Incidentally, I'm vaguely looking for "Big Finish" recs, as I love radio plays.

I particularly like historicals, and of the doctors appearing in BF, Five and Seven are my favourites (though having said that, I've heard good things about Six in this form, and you can't really judge Eight on the TVM alone, so really, I'm open minded on the subject.)

( Harry Potter - spoilers )
( The Daemons )

Two comments: why did Torchwood have to wait so long to get this good? It was, dare I say it... grown up.

Also, I see John Barrowman managed to get his pants off /Rickman.

Short account of evening:

Went punting; had dinner with nineveh_uk and then went to see Harry Potter, which I very much enjoyed despite the over-excited audience. Rickman particularly good, Broadbent pretty good as Slughorn (but too thin!), Gambon good as Dumbledore (and I normally dislike him). Extraordinarily beautiful film, mostly in (sometimes tinted) monochrome, with effective use of colour as and when.

Broke key of bike in lock, so (a) will be walking home and (b) first order of business tomorrow, find bolt cutters (and somehow move bike from Parish Church to college, that being the most likely source of the aforementioned).

The Grauniad has been helpfully providing a series of Italian phrasebooks. I particularly liked today's, which told me how to say 'I saw you at the lunchtime Mass', 'What did you think of Fr X's sermon?', 'Is there a Mass in English?', 'I need to find a priest' and 'Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.' It also included the necessary phrases for 'Would you like to come up for a coffee?' and 'Turn over, you're snoring'. Truly, it covers a multitude of.... bases.

Here, incidentally, is a meme: the guess the first line of the song meme, which is doing the rounds again. This time my shuffle function picked some rather obscure stuff (as well as some fairly obvious ones, but that's randomness, I suppose)...

1. In sixteen-forty-nine, to St George’s Hill, The world turned upside down, in this instance by Dick Gaughan (though it might have been Billy Bragg), guessed by angevin2

2. Well if I could I surely would O Mary Don't you Weep (by Bruce Springsteen, but it might have been Pete Seeger), guessed by angevin2

3. Although my lover lives in a place I can’t live Come On Home, Franz Ferdinand, guessed by dolabellae

4. Like shadows on the wall, you come and you go - wemyss correctly spotted this as Runrig, and subsequently sandpipersummer identified it as The Greatest Flame.

5. I’m not content to be with you in the daytime The Kinks, All the Day and All of the Night, guessed by gervase_fen

6. Me and my wife went all over town

7. All of the boys and the girls here in Paris

8. Joseph’s face was black as night Under African Skies, Paul Simon, guessed by angevin2

9. I’ve sailed the whole world over Across the Line, by Bellowhead, guessed by antisoppist

10. Lay down your sweet and weary head Into the West, by Annie Lennox, guessed by angevin2, who is very good at this game....

On a happier note, today the Church of England commemorates John Keble (1792-1866), priest, fellow of Oriel College (where he and Newman more or less invented the Oxford tutorial system, revolutionising university teaching), Professor of Poetry of the University of Oxford, and one of the initiators of the Oxford Movement. Even outside Anglo-Catholic circles, though, the Anglican Communion would be very different without Keble, Newman, Pusey et al, both in essentials - it's largely down to the Tractarians that weekly communion has become normal - and in the externals (vestments and candles). The catholic revival gave new energy to the Church of England and beyond, particularly in its involvement in mission, outreach, and general social justice issues in deprived urban areas.* In later life he was friends with CM Yonge, and his influence is tangible in her novels.

I've always liked Keble - quite apart from his loyalty to the C of E, he seems to have been an attractive character. My icon shows him in age, but there's a nice pencil drawing of him as a younger man:

( which is below the cut, to spare your flist )

Humph. You may recall me mentioning that, thanks to various shenanigans involving BT's inability to just change the name on a phone bill, without cancelling and reconnecting, that I'm currently without a phone or internet at home. However, I've just had customer 'service' that makes BT look helpful and responsive.

Well, thought I, it's probably worth getting a USB modem (or dongle, as they seem to be called). So I trotted along to the Carphone Warehouse yesterday, where the salesman advised me, on the basis of their coverage, to get one from 3 Mobile Broadband. Fine, thought I, and checked the system requirements on the back of the box, which read: Windows 2000/XP/Vista or Mac OS X 128 MB of RAM, 50 MB free hard disk space or above, USB slot.

All of which I have. However, when I tried last night the installer wouldn't launch. So I combed through the documentation, which again, merely specified OS X - which, to any reasonable person, implies 'all versions of OS X', right?

So off I went to CW this morning. They were very helpful, although not knowing much about Macs; the sales guy eventually found specifications buried on the website (in a place, I believe, not accessible to the customer), which said that you required 10.4 or higher. I have a steam-driven computer which uses 10.3.9, but that doesn't change the fact that this is not what the box and the documentation supplied said (and there wasn't even a weasel about 'most OS X systems'). CW bloke agreed that this was unacceptable, and agreed to refund the modem at once; however, he couldn't refund the top-up himself...

He got on the phone to 3, and spent nearly an hour going round in circles with various departments, all of whom insisted that they couldn't refund it, and that it was my fault for not doing my homework. CW bloke, bless him, kept reiterating that customers who had bought products or services in good faith - which I had - should not be penalised for their mis-selling, and that they were in a legally dubious position, and did they really want this pursued by the courts or the bad publicity they could be in for, over £15. 3 suggested that I could sell the voucher (which, incidentally, is time limited) on to another 3 customer. CW bloke pointed out that it was ridiculous to expect the customer to go through all this hassle because of their misrepresentation of their product, and that they couldn't expect me to inflict 3 on my friends when I had just had such a poor experience. They then said they couldn't make a refund, anyway. CW bloke said no-body cared if they put it back on my card or sent a cheque, but it was unacceptable for them to just keep the money. Eventually the woman at 3 - described as the manager for retail support - said she would try to work something out and would phone me back 'within 48 hours'. Well, we'll see.

So my entire morning has vanished in irritation, and I still don't have internet access at home (nothing seems to work with 10.3.9, grr.) I probably do need to get a new computer, but even if I do have a new one before BT get their act together, I certainly won't be giving a penny to 3, ever again.

Now to compose a letter of complaint to 3...

... on the upside, I was quite impressed by the Carphone Warehouse people.

I was going to catch up on Torchwood: CoE yesterday night, but ended up going for the intersection of Doctor Who and the other CoE instead, i.e. watching eps 1 and 2 of the Daemons, which inexplicably I had never seen, despite having written fic set just pre-episode (in which the Master finds himself having to attempt to conduct a wedding, and it all goes horribly wrong).
( Cut for spoilers, though it did air before my parents were married... )

Thanks to parrot_knight and his car, I spent the afternoon at the Faringdon Arts Festival, which celebrates (mostly) local musicians, artists, craftspeople, etc., and a good time seemed to being had by all - it's free, so it really is a community thing, and the standard of music on offer seemed very high.

The main attraction, however, as far as I was concerned, was fannish: Phil Ford, the chief writer on the Sarah Jane Adventures providing a live commentary track for "The Last Sontaran", followed by Paul Cornell doing the same for "The Family of Blood." Both were interesting; I found Cornell more so, but that's probably down to the fact that while "The Last Sontataran" is a nice episode, it doesn't cut as deep as "FoB".
( Cut for length and, i suppose, spoileryness... )

Once again, something that you wouldn't think could work, yet does: a Discworld/ Silmarillion cross-over, in which Sam Vimes applies his brand of policing to the matter of the Silmarils.

Evidence, by Camwyn.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's really rather good.

The Grauniad has a small, but rather nice, interview with Leonard Cohen: (I always had a notion that I had a tiny garden to cultivate. I never thought I was really one of the big guys. And so the work that was in front of me was just to cultivate this tiny corner of the field that I thought I knew something about, which was something to do with self-investigation without self-indulgence.)

On an unrelated note, but also at the Guardian, Adam Smith is blogging an Alpha course. Must remember to follow that (and not to read the comments, this being CiF); it looks like it could be quite an interesting series, judging from the first post. As far as I can see, the Alpha Course can be quite a good resource, and the most important bit is the discussions it enables, anyway - though it's woefully lacking on the sacramental and ecclesiological side (but then, I would say that, wouldn't I?)

I continue my epic quest to buy Italian train tickets. Am beginning to wonder if it's actually worth the effort of pre-booking, given that I can get tickets for the sleeper to Milan via Deutsche Bahn (I know that works, anyway).

I seem to have developed a weird fondness for Star Trek fics which are, I suppose, best described as gen fics about sex - that is, ones that involve characters trying to get their heads round other kinds of sexual and cultural norms and imperatives. So I very much enjoyed Zvi's "The Talk", in which Sarek attempts to educate a very unwilling Spock, who has just entered puberty at the age of twenty (rather young for a Vulcan) about human biology: humour, SFW (given that much of the humour depends on nothing being explicitly stated): How could you do something like that to my mother?

Quite a lot of the humour comes from the assumption that Vulcan puberty is later than human (logical, given a longer life-span) and, thus, the disjunction between Spock's thoughts, which are in some ways very rational, and in other ways that of the outraged child who is fairly sure that what he's just been told about reproduction is some sort of weird practical joke, and in any case, yuck.

I had no idea that Gerard Manley Hopkins had translated the "Adoro Te Devote" (a hymn to Christ in his sacramental presence attributed to Thomas Aquinas). It's slightly strange, stylistically - Hopkins was clearly trying to write a 'normal' hymn, metrically (11 11 11 11 isn't all that common, but it does exist), but the stresses do sometimes fall in slightly strange places.

That said, I like it rather a lot (though I'm not sure about the pelican verse):

Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore,
Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more,
See, Lord, at thy service low lies here a heart
Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.

( Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived... )

I love it when fic makes you realise the greatness of things you didn't know would work!

For instance, Gaila-Spock friendship fic. There's been a number of good Gaila gen-fic, but this one, by igrockspock is particularly good. In which Gaila attempts to work why she keeps getting human sexual mores wrong, with a bit of help from Spock, who admits that he doesn't know much about the matter, but is confident that the matter can be clarified with the application of the scientific method and a proper research plan (no, not like that, it's a gen fic†), and from Nyota, who realises that there's more to her room-mate than meets the eye.

It could have stood a beta, as there are a very few typos, but they don't detract from the fic. It's funny and moving, and a nice exploration of the challenges of culture clashes - and what you can learn from them, if you're willing to try.

† I mean, it's an R, and there's a lot of discussion of sex, because it's about Gaila, but it's not porn (unless social anthropology turns you on, of course...)

Apparently a group of beghards†, tried for heresy at Vienne in the mid fourteenth century, asserted that while sex was morally innocent, because required by nature for the continuation of the species, kissing, being merely frivolous and pleasurable, was a sin.

This has no relevance to anything I'm doing, but I found it in my notes and felt compelled to share the bogglement.

† Male semi-religious, living in communities in apostolic poverty, the male version of beguines (who are normally defined as living under a vow of poverty and chastity, though not obedience, but these chaps clearly had a somewhat eccentric definition of chastity...)

I think I'm going mad. I've lost £30. As in physically lost a £10 and £20 note, which I know I got out of the cashline this morning, and are now not in my wallet, or... anywhere. I must have left them in the machine.

Not good at all. I suppose the only consolation is that I at least picked up the card, but *aargh!*

This is not being my day. And I still don't know how to approach the conclusion of my thesis.

So when dressing this morning, I discovered that I had spent an unknown portion of yesterday with bloodstains on the back of my skirt (which is a rather nice light sand; it's a trekking skirt and my favourite garment for summer weather, because it's light and cool and has decent pockets).

Graaah. I hope it wasn't too obvious. And also, I hope they come out...

I'm almost sure I had something intelligent to say, but I am too tired, despite the fact that I have done virtually nothing today other than go to church, play croquet, and talk to my parents on the phone.

Conversation in the pub after church included the following gem:

Incumbent, to tree_and_leaf: Are you in mourning for your fellow-countryman?
Tree_and_leaf, after a pause while she worked this one out: No, I'm not interested in tennis, particularly. Anyway, I'm saving up my sporting angst for the Ashes.
Incumbent: Quite right.
Parish assistant: Oh, does Scotland play in the Ashes?

... He wasn't joking, either.