bunn

A duck egg in a fried egg and black pudding bap is an egg too far.  I had to take a shower afterwards to get the yolk off.

Tommy Shortlegs still has a limp.  To vet tomorrow.  Still no enquiries for him!  We have asked Corgi Rescue if they might know of a suitable home, since he is more or less corgiform.  Apparently they have 140 people waiting for corgis, and no corgis! 

Terry Pratchett's 'Nation' is sadder than I expected.  Not sure why I didn't expect this, given that the 'entire people being wiped out' aspect is trailered on the back of the book. 

Channing Tatum has ridiculously small eyes and a quite absurd amount of forehead.

Despite this I am having fun illustrating the Eagle Big Bang story I volunteered for, as it is well written and has huge amounts of landscape in it.  Plus, the next picture doesn't feature CT and his tiny eyes at all, but Cottia!  With a knife!   Need to find someone to draw as Cottia. 

Mollydog is *almost* 100% again, and has become loud and importunate.  I shall start her on her painkillers again tomorrow as I think the arthritis is getting to her. 

Rosemary Sutcliff's Simon is very much a local book (for local people?)    Very definitely grounded in Torrington, right down to the individual fields and the river.  Less sad than I had expected, given the whole Civil War setting, though the internal angst of best friends on opposite sides is quite well handled, the ending is perhaps a bit too happy to feel real. 

I still have a cold.  Much blank staring into space, aching, etc etc.  However, I have just worked out that I have had no coffee since Friday afternoon, which is probably a bit of a strain on the system.  Under normal circumstances I operate on a basis of always being a couple of mugs of coffee up, even when asleep.  I sometimes think that in a world without coffee I would probably only be awake for about 6 hours a day... 

It's so annoying: weather has been absolutely perfect this weekend: I was going to do SO MUCH gardening!  And instead, I have basically been asleep for 2 days and nights.

I awoke briefly to read Barbara Hambly's  'Sisters of the Raven'.  It was a readable and entertaining 'I have got a cold' book.   The setting is a group of vaguely-Arabic seeming cities set beside a lake - very well described, all dyes and spices and markets and camels.  Full of atmosphere: 10/10 on that front. 

( More blatherings re Magic For Men Only )

The excellent hedgebird has created a new Rosemary Sutcliff discussion community to take all the chat and arguments about all the many Sutcliff books that are not Eagle of the Ninth that have been bubbling up all over.  

I thought there might be a few old Arthurians who might potentially be interested.

(Yes, I am still reading piles of Sutcliff and endless books about Roman history. But this is probably not news. Am starting to lose hope of ever getting my brain back and am now getting used to living in the small corner of it that is not mostly full of historical fiction, translations of documents, & random archaeology).

 When I posted about having seen the film The Eagle,  a few months back, endlessrarities  commented to mention a 1977 BBC TV series of Eagle of the Ninth, which I'd not previously heard of.  

For some reason this came back to me today, and I googled and found this short series of snippets on the author's website. 

"This looks entertaining, and also the hair is hilarious"  I thought.   "I would like to see the whole thing!"

Having rummaged around at rosemarysutcliff.com, it sounds like there may, or may not, still be BBC archive copies of the series, and if there are not, then possibly Sutcliff's estate may have a copy in the attic somewhere, but it needs the BBC to do stuff before anything can happen. 

I posted on the Points of View website as this was suggested on the rosemarysutcliff.com site as the place to nag, but I am pretty sure that holds very little weight.  Are there other good ways to nag about this sort of thing?

I have only previously nagged music companies about an album that was not available in any modern format : rather to my surprise (and possibly a complete coincidence) they did eventually release that album on CD.  This positively reinforced me in my nagging behaviour, so I intend to do more of it...

Not sure how I feel about our ludicrous one-sided extradition treaty with the USA now being a pop culture reference. Mind you if it is all down to aliens, that would at least be some sort of explanation for the damn thing.

On the other hand : Yay!  Rhossili beach!   I was going to post a photo of the hounds running there, but philmophlegm beat me to it with a photo with Gwen and Rhys's house in the background. 

This means that philmophlegm, despite his air of elaborate scorn for all things canine -  has posted, unprompted, a photo of a doggy. Bwahahahahahaha!

... and another thing, the Kindle version of A Dance with Dragons is 20p more expensive than the print copy.  Surely paper is more expensive than bandwidth? Or is it purely lack of competition?

I am resisting the impulse to Kindle George RR Martin's Dance with Dragons at present, but if people continue this frenzied level of excitement over it then I may be forced to do so.

I note that Amazon UK seems to be taking its time sending out the print copies, and wonder if this is a marketing initiative for Kindle...

If I do Kindle it, then it will be the third book that I've found that I actually want to read that is available on Kindle, since I was given the thing several months ago.  I am still hoping that I will warm to it more, but at the moment, an awful lot of the things that cause me to go BOOK!!!! WANT WANT WANT! like a sort of pathetic book-Gollum, simply aren't available in that medium.  

Also, I find I kind of like being able to flip through actual pages. But perhaps my Kindle flipping skills will improve with use.

Title: The Fall of Cunoval
Length: 4784 words
Rating : g
Summary: What were Esca's family like, and what happened to them? What might the word 'hound' mean to Esca when he says 'I am the Centurion's hound?'
Inspired by: Eagle of the Ninth, has a few nods to Song for a Dark Queen. Also, other Sutcliff works with hounds.

(I know, I know, but apparently I felt the need to write gen from the point of view of a happily-married grandfather who is dead before either begins. Some people just have to be awkward...)

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Notes
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Apparently I am so taken by 'The Eagle' setting that I have actually taken to fanfic.  This is most uncharacteristic and peculiar behaviour of me, and I hope to be better soon, as Roman Britain is currently eating my brain.

In the meanwhile, I have finally found a use for the Welsh lessons that I only vaguely remember, which were compulsory at my primary school.  The film uses Scots Gaelic as a stand-in for whatever language was spoken in Northern Britain in the second century, but I can't do Gaelic and Welsh though still way off, is as close if not closer. 

Aaaaaanyway....  This is set a while  before the setting of the book/movie, just after the battle in which Esca's family are killed and he is taken prisoner.  A longer version of this story that takes Esca all the way to Calleva can be found here.

Esca's original name, given to him by his mother, is  Ysgafnyny bôn meaning, "light at heart". But the Romans can't pronounce it.*

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