Mihangel

A film about the unlikely support of gay activists for Welsh coal miners during the great miners' strike of 1984-5 when Margaret Thatcher was trying to crush the unions. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/31/pride-film-gay-activists-miners-strike-interview Sounds well worth seeing.

I keep a folder into which I download stories that I know I will want to read again and again. I have been collecting for thirteen years now, and there are still only twelve stories in it. One of them, which has been there pretty well since I began, is Holiday. That shows how highly I rate it. So it's a delight to find Backwoodsman here on AD. A great welcome to him.

I doubt you're disappointing many, Cole. Like you, I only bring explicit sex in if the plot and the characters absolutely demand it. Sometimes it's only implicit. Often there's none at all. And I find exactly the same as Cole. I've never counted, but I'd guess that less than half of one per cent of feedback complains of too little sex. Maybe 20 per cent applaud its absence. The rest don't say either way, but seem entirely happy with what I've written. It's one of the things that distinguishes a site like this from Nifty. And congratulations and thanks from me. (Sorry - made a pig's ear of this post. Don't really understand how to do quotes.)

We have two widely different strands of opinion here, two different moralities. The taboo against incest is hard-wired into us; or, it now appears, into most but not all of us. The genetic argument is irrelevant. What matters is the generational aspect or, as Cole puts it, the power difference. That is why I'm not worried over cousin-cousin relationships, and no more than dubious about brother-brother ones. But a story of a sexual relationship between father and son, however consensual, would be far beyond the pale, and would surely never be hosted on AD. At least I sincerely hope not. To me, uncle-nephew falls into a similar category, however small the age difference, however consensual.

The problem seems to me more generational than genetic. Every instinct says father-son is a no-go area. Brother-brother seems less iffy, or icky. Uncle-nephew? Does it depend on the age difference? In this case it's not that great, but I'm still dubious.

Eccentric, Cole? Depends where the centre is, doesn't it?

You've never heard of chin wag, butchers, monkeys, wooden hill? They're in everyday use in this house. Well, almost every day. Though I admit that up the duck is a new one to me.

Thanks for the kind words, Gwilym. By your name, you should be a Welshman too!

Just checked. Works fine for me.

Imperial measures of capacity: 8 gallons = 4 pecks = 1 bushel = (of course) 2815.5 cubic inches. Obsolete here, but evidently still current in the States. I have a correspondent in Oregon who has a prolific walnut tree that, he tells me with pride, produces around 70 gallons of walnuts a year.

For the kind words, thanks. As Nigel says, this is really Hornung's story, not mine; and so I had to try to preserve Hornung's own voice, not only in what he did write himself but in the inserted parts (especially Chapters 11 and 16 and a lot of 31) which are entirely mine. The crunch, I suppose, is whether the joins between the two can be seen. FT - in your search through the jungle you may get some guidance from the Wikipedia entry under "School story." Most of the better-known (and older) examples of the genre are now online (which Hornung's wasn't when I adapted it, and that meant an awful lot of typing!). But many of them are so moralistic that I find them virtually unreadable. The author of Eric or Little by Little positively stated that "The story of 'Eric' was written with but one single object - the vivid inculcation of inward purity and moral purpose." Yuck. To my mind the best of the earlier lot, Hornung apart, is Kipling's Stalky & Co; but remember that it was done as a deliberate parody. And none of them even hints at sexuality until Michael Campbell's Lord Dismiss us (1967), which some people praise to the skies but personally I find very implausible and unconvincing.

Many thanks, Nigel. But not Mike's fault. Mine. In this case some of the chapters are so short that they could hardly go up only one at a time. But in any event I have deep difficulties over serials. I'm never happy at having to wait weeks or months to see the whole thing, and my own stories have always been written to be posted and read at one go. Call me weird (and Mike no doubt calls me something worse), but that's the way it is. At least the next one to go up (which will be the last of those transferred) will be a compromise, broken down into bunches of chapters.

A matter of opinion. A few points: (a) If Richard had been buried at Dadlington church near the battlefield, as most of the casualties were, I doubt if anyone would be urging his reburial at York or anywhere else. It was Henry VII, who as the victor had the authority to decide, who had him buried in the Greyfriars at Leicester. If Henry VIII hadn't done away with monasteries and thus made the poor king homeless (as it were) the archaeologists would have put him back where he was, and still nobody would be urging his reburial elsewhere. (b) The people who brought this case were the Plantagenet Alliance, a very recent body - sorry, pressure group - and with much less clout that the Richard III Society, a fan club which has existed for almost a century and is happy to leave him at Leicester. The Alliance was appealing against the licence issued to the archaeologists, before any remains were found, by the Ministry of Justice (so can it be an Injustice?); which laid down that any bodies must be reburied in the nearest consecrated ground, namely Leicester Cathedral which is a hundred yards or so away. © Anyway, Richard may have been Duke of York, but as far as I know he never lived there, any more than the current Duke of York does. The new tomb, wherever it is, is going to be a tourist magnet. York has plenty enough tourists already - too many, one might say. Leicester doesn't, and deserves them. Let him stay in Leicester. (d) The princes Richard is supposed to have murdered (but you really shouldn't believe everything Shakespeare wrote) are supposedly in Westminster Abbey. Back in sixteen-something they found two young skeletons under a staircase in the Tower of London and, assuming they were the poor innocents, they tucked them up in the Abbey. Trouble is nobody's allowed to look at them to check their DNA. (e) Did you know that Leicester has revamped the signs in its car parks by adding "no burial of dead monarchs"?

Nigel's right that in (most) public schools the real social unit was the house, simply because you had maybe 50-60 boys of all ages living and eating together without any written or unwritten rules about fraternising. OK, if an 18-year-old were seen to be spending unusual amount of time with a 13-year-old, eyebrows might rise. And if there wasn't much out-of-school socialising between houses, it wasn't because there was anything against it but because there was plenty enough to do without it. But in in-school contexts like sport, drama and music you could be rubbing shoulders with any age, just like in the house. As for forms, in the nature of things the kids ordinarily tended to be much the same age, but far from always. Without in least intending to brag, I was in forms that included boys up to three years older than me, and I don't recall any ostracising at all. Older ones might regard this whippersnapper with some amusement, but not with disdain. In our (limited) spare time I would sometimes go out on, say, bike rides with boys two years my senior. No eyebrows raised about that. At least that's how it was at at my school, which was a good one; I'm sure there were places that were more restrictive. And that's how it was in my day; maybe things are different now, for better or worse. And, anyway, many (most?) such schools are now co-ed.

Nice cartoon on this by the incomparable Steve Bell.

In normal Brit parlance those kids are at a prep school (to age 13). They would then go on to a public school (13-18). Prep schools tend to be organised much like public schools, with the same or similar names for forms. So chances are you'd go through two sixth forms in your career, at 12/13 and 17/18. Though there are variations on the theme.

Thanks, guys, very much. I've never thought of Orogeny as one of my best stories; but if it appeals to you, who am I to complain?

Just read this, which seems very relevant: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/19/pity-poor-immigrants-coming-to-britain Especially the final sentence: "no one does as much damage to a country as the patriots who profess to love it the most."

Oh dear, oh dear. Rick seems to be calling for a programme of ethnic purification. Where have we heard something rather similar before? Wasn't there some tub-thumping German in the 1930s?

Just read a review in the Guardian which seems highly relevant to this thread: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/09/when-professor-stuck-snow-dan-rhodes-novel-review Rhodes is sticking his neck out in using a named character like that, and it's hardly surprising that no publisher would touch his book. But the real crunch will be whether Dawkins sues.

Brilliant, both in Odessa and Cardiff. But surely Freude, Nigel, not Heiterkeit - Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium.

Thanks, guys, for all the kind words. Clouds was done twelve years ago, and I don't remember what prompted me to write it. But I do remember being pleased with it then, and if it still has the power to please, then I'm more than happy.

One view from across the pond. Perish the day when UK police are armed as a matter of course. Thrillers and detective stories don't necessarily mirror reality. The latest available figures for the four years 2009-12 are: police killed by guns, 2; supposed criminals killed by police guns, 3 (and two of those arguably unjustifiably). That's UK-wide, in a population of roughly 60 million. While any such deaths are too many, it's not a serious problem. Guns, essentially, aren't part of our culture and apart from sporting purposes just aren't needed. Private ownership of handguns was made effectively illegal after the Dunblane massacre in 1996, and they're exceedingly difficult to get hold of. My impression is that even in the "ethnic" groups you mention the "normal" weapon is a knife, not a gun. Personally I don't know anyone who owns a gun of any sort other perhaps than the odd shotgun in a rural area.

Sadly, all my files are post-'97 Word but they don't always work fine. Some have problems (see my message on 8 Feb) that even Mike can't sort.

Oh no! I'm less computer-savvy than Cole. But let's not get into a fight over that. My stories sometimes have problems similar to Chris's. They're done as single continuous files on Word, and when the time comes I chop them up into chapters and hand them on to Mike. Occasionally all works fine. But sometimes a few chapters, or even a single one, go haywire with italics that don't take, or line spacings doubled or removed, or whatever. Why that happens, when they all come from the same original, I haven't a clue. Nor I think does Mike.