Right, well, what can I say about the Christmas two-parter?

Along with many others I have commented in the past about Russell T. Davies’ series endings, and how he’s seemed to rope in extra characters for sheer sentimentality, and not because they actually do anything to benefit the plot, and how there is a tendency for an ending where someone suddenly comes up with the idea with ten minutes to go, and the baddies manage to be defeated, and Doctor Who saves the universe again.

And having heard Jack Harkness, Martha Jones, Sarah Jane Smith, Rose Tyler, Jackie Tyler and Donna Noble were all due to feature in the final episodes, I had dire feelings of characters being shoe-horned in for sentimental reasons at the expense of the plot. And probably bloody Davros coming back too.

I had no objection to Wilfred Mott featuring as the Doctor’s companion; partly because I’ve enjoyed him as a character, and he brings a different dimension to the Doctor’s adventures — someone who at least thinks he’s older than the Doctor — and partly ‘cos, well, it’s Bernard, and you’ve gotta love Bernard, haven’t you?

The rest of this review may contain significant plot spoilers, so if you haven’t already seen it, you may wish to look away now…

Episode one saw the reintroduction of the Master, who was revitalised through some big secret ceremony by the cult who had supported him; his wife tried to spoil the ceremony and managed to put a bit of a spanner in the works, but basically the Master was back, and although he had gone blond and kept flashing into a skeletal figure and back again, was enormously hungry, and seemingly only had a matter of time until that body fell apart (and not for the first time), he was back.

Gloriously, full-on Master, now with extra insanity. John Simm’s portrayal of the Master — particularly over these two episodes — should be seen as definitive. The main problem with the Master in the old series (irrespective of how well Delgado or Ainley played the role) is that he was never properly fleshed out: you knew he was a contemporary of the Doctor’s, but never what had made him into the Master. With the backstory that started to be introduced in The Sound of Drums, the Master was becoming a much more rounded character, but still as marvellously megalomaniacal as before.

I wasn’t entirely sure about the crackling electricity bolts he could fire out of his hands, mind you. I always thought he was supposed to be a Time Lord, not a Sith Lord…

The Doctor’s and the Master’s destinies always seem somehow to be intertwined: to some extent they appear to define themselves as standing against the other, and the Doctor’s obvious admiration for the genius and general non-homicidal bits of the Master is obvious.

Also, it is worth noting that the Doctor and the Master don’t appear to have names, even when other Time Lords refer to them; this seems suggestive that the Doctor and the Master are something more than just individual Time Lords; they are almost a Time Lord archetype, some sort of primal Time Lord force personified, perhaps. Hints of the Cartmel Masterplan leaking through, after all this time?

But it can’t be ignored that Part One took quite a long time to build; that the Naismiths seemed to be being built up to be quite a sinister oligarch-and-daughter pairing who could pose a threat in future only to be dismissed once he’s served his purpose in the plot, and that the spiky-headed aliens again seemed to be there more as a useful plot device than for any real reason of their own.

But if my main problem with Part One was the slow build, there was certainly enough to keep you occupied while you waited for things to actually happen: some little amusements with June Whitfield reflecting on her past as a provocative young minx — and rather suggesting that it was only the ‘young’ bit which had changed; the whole bit where Wilf was using Fogeyscope (his collection of pensioner mates) to track down the Doctor, and of course the Master.

The Immortality Gate was originally designed to convey immortality on Abigail Naismith, but what Naismith Senior didn’t seem to be aware of was that it was not set to work on the individual within the field but on a planetary setting (bit of a miss this, how could he have worked out it could be used to convey immortality but not on who?). And of course, he got the Master to fix it, which meant that it didn’t do exactly what he’d wanted.

Instead, everyone on earth got turned into the Master, which meant no doubt that John Simm had to get dressed up in a lot of different sets of clothes for filming, as there’s presumably a limit to what you can do effectively with CGI (I wonder if he got paid at six billion times his normal rate, given that he theoretically appeared six billion times?).

So, with the Earth full of Masters (not so much clones, as they seemed to be willing to defer to the original Master — more of a Queen Bee affair?) there was only Donna Noble, Wilfred Mott, the Doctor, and a pair of aliens left to somehow try to resist the Master’s plan.

And that was the end of Episode one, although we knew the Time Lords would feature in the second…

If Episode One had been mostly building to the point where there was an Earthful of Masters, Episode Two was about the Time Lords seeking to return from inside the time-lock where they had been placed by the Doctor, along with the Daleks and others, at the height of the Time War. They had seeded a way to communicate with the Master because it was they who had planted the sound of drums in his head as a child.

So the Master was calling the Time Lords back (normally, you’d think a good thing, but the Doctor explained that the Time Lords from the time of the Time War weren’t Time Lords as he would prefer to remember them, suggesting that they were ruthless and warlike, and they had to be stopped — and he would take a life if necessary to stop them.

The Final Showdown — the Doctor caught in the middle between the Master and the Time Lords and knowing his final act could be to kill one of them — Dalton’s Time Lord President, or Simm’s Master. In the end though, he found himself unable to shoot either and got the Master to dive out of the way to shoot his machine, breaking the Master template on all other earth-beings by destroying the machine, rather than the Master.

Despite having turned him into their tool, and messing up pretty much his entire life by implanting him with the sound of drums, it turned out that now he was a bit messed up and insane, the Time Lord Council didn’t want anything to do with him, which made him a little cross. He then returned the favour to the Doctor — after all this time, were they finally coming to understand one another — and got the Doctor to dive out of the way so he could electrozap the Time Lord president.

Little aside about President Dalton here: the Doctor referred to him as Rassilon at one point, which would seem to suggest that he is an ancient and powerful mysterious figure from very early in Time Lord history (who was immortal, but seemingly sleeping in a stone form when encountered in The Five Doctors). It’s interesting that he was brought back as when encountered before he always had a certain menace about him, so if anyone could lead the Time Lords into a bloody war which would change them, I’d imagine he would be the chap. But with the Doctor being the other standing against him, and previously against Omega, it’s a bit more Cartmel Masterplan leaking out of the time lock…

With a zapped Pres, and a broken machine, the Time Lords didn’t return, and Gallifrey didn’t land on earth, so everyone was saved. Not entirely sure where the Master went, mind you. Was he just “dead”, did he follow the Time Lords into the time-lock, or did everyone just forget about him? Never mind, I’m sure he’ll tell us next time (hint: please get John Simm to agree to take on the role at least once every two or three years).

The only problem was Wilf. Going back into Naismith’s lab to rescue the Doctor, he ended up rescuing someone else at the expense of trapping himself inside a containment area. And when all the baddies were gone, he knocked on the wall to ask the Doctor to let him out. He knocked … four times.

So in order to save Wilf, the Doctor had to go and let Wilf out and wait in the containment area while the nuclear loop — or whatever it was called — blew up and fired a big lot of radioactivity into his body. Thus the David Tennant era was to end.

But it didn’t end right there: first he had time to pop along and visit various characters he’d encountered before: Jack Harkness — who he set up with Midshipman Frame from Voyage of the Damned — Martha Jones, who was by now married to Mickey Smith and fighting as a mercenary against the Sontarans (presumably for the Rutans? — also no idea whether this was supposed to be in Mickey’s parallel world or the ‘real’ one), called in to see Donna Noble finally get married, met the grand-daughter of the woman he was going to marry in Family of Blood, and finally bumped into Rose Tyler, three months before he first met her in Eccleston guise.

Then he turned into Matt Smith.

So we had a good ten to twenty minutes of extra free sentimentality, the loss of which would not have damaged the story in any way. However, and I have to give full credit to Russell for doing this, unlike Journey’s End where characters seemed shoe-horned in for the final encounter, he kept them out of the main thread of the story, so they didn’t interfere, and certainly didn’t damage the story. They were just there so the Tennant Doctor could say goodbye in his own way.

And I don’t think anyone good begrudge the Doctor a few goodbyes first. In my mind, this is the best series finale yet: there was no sleight-of-hand about the ending — we knew about the Master, we knew about the Master’s machine, we knew about the Master’s jedi electricity bolts — and the whole thing was nicely sewn together (and combined with fine performances from the cast).

If that is to be the last Russell ever writes for Who, or Tennant ever appears in, they can feel very proud of the way they’ve bowed out. But maybe a Three or Five Doctors style reunion would be interesting at some point…

So Moffatt and Smith have a lot to live up to when they appear in Spring. But the taster of their series that I saw has already left me wanting more. And so it goes:

Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!

And this is a shame, because one of the things he does do well — extremely well — is to write a compellingly and captivatingly on evolution. I know this from having read his other books (The Blind Watchmaker, The Extended Phenotype et al), and this is what made me pick up his latest — The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.

Before I start on the book, I’m going to expand on why it’s a shame. It’s a shame because his attitude towards religion will cause some religious people to see him as the enemy and not want to read it. Indeed, when I was reading this book on the bus, I had someone actually say to me “I used to really like him before he went off on one about religion; he’s a bit of a nutjob in that respect, isn’t he?”.

And it’s that perception which will probably make some religious people unwilling to pick up this book. And that really is a shame; if you have any doubts over the truth of evolution, you ought to pick up this book. What Dawkins does well in this book is to put the question of religion to one side (he makes it clear he’s an atheist, but readily admits that’s an argument for elsewhere) and sets out here to make a case for one thing, and one thing only — evolution.

And he does it extremely well…

There is a note in the first chapter where he speaks of Emmanuel College in Gateshead. This place is very close to me (some of my relatives went there), but what Dawkins — along with a group of bishops — wrote a letter about was to complain about the way evolution was taught there as a “theory”.

Yes, it is a theory. But Dawkins goes some way to identify the differences between accepted scientific theory, and the idea strung together by the man in the street which he brands as his “theory” about the Kennedy assassination. Sadly, he missed the chance to use my favourite argument: if you don’t accept scientific theory, why not treat all forms of “gravitational theory*” with the same disrespect. And, to show I’m scrupulously fair about this, if you can float about, unencumbered by gravity, I might even concede the point.

*for the physics nerds, yes, I know it’s part of general relativity.

Moving on from my rant about Dawkins probably having already alienated the people who should be reading this book, I’m going to move onto the evidence itself. He provides evidence not only for evolution (though that is the central aim), but also delves into plate tectonics, radioactive dating and radioactive decay, to provide the evidence that the world is not 10,000 years old. No, we’re talking billions.

He lists ways evolution could have been proved wrong (but wasn’t); predictions made which were found to be true, demolishes arguments about ‘missing links’ and so on. Every chapter provides a different angle of attack, different sets of evidence all laid out neatly, all supporting evolution.

As an hardline agnostic myself, I find something quite beautiful in the concept that a creator could define a mechanism as simple and as capable of producing such seemingly miraculous change as natural selection: I don’t see that there needed to be a creator, but if there was, natural selection for me would add to the beauty of creation rather than detract from it — and you can add stuff like plate tectonics to that list too.

Unfortunately, he can’t quite resist attacking people: instead of suggesting that people who have drawn a different conclusion are mistaken, or haven’t considered all the relevant evidence — maybe haven’t been taught the relevant information, he takes a much harsher stance:

…those who think that the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversityThe Greatest Show On Earth, p85

…yes, they are obviously wrong, but only a sub-set of the people who believe that will have had Dawkins’ level of education, training and understanding in science; only a sub-set will deliberately have turned their back on the evidence; others may simply not be aware of it, and Dawkins does them an injustice here.

Of course, if any of those people were reading, and have managed to avoid throwing the book down in disgust at being insulted, he then goes on to provide the evidence that the earth is simply not that new.

But, to give him credit (at least in comparison to some of his works), this sort of thing is kept to a minimum, and the tale of evolution is told, explained, and expanded on, including one of my own personal favourites — that of the Octopus eye and convergent evolution (want to know why the octopus eye has evolved without the major design flaw ours have? read the book…)

One of his passages on species is perhaps the most instructive for those who do not have a biological background. Non-scientists have raised questions before (apparently) about “I’ll believe in evolution when I see a monkey give birth to a human”. Obviously this is a load of rubbish but Dawkins explains with crystal clarity why evolution would specifically not expect this to occur:

…the common ancestor would have looked a lot more like a monkey than a man, and we would indeed have called it a monkey if we had met it, some 25 million years ago. But even though humans evolved from an ancestor that we could sensibly call a monkey, no animal gives birth to an instant new species, or at least not one as different from itself as a man is from a monkey, or even from a chimpanzee. That isn’t what evolution is about. Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact; it has to be gradual…The Greatest Show On Earth, p155

It’s only later when scientists start poring over fossils that they make the decision “this specimen looks more like group B, so we’ll classify it as group B” simply because each specimen must sit somewhere. While he’s on, he also takes the time to take potshots at some other common misconceptions about evolution (that it is a ‘ladder’ with animals gradually and inexorably becoming more complex over time and so on).

If you have any concerns over whether or not evolution is fact, please do take the time to read this book, even if for no other reason than to prove you are not closed-minded. Even if you already do accept evolution as fact, it’s still a marvellous story, full of colourful examples and there are bound to be some stories in there relating to the ingenuity of nature — and the fact that while evolution and natural selection are (in my opinion at least) proved, there’s also some arguments showing where, if there had been a designer, you’d have expected him to do a lot better, as much of it appears to be a bodge job at best.

Dawkins has managed to rein in his hectoring fairly successfully, and in so doing, has produced a wonderful work, which ought to sit on everyone’s shelf.

It said: “special treat for customers of Amazon.co.uk – £40 naked wines voucher”. It also said “claim your voucher online or by telephone”; “choose your wines from our delicious range”; “next day delivery to your doorstep”, and the thing which I think is key “claim your £40 gift today”.

Note that use of the word gift. Note also that while the voucher says you can use your voucher to buy 12 bottles of wine for only £39.99, it does not say that you must; indeed you are specifically advised to “choose your wines from our delicious range”:

Note also that when you do go online, you then see this, again emphasising the freeness of the wine in question:

So that when you do go online, and you look to pick up your gift of free wine, it turns out that you have to pay a minimum of £79.99 to qualify for this, which means that you’ve got to pay forty quid in order to get eighty quid’s worth of wine. Now I don’t call this free (at best, it’s half price), and I don’t call it a gift.

Nowhere on the voucher does it mention this.

In my opinion (which obviously does not carry any legal status), I have been misled by this advertising. I have been led to believe I can receive a gift of free wine, and when I go to claim it, I find out that they are not prepared to offer me a free gift at all, unless I’m willing to part with forty quid.

I for one will not be using their service. Partly because it’s not necessarily a brilliant deal, partly because their “comments from customers” do not include any negative responses (and I know I put one in) so they appear to be trying to whitewash this, partly because I don’t know whether the wines are actually worth the prices they quote (there doesn’t appear to be any way of comparing their prices to anyone else’s), partly because there are some major accessibility problems with their site — missing alt text on rather key things such as image links, parts of the site not working without javascript, and so on — and obviously partly because I’m a little unhappy about their voucher.

So since Naked Wines wanted to offer me something for free, it would be churlish of me not to return the favour. So I will offer them something for free (and by free I do mean free) — my qualified endorsement. If you want to support a company which makes it more difficult for disabled people to use their site, who tell you that they are offering you a gift of free wine which turns out to basically only be a money-off offer where you’ve got to pay a minimum of forty quid, and who don’t give you an opportunity to compare their wine prices with anyone else, then I’d urge you to buy stuff from Naked Wines.

I’ll even offer them a site audit at 10% off, if they want to address the accessibility problems and other concerns… (mind you, the costs for this do start somewhat above the forty quid mark) …seems fair?

One of the things that the people behind the remarkably successful Football Manager series have learned is that when they bring out the new season edition, people will buy it. But it’s not just a case of people buying any old crap: it’s a case of people buying it because they have a history of producing the best football management sims out there, and so people have come to expect a high quality game.

I do know somewhat of which I speak — I have been playing the game since its earliest incarnation as “Championship Manager” (although I would suggest that they weren’t really producing the best quality football sims until the next version — Championship Manager ’93. So in that respect I’ve been playing the football sims these people have produced for 16 years.

Bloody hell. When I think of all the time I’ve spent doing that, I could have actually done something constructive with my life.

Of course, that’s only if you assume that building a quality Newcastle team capable of winning trophy after trophy (even if it is only on my PC) is not something constructive. And for the rest of you afficionados, you might be content with my brief review: “yeah, it’s good” — before rushing off to order Football Manager 2010 for yourself.

If, however, you’d like to know what I thought of it first, then read on…

Well, all I can say, having played as Newcastle is that the realism is stunning. Not only will Ashley not allow the manager any money at all for transfers, he expects you to finish top of the Championship with a paper-thin squad. If that wasn’t realistic enough, my Newcastle side started off the season with a 1-1 draw away to West Brom, followed by 3-0, 2-0 and 2-0 wins against Reading, Sheffield Wednesday and Crystal Palace.

As usual, they’ve tinkered with the screen layout slightly, and have the tooltip affair which may be helpful to any beginners, but anyone who has played the game before might as well just switch this off — you should find your way around without any problems.

The 3D match engine hasn’t changed much (I still prefer the ‘elevated’ view) but one key thing has changed: rather than just being a pitch with advertising hoardings around, you now have a view of the stadium and the crowds. In this example, you can see Peter Lovenkrands crossing for Nile Ranger to score a diving header and get Newcastle off to a good start in the pre-season friendly against Falkirk.

Depending on the stadium, and the team, you’ll see different actions (fans cheering a goal and so on) as well as stadiums which are virtually full to those which are half-empty. It’s a nice touch.

Not so useful however is the “back room analysis”. The idea behind it is quite useful: it compares your team against the team you are about to play, tells you where relative advantages and disavantages lie — in this example I have a height, strength, speed, aggression and determination advantage over the team I’m about to play. Less useful is what you can do with this advice: you are simply directed to visit your tactics screen whereas some suggestions by your assistant or coaches would be more useful “try to play a controlling game; we don’t want these to hit us on the break” or similar.

Secondly, there’s the goal analysis. This simply tells you which 15-minute segment of the game the opposition have scored and conceded the most goals in. Really, what is the point of this? Without any further information (“team tires easily, likely to concede goals at the end particularly against fresh, fast players”) it’s just bonkers statistics. It would be fine for the media to quote it, but why on earth would my assistant manager feel it necessary to bring this to my attention unless he had something useful to add?

However, despite my quibble over this “backroom analysis” stuff, I do have to say that I very much like what they have done with the tactics screen. Instead of the previous thing, where you have arrows drawn forward and backward all over the shop to tell people to drop back (or run forward) depending on who has position, you know assign players to a particular role associated with the part of the pitch they are in.

For example, for a person playing right-hand side of midfield, you’ve got winger, right-midfielder or defensive winger: for your centre halves, you can decide who is a ball-playing central defender providing more deep-lying cover, and who is your stopper; there’s roles such as ‘ball winning midfielder’, ‘box to box midfielder’ and so on, and the number of different roles available to your centre forwards really need to be seen to be believed…

Of course, getting all of this right will improve how effectively your team plays, and might even result in you scraping past Coventry on a wet wednesday evening at the Ricoh. I suspect that this is one of these things that will eat up even more of your time as you attempt to tweak your formations and methods of play until it is just so.

So be warned: this game will take over your life; eat into all of your free time, and no doubt put a strain on your ability to carry on a meaningful relationship with anyone but your computer. But if you’ve played Football Manager before, that’s just the way (ah-ha ah-ha) you like it.

Get the game, get playing, and I’ll see you on the other side.

One of the things I discovered about High School Musical 3 was that I had no interest or sympathy whatsoever in any of the characters, and spent most of the film wishing they would contract some horribly disfiguring contagion and be wiped out by machine-gunners in some sort of protective suits. When it became apparent that this was not going to happen, I spent some time counting. I counted (well, part counting, part calculating) the number of seats in the screen, the number of tiles in the ceiling and also the number of pieces of ceiling furniture (sprinklers, light settings and so on). If it hadn’t been obvious that we were approaching the end of the film I may have considered clawing my own eyes out.

I’m not that cynical about kids films: I quite enjoyed Steve Martin’s The Pink Panther 2 (much to my own surprise), got quite a nostalgia kick out of Alvin and the Chipmunks and could pretty much tolerate Madagascar 2, so it’s not like I’m a complete grump about them.

But I had specifically been looking forward to Up, so this was actually carrying the ‘weight of expectation’ tag unlike the others. Would it live up to it?

For those of you who have not seen the advert at the cinema, it tells the story of Carl Fredricksen, who is a 78-year old retiree, who just happens to attach a lot of large helium balloons to the top of his house, thus sending him flying up high into the sky as he sets off house-ballooning to South America. Only he brings Russell along with him by mistake; an 8 year old ‘wilderness scout’ (think boy scout) who had climbed under Carl’s porch looking for something just as the house lifted off…

And that was about all I knew of the film before I went to see it.

Let’s start with what is wrong with the film… this is bound to upset some people, both the Pixar fanboi element and those people who aren’t in that category but simply loved the film. The film seemed a little on the short side to me, but it apparently clocks in at 96 minutes, so maybe it’s just that the storyline is pretty linear that gives it that impression. But criticising a kids film for being a little linear is a rather weak criticism: it wouldn’t work as a kids film if it was looking in depth at the political and socio-economic problems facing a 78-year old widower, so maybe I’ll let them off with that.

The only faults I can find from my point of view — being a little over-heavy on the ‘be nice’ message, the villain being a touch too ‘twirling moustaches’, the message being slightly formulaic, aren’t really inappropriate for a kids film, so I’ll just have to move on to what I liked about it…

Well, to start with, I liked the little animated short Partly Cloudy that they showed with it.

As for the film itself, there’s a sequence at the start showing Carl as a little boy, fascinated by stories of an explorer, meeting a girl with similar tastes, and then as they grow, a relationship developing between them, and them getting married, and both wanting to visit a waterfall called Paradise Falls in Venezuela, them being unable to have children, getting older, retiring, still being very much in love and the suddenly — and like most of this intro sequence done with an absolute minimum of dialogue — we see Carl’s Ellie suddenly become ill, him seeing her in hospital, and then suddenly him sat alone at a funeral service.

It might be laid on thick, but it manages to avoid being too tacky or schmaltzy, and for the first of two occasions in the film (the other being at the end — but I’ll leave that one for you to find) it brought a tear to my usually remarkably cynical eye.

Of course, while it was patently obvious to all adults watching what had happened, there was a large proportion of kids in the audience and I heard one ask his Dad in the row in front…

Dad, why isn’t that lady in the house any more?

…but fortunately either my kids managed to grasp what had happened (or possibly didn’t notice/care) so I didn’t have any questions to face myself…

Basically, and without giving too much away, Carl plans to take his house to Paradise Falls, where he and his wife had always imagined having a house, only to find Russell as an unexpected (and cheerfully enthusiastic) companion. And, as you can imagine, they get into scrapes and adventures. In the course of events and so on.

What I can say is that I found Carl to be a fun character. It’s not that he’s unbelievable as a 78-year old widower; he is totally believable in that role, it’s just the grumpiness and cantankerousness that pretty much make you identify with him… what? okay, well maybe that’s just me… and there’s some lovely little touches, such as the tennis balls he uses on his four-pronged walking stick thingy, or the fact that (if I’m recalling correctly) he starts out clean-shaven but towards the end of the adventure you can see a white stubble flecking his chin.

He obviously develops considerably more energy as the film progresses: at the start he’s using a stairlift to get up and down his stairs; near the end, after hiking across a high plateau, he’s capable of dragging wardrobes around and getting into a sword fight. But again, this fits: it’s been Carl’s (and Ellie’s) ambition to make it to Paradise Falls so it just seems to be perfectly reasonable that he’s feeling a bit more sprightly as he gets near it.

If you liked Bee Movie, and High School Musical 3, you’ll love this. Mostly because it’s apparent that you’ll enjoy any hogwash projected onto a screen in front of you while you autoconsume popcorn. But even if you didn’t like Bee Move and High School Musical 3, you’ve got a pretty good chance of loving this, because if you accept it for what it is — a kids film — and don’t lay on unrealistic expectations, then you will bloody well enjoy it.

And it is a very, very good example of the ‘kids film’ genre. Don’t expect it to be too complex, or clever. Don’t expect much (anything) in the way of plot twists. Do just enjoy the action, the dialogue and the humour. Up is a film which stands as an excellent example of the kids film genre, and it’s not too shabby when considered as just a plain “film” either.

Do go and see it.

We’ve got two novelisations of real events: first up we’ve got John Boyne’s Mutiny on the Bounty, and then I’ll take you through Robert Ryan’s Death on the Ice.

Mutiny on the Bounty

I picked up Mutiny on the Bounty because I had heard enough people banging on about how John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was so utterly brilliant that I thought Boyne might well be worth reading but at the same time I was fighting against the fact that I had to feel I’m being pushed towards a particular book, so picking up a different John Boyne seemed like the ideal taster.

Mutiny on the Bounty (let’s call it MotB from now on) tells the story of the (fictional) pickpocket John Jacob Turnstile, how he is caught, and he is given the choice to avoid a jail term by serving as the captain’s valet on a sea voyage. The captain is of course Lieutenant William Bligh (not actually a captain; only nominally termed so as he was given command of the ship) and the ship is HMS Bounty.

You are therefore very much aware that at some point there is going to be a mutiny, with a certain chap called Fletcher Christian being involved — but that foreknowledge didn’t stop the film Titanic being a commercial success — and it didn’t stop me enjoying this book either.

What I found particularly interesting and well done about the book was the apparent authenticity. I say apparent, because to be honest with you, I wasn’t really starting with a great degree of knowledge about how ships were run in the British Navy in the 18th Century, but I can say that it certainly appears to be well researched and put together. I was reminded of a lot of facts about the journey that I had long-forgotten, although the fact and novel are woven together well and it’s difficult without checking to work out which is novelisation, and which is historical fact.

The crew are certainly earthy with earthy appetites (John Jacob Turnstile seems to spend a fair bit of his time “at tug”) and a leery anticipation of the female natives on Otaheite (the name they used for Tahiti), and are also a superstitious lot, with a particular ceremony which they perform when crossing the equator which involves Turnstile (or Turnip as he is inevitably nicknamed) a little more centrally than perhaps he would have liked.

You quickly come to like Turnstile and hope that he comes out of the story well. As he is the narrator, it’s kind of important that you identify with him and like him, and John Boyne does this extremely well. Most of the other characters you are a bit more ambivalent about — Fletcher Christian is something of a scented fop, and while William Bligh seems to be almost the opposite of a disciplinarian (in common with more modern tellings of his tale, as opposed to the cruel man frequently portrayed in film) he’s also portrayed as very human with his own faults.

Obviously, just after they leave Otaheite, Fletcher Christian and some others (not much over half of the ship, mind you, I’d assumed it was more) m- m- no, it’s no good, the word has gone. Something beginning with M. Anyway, they do the M-word and then dump Bligh and those who remained loyal to him in a little launch, in what must have been to most intents and purposes, murder. The likelihood of Bligh and around twenty others surviving a journey of several thousand miles with virtually no food and no instruments must be around nil.

However, navigation was certainly not one of Bligh’s faults, and the final part of the book tells the story of the voyage of the launch, over 4,000 miles and 47 days, during which only one life was lost — and that to natives of Tofua, rather than poor seamanship. It’s an extraordinary story, not so much of courage (it’s not like they had much choice after being dumped in the launch) but of excellent seamanship and navigation, and survival against the odds.

It’s also made me a lot more interested in the actual historical events, and, even if we can’t know for sure what kind of a man William Bligh was, or what prompted Christian and the others to mutiny, there is still a lot of information which can be determined, and I’d suggest the Pitcairn Islands Study Center might be an ideal place to start.

Death on the Ice

In contrast to survival against the odds, the next book tells more a tale of those who, even when the odds were heavily stacked against them by fate, turned out not to survive in the end. Again, this is a novelisation of a factual event, so even without the title Death on the Ice, I had something of an inkling that Robert Falcon Scott, Lawrence Oates, and at least a couple of others, would not be returning home.

The book starts considerably later — and earlier — than expected, with the meta-story being that in 1917, Norwegian Tryggve Gran (part of the ill-fated Terra Nova expedition — but not one of those who made that last fatal polar journey) is fighting for the British as a pilot in World War I (posing as Canadian ‘Teddy Grant’ to be allowed to fight) when he is approached by Scott’s widow who knows his identity and wants him to help her finish a book on the expedition.

We then flash back to 1900, where Scott is preparing for the Discovery expedition, and meanwhile Oates is serving in the army. The first section of the book takes us through the discovery expedition, increasing tensions between Scott and Shackleton, and Oates’ military career, leading up to a Boer bullet striking his thigh, shattering the bone, and eventually leading to his left leg ending up an inch shorter than the right.

Again, it’s tempting to read the novelisation as fact, particularly since many factual things — the Discovery expedition, Scott’s marriage, Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition, Scott and Amundsen’s ‘race’ to the pole are very soundly based in historical fact, and excerpts from Scott’s letters are used in places, but obviously the dialogue is pretty much mostly invented, and while the idea of stresses and strains within the group are supported by historical evidence (letters from Scott and Oates), it’s impossible to know to what extent the writers were simply ‘letting off steam’ — as there are certainly allusions to this — and to what extent it reflects the actuality of their emotions.

The last section of the book, where Scott, Wilson, Oates, Bowers and Edgar Evans strike out for the pole is well written but can’t help but to make for slightly gloomy reading: you know they won’t be first to the pole, and what is worse, you know they won’t make it home again. Obviously some of the reasons for the failure are guessed at, but again where possible they are based on at least one historical source, such as Scott’s diaries or letters.

In the book Oates’ sacrifice — the famous “I am just going outside and may be some time” — is prompted by the fact that his feet are gangrenous and dying beneath him. This sacrifice — to allow his companions to move on without him is no less noble for the fact that by then he knew he wouldn’t be able to make it back anyway., and he knows that he at least will not be able to make it back anyway, but his companions might have a chance to move on without him. However even here, where it seems most speculative, there is still a great deal of historical fact: Scott had recorded eleven days earlier that Oates’ feet were already in a wretched state, and also that he went outside without his boots, presumably because he couldn’t face the pain involved in putting them on again.

The remaining three died only eleven miles short of the food depot they needed to reach, and fully aware of that fact — it was simply that their reserves of energy were so low, and fuel and food nil, that they did not have the energy to fight on any further, and that any potential chance was slammed shut by a blizzard which prevented them leaving their camp after the 19th of March, and was still apparently whirling outside the tent on the 29th, when Scott made his final diary entry.

Since the 21st we have had a continuous gale from W.S.W. and S.W. We had fuel to make two cups of tea apiece and bare food for two days on the 20th. Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker of course, and the end cannot be far.

It seems a pity but I do not think I can write moreRobert Falcon Scott, 29th March 1912

Robert Ryan’s book is quite a remarkable story — even though in reality much of it is not his story, it’s the story of the Terra Nova expedition, but he’s still done a remarkable job of telling it, and even takes the time at the end to explain where he’s taken liberties with actual events, telling you about what the survivors ended up doing and demonstrating that Scott did seemingly put together quite a remarkable team.

The story is not a whitewash though: there is certainly evidence that different members of the expedition made mistakes at different times, including Scott, which contributed to their eventual demise. However I think it’s probably unfair to go around apportioning any blame as any one (or two) of the mistakes would probably not have been crucial in of themselves: it’s the cumulative effect, coupled with some bad luck (particularly with the weather and the lack of fuel at the depots) that proved fatal.

Again, as with John Boyne’s book, but in this case even more so, I feel that I really ought to read more of Scott’s polar expedition. I feel privileged to have read Scott’s story — and I am deeply grateful to Robert Ryan for that, as Scott had never particularly been someone I was that interested in, so without coming across a work of fiction, I’d probably have never picked it up.

Now, in addition to having a far better understanding of what actually happened out there, I have a list of other books relating to the expedition, thoughtfully provided by Ryan at the end of this as his sources, but also obviously as a useful reading list for those wanting to find out more about the Terra Nova expedition or the characters that peopled it.

It’s also quite a simple task to find a few sources on the web for those who are interested. Apart from the obvious (wikipedia), you might want to look at Cool Antarctica or South-Pole.com. And it’s worth looking up the quite remarkable story of Tryggve Gran also. You might also want to consider picking up Robert Ryan’s book…

Dating back to 1983, the The Black Guardian Trilogy has just been released on DVD. It features three stories from the Peter Davison era of Doctor Who, including the companions Tegan, Nyssa and of course Turlough.

For me, Peter Davison was my childhood Doctor Who as I remember it: I was too young to properly appreciate the Tom Baker era (although later, and with repeats I did come, like so many others to install him as my favourite) and so for me Peter Davison was the benchmark against which all of the other Doctors were compared, much like David Tennant will be the benchmark for many of today’s kids.

I think one of the things that particularly worked during the Davison-era Who was his companions: Tegan, Adric, Nyssa, Turlough were all interesting characters who bounced off one another well, although I personally couldn’t be doing with Peri.

The Black Guardian trilogy opens with Mawdryn Undead, in which the TARDIS gets stuck on a starliner, and the Doctor needs to use the ship’s transmat beam to head down to earth, leaving Tegan and Nyssa on the TARDIS while he sorts it out. He beams down and encounters an old mate — Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, now teaching at a school, as well as Turlough, a slightly odd and not entirely well-behaved pupil at the school.

Oddly enough, the Brigadier can’t remember the Doctor at all … but does remember encountering a Tegan Jovanka six years earlier, in 1977. The Doctor and the Brigadier have to try to piece together the Brig’s missing memory in order to get back to Nyssa and Tegan, and while Turlough goes with them to ‘help’, in reality he has been contacted by the Black Guardian and ordered to kill the Doctor.

It’s an enjoyable story — I’ve always been a great fan of the Brigadier, and his appearance in both 1977 version and 1983 versions together is rather integral to the plot. Valentine Dyall, with his very distinctive voice is excellent as the Black Guardian, and it’s always nice to have a companion that you don’t entirely trust…

There’s also some interesting extras on the DVD including an interview with the Brigadier (not Nicholas Courtney the actor, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, the character) which is a little different and quite an interesting retrospective, although it does rather remind you of the disappointment that then-Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart’s first screen appearance (in the Troughton plus Yeti serial The Web of Fear) is one of the serials butchered and deleted by the BBC.

After Mawdryn Undead, we have Terminus, where after the TARDIS is sabotaged by Turlough on the instructions of the Black Guardian, it is forced to make on an emergency landing on a ship that docks with a deserted space station. Only it turns out that the station isn’t quite as deserted as they had first thought…

…it is in fact a plague ship where the inhabitants have a leprosy-like disease and are basically left to die, although it is purported that some can be cured. The TARDIS crew have to somehow find their way off the ship without being infected, only to encounter the station guards — the Vanir — who don’t want to let potential sources of infection leave.

But there are further questions to be answered — how come the space station Terminus is at the exact centre of the universe? Has Nyssa contracted Lazar’s Disease? And who, or what, is the Garm?

While the stakes seem considerably higher in this one — as opposed to simply the Doctor’s life, it turns out that indeed the future of the entire universe rests upon the actions of the Doctor — it is also less polished and possibly a little more disjointed than Mawdryn Undead (although this can possibly be explained by the production problems which are detailed if you view the title with the information text on).

Terminus is however notable for being the last story to feature Sarah Sutton’s character Nyssa of Traken, whom I had always liked as a companion (although not as much as the Brigadier, who unfortunately does not feature in either Terminus or the final Black Guardian story Enlightenment).

Enlightenment returns to the highs of Mawdryn Undead although it is a very different story. While Mawdryn Undead is a contemporary story (set mostly in 1977 and 1983), and Terminus very much a ‘future’ story, Enlightenment has a touch of period drama to it, even though it too is set in the future.

The Doctor and his companions find themselves on an Edwardian sailing ship, taking part in an interplanetary race against other period ships — including a pirate ship captained by Captain Wrack (who you might recognise as Nurse Gladys Emanuel from Open All Hours). The ships officers are beings from outside of time called the Eternals who refer to everyone else as Ephemerals.

The race is to be the first to reach The Enlighteners and gain enlightenment as their prize, with the pirate Buccaneer resorting to various underhand methods to ensure that they win (although this does expose a minor plot hole — it appears that the Buccaneer is by far the fastest ship, easily capable of outstripping all the others — so one does wonder why the need for sabotage…!).

Turlough’s character gets the opportunity to develop a little more as he chafes under the yoke of the Black Guardian — who isn’t exactly pleased that the Doctor is still alive — and instead of looking to obey the Black Guardian tends to spend his time looking for a way to escape from his service. The mood of this story is excellent, and in particular the sets and costumes need a great degree of credit, adding a considerable amount of authenticity to the episode.

You also get to see Peter Davison replace the stick of celery pinned to his lapel for a fresher one, but I’d have to describe that as a quirky little ‘touch’ rather than any sort of significant plot element.

The three stories hang together very well, with the best two setting up and finishing off the story, and while in contrast Terminus is not up to the same high standard, it’s not a bad story as such (some great costumes in there as well). If you’ve been away from Doctor Who for a while, or you’ve not seen any of the old-era Doctor Who, this boxed set might be an ideal jumping-in point…

First, it was clean. There was a regular maid service — the rooms were cleaned every day (except Sunday), and every other day you got fresh towels. Can’t fault the hotel in that regard. Our room was maybe a little small, but that’s because it was basically a double room with a set of bunkbeds put in for the kids. So maybe a little cramped, but that was because the room was at maximum occupancy; again nothing to complain about.

Facilities at the hotel were fine: internet access was available downstairs if you booked it (but as there were plenty of internet cafes/bars elsewhere I didn’t), the main bar/restaurant area had a couple of TVs in where they had Sky Sports news on for most of the time (although they did also switch it over for specific things such as The Ashes and the Newcastle game on BBC1). There were a couple of pool tables, and a very nice pool.

The pool wasn’t massive, but I wouldn’t say it was too small either; when the pool was quiet you could get a decent bit of swimming done, swimming lengths. The pool was open from 09:30 through to 19:30 (basically, after breakfast finishes through to when they start serving the evening meal) and it was perfectly pleasant. There was also a slide for the kids to go into the pool — you can see SWP just coming off the end of the slide in the photo.

Drinks were expensive in the hotel: taking ‘the large diet coke’ as a standard measure, you’d pay €2.90 in the hotel or between €2 and €2.50 elsewhere, but if you did as we did and just had bottled water with your meals, this kept the costs low. Air conditioning, fridges and safety deposit boxes were all available at an extra cost (but as we were told this in the brochure this wasn’t a surprise) — €7 a night for aircon, €5 for a fridge, and €7 a week for the safety deposit boxes.

We did find these to be worth it: it was lovely to get back to the room and be able to have 1.5l of ice-cold diet coke waiting for us (costing €1.95 from the supermarket across the road), and without the air conditioning I don’t think we’d have been able to sleep, but we had it set to bring the temparature down to 16°C which was quite pleasantly cool. One thing I would warn you about though is that Corfu is is certainly a mosquito area: we got quite badly bitten for the first couple of days until we stocked up on repellent and got some more repellent in the room.

The breakfast wasn’t up to much — a couple of slices of toast with jam, ham and cheese — although you could buy an English breakfast for €3.90 (€5 if you weren’t booked in for breakfast). As you can get larger English breakfasts elsewhere in the resort for less, I’d not particularly recommend going for the B&B route. However, if you go half-board as we did, then you get quite a selection of nice meals in the evening — every night you get a choice of two or three starters, two main courses, and two or three desserts. The main courses were also variable — in the 13 nights we ate at the hotel I think I had 11 different main courses — pork kebab, moussaka, swordfish and so on…

The chef, surprisingly enough is a chap from Vancouver called John (Janni) who seemed a pleasant enough bloke and whom I got chatting to one evening. Evenings also bring with them entertainment — a quiz where you win some free drink for your room (if you win it — we didn’t), bingo (no idea, didn’t try it) and of course karaoke. You have to watch out for Nikos though… he does have a tendency to think he’s ZZ Top with his karaoke standard being Sharp Dressed Man

(although to be honest, I’ve got no right to complain, having been talked into ‘performing’ The Kinks’ Dedicated Follower of Fashion twice)

In short, lovely holiday, hotel more expensive than elsewhere for drinks (but nothing unusual in that), a ten minute walk from the beach (maybe 15 with small children), pleasant friendly staff, and I’d happily go back either half-board again or self-catering (as I don’t really think what you get for breakfast makes the B&B aspect worthwhile). I also suspect you can probably get a better deal if you contact the Roda Oasis direct, but then the flip side of that is you obviously need to sort out your own flights and so on…

There comes a time in any holiday when pick up the obligatory holiday book and rifle through a few pages while you sit by the pool. Well, you do that if you’re not me, anyway. I tend not to read by the pool for one simple reason: you won’t find me by the pool. I’ll either be in the pool, or I’ll be somewhere else. I get in, swim for an hour or so, wander back to the hotel room, shower, and then read a bit more.

In fact, I took a thumping 4,036 pages worth of books with me to read whilst on holiday (although I only made it through around 3,200 of them). The first book to be carried around me, which is now indelibly imprinted with the smell of insect repellent — after a bottle leaking incident which ruined my phone — was Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid, a book about the history of football tactics.

Correction: make that the book about the history of football tactics. I’m very aware that even in writing this review that I cannot adequately do justice to the book: it is simply better than I can express, and conveys much more information than I can hope to iillustrate with a couple of quotes. What I can say is that if you are interested in the development of football — why teams use the tactics they do, as well as how they evolved, then you simply must read this book.

Even if, like Ricky Tomlinson’s Mike Bassett, the only formation for you is four-four-bloody-two, this will still tell you how it got there.

It takes us back to the start of formalised football: when other than the goalkeeper you basically have much of the rest of the players running around after the ball trying to score — and introduces the very first pyramid system to us, the 2-3-5.

This may seem alien to people unfamiliar with older football tactics (wot? only two defenders?) but it demonstrates beautifully where a lot of the British football terminology comes from: after having seen the diagrams, I’m familiar with what an ‘inside-right’ actually was…

And it isn’t just a story about tactics: it also provides colour to historical managers and players you may (or may not) have heard about. From Herbert Chapman’s development of the W-M formation (and the fact that the third defender dropped back from the previous position in central midfield) it explains the seeming peculiarity of British defences being made up of full backs and centre halves, and this is coupled with an abbreviated version of the ‘Herbert Chapman story’ — that prior to joining Arsenal he was actually banned from football for life, only for the FA to relent after a couple of years.

Nor is the story just about the British game: tactics from Russia, from Hungary, from France, from South America are scrutinised as well as a chapter on Italy’s Catenaccio. And it is in the development of these tactics that some little gems of stories and characters start to emerge: Béla Guttman probably deserves a book of his own but his quirkiness — and some unexpected success — lead to some delightful stories:

…when the time came to negotiate a new deal, he insisted on a huge bonus should Enschede win the league. As the club was struggling to avoid relegation out of the Eastern Division, the directors readily agreed. Their form promptly revived and, after they had narrowly missed out on the national championship, their chairman admitted that towards the end of the season he had gone to games praying his side would lose. Guttman’s bonus would have bankrupted them.Inverting the Pyramid, p97

There’s a chance to look at why the traditional numbering systems in the standards 4-2-4 tactic differ between England, Argentina and Uruguay — basically the three countries evolved their use of the tactic through different routes and with different players switching their positions.

Even the ‘long-ball’ games gets discussed with different variations and explanations — Graham Taylor’s effective ‘pressing with long range passing’ at Watford through to the ‘purer’ long ball of Wimbledon. There’s quite an informative look at the statistics which were used by Charles Hughes (although devised much earlier) who when he was at the FA insisted that the long ball game was the way forward for English football and set out recommending it.

Not only are the deficiencies of the long ball game ruthlessly dissected (although this is only fair: the deficiencies of every other tactic covered are ruthlessly dissected also) but points out that the statistics used to favour the long ball actually, if you look at them closely, show that moves of six or more passes are in fact more likely to lead to a goal than moves of five or fewer — at which point the kindest thing is possibly just to say that the people who used these stats to promote the long ball didn’t really understand statistics so well.

Influences on the likes of Sven-Göran Eriksson and Roy Hodgson are discussed, and there’s even time to acknowledge that the goal-poacher centre forward is now something of an anachronism in today’s game and of increasingly less use to the team (as illustrated all too painfully to me by Newcastle’s decline being mirrored by an increasingly ineffectual Michael Owen).

…Owen was highly critical of the then-England coach Kevin Keegan’s efforts to expand his repertoire in the build up to Euro 2000 but the reality may be that putting the ball in the back of the net is no longer sufficient — or, at least, not at the very highest level. [...] He appears a player left behind by the tactical evolution of the gameInverting the Pyramid, p349

Intriguingly on the following page there is an analysis of Manchester United — now Owen’s current team. It will be interesting to see therefore whether he is a success at Old Trafford — how he fits into Ferguson’s tactics, whether he can adapt his game long term (he certainly attempted this under Keegan at Newcastle, with a slightly deeper-lying role) and in short whether he makes a successful Manchester United stay as a goal poacher only.

Only time will tell, and only time will tell where the next evolutionary step in the development of football tactics will be, but it would appear that after taking us through 2-3-5, W-M, 4-2-4, 4-3-3, 3-5-2, many more — including of course 4-4-2 — that Jonathan Wilson suspects that the first steps are already being taken towards a 4-6-0 type of formation…

No, if you’ve noticed some interruption to the normal flow of spam hammering; if it seems that a few more spam comments have made their way through to the website proper than usual, this is because I have been on holiday for the last two weeks. Only because I’m a lovely considerate sort, I made sure that you lot have had plenty of posts to keep yourselves ticking over with in this intervening period.

I should however be back today. I might even be back by now, depending on what time the flight got in, whether it was delayed or what have you. However, I decided to prepare this post in advance also, because I thought after two weeks on holiday and four hours on a plane, I don’t think “quickly knocking up a blog post for today” was going to be top of my to-do list.

So instead, I’m going to tell you the story of the holiday preparation. Back in the days when I was in full-time paid employment, we decided to book a foreign holiday, as my wife and I had not made it outside the British Isles since our honeymoon in 2002. We had booked a trip to Rhodes in 2005, but this had to be cancelled owing to the fact we discovered we were having our second child and this would have necessitated flying at a point in time when it wasn’t particularly recommended to fly.

So some four years later, we tried again, and we went to book up a trip to the island that had been our honeymoon destination (as we both very much like the Greek islands). We found a lovely hotel, priced it out according to the brochure, and then went into the travel agents to book, only the “in the region of £2400″ that we had estimated from the brochure had turned into around £3400 by the time we made it to the travel agents, which wasn’t particularly helpful. Nor was the travel advisor in Thompsons particularly helpful either, suggesting that we should instead look for a kids club type of holiday, which wasn’t the sort of thing we were going for at all.

So we went to Thomas Cook with our budget, our destination, and the plan of approximately when we wanted to travel to see what they could do for us. They were remarkably helpful and we booked up with them at a place called the Roda Oasis Hotel, which was described as being good for families with young children.

It seemed nice enough on the holiday advisor type sites, so we were perfectly happy with the plan. Whether the holiday (and in particular the hotel) has lived up to expectations may be something else however, so I’ll tell you what the expectations are, so I can tell you how it fared against them when I get back…

My research is based on looking up the venue on various internet sites: holiday watchdog, where it averaged 7.5 out of 10. What I learned to expect based on this: it is a very nice hotel but there’s not much ‘free’ — although it has already told us in the brochure that aircon and a fridge cost more.

Trip advisor ranked it as the best hotel in Roda, where it averaged a mark of just over 4 out of 5. And some people were very keen to suggest that it wasn’t as money grabbing as others thought:

If you readsome reviews of this family run hotel, you would be left thinking that your money would be grabbed at every opportunity but this is definitely NOT the case. [...]The prices are slightly expensive however, this is true of corfu as a whole and due to the exchange rate more than anything else.‘EnglandBanker’ on TripAdvisor

Overall, Trip Advisor seemed to give the same general tone: most people had a fabulous holiday, but a few were unhappy suggesting that the hotel was more expensive than other restaurants/bars… (given that we’ve paid half board and weren’t anticipating eating lunch in the hotel, this shouldn’t be an issue — we might just need to buy big bottles of water/coke elsewhere).

Then there was Holiday Truth, which at least assured me that we had definitely picked the right resort:

If it is a bit of nightlife you desire – again Roda may not be for you. Sidari a few km away is a lot more lively and destined to become the new Magaluf or Kavos resort – basically if you can’t live without a MacDonalds and enjoy clubs – Sidari is more what you want! =). In fact, place a large tower there and you could mistake it for our own Blackpool!Holiday Truth

Not much nightlife. With small children in tow, that will do me just fine. The only other new thing I learned was that it is a longer walk into town centre than the brochure stipulated and may take more than 10 minutes. Other than that, it was just back to the hotel being nice if a little expensive.

Real Holiday reports didn’t have anything more recent than 2002, so I just discounted them entirely, leaving me expecting a nice, friendly, clean hotel, a bit further from the town centre with expected, and with hoteliers looking to scalp me at every available opportunity. Well, if that is the case, at least I will have gone prepared… and I’ll tell you what I thought of it once I’ve had a chance to unpack…