She seems very determined and likeable. They're having a kitchen put in and it'll be a tapas bar. The village does need more eateries so I really hope it succeeds. Plus we like tapas. It can only be a good thing.

Talking of food, I tried a low-fat recipe for chicken korma last night. Usually I follow Nigella's full fat, full cream extravaganza and it's fabulous. The low fat version was really good - though I deviated and added a can of coconut milk and 100g of ground almonds, so I'm not sure how 'low fat' it ended up. But it tasted good and different, enough that I'll make it again. Had a Tesco naan bread with it, which was lovely at the time but overnight it kicked off the wheat allergy with a vengeance. So now I haz pain. Ouch.

Last Thursday was the first ep of Apparitions, which I'd seen advertised at the end of this week's ep of Spooks, ironically enough. I'd probably watch a show about exorcists anyway, but what sold it was Martin Shaw, who may be paunchy now but he's still incredibly sexy. I particularly liked his hair in this show.

Shaw plays Father Jacob, an exorcist whose day job is promoting the causes of those put forward for canonisation - Mother Theresa, in this case. His protege is a hot young guy who was cured of leprosy and who now seeks to be ordained - except he happens to be gay. A little girl believes her father is possessed and asks for Jacob's help, and the paths of the girl and the cute would-be priest end up intertwining, with random interventions from some demons. Apparently they're out to stop Father Jacob from becoming Chief Exorcist because he's too good at his job.

The show runs the gamut from cheese to daft to angst, and veered close to overdoing the rather obvious right-on moral message, but for all that I really enjoyed it. There's something missing that doesn't quite bring it to the level of Afterlife (for me it was the lack of Jacob's backstory - he's hot and he's clever but we know nothing else about him), but hopefully the rest of the series will improve.

One of the characters, a nun (Jacob's secretary), is irritating and rather secular. Amusing that they need to have the Voice of Secularisation coming from a nun. Also, people kept banging on about St Bartholomew and I was rather glad I remembered how Bartholomew was martyred as this meant I could look away when the gay would-be priest met his unfortunate end in a sauna. But I did like all the theological stuff, and did I mention Martin Shaw looks hot?

Barbara Nadel

When I was overseas Barbara Nadel published two more books in her Cetin Ikmen Istanbul series, so I went *squee* when I picked them up in Borders the other day. Especially as A Passion For Killing has one of Lawrence of Arabia's kilims as a plot thread, and especially as my favourite character Mehmet Suleyman is still being pursued by the dangerous spy who fancies him.

So I was really disappointed with the clunky plot, can't-be-arsed descriptions (the worst was when the spy takes Suleyman to the top of a building to see a view of Istanbul described simply as 'amazing'. I'm sorry but this is a cop-out. Istanbul is indeed 'amazing' but I can think of dozens of better ways to describe it), frankly preposterous coincidences, Cetin's apparent personality transplant and worst of all, the frisson between Suleyman and the spy which was so exciting in the previous book now ends up as completely STUPID and unbelievable.

Only sheer dogged determination got me through it. I hate it when a really good detective series turns into complete pants. There's one more book (Pretty Dead Things) to get me up to date, but if that's as bad as A Passion For Killing then I won't buy any more of Nadel's books. Grrr.

Rammstein

The other day I wrote a R+ fic for the first time in ages. It ended up as a future fic (first time I've ever written one of those!). It felt good to revisit the fandom. Later I re-read a whole bunch of stuff from back then, which felt weird and at times incomprehensible.

Poking around for pics, we found this one from the time of Rosenrot. Christoph's outfit and haughty look sparked a discussion on an old, old AU story I'd started in 2003 and deleted in 2006. By some bizarre coincidence, I'd sent a version of that story to be critiqued before I decided to junk it as unsalvageable (the critiquer thought otherwise, but at the time I couldn't see a way of separating the plot strands). So I have the first 39k of it still. It needs a lot of work (i.e. a complete re-write, involving tots LOL): I cut out 8k immediately, and now I have to try and remember what I'd planned for the rest of it. Funny, really. I kept it for ages because I thought the idea had potential, then I deleted it, then by complete chance it came up again. And it has an exorcist as one of the lead characters. Talk about coincidences!

So I guess the moral of that story is don't ditch old fic ideas. You never know.