"'During the war,' he said in a cold quiet voice, 'I was at the sinking of the Bismarck. It was a monstruous affair. Every ship the Navy could muster was round her and we were pumping everything we had into her. It was a debauch of destruction, all of us round this magnificent ship, a triumph of men's brains and ingenuity, killing her, like vultures tearing at her, only vultures have the decency to wait until their prey is dead.' His voice had deepened to a painful grating [...] 'And those stupid bastards write to the newspapers saying that children are just being born full of sin these days, that it was the Germans who had the concentration camps and not us and all that bloody crap. It was the human race of our generation that had the concentration camps and the guilt of them is part of the inheritance of those kids out there.'"

Jane Duncan, My Friends the Hungry Generation, Macmillan (London: 1968), p170.

"'How did you come by that bit about the sinking of the Bismarck?'
I said: 'Did it ring true?'
'It was true,' he told me. 'You put into words what I felt and have never been able to say.'
My next question sounded off even as I asked it: 'Were you at the the sinking of the Bismarck?' for the question came out of the gulf between telepathic knowledge and factual knowledge.
'Yes,' Jock said, 'and that was how I felt and why I never speak of it.'"

Jane Duncan, Letter from Reachfar, Macmillan (London and Basingstoke: 1975, 1978), p125.

Tags: jane duncan, remembrance
Current Mood: contemplative

In honour of National Poetry Day today:

( One Art by Elizabeth Bishop )
( No Time by W. H. Auden )
( January, 1795 by Mary Robinson )

This entry was originally posted at http://katlinel.dreamwidth.org/45221.html. There are comments on the Dreamwidth post. Comments welcome there or here.

Tags: poetry
Current Mood: cold

Courtesy of alltheleaves, Val McDermid and others on the subject of the Chalet School on Radio 4.

I shall note, smugly, that I did get all the questions right and faster than many of the respondents in the programme (particularly the questions on who was Jo Scott's mother, and I said her surname too, and naming all of Joey's children). I shall also note that I am shocked (and think that the participants should probably be fined, but I draw the line at Head's Reports since I bar luxuries) that Daisy Venables is reported by the BBC to be the one who wants to go to the London School of Needlework when, as any fule or true CS fan kno, it was her cousin Sybil Russell who wanted to go there. Daisy trained in medicine and became a doctor.

This entry was originally posted at http://katlinel.dreamwidth.org/44848.html. There are comments on the Dreamwidth post. Comments welcome there or here.

Tags: chalet school
Current Location: struggling with rep in prep
Current Mood: bossy know-it-all
Current Music: Ernest Farrar's Brittany sung in a golden voice

How can I not love this show when it gives me a challenge like this? ( Spoilers, sweetie )

This entry was originally posted at http://katlinel.dreamwidth.org/38178.html. There are comments on the Dreamwidth post. Comments welcome there or here.

Tags: doctor who
Current Mood: excited

Another Doctor Who vid rec, again from the very talented such_heights, here.

It's an Amy/Doctor and Amy/Rory vid, but more than that, it is about tangled complexity of the many lives and stories of Amy Pond and how bittersweet that is, set to Blue Caravan, by Vienna Teng.

Since it came up in discussions of vidding at a recent convention, as a result of this and several other vids, I've recently bought around five CDs (am old skool) of music (Vienna Teng, Noah and the Whale, Tegan and Sara, for examples, and I'm still looking to get hold Métisse's Boom Boom Ba, but may have to resort to download for that, bah) because I've wanted to support the artist whose music has been used in these vids.

This entry was originally posted at http://katlinel.dreamwidth.org/36106.html. There are comments on the Dreamwidth post. Comments welcome there or here.

Tags: doctor who, vids
Current Mood: thoughtful

RIP Elisabeth Sladen.

My earliest memories of Doctor Who are of Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor and Elisabeth Sladen's Sarah Jane Smith, and among those memories are the recollection of bewilderment as Three re-generated into Four, of the uncertainty of what this all meant and how to deal with it. And that's much how I've felt today, seeing and hearing many people's words on both Elisabeth Sladen and Sarah Jane Smith, knowing what a shock the fact of her death is to her family, friends and fans (cancer or no, knowledge of it or no, the actual death is still a shock, no matter how "expected" nor how long for), and trying to deal with it, along with the knowledge that crying over someone you've never met, who you only knew through their work on a television screen, is the type of emotional reaction which gets a lot of scorn poured over it.

I never really saw Sarah Jane Smith as a role model in the sense of identifying her as someone I wanted to be like; she was just someone there in my life, getting on with what the universe threw at her. And that's how I saw her on her first re-appearance on our TV screens as Sarah Jane Smith in Doctor Who, someone who'd just got on with her life, never having given up on what made her who she was, despite being abandoned, continuing to investigate the strange things that came her way. And in The Sarah Jane Adventures, she built a new core of chosen family around that need to investigate, to understand, to protect and defend, and to help.

I've seen a lot of dismissal of episodes of New Who such as The Stolen Earth and Journey's End, but Sarah Jane Smith is an integral part of what makes those episodes work for me. Her terror as her past comes calling, in the voice of Davros, conveys absolutely the predicament of the Earth in peril from the Daleks once more, in a superb performance by Elisabeth Sladen, that contrasts with and complements the whirlpool of emotions that she expresses on seeing the TARDIS once more in School Reunion. The Doctor's appearances in The Sarah Jane Adventures, both Ten's and Eleven's, and her further adventures with them, again brings back the stories of her past back into the present, along with the added complexity of so many goodbyes.

Whatever I am feeling right now, I am glad Sarah Jane was there, sharing in the most exciting adventures in the universe, helping to save the day, beloved, giving of her strength, laughing with those who followed on from her, not just my Sarah Jane, not just his Sarah Jane, but our Sarah Jane, always.

Here's a couple of clips:

Everything's packed, I've got to go.

The Trickster wanted to end your story. But it goes on.

This entry was originally posted at http://katlinel.dreamwidth.org/35845.html. There are comments on the Dreamwidth post. Comments welcome there or here.

Tags: doctor who, sarah jane smith
Current Mood: weepy

As heard on my flist, Nicholas Courtney, the Bridgadier of Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures, has died.

At the Gallifrey One Masquerade in 2010, some jolly clever fans got together and produced a Doctor Who skit about the Brigadier. I think it's a great celebration of the Brigadier, and Nicholas Courtney's work in portraying him. Enjoy. And have some chips. Fantastic.



This entry was originally posted at http://katlinel.dreamwidth.org/34247.html. There are comments on the Dreamwidth post. Comments welcome there or here.

Tags: doctor who
Current Location: running in squircles
Current Mood: busy
Current Music: The Pretenders - Hymn to Her

For those of you who, like me, generally don't pay attention to radio schedules, the BBC are broadcasting The Diary of the Rose (by Le Guin for those who don't know, read by Laurel Lefkow) again, on BBC Radio 7.

The first episode was broadcast yesterday but is available on iPlayer.

More here.

This entry was originally posted at http://katlinel.dreamwidth.org/33717.html. There are comments on the Dreamwidth post. Comments welcome there or here.

Tags: le guin
Current Mood: sleepy

Voices for the Library have announced that Saturday 5th February is a Save Our Libraries Day of Action, with various local libraries participating. There's a list of events here.

One of the supporters of the campaign, Phil Bradley, has created a series of save the library campaign posters, based on WWI posters.

I think this one is my favourite. And this one appeals to me too.

I wouldn't be who I am or where I am or have achieved what I have without libraries, and particularly not without my local library when I was a child. There wasn't enough money to spare for buying many books when I was a child, and without the library I would not have had access to around ninety-nine per cent of the books I did read.

The whole universe is available to us through our libraries, in a space dedicated to both enjoyment and the pursuit of knowledge, and it is a space that is open to all. The local lending library is a place to expand our boundaries; it contains multitudes for the multitudes. The loss of a library diminishes all of us, and this map of proposed library closures shows just how much we will be diminished by this.

This entry was originally posted at http://katlinel.dreamwidth.org/32593.html. There are comments on the Dreamwidth post. Comments welcome there or here.

Tags: libraries
Current Mood: sombre

such_heights has created another brilliant vid, this time celebrating the joy that Amy/Rory and all the twists and turns of their relationships to Five Years Time by Noah and the Whale. It was created for More Joy Day, and it is indeed a vid of much joy.

And here it is. Go watch and enjoy.

This entry was originally posted at http://katlinel.dreamwidth.org/32073.html. There are comments on the Dreamwidth post. Comments welcome there or here.

Tags: doctor who, vids
Current Mood: boppy