I'm sure many of those who read this journal will already have noted parrot_knight's excellent recent entries on the 70s children's sci-fi show The Tomorrow People, to be found here and here. As usual, they offer an intelligent mixture of in-universe and real-world comment, plotting the various changes of format and tone throughout the series, and teasing out various important and thought-provoking themes. Well worth the read.

My blog, on the other hand, is not the place for depth of analysis. This is the place for picspam, fangirlisms, and people getting attacked by shellsuits. WARNING: SPOILERS within, for all seasons of 'Tomorrow People' and the Big Finish audio dramas.

( A Perhaps-Not-So-Brief Introduction To 'The Tomorrow People', Part I.1: Characters: John. )

Okay, so, recently? I have been fangirling too many things. I can always tell when this happens because my brain seems to be full of lemonade (not the nice still cloudy lemonade, the frothy cheap lemonade that tastes ever so faintly of soap) and fizzes inconveniently when I'm supposed to be working. As a more or less direct result of this I haven't been doing as much work on my DPhil write-up as I should have been. So, in a vague attempt to exorcise some of the fannish glee, here are some of the things that have been distracting me over the last couple of weeks.

( 1. Tomorrow People, the original series. )

( 2. Doctor Who novels. )

( 3. Blakes 7. )

I was in Cambridge over the weekend for a concert. Concert went pretty well - it was the Monteverdi 1610 Vespers, which I hadn't sung before, and which are wonderful, in a faintly mad sort of way. I'd only been to Cambridge once before, and that was for a Classics open day the year before I came up to Oxford, which passed in a bit of a blur, so this was a good chance to get to know the town a little better. I do see what everyone means about it seeming rather like a university with a few shops attached; but those few shops somehow manage to be much *better* than Oxford shops, which seems unfair. They had a John Lewis', a decent number of little winding streets lined with small shops (whereas Oxford shopping seems to be basically a crossroads stuffed with people and housing the generic high-street shops), and definitely had Oxford beaten in the book-shop department, at least in terms of my somewhat odd tastes. There was a lovely second hand book shop with the first floor entirely devoted to (mainly first edition) children's books - hundreds of WE Johns books, including several of his sci-fi titles, which I'd never seen on the shelf before, masses of Worrals, and even a fair amount of Gimlet. They were priced fairly steeply (which is to say, they were priced typically - the average price of a first edition Biggles is too easy to check online to pick up many bargains), but the range and the quality were *gorgeous*. I treated myself to a Gimlet, because I have no will power. Heffers was also a pleasant surprise - it seems to have a somewhat more esoteric range than Blackwell's, particularly in terms of Crime fiction. They had a lot of American import titles and independent imprints, which meant I was able to pick up a couple of books which I'd only seen online before. I also had a pleasant chat about early twentieth century pulp fiction with a nice man who was also reading the back of the Fantomas novel which I pounced on. There are only a limited number of bookshops where that sort of thing happens.

I've also been online shopping for sheet-music for my sister's wedding (now less than a month a way, OMG @_@), and for a new external DVD-burner, since the drive on my laptop, while still playing DVDs perfectly happily, no longer even *pretends* to burn them. So there have really been *far* too many things with which to distract myself lately. And now term has crept up on me again. Argh.

*goes back to making notes on medieval pilgrimage, with a feeling of vague catharsis*