And a fic for seasonal_spuffy.

Rated G. Ten years after...

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I've been a bit sparse on LJ of late, so it follows that when I do actually have things to write about I can only post by crossposting from DW. Karma or something?

Officially there are no seminars/lectures/tutorials for MA students in the summer term. In practice I find that, as long as I don't mind being the only person not in possession of or working towards a PhD, there are lots of guest speakers, reading groups and seminars I can find to assuage my compulsive communicator leanings. There was a very interesting session last week about interdisciplinary gender studies, with a genuine range of disciplines, although a lot of time was spent debating inter/trans/cross and various other prefixly forms of disciplinarity, and the way it fits into the neoconservative/neoliberal project. (Are they the same? Am I the Good Slayer now?)

Yesterday I spent the morning playing with seven-year-olds, on the WWPS programme - a bunch of "tall writers" go into a primary school to work with children jaded by "literacy", to try to get them excited about writing. It is certainly needed - in the first session they were really concerned about the need to use compound sentences and put in lots of commas. :-( Yesterday my partner and I had them lying on big sheets of paper, drawing outlines of each other (no, we weren't setting up a murder investigation) and then considering the outside and the inside of a personality - Stanislavskian building a character, but more fun. And a boy who told us he hates literacy wouldn't stop writing to come to join the group by the end of the session - a result, I think.

It is so depressing seeing conscientious, committed, intelligent, experienced primary teachers having to follow official guidelines and drain the life out of creative writing when the children are seven. And it's so clear that they have no idea how sentence structures might work to improve their own writing - just parrot the terminology. That's all Mr Gove wants....

LJ tells me I'm in cluster 3, but I can't post there. Another impressive achievement in customer relations. :-( I wonder if this will crosspost?

BBC Radio 4 often has gems - programmes that are not much trailed, certainly not hyped, but just a joy to listen to - or thought-provoking, or intensely-moving.

This week and last they had two half-hour programmes on the lovely Bernard Cribbins - Donna's Grandfather in DW, but so, so much more to anyone who has grown up in Britain at any time over the last half-century or so. They are on "Listen again", and I think that means it's available outside the UK too. Try it - a real national treasure and what makes him so, with a lot of celebrities explaining why he is so awesome, including David Tennant.

Look at this:



My little fic about Spike during Restless was nominated! Whoever did that, thank you many, many times!

Not many MPs have a pair of Oscars, but Glenda Jackson does, and shows all her theatrical expertise in her speech to Parliament today. They were summoned for a day of tribute to Thatcher - most of her real opponents stayed away or tempered their language in respect for the death. She said it how it was. And use the word "heinous" twice.

I'm not in any mood to party, and the use of the word "Rejoice" is forever tainted for me, just as are the words of the prayer of St Francis, which she quoted on her entry to Downing Street before proceeding to do the exact inverse in virtually every case.

I'm old enough to be able to remember the suffering she caused, the needless wars she provoked, the mass privatisation at knockdown prices of what even a previous Tory PM called "the family silver", the changes made in her era to bank regulation and council house tenancies which kick-started the debt culture of today.

She was formidable. But so is Sauron. She knew what she wanted and believed in it passionately. So did Voldemort. She introduced despicable laws to attack GLTB people. She destroyed the manufacturing basis of my country. She wrecked communities, especially in the North.

I did my celebrating when her own party turned on her after she forced through new, unjust taxes which provoked riots not seen again until the present Tory government. I rejoiced when she wiped away a tear on leaving No 10. Now I find that I don't really care that a sick old woman died in the Ritz. I do care about the legacy of division and bitterness she left.

And that someone rich enough to live in the frigging Ritz will get a grandiose funeral at her country's expense. I say she should be accorded the cost of a pauper's funeral and the rest should be privatised. Sponsored by her rich friends or paid for by her wealthy son out of the profits he made via his mummy's connections.

I remember her as triumphant, mostly over the misery of other people. I do not party, but I certainly will not mourn.

Someone on my flist referred to the amazing All-Penguin AU of a couple of years ago. Someone else surreptitiously handed me a photo via Another Social Networking Site which just cried out for captions and fic.

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We made it home on Tuesday, but since then it's been a whirlwind of appointments, meetings, putting together an order of service, planning flowers, phoning people and so on. Paris was very good for us, though, even if my poor creaky knees suffered.

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It's Dave's birthday on Saturday, and I'd already booked a trip to Paris to celebrate, so here we are. My Eurostar tickets came courtesy of a supermarket loyalty card, so if not exactly a budget destination, it's affordable.

Yesterday was very busy - I went to Daventry to register the death and get the certificates necessary for the funeral and cremation to take place, then on to Bicester to visit oxfordia and her gorgeous daughter G. There's nothing like a three-year-old to restore a sense of proportion, frankly. I took her off to a nearby garden centre with a soft play facility, which she loved, and we bought a pot plant for maman - in "lellow". Then back home with her to do some painting and for the grownups to have a good long chat. I think it was very good for me at least.

Today everything went smoothly - the taxi was spot on time, the train to Euston only a few minutes late. The Eurostar was twenty minutes late leaving, but it wasn't really a problem, and we found the hotel with no trouble. The Paris Metro has a lot of stations close together in the centre, which makes navigation very easy.

We found a brasserie, "Les Funambules", where we had a delicious meal, if a little low on the green vegetables - but, hey, this is France. We are planning to go to see an exhibition tomorrow at the Musée d'Orsay, on dark Romanticism and the Gothic - think Drusilla with a paintbrush!

We are replete with food and wine, and a long day of travel. I can certainly recommend the convenience of Eurostar, even if it did leave late. Paris streets are shiny with rain, reflecting the bright lights of the shops and restaurants. Definitely vaut le voyage!

Just in case you haven't joined the comm, but might be in Britain in August, you might like to know that registration is open for this year's fabulous Event, in Coventry, at the Ramada Hotel, on August 9th-11th.



Come on, now, how can you resist that as a combo?

We are currently running an exciting competition, too!

You do have to join the comm to see the posts, but it's OK, we won't sell your first-born into slavery or kidnap you in our TARDIS just for joining. (Unless you ask very nicely.)


Oh, and in other exciting news, I've just booked tickets to take my husband to Paris for his birthday in ten days time. How cool is that?

Move along folks, nothing to see. Now. Thanks, zanthinegirl and curiouswombat!

This MA course is leading me to do unexpected things in unexpected places. This evening I went into Coventry to a rather nice coffee shop in one of the more ghastly (in architectural terms) parts of town, where I never normally venture. One of my fellow-students runs a monthly open session there, for readers, singers and other performers. She wanted a bunch of us to go together to do some readings and promote the anthology of our writing, which now has funding from a second university source and is definitely a go.

Two others of our group read short stories - very good indeed, as I'd expected. You can see their work on our blog. You should go and leave comments. Please?

There was a singer who sang gentle, thoughtful songs, a two-man improv act, a couple of other writers as well. It's a small, safe, intimate space, and I was reading to about the same number as I routinely handled in a classroom, but many of these were strangers and I admit I was shaking a bit when I sat down - mostly with relief!

I read a short story, adapted from something I wrote a couple of years ago, with names and certain details changed. You may well recognise some of the characters, but I couldn't possibly comment...

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One of this week's prompts at sb_fag_ends is "The Man in the Brown Suit" - well, it had to be Spike, didn't it?

Set at the end of S4, during Restless
696 words, rating resolutely PG13, and that only because of naughty Spike language.
Disclaimer - not mine, or it would still be running, but Joss did tell us we could play.

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These are wombats. Need I say more, curiouswombat?

We're watching a 1963 BBC programme about the Big Freeze, the intensely cold spell between Christmas 1962 and the following March. It's fascinating - not just young!Cliff Michelmore (Wikipedia tells me he's still alive at 95) and all the other announcers with astonishing accents, or the lovely photos of the cold. No, it's also astonishing how very long ago it was, and so clearly was in terms of all the assumptions - milk floats couldn't make it through the snow, so "housewives went without milk". The train network - pre-Beeching - was all that kept some towns in touch with the rest of the world. No such thing as "the wrong kind of snow" then, and there were amazing shots of paired steam trains forcing their way through snowdrifts fifteen feet high. Coke and coal heaps froze solid, so it was hard to heat houses, and pipes were generally not lagged enough, so that even if you had water there was no draining it away.

One is so used to certain vocal tones and certain types of music being used in spoofs, it's almost a shock to hear them used in all seriousness. It's rather sweet to hear them anthropomorphising weather fronts. And apparently only the British Isles were affected.

ETA: Just saw the credits - "Designer: Ridley Scott". He must have been a mere babe!

In other news, why did you have to select such a nasty font for the posting window, LJ? Did you have an in-house competition for ugliness? Really interested to know your answer.

Reminded of Spike's first crossover into the Angelverse by hamsterwoman, I went looking and found something not quite what I expected, but really rather gorgeous.



Ouch. JM's English accent had slipped a bit at this point, hadn't it?

Thanks to brutti_ma_buoni for the link to the full text of Hilary Mantel's speech which has got all the idiot tabloids so exercised and event prompted our revered Prime Minister to criticise our double Booker winner.

It's a well-argued, thoughtful piece about how the gaze affects people being gazed at, and, in particular, the way in which women of any era who marry into the royal family (any royal family, really) become a womb, a vagina and a clothes horse. It's hard to rebut her argument, and I wouldn't want to. It is not an attack on Kate, Duchess of Cambridge. If anything it shows empathy and sympathy for her.

But Cameron knows what Blair taught him - you don't lose votes by siding with a princess who's next-best-thing to a saint. And Cameron is desperate for votes.

Gah. And grr.

Two hundred words is so little to write in my own language, but over an hour's work in someone else's. It makes me even more impressed by so many of my flist who post regularly in a second or third language and even write fic in a language not their own.

In keeping with my resolution, under the cut is another short piece about my obsession favourite show.

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The Pope is retiring. Last time this happened Henry V was fighting Agincourt. However, on that occasion it was Gregory XII stepping down in an attempt to heal the Great Schism - resigning at the same time were two other Popes - the Antipope, elected in Pisa, John XXIII and the Avignon Pope (taken very seriously as a pope, especially in France), Benedict XIII. Note the name.

Other Popes resigned - one, Celestine V, made a decree in 1294 (around the time Edward I of England was invading Wales and hammering the Scots) - Celestine announced it was OK for a Pope to resign, then put his money where his mouth was and promptly did so.

Apart from him and a Martin who was tortured to death in Byzantium (they took their religion very seriously then), however, there were two other Popes of a retiring nature. Both called Benedict:

Benedict V (964): Forced to stand down by Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, who had another preferred candidate
Benedict IX (1032-45): Sold papacy to his godfather, then had change of mind and tried to seize it back - he was later excommunicated.
(More at the BBC)

Perhaps this Pope would have been more inclined to hang around if he'd selected a different regnal name?

Whoever takes over has one heck of a job on his hands. I wonder if he will manage to drag the Church at least into the twentieth century - the current one is probably too much to hope for.

Questions from hamsterwoman - and my answers, natch.

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MPs have just voted overwhelmingly in favour of equal marriage.

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