Unthinkable Wings

On a completely unrelated note, I was poking about on Wikipedia, and discovered the entry for R.A. Bevan, a distinguished figure of British advertising with extensive cultural interests, daddy issues, and a complicated private life which involved a menage a trois with Randolph Churchill.

He was also involved in the New York ad business in the early sixties, and was, apparently, the model for Mr Ingelby in Murder Must Advertise, all of which does rather suggest that the British take-over plot in Mad Men could have been done rather differently. I wouldn't mind the AU fic...

Part of me suspects that this is a bad poem, but I am rather haunted by it none the less.† The youthful Sayers suffered from a tendency to floweriness and was overly influenced by the Pre-Rapaelites - though this one rather reminds me of Swinburne. Which is ironic, in the circumstances.


REX DOLORIS
* Signed with the sign of His Cross and salted with His salt. S. AUGUSTINE.

"WHEREFORE wilt thou linger, Lady Persephone?
The sheaves are gathered, the vintage is done,
Bacchus through the ivy leaves laughing with his satyrs
Calls us to the feasting, and the ripe, red sun
Drops like an apple, tumbling to the westward,
The shout of the Maenads is merry on the hill,
Why do the wheat-ears fall from thy fingers?
Whom dost thou look for, lingering still?
( Whom dost thou look for? Here is one to woo thee, )

Well, I finished listening to the 1970s "Man Born to be King", a somewhat abridged version of Dorothy L Sayers play on the life of Christ. On the whole, it is very good, both in terms of the plays themselves and the production, though I had a few minor niggles with the latter aspect. The great strength of the plays is the vivid characterisation; they all feel like real people. ( More under the cut, including an excerpt from the plays )

Why not - this is a deserving classic. Courtesy, this time round, of dolorous_ett

Name a character from one of my fandoms, and I'll give you either:

(a) three facts about them from my personal canon/fanon,
(b) a reason he/she sucks,
(c) a reason he/she is awesomecakes,
(d) five things that never happened to that character, or
(e) five people that character never fell in love with and why.

For the purposes of this exercise, my fandoms can be defined as Doctor Who (including SJA but not including Torchwood), Harry Potter, Narnia, the Wimseyverse, "Master and Commander", Arthur Ransome, Star Trek: TOS and DS9, John Buchan, Dalziel and Pascoe (bookverse only, unless you count my belief that the TV characters have been gradually replaced by pod people) and Wolfram von Eschenbach (just to be pretentious). I also tentatively append the Vorkosiverse, as I haven't read all of canon yet. I would like to add Hermann Kant's "Die Aula", but I think I am in a fandom of one on that count (though one day I might crack and reveal my theory as to why canon as it stands doesn't stack up, and what conclusions we might draw from this - other than that our viewpoint character is charming, but ultimately a self-centred idiot, if not something worse).

I had an odd plot bunny the other night; it involved Romana escaping the time war through judicious use of the chameleon arch, and ending up as a don and part time novelist at Somerville (probably, heaven help us, with Inkling-based snark). At one point she would see Five and be baffled at meeting someone she had invented (I admit that this is ripped off from Sayers' running into Roy Ridley and failing to remember that she'd used him as a model for Wimsey). Unfortunately I can't think of any plot other than that.

This joins, of course, the partly written Granger-Nott in post War Oxford fic; as well as Memoirs and Confessions of A Justified Snape, not to mention the bunny I offered as a prompt for the Omniocular crossover challenge, and which remained unloved: Moody investigates a series of disappearances in the 70s and runs into UNIT and the mysterious Doctor Smith.

I think I need to take some fic writing time. Of course, I also need to take some paper-writing time, some thesis writing time, and some filling in Ominous Forms Of Doom time....

Name one character from any fandom I know and I will give you three facts about them from my personal canon.

Fandoms: Harry Potter, Doctor Who (though I reserve the right to do someone else here; I don't know canon well enough for Doctors 5-8 to be confident of being able to do their companions): I'd also be keen to have a crack at: Star Treks TOS and DS9, Dalziel and Pascoe (book canon only, obviously), Life on Mars, Patrick O'Brian, Swallows and Amazons, Narnia, and John Buchan's Richard Hannay-verse.

ETA: and the Wimsey-verse, of course!

For all those who are still upset about the Ashes whitewash: as nineveh_uk reminds us, we've been there before. Though who knows that would have happened had a certain aristocratic cricket Blue not suffered an unfortunate injury while fighting crime?

Because I'm bored, I've borrowed the Character Love Meme from dolorous_ett

Name a character from one of my fandoms, and I will write no more than 100 words on why I love them.

Fot the purposes of this exercise, my fandoms are defined as Harry Potter, Tolkien, Doctor Who (but please bear in mind that I have never seen an episode of Six and my knowledge of Old Who is somewhat patchy), Patrick O'Brian, Dorothy L Sayers, Terry Prachett, and Star Trek (TOS and DS9).

‘Tell Beauty How She Blasteth’

Warnings: AU, Post-Strong Poison. This is not a cheerful story, you have been warned. It was inspired by a discussion with nineveh_uk about the paucity of AU Wimsey-fic. After writing this, I can see why there aren't many of this type of AU story out there. More specifically: Contains character death; miscarriage of justice; suicidal thoughts; suicide.
Spoilers: Strong Poison, obviously, and Clouds of Witness. Reference to one detail of Have His Carcass, but I wouldn’t call it a spoiler.
Words: 3955.
Disclaimer: There are lots of things in here which I don't own. I’m sure intelligent people like you can work out what. In particular, his lordship is unspeakably relieved that he doesn't belong to me (though normally I'm nicer, honestly!)

( Damn it, I don’t like it either. )