppose.

The relative narrowness of the hallway is also the reason why these photos are also taken on a funky angle: artistic impulses don’t really come into it, compared to the pressures of a narrow space and a linen cupboard digging into your shoulder blades.

The picture on top of this bookcase is a photograph taken by one of Nick’s colleagues—or former colleagues, perhaps. I never met him, so I’m uncertain. I believe it’s a Shinto temple, but I’d have to ask Nick to be certain, and he’s otherwise occupied creating music on his iMac (meaning I’m writing this post with my own headphones on and, should I need to speak to him, would have to send him an instant message. Odd, but it works for us, mostly. Plus, I have a glass of a rather nice Peter Lehmann white—a riesling, I think—and the opportunity to update my blog, so I’m perfectly content.)

If I’d been able to take this photograph from the other side, the Georgette Heyers wouldn’t have been quite so prominent—but that’s a confession of weakness I’m going to leave for a lower shelf, which will speak for itself.

The Steven Brust is Nick’s: he’s always telling me to read Brust because I’d enjoy him—although his claims that “It’s The Three Musketeers! But with elves!” reminds me a little too forcibly of this Penny Arcade comic. I’m sure I would enjoy Brust, but somehow I’ve never actually got around to opening one.

Ooh, look: I Capture the Castle. I’d forgotten I had that. I really enjoyed it—which isn’t a surprise, since I loved One Hundred and One Dalmatians, far more than I enjoyed the movie. In fact, that book inspired me with a desire for my own Dalmatian, but I had to settle for an imaginary one in the end. Actually, I still don’t have a real Dalmatian . . . although I suppose, technically, that the imaginary one is still around, somewhere.

I bought the Noel Coward short stories at, of course, a Lifeline Bookfest, but have never read them. At the time—and we’re talking the dark reaches of last year, here—I felt it behooved me to move out of the nineteenth century, and read some of the great writers of the early twentieth century: I’d never moved past a small amount of Mitford and an enormous amount of Wodehouse. So now I have shelves stacked with Vita Sackville-West, E. F. Benson, Ethel M. Dell, Rosamund Lehmann, and the like, most of which I’ve not read (or only read half of, as with George du Maurier.) But I’ll get around to them, someday.

The naked woman at the end is the illustrated spines of Casanova’s memoirs. Unfortunately, I could only buy half the set in this rather lovely Johns Hopkins UP edition, so I only have half a naked woman on my shelf. It’s the top half, but I don’t know if that’s better or worse.

I hadn’t realised how much of the next shelf was devoted to Nick’s books: I’ve never read Robert Heinlein, Piers Anthony, or Robin Hobb. I have read Neil Gaiman’s Stardust—and loved it, of course, despite the rather melancholy flavour—but even that’s Nick’s copy.

But the second shelf here is all mine, and while I’m an admitted fantasy fan, this is more specifically what I love: classic children’s fantasy. I’m not sure there’s much that’s truly classic missing from this shelf (except Lewis Carroll, who’s in the living room), although it’s not a complete collection of any of the authors.

But look at these lovely things!

Running from left to right, I have on this self alone

• George Macdonald (including At the Back of the North Wind, although my personal favourite, by far, is The Princess and the Goblin)
• Susan Cooper (we’ll just skip over the recent film adaptation, shall we?)
• L. Frank Baum (I think I made my passion for Baum fairly well understood in the comments thread to this post)
• Lloyd Alexander (but not, alas, a complete series)
• Alan Garner (I adored The Owl Service and Elidor, particularly)
• Mary Stewart (I don’t know how widely her children’s fantasy is read these days, but I’ve cherished my copies of The Little Broomstick and Ludo and the Star Horse for at least twenty years: these are still those original editions)
• Hugh Lofting (although I wonder, sometimes, whether I’d let children of mine read them, especially the first one, where they visit Africa. I’d certainly not stoop to the bowdlerised versions, though)
• C. S. Lewis
• Elisabeth Beresford (ah, would that we all could womble free)
• Madeleine L’Engle (more sci-fi, I know, but A Wrinkle in Time is still one of my all-time favourites. I think the others in the series are on a lower shelf of this bookcase)
• E. Nesbit

In fact, I should have more Nesbit. I’m sure I just bought The Would-Be-Goods, Five Children and It, and The Phoenix and the Carpet. I wonder where I put those?

Even the non-fantasy books on this shelf are classics, like Richmal Crompton and Helen Cresswell.

Oh, look, an entire shelf of Georgette Heyer books. I wonder how they got there? Let’s just move on, shall we?

In my own defense, can I just say that the Anne McCaffrey and Warhammer books are absolutely Nick’s? I’ve actually never read any McCaffrey, which is a little odd for a fantasy reader my age. At least, I’m fairly certain that I haven’t read any. I wonder?

Mind, many of the other, more obscure books on these shelfs are also Nick’s, including the Ken MacLeod and Snow Crash; that’s my copy of The Diamond Age, but I’ve not read it yet. And, sadly, those are my copies of David Eddings at the end. I have neither bought nor read any of his books in years . . . but I have read up to the end of the second Sparhawk series, which is what’s on that shelf.

On the other hand, there are my Scarlet Pimpernel books! I haven’t read those in years: I don’t think I have all of them, but I’m not certain how necessary it is to read them in order. I really must pull those out again, although they’re an unfortunate mix of inexpensive and fragmentary paperbacks and one fascinating, plump little hardback that’s been roughly treated and poorly rebound.

Most of these are Nick’s too, especially the Will McCarthy: I’ve not read McCarthy, but Nick swears by him, having read Bloom. He writes just the type of science fiction that Nick adores.

At the opposite end of the shelf, there are my Glen Cook novels. I have a number of the novels from the Black Company series—and must get back into them, actually—but what really fascinated me was the Garrett, P.I. series, the hard-boiled detective working in an insane fantasy world. I’m not sure why they appealed to me so much; I’ve never been an enormous fan of hard-boiled detective fiction, because of the complicated gender politics associated with thinking of women as broads and dames (the main reason, actually, why I never got into Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber), and the plots are sometimes rather incoherent right up until the parlour scene. They just thoroughly appealed to me. I might re-read those, actually, once I’ve finished this journal article.

I’m past apologising for the carpet, since this photograph makes it quite clear that I really should have vacuumed. But at least this shelf shows some slightly more high-brow reading tastes. (Not that I’m ashamed of my low-brow tastes.) I mean, look! There’s Kurt Vonngeut (honestly, I really must gather my entire collection together: they’re scattered all over the house), Vikram Seth, and Umberto Eco (now there’s another book I must re-read: I’ve not read The Name of the Rose in at least ten years.)

Sure, there’s also Helen Fielding, but she is funny. I’ve not read the Olivia Joules book, and haven’t the faintest idea what it’s like, though: I picked it up in a Lifeline store, figuring I’d get around to it sooner or later. That was only six months ago, so I’ll probably read it sometime within the next four or five years. (There are, perhaps, some disadvantages to organising your house as though it were a small lending library.)

And my Anne Tylers! I can’t even say what I like about her, although The Accidental Tourist is wonderful . . . and devastating. I think it’s the evocation of the minutiae of life that appeals to me, but I won’t deny that I need to be feeling fairly emotionally robust to deal with some of them, especially Breathing Lessons.

Perhaps that’s why they’re on the bottom shelf, near the grubby carpet.

In no particular order of importance:

I’ve always enjoyed Mars advertisements, but this new one, with the people sprouting dragons’ or bats’ wings, isn’t a patch on the old one with the aliens at the low-gravity pool party. That filled me with a deep sense of envy.

On a different note, though: you really shouldn’t fold your girlfriend up and stick her in your front pocket. That’s . . . in fact, that’s not a girlfriend: that’s an aid. Or a toy, if you prefer.

I also don’t understand the new QUT advertisement: it makes sense that they’re trying to promote the idea that attending university will give you direction, but the image of the boy pushing the trolleys? I don’t understand what they’re trying to suggest with that. Are the trolleys emblematic of your career, and his sharp control of them—mainly, his ability to stop them scraping the car—indicative of the skills that he will learn at university? Or is it a suggestion that if you don’t attend university, you’ll end up pushing trolleys for a living?

I think the strangest advertisement I’ve seen recently, though, is the ad. for V with the tortoise that works as a lifeguard. I assume it’s an American ad., based on the female lifeguards’ red swimming costumes. But I’m not entirely certain what it’s trying to suggest: that drinking V will somehow negate a large body mass and physical awkwardness? Actually, that could be useful. Still, if I’m ever in trouble in the surf (impossible: too many sharks), I hope I don’t need to rely on the services of a tortoise.

ME: Honey, why, when you took the dinner plates out of the living room, did you not take the sauce bottle, as well?

NICK: I probably didn’t have enough feet.

Time for the second episode of season four, with special guest stars my parents. Mind, they won’t be making an appearance during this live-blogging unless they say something extremely funny.

But it’s been a convivial day: we went to see the Picasso exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art—I’m not saying it was poorly curated, because I don’t think it was, but it was intensely crowded, which made it remarkably difficult to get close to the smaller, more delicate pieces, such as the Degas . . . engravings, I think they were. But they could have been pencil drawings, or charcoal, because I couldn’t get close enough to read the labels.

Then we had a lovely, slightly boozy lunch to celebrate the positive reports on my Ph.D. thesis.

And, of course, then we boozed a little more over our leftover roast-beef sandwiches for dinner.

So convivial is, I think, the best word.

In fact, take this earlier conversation as emblematic:

DAD: What’s that noise?
ME: Fruitbats.
NICK: It’s best not to ask what they’re doing.
ME: They’re fighting. Definitely fighting.
NICK: Well, something starting with “f.”

He later claimed that he meant “fraternising,” but I’m not sure that’s better.

Of course, when I started this, I thought we were closer to the start of Doctor Who than we are, because I always forget that the sports broadcast (or “braidcast,” according to my keyboard) starts at quarter past the hour these days.

But we’re up to the weather now, and while I never intended to live-blog the weather, that means we can’t be far off actual Doctor Who now.

In the interim, apparently there are isolated showers around the coast. Of course, that’s only relevant if you’re in Queensland, so make of that what you will.

My spell-checker doesn’t recognise the word “Queensland.” And we’re supposed to be the Smart State.

If Doctor Who doesn’t start soon, this will be the most boring blog post in history.

Ooh, we’ve started! I was distracted.

We’re in “ancient Rome.” I’d like to go to ancient Rome. (Should that have a capital letter?)

This was the first episode where I really liked Donna. And I do love the geeky Latin jokes, but it’s been a while since I’ve been able to say “veni, vidi, vici” after the football.

The make-up on these seers (spoiler!) really creeps me out, especially the eyes on their hands. Whoops, spoilers again.

Pompeii on Volcano Day—that’s a Captain Jack reference, surely? The Doctor only borrowed it from him.

My mother’s very confused about why the Latin that Donna’s speaking wouldn’t actually come out as Latin. That seems a good point: perhaps the TARDIS’s translation circuits aren’t very good?

You’d think he’d have some sort of bicycle lock—or something—for the TARDIS: it’s always going missing. Mind, I wish this man hadn’t bought the TARDIS as modern art, because it’s only likely to rekindle Nick’s desire to actually have a TARDIS in the corner of our living room—and we really don’t have room for one.

Ooh, cavorting with Etruscans. Sounds funs.

Unlike being a seer: that doesn’t seem as though it’s fun at all. Especially not if all you have to do is breathe in hot smoke all the time.

Dad’s slightly alarmed by the stone creature under the house. He’s a vocal TV watcher: he tends to respond to programmes with little muttered comments like “oh god, what’s that?”

Ah, hands on eyes. And eyes on hands. Simultaneously. That creeps me out, but I’m not entirely sure why. There have been many more disturbing things in Doctor Who over the years.

One of the things that I like about Donna is that she’s stroppy. We’ve had stroppy companions before, but I’ve always liked them. Like Ace.

Is it wrong that I find that Spartacus joke so funny that I just snorted out loud? (I mean, obviously the snorting out loud is wrong, but it was involuntary.)

The Romans don’t have a word for “volcano”? Is that true? (Tim, you’d know that, wouldn’t you? Because I can’t be bothered getting up and fetching the OED.)

The exchange of prophecies is hilarious, especially since three-quarters of what the Doctor says doesn’t make sense. Do you know, I really like this writer? His episode of Torchwood was devastating, but this one is so funny: he manages to make the Spartacus joke and the “she’s from Barcelona” line work in an ahistorical context.

I’d forgotten the “there’s something on your back” line Lucius directs to Donna. That’s interesting. Or it will be in about two months.

Of course, my dad wants to know now, because he’s impatient, but he’ll just have to wait.

This Doctor’s like a puppy: he’s constantly inquisitive—he’s looking at the pit the vapours come out of, at the moment—and always looking to see who he can make friends with. It’s one of the aspects that I think Tennant has brought to the role—the Doctor’s usually had high social skills, but this puppy-friendliness is new—and one of the aspects that I like most about the character. That and the fact that he’s completely mad, in a rather Tom Baker fashion.

Now the Doctor’s breaking into Lucius’s house. Really, would you want a great steaming pit in the middle of your living room? Although, I wouldn’t mind a fountain, especially in Brisbane in the summer. I could have goldfish. And lilies.

Donna’s toga is a little low-cut, isn’t it? And did women wear togas? Or was that purely a man’s costume: were the women’s dresses called something else?

Ah, Donna’s about to put her foot in it. I can see why she does it, and it’s a good thing—it’s an inevitable thing, really, for a novice time traveller—but she’ll regret that when the Sibylline Sisterhood get their hands on her.

Hey, my computer recognises “Sibylline” as a word, where it doesn’t recognise “Queensland.” Or “Spartacus.” I find that remarkably odd.

Go on, pull his arm off! That’s not as escape plan that’s likely to work very often, I wouldn’t have thought. But it works here, and that’s the important thing.

Ooh, “allons y” again . . . I’ll say again, keep an eye out for that in a couple of months’ time.

If you have to be followed by something, I suspect that an enormous, glowing, stone man who can breathe fire would be at the bottom of my list of favourites. No, not the bottom: sharks would be lower. But very near the bottom of the list. Unless I happened to have a bucket of water handy, and how often does that happen?

Ooh, Donna was kidnapped while I wasn’t looking. But I like a companion who, tied to a table and threatened with a knife, responds “Don’t you dare!” She’s brilliant, Donna.

The Doctor met a sybil who could dance the tarantella? Sometimes I want to see some of these back stories. But you couldn’t make an entire episode out of them.

How on earth could you even think that turning into stone is a blessing? I mean, I know these seers are all mad, with the inhaling of red-hot stone dust and so forth, but how could you even assume that that was a good thing? I suppose it would cut down on medical bills—and if you’re not driven nuts by all the chanting and the rocking that the members of the sisterhood think is necessary, then you must be a fairly even-tempered person. I’d go nuts with all the repetition: it’s like fifteen toddlers.

No way, yes way, Appian Way? It made me laugh, anyway. And is that a Bill and Ted joke? There’s nothing I like more than a Bill and Ted joke.

That fact that the Doctor can see time—I suppose rather like the Tralfalmadorians (don’t correct my spelling) in Slaughterhouse Five, who can see all of time like a mountain range—then that might explain why he’s slightly mad, now. Especially since, as he says, he’s the only one left, so he can’t—as he’s done for years—ignore the responsibility.

Lucius really is rather shrill and annoying, isn’t he?

That water pistol must have an enormous reservoir. That’s convenient.

Oh, Pyrovillia (don’t correct my spelling!) has gone, has it? That’s also interesting. (I’m really enjoying the long-term plotting in this season. It seems to be rather more subtle than the “Bad Wolf” seeding in season one of the new series or—what was it in season two? I’ve forgotten now. Or even Harold Saxon in season three: ah, Master? You’re not dead, are you? Or, at least, you’ll regenerate, won’t you? Please come back!)

The Doctor’s about to make Vesuvius erupt, by the way. I got a bit carried away and forgot to mention any of the narrative developments.

Oh, dear: Lucius is dead. But then so are most of the inhabitants of Pompeii, now. And also Pliny the Elder. Or was it Pliny the Younger? No, it was the father, wasn’t it?

(Honestly: I’ve seen this episode before. I should do my Googling in advance, so I can look really clever.)

I’ll buy that the Pyrovillians’ spaceship could survive the exploding of a volcano—but not that they can outrun an explosion of super-heated gas.

The destruction of Pompeii is rather disturbing to watch: I suppose it’s because we’ve all seen the photographs of the bodies and the preserved houses, and the despairing poses here are just a little too evocative.

I don’t mind that the Doctor goes back for the family, here. (And, Doctor, just because you can’t save Gallifrey doesn’t mean you should never go back, ever.) But, as I was saying, I don’t mind that he goes back for this family. I’m a sucker for a happy ending, and this family were rather charming.

(I wish he’d said “Come with me if you want to live,” though. That would have been hilariously anachronistic. But, given the lack of sophistication in my sense of humour, it was probably in an early draft and removed as too unsubtle. I’ll just chuckle quietly over the possibility in my own head.)

But, even though I like the fact that at least one family were saved, I think the final visual joke is a bit over the top for me. But we’re not up to that yet.

So does “volcano” derive from Vulcan? It would, wouldn’t it? (Tim, you’d know that. My dictionary is still too far away.)

Donna is good for the Doctor, you know. She doesn’t take any rubbish from anyone, and the Doctor does need that, because he’s been too prone to having his own way.

Ah, there’s the visual joke that’s a bit much for me. And wouldn’t devout Romans still at least have ancestral masks?

Oh, that’s not important. That was a lovely, funny episode—except for the moments when all the Pompeiians were dying—and prefigures some of the other humorous episodes, like the Agatha Christie one.

Hey, it was filmed in Italy? No—I’d best not blog Doctor Who Confidential or else I’ll be here all night.

Next week, Ood. Creepy, creepy Ood.

Nick and I have just had the nerdiest conversation I think we’ve ever had, just because I picked up a new Lois McMaster Bujold book for him yesterday:

ME: She’s not writing science fiction any more.
NICK: No, I know, and I find that very sad.
ME: I wonder why?
NICK: Well, I suppose fantasy is more profitable.
ME: But she can’t be short of money. I mean, she must sell the rights to everything she writes to the studios, although they’re never made into films, which I imagine she’s happy about.
NICK: I think she’s thrilled, given the draft to Warrior’s Apprentice that was floating around. All the Dendarii mercenaries had basically become space hillbillies by that point.
ME: Maybe that’s what happened to it: it became Firefly. Although you can’t imagine a much broader difference that between Captain Mal and Miles Vorkosigan. But he gets better, doesn’t he? Miles?
NICK: It takes quite a bit of brain damage and some nasty injuries.
ME: Well, it must be inconvenient, having such a damagable hero.
NICK: Oh, he doesn’t get less damagable.
ME: It’s brittle bones, isn’t it? From the gas exposure in utero?
NICK: Yep.
ME: And didn’t the gas make Cordelia infertile? I imagine that’s why Aral was persuaded into using the uterine . . . whatsits.
NICK: Replicators.
ME: Uterine replicators. Because they replicate a uterus?
NICK: Yep. Well, they’re not replicators in a Star Trek sense.
ME: Not in a Star Trek or a Stargate sense.
NICK: Well, that would be bad on both counts.
ME: I don’t know—imagine how easy having a baby would be via the Star Trek replicators: “Child. Male. Lukewarm.”

The lesson to be learned is this: there is no conversation among geeks that will not, if pursued long enough, end on a Star Trek joke.

I mentioned in the last post that my father has been restoring a chest of drawers for us. It’s so beautiful that I really need to post a picture on the blog. (Else, really, why do I have a blog?)

She’s had a rough life, this elegant lady. You can see the hammer marks, where someone has become rather too enthusiastic with poorly thought-out repairs. What you can’t see are the saw marks, the completely new back, and the marks where they’ve driven nails in rather than replacing the joints.

But she’s a lovely lady.

And this is basically boasting . . . but on my dad’s behalf. He’s done an amazing job with this; I only wish I had a “before” photograph.

My parents, who are arriving any moment now, are bringing with them a cedar chest of drawers that they rescued in a dire condition from an auction and which my father has spent months restoring.

So I’m stripping the hideous, black-laminate IKEA chest of drawers that has been the bane of my existence for years (I can, for example, only open three of the drawers).

But I had no idea I’d find such strange objects in a piece of furniture we use every day.

So far, I’ve found

1. A plastic pirate’s hook.

2. A fake, black-velvet bow tie.

3. My hairbrush, which went missing a couple of weeks ago.

4. A Christmas card from people I have barely spoken to in seven years.

5. The receipt for a Christmas present Nick bought me six years ago. Whoops.

6. My own body weight in scarves and shawls, including my father’s moth-eaten Liverpool University scarf.

7. A random piece of cardboard, which I think once surrounded the sari I’ve had hanging on my bedroom wall for six years—but I don’t know why this is in a drawer.

8. At least one T-shirt for every cult TV show that’s aired since 1992—plus multiple Doctor Who shirts and The Cure shirts: Nick has worn none of these for years.

9. A shopping list. I think I must have been making coleslaw, because it calls for red cabbage, capsicum, radishes, and parsley. (Well, technically, it calls for “radish” and “parsleys,” so I think Nick got his plural nouns confused.)

10. Organza bags that once held Easter eggs.

11. The bottom halves of a pair of trousers that Nick once had that zipped off at the knees: I don’t think he even has the trousers any more.

I’m sure there’d be more, but parents have arrived and I need to go and dismantle a 1960s’ sideboard.

Life in the suburbs, eh?

Example One: You really shouldn’t keep computer hardware in your pants, sweetie.

A conversation emblematic of the difficulties in talking to a geek:

NICK: There’s about two megs of that still to download.
ME: What does that mean in minutes?
NICK: Well, it’s about 380 megs in total . . .
ME: Nick!
NICK: (hurt look).
ME: In minutes.
NICK: Well, it’s about 98% done.
ME: Minutes!
NICK: Anywhere from two to twenty five.

Well, that was helpful, honey: thank you.

I mentioned way back when the frustrations of playing this game when the set you’re trying to build depends on hard-to-find pop-up cards.

Well, it’s getting worse—and it’s almost enough to drive me out of the game.

I thought Rat Pack, with its reliance on the 4000-point Fountain, was bad enough. But it’s nothing—nothing—to the In Bloom set. I’ve completed the set—or I wouldn’t be able to be flippant on the subject—but, oh, it was a soul-destroying process.

(What? I have a life! I’m . . . very busy and important, actually. Shush.)

In Bloom relied heavily on two pop-up cards: Rain and Sunshine. They weren’t as heavy as the Fountain—they were only 2000 points apiece—but they were much harder to find.

And you need many more of them to get a full set.

You need to vault one of each.

Then you need one Sunshine to make a Watermelon, and one Rain to make a Praying Mantis.

Then you need one of each to make a Firewheel—a type of flower, apparently, but I have no idea whether it’s a real one or not.

That’s already six cards: six cards that you cannot get any other way than have them randomly pop up without warning in your pack.

But it was the high-end card that was the destroyer of souls: the Alamofire—another flower, but this time I’m sure it was a fictional flower. It looked like a waratah, or maybe a protea, but was named after the company that designed the game.

The Alamofire was made from two Firewheels and a Praying Mantis: that’s five pop-up cards for the final card alone.

Is it any wonder that we were all secretly composing “Goodbye, cruel game” messages in our heads?

(No, I don’t think I am blowing this out of proportion. Why do you ask?)

And now it’s happening again, with Winston World.

Winston World is a lovely amusement-park-themed set: the game has multiple designers, and some of the cards are a little . . . well, ugly, really. (Yes, Born to Be Wild set with improbable Hells’ Angels rabbits, I am looking at you.) But Winston World is drawn in soft pastels, and the rides all have starscapes behind them, so it seems as though it’s an amusement park on another, distant planet.

It’s beautiful.

But it’s relying on pop-ups, and I’m going spare.

I need a Carousel. That’s all I need.

Okay: I need three Carousels. But that’s not important right now.

If I have a Carousel, I can make a Winston Wheel, which I gather is some sort of Ferris Wheel. Then—once it finishes its four-hour “baking” process and, really, what is the purpose of that?—I can make the top-end card.

But can I find a Carousel?

You know the answer to that, I’m sure.

And for those of you also playing Packrat—I have accumulated four hundred credits while I’ve been looking for that damn Carousel. That’s probably more information than you need on how long I’ve been wasting on this particular ambition.

Presented without commentary, because everybody knows that sunsets are cool.

A telephone conversation this morning:

MAM: Hello?
ME: Hi, Mam: it’s me!
MAM: Oh, god.
ME: Pardon?

When was the last time that Eddie Murphy starred in a movie with anyone other than Eddie Murphy?

Don’t get me wrong: the more Eddie Murphies there are in a movie, the happier I feel about not going to see it.

But is this not the ultimate in narcissism?

I’ve commented on more than one occasion about the pit of sheer, unremitting horror that is Lynx’s advertising department’s gender politics.

It’s only fair that I redress the balance, since I’ve just seen the follow up to AAMI’s awful new advertising campaign.

When Nick and I saw the first one—with the woman directing a passive-aggressive appeal to her boyfriend to take out a personal loan so he could buy an expensive engagement ring and propose to her—we were . . . well, gob-smacked, I think is the only word.

I’ve never had any patience with the “I must be married to anyone, anywhere, it doesn’t really matter, as long as I’m married” attitude that so much chick-lit (and chick-TV and rom coms) seem to feel is the appropriate attitude for women . . . and I have even less patience now that I’m in my thirties and people keep asking me when I’m getting married.

Don’t get me wrong; plenty of people marry because they are in love, and that’s a different issue. I’m not mocking that. But I don’t know anyone who ever went into a jewellry store and recorded a message demanding that their significant other propose and, by the way, here’s the ring I want you to buy me.

But, now, I’ve just seen the follow-up ad. where she’s now “the new Mrs Todd,” but apparently the honeymoon wasn’t up to her standards, so could he take out another loan—but a bigger one, this time, because she’d like to go to Paris.

I don’t think I’ve been too hard on Lynx, frankly. But these ads—these are almost the girly equivalent of the Lynx ads.

If the idea that men will do absolutely anything—including transform sentient beings into automatons—in the pursuit of the opposite sex is the most degrading way of depicting men, then this is the equivalent for women.

Dear AAMI,

You insure my car. Thank you. But this ad. campaign is grotesque. Not all women are passive-aggressive harridans, you know. And, you know what? The marriage angle wouldn’t even bother me—this ad. would be awful under any circumstances—if it weren’t for the media’s increasing obsession with bridal porn, with the trappings of the wedding instead of the ceremony itself.

Dear Woman in the AAMI Ad.,

You might want to consider whether you should have brought up your honeymoon concerns prior to, I don’t know, maybe the honeymoon? Because at this stage, I’m assuming that the next ad. will be you suggesting that Todd takes out a loan because your alimony payments aren’t high enough.

Finally, for no reason that I can determine, my putative journal article has decided to stop resisting me and has fallen, more or less, into easy lines.

Is that a mixed metaphor? I don’t suppose it matters much here. At any rate, I’ve added today around three thousand words to what’s feeling as though it might be a passable draft.

I’ve come to terms, more or less, with the fluctuations of my writing process.

I know enough now to never resist those moments when everything suddenly falls into place and it’s simply a matter of whether you can get the words on the page before the inspiration passes—but those moments never do come regularly enough.

I know that there’s always a sticky place for me at the beginning of any project: a point where the words simply won’t come and the writing has no cohesion, where I can’t even see the shape of the argument in front of me.

I know, too, that that moment inevitably passes, but that I can never force it to pass. It’s not a sign that I haven’t done enough research; I can feel now when that’s the problem. It’s a different stumbling block—perhaps a form of writer’s block?—and I know neither what causes it nor anyway to get around it other than perseverance. But the perseverance is never a pleasure; it’s pushing against an immovable object or, if I can draw from mythology (or Albert Camus, perhaps) for a moment, endlessly trying to roll a boulder up a cliff face.

But then, the process has shifted so frequently in recent years that I can only assume that this, too, will pass.

I did two good things for my writing, neither of which was initially easy: first my Masters degree, then teaching academic and professional writing.

I don’t think, to be honest, that I was a poor writer before I began teaching those courses. I have a better opinion of my boss than to believe she would continue to hire me if that were the case.

But I’m a significantly better writer now than then.

(Don’t necessarily judge me on the quality of the blog. Unless you think it’s fabulous. In which case, judge away!)

But this is a new challenge. I’m not writing a journal article that feels from the start like a short, self-contained work. I’m boiling down a 17,000-word chapter into a shorter, tighter argument—and it was a pretty tight argument to begin with. (At least, I certainly could have blown it out in several areas, but restrained myself.)

No: it’s not even as simple as that. Because anyone reading that chapter would already have the background material from three preceding chapters and my literature review. (Oh, literature review. How I hated writing you! But we found a way to make you interesting, didn’t we? Thanks to a Jonathan Rose article.) So I’m selecting material from those, as well, where it’s necessary to the argument.

And the thesis itself was big enough; I did keep it as tight as I could, but with over one hundred works by my author, I had to exercise restraint in selection and take the fullest advantage of the word limit.

And, of course, I’m fretting constantly that I’m not providing enough context. That’s the downside to working on an unknown author: it would be much easier to work on an unusual aspect of Dickens’s career, though perhaps not as satisfying. (When was the last time an unknown Dickens work was added to the canon?)

So this has been a new challenge. Not a new challenge in the same sense as live-blogging, but hopefully one that will be more productive in the long run.

Unless there’s some way that I could make a living live-blogging Doctor Who.

I love my current job, but that would be, dare I say it, fantastic.