Folks,

We have seen the first half of the BBC documentary and it looks pretty good.  Importantly, it would seem at the moment that we have witnessed that rarest of things, a film crew that has been allowed into a convention and hasn’t tried to stuff the fans.  Some of you know you were filmed in costume, and that’s it.  There’s footage of the reading and stuff, but the general look and tone is some distance away from the usual “Star Trek Loonies” portrayal.  There’s also reasonable footage of the signing at the Southbank back in June and we are assuming that the Hayling Island / Waterstones Piccadilly day will be in part two.  We definitely noticed a few of the usual suspects such as Dave Boggis and Rentawitch.  It's going to be good.

You might also be interested to know that Charlie Russell, our John Grierson Award nominated director, can be seen on BBC 2 at 10:50pm this Sunday, November 16th, in the documentary he made about his father.  It’s a very powerful piece and well worth watching.

The BBC ‘With Great Pleasure’ event is apparently sold out and there is nothing we can do about it.  We don’t have our own allocation and I don’t want to offend anyone by saying that this office is in enough perpetual turmoil not to include Box Office Services as part of our workload :o)

Those of you who were kind enough to subscribe to the ‘Trees for Terry’ drive around my birthday this year might be interested to hear that we have acquired a derelict woodland nearby that this winter will be replanted mostly with hazel and cob.  Many thanks to all.  We don’t expect to be able to photograph the green shoots until around the spring.

Finally, right now I feel fine.  This is largely due to the fact that we are more or less out from under the massive amounts of commitments we have taken on this year, although I do have to deliver a large petition to Number 10 Downing Street on 26th November.  Another reason is that I seem to be working around the problems successfully.  Typing is still a bugger, but in most respects you would have to know me very well to know that anything was wrong.  I also noticed recently that the Daily Mail, gods bless them, announced that I can’t dress myself.  This must have come as a huge surprise, not least to me, since I dressed myself this morning.  It is true that if you handed me a shirt with one sleeve inside out it would take me a little while to work out the topography, but I do seem to be getting better at that.

In the past two days we have written more than 2,500 words on Unseen Academicals.

Finally, I am delighted to be receiving an honorary Doctorate of Literature (LittD) from Dublin University (Trinity College Dublin) on 12th December. I'm sure that there will be photos.