(no subject)

shewhostaples has just been reading Susan Howatch, and wonders how Fr Jon Darrow (psychic, intensely charismatic, intermittently wise but also very flawed, old-school Anglo-Catholic priest) would have dealt with the Rev'd Magister.

This Important Question has eaten my brain; I am, alas, no nearer answering it than I was, but I want to read (or write) this so badly I can hardly say....

Though it would undoubtedly be one of those fics that only about three people in fandom, including myself, would find at all interesting.

Sarcastic but true Coleridge, via Charles Williams

(Well, via the chap who is reprinting CW's devotionals as a blog; Williams hasn't been communicating with me from beyond the grave, though he is the Inkling I'd think most capable of wanting to try... I mean, communicating from beyond the grave in general, not with me in particular. I sometimes wonder what has happened to my mind and/ or my ability to express myself.)

"I have a mind to draw a complete character of a worldly-wise man . . . He would be highly-finished, useful, honoured, popular—a man revered by his children his wife, and so forth. To be sure, he must not expect to be beloved by one proto-friend [best friend], and, if there be truth or reason in Christianity, he will go to hell—but, even so, he will doubtless secure himself a most respectable place in the devil's chimney-corner."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Table Talk.

In which the spirit is willing, but the flesh - no, honesty compels me to admit it was the spirit

Good resolutions about getting lots done this evening, to counteract a slightly faily day (well, I wrote a page and a half, in the end, and finally got tickets for trains abroad, but I wasted an awful lot of time and failed to get to Mass due to a pathetic inability to remember when the evening service started). Alas, they came to nothing, and what I have actually done is read Susan Howatch and continue to speculate about the sheer lunacy that would be a Doctor Who/ Starbridge crossover (otherwise known as Fr Darrow vs the Master).

Worryingly, this has got to the stage of me concluding that it would have to also involve Lewis Hall (pencilled in as the narrator) and the beginnings of a plot, which would include a climactic scene in which Jon Darrow would be in two places at once. DON'T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT, BILOCATION IS CANONICALLY POSSIBLE IN THE STARBRIDGE-VERSE (at least if your surname's Darrow). It would, of course, have to be an AU (for one thing, I can't see the Master trying that disguise twice. Too hard on his nerves; politics is easier than religion).

Of course, it may well not get written at all, and if it does, will probably turn out entirely differently. But my track record is much better at finishing fic which contains clergy, and there are possibilities in inserting Frs Darrow and Hall into The Daemons beyond the sheer unadulterated cracky goodness, because the Doctor is particularly obnoxious, and I don't think he refuted Miss Hawthorne on science vs magic vs faith as clearly as he thought he did....