Icing Sugar

Somebody's been out in the night and given our town a light dusting of what looks like icing sugar. Bloody cold icing sugar, to be precise. Other parts of the country got a good few inches of snow last night, we got sprinkles - and I don't mind the kind that accumulate near toilet bowls in Men's conveniences. So much for the blanket of snow currently featuring prominently on events-starved news bulletins. Apparently Scotland may get some real now by Friday, closely followed by a thaw on Saturday. Since Saturday is also New Year's Eye (a.k.a. Hogmanay north of the border), let's hope the snow gets itself gone good and fast. I don't fancy going to the traditional Biggar bonfire in a blizzard, as happened two years ago.

In other news, the latest issue of Comics International arrived. Endless revivals of old characters and 'hot' creator teams taking over existing characters. Old wine in new bottles should be the industry's slogan, but that might get a bit wearing in the long term. My trips to the nearest comic shop (30 miles away in central Edinburgh) have shrunk to once a month at most, and DC is canning the last monthly book I could be bothered to collect, Gotham Central. There've been times in the past when I gave up comics altogether, junked my collection and went cold turkey. Can't help wondering if I'm fast approaching that point once more...

Morse-Watch continues. I'm revising the text for my reference book to Inspector Morse and re-watching all 33 of the TV stories. Since I wrote the first edition back in the winter of 2001/2002, every episode has been issued on DVD complete with sub-titles that handily identify nealry all the music featured in the show. To my horror, I'm discovering a slew of errors in the first editon of the book. Happily, the new edition should correct all of those, while - no doubt - adding some new ones.

Here's a chilling thought: I started work on the first edition of The Complete Inspector Morse on a Monday, but didn't make much progress. The next day I was trying to knuckle down, make some progress. It was a beautiful spring day, nary a cloud in the sky. My spouse was home sick with flu, so I had to keep popping next door to see how they were getting on. Some time in the early afternoon I activated my internet connection and first heard about events across the Atlantic. The date was September 11, 2001. So that first edition of TCIM is always going to associated with that terrible event.

Let's hope the second edition doesn't gain a similar association.