It's taken us about a year to pull our collective fingers out, but here is the Clear Climate Code website. The code is in GoogleCode, and there's also a mailing list.

I had never read this children's classic (nor have I read Burnett's other well-known works, Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess), but like a lot of people who watched mid-70s kids shows on the BBC I have tremendously fond memories of the 1975 TV version, in which Mr Craven was played by John Woodnutt, aka the Draconian emperor / Broton the Zygon leader, and the three main child characters were played by actors who have since disappeared (though one of them is active in local drama in New Mexico).

I do remember starting to read it as a child, and being deterred by the grim first couple of chapters, where Mary's parents die and she is sent to her uncle's isolated Yorkshire home where she is insufferably unpleasant. I wish I had kept going. It is a lovely story of psychological and physical healing through close encounters with the regenerative forces of the natural world and also, y'know, just being nice to people.

The wind must have been worse than I realised today, because I found I had something in my eye a couple of times as I read the last chapters. Perhaps the plotline of a disabled child whose condition markedly improves resonates more with me these days than it would have thirty-four years ago.

Tags: bookblog 2009

Horrible toothache this morning. Persuaded dentist to see me at short notice. I go back to them on Monday. Root canals have been mentioned.

( The Web Planet: 'What power does it hold?' )

( The Crusade: 'How did I get myself involved in this?' )

( The Space Museum: 'If you want to save yourself, you'd better bring him back to life.' )

( The Chase: 'Well, you must admit it was funny.' 'Really? I haven't seen the joke yet, I must say.' )

( Ian and Barbara )

( The Time Meddler: 'That is the dematerializing control. And that, over yonder, is the horizontal hold. Up there is the scanner, those are the doors, that is a chair with a panda on it. Sheer poetry, dear boy!' )

( Galaxy 4: 'We are strange beings to you. You've never met anything like us.' )

Tags: doctor who, doctor who: 01

More often than not, I complete the last leg of my morning commute by train, arriving at the railway station at Brussel/Bruxelles-Schuman, which is within a hop, skip and jump of my office. Schuman station was opened almost forty years ago (in December 1969) as part of the first axis of what has evolved into the Brussels metro system, between there and the De Brouckère station in the city centre. But I was surprised when I came across a Baedeker map of 1910, almost a century ago, which appeared to show the Schuman station in situ six decades early:

( Read more... )

All trace of the old station has now gone. ( Read more... )

But we can get an idea of what it might have looked like ( Read more... )

I am left with one rather minor nagging mystery. ( Read more... )

Tags: world: belgium

( 22 )

( 24 )

Occasionally my reading programme drags two related books separately to the top of the "to read" pile, and this was one of those occasions. Both of these are excellent and short guides to their respective subjects.

( November Books 23) A History of the Middle East, by Peter Mansfield )

( November Books 24) Islam: A Short History, by Karen Armstrong )

Tags: bookblog 2009, islam, religion

( school photo )

I don't remember the other guy at all; apparently his name is Brian Gorman.

• Reading Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" - Chapter X, which is mostly about the Goths
  
  
  Almost entirely about the barbarians - mainly the Goths - with the deadly succession of shortlived emperors mere background detail. And this seems right - the real story is not the politics of the Empire's leadership, but the story of how the empire catastrophically failed to maintain the physical security of its inhabitants, the first duty of any state, as the eastern defences crumbled both north and south. It seems to me almost as if the Roman Empire collapsed at this point, the middle of the third century.
  
  
  (tags: gibbon)

Tags: del.icio.us, linkspam, writer: gibbon