Soup Safari #77: Potato and Leek at the Gawthorpe Hall Cafe.

Lunch. £4.50. Gawthorpe Hall, Burnley Road, Padiham, near Burnley, Lancashire, BB12 8UA. 01282771004. Website.

This Coby Grant track totally sounds like Laura Marling's Failure.

Music Listening to Coby Grant's 2019 album, Small Tits Big Dreams, which for the most part sounds like where Kate Nash would have ended up if she'd continued in the Made of Bricks vein, I stumbled on Heartbeat:



The song opens with some guitar chords which sound incredibly familiar:



My assumption is that these are not unusual chords so I'm not suggesting anything untoward, but it is really distracting.

You're Joking.

[The following contains numerous spoilers.]

Film   Todd Philips's Joker has been a perplexing success. Well reviewed all round and with a huge box office, it seems like DC's decision to produce a narrative set outside of the moribund DCU was correct and might just set be the guide to how they develop their properties going forward.

I hated it. Hated it, hated it, hated it.  The film clearly has some excellent formal elements: it's well shot, Joaquin Phoenix's performance is a tour de force and I'd be lying if I said I didn't gasp in a couple of places.

Nevertheless, I took against it pretty early on and after about an hour I considered walking out and on leaving gave it a whole half a star on Letterboxd.  It would have been 0 where it not for for Zazie Beetz.

Numerous reasons.  As someone who suffers from mental health problems, I'm tired of films which use such things as a crutch or explanation for why people do terrible things and especially as part of the backstory for villains.

Plus, I thought did we really need to see yet another representation of Batman's origin story?  With the slow motion pearls and tiny Bruce amid the lifeless bodies of his parents in the alleyway.

Well, cleaning my teeth this morning, it occured to me that on this score I might have misjudged the film.

That in fact this isn't an origin film about a Joker.  It's the origin film for the Joker. Or maybe.

In this LA Times piece, Philips left the interpretation deliberately vague, that the Fleck could be the actual Joker or just someone who inspires the figure who fights Batman:

"Even if everything in the film did happen pretty much as we see it and Fleck did unwittingly spark Gotham’s descent into mayhem and violence, is he the actual Joker that we have come to know? Or, as some fans have theorized, could one of his followers – perhaps the clown-mask-wearing thug who kills Bruce Wayne’s parents – or another disturbed, angry loner who comes along in his wake be the one who eventually becomes Batman’s ultimate nemesis?

“Maybe Joaquin’s character inspired the Joker,” Phillips said. “You don’t really know. His last line in the movie is, ‘You wouldn’t get it.’ There’s a lot going on in there that’s interesting.”

Although I don't entirely take back everything I said, this has made me vaguely interested about watching the film again with this new information. Plus if the DCU ever wanted to connect this film to one of their versions of Batman and his nemesis, this would be the way to do it.

Of course there's the other theory that none of the film actually happened and it's all in Fleck's imagination as he rots in Arkham, perhaps having seen the real Joker on TV ...

Why Vote?

Politics So we have another general election on our hands as agreed in the Parliament this evening. Those of us who haven't registered for a postal vote will be shivering our way to a polling station on the 12th December unless the House of Lords does anything weird - which everyone with a media department after their name says won't happen but a lot of things which weren't supposed to happen haven't happened in the past few months.  This actual election for example.

Back in 2005, I wrote an open letter to disaffected voters suggesting they might want to take advantage of their democratic right and as with every election since, it's time for a refresher:

Dear Disaffected Voter,

Hello. After the complete mess that was 2017, here we are again.  We pretty much knew we would be as soon as a hung parliament was announced and actually it's taken longer than I expected.  But here we are.

We're about to enter what's potentially going to be the most consequential election since the last one probably.  But genuinely, whoever wins this or at least has a majority large enough to form a coalition government. will be in a position to choose whether we stay in Europe or not, either because they'll simply revoke article 50 or put forward a referendum to see if the country wants to (assuming they can get another extension to article 50).

This is huge.  So huge that its simply unconscionable for you to sit on your hands this time.

There'll be some of you who won't be voting because for some reason you simply can't. You recently moved house and didn't have enough to time to get your vote moved to your new house. You'll be on holiday and the whole postal voting thing couldn't be scheduled properly with while you're away. Those and a whole raft of perfectly good reasons. I'm not talking to you.

I'm talking to the rest. The people who don't vote.

You'll be split into two camps. Those who can't be bothered and those who don't see the point. Yes, you. You idiot.

If you're insulted by that, you should be.

The biggest idiots are the ones who can't be bothered. The ones who have the facility to vote, aren't impeded, but simply can't be arsed walking all the way to the polling station, even though there are enough of them that the local will be in the next street. Do you realise you're screwing things up for the rest of us? Here is a list of the knock on effects of you not showing up.

(1) It makes us all look bad. There are certain parts of the world were people don't have the choice of more than one party, for that matter the ability to vote at all. Not naming any names. In some of the these places people have been killed whilst they've fought to get the chance to choose who they want as a leader. By not voting yourself, you're pissing on their fight because you're devaluing what they're fighting for. You're like Cameron's dad in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Lovely car parked up in the garage being wasted. Take it out for a spin once in a while.

(2) It's not a fair contest. By not showing your support for a party, whoever wins won't necessarily have won because the country wants them to be there. It'll be because the majority of 60% of the country wants them there. Which isn't the same thing.

(3) It makes you look bad. If you can't be bothered spending twenty minutes of the day going into a room in a school somewhere dodging a nativity, to put a cross on a slip of paper, a process which has been made as easy as possible now (now that they even print the name of the party on the ballot paper) what frankly are you good for?

Now there are the rest of you who are making a point of not voting. My Dad believes that everyone should be forced to vote by law, even if they show up and spoil their ballot paper. Within the current system it's your choice and right not to vote. So there will be a percentage of people who don't vote because they believe it's sending a message that you're unhappy with the political process in this country. There are a couple of flaws to this plan:

(1) Politicians don't give a shit about you. Because you didn't turn up at a polling station, come the day they don't even know you exist. If you don't like the political process the only way to develop it is to engage with politicians and ask for that change. Some of the parties have ideas for reform using systems such a proportional representation which means that every vote is counted.

(2) Your plan only works if no one votes. Like that's going to happen. No matter what you do, someone will be Prime Minister on Friday.

There are some, who aren't voting because they say that party policies aren't offering anything to them.  What doesn't occur to you is that manifestos are written to interest the various demographics of voters. So if you don't turn up, you're not a voter so why should they try and attract you with tailored policies? So effectively if enough of you people turned up and voted, it'd frighten the shit out of the politicians and they'd have to start listen and developing useful policies so that they can keep you on their side. There were no policies affecting women in manifestos until women got the vote. It's pretty much the same thing. You turn up, so will they.

I know this has been a bit freewheeling. If I'd wanted to I could have found a bunch of statistics and anecdotal evidence to back up some of these things. But I thought I'd go for the simple, direct, approach because don't think I've said anything which you don't already know.

I'm just trying to give you a nudge.

If you aren't already registered, you can now do it online.  Visit www.gov.uk/register-to-vote.

Even if you turn up and vote for a man with a bucket on his head you'll at least have the satisfaction of knowing when the announcements are made, someone who just wanted to have a bit of fun hasn't lost their deposit.

Just don't waste your vote. Pick a party and go.

And if the one you pick doesn't win, there's always next time.  Possibly.

Stuart.

Apocrypha Bipedium (Short Trips: Companions)

Books Extract reconstructed from the fealing shiftless electronodiary recovered from the fragments of the Internet Archive found when the remains of the Moon returned to orbit briefly in 3256, the only record we have of the 21st Century:

Ian Potter's story daemonstrates the flexibility of the short pose format to bend what ^ould otherwise be quite a straightforward brief encounter into something a bit more [...] epistolary style gathering together diary entries, accounts from the Matrix on Gallimaufry and a play written by the young Philip Shakesbeard still traveling with the Doctor and Charlie after the events in of Time of the Gaelics [...] who trying to avoid time paradoxing any more than they already have as they try to get the jung berd home.  Some of the elements are deliberate hazy so it's not always clear whats exactly happenin, but this is a really fun pomp looking in on Vicky, years after she became Criseyde, as a kind of forerunner to the Companion Chronocle audio series.  Placement: #oblivious

The Ethereal (Short Trips: 2040).

Books Some short prose's feel self contained and anothers a snapshot of much larger narrative. This is very much the latter which given this is the final story in the 2040 anthology makes sense and a number of threads from earlier stories are brought forward. But John Binns's piece mostly feels like the last chapter of a novel about the Eighth Doctor living in this 2040 world for a while, slowly bringing an end to the tyranny of the titular force which has dug itself into the planet and its technology.  Binns intercuts a significant car journey for the Time Lord with a report on the dissolution of this allegorical stand in for Facebook and other social networks and their influence on the world, quite remarkable for a book published a year or so before they were invented and a good ten years before they became weaponised in the information wars.  There are also shades of the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe and The Silents.  Placement: Just after Thinking Warrior. I do like the idea of there being a whole period in the Eighth Doctor's history of which just these two short stories are the only record.

Thinking Warrior (Short Trips: 2040).

Books The 2040 anthology featured a group of stories set in 2040. The challenge for these writers is to create stories for various Doctors which fit within the same broad piece of world building, governments, technologies or people. The somewhat wordy Thinking Warrior has Eighth working for whatever version of UNIT exists by then, investigating a security breach at a technology company attempting to discover exactly why the development of a new AI is taking quite so long. For all its futuristic setting, this could just as well be a Pertwee story.  Lots of dynamic, bespectacled, mustachioed men in brown suits say things like "I'm going to be busy for a day or two smoothing ruffled feathers" as they hide their real intentions.  Ultimately the narrative boils down to the Doctor having a long chat with a HAL 9000 who seems more human than anyone else here.  Perhaps that's the point?  Placement:  This feels like an Eighth Doctor who's travelled for a bit.  But he's alone.  End of the comics, before the audios?

Growing Higher (Short Trips: Zodiac).

Books "Never cruel or cowardly." The Zodiac anthology is, as the title suggests, twelve stories inspired by signs of the astrological signs. Although the introductory page eludes to them, Paul Leonard's story doesn't take the obvious approach of roping in the Nimon to express Taurus. Instead, it takes a more holistic approach and attributes the Taurean traits of trustworthiness and loyalty to one of the characters, in this case Bernadette, a live in helper of ambiguous relationship to a much older a Moon-based professor (think Barbara Hershey in Hannah and Her Sisters) due to be tried and convicted of a catastrophic accident who commits to staying with him through his incarceration and certain death back in Earth's gravity.  It's into their company the Doctor and Fitz wander, the former open to offering what some could be seen as a more humane punishment for the older man's crimes. This is the sort of story you might expect to find in the kinds of the anthologies Asimov and Clarke favoured, Growing Higher has some very rich world building for its slender pagination and manages to keep its council right through to the final few paragraphs. Placement: Following the old EyeSpider list, after Parallel 59.

Salva Mea (Short Trips: Snapshots)

Prose This is sweet. The theme of this Big Finish anthology is how the Doctor impacts the lives of those he meets, either through memory, letters or actually photography. In Joseph Lidster's entry, office drone Luke Tillyard's long wait for a train at Kings Cross to attend his Granddad's funeral is interrupted by Charley, who says that C'rizz has gone mad and is chasing her through the station and could he help her?  Initially reluctant he's eventually plunged into a life or death struggle with the Eutermesan in a massive battle across the concourse of the station which begs for the titular Faithless track to be played in the background.  Published and set in 2007 it's filled with incredible period details, especially about the Live Earth concert which happened a month after this anthology hit the shops (and so this is a story which was ever so briefly set in the future).  The pay off to the tale is beautifully emotional and I just wish we'd seen the crew in this light a bit more in those days.  Placement: Just before Absolution.  The calm before the storm.

Linking Material (Short Trips: Seven Deadly Sins).

Books It's going to become increasingly difficult for official calendar publishers to produce tie-ins for Doctor Who. Up until recently, there were twelve incarnations which fit nicely into the Gregorian calendar, but with the additions of War and Thirteen, deciding how to fit them all in is going to be increasingly tricky. Producing an anthology of stories called Seven Deadly Sins provides a similar challenge if you're Big Finish and you have to service Eight incarnations. So it makes sense that while seven of them each have a story which evokes one of the sins, that the other should provide some kind of linking tissue.

Which is why we have Eighth in a surreal version of Channel 4's blind auction game show Four Rooms, but with a Tory front bench like group of morally ambiguous rich people instead of experts and experiential therapy rather than nicknacks.  The Doctor enters each of the rooms and does something to provoke the sin of each of the "clients" to bubble to the surface before they're then plunged into experiencing a moment from his past leading into one of the short stories which they're going to experience as one of the characters.

As a piece of writing, it's customary tour-de-force from Jac Raynor.  I especially enjoyed the moment when Eighth meets a fellow Time Lord and goes into some detail about his biography in order to provoke envy in the musty old being.  It's a rather more prosaic forerunner to the later scenes on television when the Doctor invokes his biography as a way of scaring the monsters.  Something which could have been rather anemic becomes a much richer brew, largely due to the scrupulous characterisation of this Doctor.  A couple of things might have made me wince, but they're not really anything he hasn't done before.

Placement:  Presumably he's travelling alone but it feels like some time since the regeneration.  So I'll bung it between the comics and audios.

Ravenous 4.

Audio Another series galumphs to the end and although I've enjoyed it more than either Dark Eyes or Doom Coalition, why do I feel like it's time to move the Eighth Doctor on to some new paradigm?  Perhaps it's because once again, the stand alone episodes in Ravenous have been the strongest by far and that just as previous attempts and serialisation have shown, this sort of thing doesn't really work in Doctor Who for longer than a few stories.  When the EDAs attempted this sort of thing, it was always far more successful when it encompassed half a dozen books rather than a dozen or so, and having a single box for the Ravenous would have been far preferable to what we've had here.  That said, there's still plenty of fun to be had, especially in the closing couple of episodes.

Whisper

Doctor Who does A Quiet Place.  Sort of.  Having the Eleven as a Turlough figure seems ok in theory, but it leaves the Doctor looking like a naive idiot because once again he's in the position of assuming the best in people even if everything which has happened previously would indicate that he has no reason to.  But it feels out of character for this Doctor and it's simply bizarre when it's revealed that he isn't stringing the Eleven along to see what he's up to but does genuinely believe he's changed, admonishing the very real suspicions of his companions, one of whom has already made the same mistake.  The Doctor isn't Charlie Brown.  He's Lucy.

Planet of Dust

Doctor Who does Mad Max: Fury Road with the Beevers Master as Immortan Joe.  Sort of.  One of the joys of Big Finish is how they've taken a character like this version of the Doctor's old frenemy and made him a viable antagonist based on just a few episodes of the classic series (four of which this actor didn't appear in) without running roughshod over televisual continuity.  He has the perfect hook, a desperation to survive and although we know how he'll ultimately succeed (poor Tremas and would you believe I've only just realised that was an anagram), it provides plenty of narrative mileage to work from as is demonstrated here.

Day of the Master

Big moment for this project as the Eighth Doctor and the Bruce Master meet for the first time, or at least the first time outside of prose or the comics.  The Diary of River Song has somewhat dulled the impact, the explanation for his survival having been established there already, but nevertheless hearing McGann and Roberts in a scene together again after twenty-odd years is quite the thing to behold even if it doesn't seem like they recorded together (not that you'd notice).  Congratulations to John Dorney for returning him to a place at the end which means that other versions of his story also still make sense (in a way which suggests he was using the TARDIS Datacore as a reference).

The final episode is delicious.  Messes Roberts, Jacobi and Gomez chomp merrily on the imaginary scenery, the latter clearly enjoying every second of this and foreshadowing her reaction to the Saxon Doctor (we have to assume this is the prequel).  But the sheer number of mysteries and twists tumbling over each other to get out are incredible, to the point that I thought we might even stumble over the origins of the Eleven (was this a deliberate red herring?).  Incredibly dark in places, this nevertheless has a heart as big as the ticker carried around by Kelly Hutchinson in Roger Sanchez's Another Chance video and I can't wait to see what happens next.

"A bunch of flowers and I slam the door ..."

Music Boom. It's Graham Norton day and #Sugababes is trending on the Twitters. Here's why:



Yes, it's cover version, but listen to those harmonies. I'm bias, but this is a far richer experience than the original and indeed gives us a window into what (the) Sugababes might have been like if Siobhan had stuck around for another couple of albums.  Plus according to the track listing on Spotify, this by Sugababes.  No definitive article.  So they have properly got the name back and I'd love to know the story of that.  Everything old is new again.

Meanwhile Amelle's on Coach Trip (whatever that is) which caused this extraordinary exchange:

"Tensions have been rising between the pair as 31-year-old James - who is on the trip with Essex co-star James 'Diags' Bennewith - continues to arrive late to the coach.

And things hit an all time high when the group were asked what their favourite Sugarbabes song is in honour of new passenger Amella Berrabah.

Arg was quick to say his favourite one was Overload, and Brendan jokingly asked if it was also Diags' choice because ‘he does all the talking.’

The TOWIE star then shouted back: “You asked me my favourite Sugababes song so I'm f*****g telling you what my favourite Sugababes song is.

“Maybe I have got a different one to Diags.”

Not stopping there, he added: “You like the sound of your own voice too much mate, slow yourself down.”

After Brendan gave him a stern talking to, Arg later explained his outburst to the camera adding: “He got proper loud and rude in front of everyone, he proper mugged me off in front of my pals.”

And the rest of the passengers were shocked by Arg’s behaviour, as Steps singer Ian 'H' Watkins, 43, said: “I saw a different side to Arg. It almost was verging on nasty.”

It's probably beside the point to note that he managed to pick a Sugababes track that was well before Amelle's time and that's not the thing they had a row about. Anyway, here's Amelle singing Overload with Keisha and Heidi.

Mutya Keisha Siobhan are no more?

Music Blimey, this is quite a paragraph on the Official Charts website about guests on upcoming episodes of The Graham Norton Show:

"There's a big reunion set for October 18, as the original line-up of Sugababes will perform on TV for the first time in five years - and they've gotten their original name back. Kind of. Billed as The Sugababes, Mutya Buena, Keisha Buchanan and Siobhan Donaghy (formerly known as MKS) will collaborate with DJ Spoony for a performance of Sweet Like Chocolate. The song features on DJ Spoony's upcoming album Garage Classical, a collection of reworked garage staples from the 1990s featuring the likes of Paloma Faith and Lily Allen."

So there's a legal loophole in the definitive article? Or have they actually got the rights to their name back as CelebsNow suggest?  Either way, or whatever, this is quite a paragraph. 

Now, here's an earlier appearance by some version of Sugababes on some version of Norton's show. In 2002.

The Scent of Blood.

Audio Here a rare oddity. While Big Finish continue to go big with their Eighth Doctor coverage, with a dozen or so episodes this year across various boxed sets, apart from cameos there's only ever been a handful of BBC Audio releases in the twenty years since San Francisco (Vancouver), a smattering from the late nineties read by Paul himself, Sophie Aldred and Nicholas Courtney and the Alien Mine anniversary piece which was recorded by Big Finish in any case. Yet here we have in 2019 an "audio exclusive", essentially a double length Short Trip, with TV movie McGann on the cover, literally the same shot which appears at the top of this blog's chronology.

How?  Why?  The project editor for these things is John Ainsworth, long term Big Finish producer, director and actor, so in the absence of an explanatory preview in the party newsletter or liner notes, my guess is because he felt like it.  Well good.  His participation, not to mention David Darlington, a veteran sound designer for Who audios probably account for how bona fide to it sounds, fitting perfectly fine within the existing corpus.  We're also introduced to a new thumping version of the theme, all drums percussion and organ melody, presumably recorded by Darlington because they didn't have access to the David Arnold version which is traditional for Eighth Doctor audios.

Building on the vampire mythology from State of Decay and other expanded Whoniverse sources (which again shows the depth of experience in this production), this finds the Doctor on the streets of Edinburgh in the 1890s aiding an journalist with his investigation into a mysterious death and the strange behaviour of some of the locals.  What connection do a pasty faced aristocrat and the local quarry have to do with events?  If all of this sounds over familiar, it is, but then writer Andy Lane introduces a huge new piece of mythology which will surely mean a number of TARDIS Datacore pages will have to be re-written.

Incredibly, this is Lane's first Eighth Doctor story since his co-writing credit on The Banquo Legacy back in 2000.  But from the moment he emerges from the shadows, the Eighth is ready and present, life's champion in full effect.  The story proceeds at a lick, with much bite, so much so I had to rewind now and then because I missed some important bit of action.  That isn't a criticism.  One of the problems with any audio adventure is whether there's enough in there to cause the listener to want to re-listen and I'd say The Scent of Blood would bare a repeat.

That's not inconsiderably because of Dan Starkey's fabulous reading and his uncanny version of the Eighth Doctor.  Because McGann himself has been prolific in his own portrayal of the character, he's rarely rendered through other voices, mainly India and Sheridan.  Well here comes Starkey, who no doubt having watched his fellow actor in the studio, nails his intonations from the eccentrically speedy line readings to the Liverpudlian edge to his voice.  Starkey's other characterisations are also remarkable, notably Lord Elmhurst for which he seems to be giving us his James Mason impression.

Placement:  taking a cue from the cover, early.  Let's arbitrarily stick it before Vampire Science for S and Gs.

I now belong to a club that will have me as a member.

Politics Busy day. Read half of Nigel Robinson's novelisation of Doctor Who's The Edge of Destruction (or Inside The Spaceship or Beyond The Sun or whatever we're calling it this week). Watched the most recent Robin Hood film in which the industrial revolution seems to have happened about five hundred years early.  Watched All About Steve which isn't half as bad as its reputation, mostly because Sandra Bullock is acting her bright red boots off and didn't deserve the Golden Raspberry. Watched this new Lindsay Ellis video essay about Woke Disney which I only partially agree with. Watched 2.3 of Killing Eve. Ate a not very good Chilli-Con-Carne from Marks and Spencers. Joined the Liberal Democrats.

OK, once more with feeling.  I've joined the Liberal Democrats. 

This is my first membership of a political party.

The first time I voted Liberal Democrat (somewhat) was at school.  To coincide with the 1987 General Election, the Liverpool Blue Coat held its own mock poll with candidates from the sixth form (year 12/13 in new money) taking part in hustings and a somewhat proper campaign.  Andrew Williams, who is now a solicitor represented the Conservatives, Glenn Roberts stood for Labour (and I don't know what happened to him) and Mitchell Benn for the SDP/Liberal Alliance.  He's a comedian now.  Mitchell was by far the funniest of the candidates and was probably the reason the General Physics lab was packed out that lunch time and won by a landslide. 

He's also the reason I became an almost lifelong LibDem, apart from the fact that I could never vote for the Tories and I lived in Liverpool during the 1980s and could never vote Labour as a result either. 

So when it came time for me to vote properly, at university, age 18, I think a local election, after spending half a day walking around Headingley trying to find my polling station I voted for the Natural Law Party.  Because I was a student and that sort of thing seemed hilarious at the time.

But rest assured come 1997 and my first general election, I voted for the Liberal Democrats, not that it meant much in this safe Labour heartland or has every since.  I wasn't really passionate about it either, because, as I said, it was the default position between two parties that were beyond the pale.  The LibDems won forty-odd seats that year which looks huge until you remember Labour elected 418 MPs.  There was barely enough room on the government benches for them all to sit. 

And that's where I'd be for every election, general, local or European despite knowing, from an eye witnesses perspective of working in the polling stations that other than the locals for a while, the LibDems had little chance in our area.

It wasn't until the 2010 election that I became anything like active.  Much of this amounted to arguing the facts with people on Twitter and writing about politics on here going from surprised to deeply excited to hopeful to attending a conference fringe event to despairing within a few months. 

Like many people, this decade put me in an ideological bind, as I watched the coalition government on the one hand keep at least some of the LibDems 2010 manifesto pledges which the Tories have well taken credit for, especially the increase in the tax allowance against how the BBC was treated and poor people in general.

Then there were the disastrous Tim Farron years in which the entire party was brought down by the moral niggling of its leader at the just the moment when it needed a strong message.

Yet here I am in 2019 joining the party.  What's changed?

To an extent, I'm more emotionally ambiguous about the coalition period.  As I said in this essay back then, joining with the Tories in that moment seemed unforgivable for a traditionally Liberal party and then voting for so many of the more ideologically driven austerity measures.

But time brings nuance.  If Gordon Brown had somehow become PM instead, Labour would also have introduced some kind of austerity measures, their manifesto from that year brimming with obfuscation and vaguery.  So when their activists bring up the LibDems voting record in that period, they forget that if the LibDems had formed a coalition with Labour, if Labour had managed to keep enough seats for that to be viable, the LibDems would have their voting record to deal with instead (and all three main parties are very different beasts than they were even five years ago).

Plus there's little doubt the LibDems softened the sharper angles of their coalition partners in that era as we saw once they'd been reduced to eight MPs after 2015 and the Tories were given a larger mandate.

As Jeff Goldblum says in The Big Chill, "I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex."  I'd say the past few paragraphs cover at least a couple of month's worth.

They're also a party with a clear message.  They'd probably like it to be Fuck Brexit, but they're using the slightly tamer "Bollocks to Brexit".

The policy is clear.  If they become a majority government, they're going to assume that unlikely possibility actually happening gives them a mandate to revoke article 50.  If they don't gain a majority, they'll campaign for a second referendum with the options of a no deal Brexit, on a deal and remaining.  Labour on the other hand have a Schrodinger's policy in which voters won't know if they're voting for a remain or leave supporting party until after the election.  Ok.

Finally, it's Jo Swinson becoming leader.

Yes, her voting record in the coalition seems a bit pants if you look at basic data, but overall her decisions have been pretty nuanced, especially since she returned to parliament in 2017 having lost her seat in 2015 along with most of the rest of her party.

She's also an excellent communicator, can hold her own against the other leaders in the commons and frankly sounds more like a human being than either Johnson or Corbyn.  Plus I like that she's defining the party as being something it always was.  The middle ground in politics.  If I've accepted anything in the past few years it's that I'm centre left and that's where the LibDems seem to be now.

We'll see how this shakes out in the coming months.  At this point I don't know if my connection with the party will grow to be bigger than financial and I'll actually go out canvassing and so forth, although that would get me out of the house once in a while. 

Wow, I'm now literally a Liberal Democrats.

Please don't fuck this up guys.

Reading a Book.

Books Here's some pretty common sense but nevertheless useful to be reminded help on how to read books from Clio and the Contemporary, an old fashioned group blog written by historians.

It's supposed to be the university students and only partially makes sense for non-fiction, but a couple of items stood out to me:

"Create a reward system that motivates you. I place a post-it at the end of each chapter so I know approximately how many pages I have left to read. I use these post-its as benchmarks – as mini-motivators to get through my reading. Sometimes I add other motivators, such as a timer to challenge myself to read more expediently—I rarely get the work done within the time limit I set but just having the timer forces me to read more quickly. And, finally, I almost always plan a reward for myself for when I get to a post-it (a small victory!). For example, I’ll tell myself: “when I finish this chapter, I’ll go get a cup of tea” or “when I get through this section, I can eat a cookie” or “when I finish the book, I will take a walk with my dog.”"

Being such a slow reader, I tend to keep to a chapter at a time regime, which is fine for TARGET novelisations, less so for the more esoteric history books.

Dating a Photograph.

History The Library of Congress blog has a series of posts about the photographs in their collection and the latest entry is about dating some of the miscellaneous items by comparing them to what is or isn't there. Utilising an aerial view of their own building, they're able to show that in a city which is constantly in flux, it's entirely possible to pin it down to a decade or two:

"This photo features the Library of Congress Jefferson Building at center, and it’s always good to start with a subject you know well! The Library of Congress campus now consists of three buildings. In addition to the Jefferson Building, completed in 1897, there are the John Adams Building and the James Madison Building. In the detail photo below, the arrows point to the locations where those two buildings will be in the future. The Madison, where the Prints and Photographs Division is, will take up the entire block at lower right. The Adams will be at the right edge, where a few smaller buildings are visible. The oldest of the two is the Adams, which opened to the public January 3, 1939. So, this photo is before 1939."

Although as they say it's such a time consuming process it would be impossible to investigate every item in their collection, I wonder if there'll be a moment in the not too distant future when AI and machine learning may be able to help, following the same processes as this human.

Young and Depressed in America.

Books Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation is 25 years old and Anne Thériault has written for Long Reads about what the book has meant for her and why she thinks it was so successful and continues to be:

"What seemed most important to me about Wurtzel’s writing was that she had been messy, and she was willing to detail that mess without apology. Just: here is how I’ve behaved. She offers the reader no contextualizing, no explaining, no objective distance from the events described. I still can’t tell if Wurtzel did this intentionally or not — and, if it’s a device meant to draw readers deep into her own stream of consciousness, she doesn’t always wield it skilfully — but either way, it was a radical departure from how I’d seen women write about themselves. I’d never read a story about a woman engaging in such rambunctious self-destruction that didn’t turn into a morality tale; on the other hand, there was no shortage of stories about men being comparably messy. [link]"

Yes, exactly.  That's what struck me on reading the book, its blinding honesty and lack of fear in presenting the rawness of herself without caveat.  That continued into the sequel More Now Again, about the ritalin fuelled genesis of Bitch, the feminist polemic she wrote in between.  On neither occasion does she come across well, but it's the bravery of exploring her own failings which makes them intensely readable and relatable.

When I discovered the book sixteen years ago, my reaction was to write about it on here as though she'd been someone I'd actually spent time with, as though the book was a conversation we shared (I'd bought all three books at Music Zone in Manchester which explains the references to that city) (the science fiction writers would have course represent the Doctor Who novels I'd been reading in that period).  I mean it's fine as pseudo intellectual exercises go.  It's one of the few blog posts from back then which I actually remember writing.

But it fits within the style of this blog back in 2003, far more personal, when I felt more comfortable talking about myself.  As I've said since, as soon as someone you know talks about something they've read here, it's done.  It's much easier to be reveal yourself when you can't imagine the face of someone actually reacting to what they're reading.  That's another reason why Wurtzel's books seemed so incredible.  She talks about people who will inevitably read her words and not always in the best light.

Anyway, to celebrate this literary milestone and commemorate how things used to be, here's something I've never mentioned on the blog before.  Back in 2017, I wrote about my first kiss.  What I didn't include is that that has been my only kiss, that stupid, sloppy, drunken smacker lasting a couple of seconds from my post-uni days is the only time I've pressed lips with anyone.  Of course that implies a range of other logical revelations, but let's just stick to that one for starters, not that there's much else to add.  At least, not right now.

Thanks for Darren for sending me the article.  I bet you weren't expecting this.

"A twice-weekly serial set in the exciting world of League Football."

TV Whilst there's probably lots to say about how lawmakers on both sides of the atlantic are finally beginning to tippex out some of the horrors we endured in 2016, there's little point in my simply repeating the words of much more informed people.

Instead, here's a link to a useful distraction as Ludicrously Niche investigates the connections between Doctor Who and 60s drama United!:

"Monday 4 October 1965, 7pm, then, and the very first episode of United!, The Kingpin, is broadcast, and already we're off to a good start: the show itself was created, and naturally the very first episode was written, by one Brian Hayles, who just six months later would have his first ever Doctor Who story, The Celestial Toymaker, broadcast (2 to 23 April 1966). Hayles would go on to contribute five more serials between then and the end of the Jon Pertwee era in 1974, all but one of which featured his most famous creation, the Ice Warriors. The first episode was directed by John Davies, who directed a single Who serial: The Macra Terror, transmitted in March 1967."

The show itself feels incredibly ambitious for the time.  Sadly the whole thing was wiped so we'll never be able to compare how Malcolm Hulke's writing on the two series compared (unless the scripts are at Perivale - perhaps someone could go and have a look).

Now I'm going back to waiting for what's sure to be an explosive Newsnight.

The Washington Monument Re-opens.

History On the list of things I always wondered, but not enough to check why.

 Why does the Washington Monument change colour a third of the way up?

The Library of Congress blog explains:

"In 1856, when funding shortages interrupted construction, the monument stood only 156 feet tall out of a projected 500 feet. During the U.S. Civil War, the site was used for the grazing and slaughtering of government cattle, earning it the nickname Beef Depot Monument, as seen in this engraving (below left) [which is in the linked post -- ed.] published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper on Feb. 1, 1862. It was a rather ignominious period for the monument, after the cornerstone had been laid years before on July 4, 1848 to great fanfare in front of 20,000 people, with plans to build a design by architect Robert Mills."

The project was paused for years and then a concerted effort was made to complete the build with a simplified design in time for the centennial.