347 years older...

So three generations of my family wandered down to Covent Garden to celebrate Mr Punch's birthday.

It's celebrated on the nearest Sunday to May 9th, because in 1662, Sam Pepys wrote in his diary that he went

into Covent Garden to an alehouse, to see a picture that hangs there, which is offered for 20s., and I offered fourteen—but it is worth much more money—but did not buy it, I having no mind to break my oath. Thence to see an Italian puppet play that is within the rayles there, which is very pretty, the best that ever I saw, and great resort of gallants.

I left my camera battery-charger at home in the US, and it died, so these were taken on my Nokia N73.

I counted about 18 Punch and Judy Tents on the little green behind the church...

And a few more set up in odd places. This was taken through a very dirty pub window, because I liked the gravestones behind the stripy tent. It's like the Mister Punch/Graveyard Book crossover I never wrote.

And I was happy to catch one show that ended with Mr Punch taking on the Devil. Even if Punch didn't actually kill anyone in this particular version, not even the Scottish Banker who stole all his money.

Photo taken by daughter of an author in the pub next door to the churchyard on Mr Punch's Birthday. Note impressive streaks of grey in the hair to denote the aging process.

...

And a quick edit to add, you can listen to Saturday's Radio 2 Jonathan Ross show on http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kbb6p for the next five days. iPlayer for TV doesn't work out of the UK, but the radio one ought to work fine. I turn up about 65 minutes in and talk about Coraline, The Graveyard Book, 3D breasts and the vexing questions of how many custard creams were consumed the previous day and by who. (I ate one. One! And that was just to be polite. Jonathan is like a whale devouring krill when faced with a plate of custard creams. I'm just saying.)

finished Odd

The 30 Second scary story will be broadcast on the 27th of October on Weekend America. If you don't get NPR you should be able to listen to it -- and many other things -- at http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/.

I finished the first typed draft of Odd and the Frost Giants tonight. It's 14,000 words long, more or less, which makes it (I think) a novelette. I've sent it to a few people to read, and tomorrow I'll read it myself, and scribble on the printouts and change things, and wonder if it works or not, and try and make it work better.

Here's a link to Guillermo Del Toro and the lovely Selma Blair talking about Death: http://www.superherohype.com/news/topnews.php?id=6447

The just-as-lovely-as-Selma-Blair Colleen Doran has re-inked her chapter of A Game of You in Absolute Sandman Volume 2, and you can see what the same page looks like in the two different versions over at http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/4192671.html. Also Colleen put up a couple of pages of Sandman #20 pencils at http://adistantsoil.com/blog/?p=811

Someone sent me a link to a film that was meant to be H.P. Lovecraft talking in 1933, which just made me want to take everyone involved in creating it aside and show them interview films from that period, and make them really listen to the kind of questions that were asked back then and the way that they were answered. You can date interviews in seconds, in the same way you can date old commercials, or old TV shows. (I watched the first couple of episodes of The Tomorrow People with Maddy recently. We were a couple of minutes in when she said "This is the Seventies, right?") It was a good idea, but the joy of faking period stuff has to be getting the tone of voice and the tiny details right, because they make everything else work.

I clicked on the next YouTube link along, which turned out to be me talking about the Necronomicon, and why I want mine to have been signed by the author...



Right. Bed now.