@geoffers

he still doesn’t technically remember clara, i’m guessing, but he does remember donna, quite well, and the moment when he decides not to mind-wipe her memories was a call back to that, methinks…

Well, in the moment when the Doctor hesitates as he reaches out to wipe Bill’s memory, the music which we hear is Clara’s theme 🙂

As I have…[Read more]

@Kharis

the Doctor was interested in her because being confused, having questions, LEARNING made her smile.  It was that she DIDN’T get it and smiled that made him interested.

That is another, valid way of looking at it, and in the end it amounts to the same thing.

I agree with you, in that increasingly I get the impression that learning and a u…[Read more]

@Kharis

“Not supposed to get involved”

I took that to be a general principle.  The Doctor is supposed to concentrate on the job in hand – whatever that is in the context of the gizmo he is monitoring in the vault – and not to concern himself with individuals.  But when has that ever deterred the Doctor when something or someone engages his interes…[Read more]

@miapatrick

Loved the clockworkesque Nardel

Yes, that was a detail which didn’t fully register with me on first viewing: the mechanical whirring as he first ushered Bill into the Doctor’s study, and the dropping of the loose component.  It explains how he was re-embodied. From the neck down he is now an android – but I have no doubt that minds h…[Read more]

@janetteB

by some Timey Wimey, Moffaty trickery he might regenerate before the Christmas Special but still be the Doctor for the Christmas special

That possibility had crossed my mind, also, but as you say it may be wishful thinking.

Now I’m off to for a second viewing of The Pilot, in order to savour the details and all the little Easter eggs at…[Read more]

@juniperfish

Oh, and what the frilly heck is in that vault?

Yes, indeed; and the Doctor ‘has promises to keep’, for the purpose of which he has been in place for fifty, -or is it seventy? – years and counting. No doubt we will find out in the coming weeks, but it is a tantalising and hugely promising start to the season.

I am still gasping at ho…[Read more]

Breathless.  For me this had everything, pretty much pitch perfect. The obvious but not too laboured allusions to Susan – at last- and to River, echoes of the very first episode as well as the one which launched the revival with Rose, and the crucial decision which determined Bill’s future with the Doctor hinging on the subliminal recollection o…[Read more]

@Missy  @ichabod

I, too, remember the rag-and-bone man who came round with his horse and cart collecting scrap metal, old clothes and other items for what we would now term recycling. I don’t remember if he collected meat bones as well, but he may well have done, presumably for glue making, or grinding for fertilizer.  We used to have a knife g…[Read more]

@Mersey

The Movie Which We Do Not Name is no way to have been introduced to any manifestation of the Doctor, so your original reaction to the seventh Doctor is entirely understandable.  I have to admit that I, too, underestimated McCoy in the role until fairly recently.  I had stopped watching entirely not long after Colin Baker took over, beca…[Read more]

@pedant

There can’t be that many people who would have got the Joan D Vinge reference…

Imagine an irritatingly smug grin  🙂

@thane15

puro, you have builders disturbing the peace, I have the merry men from Anglian Water digging up the road outside to replace the supply pipes.  No music, though, shitty or otherwise – they wouldn’t be able to he…[Read more]

@pedant

just noticed that I referred to The Snow Queen

I was baffled by that, I confess, since I couldn’t discern any link with Hans Andersen and Danish fairy tales, still less with a science fiction novel under the same title, and I wasn’t at the time in lateral thinking mode. The Snow Goose, on the other hand, is a reference I do recognise; so…[Read more]

Brief footnote on the small bottle I found yesterday.  I have now cleaned off all the encrusted gunk to reveal the legend Booth’s Distillery Ltd.  embossed in the glass along one of the facets. So it is a 60 ml miniature gin bottle, 1930s vintage judging by the images of comparative examples I found via Google.

@Mersey

I agree that the current format of Gardener’s world tends to seem cramped and am glad that in this 50th anniversary year we have been promised more one-hour episodes.  The Chelsea Flower show is next month and the BBC generally devote at least an hour and a half a day to that during the week it is on. I don’t know whether you get any acc…[Read more]

@Whisht

You have just reminded me that I have a copy of The City and the City which I bought ages ago and put aside to read later.  It got buried under a pile of other books, but I have just checked and relocated it, so I have put it back on top of the pile.  I must have read most of Ray Bradbury’s output back in the day and it is, as you say, h…[Read more]

@janetteB

(re-emerging briefly from my corner)

Yes, we in the ‘old world’ are lucky in that respect.  The archaeology of hunter-gatherers is interesting but frustrating because of the relative scarcity of material evidence.  There is a reason I veered away from Palaeolithic archaeology and eventually began to find even Neolithic and Bronze Age s…[Read more]

@pedant

Take all that it is not hard to let the mind drift to a scenario where the Romans were one blast furnace away from an industrial revolution.

No blast furnaces, but in the area I am looking at there is plenty of evidence for late Iron Age and Roman iron working from the first century onward.  They were exploiting the local carstone (f…[Read more]

@pedant

Yeah; I was of course joking, as were you. I may not be a geographer or geologist or a climatologist or a meteorologist, but I am familiar with the basics, which are useful to an archaeologist. As it happens I have just been examining the more intricate details of the cretaceous and quaternary geology particular to the area of my cur…[Read more]

@pedant

I stand corrected 😳

I first read the ‘semi-arid’ claim some years ago and was surprised, as my understanding of that classification was as you define it, but the source seemed authoritative so I did not question it.  You identify the problem though: Wales – and the Lake District do steal the rain, and most of what they do not…[Read more]

@thane15

If you are judging by the examples above, puro, I think that your praise of my writing is somewhat overstated.  When I wrote yesterday evening, glass of wine to hand, I did check for typos, and even so missed a superfluous ‘a’, but re-reading in the morning light I can see several glaring stylistic infelicities. But hey, this is an in…[Read more]

@Mersey

Beth Chatto’s garden is wonderful and I just wish that they could have devoted more time in the programme to it and the interview with her.  The garden is only about 60 miles from where I live, but it is a long time since I last visited it and I really must do so again soon. At one time the format of Gardener’s World was such that they…[Read more]