petermorwood

The Katana Myth again...

2013-05-17T00:15:01Z

Advance warning for bad language - not mine, it's part of someone else's quoted post.

*****

The Japanese sword is a good weapon. What it’s not is some weird combination of Excalibur and lightsabre.

The European longsword is a good weapon. What it’s not is some weird combination of iron club and barbell.

It would be easy to adopt the approach displayed by some, er, uncritically enthusiastic katana-fans, which is to hit capslock, shout, swear and diss every other sword and the people who used them. Like so:

“Here’s the thing fuckwads. Katanas were used by MASTERS OF BATTLE called SAMURAI who knew precisely WHERE to hit, WHEN to hit, HOW MUCH FORCE THEY’D NEED, ETC. Samurai (at least when they started out, they got pretty corrupted and sloppy toward the end) were ONE WITH THEIR BLADE. The katana was known as the Samurai’s soul.
The FUCKING LONGSWORD on the other hand, was handed out to basically any fucking FARM BOY who happened to enlist/get recruited into the fucking army. That’s the equivalent of YOU picking up a fucking SWORD and getting thrown into battle. So yeah, they’re going to fucking need to be durable because no idiot who picks up a sword is going to know where to swing it so it doesn’t shatter into a million pieces. Oh and by the way, a long sword is also nearly 3 times the weight of a katana (ITS A FUCKING HACKING WEAPON), so it wouldn’t be nearly as precise or fast as a katana. And after about 10 swings, your arms will be fucking DEAD TIRED. Do you understand how much a fucking sword weighs? ITS A GIANT FUCKING CHUNK OF METAL. ITS NOT A FUCKING STICK YOU PLAY GAMES WITH…”

And so on…

This reads like someone in frantic denial about something they don’t like because it may well be true and that spoils their worldview. They’re not alone, apparently. It also reads like someone who has probably never touched a real sword of either kind, or read anything about them other than on-line misinformation and hype.

Read the raving again, but add a bit of common sense. If a weapon is so heavy that swinging it ten times leaves your arms dead tired, what the hell use is it?

Farm boys weren’t given longswords, longbows or anything else required long training. They were given pikes, or bills, or some other polearm not too far removed from the farm tools they were accustomed to using, and a short, no-real-skill-required chopping sword called a falchion as backup. Again, not too different to the tools they used every day. And then like any soldier, before “getting thrown into battle” they’d be drilled in how to use them. That’s always assuming the baron didn’t leave his farm labourers labouring on the farm where they would do some good and go to war with the properly trained men-at-arms who made up his retinue.

Steel will shatter, if it’s tempered to be hard, inflexible and brittle. Drop a modern Solingen straight-razor on a tiled floor and if you’re unlucky, you’d think it had been made of glass. Bits everywhere. Swords were not tempered that way. No smith would let one out of his forge.

And yes, I do understand how much a sword weighs, and three to four feet long is not what I call “giant”.

The longsword was not “three times heavier” any more than the katana was a featherweight. Sometimes one would be a bit heavier than the other, but if they were about the same length, they were about the same weight. Any extra ounces added by the longsword’s more elaborate guard and pommel would be balanced by the single-edged katana’s thicker blade. They weren’t blunt, either. Ewart Oakshott (who handled and collected real swords and wrote real books about them) mentions a sword of about 1125 AD in the Wallace Collection, London, whose edges “are as sharp as a well-honed carving knife.” If you think that’s blunt, go into your kitchen, hone your own carving knife and run it hard across the palm of your hand. I’d recommend dialling 911 or 999 first; you might have trouble doing so afterwards…

Top-line katanas and top-line European longswords were superb things, art objects as much as weapons, but average katanas weren’t so impressive and were actually made of poorer steel than the equivalent average longsword. Japan is not a mineral-rich country (they’ve fought wars over it) and all the folding and hammering katana-fans make such a big deal about was because Japanese swordsmiths had to improve their shoddy basic material by beating the impurities out of it without beating all of them out, since those “impurities” include the percentage of carbon that makes iron into steel. This was done for all swords, but it’s obvious that weapons for the average retainer grunt wouldn’t get anything like the level of attention given to those made for a great daimyo.

Also the aforesaid retainer grunt, usually armed with a yari (straight-bladed spear), was no more a “master of battle” than the average European feudal grunt armed with a bill or pike. Learning how to handle a sword properly took time and money; low-level grunts didn’t have much of either. “Samurai” means “servant”, and for every elegant, calligraphy-writing, flower-arranging, combat-skill-honing nobleman, there were a couple of hundred not-much-more-than-peasants standing guard in the rain.

What katanas get is an unbelievable level of hype in Western media, as related in this thoughtful essay by the late Hank Reinhardt. Working out the whens, whys and wherefores of that is another essay in itself. The sort of stuff restricted to legendary Western swords like Excalibur, Balmung and Durendal are accepted as something any katana can do with ease. Cutting a machine-gun barrel in half? Katana. (There’s supposedly “real film” of this, but like the Loch Ness Monster it’s always been seen by someone else. If it exists at all, it’s most likely WW2 propaganda with a fake gun.) Cutting stone without damage? Katana. Cutting through armour without blunting? Katana.

Bullshit accepted without criticism and defended with shrill obscenity? Katana…

What all this has done is make the katana a bit of a joke (except to the people with the itchy capslock fingers) which is a shame. It’s a good sword. Sometimes it’s a great sword. But it’s not and never has been a magic sword.

RIP The Cat Goodman, 1997-2013

2013-05-08T16:10:32Z

The white cat is gone, into the quiet earth beneath the hawthorn tree beside Kasha, and Lilith, and Bubble, and Pip, and Beemer, and Squeak.

Goodman was the last of our Old Brigade, the succession of amiable, fascinating feline personalities who've been with us almost since we started living in Ireland. Not having one of them in the house today feels very strange.

Richard brought him to our back door sixteen years ago, a small damp scrap of off-white fur he'd found stuffed into a hollow tree half-full of water and left to drown. Why our back door in particular?

“You’re the only people around here with cats as pets. Could you take him in? Or should I just knock him on the head as the kindest thing?”

Richard's a farmer, not given to being sentimental about animals, so he was just giving us the practical option - but by then the damp scrap had climbed onto my shoulder, and that’s where he fell asleep.

End of discussion.

Goodman had lots of adventures, including some very silly ones like catching a leveret, discovering baby hares with nothing to lose are FIERCE and not knowing what to do next. (We rescued him, took it back into the field and after being threatened ourselves, let it go.)

Then there was the time he tried catching a duck and came back green to the waterline. All we needed was some gold food-colouring and he would have been the star of St Patrick’s Day. Some fur from the ginger tomcat up the hill would have done it too; there were frequent exchanges of opinion that Goodman always won.

And there was the time he caught and somehow choked down an entire coot. We thought he’d been poisoned and took him to our vet, who couldn’t stop laughing when he showed us the X-ray: beak, neck, feet, the lot, all crammed inside. Mineral oil and time put things right, and Mr Goodman was rather less greedy from then on.

Today it was time to help Goodman leave a body that was old and tired and failing, and move on to a new one. So I lifted him onto my shoulder where he’d been sixteen years ago.

And like the first time we met, that’s where he fell asleep.

He was our friend. They were our friends.

Good-night, kitty. Good-night, all.

(This little eulogy is also here on Tumblr, with some photos.)

Making THAT call to the vet

2013-05-07T20:38:33Z

Two years ago it was for Squeak, and I didn't post anything either before or after. I was so wretched that words wouldn't work even though they're the tools of my trade, because it was the first time in 11 years we had to play a role in what happens. Accidents are a shock, but they mean you don't have to make That Decision.

Tomorrow morning the call will be for Goodman, to grant him easy passage to be with all the friends who’ve gone before. He’s 16, his kidneys have been failing, the meds aren’t working any more and it’s as if he waited for Diane to come home from her business trip to London then stopped holding on. He faded away this past week, and now it’s time for the last kindness, though doing it still hurts.

When Goodman’s gone, there won’t be any cats in the house for the first time in 25 years. That’s going to hurt too; there was always at least one waiting to be petted and give us a comforting purr when we came back from the sad place under the hawthorn tree. Not now. The place is going to be very quiet.

We’ll adopt kittens in a while (assuming none arrive on the doorstep as happened with Squeak, Beemer, Bubble and Pip) but not straight away. It would seem overhasty, disrespectful, like doing no more than plug a gap.

Besides, if some, never mind all, of D’s business trip comes to pass it may mean we won’t have time. We’ll be very happy if it works out.

I wish we could be happy now.

A (not quite) Christmas Story

2013-01-01T13:41:27Z

This story is a fantasy, but some of its background is true: the Belfast Blitz; the Auxiliary Fire Service; the Men from the South; and my toy fire-truck set…

I'd started to wonder if that toy was just a trick of memory, because in nearly fifty years I'd never seen another one. Despite eBay, Google and all the rest, it remained elusive. Then I found a photo on-line, from 1962, of a small boy playing with the exact same fire-truck set. He was even wearing the Fire Chief’s Helmet. That photo helped confirm my inspiration for the original story.

This present version has been slightly reworked from the one published in "The Magic Toybox" (2006). Partly I wanted to see it the way I'd like to have done with another week before deadline (I didn't get it, you never do) and partly because of the time of year and chatting with friends about Christmas presents after we watched A Christmas Story.

What is the best present? The one you really want to have ("a Red Ryder 200-shot BB gun with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time"), the one the manufacturers really want to sell you and all your friends are getting so your life will be incomplete without it (Cabbage Patch Dolls, Tracy Island) – or the one you don't even know exists until it's in your hands.

I know which did it for me.

The story had no printed dedication, but I knew who it was for from the moment it came together. My Mum liked it a lot. She'd never thought of her husband as a hero, but he was, and he even had a boring secret identity – an accountant(!) – yet when push came to shove he went to put out fires while the massed air force of an enemy nation tried to kill him for doing it.

He was a hero.

And he was my Dad.

THE LONGEST LADDER

Peter Morwood

© Peter Morwood 2005, 2013

“The longest ladder isn't the one where you never reach the top. It's the one where you never reach the bottom.”

– Robert George Smyth, Leading Fireman, AFS (NI) 1941

Everybody's had The Great Toy. I was lucky, if that's the word I'm looking for, because I had several.

They would be unwrapped with great ceremony on birthday or Christmas, and if they were especially handsome, then when I'd finished playing with them they'd be locked inside the china cabinet in the upstairs sitting-room. That sitting-room was, like in every house big enough to have one, the room that nobody went into except for weddings, christenings, funerals and in my family, at Christmas.

It wasn't some cruel parental trick, to give me a gift, allow me to admire it and then take it away again. Far from it. That china cabinet was a place of honour and a shrine to nice things: my Mum's and Dad's crystal, silver, porcelain, and now my plastic. That's where the Britains' Concord Overland Stagecoach lived, and the Herald Arctic Expedition Dogsled. They were perfect little replicas, far beyond toys. They were time capsules of their era, and thus far too good for any kid to play with on anything like a daily basis. So when I did play with them, I treated them carefully, because afterwards I knew they would be safe.

Between times, I could admire them through the glass of the cabinet, and show them off to friends who, though it was never said aloud, might not show the proper respect to something that wasn't their own. They were also thoroughly impressed by the company the toys were keeping. At first a toy stagecoach didn't look at ease among the Dresden and Royal Doulton china, the Waterford and Tyrone crystal, and the feather-light ceramic stuff with no name that Great-Uncle Johnny had brought back from China in the 1920s. But as time went by, that changed, and Mum's china cabinet became the appropriate place for such things to be.

Until one night…

It had been a terrific Christmas. I'm lucky enough to have had some really good ones, and this was the best I can remember. You'll see why.

The TV was fizzing away in the background. Since the Queen hadn't appeared for her usual lightweight talk yet, Mum and Dad weren't actually watching it, just using the sound to cover some sort of amiable parental discussion. Various relatives were gossiping; my sisters were comparing notes on some book of fashion as it related to a pair of expensively-dressed dolls, and I…

I was reading the instruction sheet for a new model aircraft, tentatively fitting parts together, and wishing I could get cracking with the paint and glue. No such luck. The order had come down from On High: "No weird chemical smells, not just yet. Let your dinner settle and have a bit of patience!"

It was the usual situation on a Christmas afternoon. The turkey and plum pudding had gone down a treat, and now the guests were probably thinking that with obligations discharged, they should move on to the next stage in the holiday social round. My parents were probably thinking that since no-one had so far said anything to provoke one of those icy family disagreements which happen so easily over the holidays, having the afternoon to themselves before the next lot arrived would be good. My sisters and I were definitely thinking that once they'd all left we could relax from Best Behaviour. We didn't intend to run amok, but what's the point of a stack of new toys when you have to play with them quietly?

And yet we were all so warm and well-fed and content that no one could be bothered to do any of that stuff.

The first notes of the National Anthem sounded from the TV, and various aunts hastily topped up their glasses of sherry before the Queen's Speech began. I wasn't interested in what she had to say, because at nine years old I regarded Our God-Saved Gracious Queen as a useful source of school holidays but not much else. So I folded up the instruction sheet, dropped the model pieces into their box, put the lid on and made my escape. With Christmas dinner over and Christmas supper still several hours of digestion away, there was pleasantly little else to do for the rest of the afternoon. I picked up a couple of the books I'd been given, and thought that if I went upstairs to the sitting-room, I would have some peace and quiet to read.

I was right about the peace and quiet. That was where we put the big Christmas tree, so that it wouldn't get in the way at dinner. This year it was a balsam pine rather than an ordinary fir-tree, and there was a scent like incense in the room. The only noise was the low murmur and crunch from a big coal fire well settled in the grate. It's very restful to lie on the rug in front of a fire like that, on a comfortably-full stomach, reading a book and occasionally stopping to take a mental inventory about how this Christmas's presents stacked up against those of previous years.

I hadn't done badly, not badly at all. Of course there were the things I wanted that I knew I was never going to get – the air rifle, for example. One of the aunts presently soaking up Harvey's Bristol Cream sherry downstairs was blind in one eye from an airgun pellet, so I didn't even bother asking any more. And there were things I'd wanted and never got because they disappeared so fast I might as well have imagined them. That plastic Roman centurion's helmet, for example, complete with the feather crest that was properly mounted crosswise, the only accurate toy version I've ever seen in my life.

But those rare disappointments were more than balanced on this Christmas by a toy – an amazing toy – I had never asked for, and never knew existed…

I was still half-drowsing over the book when my Dad came in quietly. I only knew he was there when I smelt the pipe that came out on special occasions, and glanced up in surprise at the package in his arms, a huge thing covered with vivid blue and gold wrapping-paper. He bent down to put it on the floor beside me, then patted me on the head and said, "Those exam results were better than Mum and I ever expected. Well done."

He went away in a trail of warm tweed jacket and fragrant pipe-smoke and left me with the present. I didn't get a chance to get over my surprise, or even say thanks, and maybe that was how he meant it to be. My dad had his own sense of style.

I sat up and pulled the wrapping paper off to reveal the more ordinary brown paper underneath. Inside that was a cardboard box with a picture printed on it. Nowadays, the art would be considered crude: no photos, no lavish description, just black and red ink on the white cardboard. But it illustrated the contents of the box, and that was enough: a fireman's outfit – and what an outfit!

The wording was surprisingly bland by comparison with the excitable way it would be written now; to this day I can't recall if there was a single exclamation mark anywhere in the dry text. All the excitement was reserved for the lucky kid who got that box. A kid like me.

The label simply read "FDNY Fire Chief Set. Classic 1930s Pump and Aerial Ladder trucks. With full crew. Chief's Helmet with Shield."

I was astounded. "FDNY" as in Fire Department of New York? For a kid living in Belfast's suburbs in the early Sixties, this could hardly have more rarity value if it had come from the Moon. I tore back the lid and the initial impression I got was of red. No, of RED, and most of that impression of redness came from the strangely-shaped helmet at the very top of the box.

Certainly it was strangely shaped to my eyes, bigger and bolder than anything a Northern Irish fireman would have worn. The ribbed, cross-braced crown had a gilded eagle-head supporting a big shield in front, and the enormous brim and neck-flap were completely unlike anything I'd seen before. The local helmets had high front-to-back combs like something a dragoon might wear when fighting Napoleon at Waterloo. By contrast this American helmet looked medieval, something from the Wars of the Roses exhibition that I'd seen in the Tower of London on a summer holiday. When I put it on my head and snugged the chinstrap in place, Arthur Pendragon wearing the crown of Britain couldn't have felt more grand.

But the helmet was just the gilding on a spectacular lily. When I turned my attention back to the box, underneath where it had been was not just one fire-engine, but two. Both were vivid scarlet with big, chunky black tires, white rubber hoses that could pull out from their reels, and the articulated aerial truck – with its own driver at the back! – had a tremendous ladder that at full extension was taller than I was. The deep, rich colour of the vehicles was splendidly enhanced by the chrome on radiator grilles and bumpers, pumps, exhausts and hose nozzles. They all sparkled, the hubcaps on the big black-and-red wheels gleamed; the extinguishers on their running-boards and the levers to operate the ladder were mirror-bright.

They might just have been toy fire-engines when my Dad bought them, but to me they looked like jewels.

I don't know, even now, what a real full crew means, or whether the toy-set had left out anyone important. But my crew was made up of thirty little red-plastic firemen with white-plastic helmets. They had clip-shaped hands to hold their white-plastic hoses, extinguishers, axes, and weird hooked spears that looked like fishing-gaffs.

Those little clip hands also allowed them to climb the ladders mounted on their engines, one hand for the ladder and another for a hose or for someone needing rescued. It didn't matter to me if the burning building thick with smoke was my youngest sister's doll-house, or just a cardboard box with cut-out windows, either of them draped with as much cotton-wool as I hoped Mum wouldn't miss. It didn't matter either that the victim being rescued was usually one of the doll-house inhabitants, stiffly expressionless and no more impressed by their plight than a wooden chess-piece. One of my new fire crew would save them: he – I – knew what to do to get them out of there.

When I had that helmet on, when I was playing with those fire engines, I was always equal to any task. I was a real fireman.

Just like my Dad had been.

He'd been in the Auxiliary Fire Service during the War, while holding down some other essential full-time job at the same time, but he didn't talk much about what he'd seen or done and I got the feeling that it had been boring. After all, Belfast was so far from the German bomber bases in Occupied France that London, or Coventry, or even Liverpool was much easier to reach. By the time I was ten I could quote chapter and verse on the reasons why, because I had a new hobby: building model kits of Second World War aircraft.

I'd been doing that for only six months but already, the way some kids today can remember and pronounce multi-syllable dinosaur names in a way their parents can hardly credit, I could rattle off the performance figures for every plane I'd put together. If there was a mistake in a movie or a TV show, it was my duty to point it out. At length. When The Battle of Britain came out, Dad took me to see it in the local cinema, but after the fourth shrill whisper of "Look! There they are again! I told you! Even the German planes have got British engines!" he was ready to either leave the place or throttle me. He did neither, which shows just what a nice man he really was. Even if his son was often a pain in the neck.

I was gluing yet another kit together when my Dad came in from visiting a friend in hospital. He was looking much more cheerful than when he'd gone out, so my Mum already sounded relieved when she asked him "How's Tommy?"

"Much better. He'll be home before Easter, and probably well enough for the reunion dinner."

"He should cut down on his cigarettes," Mum started to say, then pinned Dad with a hard stare. "Come to that, so should you."

"Another New Year resolution down in flames," said Dad. "I could write a book on giving up smoking; I've done it so many times." He sniffed, and his nose wrinkled at the pungent smell of Airfix glue as he looked over at where I was working. "At it again. If you spent as much time on your studies…"

"Oh, Dad!"

"All right, son. I know, I know. Your mother wouldn't have let you start that unless your homework's done. So that's all right then. And what's this going to be? Another Spitfire? No, two engines. Beaufighter? Mosquito?"

I turned the box-top over to show him, and said, "Heinkel."

"Oh. Another one of theirs." The corner of his mouth tugged down a bit; he never said anything much about it, but looking back over far too many years, I think he was a little unhappy about how many Luftwaffe aircraft I built. As far as he was concerned, they were still the Bad Guys. After all, it wasn't so long ago that they'd been dropping bombs on him. "Heinkel bombers were mostly what Tom and the rest of us saw during the Blitz."

"Not this one, Dad. The ones in the Blitz were the early types with a dorsal emplacement. That's a sort of greenhouse-thing on the back. This has a proper upper turret…"

Then I stopped my babbling, because there was an odd expression on my father's face as he picked up the half-built kit. He pretended to study it, gave me a long, thoughtful look, and set it down again. "Turret, emplacement, whatever. I'm sorry to be so poorly informed about the fine details of aircraft terminology, son. But it looks enough like one from the Blitz for me. Don't forget, I only ever saw them from underneath…"

He went off to get himself a cup of tea, and started chatting to my Mum, leaving me embarrassed and somehow unnerved. I wasn't sure why. But I found out.

The reunion party two weeks later started in our sitting-room as it usually did, with twenty or so middle-aged men in dinner-jackets and their wives in going-out dresses, all gossiping about stuff that meant nothing to me until the taxis arrived to take them to the restaurant and dance-hall. My sisters had gone to stay at a friend's house for the night, so I was all by myself when I was brought in to make my introductions. That was when I got to show off the two big American fire-engines in the china cabinet, and natter on about how detailed they were.

I was pleased at how closely the older men looked at them, so pleased that I didn't notice how strange some of those looks were.

Aunt Margaret was minding the house while Mum and Dad went off to the dinner, and she was pretty strict about bedtime. That was why, for the first time since Christmas, I didn't have time to put the toys and the Fire Chief helmet back into the cabinet before I had to make my goodnights. Instead the vehicles were carefully set out on a shelf in my room, and the helmet was perched on a bedpost over my head. They were still there when I finished reading my book, turned out my light and lay back to sleep.

There were bombers overhead. Plastic ones, from Airfix and Revell, Frog and even hard-to-find Lindberg. A Heinkel, a Junkers and a Dornier flew in tight formation across my bedroom ceiling, suspended on fine white thread. They were harried by a Spitfire and a Hurricane, and if the Spitfire was a Mk IX from 1943 and the Hurricane was a Mk IIb from the Western Desert, it didn't matter much. Airfix had done their best, the intent was there, the Bad Guys were being shot down, and I could sleep well.

Lying back in bed and staring up into the darkness, I could see the vague outlines of the model planes as no more than silhouettes against the white paint of the ceiling. Someone's car turned the corner at the end of our road and a beam of light shone through a crack where my bedroom curtains didn't meet. The car continued its turn, and the light continued its sweep like a searchlight from some wartime newsreel. It illuminated the planes as it passed. But not all of them. The Spitfire and the Hurricane remained hidden in shadow, and only the German bombers showed briefly before the darkness swallowed them up again.

There are times, just as you're drifting off to sleep, when you jerk all over as if you're trying to keep yourself from falling out of bed. This was one of those times – except that the jerk felt like something had lifted the entire bed into the air and let it drop.

And then it happened again and I was suddenly, shockingly wide awake with a blast of icy wind hitting me full in the face. It was no draft from an open window, but the sort of wind that forces tears from your eyes.

I blinked the tears away, and what swam into focus as my vision cleared made no sense at all. There was no bed and no bedroom. Instead I was staring down a night-time road illuminated only by the harsh yellow-white glare of headlights and the staccato flash of red emergency blinkers. Between me and the road was a windscreen, and it wasn't doing nearly enough to break the freezing hurricane that came at me over the long bonnet covering a very big engine indeed.

That engine was roaring at full throttle as the vehicle plunged down its self-made tunnel of light. Its cab had no roof, no walls, no doors and I stared around in disbelief, feeling horribly exposed not just to the wind but to the landscape. The hedges were bad enough, but the occasional buildings or stone walls were far worse, whipping past entirely too close to my elbow. Whatever I was in, was big. And the strangest thing was that though I was sitting on the extreme right of the wide, leather-upholstered bench seat, there was no steering wheel!

I half-turned toward the man at my left and looked past him toward a driver sitting on entirely the wrong side. The dim glow from the dashboard instruments didn't light up their faces very well. The reflection from the headlamps helped a bit, but those flashing red lights did strange things to the shadows so that the only thing I could be sure about was that my two companions were both wearing helmets with a familiar silhouette. American fire helmets.

Helmets like – I put up a nervous hand – the one on my own head…

And abruptly it all made sense. Like every other time I'd worn that Helmet, I was equal to the task. I knew what we had to do.

Recognition flooded through me at the sight of the red hazard beacons all around, the Mars lights with their unmistakable figure-eight wig-wag, the Buckeye Roto-Rays spinning like electric Catherine-wheels. There was another vehicle close behind my own, engine bellowing, and though I couldn't see beyond the glare of its headlights I knew it would be an aerial ladder truck. If they had ever really been toys on a shelf, they were much more than that now. They were full-size fire-engines with their emergency blinkers furiously flashing as they stormed along a country road.

"Bells and sirens," I said, "now." The man sitting next to me threw a switch on the dashboard and the bell on the pumper I was riding started clanging. A few seconds later the siren spooled up to an ululating banshee yowl. It was echoed by the same alarms from the aerial ladder behind me, until we were racing through the night on the wings of off-key song.

Then we started slowing down. Other lights ahead of us were waving from side to side, and the headlamps picked up a striped wooden barricade across the road. As the pumper truck rolled to a stop, someone flicked the beam of a torch full into my face.

"Quicker than we were expecting," said the man behind the light. "No complaints there." The torchlight played over my truck, then the big aerial wagon behind me, and that same voice muttered something that sounded like an oath. "Where the hell did you come from? Drogheda? Dundalk?"

For an instant the significance of those names didn't register, but I knew what the label on the box had said, and what the letters on the golden helmet-shield stood for.

"Noo Yawk," I said in an American accent learned from too many Westerns, and tried not to grin when the voice swore again, this time in disbelief. "We were on a courtesy call," I added quickly. "One neutral country to another."

"I wasn't expecting—" he started to say, then there was a brief exchange I couldn't hear and a couple of raspy opinions. "I'm not objecting, understand that," the man went on. "And we appreciate the courtesy call too. But listen, if we're getting unexpected help from neutrals, then maybe we should look out for the Swiss and the Swedish fire brigades as well. They might not speak English as well as you do, er…?"

"Chief." That was what it said on my helmet, anyway. "New York Ladder Company—" I grabbed for a number "—Twenty-Five."

"You're a bit young for a chief, aren't you?" My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and the man with the torch had POLICE in big white letters across his helmet. It was a British Army helmet, a real "tin hat" from the Second World War. There was another man behind him, and though I couldn't see anything worth reading on his helmet, I could see the Lee-Enfield rifle cradled in his hands. It wasn't pointed at me, at least not quite.

"My first turn-out. I wasn't expecting it." That was no more than the truth.

"Like I said, no objections," the policeman said. "But my God, you've got a big one for your first. Happy Easter, chum! Now let's have those lights out. You don't have black-out hoods on them. Jerry's been able to find his way in well enough tonight, so let's not make it any easier, eh?"

"Right." When the headlights and the emergency blinkers went out it got darker than I could have believed, an almost tangible blackness studded with stars and stitched with the thin beams of shrouded torches. Then a couple of dim red beacons lit up ahead of me, and over the grumble of the fire-truck's idling engine I could hear motor-cycle engines being kicked into life.

"Follow the dispatch-riders. They'll lead you where you're needed – though from what we've heard, once you pass Hillsborough you'll know damn well where you're going. And… Thanks, mate!" I heard the slam of boots that told me he had come to attention.

I returned the salute, whether the policeman could see it or not, and gestured to the silent driver on my left. Except for me, not one of the firefighters had said a word. They'd just sat there like dummies.

Or toys.

But when the transmission grated briefly before the truck began to move and that first instant of motion kicked me in the small of the back, I realised that whether this was a dream or a nightmare or something else entirely, I was going to stay with this ride from its beginning right through to whatever waited at the end. And I knew, at the pit of my fluttering stomach, that I didn't want to wake up any sooner.

The policeman was right. Well before we got where we were going, the indigo of the night sky had grown brighter until its north-eastern horizon was an amber-red glow that washed out the stars. It wasn't a steady glow, either. It shifted and wavered like something alive, and there were frequent blinks of vivid yellow as if someone was touching off enormous flashbulbs. Most of the flashes came from the ground with a few sparks in the sky that suggested fireworks. But in this time and this place it was more probably anti-aircraft fire.

"Bells and sirens," I said again. Except for the sound of the fire-truck and motorcycle engines we'd been running in silence for almost two hours, and any noise was better than the jangling tension growing in my gut. There'd been no way to ease it with conversation, either. None of the other men on the truck had said a word for all that time. They hadn't even changed expression. Once my eyes adjusted to the near-total darkness, all I could see was faces fixed in square-jawed determination. There was no fear, which was good, but also no sense that they knew how to handle whatever was awaiting us. Their faces showed nothing that hadn't been moulded there, and I was starting to be scared again.

To be ten again.

But there was the Helmet. It and the confidence it gave was going to have to get me through this. Shaking a little I reached up to touch it again – and that was when I recognised the destination I had already suspected. Even in the darkness of blackout, even with the glare of enormous fires and the spasmodic flash of explosions changing the appearance of familiar landmarks like the broad high face of Cave Hill above the city, we were heading into Belfast. I realised, as everyone else had done in the past few ghastly hours, that once they'd been able to move their air bases into France the Luftwaffe could reach Northern Ireland after all.

I'd never read much about any air attacks on Belfast during the Second World War. There'd been no mention of it at all in my thousand-page Encyclopaedia of Twentieth Century Warfare, and if a book like that didn't have the information, there couldn't have been much to comment on. At least, nothing of interest to those editors. Even the word blitz seemed almost completely associated with mainland Britain, so much that when my Dad had used the word, I thought he'd been talking about London. I'd been wrong. As another stick of bombs stamped giant fiery footsteps across the horizon, I realised that his war hadn't been as boring as I'd thought.

The air-raid sirens were still wailing as we drove into the city, though what with the fires and the explosions and the throbbing desynchronised beat of scores of aircraft engines, they were hardly necessary any more. And just as I'd seen in my bed as I drifted off, there were planes above my head. But those had been small, safe models hanging by a thread. The shapes I saw now were neither small nor safe but ugly crosses that obscured the stars, and what fell from them wasn't confetti.

The American fire-trucks were out of all proportion to the small British-built pumps and ladder-escape engines, and my drivers were finding Belfast's narrow dockland streets as tight a fit as the country roads on the way to the burning city. Our big vehicles didn't belong alongside the home-bred stuff, City Fire Brigade apparatus or fire engines that had driven in from Lisburn and Lurgan. Our crews looked wrong as we pulled up outside the first block of burning buildings, piled out and went to work unreeling hoses and raising ladders. Their big helmets and long bunker coats looked strange alongside the tin hats and shiny-buttoned tunics of the local men. I stood among them in a whirl of sparks and a gust of hot wind, working out the best way to kill the roaring beast that was eating my city.

First we needed weapons, and I directed some of my crew to the hydrants. As they ran over with hoses dragging behind them and offered up the connectors I felt a stab of betrayal as the two sets of metalwork got close enough for me to see what was wrong. The American equipment was too big, the wrong shape, it would never match up…

But in the furious glow of the fires the metal at the hose ends went as soft as if they were just plastic. The helmet knew what to do while we were playing this game, and so did the truck equipment. Each connection snapped home and locked tight, water charged the hoses so that the canvas squirmed like snakes, then came spitting and crackling from the nozzles to slash at the heart of the flames.

That was when I saw the man across the street, and I froze because I knew that face from an old photograph. Heavy eyebrows and a cleft chin, the black tunic of an Auxiliary, and the two stripes of a Leading Fireman around the crown of his helmet. He wasn't commanding a fire-engine, just a towed pump, but he was directing the crew putting out a blaze in the neighbouring building with a calmness and control that I envied.

I wasn't fooled, because I could see the fear in his eyes. I desperately wanted to speak to him, to tell him it was all going to be all right, that he was going to survive, get married, have children...

I didn't dare. I didn't know what was going to happen: suddenly nothing was certain except that the man who would one day be my father didn't need to think that this Yank in his weird hat was crazy. I swallowed hard down a throat gone very tight and blinked rapidly – from the fire, definitely the fire, that smoke was thick and it stung – then got on with business.

The stark outline of the aerial ladder rose like the neck of a prehistoric monster against the background of the nearest building, a burning warehouse, and almost before it had reached full extension there was a fireman scrambling up it, one of my firemen, with a big coil of hose over one shoulder. A few seconds later, he had the nozzle deployed and was starting to play the high-pressure jet across the base of the nearest fire.

There were so many other noises – roaring flames, hissing water, the hammer and quick-revving growl of trailer pumps, even the occasional slushy rumble and crash as a building came down – that we barely heeded the one noise that underlay them all. Then the unchanging drone of the bombers shifted its key, one thread of that tapestry of sound pulling loose and starting to unravel. Everyone who wasn't already busy with the fire glanced up. The engine-note slid along some tuneless scale from hum to whine until it became a bellow of raw noise that Dopplered across the sky at rooftop height.

In all that unbelievable racket I wouldn't have dreamed I could hear anything else, but I did. There was a stutter of machine-guns, their rapid rattle in time with the muzzle-flashes from the aircraft's nose and belly as it swept over our heads. Red paint spalled away from half a dozen shiny bare-metal discs on the fire-truck's door. It kicked under my hand and slammed viciously shut while two of the windows broke and a splinter tugged at my collar.

Then the plane was gone again.

It had only been there for a single shocking second, but that was long enough for me to see the tapering Perspex nose, the wide wings and the shark-sleek belly with its bomb bay gaping like an open mouth, everything glinting copper-bright in the reflected glare from the fires. Heinkel! The identification came out of nowhere, but that conical glazed snout was unmistakable. And then there was a sudden shiver of realisation. Dad was right. You can't see the upper turret from down here. The thought shot through my mind and left it empty.

As empty as the top of the ladder where a man had been.

I stared for just a second, trembling with useless rage, and snarled one of the words my Dad hated hearing me use. Then because there was nothing else to do, I got back to work.

It was almost dawn before the next fire engines arrived. They looked more at home than the big pumper and aerial ladder, because though they certainly weren't as local as the Northern Irish apparatus, they were at least based on the same Dennis or Leyland chassis. But they weren't really at home at all, and the insignia on their sides confirmed it. These were the crests of fire brigades from Drogheda, Dundalk and Dublin, fire brigades from well south of the border. Fire brigades that for so many reasons didn't have to be here.

But they were. The crews, volunteers to a man, had driven through the night until they reached the border and then, just as we had done, they'd come the rest of the way in darkness, with only the red tail lights of the dispatch riders to keep them from the ditches.

As the Irishmen moved in to take over from my crew, I sat back on the seat of the pumper truck. I was more tired than I'd ever been in my life, and as my leaden eyelids flickered shut, I let myself unwind, rocked by the bump and sway of the truck as it began to drive away, sung to an uneasy sleep by the single-note lullaby as Belfast's sirens sounded the all-clear.

And then my eyes snapped open. There were aircraft above me; but now they were plastic again. Small, safe models hanging by a thread. For the first time the sight of them gave me a brief shudder. The light in my room hadn't changed, so there was no indication of how long I had been asleep. Had the siren created a brief dream then wakened me just as I was dropping off? It was real enough, not an air raid all-clear after all, just the alert that summoned my town's volunteer firemen to the station at the bottom of the Antrim Road.

I scrambled out of bed and pattered on chilled bare feet to the window, hearing the engine's twin electric bells long before the growl of the big eight-cylinder Rolls-Royce engine came blasting along Bachelor's Walk. Seconds later the apparatus itself came roaring up Railway Street, a bright red Dennis F12 whose amber warning blinkers woke strange jerky shadows beyond the glare of its headlights. With a metallic grunt of changing gears it accelerated down Bridge Street and away towards the Saintfield Road, leaving only echoes and dazzle behind.

After a few moments, my mind still full of bells and sirens from both dream and waking, I turned in the street-lit dimness to look at the shelf where the pumper sat. Then I blinked, because things weren't as I'd left them. Some figures were missing.

I leaned close to the shelf, and even just by the reflected streetlights outside I could see that both fire-engines were scraped and dented. There were bullet-holes in the body panels, far more realistic that the ones I put into my model aircraft with a hot needle. Some of the plastic windows weren't just broken, but perforated and starred in a way I didn't know how to replicate. And there were more fire axes and extinguishers than red plastic hands to hold them.

In eight places along the running-boards of both trucks, where there should have been toy firemen there were now eight small red lumps like well-chewed raspberry fruit-gums. I had owned this toy-set for long enough to give its fire-crew names, to know their little plastic personalities: which of them balanced better on the ladder than another, and which had a tiny moulding flaw that meant he could wear no other helmet but his own. I knew them and knew who they were. Or who they'd been. Just toys that had suffered the fate of most toys, nothing more than moulded plastic turned to molten plastic.

But it smelled worse than that. There was the sour reek of petrol and damp, charred wood, and a nose-tickling chemical tang like old redhead matches. The rest stank like a forgotten barbecue.

Not burned plastic, but burnt meat.

It made me feel sick. I crawled under the blankets and pulled them around my ears. I huddled there and tried, tried so very hard, to go back to sleep. But there was no more sleep that night. Behind my eyelids, waiting, was the memory of fire from the sky.

The nightmares lasted for the next couple of weeks, through Easter and well past it. And then, as kids will, I calmed down. I don't know what my parents made of the nights I woke up crying, startling them out of bed. Maybe they thought I was getting worried about the upcoming 'Eleven-Plus' exam at school. If they did, that was fine with me. It was an easier explanation than the truth.

I didn't play with the fire-trucks any more. No one particularly noticed when I never asked to get them out of the china cabinet. That suited me, because I wasn't brave enough to tell anyone that I didn't even want them in the house. It would have caused too many questions. But whenever I went into the sitting-room there they were. After a while it seemed that they were watching me. After a while it just got to be too much.

So who do you talk to, when you want to get rid of the best toy you ever had?

You talk to the one who bought it. But I didn't dare come at the question straight on. The one thing my Dad had never, ever talked about was what he did in the war. So I took a chance that I might be able to get at the problem sideways, by 'writing something for History class at school', and one quiet evening I asked him.

He looked at me strangely, then got himself a glass of Black Bush whiskey and sat down. I already had a cup of hot chocolate, and we drank quietly together for a few moments like two grown-ups.

"We weren't ready," he said at last. "Nobody believed the Germans could get as far as Belfast, and even when the Luftwaffe moved up to the Channel coast they still didn't believe it. Why come all the way here when the industrial midlands of England were that much closer? After all, they hit Coventry more than forty times besides the big one in the history books."

Dad sipped his whiskey. "We lost almost as many people in just four raids, but try and find that written down somewhere. What happened here was an embarrassment. Something to forget. Because nobody ever bothered protecting all our inviting targets. We had Harland and Wolff's, the biggest shipyard after Clydeside. We had Short Brothers, making Stirling bombers and Sunderland flying-boats. Just the sort of thing the Jerries would want to stamp out. It was easy. Both factories were right beside each other, the workers lived next door, and we had about two dozen ack-ack guns for the whole city. All we needed was one good raid. It was so bad, and we were so unprepared, that we ended up yelling for help from down south."

"But Dad, I thought Ireland was neutral during the war."

"They were neutral. They didn't want to be on anyone's side, even though they'd seen what had happened to Belgium and Holland, and those countries were just as neutral. We had this joke. If Germany takes Northern Ireland, what'll the Panzers do if De Valera lies down in the middle of the road at Newry? They'll stop. But it'll be in Dundalk, to hose him out of the tracks." He took another sip of Black Bush. "It wasn't much of a joke then, either. But thank God their firemen didn't stop at Newry either. They drove all the way up the east coast from as far away as Dun Laoghaire—"

"That far?" I said. Dublin was more than a hundred miles south, and before the good roads it was more than five hours away.

"That far." Dad reached up to my school shelf, where all the boring books were kept, and showed me a map of Ireland. "See for yourself." He looked at me, and through me, and took a pull of whiskey that was more than just a sip.

"And there were two engines that came from somewhere a lot further away. They must have been a present…" Dad looked thoughtful, as if he was running that word through his head and playing with a concept that didn't make sense. Then he shook his head as if dislodging the thought. "A gift to some town down south from New York, or maybe Boston. One of those cities that think they're Irish rather than American."

"Like my present last Christmas? The big fire engines?"

"That's what I thought of when I saw the toy set in the shop. All red paint and polished chrome, not something for wartime at all. The people in those big wagons didn't care how visible they were. And there were a lot of them, a bigger crew than any of our tenders could carry. It's a long time ago, but their Chief – he was just a kid – sounded as American as anything you'd hear in a cowboy movie. And that was impossible, because right then America was even more neutral than Ireland. It doesn't matter. Whoever they were, they weren't neutral against the fire. And I suppose eventually we'd have put out the fires without them, but…"

His face went remote, as if he wasn't talking to me anymore. "We climbed up the ladders to deal with the tall warehouse buildings," he said. "And every now and then one of the meaner bomber pilots would dive down low to give their belly gunners target practice on the men at the top of those ladders. We were silhouetted so nicely they couldn't miss. Bastards."

I was shocked; Dad never used bad language. But he didn't notice my shock at all. "You don’t know how long a ladder looks when you might not climb down again. When the big American apparatus arrived, their men went up the ladders as well. And sometimes they didn't climb down again. That's why I'm still here. Because we went up in alphabetical order. And thanks to the extra men from that big crew, the bombers went away before it was my turn." Dad looked into the fireplace, where the coal had collapsed into a bed of glowing embers. I felt sure he wasn't looking at that fire, but another one, far bigger and long ago. "Do you really want to get rid of those toy fire engines, son?"

I hesitated, then made up my mind and nodded. "Yes."

Mum was annoyed at the sudden disappearance of my favourite toy, but when Dad told her that we'd given it away to a charity shop, she seemed content enough. I don't know if he told her anything about our conversation. He never mentioned it to me again.

The reunions of Dad's fellow firemen continued each year, and each year there would be one or two fewer members at the party. Then came the year I was invited. I'd just turned eighteen, and in my dinner jacket with a drink in my hand I was sure I looked just like James Bond. But I kept quiet and listened when the older men started talking, and that was how I learned things that I'd never read in my history books.

People I knew to be as Orange as a bottle of Florida juice were raising their glasses to "the men from the South" or "the lads from Drogheda and Dundalk and Dublin and Dun Laoghaire" until finally someone proposed a toast to "the D-Specials from over the Border." That was an Ulster in-joke. The "B-Specials" were an auxiliary police force, and very much heroes or villains depending on what foot you kicked with.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck at the memory of the last time I'd heard anyone talk about "D-Specials", because instead of a murmur of conversation in the background there'd been the roar of flames and the smash of falling buildings, orchestrated to the throbbing bass-line of empty bombers turning for home. But I stayed where I was, and heard stories I suspect they told for their own comfort. One in particular got my attention, because despite my uneasiness it made me laugh.

"There was this family they dug out near the shipyard, all alive for a mercy, even the cat. Wee Billy was there – remember Billy? A fierce man for the Black Bush, so he was. But it's mostly the Dubs doing the work and the man of the house doen't recognise the uniforms, see, so he asks who they are. This Jackeen from Rathmines ups and says, "We're the Dublin Fire Brigade, sor," and the father says "Jesus Mary and Joseph, I didn't think Jerry's bombs were big enough to blow us that far!"

The men in the room laughed too, though they must all have heard that one a hundred times. "Just as well none of that other lot dug 'em out, then," said one of the oldest, "or they'd have got a real shock."

There was a sudden stillness on that side of the room, and two of those hard-faced, harsh-voiced men reached for the whiskey bottle at the same time. "You know the US Consulate down in Queen's Street still says it never happened," said one.

The oldest man said another of those dirty words, but under his breath for my sake. "They can say what they like. When that Yank Fire Chief in his fancy hat says to me, 'I wasn't expectin' this,' I ups and tells him to his face, 'No, Chief, you wouldn't be. All over the newsreels it might be, but you lot think you've got the Atlantic in the way. But it's not in the way tonight, an' how do you like that? Tell your wee Mister Lindbergh he can play the isolation card all he likes, but he and his buddies might wake up some fine morning an' find they've joined this party whether they like it or not. An' they might not even get an invitation…'"

"Thought you signed the Official Secrets Act, Sam."

Sam scowled. "They were there. I saw them. An' no bloody bureaucrat can make me forget—"

"Sam, those bloody bureaucrats can make your family forget you ever existed. Stop messing around and change the subject."

"Why? This is just gettin' good—"

"Little pitchers, Sam. Change it. "

They were all looking at me sidelong, so I stuck my nose into my flattening beer and pretended I hadn't heard a thing.

I came back to the business later, trying to solve the problem that just wouldn't go away. At university, for 'research', I got into all the period war records that were legally available, and thanks to some friends in the Public Records Office I also saw some that weren't legal enough to officially exist. They were quite clear about the personnel who came north of the border on the night of 15^th April 1941 at a breakneck sixty miles an hour in the freezing dark. There were no fatalities among the Irish fire-crews, but those records are just as clear about the men who went up the ladders in alphabetical order – and who were shot off as they stood at the top.

Yet when it was my Dad's turn to climb that ladder, there were enough others in big helmets and bunker coats to go up before him, so he was able to climb back down again. Yet they were just moulded in the shape of people who go in harm's way to save the lives of strangers. But if the shape is there, does a courageous spirit find its way to where it needs to be?

No amount of musty records have ever had the answers to those questions. My Dad's gone more than a quarter-century now. The fire didn't get him in '41, but the cigarettes did at last. When he was gone I tried to close the circle, but the leg I broke on the motor-bike at seventeen meant I failed the physical, and sitting behind a desk wouldn't have been enough for what I owe.

I still collect model fire engines, and I've got examples from all over the world, but there's a space in my collection. It's reserved for an open-cab pumper and its matching aerial ladder: New York Fire Department, 1930s, 'with full crew' so I can meet my friends again. I'm not sure what I'm looking for, and there are so many names: Mack, Pirsch, Seagrave, LaFrance… Maybe mine weren't based on real vehicles at all. Maybe toys are all they ever were. The confidence and certainty granted by that Fire Chief’s Helmet is like my childhood and my parents, all gone, long gone.

Maybe one day I'll find those trucks. And on that day I'll have to make a choice. Not the usual one for a collector, which is 'Can I afford them?', but 'Do I want to have them in the house?' At the back of my mind is a fear that they might smell of charred wood and worse things. But there's also a hope that they’ll smell of balsam fir, and tweed, and fragrant pipe-smoke…

The smell of my best Christmas day of all.

*****

Interesting times (argh!)

2012-01-14T23:45:52Z

A lot of you will have seen D's posts about what happened to our household account two days ago. Ouch, a lot!

We, however, have seen what happened in the Interwebs when Diane let people know about it, and...

And, well, thank you all. I thank you, D thanks you and Mr Goodman the White Cat thanks you. (Brush off the shed fur in your own time.)

It was a straight-up fraud, so we WILL be recompensed by the bank ("in due course", as they say, which could mean all sorts of things.) You helped, more than helped, to get us out of a potential yawning hole.

Appreciated. A lot.

More later, and if I can get Calibre working properly, a story. Meanwhile, a good night's sleep for the first time in three days.

G'night - and thank you all.

P

Anne McCaffrey, 1926-2011. RIP

2011-11-23T15:14:04Z

Hugo winner. Nebula winner. The first great female SF writer. SFWA Grand Master. Grand Dame. Grandmother. Mother. Horsewoman. Dragon Lady.

She was the first big name SF writer I ever met to talk to, rather than nod in awe at. It was my second, or maybe third, convention, a smallish affair in Hull. Anne McCaffrey was GoH, so I bought all her books from the Sign of the Dragon bookshop stall and asked her to sign them. I behaved like a fanboy. She bought a copy of The Horse Lord and asked me to sign it. She behaved like a professional.

She'd given me her address, one pro to another, so when The Demon Lord came out I sent her a copy. In her letter of thanks was an invitation to visit, with directions. Unfortunately they were directions for someone who already knew the area, and this was before GPS, or indeed sensibly-sized road signs in Dublin. Sometimes all you could see was the capital letter. That's why I wound up heading for Waterford, or it might be Wexford, rather than Wicklow...

By the time I got my bearings it was nudging midnight, and I couldn't call (this was also before cellphones) because rural phoneboxes were rare as hen's teeth. In addition I'd learned (this still happens) that out in the country late at night, if you don't have exact directions for someone's house then you won't get much help from the locals. "Sure, and if she'd wanted you to find her wouldn't she have told you how herself..."

Finally I realised that Dragonhold - the old one - was down a long driveway between high hedges that looked more like a lane. A lane I'd passed three or four times already. Annie's directions were just fine. My navigation, not so much. So I drove slowly down the lane, wheels crunching on gravel, a car with Northern Irish plates crawling up to an isolated Southern Irish farmhouse at past one in the morning. I got out, backlit by the headlights, one hand raised for a timid I'm-so-late knock.

That was when the door opened and the Dobermanns came out, making noises that suggested I might be crunchy and good with ketchup. Or even without ketchup. I don't usually ignore dogs like that, but this time I did, because I had something else to concentrate on. Have you any idea how big a shotgun looks from the wrong end at that hour of the morning? Like a matched pair of railway tunnels, that's how big.

But the railway tunnels were shaking a bit, because the dressing-gowned, benightied lady at the far end was trying not to laugh. "I wasn't expecting company any more," says Annie, "and since I'm an old lady living alone-" except for the shotgun and the Dobies "-you know how it is." Uh-huh. Yup. "You can put your hands down now." I don't remember them going up. "And come on in. I'm sure you'd like a cup of coffee." There's a twinkle in her eyes. "With a little something in it."

Half an hour later I'm snuggled down on the sofa-bed in the living-room, Saffy the female Dobie has decided to be my friend, there's a peat fire settling into ash behind the guard and I've been assured that the gun wasn't loaded. So what Annie took out of it when she thought I wasn't watching was probably lipstick. BigPaws the cat ambles by, gives me a look and goes about his business. And somewhere down the corridor, beyond two closed doors, I can hear Annie laughing.

I made her laugh a lot, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. Like the time she persuaded me onto a horse for the first reluctant time in ten years, and I sat there feeling pleased with myself for about two seconds before sliding smooth as a pivot off the other side. Comedians and stuntmen practice that trick for ages. I got it right first time.

Or there was the time when I brought her my mum's Chocolate Gateau of Doom, a cake so alcoholic (the sponge, the cream filling and the dense chocolate icing use up an entire half-bottle of brandy) that it has to be kept in the fridge to prevent evaporation. This one had spent nearly 3 hours on the back seat of my car, sealed in a big round Cadbury's "Roses" tin... Annie's stable manager Derval ambled over and popped the lid in hopes of a nice choccy. The near-visible cloud of brandy vapour that jumped out at her provoked a memorable cry of "Jayzus, does your mammy own a feckin' distillery?" and if she'd been smoking her usual thin roll-up, we'd be looking for her eyebrows yet. But the only explosion that time came from Annie, who laughed until she nearly burst.

Then there was the time when she suggested I meet up with her at Albacon '86, the Easter Convention in Glasgow, where she was one of the guests. And the time after that when she suggested I go to a very small one-day event in London, run by Sign of the Dragon. The same person was there both times, a tall, slender American woman with big glasses and a bigger perm. I'd already bought one of her books. It was called The Door into Fire...

Other people might say that Annie threw Diane and me together until we stuck, but twice is not until. What she did was to put us in proximity and wait to see what happened - whether we would be poles apart and repel, or if she was right about an attraction she'd already noticed and I hadn't, at least not enough to recognise. I recognised it pretty soon, though, and just over a year later her son Todd was my best man. That'll be 25 years ago, come February. Perceptive lady, Anne McCaffrey.

And now you're gone. I'm honoured to say you were my friend. You wrote books that made a lot of people happy. But what you did for me was something special. You made two people happier than any book could do.

I'll never forget you, Annie Mac. Sleep well.

Creating Costume - words or pictures?

2011-10-06T05:10:32Z

I saw a sketch of Lady Sybil Ramkin-Vimes on Diane's Tumbler account last night, and for once it wasn't (much) influenced by a Paul Kidby drawing. That resurrected a thought I've often had: to what extent do costumers, cosplayers and fan-artists feel constrained by professional visualisations of written characters and regard them as the "official" version, no deviations allowed?

D's Star Trek Next Generation novel Dark Mirror originated from a discussion in Dublin's Gotham Cafe pizzeria (back in 1991 when it was still Independent Pizza South) over, as the book's acknowledgement puts it,

a large with extra cheese, extra sauce, pepperoni and hot chilies, and a medium with extra cheese, double garlic, hot chilies, and onions, along with two bottles of Orvieto Secco and a whole lot of Ballygowan water...

The discussion had nothing to do with pizza, or (originally) a novel, or even STNG; I was speculating over what the Mirror Universe version of the Wrath of Khan-period uniform (the maroon wrapover tunic one) would look like, since no such thing had ever been made "canonical" by appearance on-screen (the ONLY acceptable ST canon is TV and film; novels, comics, games etc. don't count, and as far as we knew, no Mirror uniform of the WoK style had appeared in any of those, either.)

I was holding out for all-black with silver insignia, prompting an inevitable "Black and silver; it's always black and silver with you, isn't it?" response. A couple of sketches on the back of a napkin showed that black WoK Starfleet uniforms would look more than a bit like German WW2 Panzer-crew kit, and it was later clear that I wasn't the only one thinking that way: the flight-crew uniforms in Starship Troopers were deliberately based on German WW2 self-propelled gun crew tunics; same design, grey instead of black.

Once D suggested piratical thigh-high boots instead of the "official" calf-high ones, we had started down the road that led to the Next Generation novel (my English Literature Honours Degree helped write the bit of very nasty Mirror Merchant of Venice, giving Shakespeare the lavish love for gore seen in Jacobean revenge tragedy. Diane re-wrote it, though I think mine was best.) :-) And we still haven't seen my take on the Mirror uniform, because late Classic Trek never went there…

Star Trek, Star Wars, StarGate and many other Star things, as well as Aliens, Pirates of the Caribbean etc. and lots and lots of anime are all visual inspiration came first, so costumers, cosplayers and the rest are in large part restricted, if that's the right word, to representing what's been shown on-screen with painstaking exactitude.

Sometimes it's so painstaking that the fan-made costumes are of infinitely higher quality than "the real thing" (by which I don't mean the imaginative stuff, that's not real at all, but what you'll find hanging up in the studio Wardrobe Department.) Anime and cartoon costumes seem to stretch a bit further: there are few things quite as dopey-looking as the "Clodbuster sword" (it's apparently a metal plank with a handle) taken from its cartoon and made (ahem) real. But there was also a bunch of very fetching young ladies dressed as the humanized (thankfully non-furry) form of the new-version My Little Pony. D, having written for the original series, was Much Amused by my never-seen-before interest. in this aspect of the show.. :-P

However, too often when it comes to costuming or drawing characters which were originally words on paper, there seems to be a lot of the same default-to-professional-visual-source. Discworld characters are based on Paul Kidby art - I can't recall any based on Josh Kirby's chaotic (my opinion) and inaccurate (Word of God aka Terry) covers - though there’s increasing influence from the Sky TV adaptations, even more steampunky and neo-Victorian. German fan "Otto Chriek" has built an incredible, fully-operational iconograph – wood and brass exterior, digicam and mini-printer interior; the only thing that doesn’t work is the imp! But even this looks based at least in part on one of the elaborate Kidby drawings. (Wenn ich falsch bin, Robert, entschuldigen Sie mich!)

The clothing and accessories of Harry Potter characters originate exclusively from the movie series (at least so it seems, because I haven't read any of the books, so must default here myself;) and of course the standard Lord of the Rings image isn't Tolkien but Jackson, despite years of art from other sources, some high-quality, others…not so much. Were there ever costumes based on the ridiculous Bakshi toon? If there were, and I saw them, my memory has purged itself and thankfully so. I'm fairly sure that needles and thread have already been busy on Game of Thrones costumes derived from the recent TV show, even though George R. R. Martin's own descriptions are more than adequate.

Certainly "representing the screen/cover/supplementary portfolio material" properly means that the costumer isn't relying on a masquerade audience (and judging panel) having read the appropriate paragraph from a big novel or long series before deciding if their work is accurate or not. But when it's a hall costume worn for fun rather than formal masquerade (which are often amazingly elaborate and complex) then I wonder why people don’t swing out more.

Is it (a) reticence: no matter how carefully the writer describes characters and clothing, is a costume or drawing that lacks "professional visual imprimatur" somehow incorrect?

Or is it (treading carefully here, masqueraders are my friends) (b) a subtle sort of laziness, skilfully recycling a pre-packaged image to avoid the work of visualising a writer’s words in your own way? (with a sizeable unadmitted dash of (a) lurking at the back as well?)

I have a feeling this will be discussed more thoroughly at the next convention I go to – and if the subject hasn't already been done to death somewhere, it strikes me as a good topic for a panel. Any con organiser who wants to use it can be my guest. I’d be curious to hear the result!

Choccies from long ago

2011-09-06T20:03:24Z

A long time ago, when my parents went "South of the Border," (from Northern Ireland to the Republic) they would always bring back Cadbury's "Rum and Butter" chocolate bars (and other stuff as well, obviously...) The odd thing is that this flavour of filled-caramel bar was - apparently - only available in Southern Ireland. It's one of those tastes that can flip you back years and years.

Looks like we've just discovered the secret of time travel, then.

Yesterday, EuropeanCuisineLady (aka Diane) made a bread-and-butter pudding so we could replace the PD place-holder photo with one of our own. It's seriously yummy (not like the one in my school dinners - ew!)

But when I said - to various "taste-tester" friends - "Now what about a chocolate custard and rum in the sauce instead of whiskey?" I got a yum! yes! go for it! enthusiasm well beyond just the fact it tastes good.

I think we may have discovered the flavour of being young and having no more to worry about than exams (rather than overdrafts, mortgages and other Grown Up problems.)

First, we need to find a good rum: D suggests Myer's Planter's Punch, I hold out for Pusser's Blue Label - but if we're stuck with Havana Gold, it'll do.

More info to follow...

An unsettling image

2011-09-05T11:45:24Z

I'VE never been disturbed by a delivery of milk before. This morning's is an exception.

That's creepy enough. The use-by date made it much worse.

Not shopped in any way. And no further comment required from me.

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

The only man on Earth who gives a (insert noun of choice) about this!

2011-06-16T13:43:59Z

That's how D just described me. :-)

The reason: satellite channel Yesterday is (re)showing the classic BBC POW series Colditz, something I last saw back in 1974, when I was still in Big School.

I've been watching it on and off, amused by the stiff upper lips (you could use SBO - Senior British Officer - Colonel Preston's upper lip as an ironing-board), pleased by how well the claustrophobic atmosphere stands up (there are very few scenes outside the castle walls), and delighted to find that even to this much older, more cynical viewer, bad guy Major Mohn (played with icy relish by Anthony Valentine) is as loathsome as ever.

But a flub of lines in last night's episode "Very Important Person" made me laugh out loud, and prompted D's comment.

I've mentioned before that I used to make model kits; I also painted the figures that went with them, which meant research (which is now being put to use in a new book.) I could geek out about vehicles painted the wrong colour, or uniforms with outdated rank tabs, both of which I saw, but what I heard was the funny.

An SS officer hands paperwork to a motorcycle despatch rider. "Give this to SS-Brigadeführer Schreck," he says. At least, that's what he was supposed to say. It came out as "Give this to Fifty-five Brigadeführer Schreck..."

Um. That's not just a geek error, it's a line error, and should have been spotted by whoever was script supervisor for that scene. ("It is a geek error," says D; "Only a geek would know what it was supposed to be." Like the original scriptwriter, then.) Anyway, in all the times it must have been reviewed before transmission in 1974, nobody - director, producer, editor, writer - caught it.

All right, I noticed it just last night, and maybe I am the only man on Earth who gives a whatnot (though historical and costume consultants get paid good money, as do continuity people) - but at least I don't feel so bad about the occasional typos in The Horse Lord any more! :-)

Oh, what a surprise - Not.

2011-06-14T19:41:24Z

Game of Thrones SPOILER below the cut.

(This warning wasn't in place earlier; the topic and response were high-profile enough I didn't think one was needed. Apologies to anyone affected.)

So Ned Stark got it in the neck (literally) in last night's episode of Game of Thrones, and D tells me it produced a chorus of outraged disbelief from many viewers. What? Didn't they see that one coming a long way off?

Neither of us have read the books, and decided to hold off until after the end of the series so we can judge the show not as an adaptation but on its own merits. Even so, I was still able to tell D about four episodes ago that Robert's drinking would do for him; that young Joffrey would turn out a nasty piece of work; and that honour-blinkered Ned would be the first to know about it. Joffrey is going to be a Bad Husband (cruel, not disinterested) to Sansa if that marriage ever happens, and his dear indulgent mummy will find last night's over-ruling of her wishes a dangerous precedent.

It's the Wars of the Roses, of course, as GRRM has said; something I slogged through at University but have had a fondness for once the need to pass exams was over. Though the parallels in the books may be different, here's how I interpret some of the characters:

Robert was Edward IV, once a great warrior but now more interested in beef, booze and broads (being killed by a boar has another resonance as well, suggesting that GRRM was thinking of Richard III's badge.) Cersei is a combination of Margaret of Anjou (vicious maternalism) and Elizabeth Woodville (devious nepotism.) Joffrey's a combination of Edward of Westminster and George of Clarence, wanting to prove he's not taking orders any more and using harsh justice to be feared by those who won't ever love him. Tywin Lannister seems a bit like Richard of Warwick, the Kingmaker*, though until the war started his means of control was more gold than force of arms. Sansa's a version of Anne Neville, one more pawn in the marriage stakes, and Ned is (or was) a less ambition-driven Richard of York, trying to do the right thing for the right reasons even though doing the wrong thing would be more sensible. All good convoluted stuff, and never a back that doesn't have a dagger ready to be stabbed in it.

*There was a board game called "Kingmaker". I don't know if it still exists, but it was most wonderfully convoluted. I used to play it with my best friend Charles and his two brothers, and each game was litigous ("show me in the rules where it says I can't do that...") treacherous and thoroughly entertaining.

Oh, and young Edward of Westminster's behaviour in malevolent youth is another reason why Richard III might have wanted rid of his deposed nephews (if he did it.) Edward was passing death sentences at the age of 7, and though that might have been at his mother Margaret's urging, a few years later a foreign ambassador (Milanese, I think) reported that he was talking about little else.

If Richard's nephew the ex-king Edward V (people with the same names infest this period: Edwards, Richards and Henrys are all over the place, and it's safer to go by title though you then get a railway-timetable effect: York, Gloucester, Somerset, and the every-popular saucy Worcester) ever got his throne back, I doubt he'd be very sympathetic to the uncle who proclaimed him a bastard in order to pinch it...

Using the blue pencil (and the red, and the green...)

2011-05-29T18:05:13Z

I've finally been able to confirm that the UK rights for the Horse Lord / Book of Years series have completely reverted to me (though not yet the US ones – or the Philippines; why there, I wonder, and not, say, Puerto Rico?) and I'm prepping them for release as e-books, as Diane has been doing with her Young Wizards. It's given me a chance – as the dead-tree versions never did – to do some re-working, because I doubt there's a writer on the planet who hasn't looked at their early work and thought "migod you didn't ort to write a sentence like that molesworth!"

Or several sentences. Or a paragraph. Or a continuity blunder.

I've always been good at spotting those, though it's a talent that's most useful before something appears in print; afterwards can be annoying, especially when (in a recent example) the writer's finished work has been through a series of test-readers, an editor, a copy-editor and a final check of the galleys.

So it's a bit embarrassing to find one that's been in every single edition of The Horse Lord, especially when it doesn't even have the excuse of a chapter or so of action between setup and dénouement. On p.90 (UK trade) p.91 (US mass)

Aldric nodded, but slung Widowmaker round his shoulder nonetheless.

Unfortunately on p.92 of both editions

The girl's sharp eyes had noticed a fine taiken racked on the bedroom wall…

And yes, the taiken longsword is Widowmaker. In two places at once. Oops. That's going to get fixed…

There won't be massive changes; this book's been popular for 28 years, and I had evidence of that popularity a couple of days back (for which many thanks, la_marquise_de_ - gosh, I'm mentioned in some impressive company!) so if ever there was a case of Si Non Confectvs Non Reficiat, this is it. But after those 28 years I can construct a better sentence than some of those from 1982, I can certainly write better dialogue, I know not to call mail "chainmail" any more – and I can remove my own guilty example of a pet peeve from fantasy that's started creeping into supposedly historical work as well.

It's the business of a sword slung over the owner's back and drawn from that position. The question kept coming up on Swordforum and NetSword, and nobody was able to offer any historical evidence, never mind pictorial proof, that carrying a sword that way ever happened in Europe. Seeing it done in Braveheart and King Arthur is neither evidence nor historical. But in 1982, what do we find Peter writing?

Aldric unhooked the longsword's scabbard from his weaponbelt and pulled its shoulder strap across so that the sheath rose slantwise to his back, well clear of his legs...then he gripped the long hilt rearing like an adder by his head, twisted it to loose the locking-collar and drew.

Once again, oops. That too is going to get fixed, because after experimenting with some of my own replicas (gosh, isn't Polyfilla spackle useful stuff?) it's clear that neither Aldric nor anyone else could perform this trick without arms like an orangutan or gibbon. What I did in later books was to have the across-the-back carry as a commonly-accepted "peace position", thus producing a useful bit of dramatic "business" where releasing the cross-strap so that it slides down to "ready position" for a fast draw is a direct threat, and possibly an insult as well.

Fast draw, with a sword? Yes indeed, like Japanese-style iaijutsu, because the first incarnation of Alban swords, culture and customs was very samurai-influenced. In the late '70s-early 80s it was unusual, and a change from the more usual Celtic/Viking/Medieval settings, which is why I did it, and there weren't many others. Without checking the bookshelves, I can think of Richard Lupoff's Sword of the Demon and Jessica Amanda Salmonson's Tomoe Gozen, C.J. Cherryh's superb Morgaine Cycle (especially Gate of Ivrel), a surprisingly small number of short stories, and of course me.

The fun part is to see how my fictional society evolved into something different; honourable suicide seems like a great device for dramatic tension. When you discover that it means your protagonist (all right, hero and favourite character) won't reach the end of the chapter, never mind the end of the book, it's not such a good idea, and you start looking for ways to keep him alive. When that attitude starts to influence the entire culture, soon you're dealing with people who've laid a thin veneer of lip-service honour over a bedrock of ruthless, scary pragmatism.

And that's much more interesting than ersatz samurai... :-)

petermorwood @ 2011-04-30T05:25:00

2011-04-30T04:25:42Z

I’ve been feeling pretty down, for two very good reasons, so today’s foofaraw left me colder than usual and I didn't watch it. Stuff to research, then stuff to write, and a quick Spellcheck correction to make sure there's always an umlaut in Obersturmbannführer and the other cumbersome SS ranks. I have my reasons... ;->

Diane recorded some of the material so I could examine Ruritanian ceremonial, uniforms and so on, though strictly ""Ruritanian" should read "Upper Saxon with a bit of Austro-Hungarian Bohemian", as pointed out by silverwhistle, one of the most intelligent and articulate analysts of the region's dodgy politics and dubious PR. All very nice, twinkly and shiny, but if TV commentators are going to use obscure terms, then they need to know that calling an "epaulette" a "shoulder-board" is forgiveable, but that an "aiguilette" is not just a different and more fancy word for the same thing.

In all the processional stuff, there were two images that made me smile: a close-up of The Littlest Bridesmaid, bored out of her tiny skull and not afraid to show it, and a shot of the groom going "phew" in a way I identified with, having done it myself in similar circumstances a bit longer ago than yesterday. (I'll try to screen-cap these and post them later.)

However, when I was in our local pub with Diane, cradling blisters from digging in ground that was a quarter rocks and glumly drinking to the memory of a fine cat, a very fine cat indeed, we heard someone make the waspish comment that England should send some of the Royal Wedding costs his way, because "I now pronounce you man and wife" would start the countdown to the next Royal divorce and a book should be opened forthwith.

We didn't think much of it at the time; west Co. Wicklow isn't a hotbed of Royalist sentiment at the best of times, but a look at Google suggests he's not the only one. Indeed, given the recent Royal record on Royal marriages that last (not many, and none of the high-profile ones at all) five quid each way would probably be a safe investment.

Mesdames et messieurs, faites vos jeux...

"You keep using that word..."

2011-04-24T23:35:24Z

"...I do not think it means what you think it means."

Decimate. Decimation. Decimated.

I've just watched a documentary in which that word was used to describe the effect of air raids on cities during WW2. Once is forgiveable, a slip of the narrator's tongue that nobody caught before transmission, but it came up repeatedly, almost monotonously, and suggested that the writer of the narration had fallen in love with the way it sounded, but never bothered to check what it meant.

I hadn't realised the bombing campaign was so ineffective that it left 90% of the targets undamaged, because to decimate something means to reduce it by 10%. It was a Roman Army punishment in which a unit guilty of some serious offence, usually mutiny or cowardice, would draw lots and then one man in every ten would be executed by his nine companions.

It's not just this particular documentary that's to blame; the misuse happens a lot, to the extent that Diane's heard me applaud when I hear it used correctly. (Pathetic, isn't it?) I wish I knew why this error has become so common, because clearly the assumption is that something decimated has been massively damaged - though I wouldn't credit anyone with thinking it means that only 10% remains. That would be giving credit where it probably isn't due. More likely, the word really intended is devastate and its variants.

Either way it's one of those niggling annoyances, like an itch you can't scratch.

Steampunk-style home heating

2011-04-12T21:25:15Z

While Sharper Image existed, I used to spend ~~too much~~ quite a lot of time with my nose in their catalogues. I can't recall ever buying anything, mind you, and often wondered why anyone would actually want some of the nonsense on offer. A bit like Skymall catalogues, in a way.

The various websites for Manufactum are a bit that way too, although with a lower "who'd want that?" response and a much higher rate of "I'd love that but ouch!", though NB the UK and International ones are very watered-down, a bit like US site ThinkGeek versus UK site I Want One of Those used to be. They've grown more similar, but there's still a caffeine-in-everything section in one and a bar-and-beer section in the other. Guess which? (The B&B features a Thing I have lusted after ever seeing one in the possession of Constable Haddock of the Ankh-Morpork Watch at last Discworld con: a sensibly-sized hip flask.. Tee hee.)

Lots of the stuff Manufactum sells is equally practical and handsomely designed, just very expensive. Anybody want to buy a Morgan 4/4 1600 sports car from an on-line catalogue store? Manufactum can accommodate you. (I thought it was a model at first, but the tag of €43,850.00 corrected this misapprehension.)

That's where I saw this amazing piece of stuff, which looks more like a movie prop than anything real. It could be at the back of a Titanic-era boiler-room set and not look out of place.

There are other variants, one where the burner is built into a cooktop, another which exchanges the upper oven for a stone-filled storage heater. An additional photo for that one shows it built into a wall-unit, but those who delight in rivets would just leave the works on display for all to admire.

I'd say it was cool, except that's hardly the right word for a heater. Don't park the Zeppelin too close...

Diana Wynne Jones, RIP

2011-03-26T20:05:08Z

In 1979 I wrote what later (much, much later) became The Horse Lord.

Since I was at university, reading English Lit., I asked a couple of my tutors to have a look at it. Apart from the usual vague encouragements nothing much happened: it was a bit too far removed from Shakespeare and Chaucer.

Then in 1981 I got a letter from Alastair Minnis, who'd moved to Bristol Uni (he's now a full Professor at Yale.) I'd been mentioned, Lord knows why, to his colleague's wife Mrs Burrow, who was a Real Writer, and she'd expressed interest in reading the stuff. So I sent it to Alastair, he passed it on, and a few weeks later I got a letter back.

That was the first time I realised that Mrs Burrow was also Diana Wynne Jones, and I'd already been reading her books; I remember Cart and Cwidder and Power of Three in particular.

She was witty, perceptive, insightful, helpful... If it's possible to hold someone's hand across the wet bit between Belfast and Bristol, then Diana held mine. "One gets so little chance," she wrote, "to talk to anyone about writing, at least of the making-things-up kind."

There were other letters, with advice, with gossip, with encouragement - I still have them all in my scrapbook - and then the phonecall that wasn't a long-range hand-hold but a long-range pat on the back when Horse Lord finally sold.

My favourite among all her books is The Tough Guide to Fantasyland - my copy is ragged, dog-eared and usually bristles with bookmarks - because it's so full of the funny, accurate comments I first saw in those letters. And there are a few that are more pointed than others; "Apostrophes" for instance, or "Names" (SWORDS...seem very proud of being known to be really Excalibur or Widowmaker.) Not an uncommon sword-name, in fantasy or folklore, but I always get the feeling of being twinkled at over the rim of a pair of specs...

And then today's news.

Not the jolting shock of something totally unexpected, but the sadness that it didn't happen later, whenever that might be. Yet today is later, if you look at it from yesterday, and much, much later than last year.

I'm glad Diana had some later.

I wish she could have had some more.

The Colour of Molesworth

2011-01-10T23:40:33Z

Diane spotted someone’s Twitter enquiry about the skool uniform colours of that admirable educational institution St Custard’s, but when she asked my advice, to mutual surprise I couldn't produce an answer straight away. So I went looking. Well, you do, don’t you?

It would seme that Skool uniform colours aren't described anywhere in the text, at least nowhere I spotted during an admittedly cursory flip through my copy of The Compleet Molesworth. The interior black and white line drawings by Ronald Searle most frequently show a light blazer with dark lapels, light piping and a badge on the breast pocket.

How to be Topp (Armada and Armada Lion, also Puffin, all early-1970s paperbacks) represent it as a yellow blazer with black piping, which is also the colour scheme used on at least one (the US?) version of Back in the Jug Agane, an edition of The Compleet Molesworth, (Pavilion 1985) and a retitled compilation simply called Molesworth (Penguin Modern Classics 2009.) The most common cover for Whizz for Atomms shows Molesworth 1 in a bubble-helmeted space-suit, though it does have a school badge on the chest, but lurking in the depths of Google Images (it was lurking, not me) I found a tiny cover image of an Atomms cover where once again he is clad in yellow-and-black. This colour scheme is not only the one most recently and frequently used, it's probably the most easily recognised, and also most closely represents the light-blazer-with-dark-piping of the monochrome drawings.

The above fakts are correkt for a change. I had all of the above books when I too was but a mere skoolboy, but after the passage of many years, had cause to check my recollections in the aforesaid Google Images. (Posh prose eh? Go it, Morwood.)

However Searle's drawings also show a light blazer with light lapels and dark piping, a dark blazer with dark lapels and light piping, and a "Henley Regatta" striped blazer suitable for both Fotherington-Thomas and that rather unsettling pupil whose "developing individual character" evidently includes Resurrection, and not the kind taught in Divinity. These are all in Down with Skool, so it's not a change of uniform between different books. Long trousis are usual, with shorts for new bugs. The school cap is always represented as being "hooped" – horizontally striped – light and dark, with a badge at the front.

The Down with School cover of the Armada and Armada Lion 1970s paperback shows a red blazer with yellow piping and a red and yellow hooped cap; these colours also appear on the cover of Back in the Jug again (same publisher, and when viewed alongside Down with Skool, very clearly the same cover designer.) The red blazer also appears on a reissue (or possibly US edition) of The Compleet Molesworth but when compared to the frequency of the yellow-and-black colour scheme, the red-and-yellow is no more than a temporary aberration.

Or hav I missed something…?

(And I note that miss_next is looking for some information about Radio Malt. I shall go looking for that, too. Funny that two questions about Molesworth would pop up on the same day... It must be an omen.)

The Škoda bites back...again.

2010-11-07T15:21:09Z

It's been a long time since the "I can’t believe it’s a Škoda" ads, as they tried to conquer an unenviable reputation, and now there's a new one. It's been out for about a week, but I've only just caught the new commercial for the hot hatchback iteration of the Škoda Fabia, and I like it (the ad, anyway. Carwise, the big Superb is more my style.)

First there was the sweetness and light car-made-of-cake ad from a couple of years back; now we've got its "darker and grittier" remake. "My Favourite Things" now has a hard-rock beat, but it would have been fun if they'd redone the lyrics while they were at it:

Gravemould on roses
And sharp fangs on kittens;
Rusting black cauldrons
And ice-cold iron mittens;
Brown paper packages
Oozing stale gore...
Let me go home!
I can’t take any more!

Though one brief shot puts that overhyped sushi knife the katana to the best use I've seen for a long time, I don't think it’s as good as the original: the CGI is OK and necessary, but the previous one used 'real stuff' (all that cakemaking was genuine) and that reality showed. If it wasn't an ad, I'd suspect a subtext about the unreality of giving Testarossaterone injections to a small family car, but maybe that's improbably subtle.

Your opinion - or mileage, appropriately for the subject - may vary... :-)

James Bond and the Mystery Meat

2010-10-22T06:10:24Z

Ian Fleming's story collection From a View to a Kill was published in 1960. Several of the stories – Risico, From a View to a Kill, and For Your Eyes Only originated as the outlines for a proposed CBS James Bond series. Risico places James Bond in Italy, going after the "big men" of a Communist-funded narcotics pipeline. Dinner with his contact, Signor Kristatos, sees Bond ordering

Tagliatelle Verdi with a Genoese sauce which Kristatos said was improbably concocted of basil, garlic and fir cones.

Fir cones, indeed! It's a bit surprising that Fleming had never heard of pesto alla Genovese, made with pine nuts (or pine kernels, if you prefer); Elizabeth David had brought out her book Italian Food in 1954, and Fleming himself was well-read, well travelled and had visited Italy at least once (though obviously that doesn't mean he encountered pesto...)

Getting information right seems to be something of a hiccup. I have a copy of wine-writer Cyril Ray's book In a Glass Lightly, published in 1967, where he has this to say about Fleming's wine expertise:

...Ian Fleming (who was once my immediate superior, when he was Foreign Manager for Kemsley Newspapers, and I was the Moscow correspondent of The Sunday Times) knew nothing about wine except what he was told when he rang up friends in the wine trade, and then usually got it wrong.

While visiting New York in Diamonds Are Forever, Bond again has dinner with a contact. This time it's Felix Leiter, and the venue is Sardi's restaurant, where Leiter does the ordering.

"… I've taken a chance and ordered you smoked salmon and Brizzola," said Leiter. "This is one of the best places in town for beef, and Brizzola's the best cut of that, straight cut across the bone. Roasted and then broiled. Suit you?"

When the food arrives, it's a bit of a curate's egg so far as Bond's concerned.

The smoked salmon was from Nova Scotia, and a poor substitute for the product of Scotland, but the Brizzola was all that Leiter said, so tender that Bond could cut it with a fork.

This treatment, however, is a bit of a mystery. Bond writer Raymond Benson, in The James Bond Bedside Companion describes it as a fictional invention by Fleming. One thing it certainly is not, was the only Italian form of meat with a similar name that I was able to find. Bresaola, though looking and sounding close to Brizzola, is neither roasted nor broiled but air dried and served in thin slices as an antipasto starter or snack.

This could have been on Sardi's menu along with some other beef main course, and Fleming mixed them up. He did that in several books, with food, wine and even guns (but carried off his mistakes with such verve that these are the Bondian aspects he's supposed to have been most knowledgeable about!) I suspect we're back to that fir-cone situation, where Fleming was told something he'd never heard of before, and described it in terms that seemed most familiar to him.

I'm a heathen so far as the American attitude towards steak is concerned: I like it well done, or at least well on the side of medium. This doesn't mean shoe leather, it just means I don't want my meat bleeding all over the plate. If I want blood, I'll cut myself; a rich beef jus is not blood.

At least one American I met was pretty rigid about what can and can't be done to beef. Diane and I went to dinner once with a business acquaintance who took us to "a great steakhouse," but when I requested mine "medium-well done" (or it might even have been "well-done") he actually got out of his seat and suggested, none too politely, that if I was going to ruin the meat, we should go somewhere cheaper... I was brought up to believe that it didn't matter what your guest wanted to do to their food, so long as it wasn't actively nauseating; this was your guest, and that should be enough. On that occasion, apparently not. But I wonder: might Fleming also have been taken aback by an excessively bloody piece of beef, sent it back for a bit more cooking, then adapted the whole thing into a "special?"

The Brizzola business of double-cooking made me think of that memorable dinner, not only roasting beef, but broiling it afterwards. One would think that would end up with seriously overcooked meat, but from Bond's reaction, it clearly did no such thing. More to the point, a consultation of our cookbooks – we have about 400, after the last cull – suggest that "broiling" isn't just a way to cook food, but also to finish it after another, longer cooking method. You can see the elements falling into place...

Then I encountered an Italian dish called Brasato di Manzo al Barolo, which is beef braised in (very good) red wine, then served in thick slices – tranches, to use the old term. The slices are thick enough to pass under a seriously-hot commercial broiler to produce a burnt, crunchy finish without actually cooking the slice of braised meat any further, and whether this was done to the proper recipe or not, it sounded like a feasible way for a restaurant to put its individual spin on the dish.

Besides describing unfamiliar things in familiar terms, Ian Fleming, bless his little cotton socks, had (according to at least a couple of observers) no head for drink, and as a result his "research meals" for James Bond novels were often something of a mishmash of incorrect or illegible notes. I've even seen one source suggesting that Bond's famous "shaken not stirred" Martini – which apparently contradicts the way in which every martini was made prior to that – was a result of Fleming sampling far too many martinis, getting the method wrong, and then sticking to his guns afterwards. It doesn't hurt that in his essay How to Write a Thriller he elaborates on how someone going against the grain like that makes for a more interesting character, which works for me. The only place it doesn't work is that such behaviour makes said character stand out and become memorable – both characteristics that a spy would do well to avoid.

It seemed to me that we'd found at least one likely candidate for "Brizzola." Diane had other suggestions; that it might originally have been a deliberately-underdone rib roast cut between the ribs into individual portions like really large T-bone steaks, and finished on or under a grill. Alternately, it could have been a London broil sliced and finished in the same way, which is what I did to a fine piece of rump steak the other night, for my birthday dinner.

The meat had been marinating since Monday in olive oil, red wine, red wine vinegar, oregano, cracked pepper and crushed garlic. It was then slow roasted, frequently basted with the marinade, then cut into four thick slices and whizzed under the grill. Luckily our kitchen cooker has a very enthusiastic grill, if it's allowed to preheat properly, so the end result was delicious.

And yes, you can cut it with a fork...!

New e-book: Prince Ivan (Tales of Old Russia 1)

2010-09-24T20:10:41Z

It's about time Prince Ivan (Tales of Old Russia #1) was available again; I keep getting asked about it!

For those interested, I've corrected the Russian - there's not much, it's a novel not a language lesson, but I had a crib. A publisher in Moscow brought it out in "pravil'no russkiy," real Russian, not dictionary crossed with phrasebook (the reviews were uniformly good, and occasionally very complimentary about how "the foreigner" handled THEIR history and folklore.)

So in exchange I did a word-hunt to make sure the bits of "local flavour" were correctly spelt. This is Very Interesting in an alien alphabet. There were a couple of nights when I was dreaming about Cyrillic (though if I'd been dreaming in Cyrillic, it would have been even stranger.)

So here you are. A story that started out with me telling the story to Diane, in a pub, with aeroplane noises. Pub? Plane noises? So what's new about that? But in a Russian folktale? It can be done. (So can a very nasty Transporter accident, but that's in Book 2.)

The Falcon swooped down, struck three times upon the ground and became a fine young man who bowed to the Princess...

turned into something like...Neeyyowww scree-scree-scree (then in a Terry-Thomas voice) "Well, hello..."

Hardly surprising that she turned it into a comic strip for The Dreamery later on. The reprint is coming out in February, with its never-before-seen sequel.

Later for that.

CSI Ankh-Morpork (not the one you think.)

2010-09-19T00:45:49Z

THE SEVEN-SHOT SIX-SHOOTER
In
MEN AT ARMS

A small mystery from the files of
CSI* Ankh-Morpork
SCRVTATIO PLVS DILIGENS
(We Look Harder)

(*Not a Watch department: the Copyedit Slip-up Inspectors work for The Times)

Page numbers from first-edition 1993 Gollancz hardback.

I completely forgot to mention this to anyone during the recent UK Discworld Convention, but it's perhaps the geekiest thing I've ever done. I checked the annotations at AFP just before clicking "Post" and there's no reference to any of what follows. The Gonne's six-shot capacity is mentioned so often that the error described here is an itch I want to scratch.

(If you're interested, there was a real firearm that worked this way, called a "harmonica gun." I showed pictures to Terry at last year's Irish DWCon and he confirmed that this was indeed what he had in mind. Impressively, Josh Kirby did the back-cover illustration - compare it to the real thing - just from text description.)

[p.60] Hammerhock, the soon-to-be-late dwarf weaponsmith, remarks on the six chambers of the thing he's inspecting.

[p.116] Vimes stared at his reflection – something (1) stung his ear and smashed the glass...There was another tinkle and a half bottle of Bearhugger's exploded (2) on the desk...He hit the floor at the same time as a pock coincided with a hole (3) punched through the wall on one side of the window.

[p.117] Pock. Splinters flew up from a point on the floor (4) where it would undoubtedly have severely inconvenienced anyone lying on the boards cautiously raising a decoy helmet on a stick...Something smashed (5) into the doorframe as the door swung to behind him.

[p.122] Vimes finds a metallic object discarded on the roof of the opera house, from which the five described shots at him have been fired.

[p.126] Carrot finds that Lettice Knibbs has been shot from the same place. Though it was probably the first shot fired, I'm counting this as shot (6) to justify the empty clip (or is it a magazine?) found by Vimes.

[p.133] Vimes examines the object: It looked like a short set of Pan pipes, provided Pan was restricted to six notes, all of them the same.

[p.135] Vimes reiterates his thoughts about the six-shot nature of the weapon and recalls how the shooter got off six shots, even though only five were aimed and described as being at him. (He's obviously counting the one that killed Lettice Knibbs.)

[p.138] The distant figure raised what looked like a stick, holding it like a crossbow. And fired. The first shot (1) zinged off Cuddy's helmet... Detritus blinked. Five more shots, (2, 3, 4, 5, 6) one after the other, punctured his breastplate.

[p.251] Lord Vetinari stood up as he saw the Watch running towards him. That was why the first shot (1) went through his thigh, instead of his chest. Then Carrot cleared the door of the carriage and flung himself across the man, which is why the next shot (2) went through Carrot...A third shot (3) knocked a chip out of Detritus, who slammed into the carriage, knocking it on its side and severing the traces...Vimes slid to a halt behind the overturned carriage. Another shot (4) spanged off the cobbles near his arm.

[p.252] A shot (5) hit the carriage wheel above Vimes' head, making it spin... "We wait for one more shot," (Vimes) said. "And then we run for proper cover." Vimes visualises the gonne, once more emphasising its six-shot nature and wondering how fast it can reload.

[p.258] (Colon) didn't even look around, which saved his life. His dive for the floor and the explosion (6) of the gonne behind him happened at exactly the same time. This is the sixth shot, and from Vimes' subsequent actions, he heard it clearly.

There isn't another shot at Colon (because the gonne is empty) and instead Cruces hits him before his escape. But he has clearly reloaded by the time Vimes catches up with him.

[p.264] "Captain Vimes? One thing a good Assassin learns is—" There was a thunderous explosion, (1) and the lamp disintegrated. "—never stand near the light." Vimes hit the floor and rolled. Another shot (2) hit a foot away, and he felt the splash of cold water.

[p.266] The gun jerked and fired (3?) at the same moment as Carrot leapt sideways...The gonne fired four times. (3?, 4, 5, 6) It didn’t miss once. She hit the man heavily, knocking him backwards. Vimes rose in an explosion of spray. "Six shots! That's six shots, you bastard! I’ve got you now!"

(This is one of possibly two very distant references to the first James Bond film, Dr. No. A Bad Guy empties his revolver into a sheet-covered fake Bond. Real Bond then confronts him and orders him to drop the gun, which he does. Bond then seems to allow the Bad Guy (who thinks he's being subtle) to pick up the gun again, but this time he gets nothing but a click. Whereupon Bond says, "That's a Smith & Wesson, and you've had your six," and shoots the Bad Guy. In fact he shoots him twice (though I've seen one TV showing where this is cut) and the second shot is a coldly deliberate 'execution' shot. This made it memorable, because examples of screen Bond being as nasty as his book counterpart are rare (deliberately not saving Bad Guys from the consequences of their own Badness doesn’t count) and I can think of only two: "I never miss" in The World is Not Enough and "Yes, considerably," in the reboot Casino Royale.)

I'm taking shot (3?) apparently at Carrot to also be the first of the four shots at Angua, making Vimes' total a correct one. He pursues Cruces and catches up as

[p.268] Cruces was lying a few feet away, fighting for breath and hammering another rack of pipes into the gonne. Vimes grapples with him and

Now we’ll start to count:

[p.268] The gonne exploded. (1)There was a tongue of red fire, a firework stink and a zing-zing noise from three walls. Something struck Vimes' helmet and zinged away towards the ceiling.

After which, Vimes has possession of the gonne...

[p.269] (Vimes) swore afterwards that he didn't pull the trigger. It moved of its own accord, pulling his finger with it. The gonne slammed into his shoulder (2) and a six-inch hole appeared in the wall by the Assassin's head, spraying him with plaster...He brought the gonne around, not aware of thinking, and let the trigger pull his finger again. (3) A large area of the door and frame became a splinter-bordered hole...Vimes managed to haul the barrel upwards just as it fired, (4) and the shot took away a lot of ceiling...Doors were opening. Doors closed again after the gonne fired again, (5) smashing a chandelier...Vimes shot the lock off, (6) kicked at the door and then fought the gonne long enough to duck.

Note that Vimes doesn't reload and, unlike Cruces after [p.264] he isn't 'off-camera' with an opportunity to do so at any time during the rest of the scene.

[p.272] Vimes drops the gonne. Fourteen lines later, Cruces picks it up. There's still no mention of reloading, but then Carrot runs Cruces through with his sword—

[p.273] And he died. The gonne fell from his hands, and fired at the floor. There was silence. (That makes 7)

Did I miscount somewhere along the line? I don't think so, but if I did – or if indeed this was an error since corrected, let me know!

One other question, and that possible second Dr. No reference: did Carrot hear and count those six shots, then – fully justified by Angua’s death – perform a Bond-style execution on another man with an empty gonne? Which then suggests, was the last shot and consequent miscount added at an editor's request, to prevent Carrot sullying his Nice reputation? (But remember that Good is not the same as Nice, and Personal is not the same as Important.)

There's only one person who can answer that, and I'm not asking, because he's got a sword too!

Star Wars the Saga (or, who needs Joseph Campbell anyway?)

2010-03-13T02:12:22Z

You've probably seen the Star Wars = Harry Potter post, which has gone on to become an internet meme. This rather different interpretation of Star Wars is just as funny, a touch less waspish for those offended by such things, and matches my previous Votan/The Long Ships post rather nicely.

I'm two weeks late on picking it up, but with something this good, better late than never.

If you know the slightest thing about Old Norse, Viking literature or our little-known but very exciting Icelandic saga (obligatory nod to M. Python) then unless a new keyboard and monitor are at the top of your shopping list, do not have a mouthful of mead - or anything else - while reading it...

A favourite old book renewed.

2010-02-25T20:01:27Z

Well, if you really want to know how it was I came to be chained to an oak tree, half-way up in the middle of nowhere, with wolves trying to eat me out of it, I'll tell you. Of course, it's not nearly as interesting as what happened afterwards, but you can piece that together yourself if you go down to any of the taverns around the Praetorian barracks and listen to what the soldiers sing. If you can understand German, of course. They sing things like:

High the Allfather
Hung in the hornbeam;
Nine days and no drinking,
Nine nights and no nurture...

or:

Alfege the Earl, Odin-born,
Great in guile, wise in war...

I often go down there and listen. It never crosses their minds that it was only me all the time...

Interested yet...?

You should be. That's the first couple of paragraphs from Votan, a historical novel by John James about how the crafty Greek merchant Photinus tries to buy the Baltic amber mines from dimwit natives who aren't as dim as he thinks, and ends up founding a mythological pantheon instead. As one does...

It's a tongue-in-cheek, witty first-person narrative, with little side-jokes that work even better if you know anything at all about Graeco-Roman history and/or Norse mythology. And sometimes it's surprisingly harsh, when that likeable (though not very trustworthy) chap Photinus gives a jolting reminder that his voice comes from the late first century, when life is cheaper than you think.

First published by Cassell in 1966, and found by me in Lisburn library around 1969 (officially I was too young for books from the Adult Library, but I was very persuasive when it came to "Viking stuff,") Votan was issued as a Tandem paperback in 1971 (owned it, loaned it, never got it back - I wasn't the only one in my form who was keen on Viking stuff, and Parky was bigger than me.) In 1987 Bantam brought out a unified-binding paperback "set" of this and James's two other historicals, Not for all the Gold in Ireland and Men Went To Cattraeth, which are the versions I now own. They went out of print in about 1990, and after that nothing for two decades.

Until now. Well, now-and-a-bit...

In Not for all the Gold in Ireland, Photinus tries to recover his family's Deed of Monopoly to the Wicklow goldmines, and ends up far too close to an Irishman called Setanta with a dislike for cattle-rustling... I started reading the book last night, in connection with another project entirely, and noticed it and Votan were getting a bit mangy. (Men Went To Cattraeth is almost mint; no Photinus, different style, different tone, unfamiliar mythology, not for me.) I started wondering if they were easy to replace, and idly looked up the titles earlier today.

That's when I discovered Neil Gaiman is bringing Votan back into print as Volume 2 of the Neil Gaiman Presents series from Dark Horse. (Thanks, Neil! Now, what about The Long Ships?))

Comixology give a publication date of 8 July 2009, while Amazon.co.uk claims 1 August, 2009; however, the absence of any actual book to buy, and the beginning-of-this-month post on Babylon Wales suggests that it'll be available sometime early this year instead. Second-hand (hardback) copies can be found in various places for various prices, from as low as $20.00 to as high as $350.00(!) but with the new edition listed at $13.00, nothing more need be said.

Here's Jo Walton's review, from the Tor Books website. My own review would be kinder, because I don't object to the humour as much as she does, but she hits all the main points.

When it comes out, get it and read it; I think you'll like it. I certainly do, and have done, for more than forty years...

Crunch crunch nom nom nom

2010-02-09T08:30:34Z

BBC4, a couple of years back, broadcast Who Killed Mrs De Ropp? a dramatization of three of Saki's delicately vicious Edwardian short stories, The Storyteller, The Lumber-Room and, of course, Sredni Vashtar.

I hunted them down on the Net, not difficult since they're all PD, and saved them as a .DOC file which I've just finished re-reading. Well, not quite "just." The re-reading was ten minutes ago, because as usual after finishing Sredni Vashtar with its final line

...Conradin made himself another piece of toast...

I ended up in the kitchen, feeding slices of Stafford's Crusty Farmhouse White into the Dualit and then, buttered with much butter, into me.

Since it happens nearly every time, I wondered: has anyone else this sort of automatic response to improbable stimuli?

Not smell, that's too easy unless the scent of coffee makes you want cornflakes (not so improbable at breakfast, but after dinner rather more so) and even sound, especially something frying, can have a Pied Piper effect. However, being enticed to eat toast by the last sentence of a story almost a century old is a bit odd because – as you'll discover if you haven't read it before - Sredni Vashtar is mostly about matters more macabre than that.

Another Word on Adam Diment...

2010-01-16T23:08:21Z

That word is "alive." Apparently.

I just discovered this on my website (yes, just... I really must start paying more attention to it, he said, not for the first time.)

Submitted by nickdiment on October 21, 2009 - 09:25.

Dear Mr Wormwood

I was interested to see your comments concerning my brother, Adam, on the link from Wikipedia which are, to be honest, verging on the libelous. Not that he would give a damn.

Adam was never in trouble with the Treasury. This is an accusation whipped up, we can only imagine, by the only person who might stand to gain in the unlikely event of McAlpine ever coming to the screen.

Succumbed to drugs! Really, why do you make this sort of guff up? Adam is well and lives in Kent.

Personally I think his books are crap and have not stood the test of time at all well. But then I'm not a author so what would I know?

Sincerely - Nicholas Diment

That's an interesting misspelling of my surname: shades of The Screwtape Letters and The Eiger Sanction, though not a major character in either.

The comment refers to my post last year (indeed linked on the Adam Diment Wikipedia page,) posted about a week before this follow-up.

Tonight I've taken another look at the entry on Another Nickel in the Machine; there are more comments since the last time, one that he's living in the Far East (which contradicts "Nicholas Diment", though Kent does get several mentions, so which of these authorities on Diment's whereabouts is the right one?) and a couple referring to marriage and children.

Getting away from the personal stuff to a topic I find more interesting, there are also suggestions about how to bring the books back through Print On Demand. This would be just the ticket, if the rights can get sorted out, because a lot of people besides myself seem to think they're not crap at all: here's one who not only enjoys them, but explains why. If PoD does happen, I'll definitely buy a set: my paperbacks are now better described as tatterbacks, and books don't get that way by being ignored.