My Soul Hath Elbow Room!

An introduction to the British transport system, overheard on the train. This gentleman was talking to somebody on his phone; said somebody has evidently never done the London commute. He had everybody around him in fits by the time he hung up.

"I'll probably be about an hour. We're playing sardines on the train."

...

"What, sardines? It's a game. You take a train, remove three of its carriages and then try to cram triple the number of people onto it."

...

"I wish I were joking."

...

"Yes... but at least if we crash we'll be perfectly safe. Nobody can move, so we'll all just stay-"

...

"We've got about thirty square centimetres each; we're fine."

...

"Probably about an hour. If I'm still breathing, I'll call you."

...

"Yeah, it's a great game..."


Even the driver got in on it, though inadvertently: "I apologise for the late running of this service. I apologise for the fact that the train is only eight coaches long and for the overcrowding that you will suffer as a result. I apologise that the heating isn't working in coach two..."

My boss knows someone who is writing an AS-Level (= 17-year-olds, for you non-Brits) Ancient History textbook on Sparta. She asked me to proofread it. I said yes. I was expecting to learn something, not... THIS. *flails*

1. Oversimplification, sometimes to the point of being outright wrong. This one I can handle. It is AS, after all.

2. She completely skims all of the problematic elements of Herodotus' so-called 'History' and tries to tell these poor kids that he's really quite reliable, actually. Of course he is! The fact that most of his information came from people in pubs and he exaggerates to make the battles sound better, makes stuff up when he doesn't know the truth (see: the infamous hippopotamus description), and is by his own admission just trying to tell a ripping good story means nothing! Nothing, I say!

Look, you don't have to go to university levels here, but my God, Herodotus is so not reliable.

3. But what's got me uncontrollably nerdraging is that I've just caught her blatantly misinterpreting a really simple source.

( Cut to save your reading pages... and your eyes. )

I don't even think she has an agenda, that's what's really making me cross. If she did have one I could understand her shoddy treatment of the sources, but from what I've read I think she's just a poor writer and a worse academic. According to her acknowledgements page, she's a poor academic who works at a college.

I live in the South-East and commute into London to work. This means that my trains are fucked - so fucked, in fact, that mine lost power on its way home tonight.

The driver's solution?


Yes. "As you can probably see, ladies and gentlemen, I've lost power to the train, so I'm going to try rebooting it."

I'm still giggling.

Okay, so I've finally got around to listening to 8DA: Situation Vacant.

It was quite enjoyable, but what I'm still giggling about is that VLC loaded the tracks for the first half in a jumbled order, and I totally failed to notice.

"Oh, right, we're starting in media res. And now we've jumped back to them all meeting. And now we're in two teams running around all being faintly useless... hold on, where did the giant robot come from?" *peers at playlist* "Ohhhhh."

Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey...

(I expect you're going to want to do the 'Wow, it's bigger on the inside!' bit. Excuse me if I only give token responses. Oh, Eight ♥)

In other news:
Scientists have found possibly the earliest divergence on the evolutionary tree of plantlife, a kind of algae (or seaweed; the article uses both) that also sounds like it's a missing link in the evolution of multicellular organisms: it's made up of lots of cells, buit they're not talking to one another so much as clustered in a gelatinous cube mess - that is, nevertheless, structured into stalks and leaves.

Oh, and we've trapped antimatter for the first time, so that's one step closer to being able to eject warp cores every other week, I guess?

It's time I admitted it. I have a problem.

Two years ago, my first drafts looked like this:
( In which the Tenth Doctor mugs the Fourth Doctor. )

And my NaNo looked like this:

( Regan and Meredith, Take 1. )

This year, my first drafts look like this:
( Written on Hallowe'en, in fact, just one day before the horrors of NaNo began. Stops before spoilers. )

And my NaNo looks like this (excuse the typoes please, I'm mostly writing on a tiny netbook this year):
( They've just got back from their son's funeral. )

So... yeah.

Somewhere in the past eighteen months (which, let's face it, have been horrific both emotionally and creatively) I have forgotten how to write.

Or at least, I've forgotten how to write fast. I've forgotten how to let the muse take me. The last time she did - and the first time in eighteen months - it was for a planning session, not a writing one..

I'm not giving up. I am well aware that I'm dragging myself out of a massive creative black hole; that I'm writing at all, and that NaNo is flowing for 1,667 words a day with little hesitation (though soem deviation and repetition - it is NaNo, after all), puts me miles ahead of where I was six months ago when 100 words a day on the train was like pulling teeth. Even if it's never quite the same again, writing is a skill and I can relearn it.

Just, it's time I stopped kidding myself. Two, even five years ago I was a much better writer, and I'm playing catch-up now.

( Big image warning )

It would be really helpful at this point if my Doctor Who shelves would spontaneously become bigger on the inside...

(You can't even see the Big Finish CD boxes down below...)

And, and! When I plugged the camera in to get these pictures off, I found the snaps of our pumpkin from last year:

( And another big image. )

52lb of fire-breathing dragon, ohhh yeah. Drawn by a very talented Jo, and carved by a slightly less talented Andy (he cut himself. "Life is like pumpkin-carving: full of woe and bits falling off.")

NaNo is going well! I took my first round of books back to the ICS library today, and found a Loeb edition of Theophrastus' Characters just sitting on the shelves. I've been looking everywhere for a hard copy - I was starting to think it didn't exist. (It may still be out of print: Amazon doesn't carry it as far as I can tell.) I can now curl up and read about Greek character stereotypes until my eyes bleed XD

Everything else goes slooowly. Bought a pair of professionally tailored trousers. They don't fit. I mean really. I swear, if I ever find another shop that sells any kind of trousering garment in my size, I don't care about the cost - I'll do what I did with my shoes and buy up a lifetime's supply. Why does everyone want to be a size 6 again?

Ran into an old school friend (C) on the train a couple of weeks ago. She seems a lot calmer, although I'm still wary - we always did get along fine when R wasn't around. C's incredibly possessive, and I remember some very cruel things she did to try to break R and myself up. So we'll see. If nothing else, keeping the two friendships separate should be much easier than it was when we were stuck in the same class all day long. The important thing is to not mention the anorexia.

"Well, I suppose wherever you are it's nine minutes past something, so in that sense at least we are all united as one. And on this side of the dateline, it's Friday the 8th of October... Friday! Woo!"

I love Richard Madeley. Why can't he wake me up every morning?

(They're moving start start of Chris Evans' show back half an hour... if that doesn't chase me out of bed, I don't know what will. Urgh.)

I've spent the weekend at my mum's, since it was her birthday today. Lots of fun - my mum is awesome - but two things that really stick out.

One, we did the maths and spoke to an advisor and it turns out I can just about afford a mortgage! On a house, even. Actually, it works out cheaper to get a house than a flat since I wouldn't have to pay maintenance costs (well, not monthly, anyway). I only need about six months to have a really decent deposit, and then...

It won't be easy - I'm not even trying to kid myself, and it'll probably still be harder than I'm expecting. But my God, just to be in charge of my own food shopping again would be a dream come true, and to be able to write secure in the knowledge that nobody's going to come bursting through the door demanding my attention because hey, this passion that I want to do for a living one day isn't important, right, would be brilliant.

And two, on the train up to Somerset I ended up sat next to a lady with a one-year old baby, and spent about an hour and a half chatting to one and playing with t'other. I kind of knew I wanted kids, but I'm still amazed at how fast my mothering instinct flared up. I've not even been near a toddler since I was one myself.

She was a primary school teacher. She asked if I'd ever worked with children before. I was so flattered. And, you know, I'm now feeling quite a bit more confident about the whole idea of adopting-while-single, because that's almost certainly what it's going to be; a sperm bank feels so selfish. Maybe I'll talk myself into it when my biological clock really goes off, but until then, the plan is definitely adoption.

Thing is, I'm already getting into that 'well, all right, just one and then I'll be good and adopt' mindset, and I'm going to be nowhere near financially ready for a good seven to ten years.

Things are lookin' up.