Taking those poxy blue sandals back and getting the nice brown ones was definitely the right choice, don't you think?
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May 2005
Just watched last night's Dr Who and I have to agree with Tom that not only is Dr Who is a bit of a tart, but he's also a bit free and easy with gender/species/group sex distinctions. Good for him, I say. Bit jealous really. I never get to dance, let alone set up an interesting threesome with aliens.
Last night I had a dream. Yes, another one. I was on a boat, with Christopher Ecclestone. We were on a river, which was all well and good, but it ran along the edge of a cliff… which was at least a mile high. The water slopped over the edge in a 'your boat would go straight over' manner which scared the crap out of me. But it was ok, because Christopher Ecclestone was there to keep me safe and sound.
But anyway, moving on. I was talking to my mate Ewan about this, and more now than ever I think his take is right. Dr Who is is the last survivor of the Time Wars. The Daleks are all dead. The Time Lords are all dead. Dr Who suffers horrendous survivor guilt and that colours everything he does.
This episode, more than any other, exemplifies survivor guilt. “Everybody lives, Rose. Just this once, everybody lives,” says the Doctor as the victims of the poorly adapted nanogenes are finally cured of their ills. The joy in his face is unparalleled by anything else we have seen in this series – he is for the first time truly delighted that he has been able to act as saviour, in however an indirect way.
Consider Father's Day, the episode in which Rose goes back in time to try to save her father's life. The Doctor knows exactly what she has done, he knows the disaster she has caused, and he knows what needs to be done to put it all right, but he can't bring himself to engineer Rose's father's death. He wants him to live, because he feels he can't be responsible for even one more life lost. He's willing to sacrifice the unknown masses in order to safe the known individual – a logic that previous Doctors would never have followed.
For ages with the new series of Dr Who I was really puzzled by the way that the Doctor seemed so passive – very much unlike past Doctors. In the episode The Long Game, with the astonishingly sexy Simon Pegg as The Editor, (why did no one tell me Simon was narrating the Dr Who Confidential series on BBC3? I would have watched them, dammit!), both the Doctor and Rose are helpless and at the mercy of the Editor and his Boss, and they rely upon a secondary character to free them.
This goes totally contrary to our expectations of the Doctor as the Mr Know It All who can fix anything. In fact, I can't think of a single episode in this series where Dr Who has actually taken charge and been directly responsible for the rescue of anyone. Dammit, even the Dalek he tries to rescue, (before he realises it's a Dalek) ends up committing suicide because Rose's DNA has infected it. Damn you, Russell T Davies. Damn your ability to make me cry over a Dalek!
But as soon as you look at this helplessness in terms of survivor guilt, it all makes sense. The Doctor is haunted by memories of the Time Wars. He can't understand why he is still live when everyone else is dead. He has no one left. Nothing left. Just him and his Tardis. Is he a traitor for not dying with the rest? Should he have done thing differently? Sacrificed his life? To what end? Time Lords were always survivors and to die a meaningless death would never have been acceptable.
So instead he is left alone, trying to make sense of what happened, and trying not to repeat what he sees as tragic mistakes. Just how responsible was the Doctor for the death of all those Time Lords, all those Daleks? We heard him crying “It's not my fault!” to the last remaining Dalek. Is that truth, or guilt? Was it his fault? How will Rose react when the truth comes out?
The Doctor is obviously in love with Rose, it's clear as day, and has been for episodes. Will he lose her when all this comes to a head*? It surely must – all the episodes are building up to a climax in which we find out what really happened in the Doctor's past. What were the Time Wars? What happened to the Daleks? The Time Lords? And where was The Master in all this? What part did he have to play? Davros? Is he still kicking about? (Or should that be 'levitating about'?)
I wasn't a Dr Who fan until this series. The old stuff I could take or leave and really not care about, but this series has been fantastic. Russell T Davies has put together a through line that has totally hooked me. He's done something truly different with the Doctor – he's made him human, fallible, vulnerable. For once, the Doctor is not there to save us poor apes, but is instead saved by us. We are going on his personal journey, instead of a journey through space and time that he happens to be taking us on.
As a scriptwriter, I find all this fascinating, and I have to admit to a bit of jealousy. What I wouldn't give to have the opportunity to take a character like the Doctor and turn him on his head, do something really cool and interesting with him. Dr Who is, without doubt, up there with Battlestar Galactica as my all-time favourite scifi.
Anyway, it's 1.20am now – how the hell did that happen? – and whilst I could easily wax lyrical for another hour or so, I shan't. Time for bed. Christopher, are you coming?
* OK, I know Ecclestone leaves at the end of this series, which means a regeneration, which means the relationship is doomed. I was just trying not to think about it, ok?
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I used to run UControl on my PowerBook, which allowed me to both switch my USB mouse to left-handed and remap the Mac's fn-delete (i.e. delete the character to the right of the cursor) to shift-delete. UControl doesn't work in Tiger, and I can't find a way to remap fn-delete to shift-delete. I know I could use ctrl-D instead, but that doesn't seem to work in FireFox.
The trouble with the fn-delete combination is that those keys are as far apart on the Mac keyboard as it is possible to get, residing as they do in opposite corners. I write so much, and am so used to shift-delete, that it's really frustrating to have to switch over to a clumsy and awkward set of key-strokes instead of my nice, smooth, one-handed shift-delete.
Does anyone have a fix for me?
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Back in Dorset now, after a journey characterised by a variety of blisters and missing public transport connections by a matter of seconds. Always feels somewhat of an anticlimax, coming back here. Makes me wish I had somewhere 'proper' to live. Still, not long til I'm off to San Francisco. Nine days, in fact. Eep, better get stuff sorted.
Had a great trip to London. Met some way cool people and had my brain stretched in new directions, the results of which you'll see on Strange just as soon as I can marshal my thoughts into some sort of form that makes sense.
I think I shall go watch Bagpuss now, if I can a) be arsed to get up off the bed and b) remember how to turn a TV on.
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I woke up with a jolt this morning. I was having a dream involving a person I actually know talking to me about a situation that actually exists, except that this person was telling me something that could not possibly be true in the waking world. It woke me, because as revelations go, it was pretty damn big and would have had huge implications.
It also left me wondering how much that dream might colour my perceptions of the situation in real life. This is not to say that I am delusional and about to start thinking that dreams are real, or harbingers, or predictive, just that much of the way we react to things is subconscious, and this just seemed to be to me another way in which my subconscious can successfully fuck me about.
I'm not really talking here about what dreams are, why we have them, or what they mean – symbolically or otherwise – but do they have a knock on effect on the way we behave and think once we have awoken? Is the dream simply a manifestation of existing wishful thinking and therefore powerless to affect us in any new way, or can a dream implant such notions? Even if such notions already exist, does bringing them to the fore by playing them out in our dreams make them more entrenched, give them more influence?
Certainly dreams can fuck with my mood.
Years back Sam, my old school friend with whom I am staying right now, and I shared a series of houses and flats in Hounslow. I had a dream once that we had gone out on a speedboat on the sea and she had fallen overboard and drowned. This tragedy was particularly harsh because (in real life) her younger brother Peter had died in a car accident only a few months before. I woke sobbing and stayed tearful and upset the whole day.
Obviously the dream didn't leave me thinking that Sam actually had drowned, or that she was about to drown, or that drowning was even a remote possibility, but it did change my mood quite dramatically, sinking me into a miasma I couldn't shake off.
However, I've also had some fantastic dreams that have woken from feeling all happy and energised. So it cuts both ways.
Then there is the issue of what insights dreams may provide into cognitive problems. This morning I also dreamt of a wonderful model for explaining the cultural change lifecycle in business – complete with a diagram with four quadrants, (for some reason there were pictures of humans, monkeys, chimps and apes in the background of each quadrant), and four conditions that had to be satisfied to progress to the next quadrant. I wish I could remember what those conditions were, because in the dream it all made perfect sense. Unfortunately, I have a very visual memory, but am crap at remembering facts, words, numbers or names.
(Which probably explains why I spent much of yesterday morning staring at Jamie Cowling trying to figure out where the hell I'd met him before, because I swear I have. My visual brain was screaming that we've met before, but my memory refused to tell me where or, indeed, if.)
So anyway, yes. I suppose in one way this is all a rather stupid post. Of course our subconscious affects conscious behaviour. It's just that usually, it doesn't rub our noses in it quite so much.
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The sandals are shit. The strappy straps don't stay strapped. They are going back to the shop tomorrow.
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Woke up preternaturally early this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. One of the side-effects of summer, I suppose. All that light.
Anyway, on this trip to London I'm staying with Sam, an old school friend, and Mark, her husband. They live in Teddington, on the banks of the river Thames, and have a little boat which we took out last night from Teddington up to Richmond. Unfortunately, there's no public mooring in Richmond, so we had to come all the way back again before getting in the car to go back to Richmond for dinner.
The boat trip was way fun!! And I got to drive! Which was weird – boats are terribly unresponsive things, and when you think it should just go in a straight line it hits a current and goes somewhere else completely. I can totally see the attraction of having a boat though – it's so peaceful and calm out on the river.
Be interesting one day to take it down to London – we could go as far as the Thames Barrier in it, but no further, but I think that's as far as you would want to go anyway.
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My friend Kate has some tickets for Duran Duran at St Andrew's Stadium in Birmingham for Saturday night. We were supposed to go, but some work stuff cropped up which meant I can't go, so she's trying to give the tix away. Interested? Drop her an email at tylluan (at) gmail.com.
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I hate buying clothes. And shoes. I'm just not very good at it. Where some women delight in trying on a gazillion outfits, I would rather that the first one fit so that I can buy it and get down the pub/to the Apple store/back online.
I have hardly any clothes at all – if you've met me more than once you have basically seen my entire wardrobe. I have male geek friends who have more clothes than I do. In fact, I have male geek friends whom I suspect have more skirts than I do, and who wear them more often.
I live in dread of the day when I am suddenly struck by the need to purchase an item of clothing because I know that what will ensue will be nothing more than tedium, back pain and suffering. Indeed, so reticent am I that my friend Kate usually has to frogmarch me from shop to shop. That girl's armlock is second to none, I can tell you.
Usually, the only things that can make me buy clothes are weddings, the threat of imminent clothing malfunction, or a sudden and uncomfortable change in the weather. Such as, for example, the precipitous arrival of a summery day which forces me to accept that my ten year old Adidas Campus are just not suitable footware for the current climate. Thus did I today decide that it was time to buy a new pair of sandals.
I knew exactly what I wanted – simple strappy heels in baby blue. I think, in retrospect, that was the problem. I knew what I wanted and all I had to do was find them. Except that this season, sandals are either flat flip-flops or covered in crap – butterflies or flowers or equally vile manifestations of too much oestrogen (or, in fact, a vile manifestation of the projection by shoe designers of too much oestrogen onto the female sandal-buying population).
So I trudged round Richmond, trying not to throw up over huge bejewelled dragonfly-encrusted sandals and generally failing to find what I really wanted. By the time I'd run out of shops to look in, I started to downsize my expectations. Maybe I could live without them being blue. Maybe I could cope without strappy. Possibly, just possibly, I could live without heels.
No, sorry, some things cannot be compromised. I don't have too bad a pair of pins, but heels really do make them look longer and slimmer and sometimes a girl likes to persist in the delusion that her legs are worth showing off to the world once in a while.
Having failed to find the perfect pair, I end up going back to the very first shop that I went into to reassess a less than perfect pair which were the only ones I'd seen that didn't look like they were designed by a rabid hippy. Whilst waiting for the assistant to locate a pair of the turquoise sparkly sandals in the right size, I spotted a pair which were not blue and not strappy, but which somehow looked really nice.
I tried on the turquoise sandals and they were nice, but felt a bit wobbly. So I tried on the non-blue sandals and they were far more comfortable – I've always been a sucker for wood and leather shoes for one, and they felt so much more stable. Trouble is, they could only locate one size 6, and the other sizes patently didn't fit. Gah. I find a pair that I actually want and I can't sodding have them.
Thus am I now the less than proud owner of a pair of turquoise sparkly strappy sandals which may well break my ankle before the week is out, but which are at least not too vile. Even if they do make me look pigeon-toed.
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Why is it that the night you really want to have good night's sleep, because you have to get up early the next day to go to London, is always the night you toss and turn and wake up too early and can't get back to sleep?
I made the mistake of giving in to chocolate fudge cake last night. I shouldn't have. Now I ache from head to foot, as if whilst I was sleeping someone had given me a good going over with a cricket bat.
And the dreams. Oh god, the dreams. Every single dream was basically the same. All about the same thing. Message to my subconscious: Yes, ok, ok, I get it. Now shut up!
Can I go back to bed now, please? No? Damn.
Anyway, off to London today, back on Saturday probably. Lots of meetings. Wish me luck.
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