Disgressed

I staggered into the bathroom as usual this morning at about ten past six and clumsily stabbed at the button on the radio. These days someone has usually retuned it to some music station (Radio Jackie? I never listen for long enough to find out) but today it had been left on good old Radio Four, where, on the Today programme, they were talking about reform of the banking system.

“now hmhm nurhh hmm nmhhhur Finney nnumrm murmmm”

Oh, they were interviewing someone called Finney – that’s Katharine’s madien name.

“mmmnhm nmmrh (By the way – this stuff is meant to represent my inattention rather than the quality of the reception or the actual sounds being made.) mmnnr mmnr Denton Wilde Sapte”

Denton Wilde Sapte? The firm of solicitors where Katharine’s brother works?

And then,  sure enough, my brother-in-law’s Edinburgh accent came through loud and clear. Well, not loud; more calm and measured, really. By now I had shaving foam over a substantial part of my chin, but I seized the radio and took it in to Katharine, who must initially have assumed that my sudden appearance meant they’d just announced the destruction of London by an opportunistic nuclear suitcase bomb, or something.

Strange to suddenly hear someone you know on the radio; it’s happened to me a couple of times with old school or university acquaintances,  and once I switched on the radio in a hotel room I’d just dumped my suitcase in, only to hear immediately a news item about a house fire in the street where my parents lived – the item so perfectly timed that in a film they would have taken the incident out or re-shot it as being too implausibly neat.

Then there was one occasion when I saw a family being interviewed on TV: they had the same surname as a colleague of mine, and the male members of the family looked so much like him they could surely only be his brothers. It was an item about Kids Who Never Leave Home; when I asked my colleague later he confirmed that it had been his family (he wasn’t there himself). They had been a little startled by the finished piece, as they had been told the item was about the medical problem suffered by his handicapped brother, which perhaps provides an insight into the general ethics and outlook of television production companies.

Radio 4’s not like that of course, though they’re not always brilliant interviewers. At least they seem to have got over the problem they had a few years ago of constsntly attempting to interview people who couldn’t really speak English. You spent half the interview listening to that nasal noise people make to show they haven’t finished speaking but have no idea what the word they’re after is. The journalists made no allowance for their standard of comprehension, either.

“So, it has been reported that the advent of the new Premier Serge Trouserin heralds a re-examination of contingencies in respect of the bruited liberalisation of the fiscal regime so lately denounced as dissimulation by sources close to the former regime. In that regard, what measures to demonstrate fidelity is the former likely to espouse?”

“Nnnnnuh. Mnnnnuh (OK, this time it represents the actual sound) Trouserein, Trouser…”

“I  mean, the circumstances inherently lend themselves to tergiversation at this point, or would you characterise that as a tendentious generalisation?”

“Nnnng. Nmnurnnn. Trouserin… nngnn Trouserin good…”

Robert’s interview seemed to go pretty well.

Elizabeth and her cronies are going to see that latest instalment of the epic today after school.

“So it’s alright?”
“Yes, so long as you’re back in time for dinner. That’s the only issue.”
“You see it’s nice to see something straight away, when it first comes out, isn’t it? Partly because it’s new, but it also means that people can’t talk to you about it. They can’t come up and keep saying, ‘Oh there’s this really good bit where they, whatever’. ‘Coz that’s really annoying.”
“Whereas now you can go up to other people and keep saying, ‘Oh, there’s this really good bit where they, whatever’?”
“ ’Zactly! Did I tell you we talked about dressing up for it?”
“Yes, you mentioned.”
“Only we haven’t really got the stuff. I can wear my red tie, ‘coz that’s Griffindor, but we haven’t really got enough red ties.”
“No.”
“The worst of it is, we drew lots to see who was going to be who, and I’m Ron.”
“Ron?”
“Yes, and I haven’t even got ginger hair. I mean A at least looks a bit like Hermione, and B is like Harry, but I don’t look like Ron at all. I mean, I’m a girl.”
“In fact, apart from being human beings, more or less, you and Ron Weasley don’t have anything in common at all?”
“ ’Zactly. Mind you, I don’t know what C is going to do. She got Voldemort. A told her she’d have wear a bald wig, but to be honest, she probably isn’t going to do it, is she?”

Katharine is affecting ignorance, although I think it’s really just a form of denial. Last night when Elizabeth was explaining how Slytherin colours were relatively easy, she asked which was the House with the bad people in.
“Come on,” I said, “You’ve seen all the films at least once. You can’t pretend you don’t know these things. I mean, even if you’d never heard of Harry Potter you could tell. Is the evil House going to be Hufflepuff  do you think? Or could it perhaps, just possibly,  be Slytherin?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t watch them properly.”
“Yeah, but come on – next you’ll be telling us you don’t know that Voldemort (what’s that – Flight of Death?) is the villain.”
“Is that Alan Rickman?”
 

“Well, hope it goes well,” I said to Elizabeth as we parted at the bus-stop.
“Yeah. It’d better be good, this film. ‘Coz we’ve kind of built it up a bit, haven’t we?”

We went to the Hidden Treasures from the Mary Rose exhibition yesterday. We’ve been meaning to go for a long time, partly because it’s in south Croydon, not very far away. In fact it’s at the Whitgift School, which I think led Elizabeth to suppose it was going to be full of pupils’ scrawled crayon pictures and papier mache models. Far from it; it’s an extremely professional exhibition which wouldn’t look at all out of place if you dropped it into the V&A. I’m not sure how the school managed to set the whole deal up, but presumably it is contributing to the further elaboration of what already appears to be a luxuriously developed set of school buildings.

The exhibition itself features a wide range of artefacts recovered from the Mary Rose;  tools, clothes, musical instruments, and a set of medical equipment including a large, wince-inducing syringe (wince-inducing if you know what they apparently did with it, and are male). Some of the objects – shoes, for example – look only slightly different from present-day equivalents; others are more inscrutable (a small wooden scraper for removing ear wax?). One of the oddest items is modern; a solid-silver model of the Mary Rose made as a gift for Prince Charles – definitely one of those thank-you-so-much-what-the-hell-am I-supposed-to-do-with-this jobs.

She was a funny-looking ship, actually, not that I know anything about it: three masts at the back and one at the front, with a yawning gap between as though one mast was missing, or space had been specially left for an unobstructed dance floor or something. I hadn’t realised before that she actually had a reasonable career before sinking, involved in two or three battles and upgraded with bigger guns a couple of times.

Good stuff, anyway – I don’t know how the school can follow this, really.

So, how was the five-parts-in-five-days series of Torchwood, Children of Earth? (Many spoilers in what follows.)

Good in parts, I’d say. It seemed to me to peak in episode two and then gradually slide, with some lengthy bits in the finale where I was literally looking at my watch. There was some genuine tension, though the relentless running up and down to dramatic music came close to parody here and there.

The chief weakness for me was the flagrant lack of concern with plot or plausibility. Alright, a degree of implausibility is obviously part of the genre. So when Gwen is cornered by a gang of people with machine guns, and explicit orders to kill her (‘no survivors’), nothing else, we’re not too surprised that their leader mysteriously decides that they’re going to take her prisoner after all.  But then when she’s suddenly and coincidentally rescued by Ianto who has somehow penetrated the perimeter of this maximum security establishment with a huge machine able to dig out a concrete-filled cell like a slice of cake in a single move (and in the three or four minutes available, the goons still shoot no-one), we’re into the worst of old-fashioned saturday-morning cinema.

Much worse than that though, is Davies’ complete indifference to how the story gets resolved (oh, let’s say they find a magic button or something right at the end). So we have a bunch of aliens intent on kidnapping children to use as narcotics (It’s never clear, of course, why they want to force the Government to collect the children for them. Since they can control all the children in the world as it is, and have a means of instantly transporting them up to whatever ship or means of transport they use, why don’t they just take them?).

Now it doesn’t take long to think of a few interesting ways these aliens could be thwarted. Maybe they’re intercepted by Galactic police, or rubbed out by a rival gang. Maybe they’re not really evil and it was all a fake, a big moral test for the Earthlings. Perhaps they are undone by their very addiction and it turns out that the children they’re hooked up to can, in the end, intoxicate and confuse them so much they blow themselves up while under the influence. I’m sure there are many better ideas, but what Russell T Davies gave us was that it suddenly occurs to Cap’n Jack that we could transmit back to them a signal they used to kill another character.  That, apparently, will either kill them all completely, or make them all go away forever (it’s not even clear what the signal actually does). They have no defence, they will never try again or retaliate in any way.

It seems as though all Davies is concerned with is dwelling on the ‘exciting’ idea of Jack being in a morally ambiguous situation, ready to trade children, including his own (!) grandchild. The ambiguity is not discussed or illuminated, we don’t even get any particular insight into how Jack himself feels about it, and you can’t wholly blame John Barrowman – although as an actor it’s true he has the emotional range of a haddock.

It’s possible that Davies has attained such revered status that no-one dares tell him his first ideas are lazy rubbish any more. He seems tired of the whole thing, so perhaps it’s good that it appears to have been wrapped up permanently.

Yesterday I was sitting at the old PC – very probably typing in yesterday’s entry, I’m not sure now – and I felt an unexpected small pressure on my slippered left foot. My brain struggled to identify the source of this pressure for a moment. It’s not a book falling on my foot. It’s not the scanner sliding off the bottom shelf. No, it feels like; well, it’s funny but it feels like sort of padded, three-toed sort of pressure, as if a cat was standing on my foot (how do I know what that’s like – when did a cat ever stand on my foot?). It’s…

A fox cub had walked in through the small open gap in the patio doors, strolled through the lounge and into the hall, where, not worried by me at all, it must have decided to check out the scanner and pile of wiring beyond, the only problem being my legs in the way.

“Oi!” I said, or something similarly inarticulate, and it ran away – back outside, fortunately, rather than upstairs or into the kitchen. There was no sign of it having bitten or pooped on anything, or even left little footprints, so I suppose we got off lightly.

This cub is one of a litter (brood?) which were born under the decking in next door’s garden and have only recently grown big enough to clamber out over the fence. Our neighbour was not at all happy about them, but stopped short of having them poisoned or short. They are cute to some degree, though I can tell you that after the sixth or seventh lawn-poop and the third or fourth grubbed-up shrub, their charm does wane a bit. They’re strange creatures – the mum, who has been around for a while, and her predecessors, have an unaccountable habit of bringing things in and leaving them on the lawn. I mean odd things; once it was a dead bird, which you can understand, but on other occasions we’ve had a small white bowl, a single shoe, and a large potato. I suppose I might be blaming them wrongly if we have a neighbour who lobs random objects into other people’s gardens; at any rate the foxes have never made off with anything of ours so far as I know.

It’s all part of the steady encroachment of foxes into town; we have a railway running nearby which provides a handy reserve/road for them, but really they’re everywhere these days and quite happy to trot down the road in broad daylight. This contrasts with forty years ago when I thought myself lucky to see a fox crossing a distant field well out in the country.

Why did they suddenly decide to move to a more urban environment? To be honest, I suspect it was when the streets started to be full of uneaten takeaways and plastic refuse bags full of wasted food, something that I don’t think really started happening until about the 1970s.

I don’t think they’re going away again in a hurry, anyway. The picture is my little friend at the patio doors, here to see if he can come in and play again.

Swine flu arrived in Sarah’s school a little while ago. We had a letter to say there was a single case, but the school wasn’t going to close;  apparently that one case turned out to be a false alarm, but by the time the tests were complete they had two other genuine cases.

Sarah herself has now fallen sick – she felt unwell at school and we got a call to take her home. But is it the dreaded Piggy Pox or some lesser thing?  She’s tired and has a slight temperature, but there isn’t the amount of coughing and sneezing I would have expected. Katharine rang the local doctor and was told to ring NHS Direct instead. There she spoke to an operator who took notes of the symptoms and said they would ring back in ten hours.

“But that will be in the middle of the night!”

“Yeah, well, we got to close the call.”

In fact, they rang back in just a few hours, with the advice that we should ring the local doctor. The eventual verdict was that she probably hadn’t got it, but should stay at home for a few days anyway. They wouldn’t prescribe Tamiflu, but would send a self-test kit (no idea what this consists of – probably a laminated card with a list of symptoms).

So far Sarah doesn’t seem to be doing too badly, though she’s still lethargic .

From a purely selfish point of view, I was wondering whether wearing a badge that says “We’ve got Swine Flu” would get me more room on the trains, but I expect not.

Standing by the office window yesterday evening and watching the rain,  I remarked a bit smugly to a colleague that in fact it hardly mattered to me whether it was raining at the actual moment I left, since it was only a few yards to the Tube entrance and the journey was all under cover from there up to Hackbridge. Little did I know.

At Victoria there were extraordinary scenes. As I came up out of the Tube, there was a really thunderous noise of rain on the roof; I’ve been there enough times in the past when it’s raining, but this was the first time the sound was actually audible.  Some of the tourists werestanding around  looking upwards (as is their wont) in dismay, but with commuter’s indifference I shoved past.

On the main concourse there was water everywhere. Around each of the cast-iron pillars which hold up the roof, a real torrent of water was falling, and there were huge pools – ‘puddle’ doesn’t quite cover it. London Transport police were standing in the water trying to stop people walking through it, presumably on health and safety grounds, though I thought it was far from clear that the areas which were wet without actually being submerged were necessarily safer to walk on.

Apart from the fact that I was getting wet just from the spray, I thought it was a good idea to get onto the platform as soon as possible, because it seemed inevitable this amount of water would lead to cancellations if not closure; but it was no easy matter. Walking around the main pool was a considerable detour in itself, and it was made much more difficult by the fact that a solid ring of people was standing all along the edge taking pictures of the waterfall around the central pillar (that’s why there’s no picture from me – I didn’t want ot make it even worse).

On the other side, the automatic barriers were standing in their own little lake, and the usual cloud of tetchy impatience amongst the people trying to get through was tinged with a faint sense of nervousness, not panic, but sort of a distant relation of panic. Once under the more solid roof of the platform, however, things seemed more normal if a little more crowded than usual, and there was even a train ready to go.

As I got on board, I heard an announcement. Many of the speakers on the concourse, attached to the pillars,  were under a continuous deluge, and elsewhere I imagine a good deal of wiring must have been compromised. But here the system was struggling through, and a dutiful announcer was evidently going to give us a helpful message amid the cascading rain.

“Passengers are reminded that smoking is forbidden on all parts of this station…”