Ladylike Behaviour

I found this image on the Sharon Kay Penman Fan Club Facebook page (I'm a great fan of her books, particularly the Welsh trilogy and the Queen's Man mysteries - and anything else with Eleanor of Aquitaine, for that matter).
It's from the Smithfield Decretals, held in the British Library, a work of canon law with lots of pretty pictures like this - and the person who posted it on Facebook found it on a blog called Interesting Pretties.
Every lady should be able to defend her own castle.

I have a hand-and-a-half sword myself, and though I'm not very good at using it (lacking anyone to practice with locally) I still get to go out on the battlefield at re-enactment shows.

Page 3 Girls and SF Book Covers

The Girl Guides Association was on the Today programme this morning (BBC Radio 4) talking about their opposition to Page 3 of the Sun. For anyone not in the UK, one of our national newspapers has printed a photo of a nearly nude young lady on their page 3 every day since - well, pretty much forever, actually. Which is a lot of naked young ladies.
Every now and then, a few women get together to say they don't like it, but the Sun carries on regardless.
There are lots of other good reasons for not buying the Sun - this is just one of them.

The campaign reminded me of the excellent blog by Jim C Hines, though.
Occasionally, he pokes fun at the improbable poses of young ladies on SF book covers by attempting to re-create them with himself as the model. It's very funny, and it also makes the serious point that the covers are sexist and stupid.
A little while ago, he got a group of SF writers together to pose together. The event was ConFusion, and the group pose has raised over $15,000 for the Aicardi Syndrome Foundation. Details are here:

http://www.jimchines.com/2013/01/group-cover-pose-reveal/

(Sorry I can't manage links, but copy and paste will get you there!)

Spitalfields Life

I've just added a link to Spitalfields Life to my side bar.
It's not because I have any special connection to Spitalfields - I've been there once or twice, but I've never lived there, and wouldn't say I knew it very well - but the "gentle author" of this blog makes it seem such a fascinating place. He finds all sorts of interesting and unusual people, of all races and nationalities, doing all sorts of different jobs, all getting along together in a small area of London.
There's Barn the Spoon, who makes a living by carving wooden spoons, and has just been along to the Museum of London to look at medieval spoons that he can copy.
There are portraits of elderly boxers, and clowns at the annual Grimaldi Clown service. There are historic buildings and snippets of local history, and artists of all sorts, and greasy spoon takeaways, ethnic restaurants, and people who make small amounts of artisan marmalade.
There are Jews and Somalis and Huguenots and all sorts of other people who call the East End home, all telling their stories to the gentle author.
It's a fascinating mixture - and it's useful to remember this vast variety for all sorts of reasons, from creating a believable and richly textured city population for a fantasy novel to more serious thoughts about immigration and how that affects life in our cities.

Planning Ahead - WorldCon 2014

It may seem to be a long time in advance, but I've just booked my tickets for LonCon - the World SF Convention 2014. (I'm very excited).

The reasons for my excitement go back a long way. In 1979, I read an article in the Manchester Evening News about the SF convention that had just been held in Brighton. I was just about old enough to have thought about going to it on my own (I even had savings, so I could have afforded it!). I read it and thought: "Why didn't I know about this?"
Not long after that, I started going to Star Trek Conventions - but in the back of my mind there was the thought that there was something bigger and better out there. Mostly in the US, of course, which put it right out of my reach.
Then in 1987, WorldCon came back to Brighton.

I went, of course. By that time, I was part of a Star Trek club, and all of us managed to get down for at least one day together (I still have a photo of us all in our club Tshirts somewhere).* I went to my first (and only) rock concert - Hawkwind were doing their Elric of Melnibone music. Elsewhere in Brighton, there was a Philip Glass opera going on.
I discovered filk music (and still have some of the cassette tapes I bought there), and saw Michael Moorcock across the hall signing autographs, and went to a writer's workshop run by Harry Harrison (who was wearing a Tshirt saying "I love the Stainless Steel Rat").
We saw Doris Lessing in the audience of the talk that Gerry Anderson gave, and somehow I managed to get the job of room steward for a showing of Doctor Who The War Games (which was on a very bad tape where the picture kept sliding across the screen, but we still watched it all and enjoyed it!).
I met members of the SCA for the first time, and that started me thinking about historical re-enactment.
I bought a phaser and was then advised to hide it until I got back to the hotel, because there was a very strict no weapons policy for the convention (which rather cramped the style of one of the ladies I recognised from Trek Cons, who usually went around festooned with weapons as an assassin. She had long blonde hair, and also did a very good Alice in Wonderland!)
It was fantastic!

There was a half-hour TV programme made about the Con. Brian Aldiss, the Toastmaster, was interviewed, and several of the people who had made elaborate costumes. My mum and dad watched it, and about halfway through, dad said: "This is just the sort of rubbish our Lesley would go to." Mum knew that I'd been there, so she was on pins for the rest of the programme, in case I turned up in the background of one of the shots!

Another thing that happened during the Convention was that one of the authors attending got himself arrested! Iain Banks was found climbing up the outside of the hotel he was staying in to get to his room, after a rather convivial evening! (I'm sure it was Iain Banks, though I can't find any record of it now. It was in the local paper, and the article was stuck up on the information boards around the Con).

Next year, Iain Banks was going to be one of the Guests of Honour of the convention - but he probably won't be around to see it. The news about his cancer is very sad, and I hope he and his partner do wonderful things in the time that's left to him.

One of the other Guests of Honour is Bryan Talbot, author of the Grandville graphic novels, among many others. My Young Man is already planning an Inspector LeBrock costume, and if he's LeBrock, I'll have to take his arm as the Divine Sarah! All we need are the badger masks.

The other Guests of Honour are Chris Foss the artist, and John Clute, who co-edited the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction and the Encyclopaedia of Fantasy (I have them both, but they're each about four inches thick, so I won't be taking them along to have them autographed!).
Malcolm Edwards is a publisher, who launched the SF Masterworks series of books and now works for Orion Publishing. He started off with Victor Gollancz, and went on to Grafton and HarperCollins, so he has a long and distinguished SF pedigree.
Jeanne Gomoll is this Con's Famous Fan - she's been active on the committee of Wiscon (the world's leading feminist SF convention, apparently - so much goes on in the US that I don't know about!) for 37 years, and she's written fan fiction and produced artworks that have had Hugo nominations.
The last guest of honour is Robin Hobb, prolific fantasy author - and of course there will be many other famous names wandering round the halls.
I wonder if I'll recognise anyone from 1980s Star Trek fandom?

*The name of the club was incredibly obscure - Ne'a'driar, which had appeared in a fan story that my friend, and founder of the club, Pat Keen, had written, and which was supposed to mean Little Brother in Vulcan - or even more precisely, Brother who is Seven Years Younger, taking the mechanics of pon farr as we understood them into account! We ran a couple of conventions in Shepperton in the 1980s, which were great fun.

The Black Orchid

What a pity this only ever ran to three issues!
It's a complete story in itself, of course, but I don't think there's ever been a sequel featuring purple plant ladies from the Amazon jungle!
In 1988, Neil Gaiman took the character of Black Orchid, a costumed super hero, and made her into something rich and strange, as only he can.
Back in 1988, I was almost as innocent of the Gotham City universe as Black Orchid's recently woken sister, though that didn't spoil my enjoyment of the story. Reading it now, I find that the story has a lot more depth to it that I didn't appreciate the first time round - because now I know about Arkham Asylum, and Swamp Thing, and some of the other little touches that were put into the story.
And now I'm wondering about reading some of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing stories....

Archaeology in TV and Film

"I'm a time traveller. I point and laugh at archaeologists."
So said David Tennant in Silence in the Library, as River Song and her team of archaeologists introduced themselves. And I trained as an archaeologist, so I point and laugh at the 'archaeologists' portrayed in TV and films.

Truthfully, though, it would be more accurate to call them "tomb robbers".

Take the Tomb of the Cybermen as an example. Having just seen and enjoyed The Bells of Saint John, I felt the need to revisit some classic Who, and you don't get much more classic than this Pat Troughton story. A team of archaeologists are opening up the ancient city of the Cybermen (in a quarry near Gerrard's Cross) - by blowing up the mountainside to reveal the doors! Even Howard Carter in the Valley of the Kings didn't use explosives, and that was back in 1922!
Then, after carelessly losing the first member of their party to the electrified doors, they mention that everything must be carefully measured and recorded, but they're soon cheerfully pulling every lever in sight to see what happens! And thereby lose another member of the party. The party itself isn't composed only of academics, either - there's the wealthy couple who financed the expedition, and their tall black servant (let's just not mention the racist and sexist parts of the story just now....that would be a whole different post). Unsurprisingly, the wealthy couple are up to no good - and it was revealed in the DVD extras that the actor who played the wealthy man was already well known from Hammer Films, mostly as the baddy searching for a mummy's tomb.

Those 'archaeologists' paid lip service to the recording of the site by writing a few things down in a note book and taking a few photographs (at least before the Cybermen were re-activated, being not as dead as they were supposed to be).
Some screen archaeologists don't even do that (I'm looking at you, Doctor Henry Jones, Jr.). Indy's very first scene was an act of tomb robbing - going for the golden statue in the booby trapped tomb/temple/whatever it was. A properly archaeological expedition would have been far more interested in finding out how those booby traps worked as they explored the complex - the statue would have been mildly interesting (okay - it was gold, and archaeologists are human too) but it would have been only one thing in a whole wealth of information that they could have brought back about the skills and technology of the local tribal peoples.
Perhaps strangely, Belloc's excavations, with all the local people digging away in the sand, was much more like actual excavations of the period - Egypt is easy from one point of view, because there's no stratigraphy in sand to speak of. It gets far more difficult in Europe, because you can see the differences between the different layers of soil, and it's also possible to date them by the finds in each layer, or at the very least, relative to each other (and more recently there's pollen analysis and lots of other fun scientific stuff).

Then there was the episode of Murder, She Wrote, when Jessica was a volunteer on a dig which was laid out in a way that hadn't been used by real archaeologists since the 1950s. Once again, there was no recording to speak of, and when Jessica found something exciting, she picked it up and waved it in the air!!!
I winced. I still wince now, just thinking about it. You don't move anything until it's been recorded in situ, which includes being photographed, and getting the people with the theodolite to plot its position and height/depth from a base line, as well as someone with a planning board coming round to draw the thing onto a plan. (When I was digging, computer planning was just about coming into use, but mostly we used tracing paper and pencils, and meter square frames threaded with string at 10cm intervals to form a grid we could lay over the bit we wanted to plan.).
I once spent a whole day uncovering a Saxon pot in a rubbish pit, gradually realising that it was the only complete Saxon pot we had found on a site that was so thickly littered with Thetford ware potsherds that some of the girls took a few home to use in the bottom of their plantpots! Though it had no intrinsic value, being pot rather than gold, it was treated very carefully indeed - and certainly not waved about in the air! It was planned, in situ, and had levels taken on it, and it was given a finds number, before we even thought of moving it. (But the thrill when it finally came loose from the earth, after all that time! That was something special.)

You'd think that, with Time Team being on TV for years, modern TV series would be a bit better about the details of a dig.
What a pity about Bonekickers, then.
I wanted to like this series. I really did! It had a real archaeological consultant, and up until about half way through the first episode they even looked as if they were trying to look like a real dig. I could forgive them the chainmail that came out of the ground after 800 years and wasn't rusted into a solid lump - viewers had to understand quickly that it was chainmail, after all.
But then one of the students invited a member of the public to jump into the trench with her, and then the same student lifted up a chunk of wood from the ground in much the same way as Jessica had done in Murder, She Wrote, and waved it around. She even tucked it under her arm and took it to show the director of the dig - and she didn't get thrown off her course! Or the dig. And this lump of wood turned out to be a piece of the True Cross - the member of the public got a splinter and started performing miracles, and the archaeologists ended up in a huge cavern under the dovecote at Garway, their only reaction to leaving a dead body behind them being "Let's go to the pub!"
Aargh!

Mayhew's London

The main character in Neverwhere is Richard Mayhew - the one who falls through the cracks in the city to London Below, and finds a different world there.

In Victorian London, there was another Mayhew - Henry, who also found a different world to the one that most Londoners were aware of. He was a journalist who worked, among other things, as a joint-editor of Punch magazine, and he wrote many books of travel, biography, popular science and also novels and plays. What he's best remembered for now, though, is his huge tome London Labour and the London Poor. He made it his business to find out how the poor lived, and what their working lives were like, and where they lived, at a time when the middle and upper classes had no idea what the lives of the poor were like, and never really came into contact with them.
The sheer variety of jobs that were being carried on in London around the 1850s was astounding. There were porters, carrying goods on their backs around the city, and quenching their enormous thirsts with the dark beer that bears their name.
There were costermongers with their donkey carts, who bought fruit and vegetables for re-sale from Covent Garden. Mayhew described not only what they sold, but how they amused themselves in their time off.
Some of the street traders were very specific in their wares - oranges and nuts and lemons were popular, and so was hot elder wine, or hot green peas, or pickled whelks.
There were street traders selling anything from a goldfinch in a cage to second hand clothes to writing paper. One man only sold nutmeg graters.
There were people called 'screevers' who would write begging letters and petitions for their clients, and there were people who went round public houses selling metal spoons.
A gentleman could outfit himself with a walking stick, pipe, and tobacco box, without setting foot inside a shop, or a doll for his daughter and a stuffed bird for the mantlepiece.
There were street entertainers who played instruments or performed magic tricks on street corners. One man was a bagpiper who had been a corporal in the 93rd Southern Highlanders, and orderly to the Colonel of the regiment, until he went blind - and found that he had not served long enough to be entitled to a pension. While he played, his daughter danced the sword dance over two long tobacco pipes instead of swords. There were acrobats and jugglers and tightrope walkers, singers and dancing dogs, and 'Negro serenaders' who were white men who had blacked up.
Mayhew did meet a real Negro, though - an ex-sailor who had lost his legs, and worked as a crossing sweeper or, when he couldn't manage to do that, would beg while wearing his sailor's uniform.
He also met lots of Jews, engaged in a variety of trades. There was a lot of prejudice against them, but Mayhew found them selling 'foreign fruit' (such as oranges), or cheap jewellery, or second hand clothes, and sometimes ostrich feathers, cigars or looking glasses. He also found that they were being undercut in some street trading, especially mentioning oranges, by the Irish boys who had come over to London after the Irish Famine, because they were prepared to live in worse conditions than the Jewish boys were.
There were 'mudlarks' looking for anything that might have been washed up on the banks of the Thames, and men who went down the sewers looking for valuables and catching rats. Mayhew interviewed a little girl who worked as a crossing sweeper - sweeping the muck out of the way of people who wanted to cross the road - who was once given threepence for her trouble. So amazing was this amount to her that she declared "I should know that gentleman again." Other people went round with a bucket picking up dog dirt (or 'pure') which they then sold to the tanneries in Bermondsey for use in the leather tanning process.
Mayhew talked to the men who worked on the river, watermen and bargemen and steam-boat men, and the omnibus drivers and conductors (when an omnibus was horse-drawn), and the hackney cabdrivers, too.
The edition I have is abridged from three volumes down to one, so I've only got the edited highlights. Apparently there is a fourth volume which deals only with prostitutes, thieves, swindlers and beggars. It gives a vivid impression of what life was like on the streets of Victorian London, often in the words of the people being interviewed. I recommend it highly to anyone who's interested in Victorian history, and also anyone who wants to write about a fantasy city if they're going to take their characters into the poorer parts of town.