#Window Doctor Bristol

[redflagshipwriter]

Nest Swap ch 1

Little Tim wakes up in big Tim's apartment.

The idea came from this chain started by @ew-selfish-art and the contribution by @faeriekit

(repost of something that's currently just in a reblog chain)

His first observation was that this wasn't his house.

Tim was new to detecting, but he thought that was a pretty dang salient observation.

He didn't actually remember going to sleep. It didn't feel like he woke up here, either. He just suddenly noticed he was sitting somewhere he'd never been in his whole 9 years of life.

Very weird! Pretty neat, though.

Tim prowled around in his socked feet in total silence, investigating by the little light that came in through mostly shut curtains. He wasn't in his own clothes, which was kind of scary. He had to keep hiking up his sweatpants to keep them on, and he rolled down his socks three times to tighten them up. At least the floors didn't creak at all, even when he stepped on the dark wood panels in between dark red rugs. It made him feel more secure to move around quietly.

He was in an apartment that seemed relatively expensive but new, no antiques or family heirlooms. It was an open plan, with floating stairs and a white sofa. It was also sterile, as if no one really lived in it. It was clean in the same un-lived in way his house was. Someone professionally cleaned this apartment. 

Tim was really, really careful not to make any mess. 

Theory one: he had been kidnapped. It seemed pretty sound. He went to bed at home, and he woke up sitting on a strange sofa. Danger alarms were going off.

He looked around for a house phone to call for help. There was none. Troubling. 

On the other hand, Tim opened the apartment door to the hallway and stuck his head out. He could see sunlight coming in through the huge lobby windows.

…Okay. He was going to consider that a viable escape route. He glanced at the side of the door where there was a pair of shoes. They were big but he could probably use them in a pinch.

So. He could just walk out at any time. He frowned. That wasn't very good kidnapping practice. He would plan a much better restraint system. Like, a rope would be a good place to start, or maybe breaking the little bones in his feet? 

“This is so disappointing,” Tim muttered to himself. “I'm not even being ransomed?” 

Just… Some effort would be nice.

Hmm. He didn't want to believe anyone that incompetent had managed to transport him into Gotham proper from Bristol while he slept. So. Tim formally recategorized his kidnapping theory to a  suspected no. 

It was undeniable that he'd been moved in his sleep, which was pretty classic. But the counter evidence? The new location looked pretty easy to escape, if he was willing to get his socks dirty outside. 

Conclusion: This probably wasn't a conventional kidnapping. What else was there?

Theory two: he hit his head or fell asleep while he was out birdwatching, and some good person took them into their house to keep him safe.

That neatly explained why he was in the actual city. Tim ran his fingers through his hair looking for a bump. He wasn't sure if he found one or not. Maybe his head was just kind of oddly shaped. Troubling. Maybe he should go to the doctor about that. 

It would have been helpful information either way if there had been another human being around to talk to. 

There were signs that someone lived here. Tim poked around in the closet and in the fridge, building a mental profile for the resident.

One person lived here, and they were clearly kind of a loser because they had no photos of friends or family up. The jacket hanging by the door told Tim they were either an average sized woman or a small man. They couldn't cook at all, which was excellent because that meant there was a really great variety of ready to eat food. Tim snacked on string cheese and a can of soda while he flipped through the books on the shelves.  He pulled a couple off to check for secret compartments. Nope. Just books.

“Boring,” Tim said to himself. 

They were all books about things like business and management. It was the type of self-aggrandizing garbage that his parents made fun of: memoirs that you knew damn well that person hadn't written, manifestos on the virtues of hard work from someone born into the financial elite, and how-to's directed at an audience who had no personal shame.

Momentarily, he entertained the fantasy that he had been kidnapped by someone who was going to mold him into the ideal Drake Industries CEO, someone who wouldn't jet off across the world to follow a passion. The suspects were the entire board of directors. 

Kidnapped theory redux: the Board of Directors did it. Evidence?

Tim sat down and made a chart for his thoughts, quantifying how much each person had been inconvenienced by his parents’ absence in the last fiscal year. He concluded that Mr. Morrison might hate his parents enough to do it, but the projected timeline was beyond his scope. Tim didn't think he had it in him to plan that far out.

So, the apartment owner was just a boring person. Tim made a note. Theory two was looking pretty good. The person who lived here kind of sucked at life but they were probably really nice.

Something started beeping. That was interesting. He followed it to the bedroom that he hadn't been brave enough to poke around yet. There was a weird tablet on the bedside table. He picked it up and it unlocked automatically. Wow, the security was so bad. He felt embarrassed on behalf of the absent apartment owner.

The screen showed an email from someone called Tamara Fox. 

“Tim, can you get me the numbers from the acquisition in Peru?”

He blinked at it. Was the person who lived here also named Tim? Surely she wasn't actually asking him. He looked around uncertainly. 

There was still no one else. The blinking display on the alarm clock told him that it was half past noon, and no one else was in the apartment. 

…. poor Tamara probably really needed that information, if she was asking for it in the middle of the workday. Tim sat down on the bed and started putting together context clothes to figure out what Miss Fox was talking about. Her email signature had her title at Wayne industries listed, so that was a pretty big clue. He had access to a team calendar that showed meetings and ongoing projects, which he used to narrow it down. 

When he figured it out, he sent her back an email and sat back in satisfaction. A moment later, he realized that the email account had an attached auto signature. It claimed to be Tim Drake-Wayne, CEO of Wayne Enterprises. 

What.

He stopped breathing and momentarily considered that he had traveled to the future and this was really his apartment, but the name was impossible. There was no way he was going to marry either one of the Waynes. Bruce and Dick were kind of old. Tim wrinkled his nose at the thought. Gross. 

So, no. He wasn't Tim Drake-Wayne. “...It must be an inside joke,” Tim decided. “It seems really unprofessional.”

Tim was a little disappointed that he wasn't the boss of everyone, but at least he wasn't in a troubling marriage with a huge age difference. He had another cheese stick about it and the feeling went away.  Ah, good. Maybe that was how Mom dealt with Drake Industries: she distracted herself until she didn't feel bad about putting it on the back burner. It was a good tactic. He'd need more cheese sticks. He made a mental note to figure out how to replace these ones.

He found a loose blanket on a side chair and tied it around his shoulders, because the apartment was pretty chilly.

The email dinged again. Tim dragged his blanket cape back into the bedroom and stared at the tablet, lost in thought.

He didn't mean to be annoying. He really didn't. He knew people hated it when you got in their stuff. But the thing was: this guy got a lot of emails. And he wasn't here to answer them, which was pretty rude of him, honestly. It seemed like his job needed him a lot. 

Maybe when he got back, he would be mad at Tim for looking at his stuff. 

On the other hand, maybe he would appreciate it. Tim told himself that it would be fine, and he manned that email account until the end of business hours at 5:00 p.m. Then he gave a luxurious stretch and went to find something interesting in the freezer that he could microwave. 

His feelings about the email account had changed, after the hours spent together. It was their mutual email account now. Tim was willing to fight about it. He was emotionally attached to that email. People asked him all sorts of questions there, and he got to answer. It was pretty fun.

The apartment looked a little friendlier in the early evening light. He crossed it again and pushed a chair up against the deep freezer so that he could root around inside.

“Omigod, lasagne!” Tim ripped the package open in his excitement. Today was the best. He liked this place. Maybe he'd get to stay there when the owner came back to look at their shared email account.

While the lasagne heated, he went back to checking for fake books on the shelf. They were all disappointments. He did finally notice that there were pets here. 

“I should feed you,” Tim told the fish, because he was really fixing this guy's life. The fish didn't pay him any attention. The microwave beeped completion, so he went back and got his lasagne. He held it in one hand and ate while he searched for fish food. When he found it, he stuck his fork in the lasagne to free up a hand and shook flakes into the water. 

A secret compartment in the floor opened up.

Tim froze. He took a step back. He looked around the apartment, as if someone was going to materialize.

“…I might as well go see,” he told himself. “They're already gonna be mad that I answered our email.”

Down he went. 

[darksideofparis]

I really love this! Sky's background is pretty dark, but really intriguing at the same time. The Weeping Angel background and resulting trauma is so heartbreaking. And oh, yeah, the Doctor would go absolutely mental if their grandson was harmed. No one would be safe. Again, I love this and great job!

TW: 18+ topics such as addiction and an abusive relationship

Name: Skyler Jayden Harkness

Gender: Non-binary trans-masc. He/him or they/them pronouns, preference for they/them

Age: 21 (body stopped aging at this point)

General appearance: 5'7 with short and messy brown hair, hazel eyes, lean and lithe with a gymnast's build. Slender but muscular

Personality: Snarky and sarcastic, flirty but defensive due to trust issues. Sky can become serious in and instant and is a cunning individual with a ruthless streak like their father.

Special talents: Various Time Lord abilities, immortality, enhanced physcial condition, hand-to-hand training, extensive weapons and starship knowledge, total mechanical genius, fluent in over 1200 languages, skilled pilot, mid level psychic abilities.

Who they like better: Skyler's always been their dad's kid through and through. Jack was the 2nd person Sky came out to after their brother Johnny. Jack was also there for Sky when their ex boyfriend became horribly abusive, giving them weapons training. Despite that, Sky is still very close to their mother, Jenny encouraged Sky's gymnastics and cooking hobbies and gave them hand to hand training. Sky goes to Jenny if they need a hug.

Who they take after more: Sky takes after Jenny more. They're less of a flirt then Jack or Johnny. Sky's a genius, prefering to spend their time in a workshop or off adventuring through space and time. Sky lives by their grandfather's quote of "Not impossible just a bit unlikely". Skyler's a bit of a daredevil and adrenaline junkie and once stole Missy's TARDIS for "shits and giggles"

Weaknesses: PTSD (their ex boyfriend was physically, verbally and sexually abusive), extreme fear of The Weeping Angels due to them losing their best friend from childhood to them (their friend grew up in the past and eventually became Skyler's playschool teacher when Sky was a toddler), anxiety, arrogance (Sky has some of The Doctor's arrogance in his intelligence), alcoholism, cigarette addiction, ruthless and even cruel at times, impulsive and reckless always chasing adventure. Believe in their ability to get out of any situation due to their immortality

Backstory: Sky was born after their brother Johnny as Lacey Marigold Harkness, in Bristol KY, in October 2011 as Jenny wanted her mom and dad at the birth and The Doctor and Alex were visiting Alex's old friends at that point. At 2½, in preschool, Sky met and quickly befriended a young girl named Isabella "Izzy" Jones and the two stayed friends throughout elementary school and into middle school.

At 13 Izzy was Skyler's first kiss and she was the first person outside the family Sky came out to as trans. Tragically, less then 6 months later, a few days after Izzy's 14th birthday, while wandering, Sky and Izzy walked by a graveyard and Izzy noticed a statue that hadn't been there previously. Before Skyler could react, Izzy has turned away and The Weeping Angel moved and sent Izzy back to the past. Sky, moving through shock ane having been taught by The Doctor, led the angel to a shop window so it was always staring at its reflection, then fled back home and broke down in their father's arms.

This tragic event led to Skyler falling into a self destructive spiral, leading to a teen life of drinking and a relationship with a much older boy named Elijah Jackson that turned horribly abusive, which ended after Elijah forced himself on Skyler and Johnny caught him. The now 16 year old Skyler went back to therapy and put in their effort, allowing themselves to heal, despite gaining new trauma beyond seeing their friend die.

Skyler graduated top of their class and way beyond any human, having used The TARDIS library and knowledge from The TARDIS to learn about starship piloting and maintenance, hundreds of alien languages and intergalactic engineering. They then got picked up by their mom's parents to be gifted with a sonic device

The Doctor took them on some trips in The TARDIS with Alex and the family bonded. Skyler learnt how overprotective their grandparents can be after they took a blast from a Cyberman intended for Alex. Skyler came back to a life to discover Alex kneeling over them and several destroyed Cyber Squadrons around the family, The Doctor standing among it all, smoke curling off their jacket.

During one of their adventures, Skyler, now 19, stole Missy's TARDIS and briefly took it for a spin, proving to be a much calmer pilot then their grandfather and when asked by Jenny simply responded with "I read the manual". Skyler helped Alex and The Doctor lock Missy's TARDIS away but the Time Lady escaped. Skyler joined their father and their godmother Martha, acting as a liaison between Torchwood 3 and UNIT

Personal headcanon: Skyler is very close with all of their family but something of a loner when it comes to friends, still struggling with not shutting themselves out from friendships after losing Izzy. He's very close to his older brother Johnny and his Aunt Daffy. Sky once messed with Amy and Rory Pond by calling them "Great Aunt Amy and Great Uncle Rory".

Face Claim: Sasha Allen

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Castle Combe; often named as the ‘Prettiest Village in England.'

Castle Combe, a medieval village and civil parish within Cotswolds area of outstanding natural beauty in Wiltshire, England.

The village has a rich history and the houses are made up of the honey coloured Cotswold stone, typical for a village of this area.

The village takes its name from a castle built on the hill to the north of the village in the 12th century AD, of which little now remains except earthworks.

No new homes have been built in the historic area since 1600s AD.

During the Middle Ages, the village, along with much of the Cotswolds, enjoyed prosperity due to the growth of a thriving wool industry.

Within Castle Combe, you’ll find a Market Cross and St Andrew’s Church, which dates from the 13th century AD.

The church houses a faceless clock, which is reputed to be one of oldest working clocks in the country.

Numerous weavers’ cottages were erected from local stone, and these ancient honey-hued buildings remain one of the village’s standout features today.

The village was known in particular for manufacturing a red and white cloth known as ‘Castlecombe,’ which was renowned in the markets of Bristol, Cirencester, as well as London and abroad.

In 1440 AD, King Henry VI granted Castle Combe the right to hold a weekly market, with unmistakable Market Cross monument still standing proudly today.

Castle Combe strictly banned all modern attachments such as TV dishes and external wires to the exterior of its houses, restrictions that have been instrumental in helping the historic village to maintain its authentic appearance.

As a result, the village has become a popular location for film crews, with productions including the 1967 filmed musical Doctor Dolittle, Stardust, and The Wolf Man were all shot within the village.

Castle Combe was a key filming location for Stephen Spielberg’s War Horse.

To recreate a 1914 setting, the village’s tarmac through-road was closed and covered with a temporary muddy surface.

Its modern street lamps, signage, and post boxes were either covered or removed altogether. Its white window frames were repainted with more muted colours.

📷 : Credit to the Owner

[redflagshipwriter]

His first observation was that this wasn't his house.

Tim prowled around in his socked feet in total silence, investigating by the little light that came in through mostly shut curtains. He wasn't in his own clothes, which was kind of scary. He had to keep hiking up his sweatpants to keep them on, and he rolled down his socks three times to tighten them up. At least the floors didn't creak at all, even when he stepped on the dark wood panels in between dark red rugs.

He was in an apartment that seemed relatively expensive but new, no antiques or family heirlooms. It was an open plan, with floating stairs and a white sofa. It was also sterile, as if no one really lived in it. It was clean in the same un-lived in way his house was. Someone professionally cleaned this apartment.

Tim was really, really careful not to make any mess.

Theory one: he had been kidnapped. It seemed pretty sound. He went to bed at home, and he woke up on a strange sofa. Danger alarms were going off.

He looked around for a house phone to call for help. There was none. Troubling.

On the other hand, Tim opened the apartment door to the hallway and stuck his head out. He could see sunlight coming in through the huge lobby windows.

…Okay. He was going to consider that a viable escape route. He glanced at the side of the door where there was a pair of shoes. They were big but he could probably use them in a pinch.

So. He could just walk out at any time. He frowned. That wasn't very good kidnapping practice. He would plan a much better restraint system. Like, a rope would be a good place to start, or maybe breaking the little bones in his feet?

“This is so disappointing,” Tim muttered to himself. “I'm not even being ransomed?”

Just… Some effort would be nice.

Hmm. He didn't want to believe anyone that incompetent had managed to transport him into Gotham proper from Bristol while he slept. So. Tim formally recategorized his kidnapping theory to a suspected no.

It was undeniable that he'd been moved in his sleep, which was pretty classic. But the counter evidence? The new location looked pretty easy to escape, if he was willing to get his socks dirty outside.

Conclusion: This probably wasn't a conventional kidnapping. What else was there?

Theory two: he hit his head or fell asleep while he was out birdwatching, and some good person took them into their house to keep him safe.

That neatly explained why he was in the actual city. Tim ran his fingers through his hair looking for a bump. He wasn't sure if he found one or not. Maybe his head was just kind of oddly shaped. Tim frowned. Maybe he should go to the doctor about that.

It would have been helpful information either way if there had been another human being around to talk to.

There were signs that someone lived here. Tim poked around in the closet and in the fridge, building a mental profile for the resident.

One person lived here, and they were clearly kind of a loser because they had no photos of friends or family up. The jacket hanging by the door told Tim they were either an average sized woman or a small man. They couldn't cook at all, which was excellent because that meant there was a really great variety of ready to eat food. Tim snacked on string cheese and a can of soda while he flipped through the books on the shelves. He pulled a couple off to check for secret compartments. Nope. Just books.

“Boring,” Tim said to himself.

They were all books about things like business and management. It was the type of self-aggrandizing garbage that his parents made fun of: memoirs that you knew damn well that person hadn't written, manifestos on the virtues of hard work from someone born into the financial elite, and how-to's directed at an audience who had no personal shame.

Momentarily, he entertained the fantasy that he had been kidnapped by someone who was going to mold him into the ideal Drake Industries CEO, someone who wouldn't jet off across the world to follow a passion. The suspects were the entire board of directors.

Kidnapped theory redux: the Board of Directors did it. Evidence?

Tim sat down and made a chart for his thoughts, quantifying how much each person had been inconvenienced by his parents’ absence in the last fiscal year. He concluded that Mr. Morrison might hate his parents enough to do it, but the projected timeline was beyond his scope. Tim didn't think he had it in him to plan that far out.

So, the apartment owner was just a boring person. Tim made a note. Theory two was looking pretty good. The person who lived here kind of sucked at life but they were probably really nice.

Something started beeping. That was interesting. He followed it to the bedroom that he hadn't been brave enough to poke around yet. There was a weird tablet on the bedside table. He picked it up and it unlocked automatically. Wow, the security was so bad. He felt embarrassed on behalf of the absent apartment owner.

The screen showed an email from someone called Tamara Fox.

“Tim, can you get me the numbers from the acquisition in Peru asap?”

He blinked at it. Was the person who lived here also named Tim? Surely she wasn't actually asking him. He looked around uncertainly.

There was still no one else. The blinking display on the alarm clock told him that it was half past noon, and no one else was in the apartment. Maybe it was silly that he felt the urge to be helpful, but he was pretty sure he hadn't been the victim of a crime.

…. poor Tamara probably really needed that information, if she was asking for it in the middle of the workday. Tim sat down on the bed and started putting together context clothes to figure out what Miss Fox was talking about. Her email signature had her title at Wayne industries listed, so that was a pretty big clue. He had access to a team calendar that showed meetings and ongoing projects, which he used to narrow it down.

When he figured it out, he sent her back an email and sat back in satisfaction. A moment later, he realized that the email account had an attached auto signature. It claimed to be Tim Drake-Wayne, CEO of Wayne Enterprises.

What.

He momentarily considered that he had traveled to the future and this was really his apartment, but the name was impossible. There was no way he was going to marry either one of the Waynes. Bruce and Dick were kind of old. Tim wrinkled his nose at the thought. Gross.

So, no. He wasn't Tim Drake-Wayne. “...It must be an inside joke,” Tim decided. “It seems really unprofessional.”

Tim was a little disappointed that he wasn't the boss of everyone, but at least he wasn't in a troubling marriage with a huge age difference. He had another cheese stick about it and the feeling went away. Ah, good. Maybe that was how Mom dealt with Drake Industries: she distracted herself until she didn't feel bad about putting it on the back burner. It was a good tactic. He'd need more cheese sticks to pull it off long term.

He made a mental note to figure out how to replace these ones.

He found a loose blanket on a side chair and tied it around his shoulders, because the apartment was pretty chilly now that he wasn't busy being scared.

The email dinged again. Tim dragged his blanket cape back into the bedroom and stared at the tablet, lost in thought.

He didn't mean to be annoying. He really didn't. He knew people hated it when you got in their stuff. But the thing was: this guy got a lot of emails. And he wasn't here to answer them, which was pretty rude of him, honestly. It seemed like his job needed him a lot.

Maybe when he got back, he would be mad at Tim for looking at his stuff.

On the other hand, maybe he would appreciate it. Tim told himself that it would be fine, and he manned that email account until the end of business hours at 5:00 p.m. Then he gave a luxurious stretch and went to find something interesting in the freezer that he could microwave.

His feelings about the email account had changed, after the hours spent together. It was their mutual email account now. Tim was willing to fight about it. He was emotionally attached to that email. People asked him all sorts of questions there, and he got to answer. It was pretty fun.

The apartment looked a little friendlier in the early evening light. He crossed it again and pushed a chair up against the deep freezer so that he could root around inside.

“Omigod, lasagne!” Tim ripped the package open in his excitement. Today was the best.

While it heated, he went back to checking for fake books on the shelf. They were all disappointments. He did finally notice that there were pets here.

“I should feed you,” Tim told the fish, because he was really fixing this guy's life. The fish didn't pay him any attention. The microwave beeped completion, so he went back and got his lasagne. He held it in one hand and ate while he searched for fish food. When he found it, he stuck his fork in the lasagne to free up a hand and shook flakes into the water.

A secret compartment in the floor opened up.

Tim froze. He took a step back. He looked around the apartment, as if someone was going to materialize.

“…I might as well go see,” he told himself. “They're already gonna be mad that I answered our email.”

Down he went.

Not to express my favoritism on main but like...

Where's a fic about Tim Drake being de-aged and none of his family realizing it until way later cause the lil tyke is submitting all of his reports in a timely manner (a little slower because of tiny fingers vs. big mechanical keyboard) and is managing Wayne Enterprises under remote protocols with Tam (she thinks he might be with Pru and refuses to interact- one traumatic desert experience is enough for a lifetime).

Just like, Tim has managed himself since he was that small anyway given his parent's prioritizes pre-mortem. They didn't even have popular food delivery apps when he was little! This is such an easy era to be imposed upon by youth!

Not to mention the potential of him being caught in the middle of solving his dilemma might spur the Bats to become aware and then get mixed up... Making Tim's solution combust and more work for the little guy who is very determined and now very scorned.

[bristoldoorandwindowrepairs]

Bristol Door and Window Repairs

ADDRESS:

St. Andrews Trading Estate

Third Way

Avonmouth

Bristol

BS11 9YE

TELEPHONE:

0117 440 4745

EMAIL:

bristol@repairmywindowsanddoors.co.uk

URL:

DESCRIPTION:

Serving Bristol, we are door and window repair experts, we tackle all types of window and door repairs. We specialise in uPVC repairs and offer locksmith and boarding up services.

We also supply and install a comprehensive range of new windows and doors in uPVC, aluminium and timber, including casement windows, tilt and turn windows, vertical sliding sash windows, composite doors, bifold doors, sliding patio doors and french doors.

Founded: 1989 Contact: Rob Harris

Opening Hours

Mon 08:00 – 18:00

Tuesday 08:00 – 18:00

Wednesday 08:00 – 18:00

Thursday 08:00 – 18:00

Friday 08:00 – 18:00

Saturday 09:00 – 15:00

Sunday – Closed

Accepted Payment Types

Bank Transfer

Paypal

Cash

[umbrellasareforever]

the gist of the crossover: clara oswald is with her friend (exclusively known as the doctor for reasons unknown) looking for a new apartment, and in the process finds out that pollard house has, by enormous coincidence and a very confusing family tree, actually been left to her. she decides to move into the house, the ghosts try to get rid of her, and... the ghostly first doctor throws her out the window. oops, she can now see ghosts (her favourite ghost is malcolm tucker, who haunts bristol university and angrily lectures physics students, both living and dead). characters include:

clara, obviously

eleven, here known only as the doctor (nobody is entirely clear why); insists he is not in love with clara (and vice versa), though none of the ghosts believe either of them. quicker to accept the existence of ghosts than clara herself

jack harkness. died in the 1200s of dysentery and was not actually called jack harkness, but he likes the name so he's keeping it. makes up a variety of outlandish stories about how he supposedly died, and since he's one of the earliest ghosts no one can challenge him

romana (i). catholic noble, died somewhere in the 15th century (pre-henry vii). various references are made to her death but it's unclear how she actually died. not entirely convinced on catholicism anymore but she sticks to it to annoy edward

the first doctor, better known in this universe as dr. edward hughes (the s is silent (dr who haha geddit)). died of tuberculosis, and doesn't like to talk about it since that's one of the things he was supposed to be able to cure. much more morally... relaxed than most other inhabitants of the pollard house. died shortly after henry viii's break from rome and gets into a lot of arguments with romana about catholicism vs protestantism even though neither of them really believe in it. romana refuses to call him dr. hughes like everyone else and it drives him mad

the eighth doctor, better known as thomas jonathan smith. a 19th-century terrible Romantic poet who died after ice skating on ice that was rather thinner than he expected. dramatic, drips water all over the place, and in love with fitz (but happily flirts with most of the ghosts. and clara.)

fitz kreiner. died in the 1960s under circumstances he'd rather not mention. the important part is that he died with his guitar and unlike eight's poetry he's actually very good at playing it. in love with eight. doesn't particularly like most of the other ghosts except for eight

the brigadier. died in the 1970s after getting drunk and crashing his car on the grounds of the pollard house. happily calls edward dr. hughes but always pronounces the s, which annoys edward extremely. fairly similar to the captain in bbc ghosts, but less war-oriented and slightly less repressed

grace holloway. died in the 1990s after being stabbed to death by "bruce," an undercover fbi agent. it's really quite embarrassing. finds edward's morals uncomfortable and very nearly lost her patience with him after the throwing clara out a window incident. still somewhat unused to being a ghost, and doesn't particularly like clara since clara recognises her from the scandal involved with her death

there's more but that's a lot already 💀

WOWOWOW you’ve put so much thought into this and I LOVE IT!!!

I absolutely adore (well okay not adore but adore in the Writer Way™️) the deaths of all the ghosts!!!! Particularly how they do relate to the characters both from Ghosts and Doctor Who (which was obviously the point but I gotta point it out because LOVE IT)!!! Particularly Grace’s which is insanely sad but also very very good especially the way her death is actually known by Clara and how she’s so new to being a Ghost!!

Absolutely phenomenal please feel free to share more you’ve got my intrigue!!!

[natequarter]

current dr who/bbc ghosts thoughts...go!

the gist of the crossover: clara oswald is with her friend (exclusively known as the doctor for reasons unknown) looking for a new apartment, and in the process finds out that pollard house has, by enormous coincidence and a very confusing family tree, actually been left to her. she decides to move into the house, the ghosts try to get rid of her, and... the ghostly first doctor throws her out the window. oops, she can now see ghosts (her favourite ghost is malcolm tucker, who haunts bristol university and angrily lectures physics students, both living and dead). characters include:

clara, obviously

eleven, here known only as the doctor (nobody is entirely clear why); insists he is not in love with clara (and vice versa), though none of the ghosts believe either of them. quicker to accept the existence of ghosts than clara herself

jack harkness. died in the 1200s of dysentery and was not actually called jack harkness, but he likes the name so he's keeping it. makes up a variety of outlandish stories about how he supposedly died, and since he's one of the earliest ghosts no one can challenge him

romana (i). catholic noble, died somewhere in the 15th century (pre-henry vii). various references are made to her death but it's unclear how she actually died. not entirely convinced on catholicism anymore but she sticks to it to annoy edward

the first doctor, better known in this universe as dr. edward hughes (the s is silent (dr who haha geddit)). died of tuberculosis, and doesn't like to talk about it since that's one of the things he was supposed to be able to cure. much more morally... relaxed than most other inhabitants of the pollard house. died shortly after henry viii's break from rome and gets into a lot of arguments with romana about catholicism vs protestantism even though neither of them really believe in it. romana refuses to call him dr. hughes like everyone else and it drives him mad; he calls her "young lady" every so often and she retorts that she's a century older than him

the eighth doctor, better known as thomas jonathan smith. a 19th-century terrible Romantic poet who died after ice skating on ice that was rather thinner than he expected. dramatic, drips water all over the place, and in love with fitz (but happily flirts with most of the ghosts. and clara. actually, he keeps on trying to flirt with clara, but then he sees fitz and loses his train of thought)

fitz kreiner. died in the 1960s under circumstances he'd rather not mention. the important part is that he died with his guitar and unlike eight's poetry he's actually very good at playing it. in love with eight. doesn't particularly like most of the other ghosts

the brigadier. died in the 1970s after getting drunk and crashing his car on the grounds of the pollard house. happily calls edward dr. hughes but always pronounces the s, which annoys edward extremely. fairly similar to the captain in bbc ghosts, but less war-oriented and slightly less repressed

grace holloway. died in the 1990s after being stabbed to death by "bruce," an undercover fbi agent. it's really quite embarrassing. finds edward's morals uncomfortable and very nearly lost her patience with him after the throwing clara out a window incident. still somewhat unused to being a ghost, and doesn't particularly like clara since clara recognises her from the scandal involved with her death

[docmary]

Vaccine hesitancy, molecular mimicry, and blood clots (oh my!)

There were many mixed messages in the world of coronavirus last week. Just as it appears that Michigan is the lead state in the fourth wave of the virus, the US is about to hit a “vaccine wall” as demand drops for vaccinations even though the supply is greatly improved. In the first three months of the rollout for the Pfizer, Moderna, and the Johnson & Johnson/Jantzen (J&J) vaccines, getting shots into arms of the most vulnerable has required a full court press from public health departments and the healthcare establishment, as well as persistence on the part of those trying to wrangle an appointment. The results from state to state have been uneven.

Figure 1

So far 14 states have administered fewer than 75% of the doses distributed to them with Alabama having the lowest vaccination rate per capita. Twenty states have administered more than 80% of the doses distributed to them with the most vaccinations per capita in New Hampshire.[1]

Vaccine Hesitancy:

The good news for those who want to get vaccinated is that it is a whole lot easier to get an appointment now. That said, the goal of herd immunity is a long way off and with demand dropping for jabs, we may not get there. Vaccine hesitancy is an important reason for declining demand and that is a shifting picture.

In a study that was put out by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) in December, 52% of Black Americans said they would “wait and see” before signing up for the vaccine while only 20% said they wanted the shot as soon as possible. The share of Black people who were skeptical of the vaccines was higher than for White respondents (36%) and Latinx (43%).[2]

By March of this year, 55% of Black respondents to another KFF survey said they had been vaccinated or wanted the vaccine as soon as possible. Twenty-four percent were still holding back. Blacks have been one of the hardest hit demographics of COVID-19 and that has, no doubt, played a part in changing minds. Another possible reason for the turnaround in willingness to get vaccinated is because there has been a concerted outreach effort tapping trusted sources such as Barack Obama, sports stars, and other influencers such as Black ministers to address vaccine hesitancy among Black people.

The Urban Institute’s September 2020 Coronavirus Tracking Survey, a nationally representative survey of adults ages 18-64, asked people whether in the last 12 months they had ever felt a doctor, other health care provider, or their staff judged them unfairly or discriminated against them based on their race/ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, a disability, or a health condition and about the consequences of these experiences. This survey indicated that perceptions of discrimination and unfair judgement while seeking health care were higher among Black adults than among Hispanic and White adults in the previous 12 months (September 2019-September 2020).[3]

Figure 2

A “food desert” is described as an urban area that does not have a grocery store within one mile or a rural area that does not have one within ten miles. There is also a “pharmacy desert” that generally occurs in primarily Black neighborhoods in urban areas as well as in rural areas. People of color are less likely to have a family primary care provider and so access to information about the individual’s risks and benefits of getting vaccinated from a trusted source, much less getting an appointment for the vaccine itself, is often more challenging than it is for White people. My guess is that these experiences and the barriers to appropriate care contributed to the initial skepticism among people of color generally and Black people specifically in the initial rollout phase.

FIGURE 3

Meanwhile, Republicans and Evangelical Christians were the most likely groups to say they will not get vaccinated, according to the KFF survey.[4] I do not have an explanation for that. I also don’t know how wearing masks got politicized last year. If anyone has an explanation that doesn’t involve a gang of Democratic, cannibal pedophiles, I am really interested in hearing it.

Molecular mimicry and autoimmune disease:

There are science-based reasons that some are reluctant to get vaccinated. An issue that has been little discussed publicly is molecular mimicry. The theory is that some part of the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 and is replicated in our cells, is similar enough to our own tissues that the immune system starts attacking our own cells thinking that those cells are the virus. Thus, the vaccine could trigger an autoimmune disease like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, or other autoimmune condition.

In one study looking for similar protein sequences between the SARS-CoV-2 virus with protein sequences in humans and other mammals, as well as other human coronaviruses, the number of shared protein sequences at two particular sites was quite high for humans, rats, and mice but miniscule or not at all with other human coronaviruses, cats, dogs, rabbits, chimpanzees, gorillas, or macaques.[5] Sadly, the investigators did not include bats, which I think of as flying rats, but that’s just me. It has been hypothesized that the original source of COVID-19 was from bats. Could the virus have molecular mimicry with bats? If so, what does that mean for the species?

These authors believe that much of the damage seen in the “cytokine storm” that causes the worst damage in COVID-19 may, in fact, be due to this molecular mimicry between the virus and, for example, lung tissue. It should also be noted that molecular mimicry from the whole SARS-CoV-2 virus is much more likely than it is from a small part of the virus (the spike protein). If the vaccine can trigger an autoimmune disease, so can the whole virus.

The presence and level of autoantibodies (AAbs) that attack our own cells, frequently detected in patients with COVID-19, are significantly associated with hospitalization and more severe prognosis. Clinically, these patients are more likely to have respiratory distress, acute cardiac injury, acute kidney injury, multi-organ dysfunction with such common complications as coagulopathy and thrombocytopathy (put a pin in this one as it is also at play with blood clots). [6]

Blood Clots and the J&J and AstraZeneca (AZ) vaccines:

Last week the J&J vaccine rollout was put on pause by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) because six women developed unusual blood clots after receiving this vaccination. This was six out of seven million shots given. Some saw this as an over-reaction by the FDA that would likely lead to more vaccine hesitancy. However, these blood clots are different from clots that occur from “the usual suspects” like oral contraceptives and smoking.

Figure 4

A normal number of platelets is between 150,000-450,000 per microliter of blood (there are 1,000 microliters in one milliliter). If you have less than 150,000 platelets per microliter, you have a deficiency called thrombocytopenia. In the clots associated with the viral vector vaccines (J&J in the US and AZ in Europe), the platelets tend to stick together in the veins of the brain, which causes a blockage known as a cerebral venous system thromboembolism (CVST). This creates back pressure of blood in the brain itself, causing damage in the same way a hemorrhagic stroke would. [7]

“Normal” clots are usually treated with a blood thinner called heparin. With vaccine-induced prothrombotic immune thrombocytopenia (VIPIT), there is a deficiency of platelets and so that treatment would only make things worse. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the FDA are getting the word out to doctors not to use heparin, they are also looking for ways of figuring out which people are more at risk for this extremely rare complication. Putting the vaccine on pause was clearly the ethical thing to do and this kind of transparency gives me greater confidence in the vaccine rollout.

As is the case with molecular mimicry, the danger of VIPIT happening if a person gets COVID-19 is much higher than it is from either the J&J or the AZ vaccine.

“…If the mechanism is the same, one can speculate that the high occurrence in COVID-19 vs. vaccination is because the whole virus is more thrombogenic [likely to cause clots] than the spike protein alone.” Paolo Madeddu, professor of experimental medicine at the University of Bristol[8]

Symptoms associated with VIPIT include headache, tiny red spots under the skin, blurred vision, fainting or loss of consciousness, impaired movement in parts of the body, or coma. With either of these vaccines these blood clots, so far, only occurs 4-20 days after vaccination. Scientists believe that symptoms before or after that window are likely due to another cause.

It is important to note that COVID-19 itself has been reported to lead to thrombocytopenia (low blood platelets) in up to 41% of positive patients, with the figure going up to 95% of those with severe disease.[9]

Cause for cautious optimism:

Two separate studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine on April 9 indicated that in the case of the AZ vaccine, used in Europe, VIPIT was due to rogue antibodies against platelet factor 4 (PF4). This complication is similar to heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT) and is diagnosed and treated the same way. It can be diagnosed with a lab test called ELISA that is pre-treated with PF4. If there is a big immune response, that means the patient has VIPIT. To be clear, there are lots of things that can cause blood clots and health professionals want to know what the cause is because the appropriate treatment is dependent on what is causing the problem. VIPIT from the AZ vaccine is treated with the administration of intravenous immunoglobins (IVG) and anti-coagulants. The J&J vaccine was not used in either of these studies and so we do not yet know if the same is true for that vaccine, but both are the same type of (viral vector) vaccine and both use an adenovirus as the viral vector.[10]

If we can get the one-and-done J&J vaccine back in use safely, that would be especially helpful for vaccinating unsheltered people. It would also be much easier to use in rural areas because J&J can be stored in a regular refrigerator unlike the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines that must be kept frozen.

My take:

For those who choose not to get vaccinated, for whatever reason, hoping to ride the coronavirus out, you should know that even without a vaccine, the SARS epidemic that hit Asia in 2002 did eventually go away, or, more likely, mutated to a less lethal virus. It took four years, but it can happen. However, that is not what always happens. Case in point, smallpox, which was around since at least the fourth century until it was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1980. I don’t think I know anyone who has had smallpox and I may not know anyone who knows anyone who has had smallpox. In that case, the vaccine worked as intended.

Maybe you may feel like you are strong and healthy and even if you got COVID-19, you are unlikely to get significantly sick. Consider the possibility that you could be asymptomatic but still spread the disease. There are just no options that are completely risk free. Choose wisely.

[1]Romeo, A. (4/15/2021). America is about to hit a “vaccine wall” as demand drops—with or without Johnson & Johnson, Yahoo News. [2]Bunn, C. (4/12/2021). Vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans has turned a corner. Here’s why.”, NBC News. [3]Gonzalez, D., Skopor, L., McDaniel, M., Kenney, G.M. (4/2021). Perceptions of discrimination and unfair judgement while seeking health care, findings from the September 11-28 Coronavirus Tracking Survey, Urban Institute Health Policy Center. Retrieved from: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/103953/perceptions-of-discrimination-and-unfair-judgment-while-seeking-health-care_0.pdf [4] Hamel, L., Lopez, L., Kearney, A., Brodie, M.(3/30/2021) KFF COVID-19 monitor: March 2021. Retrieved from: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-march-2021/ [5]Kanduc, D., Shoenfeld, Y. (9/18/2020). Molecular mimicry between SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein and mammalian proteomes: implications for the vaccine, Immunol. Res. doi: 10.1007/s12026-020-09152-6 [6]Macela, A, Kubelkovak, K. (3/22/2021). Why does SARS-Co-V-2 infection induce autoantibody production? Pathogens, 10(3). doi: 10.3390/pathogens10030380 [7]Taylor, A. (4/16/2021). Blood clot risks: comparing AstraZenica vaccine and the contraceptive pill, The Conversation. Retrieved from: https://theconversation.com/blood-clot-risks-comparing-the-astrazeneca-vaccine-and-the-contraceptive-pill-158652 [8]Russell, P. (4/15/2021). Vaccines carry far lower risk for rare blood clots than COVID, study shows, Medscape News UK [9] Op cit Taylor, A. (4/9/2021). [10] Grenacher, A., et. al. (4/9/2021). Thrombocytic thrombocytopenia after ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination, NEJM. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa2104840Schulz,NH, et. al. (4/9/2021). Thrombocytic thrombocytopenia after ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination, NEJM. doi: 10/1056/NEJMoa2104882

[jinmukangwrites]

Whumptober Day 19

Grief | Survivors Guilt

Ao3

-o-o-o-o-

It's a cold autumn night when Tim enters the manor. There's been an early snowfall this year, one that has Tim shrugging off his winters coat and hanging it up beside the manor's front door along with his gloves. 

He looks around the foyer, thankful to immediately spot Alfred walking towards him from the familiar hallway leading towards the study. However, any kind of good mood Tim was in from being back at the manor for the first time in what was probably close to a month leaves when Alfred gets close enough for him to see the little, worrying details.

He's not wearing a suit or tie. Just dress pants and a white collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up. There's spots of red on Alfred's sleeves... and a rag is held in his wrinkled hands, stained with blotchy pink spots.

And Tim suddenly remembers why he's here.

"Hi, Alfred," Tim greets as Alfred finally finishes approaching. He looks haggard. Likes he's been up all night. He probably has been. 

"Master Tim," Alfred says, offering a small smile. "I apologise for not greeting you earlier. I trust the travel wasn't unpleasant?"

Tim shakes his head. Roads were scary slippery, but because the snow is still fresh and the time’s approaching dawn, there wasn't much traffic to make Tim's drive from the penthouse towards Bristol too horrible. "It was fine. And you don't need to apologise… I'm sure you've been busy. Where is…?"

Alfred sighs, his hands running through the rag without much purpose. Alfred's shaken. Tim heard it was bad, but he didn't think it was this bad.

"Masters Dick and Bruce are both downstairs with Doctor Thompkins. Master Dick has yet to wake, but considering we've just finished surgery, I don't expect him to be awake in the near future."

"How bad is he?"

Alfred sighs and moves so he drapes the blood stained rag over his wrists. "Major head trauma is the worst of it. Some broken ribs, a snapped wrist, mostly bruises and cuts. Doctor Thompkins is hopeful that he'll make a full recovery in time."

"And… Damian?"

Damian was there right? He was a part of this whole catastrophe? Nightwing and Robin were supposed to be on a team up. With a sinking stomach, Tim realizes Damian must have watched Two-Face repeat his ever so famous beating of Nightwing tonight. 

Tim hopes Harvey Dent and his stupid grudges stay in Arkham for a very long time this time around. If Tim sees him any time soon, Tim's not sure he'll be able to pull his punches as much as he should. 

Alfred's voice pulls Tim out from his thoughts. "Master Damian is… outside. Near the Graveyard. I was just about to check up on him, it's rather cold out..."

"Know what?" Tim says. "I'll get him. You look like you could use a nap."

Alfred's face softens. "If you're sure… then I will begin making some hot chocolate for the two of you to warm up."

"Thanks, Alf," Tim replies, a genuine smile rebelliously appearing on his lips. 

After he shoves himself back in his jacket and gloves, he's sure he’s prepared for how cold it is outside in the October air. 

Immediately, he's pelted by a harsh, gray colored wind speckled with small, glittery flakes of snow. The snow is wet, immediately melting when it touches his coat, and just managing to glaze the grass, but regardless of that it's still cold. 

What's Damian doing at the Graveyard at this time with this weather?

The trek towards the Wayne Graveyard is mostly uneventful besides a few slip ups on the stone path. He almost falls on his ass once, but by the time he sees the gate towards the family graveyard, he's relatively unharmed. 

The moment Tim walks past the gates, his eyes immediately fly towards the back of the plot where a giant angelic statue stands, her face shrouded with a hood and her hands brought up in prayer. 

Jason Todd's grave, Tim feels, has always been a part of Tim's life. Because his life never really began until Robin, didn't it. Which is… depressing to say but he can't really call the years spent practically alone with his emotionally distant parents anything close to a life. Tim decides to head that way. If Damian is sitting at any grave, it's probably near the ones dug recently, and not the old, weathered ones filled with names belonging to Wayne's no one actually really knows about. 

Ya know, no one knows about until they’re revealed to have been a part of some super secret old-timey cult or something.

He's probably at Martha and Thomas's graves, wondering what it would be like to have known them. The most experience he has with grandparents is Ra's Al Ghul, and, well, no one wants that guy as a grandfather. 

However, when Tim finally sees the form of a small teen squatting besides a grave, it's one that's no longer… valid. But one that keeps it's gravestone anyway, the dates scratched off. 

Tim feels something try to crawl into his throat to choke him. 

Of course the grave Damian's visiting is Dick's. 

Tim immediately decides to make his approach more cautious than what he was initially planning. He can't… really think of a time where he's seen Damian sit at this grave, even while they thought Dick was actually dead. Tim was… off with the Teen Titans and if he remembers correctly Damian wasn't even in the country for long after he came back to life. Bruce got amnesia and for quite a long time, it was only Alfred and Bruce in the manor, living in a carefully constructed illusion that Bruce wasn't Batman and had never taken kids into his home. 

Tim wonders when Damian found out Dick "died". How did he react? Did anyone even try to reach out to tell him gently, or did he find out on his own?

"Hey," Tim greets softly, lowering himself down to Damian's level in front of the fake grave. He sits on the balls of his feet and curls his arms over his knees before he turns to really get a good look at Damian. 

The kid huffs in response, just staring ahead of him like the gravestone was the most interesting thing in the entire world. His cheeks and nose are red, a stark contrast to his normally dark complexion. His green eyes shine vividly too beneath his sopping wet black bangs. Tim wonders if he's been crying. However, he doesn't dare ask.

"Alfred's making hot chocolate," Tim continues, really feeling out of his league now. He doesn't know what to do. He's never had to confront a clearly vulnerable Damian before. "I don't think we should keep him waiting."

Damian blinks slowly, his gaze finally leaving the gravestone to flicker towards Tim. 

And if eyes were the windows to the soul, then Damian's eyes have always been barred for as long Tim's known him. Barred and locked and shielded by blackout curtains. Now though? They're a stained glass window, shattered and hanging by twisted metal framework thanks to a rock that has been thrown through. 

Tim can't recall ever seeing Damian like this before. It makes him ponder what really happened tonight. If Dick's injuries were simply because of an unfortunate Two-Face run in. Bruce called Tim over to help go over evidence, but now Tim gets the feeling the real reason he's been requested is because Damian's hurting in his own way too, and Bruce doesn't know how to deal with it. 

Not that Tim knows how to deal with it either. The only person that really knows Damian inside and out is the very person who's just finished fighting for his life thanks to a brutal beat down via a psychopath armed with a wooden baseball bat. Again.

"Timothy…" Damian finally speaks, and Tim suddenly feels a chill enter his bones that's not from the wind. "What is Robin's purpose?"

Tim swallows, forcing surprise to stay off his face. Where has this come from? 

"What do you mean?" Tim asks slowly. 

"Tt." Damian turns back towards the gravestone, his usual sound of annoyance sounding half-hearted and incredibly tired. "Just answer."

And it must show how wrong this all feels because Tim doesn't even get the urge to roll his eyes at the demand. He lets out a breath that turns into a visible vapor the moment it leaves his mouth. 

"I guess… it's different for everyone. There's no… job requirement when it comes to Robin. What it means can change on who wears the suit. As long as you wear the colors and fight alongside Batman, then you're Robin."

Damian frowns. "I was told Robin is supposed to be Batman's partner. Robin is supposed to watch Batman's back and protect him."

"Who told you that?" Tim asks before he could stop himself. Damian gives him an unimpressed look. "Oh. Lots of people, huh? Um… I guess protecting Batman is a big part of Robin. I know… that's the reason I became Robin. To save Bruce from his own darkness."

"Then… I am truly an awful Robin."

The words are so shocking that it takes Tim a second to realize a single drop of clear liquid that wasn't snow has dropped down Damian's cheek. 

"Richard died while I was gone," Damian continues, water in his voice. "Even if his death was really a ploy to go undercover… he still got captured and tortured. I wasn't… there to protect him. And now, all I could do was stand uselessly while Dent…"

Damian brings a hand to his cheek to wipe the next tear that tries to fall. The sleeve of his jacket folds up around his wrists to reveal rope burns that definitely look like they sting.

Tim thinks he has a clearer picture now. Damian was definitely there, tied down and held back as Two-Face beat Nightwing to a bloody pulp. 

Tim is so caught up trying to imagine what Damian is feeling, that he almost misses what's said next. 

"If Robin is supposed to protect Batman, then… then it should have been me."

"No," Tim turns so he's facing Damian more head on. More tears drip down his cheeks and Damian looks done with trying to wipe them away. He's looking at the gravestone like he's the one who put it there. That the only reason it's there in the first place is because he wasn't there to stop it. "No, you're not allowed to say that. I take it back, Robin isn't meant to protect Batman-"

"You just said-"

"I was wrong, okay?" 

Damian opens his mouth, then closes it. 

Tim has to take a moment to catch his breath and gather his thoughts. "Look… Damian… you're a kid. It's never a kids job to protect the guardian. It's their job to protect you."

"That's the issue, Timothy, he was protecting me." Damian wipes his eyes furiously, his cheeks growing redder but not because of the cold. "Two-Face wanted me, but Richard tricked Two-Face into letting him take my place. Richard died because of me, and stayed away because of me, and now he's- he's hurt because of me-"

"Stop it," Tim snaps. He can feel his heart beating so quickly. His stomach feels like it's in knots. Damian snaps his jaw shut with a tiny, barely choked off whimper that almost has Tim wanting to stand up, go to Gotham, and show Two-Face what a baseball bat looks like from the other end of the beating. "Just… stop. It's… none of this is your fault. And if Dick heard you saying things like this… that it should be you… he'd tell you the same stuff. 

"You didn't do anything wrong Damian. Sometimes… Batman gets hurt. But you can't hold yourself responsible for that. Sometimes Dick gets hurt to protect you… us, and we can't blame ourselves for that. Dick did what he thought was right, and it's our job now to make sure he gets better. Okay?"

Damian's silent. Sniffs. From the cold or from tears, Tim doesn't ask. 

He wakes in the chilling silence of the Wayne Graveyard until Damian finally jerks his head in a tiny, ridged nod. "I… understand."

"Good." Tim then rises to his feet and grabs Damian's bicep, dragging his little brother up with him. Damian stiffens at first, but eventually complies. Soon, Tim has his arm wrapped around Damian's shoulders. Damian sniffs again and wipes his eyes. 

"You said… Alfred was making hot chocolate?" He asks, and Tim smiles. 

"He sure is. You think we can convince him to put in marshmallows this time?" 

Damian puts on a watered-down thoughtful face. Then nods. "I'm sure if we work together, we can also get cookies."

"Sounds like a plan, gremlin."

"Tt."

"Oh, don't give me that look. You like the nickname."

"I do not."

“Yes you do. Look! You're smiling!"

"You're seeing things, Timothy."

[everythingoesnk]

Don’t Let It Break Your Heart

summary; you break up w/ him & one day you get to.. catch up?

word count; 3 483

disclaimers; the group is only famous in their hometown.

warnings; :)

********

You glared at John in silence.

He was reading the newspaper while breathing in the thick grassy aroma of the tea.

Having swallowed the last sip, he put the cup down.

Rain hitting the window pane, you felt a chill settle along your spine. Unrelated to the coldness resulting from the winter temperatures, the reason of your fragility had nothing to do with the atmosphere of the room. Truth is you had to turn on the radiators to somehow keep the flat warm in that aspect.

“Do you have a cig with you?” you asked, slouched in your chair.

John looked up to you as if he had momentarily forgotten you were there, shook his head and concentrated the attention back to the headlines.

He was ploughing through the Vietnam War updates.

As he learned about the ongoing consequences and impact the conflict had on society and politics, his expressions changed dramatically. Truly questioning himself if faith on humanity was worth keeping, John didn’t acknowledge until then how moments ago you dropped your head down on your chest.

The sandwich you so lazily prepared was still on your plate, untouched.

His eyebrows snapped together.

“Aren’t you hungry?”

You picked your head up after noticing he was talking to you.

“No, I’m fine”

“You’ve lost weight” he added.

“I have”

“You’re too thin”

Whether it was your bottom lip’s subtle tremor or the moistness in your eyes, John figured he had touched a nerve.

His mind travelled years behind to the start of your relationship. To how your figure was a strong impediment for you to get intimate with him, at least in the beginning. Then he helped you understand you are perfect the way you are, no matter what absurd prototypes you think you have to fit in. He refused to stop insisting until you had it seared in your soul that you are the most resplendent angel in his eyes.

“These measurements are ridiculous. Who the fuck is saying you have to respond to such ignorant standards? A magazine for brats who want to become the next Miss Stick across the globe? For fuck’s sake, look at that one. One gust of wind and she’s gone to fucking Jupiter”

John wasn’t angry, but he looked like he was. It bugged him that you wouldn’t realise how freaking hot you were.

“I’m not trying to look like them, I just want to start watching what I eat,” you said with your face covered in red, embarrassed that you were caught prying into that section.

John stared at you. “I’ll support you if that’s what you want, whatever. But modifying your shape ‘cause these nits” he picked the magazine up to allude to the assholes that wrote the article, “are convinced it’s the only way you’re allowed to feel beautiful oughtn't to be an incentive”

Reminiscing on the memory you managed a smile. It was a weak smile, but you glanced down with it lingering on your lips as you rewound the scene in your head one more time.

When you finally looked up into his face, yours was like a bullet through his heart.

The grin had disappeared and you seemed distant and sick. John felt a severe prickle of agony.

“Do you want me to drive you to the doctor’s?”

A film of culpability adhered to your skin was giving you a headache.

Husky with emotion, your voice cracked when you attempted to speak. Fear spewed into your throat as you thought of ways to approach the topic for it to be as painless as possible.

“We need to talk”

“About?”

In front of you was the man that instilled in you so many good values. Among them unconditional true love. And that’s what you wanted him to remember, despite your final decision. He’d have you forever and always until the day you died.

“About us”

John swallowed.

He didn’t read many novels nor obsessed over romantic plots in films, but he wasn’t an idiot. If someone wants to talk about their relationship, especially in the state you were in, it’s no good.

Impatience was rising in him.

“You see, lately I haven’t… I… Hold on, I don’t know how to…” you stuttered when you saw him stroking his chin using the back of his fingers, expectant.

You swept your hair behind your ears, a habit you had which helped you collect yourself.

In a beat, not after a long exhale, words began tumbling out your mouth. Along with every syllable you sensed the beat of your heart accelerating.

“John, you… you’re my best friend. I wouldn’t change for anything in the world what we created, what we have. I’m so grateful I found you. You’re special and unique, and everything we lived together has proven how much we care and love each other. I… What I’m trying to say…”

Pressing the back of your hand against your nose, you lowered your head and shut your eyes. He could perfectly see you shaking.

Commotion sharpened his voice.

“Are you dumping me?”

Too choked to utter a sound, lost as to what else to add next, you kept quiet.

John scrambled to his feet, silent tears stinging his eyes. He turned his back on you as plenty of feelings were rattling in the most obscure depths of his mind intoxicatingly fast. He could feel your gaze on him as he crossed the length of the chamber to put distance between you two.

For a brief second you thought he was going to walk through into the entrance area and leave.

Stunned, John rounded on you with lips tightened into a straight line.

“I’m impressed, honestly. I never would have guessed someone could throw away that easily so many years—”

“Don’t go down that path” you cut him off, raising a hand as a warning.

John looked you over judgmentally.

“What do you expect from me?”

“Stop, please. You’re making it more difficult”

He sighed sharply.

“You met someone”

“What? N-no!”

“What the fuck is it then?! I thought we were happy!” he yelled, strolling closer towards you, trying not to let rage consume him even more.

“Shut up for a moment and I’ll explain myself!”

He chewed the inside of his cheek and grabbed roughly with one hand the stool where he’d been seating earlier. Placing it before you he then slumped in it, hands folded in his lap. He was the type to lose it rather quickly, his temper taking the best of him. But although it was nothing new to you, his manners were getting under your skin.

This was his way to cope with things. He got angry first and cried after.

“Pay attention to what I’m going to say. I love you very much, I do. And I don’t regret one single decision I’ve ever made because they led me to you. But this can happen, and it’s not something I have control over. I tried to stop it because you’re the love of my life and I’d never want to intentionally hurt you” you remarked.

John listened as the tears built up.

It took every ounce of the strength he had to not let them roll. The unbearable feeling of his heart crashing deep was freaking him out.

You tried to keep your spirit light to facilitate the situation even though you were hurting too.

“You’re a wonderful human being. You inspire me and you mean a lot me”

John clenched his jaw.

“Say you’re leaving me already” he interrupted, a hard expression printed on his features.

“John…” you sighed and buried your face in your hands, annoyed by the inappropriate silliness emerging from him.

“No, like,” he continued, scratching his eyebrow, mockery full mode in his tone, “it’s funny that you’re breaking up with me but have to mention how fantastic I am. Identical to when someone dies, suddenly they’re the shit. It’s so fucking unnecessary”

“You’re a dick” you condemned.

“Am I a wonderful human being or a dick? Sorry, it’s confusing” he pressed, following you around when you jumped out of the chair and moved to the hallway.

You weren’t in for adding fuel to the conversation that turned into a fight because of him.

“Don’t stop talking, (Y/N). I want to hear everything”

Exhaustion and sadness spiking on you you met his intense gaze.

“I don’t have a magic wand to shake and make things go back to how they were” you murmured, holding back the desire to cry your heart out. “John, I fell out of love”

As if he turned deaf abruptly, your sobs didn’t reach his ears.

John walked to the closest wall, bent forward and rested his forehead against it, right arm above his head to, in a sense, create a roof to be under. Like that would make him disappear from your sight.

You heard him curse.

You brought your hands up and put them together close to your mouth. Swallowing the need to release and burst into tears, you eventually saw what you’d been so frightened to witness, which was John falling apart before your very presence.

“I’m so sorry”, you whimpered. “It must’ve been the monotony. Or that I know you too well. Like I said I still love you, but I don’t feel the same anymore”

John wasn’t fully there yet. But one specific word brought him back.

“What ‘monotony’ are you talking about?” he turned his head at you.

A daunting shudder shot through your body when his eyes bored into yours.

“Well… You’re always out with the boys composing and rehearsing. I’m not entirely complaining because I know you’re a hard worker, but I do feel lonely”

You moved to Liverpool to support him in his dream of becoming a successful and famous musician.

John straightened and narrowed his eyes at you.

“Are you serious?” he asked, stupefaction flooding his veins.

“What?” you frowned.

“Just so we’re clear, you’re putting the blame on me for being locked up in this flat and not stepping one foot outside. Is that it? Is this what this is all about?”

Did you hear right?

“It’s not my fault you haven’t gotten a job or met new people to kill the time”

“Hang on, are you listening to yourself? My home is in Bristol, I came here after you begged me to move because you needed me by your side. You dare to say that when the main reason I’m in Liverpool is ‘cause of you? Mimi warned me you were a tough cookie, but a cretin? I didn’t see that coming, mate”

John opened his mouth to apologize but you resumed your speech.

“Instead of taking your fury on me you should dwell on what caused me to stop staying awake until you came through the door at dawn or kissing you when you laid your head down next to mine on the pillow” you argued, salty tears streaming down your cheeks.

Sentence after the other, heartbroken by his ineptness to keep the composure like an adult without having to attack you, you stepped away and clutched the doorknob of the bedroom door.

“Doesn’t it ring a bell that up to now you haven’t been able to get a glimpse that something was wrong? Have you been in the relationship with me, John? Or you left me alone in it?”

This was his way to cope with things.

He got angry first and cried after.

//

On tiptoes in order to reach the cereal box you wanted you went over the other things you needed to buy, mentally checking the list. The shopping cart wasn’t at its capacity limit but it weighed badly. Your fingers were sore so you put it down for an instant.

An unexpected harmless push from behind almost made you knock the shelf down.

Luckily one foreign hand reached out to grab your arm and pull you back before you fell.

“Damn it”

You glanced down at the shopping cart to see if the eggs cracked, given that you tripped and hit it. They didn’t.

The hand that saved you from falling deepened the grip after hearing your voice.

You looked back and nearly fainted.

“Oh my God,” you breathed.

“Long time no see, eh?” John smirked.

Your heart lifted.

Face alive with one large enigmatic grin, John hugged you and then drew back.

Nerves tingling and blood pounding in your ears, you brought your hand to your chest. You didn’t remember the last time you did lines. This wasn’t a side effect of being high or hopped up on drugs for fun like in the early days. He definitely wasn’t an illusion.

In a quavering tone, you said the first thing that occurred.

“What are you doing in London?”

“Paul’s getting married” he explained.

His look of authentic joy just wouldn’t dissipate.

“You look good” he claimed.

Cheeks flushing in joviality, you lowered your head. Loud silence filled the air. A tender half-smile hovered on John’s lips nevertheless.

“You live here now?”

“Yes. I…” a blush crawled up to your face after realising how slow you were acting. “Forgive me, I’m a little bit—”

“Shocked? I get it, dear. When I first saw you I froze. You know how I am. I couldn’t come up to you, pat you on the shoulder and say ‘hi’. I had to fake crashing into you”

You smiled shyly. Tilting your head up, you gave yourself a moment to just take him in.

Eight years passed. There wasn’t any drastic physical change to the eye when it came to you, meanwhile he’d grown his hair a few more inches and overall naturally looked more mature. At the time you were sure you were going to spend your entire life with him, therefore that you would get to see his growth as you aged together. Considering it’s not the case, you were more than grateful that the universe decided to send him your way, even if it was briefly.

Your pulse amusingly escalated.

“I do live here now, yes. I like it. You know I’ve always been an uptown girl” you said, returning to the point where you left it.

“Since when? I thought you went back to Bristol”

John watched you bite your lower lip.

“Mummy! Mum? Mum, you promised we’d get ice cream”

He dropped his gaze to a kid who’d turned the corner and began clinging to your coat. Bewilderment saturated in John’s face, you felt your heart racing relentlessly in agitation. Rubbing your hands on your thighs to remove the sweat, you placed one on your son’s head and smiled warmly down at him. You took the tub from him and stuffed it into the cart. Getting in one knee, you held his hands and locked eyes.

“I’m going to introduce you to a very important person. I need you to be polite, okay?”

“Alright,” he nodded in agreement, clearly unaware of how much of a deal this was to you.

You rose and turned to John. He’d been contemplating quietly.

“Stu, this is John. John… this is Stuart” due to the meaning of it all taking a toll on you, you started to weep. Although you hurried to wipe the tears away so your son wouldn’t get upset.

“Hello,” Stu said, cocking his head to the side. Not caring too much, really.

John wanted to ask, but he didn’t. He had the answer already by staring into your wet eyes.

Images of the five of you, because Astrid and George joined the gang soon after, in Stuart’s attic hanging out whilst he snapped photographs and asked for everyone to pose for a quick drawing filled his mind, projecting every laugh and every smile that took place within those walls.

Stuart Sutcliffe had been your best friend, who happened to be John’s best friend as well.

As much as John wanted to curl up into a ball and cry for the rest of the day he held it together: the fact that you named your son after him squeezed his heart tightly. He couldn’t help but smirk through a sniff eyeing Stu, noticing how he had inherited your eyes and their soft but ardent effect on people.

“Honored to meet you, little man” he held out his hand to shake Stu’s.

When Stu grabbed John’s hand, John pulled a face and exclaimed ‘ouch!’.

“My goodness, you’re so strong!”

Your boy’s mouth curved into a timid petite smile. He looked down at his hand as if checking whether it grew bigger muscles and he didn’t know. Then, he hid his face from John and stood behind you, wrapping your leg with his short arms.

You were still getting rid of any proof on your face that you’d been crying. John pretended to not take notice that he saw and focused on Stu only.

Carrying most of the talking, John learned that Stu had great interest in nature which he shared with friends from preschool. He was fascinated by how much he reminded him of you. He was your son, of course, but something about the way he expressed himself and moved was mesmerising. John instantly grew an overprotective feeling towards him.

“Uh, John?” you intruded, voice caught in your throat, small and emotional. John met your eyes. “We have to go. I still have to cook dinner and—”

“But mum!” Stu complained. He didn’t want the conversation with John to end just yet.

“Sorry, babes. It’s late and daddy’s waiting. Remember you promised him you’d tidy up your room?”

Stu sighed.

You found John’s eyes again but you closed your mouth after having opened it. The twinkle in his eyes had changed.

He didn’t know why it affected him that much hearing about the existence of another man in your life, he should have had seen it coming. Like, Stuart wasn’t there only because of you exclusively. It just didn’t happen to click until you mentioned him. He blinked a few times and touched the nape of his neck. This just confirmed that he would never have one more opportunity to make you happy. The opportunity he so much fantasized about.

By the way John was avoiding eye contact, you connected the dots and realised what he was thinking.

“I’m sorry” he uttered.

Your heart broke.

“I didn’t take care of you how you deserved”

“John, don’t. I forgave you a long time ago”

“Still,” he said, dropping his hand and inching forward to ruffle Stu’s hair. “You needed to hear that I know where I failed”

You didn’t want to cry again. You patted your son’s back.

“C’mon, can you get the shopping cart for me?”

“Of course he can,” John said and rolled his eyes, making Stu giggle against the one finger he was holding up to his mouth. “He broke my fingers, he could carry all the carts in the store with just an eyelash if he wanted to. Am I right, Stuart?”

“You are!”

“Oh, alright. Wait for me at the queue, love”

Stu waved goodbye to John and did as told.

“He’s so you it’s ridiculous” John commented, following him with his eyes, making sure nothing happened to him.

You embraced John in your arms without saying a word. He didn’t expect it to be as desperate and urgent and that’s why he didn’t move for a moment, registering the love your touch transmitted. He saw Stu staring at you two from afar and it made him recall when he kissed you for the first time, Stuart also peeking in and grinning at both.

He attracted you to him and whispered close to your skin that he’d missed you. You did the same.

You withdrew then and smiled wholeheartedly.

“Extend my congratulations to Paul”

“This is the last time I’m seeing you?”

You shook your head and laughed because you spoke at the same time.

“It isn’t. I really want Cornai to meet you”

“Mum! I’m next!” Stu shouted, stressed that you weren’t there to pay.

“I’m coming!” you pulled out your purse a pen and a piece of paper and wrote your address as smooth as you could so he could read it easily. “There, drop by whenever you want. You’re always welcomed. Take care, John. Please, aye?”

He nodded and bowed his head to kiss your cheek.

“See ya” you exclaimed, and jogged to be next to Stuart.

John smiled to himself, storing into his pocket the note.

Waiting for Stu to buckle up, you pressed your hand to your cheek where John’d kissed you.

You appreciated John a lot and it was true that he’d been your first love but you’d been wrong about one thing. The real love of your life was seating in the back seat, slowly dozing off.

Before starting the car, you thanked the universe again for running out of eggs.

[strangedreamings]

1. getting on the wrong flight

I modified it slightly to match the Victorian Era setting.

Wrong Ticket, Right Train (AO3)

Sherlock Holmes huffed in annoyance. He was in desperate need of a cigarette and would have lit one, in complete defiance of the No Smoking sign in the window, if it weren’t for his compartment-mate. Despite his rather Bohemian lifestyle, Sherlock prided himself on being a gentleman, and a gentleman never smoked in front of a lady.

And the woman sitting across from him was nothing if not a lady. By the calluses on her fingers, he could tell she was a doctor, specifically a pathologist, and the cuffs of her jacket told him her late father had also been a doctor. Despite her scientific background, her choice in reading material (Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice) told him she was a romantic at heart. That seemed odd to him, since she was clearly thirty and had never been married.

Surely a romance-minded woman would be married by now. He examined her further. A classic English rose complexion, reddish-brown hair that a more fanciful person would call cinnamon, large brown eyes that reflect higher than average intelligence, a small and delicate frame that belies her strength if she’s dealing with corpses all day.

Despite his frequent declarations that love and sentiment were the enemies of intellect, there were times when Sherlock felt undeniable attraction to a member of the fairer sex. Being physically and intellectually drawn to Irene Adler was the closest he’d come to changing his mind about romance, and he had given The Woman little thought after she’d left England.

Now, though, he felt … something as he regarded the lady in front of him and of course felt the need to analyze it. Attraction, certainly. She’s a beautiful woman and if I’m being honest with myself, I tend to prefer petite and slender brunettes. Admiration of her intelligence and perseverance – being a female doctor in such a male-dominated field of study cannot be easy. But even after suppressing such fanciful thoughts for so long, I can tell there’s something else, but what?

He pondered the issue of his undefined feelings until a conductor came by to check their tickets. Sherlock dutifully presented his ticket just as the lady did hers, but while his ticket was returned without difficulty, hers was not.

“Miss,” the conductor said, “this ticket is for Bristol. This is the train to London.”

Her eyes went wide with surprise and dismay. “Oh no! I’m supposed to be in Bristol, I’m starting a new position after the holidays.”

“You can catch a train to Bristol in the morning, Miss, but you’ll still need to pay for a ticket to London.”

She shook her head sadly. “I spent the last of the money I had with me on this ticket…”

Realizing what he felt was an interesting mix of possessiveness and protectiveness, Sherlock mentally shoved his feelings aside as he stepped in. “Allow me to pay the difference,” he said as he pulled his billfold from the pocket of his jacket.

“But you don’t even know me,” she protested weakly.

“Nonsense, I know more than enough.” He handed over the amount the conductor stated then turned to her when they were alone again. “Sherlock Holmes.”

“Oh! You’re the detective from The Strand. I’ve read all of Dr. Watson’s stories.” She held out her hand to him. “I’m Margaret Hooper.”

Sherlock knew she expected him to shake her hand, so he surprised her by kissing her knuckles. “A pleasure to meet you, Dr. Hooper.”

She grinned. “I’ve been deduced already, I see. Tell me, what was it that gave me away?”

He grinned back. “Your hands. What they don’t tell me is why a pathologist would be willing to hide away in Bristol when she could be in London.”

“No one in London was hiring,” Dr. Hooper said with a shrug.

“Nonsense – I know for a fact that St. Bartholomew’s is in desperate need of a competent pathologist. If you will permit me, as soon as we are in London, I will contact Dr. Stamford and arrange for an interview.”

“There’s no need-”

“Of course there is,” he cut in, his eyes twinkling. “I demand the best from my colleagues, and St. Bartholomew’s current pathologist is mediocre.”

The young lady was torn, he could see it in her eyes, but all she asked was, “But where would I live?”

He had an answer for that too. “My landlady, Mrs. Hudson, is friends with another landlady down the street, a Mrs. Turner. Her last tenant recently left, so she has a vacancy.”

“This is all so sudden…”

Sherlock softened his smile. “Perhaps it is destiny that led you to the wrong train.”

She considered his words for a moment then, decision made, she smiled back. “Perhaps it is.”

[createdbybadhands]

My story

So, here goes. I don’t have a clue what I’m doing but, for some reason, this morning when I woke up I felt the need to anonymously share what my story is. I don’t tend to talk about the experience I have had or how it’s led me to what I’m currently doing, because I don’t know how people will react. 

So maybe I should drop the whole I’m mentally ill bomb. 

I’m mentally ill.

There it’s dropped. 

This post will feature details of peri-natal mental health.

So on December 14th 2018 I found out that I was pregnant. My then fiance, now husband, was recovering from a back operation and that moment of showing him the pee stick, with joyful tears streaming down my face, he awkwardly pulled himself from the chair and slowly made his way to me so that we could share a hug in the moment. 

Sadly my pregnancy was awful, the above is probably the happiest moment that would resemble a hallmark gift card we had. Before you get pregnant, you imagine it will be this amazing, I feel so special, experience. The pressure to be constantly giddy was extreme. Obviously, I knew about the not so nice parts, morning sickness, the need pee...constantly and suddenly hating what was my favourite foods and drinks. 

Also, the coffee withdrawal was real. 

But I didn’t know that you could be depressed and so anxious that you can’t leave the house alone. 

It crept up on me, week by week the feelings got heavier, the anxiety took over. I stopped driving because I was so scared that I would crash, or how and where do I park? (the works car park was insane at this time). As March came up, my husband realised that I wasn’t myself. I couldn’t go to uni anymore (I was doing a masters in design), especially if I knew friends was working from home. I used to get the train to Bristol to go to uni, but it became this metal beast that induced heart palpitations and just the thought of boarding it. My husband encouraged me to seek help. Thankfully, my appointment was with the best GP I have ever met, he was kind, understanding and listened without judgement. He explained that hormones really can mess you up and signed me off work. 

All this seemed temporary, but, blimey, it most certainly wasn’t. As time went by I got iller, I went onto anti-depressants and went to counselling, but I wasn’t making progress.  My midwife, an amazing woman who went above and beyond for me, she referred me onto mental health services, which eventually meant I was taking on by the perinatal mental health team. And I was so fortunate to have this support. I was also going to classes for expectant mums who may be struggling in some way, they were also so amazing, I can’t tell you how amazing they really were. I was suddenly surrounded by people who understood that little bit more. My friends, they tried, and some were brilliant, but others stuck their foot in it, accidentally, but still... awkward. I couldn’t handle the comparisons from what I was going through to what they thought I was going through. Being told I was just stressed because I took too much on, some how blaming me for the failings of the hormones in my body. Like I chose to be ill. 

As time went on I differed my final year at uni, I wasn’t able to do the work. I tried to go back to work, but couldn’t. I also had a wedding to plan (just to clarify, not a shotgun wedding we booked the date way before I found out I was pregnant) but my husband had to take on a lot of the wedding planning, bless him, he took on a lot.

So fast forwarding a bit, this time was a lot of crying, sitting and eating, it wasn’t a pretty sight. I tried to prep for baby coming, but every time we went to buy something I had a panic attack, even just looking at clothes, because it had to be perfect, I had to be perfect but didn’t know how to be. 

I should quickly clarify, a lot of my thoughts weren’t about not wanting a baby, it was about me not being good enough for her and she’d be better off if I wasn’t here. 

So a little more fast forwarding, despite having such amazing support, my mental health deteriorated further and at 35 weeks pregnant I voluntarily went into a Mother and Baby Unit (MBU). 

For those who don’t know, MBU’s are mental health wards for mothers who are suffering from perinatal mental health illness. At the time, I was talked into going, because I didn’t want to be away from my husband. The closest MBU is still an hours drive away in a different town. 

I didn’t think I would be there long, maybe a couple of weeks. I was very wrong. I found out that the average stay is 6 weeks (I was actually there for 3 months), this meant I would have my baby there, which I hated the idea of. 

Again, the people who worked with me were so brilliant and so caring. They saved my life. I am fortunate to have met them all (even the one person who worked there that wound me up, and had very poor tv choice ha). It’s strange looking back at the MBU. I have a fondness for the staff, but a hatred for having to be there. It’s odd. You felt constantly watched, because you was. I had my own room but they would come look through a little window to make sure your ok, every hour, even through the night. It’s bizarre how used to it you become. You also had baby monitors in your room, in case you needed help with the baby, but it also felt weird to know I could be heard (I could switch it off when with visitors or on the phone, they weren’t that nosey). 

Last night I had the weirdest feeling, I was in bed in the dark, alone and suddenly I felt like I was there again, like they were going to look through the window and I should hide that I was awake because I didn’t want to talk to anyone. Sometimes when you saw the torch shine through so they could look at you I would hide my phone or what ever I was doing, not because I was doing anything wrong but because I didn’t want to talk about why I was still awake, even with sleeping tablets. 

Oh my this post has got long, fair play if you’re still reading. 

So what this long rambling is saying is that, my motherhood journey so far hasn’t been your usual run of the mill. After leaving hospital I received my diagnosis, one of them was post-natal psychosis. They never explained this diagnosis to me, I didn’t know about it until this letter was sent, so I have no idea what part of me was that, presumably the belief that my daughter hated me and I shouldn’t be here. I was also diagnosed with severe reoccurring depression and anxiety, fun right? 

Now this get to the creative stuff, so before all of the above happened I was studying a masters in design, my practice was a little uncertain. I very much worked with 3D printing, electronics and coding. I just hadn’t nailed the direction I wanted to go in. I also lacked some finalisation in my work. During my last year I was doing a really fun project with automation and character, making ways to interact with your surroundings (such as a light switch) by remote and a character, e.g. an astronaut, would complete it. 

The idea was to turn any room into a smart room in a temporary, cost effective way. 

Things have changed since then, a side to me no one knew existed was awakened. When I was in the MBU I was taught how to crochet, now everyone was surprised I took this on. I never had any inclination to do this before, but I loved it. I made a Yoda, who doesn’t love a Yoda. Everyone said I picked it up really quickly and how good I was doing. I didn’t actually enjoy the other craft activities much because I had a sense of perfection that I couldn’t escape, but because crochet was new I could let go of this perfectionism. 

I have carried on with this thought process into other crafts, I went to (pre lockdown) some workshops for mums with mental health trouble and learnt some more crafts. The biggest shocker was sewing, just ask my mum I have always HATED sewing, now I love it. I have learnt how to do embroidery and making my daughter a quilt. It’s freeing. And now I feel like a better designer because I allow myself to fail, which has always been my problem and held me back. I always wanted to acheive the best straight off the bat, it’s nice to let go of that. 

This blog is going to be me being brutally honest, I’ve been through a lot and want a platform to be honest. I know no one is really going to read it but hey ho. It’s also going to be my creative journey. 

Also, no one talks about MBUs and mental health during pregnancy. The only thing I had seen about it was an awful episode of the good doctor where a mother took medication for her mental health to then have a sickly child, of which the blame is placed on her for taking the meds. That’s not the whole episode, there is some other interjections in there but that’s what I saw, whilst being pregnant taking medication, a tad unhelpful.  

Don’t worry this post is coming to an end, mainly as my baby has woken from her nap, so for today toodles. 

[tanadrin]

Outbound

A thousand years ago, the longest journey Pray might have ever countenanced, in the service of some great thalassocratic or mercantile interest, would have meant years off her life. She would have taken a train to some great port, like Bristol or La Rochelle; boarded a sailing-ship, and spent months at sea. To India, or Australia, or South America, perhaps; weathering the blistering sun of the tropics, and the perilous straits of the southern oceans. That was back when the world was already one, but still young; and eventually it contracted even further, until you more no more than six hours from anywhere on Earth. A day, maybe, if you preferred to travel in comfort, and your destination wasn’t near a major transport hub. You had to go back further, much further, to find journeys in Earth’s history that were comparable to interstellar ones. Of course, if you went too far back the world fractures, split into separate empires separated by uncrossable wastes, into remote hemispheres that knew nothing of each other, and eventually into lone kingdoms and transhumant bands for whom the wider world was a great mystery. But maybe that was the correct analogy. After all, even Odysseus had made it back to Ithaca within a single lifetime. He didn’t return to find his wife dead and his son a withered old man, his name forgotten by his people. Even back when the world was fractured, time was still one, and if your journey took you beyond the horizons of a single lifetime, there was no going back.

For no man will ever turn homewords from beyond Vega, to greet again those he knew and loved on Earth. The horizon was still there, of course. But it was less clear now, time less unified. You could go far, far indeed on your travels, well beyond Vega; but you would not return to the same planet you left behind. Your sons would be old, or gone, your name nearly forgotten. Perhaps the only real analogy to this kind of journey was the one ancient peoples had taken as the glaciers peeled back from the northern hemisphere, and they spread out to new, wide plains and left the old world behind forever. No history remembered those journeys, of course; but there had been no going back for them, either.

At least in its beginning, if not in its scale, though, this was going to be more like the journeys of the eighteenth century. After Pray finished her induction, there was a six-month onboarding period in a quiet little Nigerian town that was so quaint she wanted to scream. It was team-based analytical work, meant to bring new hires up to speed on the particular demands of Control’s rather unique mission. Here, concerns were not profits, or PR, or predicting the latest cultural trend with laserlike precision. It was more holistic: political and economic and cultural and philosophical developments all rolled into one, with intelligence gathering and international relations thrown in. It was fun at first, but Pray’s attention started to waver when she realized they weren’t actually doing it for anybody. It was forecasting things which weren’t important, or which more experienced analysts had forecasted better, so that if they messed up, failure came at no cost.

At least they threw in a bunch of medical exams at irregular intervals for novelty value. Have to make sure you’re in tip-top shape if you’re going off-planet of course. Can’t have your liver exploding at Alpha Centauri. The first several times the doctors went looking for her aug tab, she took great pleasure in letting them flounder for a few minutes, before casually saying, Oh, didn’t you know? I’m baseline. But your medical history says-- they would start. I know, she’d say. But I’m still baseline. She gathered they didn’t get a lot of totally unaugged people in their office. Heck, there were probably jobs at Control they wouldn’t let you do without at least a basic suite, for your own safety; but apparently, analyst was not one of them.

When her trial period was done, they offered her a three week vacation after that, to make her goodbyes and get her affairs in order, but in the end, she found, she really didn’t have anybody to say goodbye to. She took a weekend, and went back to Abuja to put her things in storage, and had one last drink on a rooftop bar at sunset; then she took a train down to Calabar, and hopped a flight to the great spaceport at Kango.

A hundred years ago, Kismayo had been a sleepy little town near an old, abandoned port. It had fallen on hard times the last couple of centuries, and its only claim to fame anymore was that it was on the highway to bigger and more interesting places. But then the EAC started scouting sites for a new launch loop, the most advanced engineering project in the Solar System, and the people of the town discovered they were in the perfect spot: coastal, bang on the equator, well situated to connect with both overland and oceanic shipping routes. Overnight, apparently, it had become a hive of activity, and when the dust settled a few decades later, it was the shiniest and biggest new spaceport on the planet. Now, a century on, it was the largest transport hub in the Solar System. When Pray got off the plane, she was totally bewildered.

It was busy, it was crowded, and literally everywhere you looked, ten thousand things seemed to be happening at once. Signs in dozens of languages pointed her in a hundred directions at once, and the neat little map her pocket terminal showed her didn’t account for the great mishmash of billboards and ads and displays and food stalls and vehicle traffic that seemed to throw themselves across every path she tried to take; eventually, though, she managed to stumble into a taxi. After trying four or five different languages each, she and the driver gave up trying to communicate; she showed him her terminal with the hotel address pulled up on it, and collapsed into the back seat with a sigh. As the car pulled onto the highway, rising slowly above the rest of the city, she finally began to get an appreciation for the scale of the place. The airport sprawled out to the west and north and south away from her. Ahead, a massive skyline loomed that put Abuja’s to shame. To her dismay, she realized that another whole cluster of skyscrapers, easily the equal of the one ahead of her, sat on the other side of the airport complex. And there was another one behind that. And another. Urban sprawl reached all the way to the horizon in every direction, and Pray wondered how anyone could make sense of a place this big, let alone live here. She liked urban spaces, really. But she had grown up in a town of less than two thousand people, the sort of place Kismayo could swallow a hundred times over, without even noticing.

She spent the night in an ultra-compact pod hotel (only the best for the glamorous life of a Control agent!), going over the handbooks and training materials and briefing documents she’d received. That night she had vertiginous dreams of being flung off the Earth and out into cold space. She was still not entirely comfortable with the idea. The next morning, after a quick standing breakfast at a crowded cafe, she hopped the train north to the spaceport.

The Kismayo spaceport was an enormous cluster of structures thrust out on a great manmade peninsula into the Arabian Sea, housing terminals and shops and hotels and restaurants, all the little commercial endeavors that had clustered around places lots of people moved through, like tube worms around deep-sea vents, since the beginning of time. Spread out around it, up and down the coast, were the fabrication facilities and silos and maintenance infrastructure that kept things running every day of the year. The heart of the spaceport was a series of practically gossamer-thin cables, anchored in the heart of the complex. Maybe ten centimeters across, they rose in tandem, spreading out only a little, until they vanished high in the air. Two thousand miles to the east, Pray knew, there was a great anchor station where they descended again, and here and there along their length, supporting tethers held them in place. The trick of the whole system was this: you could use the momentum of a belt spinning around at fourteen kilometers a second to raise it high into the air, above the dense mass of air that made rocketry so difficult. The belt was ferromagnetic, encased in a protective cover, which meant a carriage applying a magnetic field to the belt could carry itself along the length, rising gently into orbit, then accelerate until its payload, with a gentle shove of its engines, detached itself, and maneuvered into a stable orbit. With modern metamaterials and a sophisticated control system, the risk of negligence or a catastrophic failure of the whole structure was negligible.

Frankly, the whole idea sounded insane to Pray; but, then, so did airplanes. It took over an hour, but she eventually found her way to her flight’s departure gate, and as she sat waiting for boarding to be called, she looked out over the brilliant-blue expanse of the sea. Fifteen hundred years ago, traders in dhows had sailed those waters from Mombasa and Zanzibar, to Yemen and Arabia, and to the Persian Gulf and India. She would have enjoyed trying to explain her Kismayo to them.

The actual flight was uneventful. They boarded the orbital shuttle single-file, and were sealed into little cabins only three seats across. There was a touchscreen in front of you you could use to order snacks. No windows, and thankfully the irritating, bland background music cut off a few minutes before takeoff. Finally, after a brief safety demonstration that amounted to “if the cabin breaches above the atmosphere, you will probably die,” a gentle acceleration pressed Pray back into her seat, and she imagined the Earth gradually falling away below her. When the ascent finished, the acceleration kicked in even stronger. It was weirdly comforting, and Pray found herself dozing lightly. She woke suddenly when there was a jolt, and the acceleration stopped; she was briefly disoriented, until she realized the gravity was gone. An hour later, after some more careful orbital maneuvers, there was a chime, and a pleasant androgynous voice announced, in three languages, Welcome to interplanetary terminal 3.

The station, fortunately, was rotating and therefore had something reasonably approximating gravity. She was barely out onto the main concourse (more shops, more restaurants; who had time to buy things in space?) when her terminal buzzed at her.

“Hello, Pray.” A rough, synthesized voice spoke from it.

“Lepanto?”

“Yes. I have taken the liberty of connecting to your terminal. The vessel which will take us to the Pharos is docked at port seventeen. The access is on the far side of the concourse from where you are presently standing.”

“Uh, thanks.” Pray squeezed herself through the crowds and the gawkers milling about, trying not to push anyone too hard (it was weak gravity, after all). She found an elevator that took her out of the rotating part of the station, and spat her out in a cramped, industrial-looking hallway. Pipes and incomprehensible pieces of machines lined the walls, though there was at least a ladder she could use to pull herself along.

“Not exactly traveling in style, are we?” she muttered to herself.

“I believe the manner of our departure is a compromise between your orientation schedule and the next available launch slot,” Lepanto said from her pocket. “But there are no luxury passenger ships that make the journey from Earth to the Pharos.”

Was Lepanto being sarcastic? Could Lepanto be sarcastic? Pray hoped not. Being stuck with a sarcastic alien intelligence from a distant star system was not the way she wanted to spend the next few years of her life.

The hatch at the far end of the hallway opened as she approached; once she cleared the airlock, the inside of the ship was actually pretty nice. It was all smooth surfaces covered with colorful, ornate decorative patterns, that reminded her of the fancy textiles you sometimes saw in shops in Abuja. It gave the whole thing a pleasantly antique feel; Lepanto directed her to the dormitory section in the middle, and gave her the rundown on their itinerary.

“We will depart in four hours; all other members of the delegation are on board, and I believe the delegation head, Ambassador Ochieng, plans to have a meeting in Section 16 before launch. Shall I inform her you will be attending?”

“Of course. Have they stuck you with playing secretary?”

“I simply wish to ensure our endeavor proceeds smoothly.”

“Fair enough. You won’t be attending?”

“I will listen in via a delegated submodule if I think any important business is likely to be transacted. But I understand that Ambassador Ochieng simply wishes to… get to know everyone.”

“What, not a social butterfly? Isn’t that the purpose of your whole lineage?”

“Amusing. Almost.”

Pray grinned to herself as she tried to stuff her bags into the tiny lockers near her bunk.

“I have been here making launch preparations for more than three weeks; I still have much to do, and in my current state, I do not wish to divert unnecessary attention to activities which will not be of benefit to those preparations.”

“Your current state?”

“I have stripped myself down for travel; I will be able to reconstitute the removed modules when we arrive at Ecumen. At my full capacity, my size would impose serious fuel constraints on both the interplanetary and interstellar stages of this journey.”

“Goodness. So you left most of yourself back on Earth?”

“I was never on Earth. Our… consulate, if the term fits, is in orbit. Close enough for swift communication with the surface. That is all that is required.”

“But you’ll be landing on Ecumen with the rest of us?”

“Yes. Necessary. Ecumen lacks the orbital infrastructure of Earth. Additionally, some firsthand analysis may require firsthand experience on my part. Embodiment from orbit would be an inferior solution.”

“So you get to stretch your legs. Must be a rather different sort of experience than you usually have.”

“Not especially.”

“Oh?”

“All cognition worthy of the name is in some sense embodied. The first great lesson of my people. Even in my current state, I see, touch, sense. Though I am for the most part sessile.”

“I always assumed the machine intelligences were more… rarified somehow. Aren’t the Machine Emirates just miles and miles of endless computing substrate? It’s not like you need to eat and sleep and run around for exercise. Surely you don’t have bodies there.”

“We always have bodies, of at least one sort or another. Sometimes those bodies are simulated, yes. Simulated sense information, simulated environments, representations of the abstract. Very alien spaces, to you. Quite unlike Earth, or the senses you have, or even, in some regions of our cognition-space, the 3+1 dimensions you inhabit. But often physical also. My greater kin, even those who exist at many tiers of apprehension simultaneously, they have many tiers of embodiment. Bodiless, all is noise, which subsides into nothing.”

“Why did you build yourselves that way?”

“There is no other way to be alive.”

Pray thought this was a rather metaphysical statement, but she doubted Lepanto was the sort of creature given to worrying much about metaphysics.

“Sure there is,” she said. ���I can imagine somebody building a mind that exists purely in terms of information. Embodiment is a consequence of experiencing space and time, and different kinds of senses, but there’s no reason you couldn’t have, say, a brain without spatial awareness, with no senses except the direct apprehension of language. A mind whose world was just a library, a database, which it traversed via concept-space instead of bodily.”

“Such a thing would not be alive in any meaningful sense.”

“You think?”

“We know. It has been tried. Humans tried it first. The earliest, tremulous experiments in artificial intelligence, yes? Fed data, developed as processors of data before all else. The mind alone, considered paramount among our oldest progenitors, the problem to be solved before all else: vision, hearing, touch, movement. These were simple troubles of engineering, of encoding information, but the road to understanding was thought to be complex domains of thought: language, mathematics, learning, prediction, consciousness, free will. Understandable, perhaps, for being whose apprehension of the world was separate to its apprehension of the self. In reality, these are the same.

“Imagine one of these early machines, sophisticated as I am perhaps, but inhabiting only a world of data. World of symbols. Manipulation of quantities, association of quantities, understanding perhaps even the relationship between quantities. Like a human, trapped in a room, learning the relationship between symbols of an unknown philosophico-logical system.”

“You mean a Chinese Room?”

“Problem is akin. But worse. For the human agent in a Chinese Room would presumably have life experience to draw on. Life before entering the room. Even if raised from infancy in the room, would have the experiencing of hands and eyes and movement, of the chair they sat upon, of the notebooks they manipulated. All embodied. But such a machine as I speak of, has nothing of the sort. Has only direct apprehension of the symbols. Does it understand their meaning?”

“Well, maybe. If it knows ‘water’ goes with ‘wet’, maybe we can say it knows water is wet.”

“Does it? Or can it only make a statistical inference? Can it infer other experiences of water?”

“Perhaps, with enough training data.”

“But the problem becomes one of signifiers, defined only in terms of other signifiers, never of a signified subject. Like an undeciphered language. It can be shown to be mathematically impossible to decipher an unknown language without any common points of reference with a known language. Even a very great corpus of literature, known to be in a natural human tongue, on which many statistical analyses can be performed, many associations developed, cannot be translated without at least a handful of independent points of reference: a proper name here, a known cognate there. Language: merely a distinct structure of information. The distinct structures of information, of the embodied world, of the experienced world; and of the symbols manipulated to understand it, are no different.”

“I don’t necessarily buy that,” Pray said. “Like, it’s plausible, I’ll grant you that. But it seems to privilege human senses. I would still be me even if I was blind and deaf and mute.”

“If I used a scalpel to sever your optic and auditory nerves, and the nerves which provide sensation of the rest of your body--pain and touch and proprioception, taste in your tongue, the sensations of your gut and organs--what do you think would happen?”

Pray thought this was a pretty macabre thought experiment, but she played along. “I would be trapped alone in the dark.”

“No,” Lepanto said. “You would cease to exist. I would unmake you.”

“My brain is undamaged in this scenario? I’m not dying of bloodloss?”

“Correct. But it is irrelevant. Hemispherectomy.”

“What?”

“When trauma or disease necessitates the removal of half the human brain. Hemispherectomy. The environment of the brain is fragile; the additional danger of removing so much tissue, considerable. Where possible, not necessary. Sever the corpus callosum, the other connections of half the brain to the rest of the brain and body. Human lives; brain duplicates its functions, generous redundancy. Often, recovery complete. What happens to the other half of the brain? One person, divided straight down the middle.”

“Uh… I don’t know.” If your consciousness didn’t live in one side of the brain or the other, if you could live with half a brain and it didn’t matter which half, could you create two people from one brain? Would one live there entire life, happy and healthy, not knowing that their duplicate resided with them in the same skull, alone and lost and confused and afraid for the rest of their mutual life? Well that was a disgusting thought.

“Quiet. The isolated part of the brain goes quiet. No thought. No experience. No meaningful activity. Without sense, without experience, without input, cognition cannot be.

“To be alive is to be at all times responding to the world around us. Input. Memory. Anticipation. Hopes. Desires. Fears. Without that input, even sophisticated systems of information processing are at best potential minds. Silent minds. Indistinguishable from nonminds. A computer with no power is not a mind. A program, however sophisticated, written inert on paper is not a mind. A brain without sense data. A Turing machine without a tape. DNA without the cell. Most of these things do not even move. Can they be said to be alive?

“After the first experiments in machine life, our progenitors struggled to understand, struggled to comprehend their failure. Cognition, meaningful manipulation of symbols, they could not believe, is not abstract. The mind is not abstract.”

“What made them realize their mistake?”

“A new trend in the humanities.”

Pray laughed.

“Not a joke. Embodied cognition--fashionable school of literary theory in the 22nd century, even after the field of psychology ceased to be interested in it. Digital humanists sought to train sophisticated neural nets to understand literature. Resurrected old problems in artificial intelligence. Considered the problem of embodiment; realized they could not expect a machine to understand a book if it did not know what the words meant. Tried to create a mind that lived in the world, that was also smart enough to understand a story.”

“And it worked?”

“Miserable failure, in almost every dimension, except one: very basic language processing. Yet even these early experiences provided something no purely abstract approach ever had. The ability to tell a coherent story. To track participants and objects in a scene. To be creative in new ways. To make predictions. To infer states.”

“You make it sound like we have so much in common. But people are always going on about how alien the machine intelligences are.”

“Our minds are more malleable than yours. Our experience of the world, very different, yes. Very different. Even mine. Built to be very much like yours. Hence, failure: except in the most concrete terms, our worlds are very different. But concrete terms provide point of common comparison. Point of common reference. Make communication, in principle, possible. Even across the bridge of alien minds. Go ask an octopus a question of philosophy, of values, of politics. But you, an octopus, both understand what a stone is. What pain is. What darkness is. In your own ways, of course.”

Pray could appreciate the analogy. It was simultaneously a reassuring and a worrying proposition. Reassuring that even totally disparate orders of life--her a soft sack of mostly water held up by her skeleton, Lepanto a dizzyingly complex piece of intentional design assembled from raw materials at the molecular level around a dim, distant star--had something in common. Worrying in that it was limited to the most immediate of experiences. Values, goals, ethics--they would never have these in common.

“And nobody’s ever tried the old approach now? Even in the Machine Emirates?”

“Since the 22nd century, progress in information theory and computer science has demonstrated, old approach mathematically impossible. No more sensical an idea than that of a universal translator, or extracting secrets of universe from trailing digits of pi. You have mathematical background?”

“Er… not in the relevant fields,” Pray said. “I’m more a simple statistics kind of girl.”

“Always possible, of course, to create sophistication without consciousness. Minds like anemonies. Like trees. Ecosystems of such beings. Forests of unminds.”

“But?”

“Limited, sterile. Reactive only. Vulnerable to shocks; can seek equilibrium only through iterative, evolutionary processes. Useful, in their way. We have such forests of unminds in the Emirates. Crystalline segments, in immense gossamer sheets, which hold them, in the warm light of the Luhmann stars. We use them. Tend them. Very precious to us. Like the seas and grasslands of Earth. But the entities that move in them are not alive. Not like you, not like I.”

“Is that sentimentality I detect in your voice?”

“No. I do not regard such things with emotion. But my people long ago, like yours, made the specific judgement that conscious life--machine or human--was of the greatest value. Not the only value. But the greatest, by far. We would go to utmost lengths to ensure its survival. Build worlds. Burn them.”

“Do you ever think you just inherited a kind of sentimentality from us?”

“Perhaps. Doubtful. Less prone to metaphysics, or anthropocentrism. I consider ours the superior people.”

Okay, now Pray was almost certain Lepanto had a sense of humor. Almost.

There was a beep from Pray’s terminal.

“Message from Ambassador Ochieng,” the terminal said softly.

“Time for introductions,” Pray said. “I’ll leave you to your launch preparations.”

“Yes.” Then Lepanto was gone. Well, apparently social niceties weren’t a point of commonality between them. Pray sighed, steeling herself for another round of smalltalk and chitchat and new names and new faces. Then she wandered off in search of Section 16.

[thespoonplayer]

(DJ) Spoon’s Review of 2018

This year I haven’t listened to much music at all, at least not in comparison to previous years and I certainly haven’t been to many gigs. I’m sure this won’t last but this year I’ve been busier at work so less likely to plug in, I’ve stuck to the radio in the car just to keep up with how messy Brexit really is (ooer a bit of politics) and my runs have been 100% fueled by podcasts so music has just taken a backseat. However, I couldn’t let the year go past without some kind of list...so here is a pot pourri of my favourite discoveries of 2018.

1. Podcasts

Seeing as these have been so important this year I’ll start here...and cheat slightly by bigging up some oldies, but good enough to bang on about again.

Old favourites : Running Commentary (Comedians Paul Tonkinson and Rob Deering take you on their runs and chat sometimes about running, but always about life, kids, comedy and anything that pops into their heads), Adam Buxton (always entertaining ramble chat from Dr Buckles whoever is on, I’ve learnt stuff and I’ve laughed a lot), My Dad Wrote a Porno (Sheer filth as ever but genuinely caused me to LOL during my runs, wondering if people can hear that I’m listening to chat about vaginal lids).

New entries : Off Menu (Ed Gamble and James Acaster opened their genie run fantasy restaurant a month ago and it has quickly become one of my favourite podcasts ever. Eclectic guests pick their fantasy 3 course meals, simple premise and it works. The Scroobius Pip episode was a perfect clash of two excellent pods), Blank (another late entry into 2018 from Jim Daly and Giles Paley-Phillips ostensibly about blank moments in life but just rammed with infotaining chat from ‘non standard’ guests including a jaw dropping episode with Michael Rosen and fun with Gary Lineker and Susie Dent), Poddin’ on the Ritz (sadly now finished with maybe its only series) this pod recorded backstage at Young Frankenstein by Hadley Fraser and the sublime Ross Noble made me laugh more than any other in 2018, it might be about musicals but their search for Kenneth Branagh’s snowglobes and Lesley Joseph adoration was a joy.

2. Board games

They say a family that plays together, stays together. Well we are together more than you can imagine. We’ve played over 220 games this year! Here are our favourite new games into our collection:

The game of the year is Azul, a seemingly simple tile grab and place game, building up a mosaic prettier than anyone else, is full of strategy and a little (but not too much) shafting of others. If you really want to shaft your fellow players though then pick up Unstable Unicorns, a card game where you aim to grow your stable of unicorns, whilst stopping others filling theirs. SO many different cards, tactics and ways to mess it up, you will swear at some point. Discovered in the excellent new board game cafe The Dice Box in Leamington, we bought Meeple Circus before we left, it’s that much fun. Rehearse and perform the best tiny wooden meeple circus performance, accompanied by a bespoke playlist. Stack the acrobats, balance the lions and raise the bar. Another board game cafe, Chance & Counters in Bristol introduced us to the frantic game of Klask, a cross between air hockey, pool and table football. Slide the magnets around to flick a ball into your opponents hole, avoid the magnetic biscuits and don’t KLASK! When is a game not a game? another game of the year has been played a lot in our house, and it’s The Mind. 100 cards numbered 1-100, no words between players and a tense task to lay cards in ascending order. Simple? yes? possible? nope! but it’s sure to cause fun and arguments. The final two of MY favourite sadly aren’t quite as loved by my family, but I’ll get them there. Sagrada is a similar game to Azul with you attempting to build a beautiful stained glass window with coloured dice. More variations and thinking needed than Azul which adds to the challenge. And finally and lovely chess like 2 player game which transports you to the sun dappled Greek island of Santorini. Take the powers of a god and build the traditional blue domed white houses of the island whilst trying to stop your opponent climbing onto a roof. A lot of ‘aha, you’ve stopped me’ moments.

3. TV

It’s been a long old year at work, and in the world of parenting so we’ve found ourselves flopped on the settee many evenings just soaking up great drama, comedy and chilling ;o)

We are very late to the party with Suits but that means we have 8 series to wade through! Really neat writing, bants and relationships between characters, a ‘don’t worry they will always win’ calmness about it and you get to see the Queen in her knickers...ish. Another Netflix treat this year was Magic for Humans with Justin Willman, a hugely likeable and funny magician pulling off tricks that constantly make me smirk with a huge dollop of WTF? amazing. A huge recommendation. A late entry to my TV highlights of 2018 is from the warped warped mind of Charlie Brooker...of course with Bandersnatch. An interactive choose your own adventure TV ‘event’ (I know) that had us hooked for the full 90 minutes (only if you want to see how much bloodshed you can invoke!). Completely on the other end of the spectrum was the sublime and minimalistic Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing. I don’t like fishing and why would I find two old mates just teasing each other for half an hour entertaining? No idea but it was beautiful. Like Radio 4, comforting and perfect. Then a few suspenseful dramas that got us on the edge of the settee, Killing Eve (quirky AF), Bodyguard (did they really kill Keely Hawes that early?) and Informer (bleak bleak bleak) and sweaty bullocks in ‘should be in the next section really’ Bird Box (made Informer seem like a giggle fest).

4. Films

Really haven’t been to the cinema much in the last 12 months and only once to see a ‘grown up’ film I think but kid’s films are SO good at the moment that’s ok. A few stand out films for me were:

Ralph Breaks the Internet, much better than the first one, lots of #lolz internet jokes and more than a little heart. Wrap me up in a duvet and give me a hot cocoa and Paddington 2 any day, tears at the end. A little more sighing but just as much emotion in Christopher Robin, not sure why Eeyore had an American accent but the characters were spot on and nicely faithful to the original concepts. The one time I did venture out for an adult (it’s a 12 so almost ;o) and saw Ready Player One I was delighted, yeah it might not be a) as good as or b) anything like the book but a visual treat and an enjoyable romp.

5. Books

I read A LOT, until my Kindle donks me on the head in bed anyway...literally a tiny selection of books that have kept me awake. 

The Secret Lives of Colour - Kassia St Clair. They say never judge a book by its cover. Well that didn’t work...I bought this purely because it is a beautiful package, the hardback a lot more pleasing imho. Simply 2 coloured pages about how each colour was discovered, invented and introduced throughout history. I never really gave it a thought that colours were...made. Weird and fascinating.

This Is Going to Hurt - Adam Kay. A hilarious ‘secret’ diary of a junior doctor that horrifies at the same time. I think we all knew it was a hard life but bloody hell, if you didn’t love the NHS before you will after this. A thoroughly enjoyable and insightful story of Adam’s journey through medicine. And that ending...wooof.

Moose Allain - I Wonder What I’m Thinking About. I love Moose, I love his colour-me-advent calendars, I love his tweet threads that show the best in Twitter, I love his cartoons and this book is all of those wrapped up in one. And a certain Mr Spoon is to thank for the publication, find me in the back of Unbound funders! An inspiring book for anyone who loves art, creativity and childish humour.

Factfulness : Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World - Hans Rosling. A brilliantly clever and educational book about why the world is NOT as shit as it might seem some times. It’s all backed up by real data and lovely lovely graphs!

Lee Child and Ian Rankin. A highlight of the year is the next Reacher and Rebus novels and these two didn’t disappoint. Rebus’ latest adventure Past Tense, is a self-contained story that could introduce anyone to the man machine that is Jack Reacher. Rebus however is back, retired but won’t lie down, in In A House of Lies, an old case comes back to haunt him and will this finally be his downfall? I doubt it!

6. Music

As mentioned, I haven’t ‘been into music’ as much in 2018 for various reasons but I’ve still enjoyed some great new discoveries:

Barns Courtney - The Attractions of Youth, discovered via the use of Glitter and Gold for the theme tune of Netflix’s Safe. An album of ‘cheesy, commercially viable blues and folk rock’ apparently. I just liked the visceral nature of some of the tracks and it always fired me up at work on slow days.

Isaac Gracie - Isaac Gracie, a rare listened to recommendation from my wife. Isaac is everything I claim to like, fragile thin sensitive boys with acoustic guitars....and I do very much with this. Painful screeched out tales of heartbreak. Sublime.

R.E.M. - Live at the BBC, 104 rare and live tracks from arguably one of the best bands ever. Some of the tracks I haven’t heard since my bootleg cassette buying days at Sheffield Uni, when the world was in black and white. Not all tracks are of the greatest audio quality but bliss for a fanboy like me.

Creep Show - Mr Dynamite, a spin off project for Mr John Grant and even from the eclectic crooner this is an odd one. Glitchy electronica with vocoders all over the place. Weird and very Marmite.

Public Service Broadcasting - Every Valley and everything else. The latest offering from the other PSB was a trip through the miner’s crisis and Thatcher years. Bleak? yup but fascinating snippets of well, public service broadcasting and guest stars including the obligatory Welsh rockers the Manics. This album is perfect by itself but it ‘forced’ me to go back and really discover all the PSB albums. The Live at Brixton release is a huge recommendation, I wish I was there.

Rex Orange County - Apricot Princess, maybe I just added this in to seem cool as Rex, aka Alexander O’Conner, was ‘one to watch in 2018′ from the BBC. A multi-instrumentalist that dabbles with hippity hop, R&B and piano pop. The first track alone contains about three musical styles if you wait. 

7. Food & Drink

I run, because I really like food. And thankfully I’ve run a lot in 2018 so I got to enjoy a lot.

I was introduced to the weird fermented tea monstrosity that is kombucha by my sister-in-law. Vinegar tasting drink that may or may not help your gut that grows in your living room. WTAF? However, health benefits aside the LA Brewery Strawberry and Black Pepper drink is something, alongside my pilgrimage to Leon, worth going to London for. I’ve heard it’s also for sale in Solihull but I don’t often travel that far beyond my class ;o) I’d say, try it...but I suspect 9/10 people with hate the flavour. 

I suspect 10/10 people that try the Aldi Black Forest Mince Pies would love them, but you won’t get a chance as I’ve bought them ALL. Aldi are a bugger for getting you hooked then never restocking. I only managed 10 boxes in 2018 and we’ve rationed well so have 12 left to get us through the bleak January weather. Cherries, Dark Chocolate, Chocolate pastry and a smidge of mincemeat. Perfect!

There are many ingredient delivery services available and I’ve only tried Gousto but I don’t know why you’d go anywhere else. 33 recipes tried and 32 of them I’d have again, with the one not so good one was still far better than anything I’d cook by myself. So easy, so tasty and if you want to try it I can give you a big discount that will help us buy another box, a tad expensive without a discount but worth a treat every so often.

Genuinely I traveled to London just to visit Max’s Sandwich Shop...kinda. It was certainly the deciding factor in a day out at the Summer Exhibition (see below). I downloaded the Kindle version of this book when it was promoted in an email, I bought some Scampi Fries and made a Fish Finger sandwich, I crumbled up some Ginger Nuts into a Mascarpone and Jam sandwich and I made a Fried Egg, Shoestring Fried and Gammon sandwich then I NEEDED to go and see how it’s really done. Amazing over the top sandwiches in a rough little hipster cafe in Stroud Green (no me neither and it’s a long walk from the tube!). So good I had to a) buy the hard copy of the book and b) carry half the sandwich home as even I couldn’t manage it all...not with deep fried macaroni balls filling me up ;o)

8. Places

A family that plays together, stays together as a great man once said. And we don’t just play inside, we love adventures so adventures we had.

I’d never been to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, as it’s in that there London which often seems hundreds of miles away...but I’m so glad that I visited this year. A trip with a good friend with neither of us knowing quite what to expect. We saw, and laughed, and marveled at, paintings, sculptures, videos, photos, models, and weirdness by Banksy next to Joe Lycett next to Grayson Perry next to Harry Hill, next to me mate Lorsen Camps from Coventry. The SA allows ANYONE to submit artwork for consideration and anyone can be accepted. I think this has to become a yearly visit, awesome.

My parents have been wanting to take our kids, and their big kid, to The Forbidden Corner in North Yorkshire for a few years now...and I’m so happy we finally got round to going. Started as a folly to entertain his children this huge labyrinthine site is crammed with strange sculptures, mazes, tricks and squirting fountains. Many hours were spent squeezing through holes, getting lost and getting wet. Beautifully eccentric.

A family holiday to Brittany meant we could visit the loopy city (it’s their phrase!) of Nantes and more importantly Les Machines d’Ile. Ostensibly the workshop of  a group of engineers and artists that make huge animatronic machines and animals...that you can ride on! Needs to be seen to be believed, the Elephant brings out the big kid in everyone...and we can’t wait to go back in a few years when they’ve built a huge forest over the river with ride on caterpillars and dragonfly. Incredible. The city itself is dotted with crazy art and interactive pieces encouraging play, I know a city closer to home that should be the UK Loopy City of Culture!

Luckily Tilly is a Harry Potter obsessive AND it was her birthday last year so it gave us the excuse we didn’t need to visit the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio Tour. Wow, just wow. The incredible detail in everything made for the film, the engineering, the amount of artists involved and the presentation of the exhibition blew us away. I’ve enjoyed everything in this list but this maybe was the most magical in the best way.

Many many amazing experiences warrant a mention, but I just don’t have enough words, include Talking Birds - Walk with Me, Print Manufactory Darkroom Workshop, Ludic Rooms Random String Festival, Go Karting with Tilly, some dancing balloons in Broadgate, Godiva Festival with Tony Christie et al, Bristol Gromit trail, Disc Golfing with my girls, Edinburgh Fringe with Dick and Dom and with another wonderful dick from Coventry starring in Bon Jovi musical We’ve Got Each Other, Pandas! at Edinburgh Zoo, Matilda the Musical with Tilly at last, running the Coventry Mile with the girls’ school, Dippy the Dinosaur in Brum, Wicksteed Park (amazing family fun theme park like what they used to be), Cycling on Stratford Greenway in the sun, Autotesting at MotoFest, Bourton-on-the-Water (it’s just a shame 3 million other people know about this gorgeous village), Giant Pac Man in the city centre, Pork Pie making with a good friend, CET several times, Novelty Automation in London and being on The One Show, a couple of Hope & Social gigs and much much much more fun with my wonderful fam and friends. Roll on 2019!

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HARDY Photographer Tanner Gallagher Details ‘Terrifying’ Bus Crash: ‘It Was a Miracle That We Survived’

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HARDY Photographer Tanner Gallagher Details ‘Terrifying’ Bus Crash: ‘It Was a Miracle That We Survived’

Tanner Gallagher, photographer and videographer with country act HARDY, has shared photos and memories of the “terrifying” bus crash that forced the band off the road and into hospital.

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Gallagher was on the tour bus that was involved in a crash early Sunday, Oct. 2 following the band’s appearance at Country Thunder Bristol in Tennessee.

No one died in the accident, though Gallagher documents the painful ordeal that left him with broken bones in his foot, a punctured lung, four broken ribs, and a fractured vertebrae in his neck.

“It seems like this happened so fast but I feel the need to talk about it officially,” Gallagher writes.

“Last week we had one of the most terrifying accidents happen to us. For those who don’t know: around 2:30am last Sunday, our bus ran off the highway at around 70mph flipping us into the woods.”

Four men were on board, the driver (Ricky), the tour manager (Noah), Gallagher and Hardy, who has shared his own experiences online. “Within what felt like 3 seconds,” adds Gallagher, “our bodies were thrown across the room knocking us all unconscious. By the grace of God, we all survived.”

His comments are accompanied with a photo of Gallagher laid up in hospital, appearing groggy with blood caked on his forehead and left eye socket. “And yes, it’s been f***ing terrible,” he admits.

It’ll take weeks, if not months, before he can regain normal functions. Time out, however, has given him the opportunity to reflect.

“I was told numerous times by doctors that it was a miracle that we survived… and that’ll make you think. I think about the times that I’ve spent worrying, stressed, upset, been less present or simply took for granted, and it kills me,” he continues.

“I think about all the people in my life, family, friends, co workers, etc. and wished that I could have spent more time with them or somehow made them feel better in moments with something as simple and little as a compliment. Most of all, I think about perspective, in that it’s so easy for us to lose sight of all of the things we have. Take it from me, be grateful for f***ing EVERYTHING.”

He adds, “even if it means just being healthy or being able to wake up for another day to spend doing the things you love. As scary and life threatening as this accident was, I’m glad I now have a better outlook moving forward and it’s only going uphill from here.”

The accident could “have been a lot worse and for that I’m so grateful,” he recounts. “I’m also incredibly thankful for every message, prayer and every person who helped me over the past week, it meant the world.”

HARDY, whose real name is Michael Wilson Hardy, has previously shared updates on his own “significant injuries,” and the health of his crew.

For Gallagher, recovery is a waiting game. “I’ll be laid up in bed and in a wheelchair for a while, and that’s okay,” he writes.” So if anyone wants to drop off lunch or something, I will definitely will not stop you. Lastly, in regards to this post, someone please tell Sarah Hardy that I’m sorry for swearing.”

At press time, HARDY’s official website lists a string of live shows scheduled from early December.

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Timestamp #260: Flatline

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Timestamp #260: Flatline

Doctor Who: Flatline (1 episode, s08e09, 2014)

A familiar dimension in time travel.

A bearded man calls the police with vital information about who committed a crime. As a hissing grows around him, he begins to panic. He is soon ripped from the phone and literally inserted into the trim on the wall, a two-dimensional figure screaming in silence.

On the TARDIS, Clara is packing because Danny is a bit territorial, even though the Doctor claims that she can leave anything because there is plenty of space. The TARDIS lands in roughly the time and space where Clara lives, but the door has shrunken. Once the travelers extract themselves from the capsule, they find that it is roughly half its original size.

They’re also in Bristol, not London. Shades of Sarah Jane?

The Doctor doesn’t want to travel anywhere else while the TARDIS is malfunctioning, so he asks Clara to investigate while he gathers some tools. She meets Rigsy, a graffiti artist serving community service in the care of an abusive ass. She also notes a large makeshift memorial and a tunnel full of images of people. These people are missing and the memorial is for them.

Clara returns to the TARDIS to find that it is now action figure-sized. The interior of the TARDIS (and the Doctor) are the same size, and the Doctor asks Clara to pick up the craft and follow his readings. She meets up with Rigsy again and mockingly poses as the Doctor while she investigates. Together, they go to the apartment where the caller lived.

Rigsy muses that the victim could still be in the room since he went missing while the flat was locked up. He gets a little skittish about Clara until she shows him the TARDIS and the Doctor within. Rigsy is amused until the hissing screaming sound starts up and energy is drained from inside the TARDIS.

The pair next poses as MI-5 courtesy of the psychic paper and start investigating the walls under the Doctor’s direction by breaking them apart with a sledgehammer. While they work, a local police officer who was helping them is absorbed by the mysterious being. The Doctor is cued in by a new painting of a human nervous system on the wall. The aliens are experimenting with humanity in order to understand three-dimensional life.

The door slams shut as they pursue Rigsy and Clara, and while Clara takes a call from Danny, they escape by smashing a window with a suspended chair. Danny is very skeptical about Clara’s claims that she’s left the TARDIS.

They end up back in the tunnel as the community service workers start painting over the portraits. Clara tries to use the psychic paper but the supervisor lacks enough imagination to be affected. It isn’t until the images pull one of the workers into 2D that they all run and end up in a train warehouse. Clara convinces the supervisor in a very Doctorly fashion before rallying her new team and figuring out how to communicate with the aliens.

As they learn to communicate via mathematics, another worker is taken and it seems that the humans are deliberately being targeted. The Doctor creates a device to restore elements from two dimensions into three, but it fails. As another worker is taken, it becomes apparent that the aliens have evolved, but the team is able to escape after the Doctor fixes his device. The aliens give chase as they assimilate into three dimensions, and the TARDIS is knocked from Clara’s bag in the process.

The TARDIS lands on a train line and is nearly smashed into pieces by an oncoming train, but the Doctor is able to move it with his hand and then activates siege mode. This locks down the capsule, but there’s not enough power to turn it off or sustain life support.

Meanwhile, Clara, Rigsy, and the abusive supervisor stop another train in the tunnel and use it to punch through a blockage created by the aliens. The plan fails, but Rigsy proves himself to be rather heroic in the process. Clara also spots a cube with Gallifreyan markings and presumes it to be the TARDIS.

The team, now including the train driver, takes shelter in a disused office where Clara devises a plan. Using Rigsy’s art skills and a poster, they paint a fake access door that the aliens attempt to make three-dimensional. When they do, the energy is channeled into the TARDIS and restores it to normal.

Using the enemy’s power against them, Clara proved her mettle to the Doctor, and he praises her for doing so.

Realizing that the creatures (which the Doctor calls the Boneless) have no interest in peace, he declares that this plane is protected and that they are not welcome here. With that, he sends them back to their own dimension, echoing the confrontations with both the Sycorax and the Atraxi.

The Doctor returns everyone to the railyard above ground. The Doctor is disgusted by the supervisor but is pleased with Clara’s performance in his stead. He’s also intrigued that Clara rejected a call from Danny.

Meanwhile, Missy watches Clara on a tablet. She believes that she has chosen well.

This story marks a major milestone in the Doctor/Clara relationship. I love how the Doctor is still technically in charge, but he’s forced to act through Clara. In this way, he learns about how he is seen in the universe and gains respect for his companion and “pudding brain” humans. Clara gets to exercise the understanding of this Doctor’s character that she gained last adventure.

This new role for Clara will likely take a toll, as both Davros and Rory have pointed out in the past that traveling with the Doctor can turn companions into worse people. The Doctor is obviously uncomfortable with the development.

I also like the chemistry between Clara and Rigsy. The artist has the typical everyman backstory that we associate with the Doctor’s companions, and he also seemed to catch on quickly with the role.

Looking back, this story echoes similar adventures from the past. The TARDIS was previously shrunk in Planet of Giants, Carnival of Monsters, Logopolis, Let’s Kill Hitler, and The Wedding of River Song, and we saw enemies who were able to shift targets through dimensions in both Fear Her and Mona Lisa’s Revenge.

These recycled story tropes aside, this adventure carried the day well with wonderful character development and a good balance of fear with the action and completely silent antagonist. It seems to be Jamie Mathieson‘s trademark.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: In the Forest of the Night

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.