Guns and Frocks

Epilogue

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I’m nearly home now. The first time I posted this holiday was from the airport in Taipei; I’m here again now on my way back. I’ll be home with Calvin and the dogs and my Nintendo Switch tomorrow morning.

I’ve only posted once since arriving in the UK. Since then, I’ve had a busy couple of weeks, hanging out with friends and doing stuff. It’s been fun, particularly after my solitary and relaxed time in Greece.

So: a quick summary of the last two weeks.

The Beachy Head hotel

For just over a week, I stayed with Joe and Mark in Eastbourne. We hung out, watched telly, and ate. Joe and I recorded three episodes of Untitled Star Trek Project (episodes 166, 167 and 168), and an episode of Strictly Come Hamster. (It’s so much more fun doing this in person than over Zoom.) We wandered up to the Beachy Head with Rob to have lunch.We visited Brighton twice, once to have lunch and to visit famed genre merch treasure trove Snooper’s Paradise, and once to see a live podcast show called Uncanny. And one night, Col came down to join me for drinks and dinner in town.

The National Theatre foyer

Then I stayed with Ange and Joseph in London for a few days. I first met Ange over thirty years ago, when I first started teaching at Grammar. It was great to just catch up and hang out, but we also went to see the Picasso exhibition at the Tate Modern, the new production of Euripides’ Bacchae at the National Theatre, and the exhibition on Marie Antoinette at the V & A.

The Spijkerbar

After that, two nights in Amsterdam with James, who happened to be over in Europe at the same time. We visited the highlights of the collection in the Rijksmuseum, ate some food and did some bar-hopping (including a visit to the Spijkerbar). It was not my first trip to Amsterdam, of course, but it was my first time travelling by Eurostar, so that’s another thing off the bucket list.

Finally, two nights in London at a hotel near Kensington High Street. The first day, I spent an afternoon with James and Conrad at the Fitzroy Tavern, meeting some new people and catching up with a couple of old friends. And then yesterday I went for a walk through Hyde Park to Buckingham Palace, before catching the Tube back to the hotel to pack. Then off to the airport for an evening flight.

Which brings me back here. It’s been another great trip, and after such a long break, I’m kind of looking forward to going back to work on Monday to catch up with everyone and to find out what’s been going on in my absence.

And after nearly thirty-two years at Grammar, I still have a bit of long service leave left. So, Deo volente, I’ll see you all back here in a couple of years.

Naxos, Eastbourne and beyond

Nathan Bottomley — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

And that might be goodbye for now. Until last Friday I had been travelling by myself, but from now on I’ll be visiting friends and hanging out, and so I’ll have a lot less time (and a lot less need) to blog. Don’t unsubscribe yet — I might have more to say later, and I’ll almost certainly write something when I’m heading home.

Naxos

I left Naxos on Thursday morning, after staying for five nights. I think I liked Naxos nearly as much as I liked Paros. It’s bigger and more touristy, but it’s always just a short walk to somewhere less central, and there are lots of nice places with excellent and varied Greek food. I spend four days chilling by the hotel pool, swimming, reading, wandering the streets and getting to know the town.

Cycladic figurines from the Archaeological Museum of Naxos, probably third millennium BCE

Nothing much more to report. The Archaeological Museum of Naxos has been closed for renovation for a while, but there’s a room in a nearby building that houses the important parts of the collection — the same sorts of Cycladic figurines and ceramics that were in the Museum on Mykonos. I found a skilled and enthusiastic barber. And my last late lunch on the island was ample and delicious, the sky was clear, the sun was shining and there was a cool sea breeze.

My flight back to London was very early on Friday morning, and so I spent Thursday getting myself as close as possible to Athens Airport. First, a ferry from Naxos to the Piraeus. Then a metro train to Pallini, a suburban town in the Greater Athens area. And then a bus to Spata, without an R, which is a smaller town about five kilometres from the airport. I arrived at about four in the afternoon, tired and vaguely hungry.

I had my last meal in Greece here, at a hip little restaurant called Ataka. And then I went back to the huge apartment I had somehow rented cheaply from a faceless company none of whose representatives I ever met or spoke to. And I was asleep by 7 so I could be ready to get to the airport at 3 the next morning.

Eastbourne

Now I’m staying with Joe and Mark in Eastbourne. Just like last time, the plan is to hang out and watch telly, and for me and Joe to do some podcasting together in person. We’ll catch up with a few more people too.

Yesterday, Joe and Mark and I travelled to London so that I could go to the British Film Institute — more specifically the bar at the British Film Institute — where I caught up with some friends who had attended the launch of the new Blu-Ray box set of the 1975–1976 season of Doctor Who. I also met a few people for the first time — some of them people I had podcasted with and some of them people I follow on Bluesky. And two people came up and said hello to me after they recognised my voice from listening to Flight Through Entirety. (This has never happened to me before.)

And beyond

I leave Eastboune next Monday, and I fly out of Heathrow the Monday after that. Between those two Mondays, three things. First, I’m staying with Angela, who I first stayed with in 2007 and who I’ve known since 1994 when we were both working at Grammar. Then I’m joining James to catch the Eurostar for a short trip to Amsterdam. And finally, I’m planning to catch up with a few more people before I go home.

Six islands

Nathan Bottomley — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I arrived in Naxos yesterday, and now I’m sitting on the balcony of my hotel room, looking out onto the swimming pool and a courtyard full of palm trees. The hotel is nice, despite the comically crappy room. (The fridge hums incessantly and the air conditioner makes a strangled growling noise; one half of the mattress has collapsed.)

Next week I will catch a ferry back to Piraeus, and then I’m staying the night in a hotel near Athens Airport so that I can be ready to catch an early flight to London. Phase Two. Should be fun.

Naxos, Delos, Mykonos, Syros, Antíparos, Paros. I’ve visited six out of over two hundred islands. But the important ones really. Naxos is the biggest, Syros is the most populous, Mykonos is the gayest (I guess), and Paros and Antíparos are the most — I don’t know — chill. And Delos is the most sacred.

The date-palm on the site where Leto gave birth to Apollo and Artemis

According to legend, before Delos took its place as the hub of the Cycladic islands, it used to float far and wide across the surface of the sea. That’s why it was where the goddess Leto gave birth to Apollo and Artemis. Listen.

In Book 6 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Niobe, Queen of Thebes, the proud mother of seven sons and seven daughters. Niobe believes that she is more worthy of worship than Leto — Latona in Latin — who has only two children, Apollo and Artemis.

Now, ask what the reason is for my pride [says Niobe], and then dare to prefer Latona to me, that Titaness, daughter of Coeus, whoever he is. Latona, whom the wide earth once refused even a little piece of ground to give birth on.

Land, sea, and sky were no refuge for your goddess. She was exiled from the world, until Delos, pitying the wanderer, gave her a precarious place, saying “Friend, you wander the earth, I the sea.” There she gave birth to twins, only a seventh of my offspring.

Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.184–192, Translated by AS Kline

Of course, this goes as well as you might expect. Leto has Niobe’s children killed — Apollo shoots her sons with arrows, her husband the King kills himself, and then Apollo kills her daughters. Niobe’s grief is so great that she becomes a marble statue, still weeping as the wind erodes her away.

In response, the people of Thebes get together to tell old stories relevant to these recent shocking events. One of the Thebans had been travelling in Lycia when he came across an altar. He asked his Lycian guide who it belonged to.

Then I asked him whether it was an altar to the Naiads, Faunus, or a local god, and my friend replied ‘Young man, it is no mountain spirit in this altar. She calls it hers, whom the queen of heaven once banned from the world, and whom vagrant Delos, a lightly floating island, would barely accept, at her prayer. There, between Pallas’s olive tree and a date-palm, Latona bore her twins, against their step-mother Juno’s will. Having endured her labour, even then she fled Juno, carrying the divine twins clasped to her breast.

Ovid Metamorphoses 6.329–336 , Translated by AS Kline

(The guide goes on to tell the story of how Leto, still fleeing from Juno, arrives in Lycia. She comes upon a well, but when she tries to drink from it, the local farmers try to stop her, muddying the water out of sheer malice. And so they are turned into frogs. It’s not terribly relevant, I know, but I thought you would probably want some closure.)

Delos is a small island: a bit less than four kilometres north-south and about a kilometre across. You can’t stay there overnight, but there are ferry trips from a few nearby islands, including Mykonos, which is the nearest inhabited island.

I went there on Wednesday. The boat ride took a bit over half an hour. I have had great experiences with Greek guides — hello, Constantinos and Konstantina! — but I wanted to walk around at my own pace and so I paid for an online audio tour which worked on my phone.

It’s a complicated site: Delos was inhabited for centuries — there were people there four thousand years ago, the worship of Leto was brought there by the Ionions a bit less than three thousand years ago, and the island was more or less abandoned by the end of the first century CE. The terrace of the lions was built by the people of Naxos just before 600 BCE, the phallus statue is from about 300 BCE, the ancient theatre of Delos was opened in the third century BCE, and the temple of Isis is from the second century BCE. A lot to take in.

I left Delos on the return ferry in the early afternoon, feeling blessed by Leto, which is (as we now know) not always how things turn out. After returning to my hotel for a brief nap, I went to Oregano again for an early dinner.

Oregano

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

It’s about 2 PM. It’s hot, just under 30ºC, but the fresh sea breeze is pleasant and comfortable. I walk past a row of parked cars and enter the taverna. It’s called Oregano. Under the awning, all the tables are empty, but inside the taverna itself about half the tables are occupied. The chairs are made of wood, and the tables are covered with sheets of brown paper.

I look for a waiter and ask if I can sit down near the window. He nods and goes to get me a menu. The menu is big, pages and pages long — each item has a name and description in Greek, English and Italian.

While I’m leafing through the menu, the waiter approaches and asks me if I want to come with him to see the day’s specials. I say yes.

I follow him through the restaurant and into a massive dark kitchen. A lot of people are working here. There’s a row of bains-marie under glass, and behind them, skewers of roasting meat. The waiter rattles off a list of about a dozen daily specials — osso bucco with farfalle pasta, meatballs in tomato sauce, moussaka, roast lamb, Greek fish, beef stew, meatballs again, beef in risoni (orzo? kitharaki? I didn’t hear), chicken burgers, I can’t remember the rest. Perched on a shelf above the bains-marie there’s a plate of the meatballs with mashed potato.

“Can I have the meatballs?” I ask.

“Mashed potato, rice or pasta?”

“What’s best?”

He gestures at the plate on the shelf. “Mashed potato,” he says.

“I’ll have the mashed potato then.”

I go back to my table and and wait. The waiter brings me a plate of pita bread and some horrible chilled red wine in an anodised aluminium jug. The man at the next table lights up a cigarette. Surprisingly, I find this charming.

I arrived in Mykonos yesterday and went straight down to the old town, which is called Hora.¹ It’s a maze of twisty little passages, all alike — white walls, blue accents, stone pathways. A lot of shops selling expensive designer clothes and jewellery. Little secluded bars. It was much fancier than the old town in Paros, fancier than Antíparos, fancier than Naoussa.

And crowded! There were two huge cruise ships in the port when I got there, and so the streets everywhere are full of people. Older people, mostly, but a few gay men who weren’t saving their strength for the evening’s clubbing.

I checked out a few restaurants: pretty, with extensive outdoor seating and elegantly typeset menu boards, and dishes all about twice the price of the food in Parikia.

While I’m waiting for the meatballs to arrive, I look out the window at the shop across the street. It’s a supermarket. I should really go to the supermarket to get some breath mints, and maybe just to see what it’s like.

The sign on the wall of the supermarket calls it a Βασιlόπουλος, which I suppose is like a megastore, only royal.² The text underneath it is trickier: και του πουλιού το γάλα. And the milk of something? I ask Google Translate. And bird’s milk as well. I look the up the phrase and find an article in Greek about its origin. It means that the shop sells absolutely anything you might want. Even bird’s milk. (It’s possible that πουλί comes from the Latin word pullus, which means a baby bird.)

The food arrives. It’s savoury and delicious. It even manages to complement the terrible wine.

Accommodation in Mykonos is expensive, unsurprisingly, and so I booked a cheaper hotel about a mile away from Hora, further up the hill. The area is kind of suburban, with busy roads and roundabouts, and lots of big shops — toy shops, pet shops, medical centres, local restaurants like Oregano, bakeries, fruit shops. All in low, white flat-roofed buildings like the buildings in Hora, but without the heritage theme park vibe.

And unlike the cramped and grimy hotel room in Ermoupoli, this is a suite, with a spare bedroom, a kitchenette, and a balcony with a table and chairs and a sun lounge. And the shower is huge, with reliable hot water and proper satisfying water pressure.

Tomorrow morning, I’m going down to Hora and the Old Port to catch a boat to the nearby island of Delos. It’s the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, and the ruins there are extensive and important: temples, a theatre and the Terrace of the Lions. It’s been on my bucket list for a long time.

On the way back to my hotel afterwards, I’ll pick up my laundry and then check out the supermarket. Bird’s milk. Why not?

Now that I’m in Naxos, I discover that its main town is just called Hora (or Chora) as well. In Classical Greek, χώρα just means place or position (or country); in modern Greek a town gets called Χώρα if it has the same name as the island that it’s on. ↩︎
Here’s what Maria has to say about Basilopoulos: “By way of supermarkets, Basilopoulos and Sklavenitis are the Colesworths of Greece, being given a run for their money by new player My Market, as well as Lidl.” ↩︎

Five days earlier

Nathan Bottomley — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Flight

I arrived in Athens on Wednesday evening, after nearly two whole days of travelling. To explain: Calvin found and paid for all of the flights, using points as much as possible, and making sure that I had a pleasant, if somewhat indirect trip from Sydney to Athens. The first leg was Sydney to Taipei, the second was Taipei to London. Then an overnight stay at a hotel near Heathrow, where I had a terrible dinner and a brilliant night’s sleep. Then London to Paris, then Paris to Athens. I had lovely seats, and lounge access at all the airports, but by the time I landed in Athens, I was tired and grumpy and in no mood to put up with the inexplicable lack of signage at the airport metro station.

Athens

So I caught a cab to my hotel in Athens. It was near Syntagma Square, right in the middle of everything, and surrounded by Japanese restaurants, not far from the Plaka and the Acropolis and basically all of the places that I wanted to visit.

But the first place I wanted to visit was the barber. It’s always fun to get a head shave and a beard trim when you’re abroad. This time, there were hot towels, a straight razor disinfected on an open flame, lotion, a massage — the whole thing. A fast way to recover from a slow voyage.

The food was good, and to my surprise there was a cute little gay bar just behind the hotel, with cheap two-for-one low-alcohol cocktails starting at 7 PM. A nice way to wind down before bed.

I was only in Athens for a couple of days, just to orient myself before heading off to unfamiliar places. I went to Athens last year with the School’s Classics Tour, and so I didn’t feel much pressure to visit every museum and every archaeological site. But I had to visit the Acropolis again, didn’t I?

Paros

Parikia

On the Saturday morning I caught a ferry to Paros. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I really liked it. I stayed in the main town — once called Paros but now known as Parikia. It’s touristy, sure, but it’s a little town full of those white and blue buildings characteristic of the Cyclades, and there’s a long strip of inexpensive restaurants lining the bay. This is where, for the first time, I accomplished my mission — to sit by the water, read a book, drink beer and eat souvlaki.

I got to see some other places during my four-day visit. First, Antíparos. This is a much smaller island facing Paros across a narrow strait. I caught a ferry there one morning on a rare whim and walked the length of the shopping district. It’s very pretty, but much fancier than Parikia and a bit less chill. I kept walking after the shops ran out, and I came to a beach on the other side of the island. It was 30ºC, but I had no swimmers, so I stood in the cool blue water for a while before heading back to the ferry.

Sifneiko Beach

Also fancier than Parikia was Naoussa, a beautiful fishing village in the north of the island. Nick and Dina suggested that I should go there at night, when there are dancers and nightlife and young people, but I’m on holidays and I absolutely insist on being in bed by then, so I went there first thing in the morning. It was beautiful, and definitely worth a visit, but I ended up going back to Parikia in the early afternoon for a beer and a late lunch.

Naoussa

I liked Paros a lot. The hotel was really pleasant, and the young man who ran it was friendly and generous and full of helpful advice. The food in Parikia was simple and inexpensive, the water was beautiful, and once you got away from the port itself, everything was quiet and relaxed. Four days wasn’t enough: I would definitely like to go back.

Syros

‘Well, what you have to understand, young lady, is that the Greeks, not content with dominating the culture of the Classical world, are also responsible for the greatest, some would say the only, work of true creative imagination produced this century as well. I refer of course to the Greek ferry timetables. A work of the sublimest fiction. Anyone who has travelled in the Aegean will confirm this. Hmm, yes. I think so.’

Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Chapter 4

I arrived on Syros late — the ferry from Paros was delayed by over an hour, for a journey that was only supposed to take just over an hour. Still, I have an app, which tracked the ferry’s slow journey from Naxos and which set my mind at rest during a brief panicked moment when I thought I had failed to get off at my stop. (Clearly neither Douglas Adams nor St John of Patmos had access to this app.)

The Church of the Resurrection of the Saviour, Ermoupoli

Ermoupoli is the biggest town in Syros and the capital of the South Aegean region. It’s not a tourist spot like Parikia, it’s a proper town where people live, with shops and offices and a port full of massive cargo ships. And it doesn’t have those blue and white Cycladic buildings: instead, it consists of a pile of neo-Classical buildings set on the side of a hill so big that I have no intention at all of climbing to the top to visit the two enormous churches there.

I’m in my hotel room now. It’s very small and grimy, with a minuscule bathroom and very slow wifi. It does have air conditioning, which means I can retreat to it every few hours for an awkward shower when everything starts to get too sweaty.

I don’t really plan these trips at all. I still don’t know where I’ll be staying at the end of next week. Which is why I ended up in a terrible hotel room in Ermoupoli with no real idea of what I would do for five days.

It’s basically 30ºC every day, and the sun is relentless. But before I got to Syros I had only been swimming once, at a bar in Paros just a mile from the hotel, where I had a beer and went for a swim while the bar staff guarded all of my precious electronic devices.

But this grimy hotel has beach access, if by beach you mean an old concrete jetty jutting out into the bay. And so I can leave my devices in my hotel room and walk down and swim in the cool blue waters of the Aegean, which I’m doing twice a day. In the morning, after my first swim, I go to the terrace on top of the hotel where I can dry my clothes, look down at the beach and read my book.

Pariusve lapis

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

It’s my last day on the island of Paros. It’s quiet time in the hotel, between 3 PM and 6 PM, and I’m sheltering from the heat and brightness for a couple of hours before heading off for an evening walk.

According to Greek Wikipedia, Paros is the third largest island in the Cyclades, about 150 kilometres southwest of Piraeus, which is the port near Athens where I boarded the ferry that brought me here. Paros is an island made of marble, which is how I first heard of it.

In this passage from Book 1 of Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas, the son of Venus, appears out of thin air before speaking to Queen Dido for the first time. He is beautiful.

Aeneas stood there, shining in the bright daylight,
like a god in shoulders and face: since his mother
had herself imparted to her son beauty to his hair,
a glow of youth, and a joyful charm to his eyes:
like the glory art can give to ivory, or as when silver,
or Parian marble, is surrounded by gold.

Virgil, Aeneid 1.588–593, Translated by AS Kline

Fifteen years ago, when Calvin and I lived in Marrickville, our next-door neighbours were Nick and Dina. When Nick told me he was born in Paros, and that he spent a few months a year there, I told him that I knew about the island and its marble from its mention in the Aeneid. He told me about the quarries there, and after his next visit, he brought me back a little figurine of Parian marble, a bust with a round face whose only feature was a long straight nose.

Yesterday, I went and visited Nick and Dina in their home near Marmara, a small village on the other side of the island. (In both Greek and Latin, the name Marmara means marble.) Nick showed me the house where he was born and drove me around to show me where he grew up and to give me the chance to take some photos.

After that, Nick and Dina took me to lunch outdoors at a taverna in Marmara — a massive lunch of Greek salad and grilled meat. And then Nick drove me back to the port of Paros in Parikia, when I’m staying. But not before he carried out a plan he might have conceived more than fifteen years ago.

In Marathi, about five kilometres from here, there is an extensive complex of marble quarries, where Parian marble was mined as early as the 7th Century BCE. There are open cut mines, and a complex of underground mines, including the mines of Pan and the mines of the Nymphs. Sadly, these are too dangerous for the public to visit; they apparently extend hundreds of metres underground, supported by pillars of marble that have been left there to support the roof.

The marble from these quarries was famous for its translucency and used in sculptures throughout the Greek world, including the pedimental sculptures from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, which I was lucky enough to see during the School’s Classics Tour last year.

A week ago, I left Sydney’s wettest August in thirty years. Here in Greece, it’s blisteringly sunny every day. After Nick dropped me off in Parikia, I stopped at a bar for a drink and then walked back to the hotel. An hour or two later, before the sun set, I was asleep.

Hello World

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I’m in Taipei, waiting for my connecting flight to London. Just a few minutes before I’ll have to board. But I thought I’d say hi before I go.

I’ve got a six-week holiday ahead of me. I arrive in London this afternoon, where I’ll be spending the night in a hotel near Heathrow Airport. Tomorrow morning I fly to Athens. After a few days there, I’m getting a ferry to Paros, and I’ll be spending about three weeks visiting various Cycladic islands. The plan: to sit by the water, read a book, drink beer and eat souvlaki. With the occasional visit to an archaeological site thrown in.

After that, a couple of weeks in the UK. Visiting Joe for a week or so, then catching up with friends, as well as a brief trip to Amsterdam with James.

Should be fun. I’ll let you know how I get on.

The Florana Speech

Nathan Bottomley — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This essay was first published in Outside In Regenerates, a collection of essays published by ATB Publishing in 2023 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who and the 10th anniversary of the Outside In book series.

For this collection, each author contributed an essay on a single story. My essay is based on Death to the Daleks, the first Doctor Who story I ever saw.

Many thanks — again — to Stacey Smith? for the commission, and for her patience.

Wednesday, 23 June 1978

I’m about to watch Doctor Who for the very first time tonight. I’ve known of it for years, I think, but I’ve only started to get interested in the last few weeks. My friend Luke and I have been reading his copy of The Doctor Who Monster Book in class instead of solving maths problems, and although I’ve never even seen the show, I know all four Doctors by name, and I can already identify his most formidable enemies — the Zarbi, the Wirrn, someone called Steyr, the Exxilons, the Sensorites and Bellal.

But I’m watching tonight because Luke has told me that there will be Daleks.

We skip the first scene of Terry Walsh staggering through a misty greenish landscape, being shot by an arrow and tumbling into a puddle full of dry ice — it’s a scene apparently too horrific for the nine–year–olds in the [Australian] audience. Instead, we open with a spinning beach umbrella — the Doctor and Sarah are talking about the beach holiday that he has promised her on the planet Florana. “You can’t sink on Florana,” says the Doctor. “The water’s effervescent.”

I won’t get to see the Doctor luring Sarah into the TARDIS with this promised holiday until many years later: Channel 2 in Sydney won’t screen Invasion of the Dinosaurs until 1984, and Malcolm Hulke doesn’t include the scene in his 1976 novelisation. But it’s one of the best final scenes of any Classic Doctor Who story. The Doctor is describing Florana to a reluctant Sarah, who is determined not to board the TARDIS again because of the dangers she’s faced in this story and the previous one. But the Doctor perseveres. “The streams flow with waters that are clearer than the clearest crystal,” he says lyrically, as she laughs and covers her ears, convinced already of her own defeat.

Sarah is the first companion we see lured onto the TARDIS by the promise of wonders, and she’s also the last companion in the classic series to hear the Doctor’s Florana speech. (The Doctor has promised Jo that the air of Metebelis is like a fine wine, but we never get to see that conversation; all of the later companions are dropping out of their lives in some way, except for Harry, who is tricked aboard by the Doctor, and Romana, who is there on a special assignment. Oh, and Mel, whose first trip in the TARDIS occurs offscreen.) But when the show returns in 2005 as the New Series, the Florana Speech is back too — again and again we hear that the companions travel with the Doctor in order to experience wonders. The Florana Speech looms so large in our memories of the Classic Series that we assume that its underlying idea was always a part of the show.

– Why do you do it? Why do you fly off in the box with him? The truth. Please, just this once.

– Because it’s amazing. Because I see wonders.

Of course, Sarah never gets the Florana holiday that the Doctor has promised. (The Doctor also fails to get Amy and Rory there many years later, in a different medium.) Instead, she is captured, drugged and nearly sacrificed by the Exxilons. She is frightened by Bellal, pursued by the Daleks and set to work mining parrinium. Promised wonders, she is confronted by horrors.

It’s obvious why this is. Watching Donna sunning herself by the pool on the planet Midnight is fun for one scene, but we’d much rather watch the Doctor under attack by a group of terrified humans. For us, the sightseeing tour of Argolis only really kicks off once Earth Visitor Loman has been dismembered. And way back in 1965, or AD 64, it’s the arrival of the slave traders that piques our interest, however enjoyable it has been watching Barbara and Ian relaxing post–coitally in Flavius Giscard’s villa. We watch Doctor Who for the monsters, the dangers, the cliffhangers. Maybe Jo is right in Carnival of Monsters. Maybe we are evil and horrible people.

– You know, the thing about a time machine, you can run away all you like and still be home in time for tea. So what do you say? Anywhere. All of time and space, right outside those doors.

So why does Sarah stay with the Doctor? It’s still early days for her, but next year’s adventures will be full of monstrosities: corpses and Nazis; torture, peril and venom. And yet, when Harry, the Brigadier and the Duke of Forgill refuse the Doctor’s offer of a trip home in the TARDIS, Sarah joins him. “Providing we go straight back to London,” she says.

My friend Brendan says it’s because she loves the Doctor. “I worry about you,” she tells him in her second last episode. But can that possibly be enough? Is her character just distorted by the demands of the format, by our desire to watch her undergoing horrors?

– Someone’s got to be the Doctor.

– They’ll kill you.

– Never stopped him.

The New Series answers this question by creating a life for the companions that isn’t just peopled by horrors. It alludes to unseen adventures in which the companion sees wonders — Rose travels to Woman Wept, Martha visits the moon landing three times, Clara gets to snog her favourite Regency novelist. And it can now afford to put wonders on screen — the fish over Sardicktown, the creation of the earth in The Runaway Bride.

But there’s more to it than that. The horrors of Doctor Who are an occasion for heroism, and by confronting them the companions themselves become heroes. “The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life,” says Rose. “You don’t just give up. You don’t just let things happen. You make a stand.”

And perhaps the Classic Series provides this answer as well. Death to the Daleks isn’t much interested in the heroism of its female characters: in the last moments of the story, our eyes are on Galloway, whose cold pragmatism requires him to sacrifice his own life to destroy the Daleks. But perhaps the real hero here is Sarah, whose courage and ingenuity have provided the Space Marines with enough parrinium to save the lives of ten million people. Some things, even fictional things, are more important than a holiday at the beach.

Nathan Bottomley is a Latin teacher living in Sydney with his husband and three small fluffy dogs. He podcasts about Doctor Who on Flight Through Entirety.

Blake’s 7 reviews

Nathan Bottomley — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Here are two reviews of Blake’s 7 VHS tapes, which were published in Data Extract Number 100, which was a bumper issue of the Doctor Who Club of Australia newsletter published in May 1993, full of articles and reviews written by people who would go on to become hosts on Flight Through Entirety. It was on the “strength” of these reviews that Peter Griffiths invited me to review The SevenFold Crown five years later.

Of course, if you want to hear my more mature and circumspect takes on Blake’s 7, you’re out of luck, but you can still hear me talk a lot of nonsense about the show on the podcast Maximum Power.

Tape 22: Stardrive, Animals

Scripted by Jim Follett and Allan Prior

It is part of the received wisdom of B7 fandom these days that each Blake tape has one good episode and one not so-good episode. Tape 22 is, I’m afraid, an egregious exception.

Despite some truly awful model work, Stardrive begins with some tense and reasonably well-acted scenes. It’s when we discover the murderous, psychopathic Space Rats that things start to get silly and extremely clichéd. It’s off to the planet Quarry, where the strong-willed female scientist is being menaced by a group of definite fashion don’ts on motor tricycles — all of whom look like refugees from those seventies Glam Rock bands which we are all (thank God!) a little too young to remember. After a lot of running around, being beaten up, and burning holes in walls behind people without their noticing, it’s back to Scorpio in time to fit a new space drive.

There is not enough material here for a fifty-minute episode, and by Season D the tribe-of-murderous-savages scenario has begun to wear very, very thin. The ending is a nice one, however. Listen up carefully for the final line from Avon: damn me if Dudley hasn’t rendered it nearly inaudible with his final sting!

The second episode on this tape, Animals, is not much better. Dayna and Tarrant are off to Bucol 2 to recruit the scientist Justin, who just happens to be an old tutor and old flame of Dayna’s. Naturally the love-birds are stranded alone with nothing but a group of hairy horned genetic experiments for company, rousing the suspicions of Julian Clary’s twin sister, the oh-so-lovely Servalan. By the time we reach the final scene and all the right guest actors have been killed and all the mind control techniques have worn off, we have seen some atrocious acting from Josette Simon and Jacqueline Pearce and some very silly gunfight scenes in which the combatants leap out from behind pylons only to get gunned down by other people leaping out from behind other pylons.

It’s a truly clunky script which no amount of cleverness from director Mary Ridge can save. Keep a special lookout, though, for the episode’s two major design highlights: Servalan’s gorgeous ostrich-feather evening frock, and those fabulous wigs worn by Servalan’s female crew. Now surely there are two merchandising opportunites for anyone brave and entrepreneurial enough to take them up…

Tape 23: Headhunter, Assassin

Scripted by Roger Parkes and Rod Beacham

Tape 23 sees us halfway through Series D of Blake’s 7, and the teething problems have been ironed out. Headhunter and Assassin are both excellent episodes.

Headhunter first — a very tense, well-written episode which takes full advantage of the new post-Liberator set-up. Once again there is no Liberator, no teleport and no Orac to help the crew out of their difficulty. They are trapped on the planet Xenon with a convincingly frightening creature that turns all their machinery against them: they have only their own ingenuity and some convenient ancient ruins to get them out of what could be a terminally tight spot. The location work is nice, [and] there are some satisfying explosions and a nice closing line from Orac, who once again proves that a perspex fishbowl full of flashing lights will beat a fluffy dog for episode completion purposes any day. Oh, and watch for Lynda (the Inquisitor) Bellingham’s appearance as someone whose relationship with [space scientist] Muller was purely “recreational”.

The second episode is the one that I remember most vividly from its screening on the ABC in the early eighties. Tense (again), atmospheric and downright scary was how I remembered it — and I was, on the whole, right. Servalan hires an assassin called Cancer, prompting the crew to intercept and kill her as she arranges to pay Cancer off. As usual, things don’t go to plan and Tarrant, Avon and Soolin find themselves trapped on board Cancer’s ship with the assassin wandering around loose.

It’s good, claustrophobic thriller material, and as tempers start to flare all the cast get an opportunity to shine, particularly the often weak and underused Soolin (although she does have one narrow escape from Cancer which is nothing short of laughable). Guest star Richard (The Five Doctors) Hurndall is gentle and sympathetic as the aging slave Nebrox, while Caroline Holdaway’s Piri is a suitable silly girly thing for Tarrant to get all macho about. Only at the end does her performance start to get a little too over the top. (I don’t know, the sexual politics of this programme are a worry sometimes.)

So, two good tense episodes. And wedged as they are between the rather patchy opening to Series D and the gruelling succession of disastrously failed missions (but excellent episodes) that concludes the series, they are not the best of Blake’s 7’s last year, but perhaps they’re the least gloomy. Enjoy.

Coming Home

Nathan Bottomley — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

It’s the last day of this 2½-month overseas trip: by this time tomorrow I will be back in Australia.

We’ve been in Bangkok since Monday, mostly shopping and visiting Calvin’s family monk to get some statues and amulets blessed and to receive a blessing ourselves, which entailed being drenched with a lot of very cold water. (I sometimes just suspect the monk is trolling us.)

I met up with Calvin in Delhi just over a month ago. And I’ve described all of the important things we did on the trip, but there’s still a lot I’ve left out. How much we loved our driver Pappu, who was with us for 23 days in India. Some of the terrible food and terrible hotels we enjoyed. Many many forts and palaces. Driving around lost in the countryside of Bihar because the government had shut down the internet. Getting caught unwittingly smuggling alcohol into our hotel in Patna, a crime which usually doesn’t result in a prison sentence for a first offence. Giving up nicotine replacement therapy. The horrible hotel porter who threatened Calvin because he was unhappy about his tip. Getting our hair cut and being made fun of by two cute young barbers in Jaisalmer. Being sent away from Lumbini by security guards because our car was too big, only to drive past them moments later, triumphantly waving from the back of a tuk-tuk. Trying not to snigger when our tour guide in Jodhpur kept going on about Prince Albert. The guy sleeping in a corridor in Kolkata Airport who I was convinced was dead. Drinking our first lime soda in the baking heat while looking across Jaisalmer from the very topmost point of the fort that overlooks it. Calvin’s realisation about the important role that money plays in organised religion.

Anyway. It’s been fun. Really fun. But I’m ready to come home.

Urgency & Dismay, Appendix A

Nathan Bottomley — Sun, 16 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Northern India and Nepal

In the Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta, the Buddha tells Ānanda that Lumbini, Bodhgaya, Sarnath and Kushinagar are the four places that merit being seen: where the Buddha was born, where he was enlightened, where he set the Wheel of Dhamma in motion and where he was totally unbound. But, of course, there are many more destinations for Buddhist pilgrims than these.

Even in Northern India and Nepal, there are four second-tier pilgrimage destinations. Rajgir, where the Buddha preached at Vulture Peak and where he miraculously calmed an angry elephant who was intent on killing a child. Vaishali, where he spend his last rainy season before his Total Unbinding, and where he was once miraculously fed with honey by a monkey. Shravasti, the site of the Jetavana monastery, where the Buddha spent many rainy seasons preaching and where he proved his credentials to some skeptical religious leaders by performing the Twin Miracle. And Sankissa, where the Buddha descended by ladder from heaven, after spending a rainy season in one of the heavens teaching his deceased mother about the Dhamma.

A Japanese-built stupa at Rajgir

Ānanda's stupa and an Ashokan pillar at Vaishali

Ānanda Bodhi tree in Shravasti

(We managed to visit the first three of these; the last one is near Agra, I think, but we weren’t really aware of it when we were there.)

But there are other places to visit as well. Kapilavastu, where Siddharta Gautama was brought up in a palace, which he fled in order to become a monk. (There are two Kapilavastus, one in India and one in Nepal, understandably.) The Dungeshwari Cave Temple, where the Buddha spent six years practising asceticism before finally rejecting it. The Matha Kuar shrine, on the spot where Ānanda got the Buddha his last drink of water from a miraculously clear stream. And the Kesariyra Stupa, where the Buddha gave away his begging bowl before going to Kushinagar for the last time.

A Buddha image in the Dungeswhari Cave Temple

The Kesiyara Stupa

Sri Lanka

We’re a long way away from all those places now: we’re in Sri Lanka, with just a few hours to go until our five-day trip is over. But we’ve still been able to visit local Buddhist pilgrimage sites — including some very sacred ones — even though the Buddha himself never came anywhere near here.

According to one story, Buddhism was brought to Sri Lanka in the third century BCE by a son and a daughter of King Ashoka, a Buddhist monk called Mahinda and a nun called Sangamitta. Accompanied by a group of Buddhist monks, they encountered the king and his hunting party in the hills of Mihintale.

Pilgrims circumambulate a stupa in Mihintale, singing

After preaching on of the suttas, Mahinda convinced the king of the truth of their religion, and he promptly converted, building Sri Lanka’s first Buddhist stupas and temples in his capital Anuradhapura. Today, 70 percent of Sri Lanka’s population are Buddhists.

Sangamitta brought a sapling of the Bodhi tree from Bodhgaya to Sri Lanka, and today, over two thousand years later, it can be seen among the ruins of Anuradhapura, where it is still an object of devotion for Buddhist pilgrims.

The other bodhi tree

(In fact, the bodhi tree we saw at Bodhgaya is a descendant of this tree, brought from Sri Lanka to India by the archaeologist Major-General Sir Alexander Cunningham, who had a massive role in unearthing many of the sites that I have talked about here.)

So: a story and a physical relic, linking a far distant pilgrimage site to the life of the Buddha himself.

And here’s the story of a second physical relic: a bone from the Buddha’s body that survived his cremation. When Mahinda told his father King Ashoka that there were no relics in Sri Lanka, Ashoka agreed to send over the right collarbone of the Buddha, which was housed in a stupa built for the purpose, the Thuparamaya.

The Thuparamaya

And a third: one of the Buddha’s canine teeth was brought from India and housed in the Abhayagiri Monastery in Anuradhapura. After Anuradhapura was abandoned, it was moved to the new capital Polonnaruwa, where it may have been housed in a round temple whose ruins are still visited by the occasional pilgrim. (It may actually have been housed in a different building nearby.)

The temple of the tooth?

Over the centuries, the tooth travelled all over Sri Lanka as political and military events demanded, but it’s now in the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, another former capital of Sri Lanka, which we visited on the first day of our stay here. It’s a beautiful building — a converted palace — and twice a day, patient devotees endure an hour of being squashed together in small rooms, climbing up and down staircases, and politely listening to shirtless locals banging away on very loud drums: they are rewarded with a glimpse of an ornate gold box which may or may not contain the tooth in question.

The box

Bangkok tomorrow. Three nights there, eating and doing Buddhist things, before I catch the plane home on Thursday night. I’ll try and write once more before then.

Ganga Aarti

Nathan Bottomley — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Sunday, 9 April, Morning

Rajendra has told us that we’re going to the river twice today. Once in the morning, once in the evening. In the morning, we will be rowed down the river; in the evening, we will watch a Hindu ceremony.

We get up at 5 AM. There’s already traffic on the road, but not much. (During the day, the traffic in Varanasi is worse than any traffic we’ve ever seen, even in New Delhi.) The only people walking along the street at the time seem to be Muslim men, on their way to morning prayer, I suppose.

Calvin, Rajendra and I leave the car with Pappu and walk a couple of kilometres to the river. We are at a place called Dashashwamedh Ghat. Wide concrete stairs lead from the road all the way down to the water. By the time we get there, there is a bit of a crowd, nothing big. But some ceremony is already underway. A handsome young man, a Brahmin priest, is standing under a metal frame; he has an oil lamp which looks like a snake looming over a fire, and he is waving it around. Some bells dangle from the frame, and a man is pulling on a rope to ring them. They ring at a frequency that sets something vibrating uncomfortably below my right ear, and I have to stick my pinky finger in my ear to stop it. Down at the river, people are stripping off to bathe in the water.

After watching the young man for a while, we follow Rajendra down the steps to the river and walk across a few small wooden boats before reaching a boat with one occupant, who will be rowing us across the river. We get in. Rajendra gives us each a small basket containing some flowers and a small candle. During the ride we will light the candles, make a wish and set the baskets to float on the surface of the water. I can’t remember if I made a wish at all, but I do remember wondering about the content of Calvin’s wish.

Rajendra points out the other ghats along the bank of the river. A ghat is a site where a cremation takes place. Dashashwamedh Ghat, where we embarked, is the most important ghat, but there are other ghats all along the river.

We travel down the river and part of the way back. We disembark and ascend to the road above the river and walk among some new buildings — a temple complex, I think. But we stop for a second to look down towards Manikarnika Ghat, where some cremations are taking place. Calvin starts taking photographs, but a young man with an impressive moustache tells him to stop. “Look with your eyes. Camera doesn’t always work. Eyes work all the time.”

After a brief stop to buy essential oils for some reason, we rejoin the car and arrive back at the hotel before breakfast.

Evening

We’re picked up from the hotel at 5 PM. As I said, I know that we’re seeing a Hindu religious ceremony, but for some reason I haven’t asked Rajendra for any more information and I have no idea what to expect.

The streets are packed, and we have to walk through a massive crowd for a few kilometres, trying not to lose sight of one another. It’s a diverse crowd: young people, families, old people. Women tend to be wearing traditional clothes, but the men are wearing just about everything. Some people are riding motorcycles through the crowd; other people are making their way through the crowd on tuk-tuks and rickshaws.

Soon we reach Dashashwamedh Ghat. It’s packed with people, thousands and thousands of them. Rajendra leads us into a concrete building and up a flight of steps, where there is a rooftop balcony with rows of plastic seats. We sit down; there are more white people here than usual. On the river is an additional crowd of people, on boats like the one we travelled in this morning. This crowd is massive too — hundreds and hundreds of people

We wait for things to start. Behind us somewhere, the sun has nearly set.

I’m not sure how to tell you what happened next: there’s so much that I don’t understand and can’t confidently describe. There is a band: a pipe of some kind, sitars, a harmonium, drums and bells. There is a singer, but I can’t actually see him. A young man with a beautiful voice. The people recognise the songs, I think. Sometimes they raise their hands and respond, but I’m not sure what they say.

There is a row of mats, seven of them, under the frame where the young Brahmin was standing this morning with his lamp. They are covered with yellow petals, except for the middle one, which is soon covered with pink ones. There is something like a bolster or pillow at the head of each mat (a pulvinar?); on the middle one there is a statue of a god, robed and decorated, and a framed picture hung with garlands of flowers.

By the time the sun sets, there is a young man standing on each mat, like the young man this morning. Each man has a cone-shaped lampstand like a Christmas tree, with 108 individual burning lamps (I learn later). Each man also has a lamp like the man this morning, with the snake looming over a fire. The men lift the lamps in turn, moving in unison while the chanting continues.

On the building to our left, two women are fighting, and the young son of one of them is crying and fanning himself dramatically. This distracts us for a while. But basically everyone is attentive. They are watching the men, listening to the music and occastionally joining in with a response or some rhythmic clapping.

I think I become aware that things are winding up somehow. In any case, after about an hour, Rajendra hurries us off the balcony and down the stairs. Soon all three of us are travelling through a massively thick crowd on a rickshaw, whose driver is able somehow to drag more than a quarter of a tonne of large men through the heaving mass of people.

“Wow,” I say to Rajendra. “That was incredible. What was that?”

He laughs. “I’ll explain it to you in the car.”

The ceremony is called the Ganga Aarti, and it takes place every day after dusk. Tens of thousands of people attend. Varanasi has nearly 100,000 pilgrims a day, and so most of the people attending are tourists from other parts of India. When I asked Rajendra how often a local would attend the ceremony, he laughed again, and said that most locals would only attend if they had a friend or relative visiting Varanasi.

Rajendra said that the purpose of the ceremony was to ask the god to be present in some way — the god of the river or Shiva himself, I wasn’t sure. He said that a similar ceremony is performed behind closed doors in a temple to invite a god to embody itself somehow in the temple’s statues. Or something. I could easily have misunderstood. He said that the people participating raised their hands to receive grace or good vibrations — a blessing.

Anyway, I’ve attended my fair share of religious rituals over the decades, Christian and Buddhist mostly, but I have never seen anything like this. The unity and unanimity. The atmosphere, like a festival or a concert or a religious revival or a dance party. Fire and music and voice, echoing into the surrounding darkness.

Urgency & Dismay, Part II

Nathan Bottomley — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

2. Bodhgaya

We arrived at Bodhgaya on Thursday evening; we woke up hungry on Friday morning, ready to travel to the Mahabodhi Temple Complex. But by the time we reached the hotel’s breakfast room, there was nothing left to eat — the breakfast buffet had been cleared out by a group of hungry Sri Lankan pilgrims who had arrived the previous night, woken up that morning at 4 AM, gone downstairs for breakfast, and then gone off to visit the temple complex themselves.

The Mahabodhi Temple Complex is another of the four places that merit being seen by a clansman with conviction: it marks the site where the Buddha was enlightened. The first temple there was built by King Ashoka in the third century BCE; the current temple dates from the fifth or sixth centuries CE. It’s a brick temple, not large, decorated with ornate carvings. Inside is a small chamber, large enough for a few dozen people. There’s an altar table, and an image of Buddha in a glass case. He’s making the bhūmisparśa mudra, his left hand in his lap palm upwards, his right hand touching the ground, calling on it to witness the insight he has gained. (Although it’s hard to see this, as the statue has been draped in golden cloth; we watched this happening when we were inside the temple.)

Outside the temple is an enclosure marked off by a stone fence. Inside that fence is a bodhi tree, with a complex history linking it to the original bodhi tree that the Buddha himself sat under. There is also a short walking path marked with stone lotuses, set there by King Ashoka to mark the Buddha’s footsteps.

The enclosure is part of a bigger precinct. Inside are stupas and trees and walkways. On one wall is a series of golden plates containing the text of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, and opposite them are a series of prayer wheels inscribed with Tibetan script. A gate leads out to a pool, with a statue of the Buddha meditating, protected from a thunderstorm by a giant cobra, the naga-king.

Calvin wanted to make an offering to the statue in the temple — a bowl of honey from his own hives and some kheer, a kind of rice pudding provided to the Buddha by a farmer’s wife called Sujātā, ending his six years of ascetic practice. He searched the markets of Patna for vessels appropriate for the occasion, ordered the kheer from the hotel, and filled and packed the vessels. When we arrived he quickly joined the queue to enter the temple to make his offering. Once the offering was complete, he searched the entire precinct, looking for stuff to photograph. He had lots to do.

Of all the Buddhist sites we’ve visited (and it’s been many more than just this main four), this one was the most alive. There were hundreds of people in the precinct — many of them monks and nuns, many tourists, locals, and groups of pilgrims in special outfits, arriving by bus, like our Sri Lankan friends. Rows of monks sat ouside the stone fence chanting. Others sat inside the fence, retracing the Buddha’s steps. Some visitors were carefully following a series of signs, directing them to contemplate the seven weeks the Buddha stayed here after his enlightenment and the seven different activities he performed.

But despite the business and the crowds and the activity, it was not impossible to take a few minutes to sit quietly and watch and think.

We came back again later in the evening. It was less crowded, and just as beautiful, but in a different way. Calvin had more photographs to take.

3. Sarnath

And when the Blessed One had set the Wheel of Dhamma in motion, the earth devas cried out: “Near Vārāṇasī, in the Deer Park at Isipatana, the Blessed One has set in motion the unexcelled Wheel of Dhamma that cannot be stopped by contemplative or brahman, deva, Māra, or Brahmā, or anyone at all in the cosmos.”

The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56:11)

The Buddha travelled from Bodhgaya to a place near Varanasi called Deer Park, or Sarnath. That’s where he preached his first sermon, the sermon in which he first conveyed his insights to his five disciples. It’s an event called Setting the Wheel of Dharma in motion; it’s described in the Sutta quoted above.

We visited Sarnath yesterday. It’s an archaeological site: there are the usual brick remains of monasteries and temples and votive stupas all over the park. The most salient feature is another giant stupa, the Dharmek stupa, which over 40 metres high. Its base was built by King Ashoka, but built and rebuilt over the centuries to reach this height. It marks the place where the Buddha preached that first sermon.

It was Easter Saturday, so there were a lot of people there. But most of them were tourists or locals, and the site lacked the vibe of the Mahabodhi Temple Complex, the feeling a you get at a place that has been animated by millions of visiting worshippers over hundreds of years.

Still, it’s a beautiful site in its own way, and over the fence you can still see some deer — I would have been deeply disappointed if there had been no deer left. And there’s a small museum containing artefacts found during the excavation of the site, including the capital of an Ashokan pillar, beautifully preserved and polished, whose iconography has been adopted as a representation of India itself.

As we were leaving, our friends the Sri Lankan pilgrims arrived in their bus, after travelling more than eight hours to get here. By now, some of them were probably hungry.

That’s the end of our week-long tour of major Buddhist pilgrimage sites. This morning we went to the Ganges to watch a Hindu ceremony before taking a boat ride along the river and seeing how cremations are performed. Tonight, back to the Ganges for one last look.

But more of that later.

Urgency & Dismay

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

“Ānanda, there are these four places that merit being seen by a clansman with conviction, that merit his feelings of urgency & dismay. Which four? ‘Here the Tathāgata was born’ is a place that merits being seen by a clansman with conviction, that merits his feelings of urgency & dismay. ‘Here the Tathāgata awakened to the unexcelled right self-awakening’.… ‘Here the Tathāgata set rolling the unexcelled wheel of Dhamma’.… ‘Here the Tathāgata totally unbound in the property of unbinding with no fuel remaining’ is a place that merits being seen by a clansman with conviction, that merits his feelings of urgency & dismay.”

Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta, chapter 5

1. Lumbini

On the second day of the Buddhist leg of our Indian trip, we arrived in Lumbini in Nepal. I’ve rarely crossed an international border except in an airport — or in the European Union. (I have dim memories of driving through the Alps with Robert maybe twenty-five years ago and insisting that the Italian border officials stamp my passport as a souvenir.) This time, we had to visit two very rundown offices, one in India and one in Nepal, where the entire process was mediated through ancient malfunctioning computer equipment. And I think the driver may have had to bribe an angry guy. But we made it. A day trip to Nepal, back to India the next day.

Lumbini is one of the four major pilgrimage sites that the Buddha tells Ānanda about in the sutta quoted above. It’s ‘Here the Tathāgata was born’. I had seen images and video of the site before. But a lot of money has gone into the site over the past few years, and so it’s no longer the dustbowl I had been expecting. In fact, it’s been transformed into a beautiful garden.

Like most major religious figures, the Buddha had a fairly remarkable birth.

From the solid earth sprung beautiful lotuses, the nature of vajra. They appeared auspiciously where the Guide placed his wheel-marked feet.
He took seven steps and spoke with a melodious voice like Brahmā’s:
“I will be a perfect being, a sublime physician who cures old age and death!”

Lalitavistara Sūtra, chapter 7

The Buddha’s mother Māyā was travelling from her home to her father’s home for the birth, carried on a palanquin. She stopped to take a walk in the shade of a sal tree. She gave birth holding on to one of its branches, and the baby “emerged from his mother’s right side, fully aware and mindful”. He took seven steps, and a lotus bloomed from each of his footfalls. He pointed at the sky and said his first words.

The place where the Buddha was born is marked by a tree, a pond, and an unimpressive low brick building painted white, with casement windows along each wall. There’s a square parapet on top. It merely exists to shelter the main attraction: the remains of a temple built by King Ashoka, who visited and adorned the Buddhist pilgrimage sites in the third century BCE, and who is credited with the spread of Buddhism beyond the region where the Buddha lived and taught.

In fact, it’s because of Ashoka that this place is confidently identified as Lumbini. In front of the white building is a three-metre pillar, carved out of a single stone, with an inscription in the Brahmi script, saying that this spot is Buddha Shakyamuni’s birthplace, that Ashoka made and erected the pillar, and that he freed the village of Lumbini from its taxes, or at least from most of them. The pillar had been known of for years, but the inscription was only rediscovered in 1896.

Before going to the site, we spent a couple of hours being driven around the area to the north in a tuk-tuk. There’s a lot of construction going on, and the drive was very rough, but it’s going to be a lot easier to visit in a few years’ time. The whole area is full of temples, including one constructed by Nepalese Buddhists, but there are Thai temples, Lao, Japanese, Burmese, Tibetan — even French and German temples. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a “site of cultural and natural heritage […] considered to be of outstanding value to humanity”.

4. Kushinagara

Then the Blessed One, emerging from the cessation of perception & feeling, entered the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception. Emerging from that, he entered the dimension of nothingness… the dimension of the infinitude of consciousness… the dimension of the infinitude of space… the fourth jhāna… the third… the second… the first jhāna. Emerging from the first jhāna he entered the second… the third… the fourth jhāna. Emerging from the fourth jhāna, he immediately totally unbound. Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta, chapter 6

The Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta tells the story of the Buddha’s parinibbāna, his Total Unbinding, which took place here in Kushinigar when he was eighty years old. There are several sites connected to this event.

The first one we visited contained the remains of a massive stupa — a burial mound faced in stone or brick — the site where the Buddha’s body was cremated, built over some of his ashes.

The second was a temple constructed during the Gupta period (between the fourth and seventh centuries CE), which contains an ancient statue of the Buddha reclining, carved from a single block of red sandstone (since broken into three pieces somehow and covered in gold foil by worshippers). Our guide encouraged us to look at the statue from different angles: looking along from the feet, he said, it looks like a dead body, from the top it looks like the Buddha is deep in contemplation, and from beside his face you can just discern a satisfied smile.

Behind the temple is a tall hemispherical stupa, built originally by King Ashoka in the third century BCE. Both the temple and the stupa were renovated extensively during the time of Nehru. They are surrounded by the ruins of monasteries.

And finally, across the road is the Matha Kuar Shrine. A small temple, containing a three-metre golden Buddha, marking the source of the Buddha’s last drink of water before his Total Unbinding. It’s adjacent to the usual ruined monastery.

Calvin and I were the only foreigners here. At Lumbini, there were monks sitting around the sal tree — we even had a hilarious chat with one of them. (He gave us his card.) There were young people prostrating themselves before the stone that marks the exact site of the Buddha’s birth. And there was a small group of devotees chanting melodiously outside the temple. But at Kushinagar, all of the visitors were local, and only one young man kissed his hand and touched the foot of the reclining Buddha.

Anyway, we’re tired, and both a bit run down from a persistent cough which is probably not Covid. So we’ve retired early to our hotel room for a break and a nap before dinner.

Interlude: Forts, Mostly

Nathan Bottomley — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Just got back from lunch: we’re hanging out in the hotel room until dinner, relaxing for a while before the onslaught tomorrow.

The hotel room is in the Radisson Lucknow City Centre, a hotel which is only a couple of decades old, but which has been really letting itself go. There’s a lot of miserable dark wood panelling on every wall. The doors on Level 7 have signs indicating that it’s a non-smoking floor, but judging by the smell of the corridor, they were hastily put up less than a week ago. The Samsung TV comes complete with an LG remote, there’s no bath towels in the bathroom (which I discovered when I got out the shower), and the fridge doesn’t work, or didn’t until a nice man came to the door to fix it at about 11 o’clock last night. Oh, and it sounds like the toilet’s leaking.

Anyway, we’re not in Rajasthan any longer. We’re in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, which is a state larger and a bit poorer than Rajasthan. After Udaipur we went to Jaipur, and after Jaipur we went to Agra. And after Agra, here.

Our sightseeing has continued much as before, but the pace has slowed. So, we do a long day of driving, followed by a night at the hotel, followed by a day of forts and palaces and things, followed by a second night at the hotel, followed by another long drive to the next destination. Sometimes we visit something on the way. A fort, usually.

Agra Fort

My Terran Ague, which is now under control, thank you for asking, prevented me from engaging in the sightseeing in Udaipur and Jaipur. Fortunately, though, I was able to enjoy Agra, where the Taj Mahal is to be found, but where there are also two forts to visit. The first fort is Agra Fort, not far from the Taj Mahal: it was built by the Mughal king Akbar in the sixteenth century as the capital of the empire. Before it was finished in 1573, Akbar had moved his capital to the second fort, Fatehpur Sikri, in order to be near the Sufi saint Salim, who predicted the birth of his first son Jahangir, whose son Shah Jahan would go on to build the Taj Mahal.

Fatepur Sikri

Calvin complains that there have been too many forts over the last two weeks, and there’s something to be said for that, but each of them has been huge and beautiful, and I would have been sorry to miss any more of them than I already did.

But basically, we’re done with forts. Out for dinner tonight, and then tomorrow morning we’re leaving the forts behind.

First stop: Shravasti, a pilgrimage site marking a location where the Buddha delivered many of his suttas and performed two miracles. After that, we will drive to Lumbini in Nepal, staying there the night, and then visiting the site of the Buddha’s birth, at the Maya Devi Temple. Over the next week we will be visiting all four of the most important Buddhist pilgrimage sites, as well as some ancillary sites nearby.

Both Calvin and I have been looking forward to this for a long time. I’ll let you know how we get on.

If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Bikaner

Nathan Bottomley — Sat, 25 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Since my last post, we have driven 1,125 kilometers across Rajasthan. We’ve stayed in Bikaner, Jaisalmer (two nights) and Jodhpur, and now we’ve arrived in Udaipur, where we will be staying for two nights before leaving for Jaipur.

It’s all been a bit of a blur, really. Lots of checking in and out of hotels, lots of driving through the countryside, and lots of temples, cenotaphs and forts. Here is a random selection of salient observations. (I’m allowing myself one post in this format for each leg of the trip.)

After a couple of days’ grace, the Terran Ague has returned with a far more brutal and upsetting assault than before. Indescribable. I suspect that it was a mistake to have a few vegetarian meals at local eateries over the last two days, but Calvin doesn’t want to feel like a tourist, and he is thrilled by the prospect of paying only one or two hundred rupees for a meal. In any case, I’ll be living on electrolytes, muesli bars and prayer for the next few days.
Jaisalmer is a very beautiful place. It’s in the middle of the desert, not too far from the border with Pakistan, and it’s full of yellow sandstone buildings, including a massive old fort on the top of the nearest hill housing about 3,000 regular residents.

Looking up the support wall of Jaisalmer Fort

Just before our arrival in Bikaner, we visited the Karni Mata Temple, a Hindu temple that is home to tens of thousands of rats. Walking through the temple barefoot was certainly a thing that I remember doing. Our driver told us that the Italian tourists he had taken there didn’t really appreciate it. “Tanti topi,” they would cry, apparently.

Our cousin the rat

Calvin has been assiduous (some people might say annoying) in his effort to capture every moment of the trip with his little point-and-shoot camera. I can’t possibly post all his photos here, but you can find them on Facebook, and I’ll be downloading them to my photo library when I get home.

Mandir Palace

More than one of the hotels we’ve stayed in was actually part of a palace complex owned and inhabited by members of one of the royal families. In Bikaner, this was the Hotel Lallgarh Palace, which actually seemed a little bit run down and sad, in part because its corridors were adorned with what its website chooses to call “charming sepia photographs and cherished hunting trophies”. In Jaesalmer, it was the Hotel Mandir Palace, which is ornately carved from the town’s yellow sandstone and whose tower is the highest building in Jaisalmer apart from the fort.

Whenever I walk past a dog asleep in the middle of the road, I am compelled to stop for a second to make sure it’s still breathing.
I didn’t know what a haveli was when I wrote my last post from a haveli in Mandawa that had been converted into a hotel. The next morning, our guide (who was a handsome young local who spoke four or five european languages) showed us a dozen of them in Mandawa, and we’ve seen dozens and dozens more of them since. In Mandawa, a local family of artists have been painting frescoes on the havelis for decades; elsewhere, they are decorated with intricate stone carvings.
For the nerds: I was able to correct an error in my previous post from the back seat of the car using my phone’s GitHub app. Editing the file and committing my changes automatically triggered a full site rebuild incorporating my changes. (Those are all meaningful English words.) I am unreasonably excited by this.
As you can see, I have now ridden a camel. I was expecting to be mounted behind an experienced cameleer, but instead I was sat on the camel by myself as it was led along by a small, quiet teenager. Getting on and off is the most unsettling part: camels stand with their back legs first and sit down with their front legs first, so you have to hold on tight to the saddle and lean backwards to avoid faceplanting into the camel’s neck or (more likely) just completely falling off the bloody thing. Camels are grumpy and obnoxious, but really, who can blame them?

We’re in Udaipur now. Taking it easy, thank God. And tomorrow is all sightseeing and very little driving, which will be nice. I’ll catch you all again in a few days.

The Terran Ague

Nathan Bottomley — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Everyone who’s been into deep space has had the Terran Ague, or the three-day sweats as it’s commonly known. It’s a sort of a mild infection, it slightly alters the body’s nucleic structure, it seems to be a metabolic reaction to space travel.

Doctor Bellfriar, Blake’s 7, Series B, Episode 7, Killer

I arrived in Delhi on Saturday morning.

The flights overnight from Rome were lovely, of course, but I lost 4½ hours travelling east and the final leg was only 3 hours long, so I had had only about an hour’s sleep. But, you know Calvin, it was straight to business. I had a quick shower and we were picked up from the hotel almost immediately by the tour guide, Aditya from Food Tour in Delhi.

Aditya was a funny and cheerful young man. He had been a chef, and so he was able to explain to us what we were eating and even to predict with accuracy how our taste buds would respond to different foods in different combinations. We started in Old Delhi, which is gloriously squalid and crowded, trying food from stalls and restauarants, and even a coffee house run by generations of a Jain family whose specialty was a kind of fruit sandwich with cheese, which tastes like a light and delicate cake.

Six hours later, the tour had finished and we went back to our grimy hotel. I feel asleep immediately, but Calvin woke me up a couple of hours later for even more food.

You can probably tell where this is headed.

The next day, our proper tour started, which will take us from Delhi to Kolkata, via Rajasthan and the four major Buddhist pilgrimage sites. Calvin has organised it all — every night’s hotel is booked, every day is accounted for, there’s none of my hippie fear of foreclosing possibilities. This tour is serious business.

We met our tour guide for the day and our driver for the next three-and-a-bit weeks, and we headed off into Delhi. Another less food-oriented tour of Old Delhi, the Jama Mosque, Humayan’s Tomb, the ruins of the Qutb Minar complex, and the Shri Laxmi Narayan Temple.

I had already had an unfortunate gastrointestinal incident before leaving the hotel that morning, and by the time the day’s sightseeing was nearing its end I was increasingly, urgently keen to return to the hotel. I’ll spare you any details, but I was unable to muster any enthusiasm about the Rajasthani restaurant we went to for a dinner consisting of tiny metal cups of delicious things on a giant metal tray full of even more delicious things. And by the time we got back to the hotel after that, the Terran Ague had hit me full force. I spent an unpleasantly acidic night, sweating and shivering in the bed and waking up dehydrated every couple of hours.

Naturally, Calvin had come prepared with as much gastro-stop as I could possibly want — certainly enough to get me through today’s six-hour drive without any horrifying incidents.

Tonight, we’re staying at the Vivaana Heritage Hotel, which is a restored nineteenth-century haveli, a merchant’s house lavishly decorated with frescoes and carvings. And if I make it through dinner, there’s an evening of traditional puppetry, storytelling and folk music, which I’m hoping will be tolerable. Before that, though, a nap, I think.

Closing Time

Nathan Bottomley — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Well, I was never going to be able to afford to stay in Positano, of course, so the best thing to do was a day trip. Really, I should have done this when I was staying in Sorrento — it’s a 50-minute bus ride from Sorrento to Positano — but I was still at the very beginning of four whole weeks of travel in Italy, and I didn’t want to fill those weeks up with day trips and activities, to impose any structure or foreclose any possibilities.

I’m nearing the other end of those four weeks now. And I’m pretty happy with the structure that ended up somehow being imposed on those four weeks. Sorrento, Ischia, Naples, Salerno, Matera and Pompei. Four or five nights each. Not spending too much time sitting on trains and buses, lugging the big suitcase around, checking in, checking out.

I decided to stay in Pompei because the bus back from Matera stopped there on the way to Naples. And because I thought it looked pretty when I accidentally caught the wrong train from Naples a couple of weeks ago and ended up at Pompei Santuario instead of Pompei Scavi. I had walked through the town for about a quarter of an hour and entered the archaeological park through the eastern gate near the amphitheatre. There’s a long stretch of road there leading from the main square to the ruins, full of stalls and bars and restaurants catering for tourists, but it has a kind of festival atmosphere, which I think is kind of fun. And, you know, I’m a tourist.

The Santuario della Beata Vergine Maria del Santo Rosario di Pompei

By the time I decided to go to Positano, the four weeks had been completely planned, and my trip to Italy had ended up being four weeks hanging around the Bay of Naples and its immediate environs, punctuated by four nights in Matera. By then, the Amalfi Coast had joined the infinite list of foreclosed possibilities. (Mostly because I had checked out Positano on hotels.com and had decided that it would be unreasonable to spend $400 a night on accommodation at any point during an eleven-week overseas holiday.) Still, I knew it would only take me about an hour and a half to get to Positano, and that would count as having visited the Amalfi Coast.

I literally knew nothing about the Amalfi Coast, apart from its location. I had seen some photos, I think, that made it look roughly like Sorrento, with big hotels perched on cliffs and things. But I had no idea that the towns were built on precipitous hillsides, in places where it would probably have been a lot easier to just take a quick look round and decide to build somewhere else.

I walked down from the bus stop to the beach and sat on a bench on the seafront surrounded by expensive restaurants. And then I climbed back up again. That night, I texted Calvin — “I went to Positano today, which is where we will be retiring to in just a few years” — and seconds later he sent me a link to a 9½ million dollar property that would be just perfect.

I left Pompei this morning, and now I’m in the Holiday Inn Roma — Eur Parco Dei Medici. Just a 15-minute drive from the airport. The day after tomorrow, I’m flying out to Delhi to meet Calvin. But before then, I have a whole day left, and I’m near Rome. I still haven’t decided what to do.

End of Part 1.

Purae Sunt Plateae

Nathan Bottomley — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

It’s my last full day in Matera. Gotta get up really early tomorrow morning — well okay, at 7 AM — to get the bus from the other side of town to take me back to the bay of Naples. So, an early night tonight.

Matera is not a big town: located in the arch of Italy’s foot, it’s got a population of about 60,000 people. And it takes about half an hour to drag a heavy suitcase from one side of the town to another, which is what I will be doing first thing tomorrow morning.

In 2014, Matera was declared the European Capital of Culture for 2019. Also in 2019, Daniel Craig came here to shoot a car chase around the streets of the town and a confrontation with one of the three facially disfigured villains in the most recent James Bond film No Time to Die. (They also shot scenes from the risible and horribly blasphemous Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ here, but I think we should all just agree as a species to forget about that film completely.)

Those aren’t the reasons I came here, obviously. The real reason — and Matera’s main claim to fame, is the Sassi — a cunningly hidden medieval city which clings to one side of a river valley on the eastern side of the town. All its buildings are constructed from large, soft, yellow blocks of limestone. But the interiors of those buildings — including some churches and monasteries — are limestone caves. Caves which may have had human inhabitants as early as 10,000 years ago.

In 1952, the Sassi were evacuated. They were malarial, and kind of unfit for human habitation. People had lived there for centuries, with no natural light and no ventilation, crowded into the caves with their families and their livestock. But over the last few decades, with the help of the EU and UNESCO, it’s been developed, and now it’s full of small businesses, bars and restaurants.

I arrived at Matera on Monday, after hanging around a bus stop with my suitcase for a few hours and travelling 3½ hours by bus south and east of Salerno. I checked into the hotel at about 7:30, went and grabbed something to eat and then went to bed.

The hotel is like the one in Salerno, only much, much cleaner. There are only four rooms here, and no one on site most of the time. There’s a four-digit code to get into the hotel and another one to get into the room. I think only one of the other rooms is currently occupied.

(This is a much better arrangement than the hotel in Salerno, which I got into using an app on my phone. One day I left my phone in the hotel room and spent an uncomfortable thirty minutes imagining myself sitting phonelessly outside the hotel for hours and hours, hoping someone nice might come by to let me in, only to remember that the keyring with my room key had two other keys on it whose purpose should have been immediately obvious.)

Each day I’ve been here, I’ve got up and wandered through the Sassi all morning, taking photos, searching for an affordable restaurant for dinner that night (unsuccessfully), and trying to find the locations where the Bond movie was shot (successfully, for the most part, although the graveyard isn’t real and that bridge Bond falls from is actually thirty kilometres away in a town called Gravina). I’ve mostly spent my afternoons reading or wandering around the rest of the town listening to podcasts. It’s been nice. Things are a bit expensive here, I think, but the streets are wide and clean and there’s nothing to hinder those who are deep in thought.

After today, there are just over seven days left in this part of the trip. Next Friday, I’ll be flying out from Rome to Delhi, where I will catch up with Calvin, and where the second, much weirder phase of the journey will begin. I’ll catch up with you before then.

Picks of the Day

Fuck waiting until 7:30 for restaurants to open for dinner in Italy. Have a long, boozy lunch instead.
The series finale of The Good Place, Whenever You’re Ready. I watched it last night before bed: fifty minutes of alternately sobbing and laughing out loud. I can’t think of another TV series finale that gets everything so completely right.

In Transit

Nathan Bottomley — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

A brief update.

I’m just finishing a four-night stay in Salerno, just south of the Bay of Naples and north of the Amalfi Coast. It’s mostly been about walking, reading and food, to be honest. I’ll fill you in a bit more later.

I’m checking out of this grimy hotel in just under an hour. Then a walk across town to the bus stop where I’ll be catching a bus for the 3½ hour trip to Matera.

I first learned about Matera a couple of years ago, in a house meeting organised by my colleague Caterina Rupolo. It’s a town with a surprising history and a unique geography; almost as importantly, it was one of the locations used in the most recent James Bond film No Time to Die.

My phone, AirPods and Kindle are all charged, and I’m ready for a long day of looking out the window of the bus at the passing countryside. The worst thing about travelling is the actual going-from-place-to-place part, which I’ve tried to minimise on this trip as much as possible. It makes me cross. But I’ve paid for the ticket, I’ve located the inadequately signposted bus stop, and I’m ready to go.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

Among the Ruins

Nathan Bottomley — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The first time I came to Naples was in 2008. I didn’t stay there for long: I got off the train at Napoli Centrale, walked a few hundred metres to Napoli Piazza Garibaldi and caught a train from there straight to Sorrento. Maybe thirty minutes tops.

It was the height of the Neapolitan waste management crisis, which had started some time in the 1980s and would continue until about 2011. Pulling into Napoli Centrale, I could see hundreds of black plastic bags piled up beside the railway tracks. A beloved colleague in Grammar’s history department, David Patrick, knew that I wanted to visit Pompeii and Herculaneum and had warned me to avoid Naples at all costs and had advised me to stay in Sorrento instead.

The second time in came here, it was just for a few hours. It was a rainy day in December 2017. I walked from Napoli Centrale to the National Archaeological Museum, spent a couple of hours in the museum, and then walked back again and caught the next train to Sorrento. I didn’t see any black plastic bags, but it was all a bit filthy and run down, and for some reason I never really noticed that even the shabbiest parts of the city have a kind of faded glamour.

I’m in my hotel room in Naples now: after five nights here I will be leaving. I think I said before that Calvin had booked it for me. “Apparently it is not a good and safe area at the holiday inn,” He warned me. I was dismissive: “I’ll be okay. I’ve been to Naples before.”

I really warmed to Naples the last time I came here. It was on the school’s 2019 Classics Tour — the last time I travelled abroad before the pandemic. We stayed in a nice hotel not far from the monument pictured above and a short work from the historic centre of Naples: a maze of cobbled streets full of churches and bookshops and bars and restaurants. It’s grimy and faded and a bit run down, but it’s beautiful as well.

Vastly unlike the historic centre of Naples is the windswept and largely deserted shopping precinct that surrounds this hotel, and the train station that services it. It’s got a real Chatswood-six-months-after-the-Apocalypse vibe. Take a look.

Anyway, I’m actually going to be sorry to leave. The hotel was nice. I did my professionally mandated trips to the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum and to the National Archaeological Museum, and I thoroughly enjoyed them all. And I got to wander the streets soaking up the grimy grandeur of the place. I’ll be back, deo volente.

The Week and Pizza

Nathan Bottomley — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I’m writing this in the Holiday Inn in Naples, in a large hotel room, in a skyscraper, surrounded by graffiti and urban decay. Calvin booked the hotel for me — using points — after I decided that I would spend my time in Sorrento just relxing and that I would start my sightseeing the following week from Naples. And although this hotel is some distance from Naples’ beautiful centro storico, it’s very close to a train station that will take me wherever I need to go.

After writing my last post, I spent a couple more nights in Sorrento, and then I caught a train to Naples and a ferry to Ischia, which I have wanted to visit for years now. (There are ferries that go directly from Sorrento to Ischia, but they don’t run during February.)

Ischia is a small volcanic island about 10 kilometres across, just off the coast of the Cape of Misenum, at the end of the northern arm of the Bay of Naples. The Romans called it Pithecusa or Pithecusae, a name that includes the nearby islands of Procida and Vivaria. In Metamorphoses Book 14, Ovid says that the island is named after the little yellow apes that were once its inhabitants — formerly a race of people, the Cercopes, whom Jupiter transformed into apes as punishment for their deceit and trickery. (Pliny the Elder says that the island is named after its clay deposits, but that is just the sort of thing that he might be expected to say.) Aeneas stopped on the island on the way to Cumae, according to Ovid, which is why it’s also called Aenaria, a name that it has passed down to a number of thermal spas and restaurants.

It had become apparent during my stay in Sorrento that there’s nothing much open there during February. And so every night I would start wandering around at about half past five, hunting for somewhere to eat. This continued to be a problem when I arrived in Ischia. During my first hunt, I found the Castello Aragonese, pictured above, sitting atop a volcanic plug connected to Ischia by a stone bridge. When I came back to visit the castle the next day, it was closed. The thermal spas were also closed. And the restaurants were closed. The bars were open, for the locals I suppose, and so I was still able to eat bar snacks and burgers and toasted sandwiches, but I couldn’t find anywhere that served the sort of Italian food that was really my main reason for coming to Italy.

Last night, my hunt was successful. I realised a few days ago that I just needed to be more patient: restaurants here don’t really open for dinner until 7 PM, which is more than an hour after I usually eat dinner. So I held off, and was rewarded with the sort of food I had been imagining since I arrived on the island. It was at a restaurant by the port called Pane e Vino, whose owner told me that, while living in London as a young man, he had discovered that Australians are much more fun and relaxed than English people.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I’ve walked and read and relaxed and listened to podcasts, but I haven’t actually done any proper sightseeing. So tomorrow I’ll catch the train to Herculaneum, which isn’t closed on Sundays, and then I’ll work out what to do after that. But in the meantime, tonight, in the hotel restaurant, I will be eating pizza.

Raining in Sorrento

Nathan Bottomley — Sun, 19 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I arrived in Sorrento the day before yesterday. This is my third time here. I first came here in 2008 and then again in 2017 (when I stayed for about ten days).

I like Sorrento. It’s a bit touristy, particularly on the weekends, but it’s very pretty and there’s lots of places to eat, to walk, and to sit quietly and read. And it’s close to other things, like Capri, Pompeii and Herculaneum.

This time I’m not going to any of those places. I’m here for two more nights, and I plan to take it very easy. This morning I had breakfast at the hotel, sat at a bar drinking coffee and reading, and then took a walk down the cliff to the marina, followed by more sitting and reading. But then it started raining, so now I’m back in the hotel writing this. If it doesn’t ease up soon, I might start doing some podcast or website things until I head off for drinks and dinner.

Some random thoughts about the trip so far, in no particular order.

I’ve been trying to speak to people in Italian. My knowledge of Italian is more theoretical than practical, so I’m a bit halting and diffident, and people normally leap in to rescue me by responding in English. But I persevere.
I spent my last full day in Eastbourne wandering around while Joe was at work. During my walk, I saw three people with only one leg (each). Mark assured me that this was not something he had ever noticed, so I hope and expect it was all just confirmation bias and that the average number of legs among the population of Eastbourne is only very slightly less than two.
Pasta alla Genovese tastes familiar for some reason, but I have decided never ever to order it again.
Everything is closed in Sorrento in February. This absolutely doesn’t matter to me at all, although I am missing a bar in Tasso Square that I quite liked and a cheap restaurant just outside the centro storico which I visited for lunch the last time I was here.

Italian trains are a bit confusing, and it’s just possible that I paid €13.50 for a €58 trip from Rome to Naples. Don’t tell anyone.
As I said in my previous post, on my last night in Eastbourne, Joe and Mark took me to see Relatively Speaking, an Alan Ayckbourn play first performed in 1967 with Richard Briers and Michael Hordern as the two male leads. The play itself was fun, but Blakes 7’s Steven Pacey and Skippy’s Liza Goddard were both indisposed, and so their parts were (ably) played by their understudies. We had a great time, but I believe I was the third youngest person in the audience: my enjoyment of Act Four was affected somewhat by an apparent incontinence pants incident suffered by the woman sitting immediately to my right.
Angela and I spent a morning at the British Library visiting its Alexander the Great Exhibition. I had no idea that Alexander had had such an eventful afterlife, becoming the hero of a series of romances, including stories of his flight through the air in an engine powered by griffins, his descent to the depths of the sea floor in a glass diving bell, and his encounters with men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. Worth a visit if you can get there.

Picks of the day

I’m currently enjoying the podcast If Books Could Kill, in which Michael Hobbes critically revisits the dark side of some of the most famous airport non-fiction of the last few decades, including Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner’s Freakonomics. Hobbes is really thoughtful and funny, and he gets extra points for pushing back on Twitter against centrist dunderhead Jonathan Chait’s credulous bullshit take on healthcare for trans children, which was published in The New York Times in the last week or so.

And while we’re on the subject of The New York Times’s appalling coverage of trans issues, here’s The Onion’s take on it — the most blistering satirical article I’ve seen from them in decades.

Hm. It’s stopped raining. Off for a walk. Chat soon.

Hello world!

Nathan Bottomley — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I’m in Slough.

Well, not Slough exactly. The parish of Colnbrook with Poyle, Slough. The Holiday Inn Express London — Heathrow T5. A boring hotel near the airport.

I’m flying off to Italy tomorrow morning, and I have to be at the airport before 5 AM. So Calvin — very thoughtfully — found this hotel and booked me a room for my last night in the UK. I’m excited about tomorrow’s flight, but I’ll be travelling by train for a few hours afterwards, and I won’t be arriving in Sorrento until the afternoon. So a boring hotel is just the sort of place I need to be to chill for a few hours. Gotta get into a state of mind where I won’t get cross tomorrow when I inevitably get lost at some point.

This is my first post, even though I arrived in the UK nearly two weeks ago. Normally I blog when I’m travelling alone, so that I have a record of the trip to read later. But the last two weeks (or so) I’ve just been too busy.

I don’t really want to write about it all yet. But I had the best time. I stayed with Joe and his partner Mark in Eastbourne: I’ve been chatting with Joe daily since October 2020, and I finally, finally got to meet him in person. We recorded 11 podcast episodes together — including the latest episode of Untitled Star Trek Project. And we just hung out — eating, wandering around, climbing up Beachy Head, watching telly, talking. And we did some touristy things too. A pilgrimage to Leeds Castle, where The Androids of Tara was filmed in 1978. A trip to the Fitzroy Tavern in London to catch up with some Who fans and podcasting friends. A hilarious last night where we went to the theatre to see the new production of Relatively Speaking by Alan Ayckbourn.

Joe wasn’t the only friend I met in person for the first time: there was also Si, Pete, and Conrad, who I’ve been podcasting and chatting with online for some time now. New people too: Steve, Chris, and Rob Valentine, who listens to FTE and who is very generous in his engagement with us on Twitter. And I caught up with some people I hadn’t seen for a long time: Colin, Angela, and Simon Catterall and his partner Majed (who I was also meeting for the first time).

Huh. I said I didn’t want to write about all this. I think that’s because I don’t think I can satisfactorily express how great it all was, and how grateful I am to everyone I got to see — but particularly Joe and Mark, who were so kind and warm and generous and so much fun to hang out with. I love you all. I can’t wait to see you again (except Colin, who will be here in a couple of hours because he’s flying to Copenhagen tomorrow and staying in this hotel tonight).

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

Nathan Bottomley — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT

This essay was originally published in You on Target, an anthology of essays about the Doctor Who Target novelisations, released in 2020. In it, I talk about (among other things) Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation of the Doctor Who story Invasion of the Dinosaurs.

Thank you to Christopher Bryant for commissioning it.

66 million years ago

Somehow, the pterodactyl was glad to be back. It had been a very difficult day.

Just this morning, it had been sunning itself in this sandy clearing. It must have fallen asleep, for the next thing it knew was that it was somewhere else, in a giant underground cavern. There was some kind of mammal there, a mammal with a head covered with a shock of white fur. The mammal was holding a searing bright light, which had sent the pterodactyl off screeching to the roof of the cavern. But then mammal had gone away, and the pterodactyl had settled down to wait for sunrise.

Still, that’s all over now, it thought.

But this very thought was interrupted by a loud, high-pitched buzz. The pterodactyl looked up to see two more of the brown-coloured mammals, appearing out of nowhere in a swirling eddy of light.

It couldn’t understand the ugly noises coming from the mammals’ mouths, of course, and it couldn’t admire the highly polished fingernails of one or the expensively cut lounge suit of the other. But it knew that they would attract the attention of the Monster, who would soon be along to enjoy them as a between-meals snack.

So it flew off, the tip of one leathery wing grazing the cheek of one of the mammals as it went. The Monster was coming.

Silence. A sound of thunder.

12 January 1974

At teatime today, Part 1 of Invasion of the Dinosaurs is broadcast for the first time.

(I will turn five in three months, but I don’t appear in this chapter of the story.)

Part 1 is a pretty good episode. The Doctor and his new assistant Sarah Jane Smith are exploring a mysteriously bleak and deserted London. They are mistaken for looters, and are quickly arrested. No one will even listen to their story: they are apparently powerless to escape from a rigid and tiresome military bureaucracy.

And then, at the cliffhanger, they are menaced by a roaring puppet Tyrannosaurus.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs will not become an instant classic. Last year’s finale, The Green Death, featured simple rod-and-string puppet maggots, and psychologically scarred an entire generation of children. But no one will be scarred by Invasion’s puppet dinosaurs, because they are plangently, lamentably bad. They float in mid-air, amateurishly CSO’d onto poorly-directed location footage. They burst suddenly through cardboard walls. Instead of roaring, they actually seem to be saying the English word ROAR. One dinosaur retreats out of shot, pulled by the tail by an off-screen hand. Another two dinosaurs fight, menacing each other with bendy rubber teeth. (Or are they snogging? It’s honestly hard to tell.)

Six weeks later, a man with polished fingernails and a man in an expensively cut lounge suit will vanish completely from a secret government base underneath an evacuated London.

19 February 1976

Malcolm Hulke’s fifth Doctor Who novelisation is published: a version of Invasion of the Dinosaurs called Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion.

Unlike the televised story, it’s a triumph. And not just because it doesn’t include a single puppet dinosaur.

Consider how it reveals the backstory — the evacuation of London and the mysterious appearance of the dinosaurs. In Part 1 of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, the Doctor and Sarah hear about these events in some fairly unremarkable expository dialogue. But in Chapter 1 of the novelisation (London Alert!), we see the same events through the eyes of Shughie McPherson. Shughie is a young unemployed man from Glasgow, who has come down (up?) to London with some mates to see the Cup Final. He misses the evacuation because he is too tired and hungover to leave with them.

He wakes up in a London that has been completely abandoned. There’s no electricty, so he decides to leave the house, only to discover that the entire street is deserted. Terrified by the sight of the broken body of a young milkman, he falls to his knees and recites the Lord’s Prayer. And then he is attacked and killed by an unseen dinosaur.

In the televised version of the story, there is no one as interesting and skilfully characterised as Shughie McPherson. And no one like him has ever appeared in Doctor Who before.

Malcolm Hulke is brilliant at backstory and characterisation. There’s an entire chapter in Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters devoted to the odd, one-sided relationship between Dr Quinn and Miss Dawson. In Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, we learn all about Jane Leeson — a character who gets a couple of minutes of screen time on television — what her life was like on a miserable, overcrowded earth, how she met her husband, and why she left to colonise the planet in whose soil she will finally be buried. And in Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils, we learn how Captain Trenchard aspires to be a hero, and how he is tragically killed by his own buffoonish incompetence.

21 June 1978

Here I am, appearing in the story at last. I’m ten years old, and tonight I will watch my first episode of Doctor Who.

A couple of weeks ago, my best friend at school showed me my first ever Target book. It was called The Doctor Who Monster Book. Somehow, Luke and I managed to spend hours of class time looking through it, when, presumably, we were meant to be doing mental arithmetic, or reading English books, or doing whatever the hell you do in Fourth Grade in primary school.

The Doctor Who Monster Book had a picture of Tom Baker on the front cover, apparently drawn by someone who had never actually seen him, even in photographs. There were sections on each of the Doctors, double-page spreads for all of the top-tier returning monsters, and even pages covering the the Zarbi, the Sensorites, and the Uxariean mining robot.

Because it was a Target book, many of the pages reproduced Chris Achilleos’s cover art for the novelisations. On pages 52 and 53, you could even see the classic cover of Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, depicting Pertwee’s Doctor, his hand protecting his face, as a Tyrannosaurus rex advances on him from behind, and a pterodactyl snaps at him with an almighty Roy-Lichtenstein-inspired KKLAK!

But the star of the books was the Daleks. Five pages were devoted to them, chronicling their exploits in every Doctor Who story of the sixties and seventies, culminating in the Doctor’s attempt to avert their creation in Genesis of the Daleks.

Tonight’s episode, Luke tells me, is called Death to the Daleks. And so I will go home after school, and announce to my family that at half past six, on Channel 2, we will be watching Part 1 of my first ever Doctor Who story.

It will change my life.

Later in 1978

At ten years old, I am already a voracious reader. Summer is hot in Sydney, and we are lucky enough to have a swimming pool in the backyard. Sometimes I come home from school and sit on the top step of the pool and read. I’m often reading a Target novelisation.

By now, I’ve got quite a collection going. I get a couple of dollars a week in pocket money, in exchange for simple chores like wiping up the plates after dinner and not coming downstairs to annoy my parents after bedtime. I use that money to buy novelisations. David Jones at Warringah Mall has a bookshop, just near the butcher. We go there every week to buy meat, and after that I choose five or six novelisations and put them on lay-by until I can save up enough money to take them home with me. I write my name and phone number on the first page of each book.

Soon I have dozens of them. They’re almost always Pertwee or Baker stories, although I do have Doctor Who and the Cybermen, starring a strange old Doctor who I have never even seen. Some of them, like Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear, Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom, I have seen on television. Others, Doctor Who and the Mutants, Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils, Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion have not been on television since I started watching Doctor Who.

April 1979

I’m in an airport, in the United States somewhere. My family are here on holiday: perhaps we’re travelling across the country, from LA to New York, I think. In my bag, there is an exercise book in which I use a biro to write an account of the trip; there are also a few Target novelisations from my collection.

My edition of Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion doesn’t have the cover with the pterodactyl saying KKLAK! It’s a later edition with a T. rex on the cover, based on a painting by Charles R. Knight, standing in front of a building I will later learn to identify as St Paul’s cathedral.

This is my first vivid memory of reading a Target novelisation: Sir Charles Grover, with his expensively cut lounge suit and delusions of grandeur, tells the Doctor that he is “in time to be present at the most important moment in the world’s history.” The Doctor, unimpressed as ever by the most important moments in the world’s history, replies, "On the contrary. I am in time to prevent a crime.”

I think I might be in love.

Interlude: Nathan meets Tom Baker

It’s March 1980, the last year of primary school. I’m still friends with Luke. He has told me that Tom Baker is visiting Australia, that he’s coming to Warringah Mall, and he’s making an appearance in the Grace Brothers car park.

My father has agreed to let me go. The night before, in preparation, I watch a new Doctor Who episode, Part Something of The Creature From The Pit. I also go through my collection to find a novelisation for Tom to sign. I settle on Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng Chiang: it has the best likeness of Tom on the cover. He is dressed like Sherlock Holmes, staring grimly out of the picture with his piercing brown eyes.

My mother is in hospital for the first time. Over the next ten years, she will often be in hospital. Now, in the distant future, I still remember going to see her years later, reading Doctor Who Magazine on the bus, clutching it in my hand as I go to visit her in the room where she will eventually succumb to the cancer that kills her.

That’s still ten years in the future. Right now, I’m in a long queue at the rooftop car park. Luke and his sister Rachel are with me. Immediately behind me in the queue is a boy who I will actually meet and befriend many years later: one of my co-hosts from the podcast Flight Through Entirety — Richard Stone. He has just about forgiven me for what happens next.

Many more people have turned up than the organisers expected. But we’re not very far from the front. Behind us, the queue snakes off into the distance. Ahead, I can seen Tom in the distance, wearing his costume from last night’s episode.

While we wait, I talk to Luke about my mother’s trip to hospital. I am overheard by a kindly old lady who is walking up and down the queue to keep everything running smoothly.

It takes an hour, I guess, but now we’re just about standing in front of Tom himself. An announcement is made. Tom needs to leave now, and so the people in front of us will be the last people to get to speak to him.

But the kindly lady intervenes. “This boy’s mother is in hospital,” she says, and I’m allowed to go up and speak to Tom. No one behind me in the queue will get that opportunity.

I can’t remember what I said. But I do remember Tom signing my Target novelisation and saying, “Your mother’s in hospital? Well, you know, if you ever need help, let me know. I’m a Doctor.”

His eyes are piercing and blue.

5 November 1984

In Sydney, in the late seventies, Channel 2 shows repeat after repeat of Doctor Who, four or five nights a week, at 6:30 PM, just before the news. They start at Spearhead from Space, and go up to the most recent episode with Tom Baker, and then back to Spearhead from Space again. Weirdly, they leave out anything scary, anything only available in black and white, and anything with the Master.

But tonight, they’re showing Invasion of the Dinosaurs for the first time. Part 1 is still only available in black and white — the colour version was deliberately incinerated — and so they’re renumbering the episodes to make it a five-part story. Watching Part 2, now re-branded as Part 1, is the first time I ever see the televised story, and it opens with the Doctor and Sarah inexplicably menaced by an unconvincing puppet Tyrannosaurus.

26 June 2010

I’m all grown up now. Crazily, I got rid of my whole collection of Target novelisations years ago. There were dozens and dozens of them, but I only kept one. Now the books are available in a completely new format — audiobooks. And so I start my collection up again, buying a copy of Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion.

Unlike my previous copy, this has the orange cover with the pterodactyl going KKLAK! It’s read by Martin Jarvis, who played Butler in the episode.

Martin Jarvis is, of course, superb. He does great accents for poor old Shughie McPherson and his mates, and great voices for the Doctor, Sarah and the Brigadier. More impressive, of course, is his note-perfect Martin Jarvis impersonation. Butler is much kinder and more working class here than the posh and distant character he was in the televised version. Hulke has given him a livid facial scar, to help us to recognise him when other characters don’t know who he is. When Sarah taunts him about that scar, she is embarrassed to learn that he got it saving a terrified child trapped on the ledge of a high building.

Hulke has a genius for backstory and characterisation.

January 2016

And now, in the distant future, my iPhone contains dozens of audio versions of Target novelisations, even ones that I have never owned before, like Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, tantalisingly referred to in a footnote in Chapter 3 of Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion.

My favourites are always the novelisations by Malcolm Hulke. I have all of them now, except for Doctor Who and the War Games. (Why don’t I have that? Wait here a second while I go and put it on my Audible wishlist.)

And my favourite audiobook is still the first one I ever bought.

5 billion years from now

The sun expands, and the Earth is destroyed, but nobody watches it happen. The Doctor is there, with his new best friend Rose. Later, or earlier, they will go out to get chips.

Blake’s 7: The SevenFold Crown

Nathan Bottomley — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

This review of a very early Blake’s 7 audio drama was published in TV Zone issue 99 (February 1998). I can only barely remember writing it, and I didn’t actually have a copy of it anywhere until recently, when Peter Griffiths, who had commissioned me to write it, sent me a copy of it he found a couple of weeks ago. Thank you to Peter for giving me the chance to write it and for unearthing it and sending it to me after so many years.

AVON: Are you going give it to me?
SERVALAN: How can I stop you taking it?

The SevenFold Crown is a new Blake’s 7 radio drama serial written by Barry Letts, who produced Doctor Who in the Seventies and wrote the Doctor Who radio dramas The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space. The SevenFold Crown has just been released as a two-tape set by BBC Worldwide and will be broadcast on Radio 4 later this month, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the first broadcast of Blake’s 7 in 1978.

When Avon’s sleep is disturbed by a fabulously silly dream in which he is being flogged and menaced by Servalan, he decides that the lady herself is responsible, and heads off to the planet Ferno to confront her. Down on Ferno, Avon and Vila discover that Servalan has one of three parts of the SevenFold Crown, an ancient alien artifact that (as usual) confers incredible Mind Powers on its wearer. Our heroes’ quest for the remaining parts takes them to the planet Torella (which has a thriving tourist trade despite its medieval
justice system and high rates of random capital punishment) and the mysterious planet of the ancient Devani.

Freed from the constraints of year-long contracts, the cast all overact marvellously. And since the dialogue lacks the clever bitchy flight-deck banter of the TV series, overacting is often necessary.

But why go into it in any more detail? The teleport keeps malfunctioning, Orac refuses to give the crew crucial information, Avon tries to abandon a crewmember, Servalan tricks the crew into teleporting the wrong person up… Honestly, everything you would expect from a Blake’s 7 anniversary special and more. Even the sound effects and the teleport music sound authentic.

All the male principals from Blake’s 7’s final year are back: Paul Darrow as Avon, Michael Keating as Vila and Steven Pacey as Tarrant. And (thank God!) so is Jacqueline Pearce as the sequinned psychopath, Servalan. Josette Simon and Glynis Barber were (ahem) unavailable, and so the remaining female crew members have both been recast. Angela Bruce (Brigadier Bambera in Doctor Who’s Battlefield) plays a reasonabiy convincing Dayna, while Paula Wilcox’s Soolin is disappointingly girly and cheerful — not at all like the laid-back hardfaced bitch Glynis Barber played in the TV series.

And, of course, everyone sounds much older. Steven Pacey has particular trouble recreating Tarrant’s growly character voice, while Servalan sounds a little huskier and a little more formidable. Paul Darrow is the same as ever, although he delivers his lines in such a macho and deadpan way he must often be in danger of dislocating his jaw.

Freed from the constraints of year-long contracts, the cast all overact marvellously. And since the dialogue lacks the clever bitchy flight-deck banter of the TV series, overacting is often necessary. For example, Avon: “I have torn out the throat of a tiger with this very hand” or Servalan, discussing Vila’s imminent execution: “Your friend’s head would make a simply ducky little souvenir for somebody, wouldn’t you agree?” (Not really.)

In fact, the script is this serial’s big weakness. The SevenFold Crown is full of stupid technobabble and laborious dialogue where characters describe to each other in detail all the exciting events unfolding before their very eyes. There is also a tendency for Letts to try to end each scene with a punchline. Unfortunately, he is not much of a comedy writer, and the lines are just not funny. “If I get shot with a hallucinatory blaster,” wonders Vila, “do I really die, or shall I just pretend?”

If you make it that far, at the end of the tape there are a few short interviews with the principal cast members. You won’t hear much here that hasn’t been said before in fanzines and programme guides, but it’s nice hearing it said in the actors’ voices. A special award for sneaky disparagement goes to Steven Pacey, who expresses “amazement” and “astonishment” at Blake’s 7’s success. And when he’s asked about Tarrant’s personality, he replies “What personality was that, then?”

Nice one. Steven. Well spotted.

Airing 17 Jan 1998. BBC Radio 4.

Written by Barry Letts
BBC Audio, ISBN 0 56338200 7
Price: £8.99
Out now

The Wrath of Conn

Nathan Bottomley — Sat, 16 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

This essay was first published in Outside In: Makes It So, a collection of essays published by ATB Publishing in 2017 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the debut of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

For this collection, each author contributed an essay on a single episode or movie. My essay is based on the Series 4 episode Clues.

Many thanks to Stacey Smith? for the commission, and for her well-judged editing suggestions.

Ensign Gladys McKnight

Personal Log, Ensign Gladys McKnight, Stardate 44501.3

9 stone 5 lb (pathetic), alcohol units: 9 (ditto), cigarettes: 2 (stupid replicator malfunction; edgy af right now), calories: 3897 (fuck off. seriously).

Horrifically hung over this morning. Stupid Reg. He’s gotta be the most absent boyfriend I’ve ever had. Got a text from him yesterday, cancelling our date last night. “Sorry, sweetheart. Lots of work on in Engineering. Geordi’s been riding me non-stop ever since Ventax II. I’ll make it up to you.”

Didn’t believe him for a second. “Computer, locate Lieutenant Barclay.”

“Lieutenant Barclay is in Holodeck 3.”

Asshole.

Day off today, because that whole Harrakis V thing finished early. (No idea what we were doing there. Being tormented by some all-powerful alien entity, I imagine. At least this one didn’t want to kill off half the crew. Poor Ensign Haskell. I’m still using that stick of Maybelline Superstay 24 Color he lent me.)

The crew spent yesterday raving about their plans for the day off. Alyssa was gonna spend time with Andrew playing parrises squares. (I’ve never heard it called that before.) A whole bunch of crawly suck-ups were going to Worf’s tai-chi class, hoping to get noticed. Picard booked the holodeck for a horrific larping session with the fucking bartender. And Alyssa tells me that Dr Crusher was planning to spend the day growing moss. Wtf is wrong with that woman?

Anyway, I snuck into Crusher’s lab and replaced all her moss samples with scrunched-up sheets of pink cellophane. She’s too stupid to notice: she still doesn’t know that I broke into her quarters last month and replaced four of her wigs with those comedy Nausicaan halloween wigs Mr Mot gave me. She’s been looking like an idiot for last month. That’ll teach her to keep nagging me about emphysema and cirrhosis of the liver.

I was sneaking out of Sick Bay when I crashed straight into stupid Commander Data. He picked me up off the floor and apologised, but he refused to tell me why he had knocked me over, or even to admit that he had done it in the first place. Lying bastard. He should be cleaning tables in Ten-Forward, not patronising actual human beings on the bridge when they’re trying to do their jobs.

“Ensign McKnight. I have been looking for you all morning. There is currently an opening in the conn position on the bridge. Would you care to take the beta shift this afternoon?”

Brilliant. There goes my day off. And conn officer is the stupidest job on the ship. Eight hours of staring at a big screen pressing buttons, like a stinking virgin Gamergater. And have you seen those stupid instrument panels? The ship hits the smallest asteroid and they explode immediately. I’ll be lucky to get through the shift without a huge shard of metal embedded in my head.

Personal log, supplemental

Still alive and shardless, thank Christ. What a waste of time though. By the end of the first hour, I was basically pressing buttons at random just to amuse myself. We’re lucky I didn’t crash us into a quantum filament. Whatever the fuck that is.

I’ve snuck out for a quick fag in the loo. Shift only just started. Feels like there’s still about 24 hours left to go.

Personal log, Ensign Gladys McKnight, Stardate 44502.5

9 stone 3 lb (weight loss mostly due to hangover dehydration), alcohol units: 7 (yay!), cigarettes: 23 (broke into Reg’s quarters and stole all the isolinear chips from his replicator), calories: 2686 (no calories in Tamarian Space Vodka, right? I had difficulty understanding the label on the bottle).

Blacked out on the bridge just after that last entry. Still, not like that time I blacked out in the Observation Lounge, or the other one at the Stellar Cartography Christmas Party.

This time, everyone else went down as well. Thank God. Imagine blacking out mid-sentence during your first shift on the bridge. It would be like the time Ensign Gomez got high as a kite and plummeted off a catwalk to the bottom of the warp core. Alyssa says she’s still eating all of her meals through a straw. Silly cow.

The entire bridge crew are acting like they’ve never blacked out in the middle of a shift before. Pompous, stuck-up pricks. Worf keeps moaning about his sore elbow to anyone who can bear to listen. “Tell Crusher,” I said to him, “or stfu. Crybaby.” Troi screams every time she walks past a mirror. (Has she finally noticed the horrific cameltoe she’s been rocking for the last few months?) And Geordi looks at Data like he’s caught him in bed with the pool boy. Something about Professor Underhill and the ship’s chronometer. Nerd. No wonder he never gets laid by an actual human woman.

I’m beginning to regret breaking into Crusher’s lab now. What a fiasco.

Personal log, supplemental

It’s the middle of my second shift on the bridge. I’m hiding in the loo again. Not coming out until we leave the Ngame Nebula.

They’ve ordered me to delete these last two log entries. No idea why. Something about Troi wandering glassy-eyed onto the Bridge and doing her best Paul Robeson impersonation. Then Data gave a big long expository speech and I kind of zoned out. There’s a lot of standing around talking goes on on this stupid ship.

The upshot of the whole thing is that some poorly-characterised aliens don’t want anyone to know about them. The Paxans. They’re xenophobes, which is ancient Greek for toothless, meth-addicted hillbillies. And we’re supposed to let them wipe our memories. I wouldn’t trust them to wipe my ass.

Which is why you’re reading this. I’m using a warp core manifold to send these logs back to the early 21st century for widespread publication. By the time the 24th century comes around again, I want there to be Paxan teatowels, Paxan sitcoms, Paxan theme parks, and delicious Paxan breakfast cereals.

Make it so. Bastards.

Nathan Bottomley is a Latin teacher living in Sydney. He can be heard constantly complaining about Doctor Who on the podcast Flight Through Entirety.

Last Days

Nathan Bottomley — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

I’m writing this post from the Royal Suite at the Bangkok InterContinental Hotel.

It’s the largest suite in the hotel. I’m seated at a glass coffee table in the lounge; there’s a lavish entryway, a 12-seat boardroom, a kitchen, a massive bathroom with a sunken bath, a dressing room, and a bedroom larger than all of the other hotel bedrooms I have stayed in in Europe. In fact, I think this suite is bigger than all of those European hotel rooms combined. It’s definitely bigger than our house.

“It’s too big,” said Calvin as we walked in.

We arrived in Bangkok on Sunday afternoon. Calvin had spent a day or two here before meeting me in Siem Reap, so he took me to dinner in a busy fluorescent-lit local eatery. It had been cool in Luang Prabang: it was hot and muggy in Bangkok. The icy beer I had with dinner was magical.

When we woke up on Monday morning, Calvin’s legs were covered in bites. In fact, he was driven out of bed at about 4 AM. Bedbugs, he said. We went up to the Club Lounge to complain, and they moved us to the next room so that they could burn the bed to the ground.

They offered us free dinner in one of the restaurants as compensation.

I think I’ve only been in Bangkok once before, in 2005. (Apple’s Photos app tells me that it was 2004, but I remember having to miss some early episodes of Series 1 of Doctor Who, which means that it was April 2005. Shut up.) Calvin comes here every year or so, and came here frequently as a child; as a result, he isn’t here to do touristy things.

Instead, he’s here to eat, to shop, and to visit the family temple. We’ve been personally blessed twice — a ritual washing and another ceremony that involved a monk drawing patterns on our heads with oil, wax and some kind of powder. We’ve bought some Buddhas and candles and jewellery and had it blessed. We’ve taken the monks out to lunch. We went to a restaurant called Insects in the Backyard, which Calvin thought was superb, even though it just serves unimaginative Western food sprinkled with deep-fried bugs. And the hotel is at the centre of a massive conurbation of giant shopping centres, which we’ve wandered through for hours, eating and buying things. Bigger clothes, mostly.

A couple of days ago, the toilet in the hotel room got blocked. I cannot honestly claim to be blameless in this matter: I’ve been giving the breakfast buffet a pretty serious workout every morning. Plumbers came to the room a couple of times to fix it, but with no lasting effect. And so they asked us to move rooms again.

Calvin was, of course, terribly annoyed. We ended up meeting some sombre and apologetic hotel managers in the Club Lounge, who told us how deeply sombre and apologetic they were, and invited us to call them at any hour of the day or night if we had any problems at all.

The toilet in our third room blocked this afternoon.

I went up to the Club Lounge to make a report, and then settled in to write a blog post. Before long, one of the sombre and apologetic managers came up to talk to me. He was dangerously sombre, to a degree that made me want to crack jokes and cheer him up. He said that we would have to move rooms again.

So here we are. I’m in the Royal Suite, writing a smartarse blog post; Calvin is wandering around complaining about the power points. Complimentary dinner tonight, hopefully followed by champagne in the bath. (Probably not, actually; Calvin is a hopeless prosaic.)

God mode

Nathan Bottomley — Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

I met Calvin in Siem Reap on 27 December.

It had taken me two days to get there from Athens. A flight from Athens to Dubai, which was delayed a couple of hours due to fog in Dubai; a night spent in the First Class Lounge in Dubai, since it was too late to get to my hotel; a flight from Dubai to Bangkok; a night in the Novotel at Bangkok Airport; and then a short flight from Bangkok to Siem Reap.

Calvin is clearly much better at this holiday thing than I am. He used points to arrange our first class flights, and he used points to book us into the Sofitel Angkor Phokeethra Golf and Spa Resort at Siem Reap. It’s a massive hotel, with a spa but no golf course, built in a sort of French colonial style. The staff say bonjour to you as you walk past, even quite late in the day.

I met Calvin at the hotel, dropped off my luggage and immediately went on an informal tour of the city. Calvin had arranged it the day before with a tuk tuk driver he met at a temple he was visiting. We spent a few hours careening around the city, had lunch, and took a boat ride up the river Tonlé Sap to a floating village on the edge of a massive freshwater lake. For dinner, Calvin had made a reservation at a famous restaurant called Haven, which is normally booked up months in advance.

For the next two days, Calvin had booked a tour of the temples around the city. We visited nearly half a dozen on the first day, beautiful ruined temples, surrounded and covered by forest, massive and complex, covered in sandstone carvings. On the second day, we spent the morning at Angkor Wat, arriving before 5 AM and watching the sun rise behind the temple, surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of other tourists.

For me, 2017 was the year of visiting temples — in Sicily, mainland Italy and Greece — and I saw a fair number of temples in Japan in 2016 as well. Angkor Wat is the most impressive temple I have ever seen. Not just the size and scale, but the intricacy of the carvings, on nearly every available surface.

We’re in Luang Prabang now. Calvin booked us a room in the Hôtel Sofitel Luang Prabang, a small resort hotel with only 24 rooms, which was the governor’s residence a hundred years ago, then government offices, and finally, a prison. The swimming pool was probably installed after that.

Luang Prabang is much smaller than Siem Reap — 55,000 people. It’s touristy as well, but more in a hippy backpacker sort of way. That’s slightly irritating, in so far as the streets are full of dreadlocked and tattooed young people wearing silk drawstring pants decorated with elephants. But it’s quiet and relaxing. The food is good, both in the restaurants and at the side of the road. And there are fun things to do, but not so many fun things that we’ll be running around non-stop until we leave on Friday.

Calvin organised a tour on our first day: a boat trip to visit a cave containing a thousand Buddha images, and a bus trip to a bear sanctuary and a waterfall. Today, New Year’s Day, we visited as many temples as we could possibly find, and went to the night market to watch young people buying silk drawstring pants. Tomorrow, we’ll be meeting some elephants. Calvin organised it.

καλά Χριστούγεννα

Nathan Bottomley — Sun, 24 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Most of my last post was written on the ferry to Patras. I had decided to spend two nights there, not because there’s anything particularly cool about it, but because it the first place where I could see The Last Jedi in English. (English films are usually dubbed in Italy.) I saw the film a few hours after I arrived; I saw it again the following night.

I struggled to find anything much to do in Patras. I had some laundry and shopping to do, and I had to organise a bus ticket to Delphi. A Google search of things to do in Patras wasn’t particularly promising, but it did mention a Byzantine castle on a cliff overlooking the city, not far from my hotel. I climbed up the cliff, but the castle was closed on Mondays.

The bus to Delphi left at lunchtime on Tuesday. To kill time in the morning, I tried the castle again. It was worth it. Even a nondescript Greek town can be incredibly beautiful.

I had already been to Delphi once, on the School Classics Tour in June. We just stayed there one night. It was fantastic though — a warm evening, lots of bars and restaurants open, a friendly little town.

I didn’t really take advantage of it though. We let the boys go out for a few hours of free time, while I waited for them in the hotel bar, editing an episode of Flight Through Entirety.

This time, I stayed there for two nights. I had booked a single room in the hotel at an absurdly cheap rate, but the manager upgraded me to a double room out of sheer kindness and generosity — a room with a view over the valley, towards the sea.

It was freezing cold, of course, and lots of the bars and restaurants were closed. But I was able to spend more time at the archaeological site, which was much less hot and crowded than it had been in June. And it was lovely to be somewhere small and quiet. I really enjoyed myself.

The morning I left, it snowed. Not in Delphi itself, where it was just raining, but on the mountains on either side. I watched the snowflakes falling from the balcony of my room.

The bus from Delphi to Athens goes further up into the mountains, through a town called Aráchova. Everything there was completely covered in snow. I’ve only seen snow maybe twice before, so just days before Christmas, this was magical. (I only have very crappy photos of this from the window of the bus, with a woman’s head in the frame, so I’ll leave this to your imagination.)

I arrived in Athens in the afternoon. Calvin had booked me in at the InterContinental, a much classier hotel than the ones I’ve been staying in for the last few weeks. You can see the Acropolis from here, and the Philopappos monument, which is on top of a hill directly opposite. It was too late to actually do anything: all the archaeological sites close at 3 or 4 PM in winter, but I walked straight to the Acropolis as soon as I had checked in. Just to gaze up at it.

For €30, you can buy a ticket to the Acropolis, which includes entry to the Theatre of Dionysus, the Ancient Agora, the Olympeion, the Roman Agora, the the Library of Hadrian, the Kerameikos, and one or two more sites. When I was here on the tour in June, the only one of these I visited was the Acropolis, so I’ve spent the last couple of days visiting as many of the rest of them as possible. I also made a return visit to the Acropolis Museum.

Yesterday afternoon I went for a walk before dinner, and found myself at the park containing the Philopappos monument. I don’t know what it’s called, to be honest, but there are lots of cool things there, including the Pnyx, where the Athenian Assembly used to meet, and the Prison of Socrates, which we’re just going to say is the site of Socrates’ suicide, and therefore the setting for Plato’s Phaedo. That’s where I took that photo of the Acropolis, just before sunset.

Now it’s Christmas Eve, my last full day in Europe. (I arrived in London on 2 November, so it’s been just less than two months.) Tomorrow I’m flying to Bangkok, where I’m staying just one night. Calvin is there now, but he will have left by the time I arrive. I’ll catch up with him in Siem Reap, and we’ll be heading off together for a tour of Angkor Wat. I’ll let you know how we get on.

Merry Christmas.

Writing: I posted a thing about Star Wars: Episode VIII, which I think was a brilliant film. Don’t read the post if you haven’t already seen it. It’s lousy with spoilers.

Burning Star Wars to the ground

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

I didn’t actually come here to free slaves.

Qui-Gon Jinn, The Phantom Menace (1999)

Perhaps the most baffling complaint about The Last Jedi is this: the Finn and Rose subplot is poorly integrated, and could easily be cut without damaging the film. I’ve seen this complaint over and over again, even in reviews that are broadly insightful and positive about the movie. And I think it’s completely wrong. The Finn and Rose subplot is thematically central to the film.

Let’s recap. Finn and Rose need to visit a town on the Space French Riviera called Canto Bight, in order to make contact with someone who will help them break the security codes preventing them from boarding Snoke’s ship undetected.

So they leave the fleeing Resistance fleet in a shuttle and land in Canto Bight. Rose warns Finn that the people there are the worst people in the universe. It’s a wretched hive of scum and villainy, apparently.

We cut immediately to a shot of a popping champagne cork. Canto Bight is a gloriously golden deco set full of fat aliens in lovely suits drinking expensive drinks and carelessly throwing gold coins onto roulette tables. Finn is hugely impressed: these are the richest people in the galaxy. This is like nothing we’ve ever seen in Star Wars before.

Then there’s a shot of lots of lovely champagne glasses shaken, Jurassic Park style, by thunderous footsteps outside. We rush to a balcony, much like the balcony on that planet in the Hosnian system from which the Republican government witnessed its own destruction. A race is starting up, a race in which giant horse-like creatures — fathiers — are running around a track; presumably the rich fat aliens are betting extravagantly on the outcome.

While the race is going on, Rose tells Finn why she hates Canto Bight. The people of Canto Bight are rich from the profit they have earned dealing arms to the First Order. Her own planet was mined to create these arms, and then destroyed in order to test them. She doesn’t blame the First Order for this: she blames the fat aliens, the one percent, the richest people in the galaxy.

Throughout Rose’s speech, Finn is using a telescope to watch the fathiers racing. While she describes the oppression of her planet, Finn is watching the fathiers being savagely whipped by their riders: when we seem them later, they will have visible marks from this mistreatment. Then Finn moves the telescope to see one of the trainers attacking a small child, a stable boy. The fathiers and the boy become a symbol for the oppression caused by the people of Canto Bight, including the oppression of Rose’s home planet.

Finn and Rose return to the casino and spot the codebreaker, who seems to be a beautifully-groomed rich arsehole too concerned with his gambling to help them anyway. But before they can reach him, they are arrested by the police, whose job, of course, is to protect the interests of the rich fat aliens, and ensure that their conspicuous consumption should continue unmolested. We’ve never seen the police in Star Wars before: they will be our antagonists until the end of this sequence. The police tase them immediately and take them to prison.

After he rescues Finn and Rose, Benicio Del Toro will tell Finn and Rose that the fat aliens are rich not just because they sell arms to the First Order, but because they also sell arms — X-wings! — to the Resistance. “They blow you up, you blow them up,” he says. It’s not just the First Order oppressing Rose’s home planet. It’s the continual war between the Separatists and the Republic, the Empire and the Rebellion, the First Order and the Resistance. The peoples of the galaxy have been oppressed for decades by Star Wars.

No one in the Star Wars films cares about the miserable inhabitants of Rose’s home planet. (It’s called Hays Minor, as if anyone cared.) The good guys in Star Wars don’t liberate the oppressed. They blow up space stations and smash up Star Destroyers. Or they levitate rocks and ransack their desk calendars for wise sayings about detachment and balance. Even in this film, while Admiral Holdo is bravely sacrificing herself to save people’s lives, Rey is fighting Kylo Ren for possession of Luke Skywalker’s fucking lightsaber.

And that’s why no one on the Outer Rim answers Leia’s distress call from Crait, the planet salty from the tears of a million fanboys. No one on the Outer Rim gives a shit about the Resistance. Because the Resistance does nothing to relieve their oppression: instead, it actively contributes to it, only ever solving things by getting in an (expensive) X-wing and blowing something (expensive) up.

The film has two endings. The first one is the traditional tableau of our rebellious heroes, like the ones at the end of Episodes IV and VI, where the Rebellion celebrates victories that will not end up making life any better for the oppressed inhabitants of Hays Minor.

The second one is unlike anything we’ve seen in Star Wars before. Or is it? Somewhere on the Space French Riviera, the stable boy is telling the story of Luke Skywalker, a story he can’t possibly know. Like Rey, like us, he has an action figure to help him act the story out. Finn and Rose have given him a spark of hope: they released the oppressed fathiers, let them smash up the rich fat aliens’ casinos and cocktail bars, took off their saddles, and left them to run free in moonlight and long grass. Rose was smiling as she did it.

Because the Force doesn’t belong to the Jedi any more, the stable boy uses it to pick up his broom and starts sweeping. He pauses for a moment and, like farmboy Luke, he looks up into the sky. And John Williams kicks into gear.

Rian Johnson has burned Star Wars to the ground. Now we know who the real enemy is. And we know what the Resistance should really be doing. Let’s hope JJ manages to stick the landing in Episode IX.

Bari — Episode II

Nathan Bottomley — Sat, 16 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

If you asked me right now to name my favourite Star Wars film, my answer, without hesitation would be Episode VII: The Force Awakens. It’s the funniest of the Star Wars films, it has likeable, charismatic, well-drawn characters, and it carries on the overwrought intergenerational Skywalker saga in a satisfying way.

Plenty of people dismissed it as a remake of the original Star Wars film. Which it was, of course. But we hadn’t had a remake of the original Star Wars since 1999, and we hadn’t had a good remake since 1983. So 2015 needed a new remake of Star Wars to relaunch a the new series of films and to remind us that Star Wars isn’t just about bored actors sitting listlessly on couches talking about trade embargoes.

More than that, though. After nearly forty years of Star Wars films and spinoffs, The Force Awakens understands what it’s doing in a way that the original Star Wars really doesn’t.

I’m in Bari right now, on a ferry romantically named the SuperFast II. I’m about to head over to Patras in Greece. It’s the second time I’ve done this.

The first time was in 2008, my last long service leave. That time, Bari was not fun. My train arrived late, I had just over an hour to get to the ferry, I didn’t know where the ferry left from, I had a crummy paper map, and I got completely lost in the narrow and slippery lanes of the old city. And it was probably raining. I remember being getting incredibly angry and flustered, which was a thing that happened a lot on that particular trip.

This time, I booked a hotel for a night. So, when the train arrived late, I just needed to walk a few blocks drop off my luggage and then go out for dinner. Totally relaxed. After dinner, I wandered down to the water and around the old city. On the way back, I found a nice bar and had a glass of a noxious liqueur called pugliese. It was nice.

I didn’t need to check in for the ferry until 5:30 in the afternoon. I couldn’t find anything pressing to do, so I explored the streets of Bari, got a beard trim, had lunch in the old city, found the seaside and wandered around there for a while. I ended up finding somewhere to sit and read for a couple of hours.

I’ve said this before here: at the start of this trip, I had only a few concrete plans. I had a hotel booked for the first couple of days in London, a flight booked to Amsterdam, another hotel booked for my last couple of nights in Athens, and then a flight from Athens to Bangkok at Christmas. (Thanks, Calvin.) I also wanted to stay in Sorrento for a while. But everything else was open. I could go anywhere or do anything.

And yet, this trip has pretty much been a remake of my last long service leave. Last time I explored the south of France a bit more and only stayed in Italy for just over a week. But otherwise, the itinerary has been the same.

It would be easy to be disappointed with myself. I’ve still never been to Spain or Portugal. I didn’t go to Budapest or Trogir. Most of my time has been spent in places I’ve seen before.

But I just don’t care. I explored lots of new places in Sicily and Greece on the Classics Trip in June. I’m meeting Calvin after Christmas: we’ll be visiting Cambodia and Laos, adding two more countries to the growing list of places I’ve visited in South-East Asia.

And this trip has been so easy and pleasant. Most of my train trips have been about two hours long; none of them have been longer than four hours. I’ve enjoyed seeing familiar places, and finding out new things about them, and having new things to do. Venice, Naples, Sirmione and Antibes were all great. And I’m more relaxed and well-rested than I have ever been, I think.

I’ll be staying in Patras for two nights. I don’t know anything about Patras, except that there’s a cinema there called the Odeon, where Star Wars — Episode VIII is screening in English. I plan to watch it at least twice. I’ll let you know after that whether it’s my new favourite.

Sorrento things

Nathan Bottomley — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

It’s raining like crazy today, so I’m postponing my visit to Pompeii until tomorrow, which is my last full day in Sorrento.

I arrived here on 3 December. There have been plenty of day trips since then, but also a lot of relaxing and doing nothing. So, this post will be mercifully free of narrative. Instead, some Sorrento things.

Io non posso entrare

There are dogs everywhere here. They’re allowed, or at least tolerated, in bars and restaurants. One woman was walking a dog in the ruins of Herculaneum; someone brought their dog into the Archaeological Museum in Naples.

And there are dogs freely wandering the streets. Last night I was sitting outside at a bar, when a dog wandered past and cocked his leg on a nearby fruit stall. The owner gently kicked the dog, who growled at him and ran off.

There’s one grubby snaggletoothed dog who wanders around Tasso Square. He seems fairly confident in traffic, but every time I see him, I’m terribly anxious about him getting run over. I’m sure he’ll be fine.

Christmas

It seems like middle-aged complaints about the length of the Christmas season start earlier every year. It’s been Christmas for my entire trip, all the way back in London in November. But it’s been crazy in Sorrento. Take a look:

This is all very sweet. The only annoying thing is the nightclub next to my apartment that plays Feliz Navidad loudly just once every night sometime late in the evening. Oh, and the horrific Christmas music that was playing throughout the main shopping area on Capri.

Uno spritz, per favore

It seems to me that Aperol only has only been a thing in Australia over the past year. Here it’s everywhere. Even the Beginner’s Italian course I’m doing on Babbel tells me that I have to have at least one spritz before dinner. And so I do.

Speaking Italian

My Italian is hundreds of years out of date, of course, and I’ve never actually formally attempted to learn it before. Now, for the first time, I’ve tried to give it a go.

The only thing is that my Italian is audibly terrible, and so everyone I try it on responds in English immediately. But still I persist.

More than once, though, I’ve received a verbal pat on the head for asking for the bill in Italian. Which is fine: I’ll take literally any reinforcement I can get.

Food and agoraphobia

I’ve never told anyone this before, but I actually get slightly anxious going into a shop or a bar or a restaurant I’ve never been to before. I often have to wander around for ages before finding somewhere where I’m prepared to go in and eat. (It’s even a thing at home, but then I have Calvin with me; given the choice, I’ll always go to somewhere familiar.)

It’s ridiculous, obviously. I’ve found lots of places to eat here; even the least expensive places have fantastic hearty food. The one time I screwed up the courage to go to a classy-looking restaurant and order from the specials menu, I ended up with a massive plate of gnocchi with gorgonzola and walnuts, which was like eating a giant tub of rancid wallpaper paste. I won’t be doing that again.

Naples

Naples is kind of horrible, isn’t it? I only spent one day there, last Saturday. It’s glamorous, but filthy and rundown and vaguely threatening. I wanted to visit the Archaeological Museum, which was okay — full of things looted from Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The highlight was the Secret Room, to which children under 14 are admitted at their own risk. It’s full of Roman erotica — frescoes of scenes from mythology, phalluses, tiny bronze dicks, and ridiculously obscene sculptures. Here’s the highlight:

This is exactly the kind of thing Cory Bernardi warned us about

Leaving Friday

I’m catching the train to Bari on Friday, staying there one night, and then catching the overnight ferry to Patras. Two nights in Patras, not because there’s lots of fun things to do there, but to give me the opportunity to repeatedly watch Star Wars VIII.

I’m going to go offline some time tomorrow, to avoid spoilers. I’ll be back once I’ve seen the film a couple of times.

Until then, here’s an inexpertly cobbled together photo gallery of Sorrento and the towns nearby. I’m off to have lunch somewhere I’ve been to before.

Reading: La Belle Sauvage, by Philip Pullman. Set 10 years before Northern Lights. It’s beautifully written, wonderfully anti-clerical, and about a third of the way through, it’s starting to get very tense.

ἐκκεκώφωκε τὰ ὦτα καὶ ἐμπέπληκε Λύσιδος

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 05 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve made a lot of mistakes in the past few months.

Here’s one. I’ve been booking the cheapest possible hotels on trivago.com and booking.com. I can’t afford to stay in lovely five-star hotels every night for two months: I need to find cheap hotels reasonably close to the action in whatever city I’m staying in.

It took me a little while to properly get the hang of these sites, and so the hotel I booked in Amsterdam ended up being outside the old city, across a big bridgeless lake called the IJ.

The only easy way to cross the IJ is to take a free ferry from Amsterdam Centraal station to a place called Buiksloterweg. It’s free and it only takes five minutes. People board the ferry on foot, on their bikes or by just riding their motor scooters straight onto the deck.

The first night I tried to cross the IJ, I caught the wrong ferry and had to walk 45 minutes back to the hotel. Which was fine: I like walking, and I had podcasts to listen to.

But after the results of the non-compulsory non-binding postal survey, I had some very, very late nights out, and ended up having to catch the ferry, tired and emotional, at 3 o’clock in the morning. Or later.

It would have been much easier if I had booked a hotel in the Kerkstraat. Or somewhere else in the centre of Amsterdam.

Today, I went to Capri.

This wasn’t a mistake. I’d been there before, in 2008. It was spectacularly beautiful. Obviously, after my day off yesterday, it was going to be the first place I would visit during my stay in Sorrento.

I bought my ferry ticket from Sorrento port at 9 AM today. It cost €30. I had to choose a time for the return trip: 1:30 PM or 6:45 PM.

I chose 6:45 PM. There was no way I would get everything done by lunchtime, so I would have dinner on Capri and then head home after that.

I arrived on Capri, and, for the first time this trip, I checked in on Facebook. Lots of likes, which was nice, and a gratifying response from a beloved teacher from university. “Glorious place,” said Dexter. “(if expensive).”

He’s right. I’ve been travelling for over a month now, and today was the most glorious day so far.

I headed off towards the Villa Jovis, which was the biggest of the twelve villas on the island belonging to the Roman emperor Tiberius, who retired to Capri in 26 CE, leaving Rome to the tender mercies of Patrick Stewart’s Sejanus.

My first mistake was to take a wrong turn. I ended up at a place called the Arco Naturale.

Happy accident. But I was still keen to visit the Villa Jovis. I walked back, took a right turn at the Via Tiberio, and headed off in the right direction.

I found myself walking behind a talkative young American couple. I had been enjoying the silence, and I really didn’t want to follow them around Tiberius’s villa. So, at a fork in the road, I decided to head off to the Villa Lysis. There would be time for the Villa Jovis after that.

Tacitus mentions Tiberius’s twelve villas, but I know nothing at all about them. I supposed that the Villa Lysis might be one of them, but somewhere in the back of my mind I thought it seemed like an unlikely name for a Tiberian villa. (Who is Lysis? Why isn’t his name in the genitive case?) In any case, I was expecting some ruins.

I was wrong, of course.

There’s an early Platonic dialogue called the Lysis, about the nature of friendship. At the beginning, Socrates runs into Ctesippus and Hippothales and a bunch of young men who are hanging out with them. Socrates quickly realises that Hippothales is in love, and when Hippothales blushes and hesitates to tell him who he’s in love with, Ctesippus buts in and tells him that it’s Lysis: Hippothales won’t shut up about him — “Indeed, Socrates,” says Ctesippus, “he has literally deafened us, and stopped our ears with the praises of Lysis.”

That’s the Lysis that the Villa Lysis is named after. The villa was built in the first decade of the twentieth century by a man called Jacques d’Adelswärd Fersen. Fersen was born in Paris in 1880 to an incredibly wealthy family; at the age of 22 he inherited a bunch of money from his grandfather’s steel mills. After some kind of scandal involving tableaux vivants of schoolboys (whatever that means), he fled Paris; he settled in Capri in 1904 and built the Villa Lysis.

Fersen killed himself in 1923: glamorously, he dissolved 5 grams of cocaine in a glass of champagne and drank it. But he spent nearly two decades living in the Villa Lysis, smoking opium in a dedicated room, and sharing his life with an attractive young man called Nino Caesarini.

The inscription at the front of the Villa reads DOLORI ET AMORI SACRVM: sacred to pain and love. It’s totally camp and dramatic, of course, like the life of Fersen itself. He sounds like a truly terrible person, of course, but what would it have been like to be gay a hundred years ago, even in Europe, even for someone ridiculously privileged?

Okay for a while at least, I guess.

There was a ridiculously ramshackle path from the Villa Lysis to the Villa Jovis, which took half an hour and left me out of breath and disoriented. But I got there.

The Villa Jovis was a massive palace, bigger, I think, than any other villa I’ve ever visited. It’s right at the top of the Monte Tiberio, on the easternmost part of Capri. The unenthusiastic ticket-selling-guy gave me a horrible ASUS phone with an app on it to help me find my way around. The villa was massive and glamorous, perched on top of a cliff, eight stories high in places, with baths and kitchens and reception areas, and a massive dining room overlooking the sea.

Tiberius died there in 37 CE. According to an inscription in the main square of Capri, the elders of Capri don’t believe the infamous stories of his tableaux vivants, and are proud that he ruled the Empire from their beautiful island.

I got back to the main square at about 2:30 PM. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. But there was still four hours to go before my ferry back to Sorrento.

What was I to do? There are any number of things to do in Capri, but now, hours later, back in my apartment in Sorrento, I’ve already walked over 28,000 steps and met 173% of my move goal. I was tired and hungry.

A toasted sandwich and an aperol spritz in the main square cost €20. So I settled up and headed down to the Marina Grande, where my ferry would be leaving in three and a half hours.

There’s a whole mistake theme to this post, which I should be circling back to now. But screw it. I regret nothing.

My Kindle easily fits in my jacket pocket, so I spent hours sitting at various bars and restaurants, eating expensive food and drinking expensive drinks and reading and looking out over the water. It was dark soon enough — time to leave. The ferry was enormous: unlike the ferries that travel across the IJ, this one was full of luxury cars driven by attractive Italian men. I started writing this post there: but now it’s finished, and I’m back in my apartment. And tomorrow I can do anything I want.

I’m planning to sleep in.

Phase III: Dolce Far Niente

Nathan Bottomley — Mon, 04 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

I never really planned this holiday. Calvin booked the plane tickets and the hotel accommodation at the start and the end of the trip, and helped me to buy my Eurail pass. But I always intended to just make things up as I went along.

But I did have one thing I really wanted to do: to stay in Sorrento for a couple of weeks. Sorrento is a smallish town on the Bay of Naples. From there, you can catch the train to Pompeii or Herculaneum, or to Naples itself, and you can catch a ferry to Capri. So it’s within easy range of some spectacular ruins and archaeological museums. And even though it’s a bit touristy, it’s much quieter than the places I’ve been lately.

I arrived here yesterday. I’m staying in a small, newly-renovated apartment just off Tasso Square. The bed is soft, and the shower has good water pressure. Which is important, and rare. There’s even a kitchen. Not that that means anything.

I’m here till the 15th. Plenty of time to chill; plenty of time to see all the ruins and museums without feeling rushed.

I spent the last week travelling from Verona down to Sorrento: three nights in Venice, two nights in Florence and two nights in Rome. (Not really long enough, but I wanted to keep the train journeys short, and I lost a couple of nights to my extended stay in Verona.)

I had never been to Venice before. I did all the usual things: St Mark’s Cathedral, the Bell Tower, a gondola. (Gondoliers don’t sing O sole mio any more — they just chat to their mates on the phone.) I ate food and wandered the streets. Venice is kind of ridiculous; even though it’s very busy and touristy, the canals and the bridges and the alleys are really sweet and hilarious, and it’s easily possible to disappear down a side street to escape the crowds and have a quiet drink somewhere.

It was my second time in Florence. Again, there’s a standard list of things to see: the Duomo, David, the Uffizi, the Ponte Vecchio. I went in search of a crappy replica of David which I remember seeing when I first visited 20 years ago, and accidentally ended up at the Piazzale Michelangelo, which is a big square on top of a hill just outside the old city. Here’s the view from there:

And finally, Rome. I don’t think I know how to do Rome properly. It just seems crowded and unpleasant; and it’s increasingly necessary to be insistently grumpy and hostile to avoid buying bracelets and things from the jovial young street hawkers who circle around every tourist attraction.

I arrived mid-afternoon, and did a big walk down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, past the Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, the Bocca della Verità, that island in the middle of the Tiber and then back to the hotel by metro. The next day — my only full day in Rome — I visited the Palatine, the Forum and the Colosseum in the morning; in the afternoon, I saw some Caravaggios in the Church of St Luigi, gave up on the queues to the Parthenon and St Peter’s and went to a bar to drink beer instead.

Maybe it would have been better on a weekday. Maybe it’s a mistake to stay in a hotel so near the train station where it’s kind of horrible. Maybe I should have just spent the afternoon in the Capitoline Museums reading the inscriptions or something. I’ll need some advice from more experienced travellers before I attempt it again.

Enough of that. Time to go and have some lunch. I’m determined to spend the day doing nothing. It’ll be nice.

o quid solutis est beatius curis

Nathan Bottomley — Sat, 25 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Not actually my photograph of Sirmione

Sirmio, jewel of islands, jewel of peninsulas,
jewel of whatever is set in the bright waters
or the great sea, or either ocean,
with what joy, what pleasure I gaze at you,
scarcely believing myself free of Thynia
and the Bithynian fields, seeing you in safety.

Catullus 31, translated by A. S. Kline

Sirmione is a peninsula — nearly an island — that juts out into Lake Garda in Northern Italy, not far from Verona. It’s not big, just a few kilometres long. An easy walk.

Some time in the 50s BCE, the young Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus visited here, and the poem I quote from above is his reflection on the experience. He describes his visit as a happy homecoming; exhausted from his journey and from an unprofitable year serving on the staff of a provincial governor in Turkey, Catullus marvels at the bright waters of Lake Garda, lays down his cares, laughs joyfully and finally goes to sleep in a familiar bed.

My visit was a bit different. In my last night in Antibes, after writing but before uploading my last post, it became horribly clear that I had contracted some kind of foodborne illness. I’ll spare you the details, but I’m blaming undercooked meat. In any case, I had a long and gruesome train ride from Antibes to Catullus’s birthplace Verona, only made longer by my pathological terror of arriving late for connecting trains. I arrived in my hotel at about 6 in the afternoon and went straight to bed.

I spent my first day in Verona reluctant to eat and unable to be bothered to think about what to do next. So I decided to stay here for four nights instead of two. I visited the Roman theatre and the Archaeological Museum, saw Juliet’s balcony, and climbed around the Arena, a Roman amphitheatre in the main square still used for concerts and opera performances. I wondered if I would actually run out of things to do.

And then I remembered Catullus 31, and decided that I would spend my last full day here making my own visit to Sirmione.

It took an hour to get to Sirmione by bus. It was raining and freezing cold. The waters weren’t bright or full of laughter. And someone stole my umbrella while I was having lunch.

But it was magic. You cross a bridge to get onto the peninsula, and there’s a big castle there. The submerged part of the castle is full of ducks. You can climb to the very top of the tower and look out. On the furthermost part of the peninsula are the unexpected (to me) remains of a massive Roman villa. It’s called the Grotte di Catullo, built too late to actually belong to Catullus’s family, but still massive and labyrinthine and — in the wind and rain and the cold — romantic and desolate. And for the first time in days, I sat down and enjoyed some food, the Italian food that was one of my major reasons for making this trip in the first place.

Le wifi antibois

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Tonight I’m staying on the Côte d’Azur, extremely annoyed at the quality of the wifi access.

This is the end of my first full day in Antibes. I’ve never been here before: coming here was entirely Angela’s idea. I’m not sure I had even heard of it.

I had always assumed that I would need to be ludicrously wealthy even to think about staying on the Côte d’Azur. That impression was reinforced last night when I was wandering the streets. They were full of yacht hire shops, and expensive wine shops that guarantee immediate wine delivery to your yacht.

Here are some of the yachts I saw today:

I also spent some time in the Picasso museum, which is a hilltop seaside castle where Picasso stayed for a few months in 1923. But most of the artworks here seemed to be from the 40s; they were vastly more cheerful and silly than some of the upsetting things I saw in the Centre Pompidou.

I suppose I should recap. I left Amsterdam on Friday and caught the train to Paris, where I stayed three nights — two full days. The first day I hung out in the Louvre, mostly looking at antiquities, although I did check in to make sure that nothing bad had happened to the Mona Lisa. (It was fine. Disappointing.)

I spent the second day relaxing and enjoying Paris. The highlight: visiting the Centre Pompidou for the first time. I spent most of my time on Level 5, looking at the modern art collection. I’m not recording my reaction here, for fear of appearing like a facile idiot, but some of it was breathtaking, some was hilarious, and some of it was fabulously nasty and unpleasant. A good afternoon.

The next day, I left Paris on the TGV, travelling to Marseilles. The trip was incredibly fast: from the window seat, it seemed like the trains travelling in the opposite direction were going to take my face off. Sitting opposite me was a fantastically elegant woman in her 70s, and we ended up chatting for a while.

We talked about the weather, about all her languages, and about my job and my plans. She was incredibly urbane and charming. And just when we were a few minutes from Marseilles, she gave me some advice. Watch yourself in Marseilles, she said. Make sure you don’t get robbed. It’s full of blacks and Arabs.

Leaving France tomorrow. A long, slow train trip to Verona. I’ve been there before, back in the 90s, with Robert. After that, a week travelling around northern Italy, then a few days in Rome, probably, then two weeks in Sorrento. I’ve already booked an AirBnB right in the middle of town, just near Tasso Square.

And that’s this post finished. But the wifi here is too slow for me to upload it. I’ll have to wait till I’m on the train tomorrow, for God’s sake. (Update: there was no wifi on the train tomorrow.)

Reading: God, A Human History by Reza Aslan. Not only is he kind of hot, he was once sacked from CNN by describing Donald Trump as a piece of shit on Twitter.

61.6%

Nathan Bottomley — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

11.30 PM

I bounce my arse over to the next stool at the bar, next to the American boy with the goatee. His name is Aaron. I haven’t spoken to him yet. It’s noisy here, and so I have to shout to be heard by the pretty South American barman. His name is Hector.

“Hey. Can I tell you something important?”

Hector, Aaron, Joost and Tony are listening, I think. They’re surprised to hear me talking. I’ve been here for an hour or so, but I’ve been too shy to talk to anyone directly. Apart from Hector, obviously.

I’m really shit at gay bars.

Hector replies: “No. You can’t.”

“Never mind that right now,” I say. “You know I’m from Australia, right? Well, we’ve been having this long postal survey thing there to see if gay people are allowed to get married.”

Hector shrugs.

“The result is being announced in half an hour.”

Before I left on this trip, I thought that when I landed in England, I would for the first time be in a jurisdiction where I was permitted to marry. But that’s not true, of course.

Holland was the first country to legalise gay marriage. The world’s first gay marriages happened here in April 2001. Sixteen and a half years ago. And I was in Amsterdam for a few days in 2008.

Which is why some of the people at the bar just assumed that we had equal marriage already.

The bar has wifi, of course, but it’s not great, and like a lot of pub and restaurant wifi networks here, it requires you to check in on Facebook before you connect. It’s a security nightmare. I’m expecting lots of spam from here on in.

I don’t think I can stream video on this network, so I’m refreshing Twitter repeatedly to find out what the result is.

My friend Simon said all along that he was hoping for a result in the sixties. That seemed very optimistic to me. Here at the bar, people are assuming that it will be a YES vote. “But there’s Brexit,” I say, “and Donald Trump. Unexpected things happen.”

This trip was planned before the postal survey was announced. I remember realising that I would be on my own when the result came in, and that that would be terrible if the news was bad. Which is why I’m at the Spijker Bar, drinking water and horrible Dutch beer.

It’s been a horrible few months. You all know that. I’ve been sleeping badly, full of rage and anxiety. I’m a wealthy middle-aged white cis male, with a supportive family and a supportive workplace. Other people have had a much worse time than me. It’s still been pretty bad though.

The NO campaign was vile and so mendacious, and disgustingly transphobic. I won’t be forgiving them in a hurry. And I won’t forget about the millions of dollars that conservative Sydney churches spent to get their lies disseminated.

The chief statistician does a lot of throat-clearing, apparently. It’s a big day for him. So by 12:03 AM, we still don’t have a result. I tweet anxiously —

— only to find my Twitter stream full of people swearing in all caps at the statistician as well.

I couldn’t see him of course. But he had a big smile on his face; I think the people watching him would have suspected at least that he had good news to deliver.

Sorry I wasn’t there to celebrate with you. It sounded like it was amazing. I’m having fun, but I really miss you all as well.

Wachten op het resultaat

Nathan Bottomley — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Nothing much to report from Amsterdam, really. I’ve been sleeping in and wandering the streets since I got here, really. Which is more or less what I was hoping to do. Reading, listening to podcasts, trying to avoid the local food. That sort of thing.

The highlight of my stay so far was the Rijksmuseum. It was closed for renovation for nearly ten years, so the last time I visited was in the 1990s. Back then, it was kind of baffling. A maze of white rooms full of furniture and porcelain, organised chronologically, I suppose, but basically incomprehensible. After the renovation, the furniture and porcelain is still there, of course, but it’s all organised much more clearly and comprehensibly. And there’s a Rijksmuseum app, of course, with any number of guided tours on it, which helped me to find and appreciate the best bits of the collection. Tomorrow, mood permitting, I’ll spend the morning at the Van Gogh Museum.

Just under 12 hours before the announcement of the postal survey result. It happens at midnight here. I’m a bit apprehensive about being alone when the news breaks, to be honest, so I’ll be spending the evening with my own people, at the Spijker Bar in Kerkstraat.

Leaving here on Friday and spending a couple of days in Paris, which is a city I find a bit intimidating. Then off to some new places in Southern France and Italy, I think. I’ll work out the details later.

Phase II

Nathan Bottomley — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

I’m in Amsterdam now, in a darkened pub, drinking Amstel and typing this post on my phone with a Microsoft foldable keyboard. I’ll upload it when I get back to my hotel.

It’s my fourth time here: apart from Tokyo, this is the foreign city that I’ve spent the most time in. It’s still amazingly familiar. Every street, every square brings back memories.

I plan to keep most of those memories to myself. I came here twice in the 90s with Robert. The first time was the first time I ever came to Europe. Robert and I caught the ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland. We arrived after a sleepless and unpleasant ferry ride, and the first thing we saw was a guy rollerskating beside a canal, freezing his arse off in tiny latex shorts. We immediately decided to stay for a week. The second time, we stayed here for two weeks over Christmas and New Year. It snowed. It was magic.

We were young then, and we had a fantastic time. But that’s all I intend to say. On my way here I walked past the sites of some of our best exploits. I regret nothing.

In 2008, I stayed here by myself for a few days. According to that trip’s travel blog, I basically spent a couple of days wandering the city, drinking beer and only occasionally wandering into a museum or art gallery.

This time I’m staying here for a week, but I have no idea what I’m doing after that. I’ll have to make a decision tomorrow, I think. Southern France, and then straight to Italy, probably. I’ll sit in a café with my computer tomorrow morning and do some proper planning for the next few weeks. Suggestions welcome: feel free to comment on this post.

My last few days in England ended up being terribly busy: I really should have arranged to stay a few days longer. I had a lovely evening in Brighton with Stephen and David. I went to Manchester to meet the inimitable Simon Caterall and to make a pilgrimage to Canal Street. I also met charming friend-of-the-podcast Colin Neal, had dinner with Sarah G, lunch with Peter G, and tea with Angela, Joseph, Alex and Elizabeth, who made me incredibly welcome on my last night in London. And I experienced Southern Rail in a way that will help me to truly appreciate the jokes they make about it on the News Quiz.

Tomorrow: nothing. Reading and chilling. After that, my first visit to the Rijksmuseum since the first time I came to Amsterdam.

Watching: Season 1 of The Good Place. For the third time. And it’s still brilliant.

My own bodyweight in chips

Nathan Bottomley — Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Sleep, mostly

I’m in a pub just outside Euston Station, waiting for a train to Manchester. I’ve got a bit over an hour to wait; I think I overestimated how long it would take me to get here. The pub doesn’t have wifi — I’ll have to upload this post when I get on the train* — but it does have bitter.

I arrived in London last Thursday morning. Before that, I had flown about 15 hours from Sydney to Dubai, had had about two hours in Dubai Airport, and had flown eight hours from Dubai to London. In first class — did I mention I was flying first class? — you can lie completely flat and sleep, and I so on the way to Dubai, I managed about nine hours of sleep, at about the same time as I would have slept if I had stayed in Sydney. By the time I landed at Gatwick at 6:40 AM, I had been awake for about 12 hours.

A car picked me up at the airport — first class — and drove me to the hotel in Whitechapel. It took about 2½ hours, with the traffic getting heavier and heavier as we approached our destination.

When I got to the hotel, they told me that the room wouldn’t be ready for about 4½ hours. I had wanted a nap and a shower; instead I ended up wandering down to the river and walking to the Embankment.

At just before 11 AM, I found a pub. One of the things I look forward to most in England is the warm, flat beer that clueless Australians used to enjoy mocking. I’m having one now. There was also a burger and chips, predictably terrible, but the beer was fantastic.

Got back to the hotel, waited half an hour, and then went up to the room. I know you’re supposed to try to stay awake until bedtime, and I know that sleeping all day in an exciting foreign city is a terrible waste, but I was asleep by 2:30 PM. I woke briefly at 4:30, and then slept all the way through till 3:30 AM.

As a result, it took me a couple of days to recover from the jetlag. I kept waking up at 1 or 2 or 3 AM. On Saturday, I accidentally slept in until 11:30 AM. Since then, I’ve been fine.

People to do

This Friday, I’m flying to Amsterdam: I’m only spending eight nights in the UK. Turns out, it’s not really going to be enough. There a lot more people to see than I expected.

So far, I’ve had a lovely breakfast at the Wolseley with Peter Griffiths, and a fantastic pub lunch with Peter and his long-time housemate Rebecca. I wandered through the Turner exhibition at Tate Britain with Angela Cartwright, and had afternoon tea with Angela and her family — Joseph, Alex and Elizabeth. I spent a lovely morning having breakfast with my former student Ian Goh. And I caught the train to Brighton to spend the afternoon with Stephen and David, followed by a pub roast, followed by beers in various Brighton pubs. I just left Brighton this morning.

(I’ve also uploaded an episode of Bondfinger and an episode of Flight Through Entirety. I wrote some of the show notes in Green Park, where I took the photo at the head of this post.)

Soon I’ll be heading up to Manchester, to make a pilgrimage to Canal Street (Queer As Folk, Cucumber), and to meet Simon Caterall for the first time, after months of fun interaction on Facebook. And when I get back, I’m catching up with Sarah G, and (hopefully) a couple of other people too. As well as catching up with everyone else one more time.

So it’s going to continue to be busy until I leave on Friday. After that, there will be weeks of travelling on my own. Should be fun.

Reading: Zealot, by Reza Aslan. (Saw a video promoting his new book about God. Turns out he’s hot.)

Hello world!

Nathan Bottomley — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to Guns and Frocks.

I’m writing this post in the First Class Lounge at Sydney International Airport, just before catching a flight to London. The last time I was here was in 2008, the last time I took long service leave, and I was about to start a month-long trip travelling around Europe by train. I was flying economy, of course, but Calvin had used his point acquisition superpower to get me into this lounge before my flight.

But this trip will be much grander. Calvin has levelled up, and so I’m flying first class. And instead of a month-long trip, it’ll be two months. I’m spending a week in England first, catching up with friends, and then flying to Amsterdam. After that, nothing much has been decided. I want to go back to Sorrento and spend more than a week there, visiting ruins and museums and things, and chilling out and reading and drinking limoncello. But apart from that, I have no concrete plans.

I’m travelling on my own, so this is my diary. I hope you’ll check in with me from time to time. I’ll put up some photos and talk about what I’m up to. Feel free to comment on my posts. I’d love to hear from you. And I’d be very happy to hear your suggestions about places to visit; I’ve really got no idea right now.

What to expect from Season 9

Nathan Bottomley — Fri, 04 Sep 2015 00:00:00 GMT

With the debut of Doctor Who season 9 only weeks away, it’s time to ask ourselves what we can expect to see from this exciting new series of Doctor Who.

THE DALEKS ARE BACK! For the first time in 5 years, and for the first time ever on TV in colour, the Daleks (and their gorgeous blonde secretarial staff) will explode onto our screen in a thrilling season opener. Aubrey Woods guest stars as a heavily-made up Dalek collaborator with a terrible, terrible secret.
THE RETURN OF THE MASTER! We’ve all being waiting for the return of the Doctor’s nemesis since last year’s season finale, and all reports suggest that we won’t be disappointed. The renegade Time Lord will appear in no less than two stories this season, as crazy and sexy as ever (although a little thicker around the waist).
PENIS-SHAPED MONSTERS! Doctor Who has a glorious history of alien menaces shaped like human genitalia, from the Brains of Morpho to the terrifying Rills — and this year will be no exception. Not even a yellow shower curtain will make this horrifying guest star look acceptable enough to take home to meet your parents.
ALLEGORIES ABOUT RACISM! Nothing sends the kiddies scurrying behind the sofa faster than leaden allegories about the evils of something very obviously evil. So when the Doctor and his companion head off to the planet Solos, expect lots of dull, uncontroversial political messages about how bad genocide is. Thank God that our favourite programme has never been guilty of racism, like those shows that other people enjoy.
INGRID PITT’S BREASTS! Such a shame that so few fanboys are even remotely interested.

Doctor Who season 9 will debut on BBC1 on 1 January 1972.

Dear Neato Robotics people,

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Neato Robotics people,

My partner and I are the proud owners of one of your robot vacuum cleaners. It’s one of five vacuum cleaners he has bought for the house, and he really loves it. He has named it Alice. It’s something that remains undiagnosed, I’m afraid. Anyway. We soldier on.

He is particularly impressed by the design and performance of the robot vacuum cleaner, and proudly informs me that it cost him only just a little more than 1000 AUD. I’m a bit less impressed with it, I have to admit. It finds it almost impossible to cope with rugs: it snags itself on fringes and loose threads and finds itself unable to move any further. I would have thought that rugs were just the thing you might design a vacuum cleaner to be able to deal with, but what do I know? I’m a Latin teacher, not a fucking engineer.

Another sore point is this. We programme the robot vacuum cleaner to work at night, so that it doesn’t annoy the dogs, and so that we don’t kill ourselves by tripping over it on our way to the fridge. However, when the robot vacuum cleaner inevitably snags itself on a rug or a piece of thread, it is designed to inform its owner of the fact by emitting a persistent, plaintive beeping noise, which continues until the battery runs out.

Now there are reasons I might want to be woken up in the middle of the night and warned repeatedly about something. Perhaps the house is on fire, or the zombie apocalypse is underway, and everyone I have ever loved is dead. But, and don’t take this the wrong way, I just don’t need to be woken and warned because the robot vacuum cleaner is shitting itself about encountering a rug on the floor again.

Still, it’s not all bad news. My partner only needs to bring out one of the other four vacuum cleaners nine or ten times a day, and I still get to trip over it when I wander downstairs at night in order to turn the fucking beeping noise off.

Warmest regards,
Nathan Bottomley.

Guns and Frocks

Nathan Bottomley — Fri, 28 Aug 2015 00:00:00 GMT

This adventure was going to require a serious frock.

Paul Cornell, Human Nature, Chapter 1

It’s 18 February 1995. My friends and I are attending Tri©on, a Doctor Who convention which is being held at the Parramatta Travelodge in a suburb of Sydney called Rosehill. Mark Strickson is the special guest: he has made the 500-kilometre journey from Armidale, where he is currently studying at the University of New England. He has hilarious things to say about how stunts were performed in the studios at the BBC Television Centre.

One of the items on the programme has already been cancelled. It was called Companion Makeover, presumably in honour of Strickson, but no one is really sure who is running it or what it is supposed to be about. So the organisers have decided to replace it with an interactive panel called DonaWho, in honour of The Phil Donahue Show, which will end its 26-year run some time later in the year. Like its near namesake, this panel will feature a compere with a radio mic who will wander around the room, soliciting bracing contributions from the audience and creating entertaining conflicts among its members.

Twenty years later, I can’t remember why I was the one given that microphone.

I have already planned what I want to do. I may have worked it out on the train on the way up, if I caught the train, or perhaps the night before if I was driving there in my sprightly yellow roadster known as Carol. In any case, I have a plan. “Ladies and gentlemen”, I probably say, “today I intend to create to set fan against fan, to create a rift in Doctor Who fandom that will echo throughout the ages.”

And I mean it. Today, I will split the audience into two irreconcilable warring factions — not Rills and Drahvins, not Savants and Deons, not Daleks and Thals. This time the factions will be called Guns and Frocks.

The ‘Guns and Frocks’ thing dates back a few years now. I think it’s [Doctor Who novelist] Gareth Roberts who said that Doctor Who needs less guns and more frocks. And it became a very quick shorthand for two rough schools of writing in the Doctor Who novels: one of which was militaristic space opera books that were very serious, and took themselves very seriously; and then at completely the other end of the spectrum, very camp ones that did not take themselves seriously….

Interview with Kate Orman, 2005.

By the begining of February 1995, Virgin Publishing had released 22 original novels in its New Adventures range. The range had started in June 1991, two years after the soft cancellation of the TV series, and one month before the publication of the long-delayed novelisation of the last available Doctor Who story, Battlefield.

The New Adventures were explicitly intended to be the official continuation of the Doctor Who story. They starred Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor, reconceived as the dark and mysterious arch-manipulator we barely glimpsed in Remembrance of the Daleks, along with his companion Ace, whose soft-left politics and fascination with chemistry was inexplicably transformed into a hard-right obsession with military hardware and a fascination with killing things.

I remember being disappointed by the New Adventures at the time. Reading a New Adventure took many times longer than watching a Doctor Who story. And it wasn’t something you could enjoy drunkenly with friends. More than that, though: the New Adventures were grim and dark. They introduced uninteresting plot elements early on that demanded the reader’s memory and attention until they were unimpressively slotted into place towards the end of the novel. And they were heavy with continuity. Not fun Hand-of-Sutekh continuity: dull, leaden continuity involving Arc of Infinity or the history of the Earth Empire as established in the Pertwee Era.

There were a few exceptions. My friend Kate Orman had written a book called The Left-Handed Hummingbird, an immensely clever and well-written piece of science fiction. Paul Cornell had written two novels: Timewyrm: Revelation, which had featured a sentient church and a weird mindscape redolent of nostalgia and love for the television programme we had lost, and Love and War, which had introduced the incomparably clever, knowing and hilarious Professor Bernice Summerfield. And Gareth Roberts — who had loved Tom Baker’s Doctor and Lalla Ward’s Romana nearly as much as I had — whose novel The Highest Science had featured hilarious turtle-shaped aliens, and which would, a million years later, form the basis of the brilliantly entertaining 2009 Easter Special, Planet of the Dead.

Benny grinned at her. ‘My dear Roslyn, frocks are the purpose of life.’ She twirled, her skirt flying out around her, grabbing at her hat. ‘Frocks are what it is all about. Do try to remember that.’

Kate Orman, SLEEPY, Chapter 22

“I’m going to ask you five yes/no questions, and I want you keep count of how many questions where your answer is yes. Ready?”

They are ready, and so I ask them these questions:

Has your enjoyment of a Doctor Who story ever been spoiled by what one of the major characters was wearing?
Have you ever as an adult had to stop yourself from crying while watching a companion’s departure scene?
Do you prefer a companion wearing high heels to one wearing combat boots?
Do you think Delta and the Bannermen is seriously underrated?
Have you ever, in public, in a mixed gathering, impersonated one of the following: Lady Adrasta, Helen A, Count Scarlioni, Harrison Chase, Lady Peinforte or President and Supreme Commander of the Terran Federation Servalan?

“Now I want you to get up and change seats. If you answered yes to zero, one or two of these questions, I want you to sit on this side of the room. You guys are the Guns. But you answered yes to three or more questions, I want you to sit over here. You are the Frocks.”

Fortunately, the audience splits into roughly two equal groups. Here they are, sitting in rows, staring uncomprehendingly at each other across the aisle.

[Nathan] then asked a whole bunch of Who-related questions, trying to determine if there were any real dividing factors. Most factors had people on both sides both agreeing and disagreeing, but some were dividing (opinion on Mel was amazing — the Frocks loved her and the Guns hated her).

The debate was really, really fun and there was no animosity on either side, due to the fun approach.

Stacey Smith?, The Frock Homepage, with Gun

Doctor Who is over fifty years old now. And I love it to death. As my friend and fellow-podcaster Richard once said, it can be anything, any story. An elegiac history lesson about sectarian murder. A ludicrous space opera featuring robot monsters and a megalomaniacal Bond villain. A love story across dimensions. An allegory about racism, a rollicking adventure story featuring racism, a story — many stories — in which the Doctor fights against exploitation, oppression, and villains without any sense of humour.

But there are things about Doctor Who that leave me cold. The history of the Time Lords. Harmonising the ridiculously inconsistent stories of the various Dalek factions. Explaining why the Cybermen in Attack look so much like the centuries-later Cybermen of Earthshock. And believing that watching people with guns attacking other people with guns is adult, serious and entertaining.

Here’s what I love. Billy’s sadness when he remembers how little his friends loved and understood him. Tobias Vaughn’s laughter as Zoë destroys his receptionist computer by talking to it in ALGOL. Pertwee’s time flow analogue, made of forks and corks and tea leaves. The Hand of Sutekh. Tom and Lalla effortlessly outshining the dull, unimaginative forces of evil. Beryl Reid’s tango hairdo. Melanie Bush trapped under a crocheted throw-rug, screaming at an advancing toasting fork. Sylv dancing awkwardly with Ray in Wales in 1959. And a Doctor who would “make the villains fall into their own traps, and trick the monsters, and outwit the men with guns. He’d save everybody’s life and find a way to win.”

Those are things, I hope, that both Guns and Frocks can agree on.

Thanks

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 GMT

And that’s that. Thank you to everyone who commented, and to everyone who told me that they were reading along, and to everyone else who’s been reading. I had a great time on the trip, much better than I could have imagined, and it was nice to think that I was somehow sharing my experiences with my friends.I’ll see you soon.

Home safe

Nathan Bottomley — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Our last day in Tokyo was largely uneventful. We took a quick trip back to Harajuku to check out a 100-yen shop. (These are great. Full of things shaped like cartoon animals that are good for opening jars.) Then a turn around a supermarket near our hotel in Shinagawa to make sure there were no foodstuffs unavailable in Australia that we hadn’t already bought. Then back to the hotel to pack up. Calvin filled two extra boxes with food, as well as the complementary contents of the daily-replenished minibar.

And then, the airport. Duty-free shopping, hanging round in the the airport lounge, killing time. The first leg was from Tokyo to Cairns: my first ever business class flight. I was a little underwhelmed, to be honest. I could survive seven hours sitting on broken glass with a gun to my head, provided I had video on demand, but on this flight there were only eight channels, and the highlight appeared to be Andrew Denton interviewing Rod Stewart. We did this flight on points; had it been with money, I don’t think I could justify spending thousands of dollars on a slightly bigger seat and much jollier flight attendants.

Anyway. We arrived in Cairns, and decided not to prolong the agony. Instead of waiting six hours for the next business class leg, we got straight back on the same plane in economy class. And two and a half hours later, we were in Sydney.

No fugu for you

Nathan Bottomley — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Saturday night we went for dinner to Shibuya, which, According to Calvin, has the busiest intersection in the world. It’s massive, with neon signs and animated billboards. And everyone in Tokyo was there. It made Piccadilly Circus look like Johnston Street, Annandale.

We were having dinner with a couple Calvin knew; we had run into them a couple of days earlier in the lobby of our last hotel. With the help of Nick, who knows Japanese, we found a good restaurant, full of locals, and had nice meal. We drank plum wine and cherry-blossom sake. Apparently there was whale bacon on the menu, but since I heard this as “quail bacon”, I wasn’t particularly shocked until later. Calvin didn’t have any, which was a surprise.

Sunday morning, on Nick’s advice, we went to Harajuku, which is apparently full of wacky young people dressed in cartoon-character-Victoriana-S & M-wear. It was so cold, though, that we were disinclined to explore, and only caught sight of one or two of the less extreme examples.

Then to the giant department stores of Shinjuku. This was fun, but I was already starting to feel unwell. I think parasites from the sushi I’ve been eating had invaded my cerebro-spinal fluid and were making my joints ache. Or something.

We met Ben Tupman and his girlfriend Satoko fo lunch in Shinjuku. We ate in a Korean barbecue restaurant, where we selected our own food and cooked it on a hotplate embedded in the table. Calvin tricked me into eating heart (again), and we may have overeaten in order to avoid the 500 yen fine for taking food and not finishing it.

During lunch, we discussed Calvin’s plans for eating fugu, the poisonous blowfish that nearly killed Homer Simpson in 1991. Fugu restaurants only serve fugu normally, but Ben looked at the menu that the concierge had given us, and helpfully informed me that if I didn’t feel up to fugu, the restaurant also offered shirako, which is the fugu’s sperm.

Unsurprisingly, by the time I got home, I was horribly nauseous, and I split the evening between groaning weakly and being sick. Sadly, neither of us got to taste any delicious fugu.

Both dogs found

Nathan Bottomley — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

We got a phone call last night saying that Gracey had been turned in at a vet in Marrickville. Willey wasn’t mentioned. Years ago, they used to escape occasionally, but they would always be found nearby and together. Willey would always follow Gracey.

Calvin rang when the vet opened again this morning and was told that stupid, faithful Willey was at the vet’s too. Trish is going to pick them up this morning.

I’m very relieved. That was an unpleasantly anxious night.

Last full day today. We fly out at 9.25 pm tomorrow night.

Worry

Nathan Bottomley — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Another great day yesterday. We got up horribly early in the morning to go to the fish markets at Tsukiji. Calvin had seen them on Lifestyle Food, and it was the first thing he wanted to do once he had finished working. There are some photos, as usual, but Calvin also took some video of people slicing up giant tunas with swords, or sawing up frozen ones with power tools. Awesome. There are live crabs, and giant scarlet octopuses. And you constantly have to dodge the noisy three-wheeled carts which zip among the stalls.

Sushi for breakfast, of course, and then back to the hotel to meet Ben. Ben took us to Ueno park, where all of the cherry blossoms were out. Ben reckoned that the park wasn’t very crowded, but he may have been in Tokyo too long: thousands of people had turned up to photograph the cherry blossoms, and the paths were lined with roped-off tarpaulins, which Ben said were reserved areas for companies. But they looked to me like they were full of hippies and vagrants rather than sober corporate types. We visited a shrine dedicated to the fox spirits, and a lake with swan-shaped paddle-boats, before heading off to the markets and the inevitable drink.

Calvin and I had an early night, narrowly avoiding another work dinner.

This morning I was woken by the news that two of Calvin’s dogs had escaped, but had been picked up and brought back home by someone kind who knew where they lived.

We visited Akihabara again this morning, and I showed Calvin the sights I had seen a few days early. Even he managed not to buy any electrical equipment. We met Calvin’s Japanese colleague Hayuru, who took us to lunch at a restaurant where they cook a kind of fishy noodly omelet on a hot plate embedded in the table.

Now we’re waiting to meet some of Calvin’s old gym friends, who we ran into in the lobby of the last hotel. We’re having dinner with them. I can’t say I’m enthusiastic, though. We just heard that the same two dogs escaped again this morning, and only one of them has been accounted for. I hope Willey is okay.

Blossoms and bidets

Nathan Bottomley — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Calvin ended up getting back from his work dinner after 11.30 last night, long after I had fallen asleep. Right now I’m waiting for him in the glamorous hotel lobby, behind a bamboo garden and in front of a water feature. When he gets here, we’ll pick up our bags and head off to our last hotel. He assures me it will put this one in the shade.

After Calvin left for work this morning, I rang Ben Tupman, who took a year’s leave from Grammar last year and never came back. He’s living just out of Tokyo now. We’re catching up tomorrow, which I’m really looking forward to. I’ve got lots of Japan questions to ask him, for a start. Like, how do you type? How do those handheld electronic dictionaries work? And would he consider wearing one of those surgical face masks if he caught a cold?

After speaking to Ben, I walked to the Imperial Palace Gardens, which are visible from the hotel room window. They are surrounded by a moat about five kilometres long, but most of them are actually open to the public. I walked around the moat and wandered through the gardens, spending a salutary few hours taking photographs of cherry blossoms. They’re really coming on now.

Then, by way of contrast, I went by metro to Akihabara, which is a busy and garish district, packed with stores selling consumer electronics. I worked my way from biggest to smallest. But I was very self-controlled. I added to my collection of screen protectors for the iPod touch, but didn’t buy anything else. I’ll be back, though: Calvin wants to go later to pick up one of those horrifying heated Japanese toilet seats with built-in bidet and water jet, and a mysterious third spray setting specifically for ladies. He’s been obsessed with them ever since we arrived.

Glamour

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Tonight’s blog entry comes to you from the 34th floor of the ANA Inter-Continental Hotel Tokyo, where I’m sitting at the window of the club lounge with my complimentary glass of champagne and my complimentary plate of nibbles, looking out over the Tokyo cityscape as twilight falls. The view is amazing: the skyscrapers, the neon lights, the flying cars. Wish you were here, obviously.

I’ve been on my own again today while Calvin’s been working. In fact, he just dropped by for five minutes as I was writing this, but he’s off to dinner with the Japanese CEO (or something), and won’t be in until ten: he’s gone native. He’ll be working tomorrow as well.

Yesterday we spent the day sightseeing in Kyoto, before catching a train to Tokyo in the afternoon. We reached the hotel at eight in the evening. Our taxi pulled into the driveway and was instantly unpacked by efficient and courteous bellboys, while we were ushered into an absurdly glamorous hotel lobby. It’s three storeys high, the ceiling is carpeted with expensive chandeliers and there are glassy water features and bamboo gardens in every direction. From the open-concept champagne bar on the mezzanine level, a glass staircase descends, tastefully lit from within by purple fluorescent lights. I keep expecting Cameron Diaz to stagger down it carrying that all-important envelope. (There are a lot of posters of her around, actually. I’m going to start carrying cloves of garlic, I think.)

Kyoto was lovely. The Guide says that you need to spend several days there, savouring the food and visiting the historic buildings. But if you’ve only got a few hours, there’s a walk it recommends. We followed it for most of the day, visiting huge temple complexes and walking down cobbled streets lined with tea houses and quaint, crappy souvenir shops. The photos are really worth a look. There are turtles.

Today, I took it easy. Calvin suggested that I should make the most of the last day of our rail pass and go to see Mount Fuji. I was tempted, obviously, but just couldn’t face the hours of complicated train trips it would have taken. Instead, I spent the day catching up on the backlog of photos and visiting huge glassy shopping centres and multi-storey electronics stores. I spent an indecent amount of time stroking a MacBook Air.

Off to dinner soon. Trying to remain seaweed-free today. My hopes remain high.

48 hours without coffee or garlic

Nathan Bottomley — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

We’re back from our stay in the Buddhist temple, and it’s quite different from what I expected.

We stayed at Eko-in, which is a shukubo, a Buddhist temple which doubles as a hotel, where the guests are looked after by novice monks. I had expected hard benches and drafty rooms; instead, our room was the most beautiful one I’ve had on the trip. There was a TV and an electric heater; the toilet outside had one of those creepy Japanese heated toilet seats.

Eko-in is in Koyasan, a mountain village full of temples and holy places, the home of the Shingon School of Buddhism, founded by Kobo Daishi in 816. He’s still there, apparently, in eternal meditation, although I didn’t see too many signs of life at his mausoleum. Calvin remains convinced, however.

It took us five different trains to get here; the last was a scary funicular railway like the one in the Blue Mountains. A bus took us to the temple. We didn’t have much time once we arrived. We wandered through the cemetery, which is beautiful: crumbling lichen-covered monuments surrounded by tall cedar trees. Very sad and peaceful.

Dinner was at 5.30. There was sake, but the monks can’t eat meat or onions or garlic, so neither could we. (No garlic! This is exactly the sort of thing that gets me so cross about religion.) Calvin enjoyed the food, but all I could think about was that fantastic plate of tagliatelle I had in Nîmes. The breakfast next morning was even more bland and horrible.

We spent yesterday going from temple to temple. Japanese Buddhist temples are beautiful. They’re dark inside, full of black lacquer and red and gold and soft orange lanterns. Kobo Daishi’s mausoleum contains tens of thousands of lanterns. When I expressed awe at this, Calvin pointed out that they ran off electricity; this was his revenge for my skepticism about Kobo Daishi’s immortality.

We reached Kyoto this afternoon, and were immediately unimpressed by the hotel. Mind you, it was better than any hotel I stayed in in Europe (apart from Sorrento), but Calvin hated it the moment we walked in. So our plans have changed. We’ll spend the morning sightseeing in Kyoto, and then we’ll catch the train to Tokyo, where we’ll stay until we leave for home on Monday night.

Red meat on Fridays

Nathan Bottomley — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I’m just back from dinner. Calvin and I went to a restaurant under the hotel called Wakkoku, which was recommended by the Guide for the quality of its Kobe beef.

We were seated at a bench, directly in front of the long rectangular hotplate where our meal was cooked. Next to us we had small bowls of vinegar and soy sauce.

I started with smoked salmon, served with capers on a bed of lightly pickled onion. Calvin had tongue. (Delicious. I broke my skeletal-muscle-only rule to try it.) We ate our entrees while watching the chef lightly fry huge slices of garlic, carefully creating two small piles. He placed the garlic on large plates, which sat on the hotplate in front of us. Then he added small piles of salt, pepper and mustard.

We ate a light salad while the chef brought out two 250 gram slices of Kobe beef, amazingly geometrical, and marbled with fat. He cut off the fatty ends, and then cut two-thirds of the rest into slices and carefully fried each surface.

We dipped these slices in pepper or in a mixture of mustard and soy sauce. They were rich, juicy and fatty — by far the most delicious meat I have ever eaten.

Then he used the molten beef fat to lightly fry pieces of tofu, eggplant, carrot and radish. He served these to us, and added some of the pieces of fat themselves (oh my god!), and then the rest of the beef, and then bean shoots mixed with the rest of the pieces of fat. Calvin was defeated by the richness of it all, but I made it all the way to the end. So much delicious meat.

That was when I remembered Good Friday. Tomorrow and Sunday: penance and self-mortification. I’ll get back to you after that.

Easter among the Shintoists

Nathan Bottomley — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I’m writing this post from the top floor of the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Kobe. We arrived here yesterday afternoon, and after about five minutes of conversation, Calvin had us upgraded to Vice-Emperor Status, which means a massive room and free access to endless free drinks in the Ambassador Club Deity Lounge. He’s my absolute hero.

View from the hotel room window in Kobe

I met Calvin at Tokyo Airport, after a horrid long-haul flight from London to Tokyo. There was to be no sleeping on this flight, thanks to the many children around me, and the confined economy-class seating. But the inflight entertainment was spectacular: I watched hours of cartoons and sitcoms, episodes of Torchwood, and, for the very first time, This is Spinal Tap. No one ever told me that Patrick Macnee was in it.

Dinner last night was hampered a bit by our complete inability to communicate with the staff in the restaurant. Buying train tickets this morning was hampered by our relative inability to communicate with the staff at the railway station. We’ve picked our restaurant for dinner tonight, and are hoping for a menu with pictures on it. Although we’re pretty sure that most waiters in Kobe will understand the word beef.

Caught the tourist bus around Kobe today, visited a beautiful Shinto temple, wandered slack-jawed around a six-storey electronics shop and climbed the hill behind the city on a scary cable-car thing.

Tomorrow, we’re off to Koyasan, where we’ll be staying in a Buddhist temple for two days. I’m guessing that opportunities for beef, beer and wi-fi will be limited, so I don’t expect to be blogging again until after the weekend.

Strike three

Nathan Bottomley — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I had a bit of a ceramics day yesterday. There were no trains running, and I was reluctant to attempt the buses, so I was restricted to places within easy walking distance of the hotel. Fortunately, that included the National Archaelogical Museum and the Kerameikos.

I had visited the museum the day before, but by the time I reached the pottery collection on the top floor, I had pretty much had enough. I briefly walked through all the rooms in reverse chronological order, only stopping to look at the occasional pretty or unusual piece.

This time I had a few hours to walk through the whole collection, in order. And I was glad I did. Everything was very clearly described and explained, and there were beautiful examples of the different techniques and types of vessels. By the end, I knew a lot more than I had when I arrived.

More souvlaki for lunch, and then the last of the archaeological sites on my list. The Kerameikos was where a lot of the pottery was made, and although the ruins are now little more than square brick outlines, there is a small museum there with more pottery and grave markers. I wandered around for a while, marvelling at the tortoises and the flowers, looking up at the Acropolis, and trying to imagine Athens 2500 years ago.

On my way back to the hotel, I started to notice ominous signs on the telegraph poles. Brightly coloured signs, prominently featuring the word apergía and the date March 19. I went back to my local pub and decided to have an early night and not to worry too much about it.

Of course, I couldn’t sleep. I’ve had a fun few weeks travelling on my own, but I’m really looking forward to travelling in Japan with Calvin. It was like Christmas Eve: I couldn’t sleep till nearly midnight, and I was wide awake at 4.30 am.

And good thing too. The signs were advertising a general strike in protest at the changes to pensions the Greek government is planning to bring in tomorrow. When I checked out at 5.30, hoping to get to the airport in time for my flight at 8.55, the reception guy said that there would be no buses or trains or taxis today.

But 5.30 in the morning was early enough for the strike not to have kicked in yet, and I managed to get a cab to the airport, for only a couple of euros less than the cost of the previous night at the hotel. After spending a couple of hours wrestling with the ancient Windows machines in Athens Airport’s crappy first-class lounge (darling!), I’m now in the air about three hours from Heathrow, where I catch my flight to Tokyo.

Strike two

Nathan Bottomley — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Today is my last day in Athens, and my last day in Europe. I’m leaving tomorrow morning at 9 am to fly to Tokyo via London, where I’ll meet up with Calvin.

Yesterday was another beautiful day, hot and sunny: for the first time, I shed the jacket completely. I decided to head up to the Acropolis again. This time I started with the excavations on the south side and the Theatre of Dionysus. Then up to the Acropolis itself.

It was still spectacular. It was Monday, and entry was no longer free, so it was less crowded. I took a couple more pictures, but basically just tried to memorise the place as much as I could. This time I noticed that from the Erichtheion you could see the Ancient Agora and its amazingly intact temple of Hephaistos. I also saw a lump of rock nearby which people were clambering on, and suspected that I knew what it must be. I headed towards the exit.

Before I got there, I ran into the American students again. They’d been having fun, and were getting ready to leave the next day.

The lump of rock had a plaque on it quoting the chapter of the Book of Acts where Saint Paul preaches to the Greeks about a God previously unknown to them. This was the Areopagus. I wandered up, marvelling at its slipperiness and wondering if there were as many beer bottles there in Paul’s day. I saw the American students again, but climbed down before they saw me: it would have been ridiculous to say goodbye to them for a fourth time.

I went through the Ancient Agora, and walked around the temple of Hephaistos. They have little tortoises here, like the one that killed Aeschylus. I emerged from the agora into a fabulously cool street, full of roadside cafes where attractive young people were playing backgammon and drinking that scary frothy Greek coffee. I vaguely decided to come back and eat here that night.

Souvlaki for lunch: the best thing I’ve eaten since Italy. Then the National Archaeological Museum for the afternoon. Had a happy time looking at all that gold Schliemann dug up in Mycenae, and spent quite a while looking at the Neolithic artifacts. By the time I reached the fantastic ceramics rooms on the top floor, my knees and ankles had had enough, and I didn’t do more than a cursory tour.

It was dark and overcast when I left the museum, but not yet time for dinner, so I walked back to the cafes near the Ancient Agora. It was quite dark when I got there, and the bookshop I’d spotted earlier had no books in English, and it was too dark to read at any of the cafes anyway, so I decided to head back. Not before seeing the Acropolis all magnificently lit up, though. I tried to take a photo, but it was dark and the camera’s a Sony, which means that I can’t work out how to change any of its settings.

There was a notice at Thissio station, which looked like it said there would be a train strike for the next 36 hours. When I got to Omonia station, there was an English announcement that confirmed it.

So, no trains today. I can’t face the buses, frankly, and so I’m stuck doing things within walking distance. That might mean another trip to the Archaeological Museum to take a proper look at the pottery and a trip to the Kerameikos. Or it might mean dicking around on the internet and drinking at the pub next to the hotel. Let’s see, shall we?

The Athens photos are up

Nathan Bottomley — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I don’t have time to write a long post right now, but I just wanted to say that I’ve uploaded my photos from today’s sightseeing tour of Athens, including my first ever trip to the Acropolis.

Normal whinging about the vicissitudes of overseas travel will resume as soon as possible.

Cradle of civilisation

Nathan Bottomley — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The ferry arrived in Patra yesterday lunchtime, and I easily found the railway station. But when I tried to buy a ticket to Athens, the man at the counter said that there had been an accident, and that it would be half an hour before he could tell me whether there would be any trains to Athens. He may have added something in Greek to the effect that the line had caught fire, or that a tower had fallen on it; my Greek is about two and a half thousand years out of date.

I had been followed to the station by three American students, who also asked for tickets, but the ticket seller suggested to them that they could catch the bus at the bus station we had passed on the way to the railway station. I decided to do this as well.

The bus trip was incredible, and much faster than the train would have been. We drove along the north of the Peloponnese, looking out across the water towards northern Greece, until we reached Corinth; then we drove along looking south across the water towards the Peloponnese. The sky was blue, there were mountains; it was terribly beautiful, and a nice confirmation of all those maps of Greece I’ve looked at over the years.

The American students were on the bus with me. They were studying architecture and construction science at a university in Texas; they were studying abroad in Italy for a whole semester, and were taking their spring break in Greece.

When we got to Athens, things were less attractive. The bus station was, as usual, full of lost luggage and lost souls. From there I caught a local bus to Omonia, which the Guide describes as a “home to pickpockets, prostitutes and drug dealers”. The garbage collectors, like those in Naples, must be on strike: everywhere you look there are six foot piles of garbage, and small drifts of garbage everywhere else. The window cleaners’ strike appears to be in its third decade.

The hotel didn’t improve my mood. It’s called the Hotel Joker; the lit sign on the side has a malfunctioning R. I only reconciled myself to Athens when I visited the pub next door. The staff were friendly, the beer was cold, and they were enthusiastically playing that Greek music which I had always thought Greek people only pretended to like just to placate their mothers.

This morning, the first place to go was the Acropolis. And it was as easy as catching the metro to the station called Akropoli, climbing the escalator and looking up. Unfortunately, the staff there were also on strike: the Acropolis was not opening until midday.

This gave me plenty of time to visit the temple of Olympian Zeus and the Pnyx and the Hill of the Muses, from where you can see the gleaming white buildings of Athens stretching out to the hills, much less grubby from a distance. I also had a brief preview of the new Acropolis Museum, which is due to open fully this year. When twelve came round, I briefly considered leaving the Acropolis for another day, but that was a crazy idea, and so I went there straightaway. Spectacular, of course. I ran into the American students on the way down the hill.

After that, a late lunch, and a wander around Syntagma and Plaka, which the Guide tells me are the heart of Athens. It’s Sunday, so all the shops were closed, but there were markets and pubs and a happy carnival atmosphere. I stumbled across the Roman agora, and the Kerameikos, which is where all those famous Greek amphoras were made, and which doubled as the red light district, before the area around my hotel took over, of course.

Tonight, the pub again, I think. Tomorrow, the museum, and the inevitable second trip up the Acropolis.

Last leg

Nathan Bottomley — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The train was late, and I did get lost on the way to the port. But I’m writing this post on board the ferry, about four hours out from Pátra.

The train was only ten minutes late into Bari, and I was sure I knew which direction to go to get to the sea. Things were looking good: the street continued straight ahead, there was a breeze, I could see a pavilion of some kind up ahead. Suspiciously, though, there were no signs saying This way to port. Not to worry, I thought, Bari is probably embarrassed about simply being a ferry port on the way to Greece, and it bolsters its self-esteem by having lots of signs directing you to its lovely church and prestigious university, and no signs telling you how to leave.

That was when I got lost. The pavilion was a false alarm, and I found myself in a maze of twisty little cobbled streets, all alike. Perservering, I passed the church and the university, and came out on a wide street by the ocean. I immediately noticed something about half a kilometre to my left that looked like a port, and after a few moments, I noticed another port-like thing about a kilometre to my right.

I approched a sausage-seller in a van with (literallly) all the Italian at my command: Dov’è il porto? He said it was the port-like thing on my left.

So I got to the ferry with enough time to check in and eat dinner before it was time to depart. My Eurail pass entitled me to (nearly) free passage and a reclining aeroplane-style seat, which was easily comfortable enough to sleep in. It’s quite nice here, nicer than a train: there’s a bar and a restaurant and a duty free shop. There’s (slow and unreliable) wi-fi and televisions showing BBC World, Greek News and Italian sitcoms.

One more train trip and I’ll be in Athens. My guidebook tells me they have wi-fi there too.

Sunshine, ruins and cutting it fine

Nathan Bottomley — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

It was a beautiful day today. Sunny, warm, clear skies, for the first time since Rome. But I was slow to get moving, and still had several thousand photographs from Pompeii to label and classify, so I didn’t get going until about ten o’clock.

I went to Herculaneum, which is a town less well known than Pompeii, but far better preserved: instead of being covered in ash, it was drowned in boiling mud, which was bad for the inhabitants, but good for the archaeologists. The ruins in Pompeii are rarely more than a storey high; Herculaneum is full of two-storey buildings, and even some wooden structures survive.

Only just over four blocks have been uncovered. So it’s not a complete town like Pompeii, with theatres and temples and amphitheatres. There are a few public buildings, but it’s mostly just shops and houses.

And it’s just terrific. More houses are open to the public, there are more mosaics and frescoes, and the site has been planted with gardens. You can’t get lost there, which is a shame, but you can certainly get immersed. In fact, in some of the photographs you can barely tell where the ruins end and the surrounding suburb begins.

Again, it’s taking hours to upload the photos, but I still had time for a last dinner in Sorrento, and a night-time wander through its narrow streets.

Tomorrow I’m leaving for Athens. It’s going to take over twenty-four hours: Sorrento to Naples by the Circumvesuviana, Naples to Bari by Trenitalia, a frantic dash to the ferry wharf, a ferry trip from Bari to Pátra, then a train trip from Pátra to Athens. There’s less than two hours between my arrival at Bari and my departure: if the train is late, or if I lose my way between the station and the ferry, I could be spending the night in a town so grim that it doesn’t even rate a mention in Europe for Less Than Thirty Altairian Dollars a Day.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

Housekeeping

Nathan Bottomley — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I made it to Pompeii yesterday.

I wandered around for hours and hours, taking photos of absolutely everything. It was great. It’s the skeleton of an ancient Roman town of course, but it’s so nearly an ancient Roman town that you can barely believe that all those centuries are completely irrevocable, that there’s no way of bringing it back to life, just for a day, to see what it was like. I visited the house of Caecilius, saw the Cave Canem mosaic in the house of the tragic poet, and also saw [a replica of?] that famous mosaic of Alexander and Darius, which I hadn’t even realised was from Pompeii. (A shame my photos of it are so crap.) It was a little bit like wandering around Avignon, I guess, but with fewer toilets, fewer cafés and less wi-fi access. But the walls, the narrow cobbled streets, the towers, the squares are all there.

The visit was surprisingly tiring, and I slept for about eleven hours last night. Today, I felt disinclined to do anything much. I spent about three hours uploading photographs to Flickr and dicking around on the internet, I did some washing, and I wandered the streets of Sorrento. It’s very pretty here, even if you have no interest in clothes shopping or shitty souvenirs.

I’m putting the Pompeii photos up now. There are lots of them. I’ll get round to labelling them all tomorrow. I’m going out for a drink, and then dinner. And another early night. Tomorrow I’m going to Herculaneum, and finally facing the full horror of the twenty-four hour voyage to Athens that awaits me on Friday.

Dies Jovis

Nathan Bottomley — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The Pompeii thing didn’t work out. I got to the station this morning to discover that the drivers on the Circumvesuviana railway were on strike. A young English woman there told me that this happens a lot. I repaid her by saying that the garbage collectors in Naples were on strike, and that I saw huge drifts of plastic bags from the train. She seemed grateful for the warning. I may not make it to the museum in Naples, actually.

So, no Pompeii. What to do instead? Sorrento is beautiful, as I said yesterday, but there are too many clothes shops and craft shops and objet shops here, and too many American tourists. So I decided to go to Capri instead.

The ferry to Capri takes 25 Italian minutes, which is about 45 of your Earth minutes. It was full of American tourists. But Capri itself is astonishing.

The emperor Tiberius retreated to a villa in Capri from AD 27 to 37, leaving his city prefect Jean-Luc Picard to run Rome in his absence, if the BBC drama series I, Claudius is to be believed. In fact Tacitus claims he had no less than twelve villas there; the biggest of them was excavated last century. It’s called the Villa Jovis, and it’s on the highest mountain on the island, 335 m above sea level. So I went to see it.

It’s a bit of a hike. You take the Via Tiberio, go past the Tiberius Elementary School (who named that?), and then on and on up the mountain. The walk takes about an hour, but it’s worth it. The villa itself is a bit of a big ruin, but that view! Who wouldn’t forgo running half of Europe if you could look out the window and see that view?

My ferry back to Sorrento didn’t leave till 6.30 pm, and I finished my trip to the villa at about 2, which is when the rain really set in. I had some lunch for a while, went for a walk, and still had two hours to kill. You’re on Capri, I told myself; don’t waste it just because it’s raining. You might never make it here again. Go for a walk or something.

Ten minutes later, a hailstorm broke out. Rivers of water were flowing down every staircase and from every manhole. Drenched, I retreated into the nearest café and drank half a bottle of red. An elderly American tourist complained to the waiter that she didn’t know what a cappucino or an espresso was. Instead of hitting her, I decided to watched Grande Fratello. It’s day 49, and the housemates appear to be yelling and gesticulating at each other.

Tomorrow, deo volente: Pompeii. There’s a lot of thunder about right now.

A kind of homecoming

Nathan Bottomley — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

My hotel in Rome was right next to Roma Termini, Rome’s biggest railway station. It’s not the most salubrious part of Rome. I wasn’t actually offered drugs, but a tall black man with dark brown teeth tried to sell me a watch once, and later shouted at me and pushed my shoulder when I carelessly trod on his friend’s stock of pirate CDs, which he had laid out on a blanket on the sidewalk. And fair enough too.

The hotel itself wasn’t the most salubrious hotel of the area. Groups of people used to huddle on the front step, to discuss how the drug sales were going, I imagine. And my room wasn’t that great, with its tiled floor and freezing draught and unreliable hot water. I had to yell at the bent and wizened old man at reception to get him to start the pilot light so that I could have hot water for a shave. I felt mildly guilty for several minutes afterwards.

So imagine my surprise when I arrived in Sorrento this afternoon, and found out that the hotel I had booked looked like this:

This is the lounge of the Ulisse Deluxe Hotel. It’s cheaper than my hotel in Rome, but it’s the only hotel I’ve stayed in so far that wouldn’t give Calvin an instant aneurysm. There are sliding glass doors at the entrance and a toaster in the breakfast room. My bathroom even contains a bidet, for God’s sake.

Sorrento itself is lovely and clean and safe. I’ve had a very relaxing evening here. Thank God I didn’t decide to stay in Naples. Tomorrow: Pompeii.

Dum Capitolium scandet

Nathan Bottomley — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I climbed the Capitoline Hill three times yesterday.

It was sunny, as I said before, and so I wanted to try the Forum again without a camera or an umbrella, to get to know the space better. Or something. I had a nice time. Then I thought I’d climb the Capitoline to see what the museum was like.

It’s beautiful. There are two buildings on either side of a courtyard surrounded by statues; in the middle is an impressive bronze of Marcus Aurelius on a horse. But I didn’t have enough cash on me, and I was hungry by then, so I walked back to the hotel for lunch.

The second time I climbed the Capitoline was to visit the museum. It was extraordinary. I spent a happy time in the basement reading dozens of Latin funerary inscriptions, feeling close to real dead Romans and marvelling at all the spelling mistakes. As for the rest of the museum, I can’t even describe it. Nearly every photograph in every Latin textbook we use at school was taken there. The dying Gaul. Eros and Psyche. That bust of Cicero. Frescoes of great scenes from the historian Livy. The contents of Maecenas’s gardens. Bits of a massive statue of Constantine. That bronze she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. And a hilarious collection of religious paintings.

I left the museum and went down the stairs to return to my hotel room. There was a huge political rally in the way. There’s an election here next week — every available surface is covered with “Vote Saxon” posters — and so a bunch of wacky left-wingers with flags and balloon were getting in early, I think.

By the time I walked back to the hotel, I was looking forward to a pee, frankly, and thinking about getting my bag and then going back out for dinner. And then I thought about how rarely I leave my hotel without taking my bag. And then I thought about how I hadn’t left my hotel without taking my bag.

The third time I climbed the Capitoline, I was running, frantic, desperate to get my bag back from the museum cloakroom. My bag contained a pad, a jumper, a spare camera battery, a copy of Europe on Less Than Thirty Altairian Dollars a Day and a second-hand copy of Gulliver’s Travels I bought in Nîmes. But I couldn’t do without it. I had caught the metro to the Colosseum and run along the Via dei Fori Imperiali. I knew that the museum wouldn’t close for a few hours; I didn’t know whether they would charge me another 8 euros to get back into the museum.

The Capitoline is steep and tiring, but the security guards let me straight back in. My bag was fine. The happy ending: I had a lovely and hilarious two-course dinner near my hotel reading about Gulliver’s escape from Lilliput. The bowdlerised version I read as a child never had this much pissing in it.

This evening: Sorrento.

The Forum, the Basilica and the River

Nathan Bottomley — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Until I reached Rome, I had been very lucky with the weather. Every day had been sunny, except for one day in London, and one slightly rainy morning in Paris. London was cold, but otherwise it had been very mild — mild enough to wear a T-shirt and jacket, like I would in a Sydney winter.

But the last two days in Rome have been cold, overcast and rainy. Yesterday I went to the Roman forum, for example, and was driven back to the hotel after an hour by the rain. My umbrella had disintegrated overnight, and I was trying to hold it together and operate the camera and not fall in the mud all at the same time. I think some of the photos are at crazy angles as a result.

Anyway, at the hotel I got the waterproof hooded jacket Calvin leant me, and I was good to go. I caught the metro to the Spanish Steps, and had a long afternoon walk. The Spanish Steps, the Piazza del Popolo, the River, the Museum of the Ara Pacis Augustae and the Mausoleum of Augustus, more river, St Peter’s Basilica, that island in the middle of the Tiber and then the Pyramid of Sestius. This last one took me hesitantly off the map, but I had a vague memory of a Piramide Metro Station, which proved to be correct.

The visit to St Peter’s was a spur of the moment thing. I had just intended to walk the length of the river, but I saw the dome in the distance and decided on a visit. It is impressive, isn’t it? I didn’t visit the museum, but I went into an adjacent treasury thing full of chasubles and giant candlesticks and reliquaries (including one containing the skull of St Luke the Evangelist!). And I visited the tombs downstairs, just to make sure John Paul II was still resting comfortably. See how thoughtful I am!

There are lots of photos again: I spent an hour and a quarter uploading and labelling them when I got back that evening. Then more red wine, more pizza by the hectogram and then an early night. I was hobbling by then.

Today it’s beautifully sunny. I’m planning to swing by the Forum again, and then perhaps a park. Or the Vatican Museum. Or the Capitoline Museum. I’ll decide later. It’s my last full day in Rome: I’m catching the train to Sorrento tomorrow.

The Visitation

Nathan Bottomley — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

In case anyone thought I was being an insufferable Mac snob when I said that I was reluctant to use the Windows machines at the internet centres in Rome: my thumb drive thing came back from the internet centre this morning with no less than three separate viruses on it. Let that be a warning to you all!

Monument after monument

Nathan Bottomley — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

It rained on and off all day yesterday. In the morning it looked like it would clear up, so I left my umbrella in my hotel room and walked down to the Colosseum. As I approached, a couple of people asked me if I wanted to join a tour group: one inventive young man even suggested that I wouldn’t be allowed in if I didn’t. The queue to get in was long, and by now it had begun to rain hard enough to be annoying, so I took the Metro back to my hotel, grabbed my umbrella, and took the Metro back again. I needn’t have bothered: there had been people selling umbrellas on every street corner, and by the time I got back to the Colosseum, the rain had eased off.

Unlike the Arena in Nîmes, the Colosseum is only a skeleton, but at twice the height, it’s still amazing. I spent an hour there wandering round taking photos, and wincing at the accents of the American tourists. The ticket to the Colosseum entitles you to a visit to the Palatine hill, just across the road, so I decided to go there next.

Last time I was in Rome, I visited the Forum, but this was my first time on the Palatine. I could have done with a map or a guide, really. The hilltop is covered with low walls and gardens and things, and I recognised very little: an enclosed garden, the stadium of Domitian. A few things were labelled, but half-heartedly. The rain started up again, and so I took refuge in the Palatine Museum, which is mostly full of fragments of statues found on top of the hill.

By now it was afternoon. I had had lunch. (Pizza sold by the hectogram. Fantastic.) I decided that I had had enough of ruins and monuments for a bit, and that I wanted to see the river. So I walked down the hill, past the forum and the Arch of Constantine and then past the Circus Maximus, which is now a park. But the ruins and monuments kept on coming.

First, the Bocca della Verità. You know, like in Roman Holiday. Tourists were lining up to take wacky photos of each other with their hands inside the mouth. It didn’t bite any of them. Across the road was that round temple of Vesta I had been wanting to see. And next to that was another temple, completely covered in scaffolding.

I wandered over to the river and took a couple of photos of the Fabrician Bridge. And then I spotted the Portico of Octavia. (What is that? I must look it up.) And then, wandering uphill towards the hotel, I saw a whole block full of ruined temples: the Area Sacra.

And that was when my camera got full. One gigabyte of photos in just under a month. So I abandoned my sightseeing and headed back to the hotel. It took an hour to upload and label the day’s photos; by the time I finished, it was time for a drink and then dinner. It was warm enough to dine outdoors: I treated myself to a two-course menu turistico thing, which came with accordion accompaniment. Then a brief swing past the internet centre to catch up with the iPhone news and then to bed.

Forums today, I think. I’ve emptied the camera, and I’m ready to go.

A cold day in Rome

Nathan Bottomley — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Keen-eyed readers will have noticed that despite my last post, photos from Rome have started to appear on this blog. How is this possible? Well, some nice young men in a mobile phone store told me that there is almost no wi-fi in Italy, so I swallowed hard and visited an internet centre instead. Fortunately, the one nearest the hotel uses Firefox, which is a bit more secure than the Internet Explorer installations I saw elsewhere. But enough of that.

Yesterday afternoon I went for my first long walk, to make sure I could get to the Forum and Colosseum without getting lost. Of course, they’re not very far from my hotel near the station, but I still had no difficulty finding them. I took some photos, but since it was getting late, I decided not to pay to go inside. There’ll be plenty of time for that later. The area was very familiar from last time, although I don’t remember seeing Trajan’s column or the Circus Maximus before. God, what did I actually do the last time I was here?

Beer and gelato for dinner, then an early night to recover from the previous night’s train journey.

Today it was raining when I woke up, and quite cold, the coldest since London. But I had things to do. In the morning, I visited the Pantheon. Apart from the front, from the outside it is astonishingly hideous. Blunt and brutal. The inside is glorious, of course, although I was appalled by the nerve of the Christian upstarts who put up signs about saints and silence and reverence as if they owned the place.

After that, I stopped by the Trevi fountain just long enough not to have my pockets picked. Then, after an ample lunch, I spent the afternoon in the Museo Nazionale Romano. It’s all ancient Roman stuff, statues and frescoes and mosaics, as well as a display of frescoes from Pompeii which are usually housed in the museum in Naples. I’ve been trying to write about them for about fifteen minutes now, but I can only come up with crap sentences stuffed with adjectives. They were great.

Off to dinner now, followed by some gelato, and then a quick trip to the internet centre to upload this post and my day’s photographs. Tomorrow, the Baths of Diocletian, I think, followed by the Forum and the Colosseum.

Life on Mars

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The trip to Rome was not too bad after all. The Norwegian family were nice, and their four-year-old daughter was cute and well behaved. And it turned out that not only was there a dining car in the next carriage, but it was possible for all of us to sleep lying down at the same time. I think I slept well, but I’m pretty tired now, and when I had a lie down in my hotel room earlier on, it felt like I was rocking from side to side. When I asked the Norwegian woman how she had slept, she was evasive and distant, so I suspect that for much of the night I was snoring or farting or both.

We arrived in Rome at about 11, one hour late. I found my hotel easily enough: it’s just near the station. But it is odd. Reception is on the first floor, and the rooms are behind a door on the fifth floor. On the other floors, there are other hotels and pensiones. And they serve breakfast at a café round the corner.

After dumping my stuff, I went on my customary hunt for a cafe or bar with wi-fi. No luck at all. There are internet centres on every corner, full of scary Windows machines infested with toolbars and spyware and shitware. Nothing I’d be prepared to type a password into, and nothing that it’s possible to upload photos from. Some internet centres offer to burn your photos onto a CD, which would be great if it was 1996, but doesn’t help me get my photos safely off my person and onto this blog.

So I uploaded yesterday’s blog entry standing on a street corner using stolen wi-fi. I may have to do the same with this entry. And it’s just possible that there won’t be any new photos here until I return to the present day. See you then.

Lost in Paris II

Nathan Bottomley — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

My trip back to Paris took three hours and was very easy. Three hours of sleeping lightly, listening to Doctor Who audios and looking out the window at picturesque French villages. I was looking forward to sitting elegantly in one of the cafés at the Gare de Lyon, drinking wine and using the free wi-fi that so excited me last time.

We were pulling into the station when I took another look at my Paris–Rome ticket, and it occurred to me that Paris Gare de Lyon and Paris Bercy might be completely different stations. A quick look at the departure board at Gare de Lyon confirmed it: there was no train leaving from there for Rome.

Frantically consulting Google Maps, I discovered that the Gare Bercy was only a mile away, and that it could be reached by following the Rue de Bercy. Even I managed that without getting lost. The station itself was horrid: no cafe, no wi-fi and nowhere to sit. Thank God there was alcohol available.

And so now I’m on the train. A second class couchette was the only thing I could get, which means I’m currently sharing a tiny room with a nice Norwegian family of three and a reticent young Japanese woman. I don’t think there’s enough room for us all to sleep at the same time. I’m hoping the conductor guy is going to bring our passports back tomorrow morning. And I’m beginning to suspect there will be no food served on this trip.

I’ll upload this post when I arrive in Rome. And I’ll let you know then what kind of state I’m in.

Conversations with Mormons

Nathan Bottomley — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I spent a few hours checking out Roman ruins, and at about three in the afternoon I was wandering the streets when I saw a pair of well-dressed young men ringing a doorbell.

Now, I’ve been in France for just over a week. And everyone here speaks French, apparently. I’ve had to book hotels in French, and order meals, and buy train tickets. I’ve even explained the merits of the Eee PC to a few curious passersby. But my French is not what it was. I can tell people that the monkey is on the branch without making any mistakes, but otherwise I find myself horribly self-conscious about genders and irregular verb tenses and things. I came top in French in 1A, for God’s sake, I shouldn’t be uncertain about the future tense of faire.

So I was so excited by the prospect of a conversation in English that I went straight up to the young men. The more confident one told me he was from Idaho (bless him!); he had learned French at school and had done some intensive language training before coming to France as a missionary. I told him about my plans, and he was lovely and enthusiastic, as Mormons are. He briefly attempted to hook me up with missionaries in Sydney, but didn’t push it when I told him I wasn’t very religious. I said goodbye and walked away much happier.

The ruins had been great, of course. I went a bit mad with the camera. There was the Maison Carrée, where they show you a cheesy 3D film about the heroes of Nîmes. And then the beautiful Jardins de la Fontaine, where there was once a temple of Augustus and where you can still see the ruins of a temple of Diana. And at the top of the hill is the Tour Magne, a deceptively squat-looking tower from where you can see a panoramic view of the whole town. If you can cope with the scary spiral staircase leading to the top. I even visited the Castellum, which is the cistern at the end of the aqueduct, which used to distribute water all over the colony.

Catching the train to Paris this afternoon, and from there to Rome. I arrive on the morning of the fourth. I’ll catch up with you all then.

Colonia Augustus Nemausus

Nathan Bottomley — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I arrived in Nîmes yesterday lunchtime.

The hotel was easy to find, but hideously grim and unimpressive. To name and shame: it’s the Hotel de Provence, Nîmes. When I checked in, the concierge apologised about the room, and I said no, I’m sure it will be perfectly alright, but I was horribly wrong. The walls are grimy and the shower overflows. There’s a smell in the corridors, and there’s a continuous grinding sound somewhere on the second floor. There’s only one power point. I got home this evening to find that no one had done the room. Avoid.

The hotel put me in a bad mood, so I went off to look at the town. At first, I was unimpressed. It was like a grim country town in New South Wales: wide streets and shitty Chinese restaurants. Like, say, Guyra, only not as nice. But then I turned a corner, and at the end of the street I saw the Maison Carrée.

And from then on, I started to cheer up. After the Maison Carrée, you turn another corner and there are clothes shops and nice bookshops and trendy cafes with alfresco seating, and a few hundred metres further there’s a giant Roman amphitheatre.

I visited the amphitheatre in the afternoon and took dozens of pictures. They’re all up now. It’s the best-preserved Roman amphitheatre in the world: in fact, it still seats 15 000 for the annual bullfights. I hung around there until it closed and then went off to find somewhere to drink. Most places were full of soldiers, as has already been noted. I wonder why.

This morning, I spent an hour booking my ticket to Rome (overnight, via Paris again), and another hour trying to find a bus to take me to the Pont du Gard, which is a stretch of Roman aqueduct about 20 km from Nîmes. It’s beautiful. It spans a valley covered in what I want to call bushland; three levels of beautifully preserved arches, built in the first century to supply Nîmes with water. The pictures don’t do it justice, of course, but I’ll try and upload more of them tomorrow.

All the cafés round here are full of hot young soldiers!

Nathan Bottomley — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I just thought I’d mention it.

From Avignon to Nîmes

Nathan Bottomley — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Just under an hour before my train leaves for Nîmes. There are a few things I want to see here:

a Roman arena (which is about 50 metres from the hotel I’ve booked),
the Maison Carée (a temple built in honour of Augustus’s grandsons, I think),
the Tour Magne (a big tower, by the sounds of things),
the Pont du Gard (the remains of an aqueduct about 20 km from town),
and a triumphal arch which is around there somewhere. I have a photo of it on my desk at work.

I’ve given myself three nights there. Hoping that’s enough time. And then to Rome itself. There’s a possibility I might have to catch the TGV back to Paris, and then another train to Rome. I’ll find out this afternoon.

Day off

Nathan Bottomley — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Well, I had a great day in Avignon yesterday, wandering the streets and visiting the Papal Palace. The palace is amazing. Most of the rooms are quite empty: stone walls, high ceilings and mullioned windows, with occasional traces of the frescoes and polychromy which once rendered the rooms garish and hideous. Unfortunately, they don’t let you take photos inside, but I did sneak one from the topmost tower.

I can’t imagine what it would be like for a devout Christian to visit a place like this. The building is huge and beautiful, but room after room reveals the popes to be grandiose monsters, and medieval Christianity to be a brutal confidence trick. Does that sound harsh? Anyway, at least we got some lovely buildings out of it.

It’s my last full day in Avignon. Off to Nîmes tomorrow, for some Roman ruins. So doing nothing much today. I might walk over to Villeneuve-lez-Avignon on the other side of the river. I might go to Place les Halles, where there’s lots of great food at lunchtime. I might see if I can find that restaurant Geoff mentioned in his comment on my last post. But there’s no list of things to do or sites to see. Just gonna enjoy the atmosphere, I think.

Lost in Paris

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I decided to stay in Paris for just two nights. So far, I’ve spent all my time in big cities, and I want to go somewhere smaller and more restful. I got a lot done during my one whole day, but it was tiring and a bit stressful, and I’m glad to be off.

I had three things to do: buy a ticket to Avignon, book a hotel room there, and see the antiquities in the Louvre. Not a hectic agenda, but nearly more than I could manage.

Buying the ticket was easy. I had checked out the Gare de Lyon the night I arrived, and I knew I could get there. But after leaving, I got lost almost immediately. And I discovered that despite years of high-school geography, I am completely unable to use a map to get from one place to another. I can’t remember place names and directions, and I need to turn the map around so that it corresponds to the layout of the streets. Except that that doesn’t really help.

After an hour of standing on street corners, frantically rotating an obvious tourist map and swearing in English, I came across a metro station and decided to use that. The metro system map was fixed to the wall, which made rotating it more or less impossible, so I decided not to tempt fate, and went to the station nearest the Louvre on the line I was on anyway.

There followed another hour of hunting for wi-fi enabled cafes, booking hotel rooms, rotating the map, swearing, tearing up the map, and being offered directions in French by a helpful old man. However, I can’t understand directions either, even in English, and I was too busy wondering if the old man would want money to really pay attention.

But I did find the Louvre, mostly by following the well-signposted Avenue de Louvre, with its Café de Louvre and Tabac de Louvre and so on. It ended up being the huge-ass palace thing at the end of the street. And although the Greek and Roman ceramics were closed (damn!) I spent a happy few hours wandering around, mostly looking at Classical Roman sculptures, finishing with a quick run around to catch the Mona Lisa, and Michelangelo’s prisoners and the Venus de Milo. The Louvre map was smaller and much easier to rotate.

After that, I did the obligatory tourist spots, most of which I had visited last time. There are photos, as usual. Then dinner in Saint-Denis, as David suggested, and then back to the hotel. And I only got lost on the metro once.

Les beaux messieurs font comm’ ça

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Well. I’m in Avignon. I arrived early afternoon yesterday, and I’m in love with it immediately. It’s small, for a start, and I don’t need a map. I wandered the streets last night, totally certain that I wouldn’t get lost. And it’s beautiful, full of well-lit medieval churches and surrounded by walls. I walked through a gate last night, and it was like leaving a fairytale castle.

And then there’s the famous bridge, with its well-known nursery rhyme. It’s too narrow to dance on, of course, but you can see me standing on it with confidence. There are lots of photos.

Today, the Papal Palace. And tomorrow, maybe I’ll catch the bus to the Pont du Gard, a massive Roman aqueduct just over 20 kilometres from here. Then off to Nîmes for a few nights.

I’m changing my plans. The trains are a bit complicated, so I’m going from Nîmes back to Paris, and then overnight on the train to Rome. Then Rome for a few days, before Sorrento, which is the place I’m most looking forward to.

Free wi-fi!

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Here I am at the Gare de Lyon. My train leaves at quarter past 11, which left me enough time this morning to eat breakfast, pack up, and arrive at the station more than an hour early, with a heavy backpack and nothing in particular to do.

But there’s free wi-fi here. So I’ve been passing an agreeable few minutes labelling my Paris photos on Flickr and dicking around on the internet. And with a clear conscience. Wi-fi is ubiquitous in Europe, but you usually need to pay for it. I found a great café in Amsterdam with free wi-fi, and I hung out there a lot. In Paris, many cafés had it, but most of the waiters had no idea how to let me use it. Here at the station, however, it’s free and unlimited.

I’ll write about my day and a half in Paris when I’m on the train. And I’ll upload it when I arrive in Avignon, wi-fi permitting. Until then, enjoy my photos of Paris. And thanks to Tsunami, the unsecured network near my hotel which made uploading them possible.

Crocodile Dundee and the Stingray

Nathan Bottomley — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I have already suggested that this trip was not very carefully planned. Some people like to keep a completely open mind, making decisions at the spur of the moment, suddenly abandoning their plans and heading off in a completely new direction. I am not one of those people. I just find that planning ahead makes me tired or thirsty or angry, and I like to put it off as much as possible. That’s why I bought a Eurail pass. That way, I could leave Sydney with no more than a four-day hotel booking in London and absolutely no idea what to do after that. I didn’t have to consider the weeks and weeks I’d be away from the couch, travelling, booking hotels, finding food and interacting with scary new people.

I spent the night being woken by the happy singing of binge-drinking English children. This morning, I walked the streets saying goodbye to Amsterdam and chatting with some of the city’s more colourful drug dealers. One of them offered me his condolences on the loss of Steve Irwin, whom he referred to as “Crocodile Dundee”. He wasn’t going to sell me cocaine, apparently, but he was willing to give me some in exchange for some money. Sadly, I’d left my wallet in the hotel.

And now I’m on my first train: Amsterdam Centraal to the Gare du Nord in Paris. It’s a lot like a plane, but with less fear and more legroom. They’re even about to serve us lunch.

I arrive in Paris at 4.30 pm. My hotel is not far from the station, but I’ve forgotten to download the map from Google Maps. (Can you do that? I suppose you can.) So if I can’t find a wi-fi equipped cafe near the station, I could be in trouble. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Het weekend

Nathan Bottomley — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I decided to stop killing time in pubs and wandering the streets, and to do some proper sightseeing.

The Rijksmuseum is still closed, just like last time I was here. That’s a blessing really. It’s a huge building, full of rooms and rooms of Delft porcelain: mazelike and impossible to comprehend. But they’ve shifted the main bits of the collection into a side building, twelve rooms with a sensible number of artifacts, including some Vermeers and Rembrandts. The Night Watch is in the last room. But my favourite thing is the rear of a ship that the Dutch captured when they raided a naval base at Chatham in 1667.

Then the Van Gogh museum. Most of his paintings are here. They’re beautiful, but the exhibition is rather sad. His paintings become a bit scary towards the end. Upstairs there’s an exhibition of envelopes and menus scrawled on by the artist.

Then back to my quiet wifi-equipped cafe to upload some photos. It was Friday afternoon, and the cafe was full of drunken Mancunians singing Sweet Caroline (da-da-da!). Over here for the weekend, of course. And this morning, the streets are full of groups of young men, quieter and more dehydrated than they were last night, but no doubt up for a huge Saturday night tonight.

As for me, I’m taking it easy today. I’m travelling to Paris by train tomorrow, and that’s when the heavy-duty tourism begins. I’m gonna need my strength.

“Want some charlie, mate?”

Nathan Bottomley — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Had a great night last night. Went straight to the Leidseplein to check out all my old haunts. Instantly felt at home. It’s great to be able to walk around a foreign city, confident that you won’t get lost, and familiar with good places to eat and drink. In keeping with Amsterdam’s reputation as a party town, I was in bed before nine last night. Feeling terrifically well rested now.

I’m staying in a hotel not far from Centraal Station, near Dam Square. I haven’t spent much time here before. The area by the Leidseplein is genteel by comparison. There are lots more tourists here, and many more of the tourist-oriented businesses Amsterdam is famous for. There are sex workers in the window just around the corner. And I’ve been offered drugs on the street about five or six times, once as I was actually walking in the hotel door.

It all sounds a bit seedy, I guess, but I can’t tell you how happy I was the moment I arrived. I’ve got lots of good memories of Amsterdam (most of which I intend to keep to myself), and I’m really looking forward to spending a couple of days here.

Red

Nathan Bottomley — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

This is my third time in Amsterdam. The first time was on my first trip to Europe, with Rob. Within an hour, we had both decided to stay there for a week. The second time we went, we stayed for two weeks. We had many adventures, but my favourite part was just staying for a long time in a beautiful, alien, old-world city. Shopping, eating, drinking, browsing in bookshops, doing laundry. We did touristy things as well: going to the zoo, cycling in a snowy park, touring the canals, admiring the architecture, visiting museums.

But in those three weeks, I barely noticed the red light district. I remember wandering down a canal once and seeing a few sex workers in windows, but it was daytime and we were just on our way somewhere.

So. I went for a couple of walks last night around my hotel. The first time was to look for somewhere to eat. The second time was to sober up a little before interacting with the hotel reception guy, who keeps your room key behind the desk while you’re out. (What’s with that?) And on my walks, I discovered that my hotel is right in the middle of the red light district.

I’d already seen the women around the corner, just next to the oldest parish church in Amsterdam. There’s a photo. But last night, I walked through many narrow, narrow alleys with dozens of windows on each side. Around them are red fluorescent lights, and inside are ultraviolet lights, which create a shimmery purple glow on the women’s underwear and on their white PVC nurse’s uniforms.

Well, of course, for a gay man brought up in a leafy suburb, this is all very embarrassing. Every time I make eye contact, I’m invited in to join them. And I’m painfully aware how rude it is to pointedly ignore people.

So today I’ve decided to browse some bookshops, do some laundry, and visit a few museums. Just to calm myself down a bit. And after that, maybe somewhere local for dinner.

White wine

Nathan Bottomley — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

So my flight to Amsterdam was cancelled. After queuing for about three months at the BMI ticket sales counter, I was allocated a seat on a flight an hour and a half later. Not to worry, I thought: Calvin to the rescue. I’ll just swan around in the BA lounge for a while, using the diamond (diamond!) club membership he so thoughtfully organised.

No luck though. I’m in Terminal 1, and the Cathay Pacific lounge is in Terminal 3. The nice lady refuses to let me into the British Airways lounge because I’m flying BMI. That makes me insufficiently patrician, I think.

So here I am surrounded by commoners, reading the Guardian and waiting for my flight to be called. The gate opens 5 minutes before the flight is due to leave, so I don’t expect to be leaving on time.

Amsterdam!

Nathan Bottomley — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I’m finally here, three hours late, but I’ll be buggered if I’m gonna hang around in my hotel room blogging. I’m off down the canals to the Leidseplein for a beer. I’ll catch you all later!

Last day in London

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Glamorous morning yesterday. Ange dropped Joseph and the kids off at school, and the two of us headed into town. First stop: floor five at Harvey Nichols. Ludicrously expensive muffins and coffee, surrounded by women in scary makeup and black leather pants. (This cost us £22: if I’m sleeping in the streets of Sorrento in a fortnight, you’ll know why.) Then where else but Harrod’s, where we found a scarily realistic waxwork of the owner benignly but insanely overseeing his customers, while the man himself was busily accusing everyone in the Western world of complicity in Diana’s death. Looked at lipstick and ties for a bit before heading off to the food court for lunch. Fabulous!

But it wasn’t all high culture. Ange escorted me to the Victoria and Albert Museum. It’s extraordinary. I can only compare it to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (of which more later), in that it consists of room after room of baffling objects from all over the world and all throughout history. I spent some time looking at neolithic Chinese burial artefacts, before wandering desultorily through the rest of the museum. The highlights included some huge tapestry patterns by Raphael and corridors of wrought iron railings. I was about to give up when I came upon an extraordinary room.

Apparently the Victorians loved doing plaster casts of churches and statues and monuments. One room in the V & A contains giant casts of Trajan’s Column, as well as dozens of Christian artefacts, including the huge main doorway of the church at Santiago de Compostela. The adjoining room has a huge plaster statue of David. Impressive and curiously kitsch at the same time!

I gave the Science Museum a try, but apart from Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, nothing really grabbed me, so I headed off to the Natural History Museum in search of dinosaurs. Entering by the side door, I mistakenly thought that the entire museum was obsessed with geology. I was about to leave disappointed (sorry, Sara), when I found a wall covered in dozens of fossil ichthyosaurs, and then the museum’s entry hall with its massive Diplodocus skeleton.

Had a quick pint in Charing Cross Road before meeting Sarah in Soho. We had a delicious dinner of tapas, walked across Waterloo Bridge, more pints, and then off home to Gary’s place. A great night. I must try and see Sarah more often. If that means coming to London more frequently, well I guess that’s what I’ll have to do.

Today was altogether quieter. Wandered around Dulwich with Ange and her friend Rachel. A delicious pub lunch, my last pints of English bitter for the foreseeable future (tomorrow, Heineken), and now home, blogging and preparing for my plane to Amsterdam tomorrow morning.

A whiff of Joan Collins

Nathan Bottomley — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Off to Harrod’s and Harvey Nicks today. Fabulous!

I’ve still had very little time to blog. Another brief summary. Saturday: the Old Naval College, lunch courtesy of M & S, the Maritime Museum, Greenwich Observatory. Dinner and clubbing with Peter. Sunday: Hyde Park, South Kensington, Chinatown. Two episodes of Torchwood.

Leaving Wednesday morning for Amsterdam. Thinking of France after that. I’ll have time to write more when everything settles down.

In short

Nathan Bottomley — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Well, I was away from my computer on Thursday, and we got home quite late last night, so this is my first entry for a couple of days. So what have I been up to?

Very briefly. Thursday: breakfast out, quick visit to Dulwich College, British Museum, dinner and drinks with Peter. Friday: trip to Oxford, lovely lunch with Joseph’s parents and sister, quick walk around town, back home for an hour of crap British TV.

Not a very detailed or evocative post, I know. I promise to revisit all this in more detail in a couple of days. (Remind me to tell you the story about the Bassae sculptures.) Heading off to Greenwich today, and out tonight with Peter and Sarah. There will be dancing, apparently.

Until next time, enjoy this photo of snowdrops near the river in Oxford. I’ll write again soon.

Cat-ostrophe

Nathan Bottomley — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Another relaxing day. I packed up my stuff and said farewell to my tiny hotel room before heading out for more sightseeing. I thought I would go to some of the cut-price ticket booths in Leicester Square. I’m thinking maybe Wicked, which Philip recommended and which Calvin saw in Chicago. Although I did notice that Penelope Keith is playing Lady Bracknell. Again, apparently.

Anyway. the train stopped at St James’s Park Station, and I suddenly felt like a walk. The first time I ever came to London, St James’s Park was covered in snow or ice or something, and it was horribly, horribly cold. So today I had the opportunity to wander about in the sun and have a proper look at it.

It’s beautiful.

After my first brief walk, I spotted a crowd around Buckingham Palace. I joined them for a bit, but nothing particularly fascinating seemed to be happening, so I went back into the park. But not before I saw this:

The Queen's sheep?

These lovely guards saw me trying to take a photo through the fence, and graciously moved so that I could get an unobstructed view. But can anyone explain to me why they were guarding a sheep? Is it the Queen’s? And if so, why?

Went over to Angela’s in the afternoon. Hung out, watched some telly, had dinner. And now everyone’s in bed, and I’m on a comfy sofa by the fire. So relaxed that I can’t even get worked up about the inconsistent apostrophes in the signage at St James’s Park tube station.

(Not even the Queen gets it right. A sign by the gate at Buckingham Palace describes the Royal Mews as “one of the worlds [sic] finest working stables.”)

Thanne longen folk...

Nathan Bottomley — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Yes, it’s sad. But it was nearby and all.

I didn’t see Jennifer Saunders falling out of her car, or Tom Baker dropping by to offer helpful advice about Krynoids. I just had a quiet moment to myself, thinking about all those sketches and alien planets and Roman villas that had been hosted here over the years.

After that, I went and did some sensible sightseeing. The Globe and Southwark Cathedral and things. There are photos.

Now I’m off to the pub down the road for some food and some more beer. It’s still beautifully sunny, but very cold at night, and I’ve managed to catch a bit of a chill. But if there’s a better cure for that than English bitter, I don’t want to know about it.

Extravagant future plans

Nathan Bottomley — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I spent some time wandering the streets, window shopping and being a general tourist. Then over to Ange’s to plan the rest of the week, to watch Neighbours on Channel 5, and to have dinner. Got home late, and freezing cold.

I spent the morning uploading photos to Flickr, which is a long and arduous process for some reason. So I’ll write a longer post tonight.

Made some decisions. I’m staying in London till the 20th, then flying off to Amsterdam, where I’ve booked a hotel for four nights. Then what? Somewhere in France, I think. Nîmes? Carcassonne? Paris? Any ideas, anyone?

Off on a pilgrimage now. More details later.

Mind the gap

Nathan Bottomley — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

A quieter day yesterday.

Spent a little while in the morning uploading photos, blogging and chatting with people at home. Nice and relaxed. I felt quite good: less grumpy and dehydrated than my first day, and a lot less tired. And it was another beautifully sunny day.

I caught up with Ange and the kids on the south side of Westminster Bridge. We wandered down the south bank of the Thames, had lunch, and wandered into the Tate Modern.

I loved the Tate Modern the last time I was in London, and had a vivid memory of the Weather Project, a clever installation in the six-story Turbine Room. So I was a little disappointed to find that the Turbine Room seemed to be completely empty. Perhaps, for once, there was no installation there.

You can see the photo above. There was a huge crack in the concrete floor, more than a foot deep in places, forking and zigzagging like lightning. God knows how they did it! You can see from my (crap and numerous) photos how popular it was with the kiddies.

Ange drove me around through the London traffic for a while, dropping me off in Picadilly Circus. I caught the tube back to Earls Court. I had a couple of quiet pints in a local pub, and wandered back to my room to await a phone call from Calvin.

A nice day.

No place like London

Nathan Bottomley — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Well, after a long journey, I’m finally here.

I flew Qantas from Sydney to Hong Kong. Read a book most of the time. The inflight entertainment consisted of VHS videotapes projected onto a screen metres away, like the entertainment on a coach to Goulburn. In 1990.

I had a window seat, but the aisle seat next to me was free. So I had more room than those rich bastards in business class, and I didn’t have to clamber over anyone to get to the toilet. Result!

I tried to put up another post during my three-hour stopover in Hong Kong airport, but the wi-fi there was third-world standard, and I had left my power adapter thing in my check-in luggage. The business class lounge (thanks again, Calvin) was very nice, but I was determined not to be too jetlagged when I arrived, so I was uncharacteristically abstemious. The food was particularly nice, and I got to have a long, warm shower.

Hong Kong to London was on British Airways. I’m not sure how long it was: I spent all but the last three hours fast asleep, even refusing the first meal service. A free seat next to me again, but the aisle seat was occupied, so I had to clamber over a sleeping woman to get to the toilet. Having the window seat was well worth it, though. What’s more spectacular than London at dawn?

British customs and immigration reluctantly allowed me into the country, and I went straight to the hotel in Earls Court which I had booked online. It’s fairly comfortable and inexpensive, but grimly post-war and English. There’ll be more photos later.

And what a beautiful sunny day it was! Glorious after a week of rain and sweaty humidity. You can probably see how blue the sky was in the photo above.

First I caught up with Angela and Joseph and their kids Alex and Elizabeth. They live in a beautiful house in East Dulwich, a lovely suburb in South London. We wandered down the high street, taking in a street market, visiting a fabulous deli and stopping off at my first English pub this trip. Mmm, warm English beer.

Then I met Peter in town, at the Borders in Charing Cross Road. Headed over to have dinner with Sarah and Gary. It was lovely. Gary was back from his exciting job in Cardiff, so I was lucky to catch up with him at all. Today he flies off to LA for a Doctor Who convention. Also there were some people I haven’t met before: Paul, Simon and Debbie. Simon and Debbie were also off to the convention today; I’m hoping to catch up with Paul again later in the week.

An epic post. I’ll try and make later ones more concise and exotic.

Hello world!

Nathan Bottomley — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to Furius Abroad!

I’m writing this post mere hours before boarding my plane to London. I’m in the first class lounge, thanks to Calvin, but I can barely believe that I’m allowed here. Too scared to order food, drinks or massages, in case they throw me out for being too poor or badly dressed.

I’ve taken one or two photos of the lounge, which is a kind of glamorous, wood-panelled version of the Starship Enterprise’s Ten Forward. The photos are not very good, of course. I’m having to photograph discreetly, because, as I said, they’ll throw me out if I make any trouble.

I hope that you’ll come back here from time to time. All my photos from the trip will be available here, as well as the occasional mordant observation or hysterical cry for help.

And please feel free to write comments. This trip is incredibly poorly planned, so I’d love it if you suggested places I could visit or things I could do to keep myself occupied.