David Gillon

So not only am I trying to get ready to go visit my family for the rest of the year, but I'm trying to sort out the house prior to my mother coming back with me for a visit in the New Year. Stressed doesn't cover it (my standards of tidy are not my mother's). Or my mother threatening to come and stay with me, my sister raised the potential on the phone this evening that it's just a plot to make me tidy the place up.

I've got so many things on the go I've yet to open the new laptop that arrived yesterday, I just haven't had the time (it's basically meant to be a spare for travelling  as my primary laptop has a damaged case and isn't really up to being open and shut regularly anymore - so I picked up the cheapest thing Dell had going on Cyber Monday, which effectively worked out at about £400+ of laptop for £250 after stacking discounts).

I had my first Christmas Meal of the season yesterday, lunch with friends I haven't seen as often as I'd like this year, which ate up the whole afternoon, so I came back, picked up the laptop from my neighbour (of course they scheduled to deliver it while I was out), came in, dumped it on the floor, slept for a couple of hours, then went straight back out to a pub quiz with half the people I'd just had lunch with. Which we won, for the fourth time running.

On the political front I've been doing a lot of disability issue tweeting and I also provided comments for another Disability News Service article last week. The same two academics who totally destroyed the Two Ticks scheme a few years ago by demonstrating that it was being used for whitewashing corporate reputations, not for improving access to work for disabled people, have now turned their attention to its successor, Disability Confident, which I'm DNS's goto guy for comments on. They haven't quite destroyed it as thoroughly as they did Two Ticks, but they definitely landed a few good punches : https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/less-than-80-private-sector-firms-achieve-disability-confident-top-level-in-three-years/

Currently Reading :

16 Ways to Defend A Walled City : K J Parker

If I'd realised Parker is actually Tom Holt I might have picked this up even sooner. I'm not finished yet, but I'm thoroughly enjoying it. The walled city in question is clearly Byzantium, but we're theoretically in a secondary world, so it's just 'the City' and its people the Robur (aka "blueskins"; given they're also described as brown a couple of times I'm presuming a very dark African skin tone). Everyone else is a "milkface" and very much a second-class citizen. We don't get to find out what the classic 15 ways to defend a walled city are, because Colonel of Engineers Orhan isn't a classical kind of soldier (his career path goes barbarian, slave, carpenter/slave, navy shipwright, army engineer) and besides, they depend on things like having an actual army.

After getting caught up in a pirate raid on the fleet base, Orhan, who is probably the highest-ranking milkface in the Empire, decides things are looking iffy and takes the entire corps of engineers off for a couple of months bridge-building in the wilds. Eventually his conscience gets the better of him, and he sets off City-wards, only to find the entire army massacred in the woods (very Teutoburger Wald). So he takes a gamble, and sneaks his men into the City on the 'Shit Fleet' barges, which have been abandoned precisely where he expected, and which is just as well as there are 70,000 men camped outside the walls. With the army dead, the fleet MIA on their pirate hunt, the bureaucracy fled, and the Imperial family incapacitated, Orhan realises he's the senior man left in the City, so he steals the Imperial Seal and sets out about organising the defences.

The thing about Orhan is he's not a soldier, he's an engineer, and all he cares about is getting results, which means he's as bent as a three pound note. He's spent a lifetime conning the Imperial bureaucracy, and now it works for him, because he's the man with the Seal (well, sort of). He needs an army to man the walls, so he legitimises the Greens and the Blues, the chariot racing and gladiator supporting Themes, membership of which is theoretically punishable by death, even though everyone except the upper class belongs to one or the other. This is roughly equivalent to drafting the Mafia and the Triads, with all the complications you might expect, and goes down poorly in some parts. He needs catapults for the army to operate, so he drafts the Blue's chief carpenter/theatrical designer (because showing up the other theme at events means making the grandest entrance, and she once had them enter the arena on a galleon with billowing sails and no visible means of propulsion. He does screw up on the Ministry of Supply front when he puts in Aichma, his tavern-owning female friend whose protection he promised her father on his deathbed (on the grounds he needs someone he can trust absolutely, and she is one of the few people smart enough to do it). Aichma has the sense to realise that even if she's smart enough she can't do the job, that it needs the machinery of the Imperial Bureaucracy, and the street knowledge of the Blues and Greens, but mostly Orhan calls things right, and he admits all the time that he's far luckier with people than he should be.

And then the enemy chief arrives, and things get really complicated.