Disgressed

Recently this blog has been absolutely plagued with comment spam. This stuff is more sophisticated than it used to be; it often has only one link in it and it reads like a real (if somewhat lame) comment, so it can’t be warded off just by blocking anything with the word ‘viagra’ in it. I wasn’t sure why it was so bad – Conscious Entities was getting very little spam, in spite of its massively larger traffic.

So eventually I looked for a captcha plug-in. You may know that captcha is that thing where typically you have to type in a word shown in a distorted picture to prove you’re a human being rather than a spambot before your comment or whatever will be accepted. I’m told that really good spambots are now getting better at reading from distorted pictures than human beings, but in most cases it still seems to work well.

Anyway, browsing through the WordPress plugins which offer some kind of comment captcha, I found one that, by dint of doing something far too clever for me to understand, was apparently able to detect robotic submissions without requiring human users to do anything. Couldn’t be bad. I downloaded the files, installed and activated.

It was 100% successful in warding off spam; unfortunately it was also pretty good at warding me off, too. I found I was no longer able to log into my own blog. But now I’m back! In the end I had to go in and mess with the database manually (or by means of PHP something or other), which although it was actually perfectly straightforward, I find a bit scary.

As I was about to install a different anti-spam measure, I noticed that Akismet was deactivated. Am I an idiot or what? (Akismet is the basic anti-spam plugin which is normally the first line of defence for WordPress). In essence, I’d been running with nothing but a blacklist to protect me.

Anyway – enough of that.

The general plan was that we would spend several days getting out to visit places and two or three days on the beach at one of various places along the coast (Dinan itself being inland a bit, not to be confused with Dinard). In the event the weather failed us a bit, being overcast on several days, so that we only ended up doing one beach day.

One trip out, inevitably, was to Mont St Michel, where the girls had been before – I’d only seen it in the distance.  It’s a bit like the Eiffel tower in that the crowds are terrible, but you sort of have to do it. Apparently the sea is gradually silting up, so that left to itself the island, or peninsula, would be fully incorporated into the mainland in about twenty years, but there are plans to dig out the sea bed at either side and build a tram (wtf, as they say). I understand the Benedictine monks who originally created the place were induced to return some time late in the last century, but bitter experience having shown them that the place was no longer suitable for any serious monking, they left again early in this century.

Brittany is full of neolithic monuments to an absurd degree – alleged covered walks (ie six collapsed boulders), menhirs and dolmens: you should assume in imagining this part of the trip that every so often we stop and follow erratic signs into a distant field where a few ancient stones, usually overgrown with weeds, are lying around. One farmer had surrounded his allée couverte with a field of maize, leaving one row out to make a narrow path so that visitors still had access.

Another hidden item was the charming little castle of Hunaudaye, which somehow remains invisible until you’re quite close. The rest of the party, I think, believed I had led them astray, and was preparing to pretend to be interested in another low pile of stones, but although it’s not in mint condition, it’s definitely a proper castle.  Apart from climbing the towers, etc in traditional style, you could visit the rather odd exhibition on medieval humour which had been created in several of the rooms. I think it may have lost something in non-translation.

We also got the ferry (the vedette, which I now learned means ‘launch’ as well as ‘film star’) over to the Ile de Brehat one day, sort of a small French Channel Island, and not altogether like a smaller Guernsey in being rather over-full of both houses and tourists.

With a kindly goodbye from Mme Dabare, who made a last-minute bid to have us eat and drink in her place, we set off for the second stage. Here we came across the only snag in our flawless planning. Having returned the hire car to the ferry port, we assumed it would be easy to pick up a taxi to get us to the station. Not a bit of it. There were about six taxis there, but they were all pre-booked and would have nothing to do with us.  Katharine asked the person at the Britanny Ferries to ring, which she grudgingly did, but nothing much happened. After fifteen or twenty minutes a lone taxi appeared which someone else got because we were standing at the wrong end of the rank. We rang ourselves, one of the companies whose drivers were still hanging about waiting for their ‘pre-booked’ customer.  Ah no, they said, not worth us sending someone – you just wait, there’ll be one along in a minute. Another twenty minutes or more, and at last a single taxi did arrive. We hurried forward. No, sorry, this one is pre-booked. Eventually, at long last, we got one. As we left, the pre-booked taxis-drivers, still waiting patiently,  looked up from their cigarettes and jovial conversation for a moment.

Luckily, our plan had included a drastically over-long margin for error, which proved just long enough for us to still catch the TGV. At Gare du Nord, no taxis.

It all seems so long ago. We took a taxi down to Portsmouth: it sounds mad, but for for us the train fare would have been significantly more – and the train wouldn’t have come to our door when we wanted it.  Mustafa, our friendly driver, was unable to work out where the hell he was supposed to go to drop off passengers at the ferry terminal, and I have to say it was completely obscure to me, too. When we finally stopped, outside the ‘departure lounge’ but evidently behind the wrong fence, we were approached by one of those people who should never be given a peaked hat.  A normal human being would have said something like “You’re supposed to go over there”, but this lady’s opening sally was “Right, I must have this moved – now. It’s security.” Have a nice day, there.

The crossing, overnight, was not too bad. We went in the most upmarket of the ferry’s restaurants, which was OK though the food didn’t quite come up to the promise held out by the decor and the waiters.  We had been too late to book a cabin, and had to sleep in reclining chairs, which wasn’t great, but wasn’t as bad as it might have been. Wandering round the boat early in the morning I was suprised at the places some people had picked out to kip down in instead of their allotted seat – under the main stairs?

At St Malo we picked up a hire car without particular difficulty (I’d found it almost impossible to find out in advance which of the hire companies in the town actually had cars at the ferry terminal – only two out of the six or so do – Avis and EuropCar if  you’re interested).  One potential problem with our plan was that the ferry dropped us off in St Malo, a little the worse for wear, quite early in the morning, while we couldn’t get into our apartment in Dinan until late afternoon. In the event, it wasn’t really a problem: we spent a pleasant day visiting (revisiting in some cases) St Malo, or St Smello as the recorded commentary on the tourist train would have it.

At Dinan we luckily drove to exactly the right car park and found the place in the Rue de l’Horloge easily: finding Mme Dabare our landlady to collect the key was not so easy. The directions we had took us to a little tunnel and told us to ring at the last door just before we emerged. There was no door at the end of the tunnel, and trying the door at the near end yielded no results. What the directions should have said was: come out the tunnel at the other end, cross the small shopping centre, but don’t go out the obvious way, instead taking the steps to the left and the path that follows, where the door to Mme Dabare’s apartment is behind you, concealed by a wall and a flower bed.

It was a remarkable apartment, though: sixteenth century, including a big panelled room hanging out over the cobbled street, right by the old clock tower (thoughtfully organised not to strike between the hours of 11 at night and seven in the morning).  We could give tourists a surprise by suddenly opening the window and leaning out when they were trying to take a picture of the house: if we left the windows open we could get the full benefit of the hurdy gurdy man, traditional Breton musicians, and, er, Andean flute players who entertained the streams of tourists.

Mme Dabare herself was a most friendly and helpful lady, though she spoke no word of English.  I was gratified by the amount of operable French I seemed to have retained:  I even spontaneously came up with vitraille when remarking on the decorated windows in our bedroom (the girls said they were glad they hadn’t got our four-postered room because the stone knight’s head on the wall and the mysterious hole containing, if you peered in, a crucifix, would have affected their sleep).

Mme Dabare’s own apartment was directly connected to ours by a door which she urged us to knock on if we needed anything. Indeed, she invited us to come round for dinner one evening, in that non-specific way which leaves things in the air.

Dinan is a great place to wander round – there’s always some new little park or fragment of the walls, or quaint old street.  Down the steep Rue Jerzual, lined with nice shops and restaurants, you get to the Port of Dinan – a small river port on the river Rance, full of even more restaurants and amazingly picturesque; the city walls are behind with the Jardin Anglais just showing at the top, while the river is crossed by a high viaduct. It’s possible to do day trips up here from St Malo, but not alas the other way round. We did go on a boat in the other direction: above Dinan the river was canalised by Napoleon so that boats could get to any of three ports on the Atlantic coast, where they had a better chance of evading the British blockade. The two gentlemen operating the boat gave us a commentary on the way out and then got out the music box and sang traditional songs on the way back.

More later.

We’re off on our hols. Over the Channel on a ferry to St Malo tonight, a week in Brittany, TGV to Paris, a week there and then back on the Eurostar.

See you in two weeks.

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.