Nice Plums Mister Baker.

What a lovely photo of this lovely man. Just pottering around his garden under the Plum trees. Very Heaven.
It is from  Tom Baker's own website. Check it out. You will feel like you have found a way to the Best Tea-Shop At The End Of The Universe. Cosmically charming.

Rock Pool.

(From my Sketchbook.)This was a glimpse i had into a small rock pool on a beach in Newcastle..It is not entirely accurate.actually it is nothing like the rock pool I found in Bangor. All I saw in it was a dead crabs claw, a coke tin and part of a license plate of a car.
               This is what I would like to have found in a rock pool in Bangor.

Pier Pressure.

                                                                (From the sketchbook)

Beside The Seaside.

(From my sketchbook)Was watching The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes as part of a truly beautiful box set collecting all the Basil Rathbone Holmes movies and was completely taken with this. It is Holmes in disguise performing at a garden party a young woman he is protecting is attending. He disguises himself as this entertainer and sings and dances and it was minutes before I realised it was actually Holmes. Basil Rathbone really goes for it and is quite excellent and completely plausible as an end of pier singer. There is a deft lightness of touch and a lyrical spring in his steps as he kicks up his heels. It is a side of the actor I had never seen and was dazzled by his quirky performance. Inspired to scribble actually. I have been listening to his readings of Edgar Allen Poe stories which he does just magnificently. His instinctive intonations lend the baroque quality of Poe's writing a gravitas that impresses the ear.He could have made shipping forecasts sound ominous. Which I suppose they are if you are a deep sea trawler fisherman.

What the Dickens?

Probably the first biography I read as a school boy at Holy Cross Boys School. Managed to find a lovely condition copy at Atomic Collectables, Jim Mc Kevitt's magical emporium in North Street Belfast. The things that man turns up. I remember that this book confused me for some time. I am not quite sure exactly what it was but something in the text and artwork made me think that the characters Dickens wrote about were all real. That he knew Oliver Twist and David Copperfield and that Fagin and Bill Sykes and all the others just lived in different parts of foggy olde London. Perhaps in a sense they were real or at the very least have become something of a memory as opposed to a memory of fiction. The whole world of Victorian London has taken on a dream like quality with the passing of time. Maybe that is all the past becomes when enough time has passed. Reality becomes as intangible as fiction. Or maybe my brain is broke.

Fu Man-Holmes.

Finished this in the early hours with the sound of a sudden cloudburst drumming a tattoo on my roof (The actual roof of my house, That is not a euphemism for the top of my head). Cay Van Ash comes across as a hybrid of Conan Doyle/John Buchan/ Sax Rohmer but has just enough of his own voice to propel the narrative forward in a vigorous fashion. He even manages to make Wales seem like an exotic lost kingdom of hidden valleys and storm lashed coast lines.(Which it probably is as they film so much of Doctor Who there.). His Doctor Petrie is pretty much as Sax Rohmer would have him and his Holmes is an older even more insular figure than Doyle wrote him. He carries a sadness that he never did under his original creators tenure. Perhaps it is because now he truly is a man out of his own time as the Victorian age is past and his formidable skills seem tempered by the changes of society at large.
            It is an entertaining ride with many unexpected thrills. The characters are well observed and their situations engaging, as companions are traded and roles swapped around. For Petrie must engage the aid of Sherlock Holmes to find and possibly rescue Nayland Smith from the clutches of his nemesis The Devil Doctor Fu Manchu who has abducted him. Is his friend alive or dead? Has the evil genius surgically altered his helpless foe to have the head of a salamander and the gills of a puffer fish? Will Holmes even allow himself to be coaxed out of a well earned retirement in Sussex raising bees? The author cleverly weaves so much around established canon(No easy thing when you consider the sheer bulk of material that exists around Holmes) that it is entirely plausible to see this period in the Great Detectives life as yet another that remained unspoken off for so long but which took place when the world thought he was busy doing nothing. I enjoyed the pacing of the novel and the adventure very much. Anyone expecting Robert Downey jnr Indiana Holmes type pacing might find it a little slow moving but then they are probably reading something else(GQ magazine at a guess.). There are a couple of bar scenes in country taverns and in my minds eye I am sure I saw Kenneth Moore in a smokey corner having a relaxing pint and a puff on a pipe.
              Fu manchu is as brilliantly devious and mysterious as ever in this book. There are no mere cameos or homages at play here, It feels as authentic as anything in either canon. I would be surprised to find a follower of any of these long lived and much loved characters who did not feel it was a worth having in any-ones collection. Might be a bit tricky to find a copy but is that not a significant part of the adventure of book collecting?
               As adventures go there is a nice reward at the end.

Return To Telos.

Oh cannot tell you how excited I am by receiving this copy of Return to Telos (The last story in season four of the big Finish Fourth Doctor and Leela Stories.) The previous story The Fate Of krelos ended on such a cliff hanger it beautifully played into that sense of expectation viewing the original series did. Well here we are; The Tardis is hurtling through the vortex back to a reunion of sorts. A place and a time where old friends and enemies wait and the past is about to very much become the present..I just do not believe we have reached the end of another season of these great stories. I know there is another season coming in 2016 with the wonderful Lalla Ward and Tom Baker recreating their much loved chemistry but when you live on the slow path six months is a long time.
            Just reread that last line.For shame, you see how greedy one can become when you get what you want..you just want more..