A stout carl for the nones

It's possible some people don't realise how clever and appropriate the title of my last blog post, about going to Southwark for the Excel competition with 29 competitors, was. I refer you to the prologue to the Canterbury Tales:

Bifel that, in that seson on a day,

In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay

Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage

To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,

At night was come into that hostelrye

Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye,

Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle

In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,

That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.

The chambres and the stables weren wyde,

And wel we weren esed atte beste.

And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,

So hadde I spoken with hem everichon,

That I was of hir felawshipe anon,

And made forward erly for to ryse,

To take our wey ther as I yow devyse.

Which is one of my longtime fascinations that I've never really blogged about here very much, so let me rectify that tonight. I've never been into poetry, as a rule, because there's just so much really, really bad stuff out there that calls itself poetry. But I'll always make an exception for the man who pioneered English-language verse in the 14th century! 

I got into Chaucer in a very piecemeal kind of way when I was young - it wasn't a school thing, at least directly, but I did end up with some kind of book of poems as a youngish teenager which included the portrait of the Miller from the Canterbury Tales, along with a modern-English translation, and I found it fascinating. It was the kind of thing that stuck in my mind, just because of the wild difference six hundred years can make to a language (if it's a relatively new one like English, cobbled together from Anglo-Saxon and Norman French over just a couple of centuries by Chaucer's time). And so when, a while later, I saw those same lines in a book I found in a charity shop in Long Eaton, I bought it and discovered the whole of the Miller's Tale!

The cover's meant to be orange all over; it's been left out in the sun at some point and partly bleached white. There's a stamp on the inside front cover saying it belongs to Carlton-le-Willows School, and it's signed with the name Joanne Penter. I'm very grateful to her for giving it away, because it started me on a new fascination, and got me searching around for other books about the Canterbury Tales! As I recall, the school library was of limited use, not having a copy of the Tales themselves, but I did come across other excerpts and critical analysis here and there. And eventually, as a birthday present, I finally got a complete works of Chaucer in the original Middle English!

Which is completely at odds with my other obsessions of my teenage years, which ran more towards comics and cartoons (I haven't changed much), but there's always been a place in my heart for Chaucer, and I can and do still quote big chunks of the really impressive poetry he managed to produce with such an ugly language. I never liked English lessons at school, and dropped it as soon as I was able to, but if there'd been at least a bit more Chaucer involved, I might have felt very differently.

In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay

 Yesterday was the grand final of the UK Excel Championship, live and in person in London! It all happened on the first floor of the Blue Fin Building in Southwark, with 29 Excel experts gathered around a big conference table with laptops, supervised by a whole lot of other Excel experts who did a really awesome job of running the whole show!

I was staying in the student hall of residence just next door, and very nice it was too, and so was there in ample time for the 10:00 arrival before the 11:00 start, as per the schedule.

Actually, the whole thing started rather late, although they made up the time very impressively by the end of the day. As I've said before about memory competitions and other things, if everything went according to plan I would have no idea what was going on. I like a bit of chaos at these things. And the worst technical problem seemed to be organisers' laptops that would either connect to the internet or to the big screen, but not both.

Still, Hadyn's bingo-card prediction of a late finish didn't come off, but the rest of his awesome predictions video was very impressive!

I note that he originally had me finishing fifth (as per my own goal for the championship set out in my last blog), but then downgraded me to ninth when he thought of a better way to calculate it. Shocking! But I did make sure to fulfil the other prediction that I'd bring a pack of cards. I wasn't planning to bring cards to an Excel competition, but having seen the video I made sure to do it anyway. I've generally kept quiet about being a memory man in the Excel community, but it's all common knowledge now, so that's my thing in Excel world until I become world champion at that one too.

The organising team are a very impressive mix of genius characters who manage to get everything done and look good while doing it...

And our first case of the day was written by the ever-humble Giles Male about his wardrobe of fur coats and dance troupe:

I did relatively okay at this one, but only managed the eighth-best result.

Ha Dang stood out straight away as being the man to beat, and kept that comfortable position all day!

I was feeling more hopeful about the second case, by Harry Watson, because his cases tend to be my kind of thing...

... but actually, I really made a mess of it. Mixed up a formula for one of the levels in a way I could have spotted with a basic bit of double-checking but didn't, and ended up way down the rankings. It was still a lot of fun, though!

So that was unimpressive, and I could have done a lot better. Not better enough to come close to troubling the top three, but still better than 14th. But never mind! We had one more big exciting task after lunch, this time by Harry Gross! And word had leaked out that it was going to be based around Alice in Wonderland, so my preparation for this competition (while everyone else was designing custom formulas for every eventuality and practicing hard) was to buy a copy of the book to read on the train down to London. Which I forgot to put in my bag.

I thought I did okay at this one, though again I could have been better with just a bit more attention to little details and picked up some extra points. Still, seventh-best was a new high for the day!

Lorenzo came close to knocking Ha off the top spot overall, but didn't quite get it. A well-deserved win, and some awesome performances all round! And I finished ninth, so Hadyn clearly knows better than me how good I am at Excel!

Ha wins a really awesome champion's belt, and a free trip to Las Vegas for the worldwide finals in December! And everyone else got prizes too - a medal for everyone, and our really cool name badges showing how long we've been using Excel were a real treat!

Yes, I remember when Clippy was new. There were alternatives to Clippy the paperclip that you could select, and I preferred one of those, but I can't remember which it was after all these years. And I remember when the ribbon was introduced and Ruined Excel Forever. I'm old.

But the very BEST prize was a custom T-shirt for the winners of each qualifying round and each case on the final day! And as the winner of "Old Money", the third qualifying round, I got this amazing design (courtesy of Jaq Kennedy) - 

This is far cooler than I could ever have expected. I wore my lucky Zoom-Zoom shirt to the championship, but that shirt is clearly only really lucky for memory competitions. From now on, this Old Money shirt is my lucky shirt to be worn at every Excel championship! I'll be the world champion before you know it!

Excel's coming home

 Yes, it's the grand final of the UK Chapter of the Microsoft Excel World Championship's competition on Saturday! There'll be a livestream from around 11:00 here if you want to watch it and cheer me on. Or the other 31 competitors, if you'd rather cheer for them instead. I don't mind.

Anyway, my target here is to finish in the top five. I think that's realistic, given how the season has gone so far. I've done very well in the last two competitions (round 3 of the UK qualifying and round 8 of the worldwide "Road to Las Vegas"), but those both happened to be the kind that rewarded figuring things out in your head more than technical skill with obscure Excel formulas. I've not done so well on ones that work the other way, so we'll just have to see how it goes in London.

You could look at the rankings on the UK website and say I'm the fourth favourite:

But you'd be wrong to do that, since there are (at least) two really really good Excellers who only took part in one of the three rounds and still qualified. Chris Clarke was second in the world championship last year, and Lorenzo Foti got to the last 24 on the big stage in Vegas. If we look at the Road to Las Vegas rankings for this year (filtering just for UK and Italy, seeing as Lorenzo counts as Italian there but lives in Britain now), we can see they're both a good way ahead of me, as are the others of the top five UK-ers up above:

Actually, we can see that Karim is just fractionally ahead of me in both rankings. He's clearly my arch-enemy.

Harry G, Harry W and Elliott are among the wonderful people organising this whole UK event, and creating the cases for us to use our Excel skills on. Michael Jarman, reigning world champion, probably isn't going to be in London, unless they spring him on us as a last-minute wildcard.

But all in all, if I finish in the top five, I've beaten at least some of these rivals who are demonstrably better than me, so I'll be delighted! And it'll be a lot of fun whatever happens, so I wouldn't even mind coming last. Much.

Escape from Blood Castle

 This time it's my brother's fault for reminding me of another book in my sprawling collection...

This one hasn't quite been in my possession since time immemorial. I bought it from the Chip Club primary school book catalogue in what was probably 1985 (the first page rather confusingly says it was first published in 1984 and copyright © 1985) . Or rather, my father bought it at my request - it's not like I paid for Chip Club books myself whenever the new leaflet made its way to the classroom, but I always got one from it. I expect many parents grumbled at being expected to buy a vaguely educational book for their offspring on a regular basis, but since my dad was a teacher, he was all in favour of the idea, however short of money we might have been. And this particular one is a real treat!

It's the first in the series of Usborne Solve-it-Yourself books, and by far the best of them. I eagerly bought some others in the range, only to find they were much simpler, less complicated and ingenious than this pilot episode. It's a great shame, but at least we got Blood Castle in all its glory.

Each double-page spread presents a puzzle for the reader to figure out before turning to the rest of the story. How does Ivor get into the castle? Obviously, he climbs up the lion statue, onto the roof, up the drainpipe and onto the ledge, where he fishes for the key on the windowsill using the nylon thread and sharp hook described in the text, then goes back down and lets himself in the front door. Ignoring the open door that leads to the snake pit, of course.

There's a page of hints (in mirrored writing) at the back of the book, just before the answers pages which explain everything. It's great stuff, and the following pages are perhaps the best of all:

What really happened? You might well ask, because the really clever reader of this book, i.e. me, might notice that the whole thing doesn't actually quite work. The answers page is wrong!

"The pendulum goes up not down. (Follow the cogs round to see why.)"

But if you do follow the cogs round, you'll see that the pendulum actually goes down, right onto Ivor! Check out the pink and yellow cogs on the left, just above the big wheel that the balls turn. It's disguised by the arrows being on opposite sides, but the two wheels are marked as both turning in the same direction! The artist made a mistake, and I'm clever enough to spot it! It's no wonder I was such a fan of this book.

And no, I didn't get the solution to a single one of the puzzles without looking at the answer page. But that's not the point!

I had a little practice in spotting flaws with Heath Robinson machinery probably shortly before getting Escape from Blood Castle - the Beano Comic Library no. 64, Baby-Face Finlayson in "Little Angel" came out in November 1984 and among the many, many silly pictures that were almost certainly the funniest thing I'd ever seen in my life up to that point was this unusually-powered lift:

... which even my eight-year-old self (unobservant oaf though I generally was) could see doesn't quite work the way it should. The rope should be attached to the treadmill, not to the man on it. Was it deliberate (I mean, it's so obvious), or was it a glitch in the brain of the artist? To this day I'm not sure, but perhaps it encouraged me to start scrutinising every picture I could find in the hopes of spotting other gaffes...

Just to be fair

 Boots started it in both the big Puss and Boots stories I shared yesterday, so I thought there really should be one on here where the cat is the provocateur and gets his well-deserved comeuppance at the end of the tale. So here's an interesting one from the 1974 Sparky Book:

A full splash page with the title is something Puss and Boots seem to have often got. There are three others in this annual, one for I-Spy, one for the Kings of the Castle and one for the lengthy "Bushboy" story that takes up the last eight pages (all full-colour, too) of the book. A couple of others (Pansy Potter and the other Puss n Boots) have a big picture and two small panels beginning the story on the first page. I think it works best with this one - it doesn't feel like a waste of a page that could be used for more pictures, but an eye-catcher with still enough detail and reading to entertain the reader. That Boots wears braces with his football kit is brilliant.

The tongue-lolling enthusiasm of the first-aider is another high point. And see, this time it's Boots who's innocently going about his everyday business and Puss who torments him just for the fun of it!

I like the way Boots just carries on, still not expecting any more booby-traps.

You have to feel a bit sorry for Tich. The worst he's done to deserve that is a bit of pointing and laughing. Well might he say b-b-baggle!

And it's another Sparky crossover of sorts! Sir, the boss of the Sparky People and by implication the person in charge of this whole annual, intervenes to protect the readers' delicate sensibilities from the sight of the climactic duffing-up. Which is unusual - "We are the Sparky People" did supposedly represent the people who created all these stories, but they tended to live more in a world of their own. They also have a cat called Puss, but I don't think he's any relation to Tich's loving uncle.

Anyway, the most fascinating thing about the safety curtain there is that it's blue. Half of this Sparky Book's pages are full-colour, and the other half are duotone red, black and white. But this final Puss and Boots page and the title page, if not the middle two, are actually on the colour pages - they just use no colour other than red, except for the title and the curtain!

If it's a deliberate technique, it's very clever. It really reinforces the idea that Sir's interruption is on a different level of reality from the events of the comic story. The L-Cars story on the next three pages does something similar - it's all sepia-toned except for the sound effects lettering, which is very big, bold and all the colours of the rainbow! The story is about Frederic and Cedric driving the Inspector mad by making a lot of noise, and all the colours really make the point clearer. Someone at the Sparky was really doing creative things with the materials available!

Baggle!

 I definitely need to update this blog more. It's only a few blog posts ago that I last read something good on Ludicrously Niche and had to chip in with a comic from my own collection, and it starts to look like that's all I do here. But he's talking about Puss and Boots, and I felt I just had to share this. There are a few Sparky Books I've owned since time immemorial - the ones dated 1976, 1977 and 1978. And the 1978 one (which I think might have been the first one I read, though it was so long ago I'm not sure why I think that) contains an all-time favourite comic adventure of that cat-and-dog duo!

Yes, it's not in mint condition. Like all good comics, it's been read a lot over the years. It's a little strange that the cover focuses on Ali's Baba, but the Sparky books of the seventies rotated their cover stars, and just crammed a few extras into the margins. Peering through the kitchen window here, we've got Throgmorton, Babbymummy, Superwitch, Peter Piper, and just barely visible at the edge of the window there's Boots. I wonder what he's done with Puss. Anyway, one of their stories inside is the all-time classic...

You see, the thing about Puss an' Boots is that they don't just fight like cat and dog. They fight like cartoon characters who know they're indestructible, and they revel in it! A quiet start like this is always going to escalate quickly...

In this world, an enormous anvil falling on top of you just causes a comedy bump on the noggin that disappears after one panel. And "I shall assume that the blacksmith left that up there when he was shoein' the HORSE-FLIES..." is a line that's always stuck with me for sheer cleverness and silliness.

The distinctly proletarian dialogue was a real treat, too. For someone whose main comic of choice was the Beano, where everyone's just that little bit more middle-class, this was like a glimpse into a different world! I also love the way one of Tich's friends has a much more advanced vocabulary than the others. Tich communicates solely by means of the word "baggle".

Boots lives in Nirdlewick-on-Tay. "Nirdle" is a word that appears possibly even more frequently than "Baggle" in these stories, and this annual also has a couple of "Planet of the Nirdles" stories, one of which is a sort of crossover with Puss and Boots!

Over the years, I've acquired a few more Sparky Books, including what was apparently the last one, dated 1980.

The poor condition of this one is nothing to do with me - it was like that when I bought it, a couple of years ago. This feels like a very strange kind of cover - the small figures and big letters somehow make it feel a lot more old-fashioned than 1980. Maybe that's deliberate, since a lot of the content is apparently reprints of old stuff.

The choice of characters is interesting, too. Notably, Thingummy Blob and the Prof are sitting on top of the S, but they don't have a story inside the book. Mr Ackroyd (the short-sighted silly-billy) takes up a lot of the interior pages, but he doesn't get a look-in on the cover. And Baron von Reichs-Pudding (the flying hun from world war one) is shooting a machine gun at Mr Bubbles, which seems a bit drastic.

But this annual does have a new four-page Puss and Boots, and four old one-page adventures too:

Cartoon violence is definitely the best kind.

Old-fashioned Excellence

 The UK Chapter of the Microsoft Excel World Championship held its third and final online qualification round today, and it was another classic with a specifically British twist - calculating things in pounds, shillings and pence, and needing to create Excel formulas to give the answers in specific ways that Excel can't generally deal with, in a short space of time!

It takes some creative thinking. And there were price-lists to look up of commodities you might have bought in 1966, and calculating the difference between the price in 1966 and today, and all kinds of ingenious silliness like that.

And maybe it's just because I'm so old, compared to all these young people who seem to populate the UK nowadays, but I did better at it than everyone else!

So yes, I'm feeling happy with myself tonight! Next stop, the live final in London on September 6th! It's far too long since I've been to an in-person competition of any kind! And I can win a trip to Las Vegas for the World Championship, if I win that one! Which would be extremely cool, for many reasons! It's even far-too-longer since I went anywhere overseas, and longer still since I went to Vegas (even though I still cite it as my favourite holiday destination). Even if I don't win the free trip, in fact, I might rob a bank or something and see if I can get there this year...

This worm has a hat on

 A lot of people have been paying tribute to Allan Ahlberg, and quite rightly too! At least one person on the internet mentioned this particular favourite that can be found on my bookshelves...

As you can see, it belongs to Ben. This book has been in my possession at least since the time when our misguided parents bought me and my brother each a pack of stickers with our names on, resulting in everything in a five-mile radius becoming the property of either Ben or Joe - I've quite possibly had this book since it was published (third printing) in 1981.

I don't know why I've kept it among my books ever since then, but I'm glad I did. It is very funny, after all, and do I need any more reason than that?

They try to make me go to rehab, I say no no no

 Sorry I haven't updated this blog for a long time. We're past the twenty-year mark of me starting to write things here regularly, so fire off the party-poppers, but it's a bit alarming to find I'm old enough to have been doing something for two decades. I'm an old man.

Coupled with this, I don't remember whether I've ever mentioned in this blog that I've got multiple sclerosis, but yes, that's a thing. It makes me into the kind of person who knows his NHS number off by heart to quote when people are delivering a new batch of medication to me every few months, and involves going for an occasional appointment with a nurse in the rehabilitation section of the hospital at lengthy intervals. It's very much like being Amy Winehouse, only less musical. But it's irritating when I always used to be the kind of young and active person who didn't see a doctor from one decade to the next.

So stay tuned if you're still keen to hear what Sniffer got up to in Daredevil comics of the late 1940s, because it's still coming, but excuse me if I indulge my more infantile side and talk about Bluey today.

See, someone on a forum recently ran a poll of favourite Bluey episode, and I stick by my judgement that "Shops" is the epitome of perfection for that wonderful cartoon. Just because it undercuts Bluey's habit of using heavily-scripted play sessions to deal with her issues by putting her into conflict with Mackenzie, who just wants them all to make things up as they go along. It's brilliant.

And as an honourable mention for sheer cleverness, you can't beat "Flat Pack". Capsule summary - Mum and Dad struggle to assemble a flat-packed garden chair while Bluey and Bingo play with the discarded packaging materials. Their playing represents the progress of life on earth, simultaneously on the macro scale of millions of years of evolution and the micro scale of a single human (cartoon dog) life. The episode ends with Bluey symbolically ascending to Heaven while Bingo leaves Earth to explore the universe. All in seven minutes, including opening and closing titles.

But someone else suggested the third-season episode "Cricket", which I hadn't seen before, and just... wow. I'm blown away, not for the first time, by this simple kids' cartoon. How do they manage to keep producing this kind of genius?

Bluey's dad Bandit narrates the episode in his characteristic way. "It was some kid's birthday, I don't remember who, and we were playing cricket." - which immediately makes this an episode that resonates with me. See, my brother's birthday is in the summer, and we had an important family tradition of the one whose birthday it isn't getting a 'little' present so as not to feel completely left out. It became a running joke that I'd always get a cricket set for my brother's birthday (bat, tennis ball and set of stumps). Which led to scenes exactly like what's happening at the start of this episode - an ad-hoc game of cricket that a handful of dads seem to be much more invested in than the kids, who are standing around or playing something else.

Bluey wants to play tig instead, but her dad insists that cricket is more fun. Rusty hasn't had a bat yet, so they call him over, and Bandit says they'll just get Rusty out and then play something else. "You'll never get Rusty out," says Bluey, matter-of-factly - and sure enough, Rusty nearly takes Bandit's head off with his fierce drive of the gentle first ball!

It turns out that Rusty is really good at cricket. The episode chronicles the dads trying to get the six-year-old out, starting out by taking it easy on him and moving on to throwing everything they can at him in an attempt to preserve their dignity, to no avail. And we flash back to see how Rusty got to be so good. He really loves the game, and plays it at every opportunity. Becoming an expert at placing his square cut so as not to break the kitchen window, dealing with the uneven surface of Jack's front yard, being allowed to play with his big brother's mates who bowl really fast and use a proper cricket ball - it's a story of dedication to the passion of his life and hard work at becoming the best he can be.

I was never really into cricket, despite the annual gift. I've no idea who thought I wanted a cricket set, but it did at least give the grown-ups an afternoon's entertainment in the garden every year. But the point of this episode is that Rusty is still me - it's me getting into memory competitions, and everything else I've been passionate about over the years. And the ending of the episode, as is so often the case with Bluey, is so wonderful as to make me shed a tear or two.

That there are people in the world who can produce this kind of masterpiece in the name of a simple piece of children's television entertainment will never cease to amaze me, and just goes to show that there's something generally right with the world. Go and watch it, right now!

Teen-age lingo

 I shared one of DC comics' "published as a public service" one-pagers here in the course of talking about the Justice League, but this one here is an even better example than Snapper Carr of the way DC presented "teen-agers" in the 1960s:

From the Brave and the Bold №58, published at the new year 1965, it shows Superboy helping the teen-age population of Smallville plan a community event that will really let everyone get hep to the rules! Because that is of course what sixties teens were all about!

You can tell they're teenagers because one of the boys isn't even wearing a tie! He's probably the most outrageously modern of the group, and he'll probably learn a valuable lesson about conformity soon enough. At least they're all fully aware of the problem of spontaneous combustion of oily rags, now that Superboy's hammered the point home so effectively.

Mind you, Superboy's presence makes me wonder if this is really the sixties anyway - he is, after all, "Superman when he was a boy", which in the contemporary Superboy comics was depicted as non-specifically pre-war kind of surroundings (sixties Superman was generally depicted as middle-aged, unlike the modern insistence that he's under thirty). So maybe these teens are 1930s kids who are very much ahead of their time in terms of clothing and lingo!

In any case, please seal your oily rags away carefully and tell all your friends to obey the rules!

Watching paint dry

"The Moonstone", mentioned in my last blog but one and one of my favourite books, has a central plot point involving the length of time paint takes to dry. So does my favourite cartoon, ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks (the episode "Safety Third"). I always say the later seasons are the best, with the snappy dialogue and perfect characterisation that I love so much, but this is one of many first-season episodes which stand up alongside any of the rest of the series. There's a wonderful conversation between our heroes of the type I've had (in the role of Simon) many times before. Some people just don't want to do sums themselves...

Don't touch it! The paint won't be dry for fifteen hours!

Oh, man! That's like ten at night!

Alvin, if it's two in the afternoon now, what time will it be in fifteen hours?

Erm, 12:30? No, 11:15! 6:35!

Stop guessing!

Just tell me!

Figure it out!

Tuesday!

T-Tuesday? What?!

I thought it was a trick question.

I know! I know! Eight o'clock!

You're not even trying!

Okay... think out of the box...

No, no! Think IN the box! Right in the centre of the box!

Is that a clue?

Five in the morning! It's five in the morning!

And this scene is followed by the greatest ever example of Simon's habit of talking in his sleep. "I've had enough with all these egotistical unicorns! I've had it up to here!" Alvin, sneaking out to steal the car at five in the morning, promises to take care of the unicorns, and Simon responds "Rub peanuts in their faces."

See, this is why I love Simon so much. Perhaps it's a little hard to explain.

You kept that quiet!

 Someone told me today that she'd seen me on TV ("Superhuman Genius", of course - did they really show it yet again?) and was shocked to recognise me! This is someone I've known, in a professional capacity, for about three months, and I was doubly shocked to learn that I hadn't previously mentioned my illustrious TV career!

I mean, it's the first thing I tell people, as a rule. Am I getting less boastful in my old age? Clearly I need to work on that.

June 21st, 1848

 A couple of weeks ago I found this treasure in the lovely second-hand book shop in Worcester.

£2.45 for what the back cover rightly calls "three gripping novels by Wilkie Collins". I'm a great fan of Wilkie, and definitely had to snap this one up when I saw it. And having read the two later, shorter novels first (having only previously read them on Project Gutenberg, which is nice in its way but not as good as having a real papery book in your hands), it was only today I came to start on The Moonstone.

And a very appropriate day it is, too, because I'd entirely forgotten that Rachel's birthday party when she receives the eponymous diamond happens on June 21st! I only mention this trifling circumstance because* this is exactly the kind of thing that Gabriel Betteredge would find in his Robinson Crusoe and take as an absolutely certain prophecy of the future! I'm confident that at some point today (better hurry up, it's half past seven already), someone will present me with a diamond worth at least twenty thousand pounds. Or something equally coincidental anyway, like maybe I'll get caught in the rain, fall into a fever and be unable to pass on important information until a plot-convenient moment. Or just do a memory stunt along the lines of the one that forms the climax of the novel.

This "Great Classic Library" was published in 1994, and seems to have been a great way to get some of the more obscure works by great authors into your hands. I'll have to collect them all!

I suspect the choice of which novels to include in each one was dictated as much by page count as by any objective judgement of quality. This Collins compilation is in the wrong order - My Lady's Money came before The Haunted Hotel and Mr Troy the lawyer from the former makes a cameo appearance in the latter, referring back to it. But I'm surprised I haven't come across these volumes before at some point in the last thirty years, and I'm going to have to find space on my bookshelves for them!

Or rather, buy some new bookshelves. My existing ones are full up at the moment, and any new acquisitions have to be wedged in on top of the rows of books. And these are really hefty things - 680 pages in the one I've got! Ooh, maybe someone will give me a bookcase as a present for Rachel Verinder's birthday today! The prophetic powers of Robinson Crusoe work in mysterious ways!

* That was an in-joke to entertain any other Wilkie Collins fans among my readers. His narrators are forever saying "I only mention this trifling circumstance because..." whenever they talk about something they have no reason to mention but which is important for the reader to know in order to make sense of the rest of the story. The existence of a dust-heap, described in minute detail in "The Law and the Lady" is a personal favourite.

Metamorphosis

 The world of American superhero comics (currently a horribly barren place in terms of entertainment, almost without exception) has been enlivened for the last six months by the long-awaited return of Metamorpho!

One of my all-time favourites, of course. And this series, unlike the other modern-day resurrections of the Element Man that I briefly moaned about in my excessively lengthy recounting of Metamorpho's glory days some years ago, is done exactly right! A loving homage to the works of Bob Haney and Ramona Fradon, written by one of the rare and special people who knows what makes them so great!

And that writer is Al Ewing, who is ALSO one of the even more vanishingly rare people who gets my very favourite obscure superhero, Manikin! The man is so in tune with my preferences, it's (pardon the pun) Stagg-ering!

This series is maybe more outright comedy than the classics of the sixties, but, well... I honestly can't remember the last time I laughed out loud four or five times while reading a single issue of a comic! And Metamorpho #6 accomplished that - I urge you to go and check it out; you won't regret it!

Not least because Prince Ra-Man shows Rex a potential future in his mind's eye - in the form of a PERFECT pastiche of Fletcher Hanks's Stardust!

Another all-time favourite superhero of mine. Seriously, Al Ewing seems to be writing comics personally tailored just to me right now. Rex doesn't quite get it, though...

And of course the comic ends with the traditional plea to the readers to keep Metamorpho alive, and maybe, just maybe, he'll one day get his own ongoing series again!

Please all write into DC Comics en masse, demanding it! Or, even better, buy the trade paperback - out in September! Available to pre-order now!