Beatrix Released
Shaenon: I don’t always plug my non-comics writing here, but my short story “Beatrix Released,” now on Escape Pod, may be of interest to fans of Narbonic and Skin Horse. It combines two of my passions: mad science and Beatrix Potter. This is kind of a silly story, but I did some research for it, including reading Potter’s teen diary (which, as in my story, was written in code) and visiting Hill Top, the farm she bought (along with a big chunk of the Lake District) with her children’s book money. So if you enjoy in-jokes about Pre-Raphaelite painters and bad Victorian poetry, check it out!
And if you want to read more of my prose fiction, I have links on my website, shaenon.com.
Channing: This sounds like the best kind of nerdy.
Loved the William McGonagall reference.
It was a joke for one person, and it turns out that person is you.
I am tried and found wanting – it caught my eye, and I saw its sparkle, but did not recognise it for what it was. It seems that I do not so much know the great man’s works as know OF them.
I got it too, although I suppose being actually Scottish helped.
(Every time a family trip involved crossing the Tay, my dad would quote both “The Tay Bridge Disaster” and “The Silvery Tay”.)
Make that four people, apparently. I can still declaim some small chunks of McGonagall poetry from memory.
Holy crap! I didn’t know Escape Pod was still going!
So a little Googling of McGonagall tells me the story occurs in 1882 or 83. Which would make Beatrix about 16 years old.
If you like Beatrix Potter and you like whimsy, you might enjoy Susan Wittig Albert’s book series, The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter. On the one hand, they are carefully researched and beautifully written stories from Potter’s life. On the other, there are talking animals—the Badger Rules of Thumb are a delightful guide to life.
I enjoyed that, but you realise saying “London is quite close to Middlesex” is like saying “San Francisco is quite close to California”?
Also, “an algae”? “Rogue”?
Nothing wrong with a hint of rogue… 😎
That may have come across as a bit harsh. I suppose a couple of encryption/decryption errors are to be expected, and I dare say Middlesex was just an additional layer of obfuscation in case her mother got to it.
If she’d bee a few years older, it would even have been technically correct (albeit maybe somewhat arbitrary). London was a county in its own right for a while. But I I think that West Brompton, where she was living with her parents, was still in Middlesex even then.
“been”
London is a county of its own now; Greater London, which absorbed most of what used to be Middlesex in 1965. Prior to that, as far as I can make out from Wikipedia, Middlesex was understood to be separate from London, although it doesn’t seem to be clear how until the County of London and County of Middlesex were created in 1899 (at which time the County of London also claimed a fair chunk of Middlesex).
West Brompton is apparently part of Kensington, which puts it in the middle of that chunk. So, yeah, prior to 1899, it was Middlesex. But the impression I get is that it would be quite plausible for someone at the time to consider that “Metropolitan Middlesex” was London really, and the rural districts were the actual Middlesex, with the 1899 decision just formalising what people thought already.
ICBW.
True, but, we’re getting into definitional territory here. I phrased my comment the way I did because, as you yourself implicitly point out, the ceremonial county today isn’t “London”, it’s “Greater London”. The old county of London was, apparently, very close to what’s now “Inner London”. And I know that, to me as someone who grew up in the North with an older sibling living in “Beckenham, Kent”, “Greater London” isn’t “London”; but I equally appreciate a modern tendency to use the two terms interchangeably. Either way, our collective pudding has probably been not just prepared but egregiously over-egged by now.