Today's Torygraph Obit

[muninnhuginn]

I suppose it reflects the ravens' occasional ambiguity about war that the thought of heroic WW1 pilots has always had a certain glamour. So this is touching: Death of Henry Botterell, believed to be the last surviving WW1 pilot Too much Flambards and its sequels at a tender age?

Evidently we're not the only ones: Torygraph opinion this time, in a profile of Richard Hillary. To the end of which can only really be added, from Owen's "The Next War":

We laughed, knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars; when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death - for Life; not men - for flags.

And then deny it all as romantic twaddle and recoil, appalled, at thinking that way. Hah.

Comments

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Yeah. And that Owen (http://www.usglobe.com/Europe/Britain/owen3.html) always reminds me of the Kipling one that feels as if it's about war when it's really about the conquest of disease: here, except the heading notes give it away (http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/p1/spiesmarch.html).

Changing the subject a little, I spent a while working in Craiglockhart House, and late at night, with the odd noises from the woodwork and unearthly-sounding pigeons in the rafters it was very easy to believe it could have been haunted by the memories of Owen's or Sassoon's fellow patients -- I was never actually scared until the night I heard what sounded like marching boots on the gravel drive outside, and then I hared off for the main road and the bus route home quite quickly.

Superstitious, me?

[muninnhuginn]

Oh, if anywhere were haunted it would be Craiglockhart. Whether the ghosts would be the hopefully uplifting Owen and Sassoon types, the more pathetic ones (or is that an incredibly condescending assumption to make?) of their fellow sufferers, or the nightmares unleashed from their minds, is another matter. The latter could be scary: kind of reminded at this point of Greg Bear's Psychlone, which, if recollection serves at all, involves a tremendous and destructive gestalt thingie composed of the neuroses of Vietman veterans.

[Odd, Craiglockhart's one of those places we've read about so much over the years and somehow assumed was no more. Pleasing that it's still standing.]

As for superstition and being spooked: what could be more scary than not believing in the supernatural and then hearing something. At least the credulous are prepared to be scared. However, surely marching boots are only scary when you're trapped in a deserted station in the company of Joanna Lumley and David McCallum!

[akicif.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you've ever seen "The Stone Tapes" - it was a TV ghost story for Christmas one year when I was young: the idea was that sufficiently traumatic events could be somehow imprinted on the place they'd happened, and then replayed by an appropriate trigger. But if I'd had to name anywhere in Edinburgh that might be haunted in that sense, Craiglockhart House would definitely have been on the list, and probably well ahead of the more touristy places; castles and crypts being so passé...

Lumley and McCallum: sounds like an episode of something I've not seen, but obviously worth watching. Now, was he in an episode of the New Avengers, or she in an UNCLE one?

[muninnhuginn]

Dunno if they ever guested in the other's show (don't have the kind of mind to remember hoards of facts like that).

Reference was to Sapphire and Steel, which seems mainly to have been forgotten. We thought it was worth watching. Bravo, in one of its incarnations, or maybe the SciFi channel, repeated the shows not long back. But probably only the once: seems to be the case that everything ever made, especially the vaguely cult-y stuff, is quietly repeated once and then even more quietly retired, presumably through lack of large enough response. (Similar thing happened to Star Cops on UK Gold.)

Episodes of S&S are still creepy, though slightly dated (actually, the single, or at most two, set per story, obviously studio-based format made it look old-fashioned even then, post-New Avengers, into the 80s).

As ever second time round, failed to see the episodes we'd missed the first time. (Think it's some kind of syndrome, this missing the last crucial episode business.)