I feel like I’ve been on a ten mile run while weighlifting, and stopped by running face first into a wall. Note to self: don’t go to work with flu. I bet I don’t even give it to anyone.

For Back to Middle-earth Month, I thought I’d work my way through my (long) list of LOTR to read emails/bookmarks/RSS feeds. I have nearly made it but it doesn’t look like a lot of activity. So I thought I’d write about what I’d been reading. Although it would be easier to remember what I’d read if I hadn’t been deleting the reminders as I read them!

History Lessons: The Third Age by Nilmandra: This one’s been the easiest to keep up with because there haven’t been that many updates in the past (quite a) few months. It’s all about Elrond, so you can’t go wrong with that one really But mostly, these are the stories Tolkien should have been writing – he just didn’t realise how important/interesting Elrond was

Arwen’s Heart by Bodkin: I started reading this when there were just a few chapters, so by the time I came back to it I had about ten to read. I was expecting to just deal with Arwen during the time when Aragorn was Estel, but it goes right up to the end of the Third Age, which was not an unpleasant surprise. Bodkin makes Arwen really sympathetic in this, and there are all sorts of other interesting things going on with other women in the story too.

A Lesser Treason and A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Jay of Lasgalen: Every time I think I’ve caught up on Jay’s stories, she goes a posts a new story or chapter. Both of these are Jay’s usual twins stuff. Both really good, of course. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has some great action scenes in it, A Lesser Treason has some great emotional family moments. I’m caught up now, Jay, you can finishe A Midsummer Night’s Dream!

Don’t Panic! by Boz4PM: Nilmandra recced this one in her LJ, so I had to go and see what it was all about. It’s a realistic girl dropped into Middle-earth story. There’s loads of interesting stuff in there about how they did ordinary stuff at the time, as well as loads of Middle-earth knowledge. There’s a sequel but I haven’t started that one yet – it took me long enough to read this one (it’s quite long).

Daytime TV, an essential aspect of being ill. Usually all I watch is Pet Rescue but it’s not on, so I watched Doctors instead on the basis that it had Jaye Griffiths in it. I liked her character, she was quite cool. Although the actor’s looking quite old – although some of that could have been the makeup in comparison to Bugs. Christopher Timothy is looking really old, though. He’ll still always be James Herriot though.

The only trouble was by the end I wanted to know what was going on between Jaye Griffith’s character (Elizabeth – never a shortened version, seems to be a lot of that going round) and the blond guy (later found out he was called Nick). I was quite impressed that the BBC’s website has a timeline that tells you what happened in every single episode ever, at least as far as the regular doctors are concerned. I also discovered that Tom Butcher and Steven Hartley have been doctors in it!

There’s a whole mystery now about how Nick got a dodgy shoulder (can’t remember what he said was wrong with it), but it looks suspicious and possibly involving Elizabeth. I reckon she hit him. If I’m back in work tomorrow I’m not taping it, I’d hate for my guess to be wrong.

And now I have to try and engage my brain a bit for last night’s Poirot.

I can’t work out whether my room is hot or I am or both. I’ve worked out that I’ve got the sore throat bug, though. I’ve actually had a sore throat since Friday, it just took me a while to work it out. My brain’s not quite working at the moment, unsurprisingly.

I’m all excited cos the Remix archive is up! I wasn’t expecting it to be until after I went to bed. So far I’ve only checked that my story is there (it looks quite weird that thin!) and to see which of my stories has been remixed. It’s slightly sad that I had to check back to my story to find out what the original was (see above re brain) but I’m really excited about what the remixer has done with it. I will give them more coherent feedback once I can work somewhere above ‘squee’.

I have an idea for a B2MEM related post, that I will try and get in before the end of the month. But I decided to talk about the TV I’ve watched recently – because there’s actually been some on!

I got round to Poirot last night. Usually they just do one at a time, at New Year, but there’s another one tonight, which surprised me. I did enjoy last weeks but I was completely confused by the end. I don’t know whether that was me or the program, though.

I watched Comedy Connections about Drop the Dead Donkey. It’s been so long since I’ve seen any of it that I had forgotten loads of it. Like Gus’s management speak. It must have been the first time I’d heard any of it. It was really interesting to learn all sorts about it as well. I’m really disconcerted by the way Neil Pearson doesn’t seem to have aged at all.

Then there was a one-off drama called Best Man. Technically it was in two parts, I watched it in one (much better). I was a bit skeptical at the beginning because it seemed quite strange. It was about these two men who had a bit of an odd relationship. You saw how they became friends in flashbacks and their relationship was always a bit odd. The whole thing was pretty much about who was the more strange of the two. It was really good, though. Plus it had Zoe from Spooks and Jeff from Coupling in it.

I’m really missing the ‘Mrs Peel, we’re needed’ bits from the beginning of The Avengers. Although that was probably because this week’s wasn’t that good. I’m still entirely confused what relevance the dog had.

And there was new Taggart, yay! And on a Wednesday, the most boring day of the week when there’s never anything worth watching. I entirely failed to work out whodunnit, as per usual, but I did manage to start it just right, that I finished just after the actual program did, thus gaining me back 15 minutes of my life.

I’m so nearly done with watching Bugs, I’m down to the last DVD. Except that the last DVD won’t play. But that’s ok, because Play.com have a returns policy. So I emailed them and got an auto-reply that said they aim to reply within 24 hours. Four days later, I’m still waiting. I’m not impressed.

Also, I think I have flu. Obviously, having had it twice already, and a flu jab, and drinking lots of orange juice i no defense. My room’s a mess and I have a whole load of things that need doing, and no energy to do them. And no Bugs to watch either.

I’m so used to my ridiculously big resolution this looks so big, I almost don’t know how mum copes! I’m down for the Rotary District Conference, which was in Bournemouth this weekend, so I’ve taken a long weekend off and am staying with my parents.

I had a good time at the Conference – they had some good guest speakers. We could see Rotarians being entirely confused by us sitting at the foot of the stage eating bacon butties, though, as the District Chairman didn’t tell them until the end of his talk. I had fun with the Rotaractors too, and we did come up with some publicity stunt and fund raising ideas in the pub! I’ll be posting more about the conference on the Wallingford Rotaract website once I’ve got home and got my photos of my camera.

I’ve enjoyed watching the Commonwealth Games as well. I was quite amazed to see swimmers representing Jersey and Guernsey – there’s probably more athletes from Australia taking part than live in the whole of Guernsey! But I heard last night that the Isle of Man had won their first medal in something like 20 years, so good on them.

I’ve discovered the Commonwealth fencing is in Belfast in September. I was thinking about having a holiday round about then anyway, so I’m going to go to that. I will have to get myself an England flag during the World Cup though, it won’t do to have a Union Jack. I’m very tempted to go to the next winter games in Vancouver, too.

I’ve been reading some stuff both that’s linked off metafandom and in various people’s LJs about feedback, and there’s one thing I find really odd. This is people complaining that after an hour/a day/something in between, they’ve not had any comments.

Not everyone goes on the internet every day. Depending on how busy I am at work, I might check my emails once or a few times, but I won’t reply to any unless it’s urgent. If I’m out in the evening then I’ll check them between coming in & going out, or coming back in & going to bed, but again, won’t reply unless it’s urgent.

When it comes to reading fic I may or may not read it when I see it’s there. It might depend on how long it is, whether I’m in the mood for it then, or whether I know I want to take my time reading it. I have a ‘to read’ folder in Outlook Express, in RSS Bandit and in Firefox. Sometimes I forget there is anything in there and I could be reading it months later.

I’m working on the basis that I’m an average internet user in fandom, which may or may not be true, but I’ve not really got any basis for comparison being as I’m me and not anyone else.

But it strikes me that it may be that no-one’s had a chance to read your fic in that time. Or that they have read it and are taking the time to think about what feedback they want to leave. In my case, I hardly ever give feedback when I’m not on my computer because it means I have to take a roundabout way to login and I’m just too lazy.

P’raps other people have different ideas of how much feedback they want. If anyone person leaves me any feedback at all, not matter how long after I wrote it, that’s great. If more than one person does, I’m over the moon.

As I had my computer backing up my entire hard drive this weekend, I sat down and managed to get from halfway through series 2 of Bugs to halfway through series 3. Somewhere early on in there were two more Bill guest stars. Clara Salaman (Claire Stanton) was a good guy with shorter hair. George Rossi (Duncan Lennox) I was amused to see was a bad guy with a beard. I think he was supposed to be Scandanavian, but obviously in the Sean Connery style (ie with a Scottish accent).

I’m really enjoying series 3, now they’re letting the characters have lives in between foiling bad guys. Not that series 1 and 2 weren’t bad, but they do get a bit samey, and making them semi-official (with an office that’s not Ros’s flat), introducing two new characters and giving them lives was a good way to do it. I think that now he’s got something interesting to do, Jesse Birdsall’s acting has improved. Either that or I’ve just watching so many I’ve got immune to it.

There’s nothing quite like watching ~10 episodes in a weekend to show how samey a lot of it is, though. For Our Heroes(TM) the plan is:
1) bug it
2) blow it up

The bad guys have obviously never read the Evil Overlord handbook, so explain their evil plans to Get Rich Quick(TM) before trapping the good guys with a bomb of some description that they can either stop within 1 second of it blowing up, or manage to get just far enough away that they’re thrown to the ground but not blown up. It’s not surprising it got taken off when the Real IRA set bombs off.

I reckon that so far the Stephen Gallagher episodes are the best. Interestingly, the guys who created Smallville (Alfred Gough and Miles Millar) have written at least two episodes.

The technology has definitely moved on fast. In the first series everything was on floppy disks. By the second we’re on the gold writeable CDs. Although no matter how far we get, their monitors still look ancient. The first episode of the third they all have mobiles, although they refer to them as cellphones – which is slightly less annoying than it was in The Avengers because Bugs is done in an American style: 50 mins long and opening credits five minutes in. It’s quite cool to see those big mobiles – I wish they were still that size, I hate that they’re small. And only partly because they don’t fit into my rabbit.

I can tell winter 96/97 was a cold winter because not only have we seen snow in the third series, but not even their makeup has been enough to tell that they’re really cold at times. I’m not surprised Craig McLachlan wanted to leave after that!

Recently, Nilmandra had a post about characterisation, and in the comments I talked about liking characters I want to grow up to be, or at least some aspect of their personalities I’d like to have. I’ve also talked with Sel on various occasions about characters we want to grow up to be. So I thought I’d list some.

Ros Henderson (Bugs) – Quite aside from the fact that she was played by Jaye Griffiths, who I loved in The Bill (which was the whole reason I started watching Bugs in the first place). Ros is really intelligent – there’s nothing she can’t do with computers and gizmos. If there’s something electronic you need doing, she’s made a gizmo to do it. She also knows a lot of science, which isn’t a surprise. She’s also good as a spy-type, not easily scared, can think on her feet, and can fight if she needs to (even if she’s not quite as good as the boys).

Ace (Doctor Who) – Ace was the person I wanted to grow up to be when I was little. I’m still not sure I don’t. She had that whole cool-thing going on where she didn’t like school and was a bit of a rebel. But she was good at chemistry (especially when it came to explosions). She was also a useful person – she made friends easily (it seems to be a bit of a pre-requisite in a companion, or perhaps it’s just spending all that time with only The Doctor for company), she could go and investigate stuff on her own and she wasn’t easily frightened.

I’ve just recently listened to Big Finish’s Live 34, in which Ace seems to be about my age. It’s interesting that they’ve had her growing up, so she’s less of a rebel, more independent when it comes to being someone The Doctor can rely on to go off on her own and do something useful (even if she hasn’t quite lost her taste for explosions). Even if I’m not quite sure I want to be the Ace from the TV series when I grow up, I definitely want to be the Big Finish’s version.

CJ Cregg (The West Wing) – She’s the character everyone loves and it’s not hard to see why. I’m finding hard to say why, though. She’s good in a crisis, always has a witty put-down, has a good relationship with the press and other important people, is really intelligent about lots of things, especially political stuff. She also really cares about people both her friends and people that are affected by decisions the president makes. But she’s also human – I really like the old days when she was still Press Secretary and she and Carol used to discuss how good-looking any man that had a meeting with her was.

Beth March (Little Women) – I think it was on the BBC’s Big Read that I heard it said that everyone’s favourite character from Little Women was Jo. That would be everyone except for me. As much as I loved Jo and her tomboyish ways, I liked Beth more. Beth was almost too-good-to-be-true perfect – she always put others before herself. Not that the other girls didn’t, but sometimes they needed to be prodded into it. Beth always did it off her own bat.

Emma Peel (The Avengers) – I saw a quote on a website somewhere saying that one of the reasons The Avengers was so successful was that all the blokes wanted Peel and wanted to be Steed, and all the women wanted Steed and wanted to be Peel. Emma Peel kicks arse. She can hold her own in a fight and when it comes to brains she’s really clever. She’s always ready with a witty comeback and she’s seriously not easily scared.

There are probably others that I’ve forgotten. But who do you want to be when you grow up*?

* Actual growing up not required

It’s that time of year again – World Rotaract Week, and so, as promised, I’m going to pimp to you this organisation which seems to take up a lot of my time (out of choice, I should point out).

Rotaract isn’t something many people have heard of – I hadn’t – except for my office, my friends and those who regularly read this, as I talk about it a lot. It’s an international organisation for people aged 18-30. It’s affiliated with Rotary, but we’re a whole lot more interesting than them. The main point of Rotaract is to raise money for charity and help the community while making new friends and above all, having fun.

I don’t talk about exactly what we do that much because mostly I write it up on our club’s website. If you want to know, there are photos there, a blog of past events, and you can see how busy I could potentially be if I went to every event listed in our diary.

One thing we did this year that I remember well was on a hot day last July (the Rotaract year runs from July to June) – it was the day Half-Blood Prince came out – counting money and spending some time stood in the sun. We were collecting money for the local toy library by the simplest possible (but not exactly the most exciting) means – a tinshake. Which means you stand in the street with a bright yellow tabard on holding a tin. The local council rules say we’re not allowed to shake the tin or ask people for money.

Having done it myself, I now make sure I give money to anyone I see holding a tin – trust me, they’re pathetically grateful for making their time go a little more quickly.

Having collected the money we went and saw the toy library and while we were there, established that their shed needed painting.

Now, on the radio the other day I heard a very true statement. Someone was saying that time is much more precious than money because we only have a limited amount of time. So anything that we invest our time in has to be worth it. It’s easy enough to give a bit of money to charity, it only takes a small amount of both money and time. Giving up time, though, is more precious – it’s often a lot harder for charities to get people to give up their time than it is to get them to give up their money.

For us, most Rotaractors are just recently out of uni or in their first job and have debts, so we don’t have that much money to give away. But what we do have is time that isn’t going to be filled up with kids, for a start. So, we painted their shed for them. Between four of us it only took an hour, but was a lot of fun. I still have blue paint on me. Luckily, one of our members had just bought a house and told us in advance to put masking tape round the windows and plenty of newspaper on the floor. Sadly, we underestimated plenty. As one of our members put it afterwards, we painted the shed 100% well: 100% of the shed and 10% of everything else.

Also this year, we’ve done cheap things like watching DVDs round someone’s house, gone to the cinema and local amateur theatre, and more expensive things like celebrated Burns Night.

Yesterday I woke up at 8.45 and managed to struggle out of bed at 9am. I put my phone on to find a text message from a friend to tell me she was going to pick me up between 8.30 and 9. Luckily, she was late and I was just about dressed by the time she arrived! The reason I was up early on a Sunday was because we were off to the Rutherford Appleton Labs, where she works, where we were going to have breakfast.

No, really. The National Committee have challenged every club in the country to have breakfast in unusual places. The laser control room was quite an unusual place to eat breakfast. It was actually in the Vulcan laser control room, which is in the Guinness book of records. It’s quite a cool room – full of computers and equipment and looks like it wouldn’t be out of place in Sam Carter’s lab on Stargate.

While we were there we took our tea outside to have our photo taken with the big satellite dish in the backgound. I should point out that it was snowing at this point, and therefore just a little bit cold.

Last night was a bit more sedate as we went to the local theatre. A company formed by a friend of one of our members is on tour round the country using students who want to go into theatre/acting who are currently in their gap year. They were performing Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, which are a series of monologues. The first one they did was about an hour long – we were amazed that the time went so quickly, and the amount the bloke had to remember.

They were all really interesting and really well acted. If I was a casting director I’d hire them today. They were an improvement on Jesse Birdsall, which says more about his acting than it does theirs, mind you.

If this sounds like fun (if slightly masochistic fun at times) there’s more information on internet. There used to be an International site, but now your best bet is to either go to the UK site, which has lots of info along with links to sites in other countries, or do a search for your area. You can choose to give up as much time as you like. If there’s not a club near you listed, then it’s worth emailing to ask – it might be that there’s one in the process of being set up, or it might be that once you’ve expressed an interest they might think about setting one up.

And if you’re sitting here thinking you’re not the right age, you probably know someone who is.

I feel like I’ve done nothing this week and still not had any time left. And since I haven’t written much in here this week, I thought I’d talk about what I’ve been up to this week.

Tuesday we had a film night, which I must write up for the Wallingford Rotaract blog. One of our members has a widescreen TV with surround sound, and as they got me 2001 on DVD at the end of my year as president, it seemed like a good place to watch it. The problem is convincing the rest of the members that! In the end we watched Galaxy Quest. Of the five of us there, one hadn’t seen it, the rest of us had but were happy to watch it again. It just never gets less funny, and every time I watch it I spot more things that are based off other sci-fi and other things I’ve missed. It’s such a good film.

I also wrote 25 drabbles in four days, which is a hard way to write 2500 words. Although it helped that work wasn’t that busy at the start of this week. I also wrote 25 different characters, which wasn’t how I planned it to start with, but I quite enjoyed writing characters I’d never written before. I also really enjoyed writing LOTR again. I’d forgotten how much canon I’d forgotten as well. I’ve actually been catching up on my LOTR reading now, and reading the Atlantis in between for a break. A lot of the stuff I’ve been catching up on is quite intense, so a bit of crack!fic is always good for a change. I’d also forgotten how much I liked writing drabbles, so I will have to make more of an effort to write some more – I have some ideas on that front.

I’ve been trying to get through my Bugs DVDs too. The one I watched last night was the first to feature a future The Bill regular as a guest star, in this case Terry, although he only had two lines.

On a similar note, this weeks The Avengers had Peter Cushing in it. Despite some really ridiculous plot holes it was still an enjoyable episode. The one thing that got me was Emma Peel referring to her bag as her purse. I know, from surfing round, that the only reason these got made was because they were able to sell them to America in advance. I still don’t think that excuses the Americanisms though, especially when they go to so much trouble to make it very British.

I’ve been listening to the podcasts Wil Wheaton‘s been doing this week. They’ve been surprisingly listenable. I say surprisingly because often I can only take so much of constant American accents, depending on the accent. The ten minute ones I’ve barely noticed, but today’s (technically yesterday’s) was 73 minutes. I did have to stop near the end to watch My Family (just started watching it after only previously seeing bits – it’s very funny) but I think it only got grating after that, and I had reminded myself what no accent at all sounds like (relatively speaking, of course.

At some point, when I get round to it, I want to write up the character-related post that’s been going round my head. I also need to talk about LOTR for b2mem. But World Rotaract Week starts on Sunday, so I’ll be blogging about what we’re going to be up to, and talking lots about Rotaract. Really, you’ll be sick of it. Unless you’re 18-30, in which case you should be joining it. If I get to it between breakfasts on Sunday I’ll tell you why, otherwise it’ll probably be Monday.

Yesterday afternoon at work, someone wanted me to print out some stuff in colour. So I did, then went upstairs to wait for the ridiculously slow colour printer to print them.

I got up there to find it was turned off. Which was odd, so I turned it back on and waited for the half hour it takes to warm up. Okay, I exaggerate, it was more like five minutes. But there were only two people up there at the time, both typing away, so I thought it was probably best not to disturb them.

So the printer was eventually ready, except that it did its usual ‘I’ve just been turned on and I’m not happy’ error message, so I turned it off and on again, which usually fixes it (the few times it doesn’t, turning it off and on and second time does).

So eventually it was printing. Except it wasn’t because it got a paper jam on the first sheet. I got the paper out and noticed, when I opened the lid, that there was a burning smell. No-one had said anything and it was possible it was coming from the kitchen next to the printer, so I put the lid down and thought I’d see what it did next.

What it did next was give me a fatal error message. When it gives you these it also helpfully gives you an error number. All the numbers mean something but we don’t know what, we have to ring the people we get the printer from to find out.

So I went downstairs to my desk where I have the phone number and took it back upstairs, so I could look at the printer at the same time as being on the phone. At which point the people up there decided to tell me the printer was broken and they’d called an engineer that morning.

It was probably just as well that words failed me at that point.

I put the next episode of Bugs on tonight and there was Peter Woodward! I’m sure he had less hair in Crusade and Atlantis, but he’s bald in all three. I spent the episode thinking he really does have the voice to be playing an ordinary business man-type. And, oh, look, he’s a bad guy. That came as a real shocker.

The strangest thing in it was their interpretation of internet and email, which is what you’d expect from a time when it’s all a bit new. Which in 1996, it wasn’t, not really. It was just a really, really weird email system that was sort of like instant messenger but using all the wrong words and just everything was wrong. They totally didn’t anticipate spam though

I’m 4 episodes into series 2 at the moment, and while each episode is fine (although the one before last had lots of bugs in it and I really could have done with not being eating at the time) the overall arc is boring me already. Series 1 had tag scenes at the end that were just excruciating. Series 2 has a bad guy who is supposedly behind all the other bad guys this series. I can’t remember the whos, whys or wherefores and really don’t care.

Bring on series 3 – or more to the point series 4 as that’s the one that got me into the fandom in the first place.

As part of Back to Middle-earth Month, the There and Back Again LJ, and HASA have been challenging people to write something based on the Tale of Years from March 3019:

In the “Tale of the Years” Tolkien tells us about what happens to certain characters each day of March 3019. We challenge you to write about the character(s) he does NOT mention.

So, I’ve written a drabble for each day of March, up till the 25th, and each one from a different character’s point of view. Which is a hard way of writing 2500 words. And a pain to put here because I’ve got 25 LJ cut tags, the links for which I then have to copy back in WP.

But, I present to you, March 3019.

1st March

2nd March

3rd March

4th March

5th March

6th March

7th March

8th March

9th March

10th March

11th March

12th March

13th March

14th March

15th March

16th March

17th March

18th March

19th March

20th March

21st March

22nd March

23rd March

24th March

25th March

In the last few days I’ve read three books:

15.2 cm / 155 cm (9.8%)

Two of them were Cheerleaders ones – good for if you don’t have a brain. One of them I think I’ve read before. It was still mostly about the love lifes, though, so pretty standard stuff. The other I quite enjoyed because it was a bit different – about the whole team and how they’re affected by what’s going on around them. It was a bit quickly solved, though, despite being a thicker book than the other one.

The third book I raced through too: Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton. I’ve been reading his blog for a while, so it was interesting to get all sorts of backstory into what was going on in his life. He is a good writer and very easy to read. His other book’s on my amazon wishlist now!

Also, a writing update! One day before deadline, I have posted by entry to the Lost City Found Free Your Mind challenge: I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For and is a Jack/Elizabeth Atlantis non-AU fic. Yes, really.

8,402 / 20,000 (42.0%)

In theory, I should manage 20,000 words by the end of the year, no problem. Specially as my Remix fic is now in beta.

I am working on something for Back to Middle-earth month, too. What I mainly meant to do was catch up on my LOTR-related reading, but got entirely sidetracked by The Avengers. Which is too full of Steed & Peel getting together for my liking. I have been inspired to write some LOTR though! So expect some later this month.

In entirely unrelated events, in the latest episode of Bugs they had a timer set on releasing what were essentially killer beetles. Given all the high-tech stuff they had in it (including their first CD-R), it was really strange that they were ordinary kitchen timers. Hmm.

I have finally finished my website. As well as an update I’ve been re-organising it and changing the look slightly. Needless to say, it’s still red. Mostly I’ve just CSS’ed it, added some more colours and made it so updating it doesn’t take so long.

I’ve had a bitch of a week. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I worked really hard (and late, although not by loads), so that wore me out. It calmed down Thursday in time for me to have a migraine instead. I took lots of drugs early on, so it wasn’t too bad, but I’m still tired from all that, which is really annoying. Plus I keep on making typos by exchanging one word for another and confusing everyone completely.

I really enjoyed this weeks episode of The Avengers. They did a body swap episode, so a pair of bad guys (who were lovers) swapped bodies with Steed and Peel. The guests acted Steed & Peel really well, so you were never in doubt who was who. He gets swapped first, so the bad guy tricks Peel into getting swapped (since it requires a big machine). But you’d think she’d have been more suspicious when he refused a drink (although mainly because she said ‘you know where it is’ and he didn’t), called her Emma and walked into the place before her.

The funniest part was the announcer when we came from the adverts, who tried to explain who was who but was a bit confused!

As much as I like Steed & Peel’s constant innuendo, seeing them kissing was a bit wrong (although technically it was just their bodies with someone else’s pschye in them). At the end, she has to convince him she’s herself and whispers something in her ear, which immediately does the trick – I’d love to know what it was!

Last week’s episode was also really good. The plot had some bad guy after Steed, and particularly Peel. He takes Steed out fairly early on, then spend the episode slowly winding Peel up so she’s not quite sure what’s going on. Once he reveals his plot, then she’s really scared, although she’s pretty much fine right up until the end when she’s fighting with the bad guy and losing (having already taken out the bad girl).

When Steed saves her at the end, it’s quite sweet that she just smiles at him and he takes her hand to lead it out – nicely subtly done.

I’ve been surfing round The Avengers Forever website which has all sorts of useful information on it.

I’m so tired I could go to bed now. I won’t because I know I won’t sleep. I’ve pretty much had the week from hell as far as work is concerned and I’ve still got another two days of it. I haven’t worked that long hours but I’ve worked really hard and it’s completely worn me out.

I’ve also been working hard on my website – which is nearly finished! – which hasn’t helped.

I wanted to say something about Back to Middle-earth Month but I haven’t got the energy. I’ve only got the energy to type this because I had a lie-down and a read. I wanted to get a whole load of things done tonight, as I have a guitar lesson tomorrow and I’m out at the local open mix night Friday night. Well, assuming I’m awake, mind you.

It’s annoying because I thought I was getting better. I mean, I’m better than I was, but I want to be better now. When I’m not tired I forget what it’s like. I feel like life’s passing me by because I haven’t got the energy to interact in it.

And now I seem to have used up the energy I gained from lying down and reading for a bit, I can’t think or type properly any more. I think I’ll go and watch Bugs, which doesn’t require a brain – I’m slightly excited that I’ve made it to the second series now, although I suspect the first two episodes might be a two-parter, which is annoying.