Hole in the wall

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This is exactly what you want to be the first thing you see when you pop home at lunchtime on a completely unrelated errand.

A hole in the wall by the side of the carpark.


At first I thought it had just crumbled and a couple of stones had fallen out. Then I saw the distinct dent in the concrete post in front of it and had one of those Pascal-like pensées: “some bugger’s rammed this.”
And then I went round to the other side of the wall, which is next to someone’s driveway …
Oh, dear.

There were no eye witnesses but there were ear witnesses. It happened shortly after 11am, so was probably someone making a delivery rather than a resident. That meant it wasn’t hard to pin down who it might have been and after I’d contacted his company he called me to fess up: a charming Sikh gentleman who had actually been doing a quote for work on our downstairs neighbour’s flat. His foot slipped on the brake, he was going to tell us but then he got a phone call and it completely slipped his mind …
Anyway, all’s well that ends well and our insurers are on top of it. We have however indicated to the owners of the flat that we would rather this gent wasn’t in any way involved in work that might affect the structure of the building. Not if he’s that absent minded.
It would be quite cool if the collapsed wall had revealed some hidden treasure or a map or a dead body or … Nah, no such luck.

Kindle egg

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They’re suspicious people down at Amazon. Cheryl put up Kindle versions of His Majesty’s Starship and Jeapes Japes and they promptly got taken down again until Amazon could be absolutely sure she had the right to publish them. They’d noticed paper versions exist, you see. Can’t be too careful.

But, we were able to convince them and the Wizard’s Tower Kindle editions of said books are now available – as already were The New World Order, The Xenocide Mission and Time’s Chariot. So, the entire Jeapes oeuvre is now available Kindlectronically. Buy them now. It is your destiny.

Silence!

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So, Dr Who is off with a swing. It took its time, though. It’s good to be thrown into the middle of the action … but it helps to know why we’re meant to care first. Last week’s episode wasn’t really the start to a series; it should have been about three quarters of the way through, having previously introduced Amy + Rory + River to any new viewers. It’s nice to have my intelligence respected by a TV producer who expects me to work it out, but if I was a new viewer starting from scratch, I expect I’d have got about halfway through “The impossible astronaut” before turning off out of irritation. Hey look, they’re all upset that their friend’s dead. But he’s not! Oh, he’s a younger version. So why not tell him what happened anyway? Since when did this guy, of all guys, pay close attention to the sacrosanctity of the timelines?

But that was a blip. Last week was worth persevering with and this week we strike gold, with creepy tensions and some laugh-out-loud moments, the first of which was River’s means of not dying by falling from the fiftieth floor of a building. And the mystery of finding out who the little girl is will keep me more hooked than the weird crack in the wall from last year.

The Moff does have a few leitmotifs up his sleeve that he likes to reuse, doesn’t he? Decaying, creepy locations, possibly with cryptic messages scrawled on the wall. Inscrutable aliens who are nasty because they’re scary and inscrutable but not very good at explaining their motives. Small children in danger. The inability of two people to have a simple conversation going: “look, please can you explain what’s going on?” / “Why, certainly. As you can see, I’m in this spacesuit …” He’s good at juggling them but he doesn’t have that many opportunities to use them left before they start being boring …

So, as the late Nicholas Courtney’s most famous character would have said, onwards!