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I took my daughter to her swimming club in the first time in ages (due to our schedules my wife and I swapped over and she had taken Phoebe to the football class that I usually do). It’s amazing to see how far my daughter has come on. I used to love doing swimming because Phoebe would get scared and cling to me like she cared about me, but now she is much more confident and can do some terrifyingly dangerous looking things. I had to catch her as she jumped in from the side, whilst making sure she didn’t crack her head open as she leaned backwards and also catch her as she ran over a big float on the water and then jumped off the other side. It was a lot of fun. She’s nearing her second birthday now, unbelievably, and it’s hard to register that she’s not a baby any more. But a high-spirited, good humoured and ridiculously bold little girl. I am in awe of her and can only mourn all the other sperm I have wasted in my life. They could all have been cool little kids too. Though it might have been difficult to arrange the schedule in taking them all to both football and swimming.
Tonight we watched episode one of Timeless after many insistent adverts from 4OD to give catch up a go. Annoying the first episode wasn’t on catch up. Nice work 4OD, you pricks, but as it’s vaguely within the arena of what I am working on at the moment I forked out £2.50 to buy it on iTunes. As you know I can be quite pernickety about time travel fiction (as opposed to?), but I sensed from the start that this show was not going to be the most rigorous of work.
Terrorist bad guys (or are they?) steal a time machine and so obviously an historian is sent back to try and stop them changing the past (along with a soldier and a black time travel pilot who I imagine is going to have to spend most of this show standing outside of wherever the white people are - but that’s an interesting thing to explore). There are two Professor Space Time-style lines of the “Not where, but when” variety in this first episode, which is very satisfying. But mainly it fails the Richard Herring rigour test. It’s a shame they feel the need to make up a character (though I can see it’s probably a plot thing), but also it’s understanding of how much our present world would change if <Spoiler alert>, the Hindenburg did not crash when it crashed (but the next day instead) is very very wrong. With an event that big and the lives of so many people saved, everything would be different now and the planet would be inhabited by an almost entirely different set of characters.
But if you suspend your belief and accept and enjoy it for what it is, then it is probably acceptable entertainment. If only so that I can sit and scoff and say to my wife, “Well that isn’t what would happen.”
It’s just gone up today, but there’s been a lot of love for the latest RHLSTP with Jess Thom (also known as Tourettes Hero)
Watch it here.
