Today is the 23rd anniversary of the release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Here's a repost of something I wrote on it last year.

"Ask yourself, why do you seek the Cup of Christ? Is it for His glory, or for yours?"

Yesterday I wrote about Raiders of the Lost Ark and about how great it is. But let's not forget it's part of a franchise, one of the rare kind where the other films mostly stand up to the original. And, as I was talking about how Raiders is based in Judaism and the Old Testament, today I figured I'd go to the other end of the Bible: step forward Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and its quest for the Holy Grail.

Only despite the whole Da Vinci Code kerfuffle, there's a problem. Because the Holy Grail isn't in the Bible, or at least not in any direct way.

Jesus coins the wine/blood symbolism at the Last Supper but there's no great description of a Grail, they just use a cup to drink from. Boring and conventional I know, but there you go. No, the Holy Grail is basically a medieval plot device.

See, somewhere between 1181 and 1190, a French poet called Chretian de Troyes wrote Perceval: The Story of the Grail. During the poem, Perceval manages to impress King Arthur, fall in love, meets the Fisher King and has a vision of the Grail. Here it's an object of power, capable of healing the Fisher King if only Perceval asks the right questions - which he fails to do. It's nothing to do with the Bloodline of Christ, it's just the cup that the King's communion is carried in, important because that's the only food and drink he's receiving.

The Grail became holy around a decade later, when Robort de Boron fills in the gaps of its history - Joseph of Arimathea uses the cup from the Last Supper to collect some of Christ's blood after the crucifixion, eventually making his way to Britain (which links in with an early tradition that had Joseph and a bunch of other minor characters from the Gospels making their way across Europe, as well as being the source of the idea that Jesus once visited England as a boy - cue Jerusalem). None of this really has anything to do with the Bible - effectively it's New Testament fanfic. Somewhere along the line the Grail became the object of a quest carried out by Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and it became enshrined in literature as a sacred macguffin.

And in a lot of ways, that's the Grail's purpose in The Last Crusade - it's an excuse to reconcile Indy with his father, and once this happens, the Grail is lost again. However, it's this story, contrasted with the actions of the film's antagonists, that shows that Indy is capable of understanding, and experiencing grace.

Look at the film's bad guy. Donovan is a suave but ruthless businessman obsessed with the Grail and its potential to bring him immortality. To this end he aligns himself with the Nazis and manipulates both of the Joneses; after all, they're all really just tools to help him live forever. It's that arrogance, however, that ultimately damns him - when confronted with a roomful of potential Grails, from which he must drink to receive eternal life, he picks the most ornate. He sees the world from a pedestal and the Grail as his prize - of course it's going to be shiny and jewel-encrusted. But whoops, it's the wrong one and it ages him to death instead - "He chose...poorly," the Grail's guardian wryly comments. Donovan's Grail quest was all about the prize, not the lessons learned along the way - after all, he never learned them because the other characters did all the work.

Indy, on the other hand, has purer motivations - he just wants to save his dad's life and go home. And yet because of this, because his quest is noble and involves risking his neck for that of another, Indy is able to succeed. He does his homework ("Jehovah is spelled with an 'I!'"), he risks his life, and he's finally able to act with humility and wisdom - he doesn't want to be a king, he just wants his dad back. "That's not the cup of a carpenter," he mutters about Donovan's false grail, before picking the cheapest and most inconspicuous cup on offer. This is the right choice, because this is the Cup of Christ and the Grail and it's associated quest reflects this - humility, wisdom, self-sacrifice, reconciliation. The Christian concept of humanity being reconciled back to God is symbolised through the Spielbergian theme of a son's relationship with his father, and once this happens the Grail is no longer needed - it disappears and its temple collapses, job done, and all that remains for our heroes to do is return home wiser than when they set out.

Heck, even the audience is enlightened in the final moments - we find out that Indy named himself after the family dog.

I guess it's appropriate that a trilogy (let's put aside The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for the moment) that began with Indy confronted by the Wrath of God (in the form of the opened Ark of the Covenant) should end with him encountering God's grace - judgement and mercy meet around the Easter story in which the Grail myth has its origins. The prodigals return home and a fracture family is reunited. We've seen wrath - and melted Nazis - now we get to see healing.

There's another Indy film after this, of course, but that plays with sci-fi more than it does with myth and somehow it's weaker for it - it tries to emulate fifties B-movies, but bringing in aliens and Communists (the interchangeable 'Other' of films like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers) weakens it somehow - Indy seems to be the detrrmined hero who doesn't know when to stop even when divine forces are moving around him. It's that determination and heroism that brings him a measure of healing in The Last Crusade. I'd say he deserved it, but that wouldn't be grace - Indy's always been a rough diamond for all his heroism.

But even rogues can sometimes be pilgrims.

PS. Shameless plug: by coincidence, I also talk about grace today over at my other blog, only there it's in the context of mobile libraries. Feel free to call me eccentric.

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Ahh, turtles. And tortoises. Chilled out caravaners of the reptile kingdom. I'm glad you get a day to yourselves.

As a child, I had a pet tortoise. His name was Tommy, and while I was young I can still remember him slowly wandering around the garden and eating lettuce. After all, that's what tortoises do.

Well, that and hibernate.

It was during his hibernation one year that Tommy... Disappeared. I don't know when it happened exactly, but I recall being told that it was time for him to wake up, going out to his makeshift home, looking inside and...

He was gone. And I was shocked and sad but it didn't make any difference, he had disappeared without a trace.

Mom and Dad came to the conclusion that he'd woken up early and simply wandered off. I don't think that's what happened, but nearly thirty years later they've stuck to that story, so I'll believe them, or at least believe that's what they believed.

There's a part of me that wants to accept this story, and hold on to the idea that Tommy is out there somewhere, slowly exploring the world and munching lettuce. It's a nice thought.

As an adult, I'm not so sure. I suspect theft - apparently there was demand for black market tortoises. I can't prove this, of course, but I like to believe he was happy in his new home, and that he got over the emotional trauma incurred by his unscrupulous kidnapper being banged up for a string of unrelated but serious offences. After all, a man capable of stealing a tortoise is capable of anything.

I appreciate that I'll never know the full story. But I just wanted to tell it, because today is World Turtle Day.

Vaya con Dios, Tommy.

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Every so often you stumble across a piece of history that you never knew existed. Not one of those 'known unknowns' that you know you're unfamiliar with, like, say, the Defenestrations of Prague, but something completely new.

Today is the Circassian Day of Mourning, held to commemorate the genocide of the Circassian people by the forces of Tsarist Russia. Now I consider myself to be fairly well informed, but here's a story of how, just 150 years ago, around 400,000 people were killed and nearly 500,000 were effectively banished to Turkey (these are official figures, and may be closer to 1.5 million in truth), and yet I'm willing to bet that very few people in the UK have heard of this. Or maybe they have and my general historical knowledge is much worse than I thought.

It's an illustration of just how big history is, and how in the process of that history becoming a narrative, certain stories get lost or don't get the traction they need to become one of those things that everyone just seems to know. I hadn't even heard of the Circassians, and yet there's a history, a culture, a legacy that still has implications for people today. It's one of the beauties of the internet that episodes like this can become more widely known, and may put an onus on bloggers to spread word of the lesser known facts and histories and discoveries that we stumble across. It's all part of making the world a bigger and yet more connected place.

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And so Facebook has been floated on NASDAQ, leading to lots of economic excitement and Mark Zuckerberg become rich beyond the dreams of Luthor. It's probably the biggest tech story for a long time, mainly because Facebook has become so pervasive. It's everywhere.

But I'm a sceptic, bordering on techno-dystopian (maybe a lot of us are and that's why Blade Runner is getting a sequel). I love the internet, don't get me wrong, but nowadays Facebook leaves me cold.

I think it might be the privacy thing... No, wait, it's not. It's the opposite. It's the publicity thing. Facebook seems to want to know when we do anything - here's your timeline, here's what you've bought in Farmville, here's your Words With Friends score, here's a picture of you with a traffic cone on your head posted by someone you haven't even thought about in years... It's not content, it's noise.

Now, I admit I'm guilty of that, mainly using my FB profile to tout my blog posts. I hope they're not noise, but some may see it as such. Fair enough. I admit my hypocrisy.

But while that stuff may be noise to you and me, to marketing gnomes working long and hard in the data mines, it's information. And now FB is going to make mondo amounts of money by hitting the stock market, it's going to be under pressure from shareholders to keep making more money.

Now, it doesn't make stuff, it's reliant on one thing - our data. And when the pressure mounts to keep growing, to dive ever deeper into Scrooge McDuck-like piles of money, it'll be our data for sale: our likes, dislikes, the people we're friends with, the words we write in our status updates. People already look at stuff like that and think 'ka-ching', it's going to get worse. In one sense this is the brave new world of the information society, get used to it, but FB may well be ground zero for this sort of thing...

(I wouldn't be surprised if someone came up with the bright idea of it becoming a pay-to-use service. That'd be interesting. I suspect Google+ would become a lot more popular...)

(And that's before we get onto the Twitter joke that's being doing the rounds: the reason Facebook has gone public is because no-one can find the privacy settings.)

I dunno. I sound like someone telling hoodie wearing kids to get of his digital lawn. At least I haven't got on to how Facebook's about to mutate into Skynet.

But the world will still be turning tomorrow; some people will be richer and social networking may or may not change into something unrecognisable or unwelcome.

And the sun will still come up.

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I'm not a scientist.

This probably comes as no surprise, given the contents of this blog, but I am interested in the history of science, how discoveries impacted the society around them and vice versa. That's why I'm interested in today's commemoration. World Telecommunication and Information Society Day is a UN sponsored celebration of the opportunities afforded by the internet and initiatives to bridge the digital divide. This year's theme is 'women and girls in ICT'.

When you're talking about tuis subject, one woman immediately jumps out. a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace">Ada Lovelace</a> was the daughter of Lord Byron, not that they had a relationship; discovering that she had a talent for maths (and earning the nickname 'the Enchantress of Numbers', she was the first to recognise the true potential of Charles Babbage's primitive computing 'Engines' going so far as to figure out a prototype computer program. It never got used, more because of the limitations of technology, and somewhere along the line Ada's contribution to the birth of computing became an oft-forgotten historical footnote.

And that's just one of the reasons to celebrate female pioneers in science, engineering and computing whose stories aren't as well recorded as their male counterparts.

For instance, the majority of staff at Bletchley Park were WRENs, working on breaking Nazi codes and operating some of the earliest electronic computers, such as Colossus; some of their memories are recorded here.

Those WRENs fall within something of a tradition, because before computers were computers, computers were people, with the term referring to a fairly menial role manually crunching numbers for navigational charts, scientific data and the like. One of these ‘computers’ was Henrietta Swan Leavitt who, while routinely counting data for Harvard College Observatory, figured out the basis of measuring distances between astronomical objects, which in turn provided evidence for the expansion of the universe. Not bad for $10.50 a week, although sadly you won’t be surprised to hear that she received no recognition for this until after she died in 1921.

Beyond the information society, the list of unsung female heroes of science goes on; Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951 - her cells turned out to be remarkably resiliant and became known as the HeLa line, used to make breakthroughs in research into AIDS, cancer and polio, amoung others; Rosalind Franklin did much of the research that lead to our understanding of the structure of DNA, but her research being published later than that of Crick and Watson's and her early death at the age of 37 meant that her work has often been overlooked.

It would be cool if... Well, I was going to say if the next Steve Jobs was a woman, but a) it's still soon to be talking about the next Steve Jobs, and b) it's best to concentrate on being the first you than the next anyone else. And yet there's something in this - in the UK, men are almost six times more likely to be employed in SET occupations than women. As a UKRC research report states, "The under-representation of women in SET is increasingly seen as an issue affecting economic growth and productivity... Research suggests that diverse teams that include men and women are important to innovation and economic development."

Novelist Neal Stephenson has written an article on 'Innovation Starvation', about how we seem to have lost a sense of technological optimism and the resulting inspiration that leads us to carry out epic scientific and engineering projects. There are probably many reasons for this, but one seems fairly obvious - about half the population has become marginalised from contributing to a solution. The first programmer may have been a woman, but the general perception of computing is still that of a male-dominated industry, and that sort of perception has ramifications.

One of the potential solutions to this innovation starvation Stephenson has been involved in is a rediscovery of science fiction as a vehicle for big, inspirational ideas rather than an exploration of tech's darker side. And maybe that will tie in to the growing visibility of women in SF fandom (another field of which there's a false perception of it being over-whelmingly male). That puts an onus on many sci-fi writers, particularly those in more populist media like comics - write better female characters!

That's not quite as simplistic as it sounds - we help form our society through the stories and narratives we tell, and, well, you can write education strategies till they're coming out your ears, but I'm still willing to bet that more people have heard of Watson and Crick that Rosalind Franklin; more people have heard of Charles Babbage than Ada Lovelace. Maybe the importance of days like this is simply in that we tell a wider range of stories and that they're told well, inspirational and aspirational.

After all, Ada's dad was a poet...

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A few months ago, DC Comics announced Before Watchmen, a series of prequels to the classic graphic novel created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. This sparked a number of debates, mainly around whether or not Watchmen actually needs this sort of follow-up, but also about creator rights (I blogged about it here, but long story short - I think Watchmen is a complete work in itself and so prequels are unnecessary, but if Moore can remix Dracula and The War of the Worlds into The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, then DC can play with Watchmen).

But if that wasn't enough debate about the commercialisation of art, today has seen the announcement of the only kitchen appliance on earth powerful enough to make Alan Moore spontaneously combust. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, they're making a Watchmen toaster.

Seriously.

Here's an article on it.

Obviously it's the very definition of selling out your artistic integrity, but it's just so ridiculous that it actually becomes hilarious. In some ways it's a scathing commentary on culture. I'd half be tempted to belief that it was done to deliberately wind up the sort of comic book fans who take things a little too seriously...

So, who's up for clubbing together and buying Alan Moore a Watchmen toaster for his birthday?

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I feel sorry for the Mayans. They develop a calendar, which takes some doing, and yet when their calculations apparently stop, a bunch of people think that the end of the world has been predicted. It's very specific - the world either goes kablooey or undergoes radical transformation in December this year. It must be true, books have been written about it.

Of course, it's actually cobblers. As with any end of the world scenario that sets a specific date it runs the risk of being overtaken by events. It reminds me of a Christian bookshop I frequented, which had a small section of books based around 'interpreting' biblical prophecies - apparently Saddam Hussain was going to be the antichrist, or the world would end once the EU reached 13 members. Now the memory of that shelf is kind of sad - books that had been overtaken by history, yes, but also books that had become a part of history, a history of getting the apocalypse wrong, and the socio-political-religious factors that underpinned these particular interpretations.

Anyway, a 2012 end date was the fashionable theory in pop eschatology, but guess what? An archeological expedition in the jungles of Guatemala has uncovered a mural created by the Mayans. And on this mural are calendar calculations stretching way beyond this year, thousands of years into the future.

What's interesting is that the article refers to different mindsets when it comes to this sort of thing - the Mayans were more concerned with continuity, while our society, with its Doomsday 2012 books and constant headlines about ecological, social or economic collapse, seems more interested in catastrophe. Maybe that's tied up with how we see history - the chief influences on the West talk about history as progress (intellectual, social) and/or history having a distinct end point (such as the Book of Revelation, and it's interested to note that, of all the various interpretations of biblical prophecy, the one that has the greatest hold on us is the one that's most catastrophic... But hey, at least all this has given me some ideas for my Bible blog...)

So the world's not going to end in December, at least not because the Mayans predicted it. We can go on thinking about Christmas presents and New Year parties. It would be optimistic to say we can put the whole 2012 thing to rest, but we can at least give the Mayans a break...

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May the Fourth be with you! Ha ha!

The Star Wars movies (originals, obviously) are some of my all-time favourite films. Of course they are - I'm 33, born in 1976, and therefore Star Wars (I refuse to call it A New Hope), The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are some of the fundamental stories of my childhood. Not only the films either; they were the first movies that really pushed the merchandising side of film-making, and so I had a substantial collection of Star Wars toys - the first one I acquired, second hand, was one of the third-stringers, an Imperial officer who got Force choked by Darth Vader, but I moved up the ladder. Heck, I had an X-Wing Fighter. I had the Millennium Falcon!

My grandmother wasn't impressed by all this. A lot of the characters in the trilogy are pretty much grotesque, and if I was ever ill for no apparent reason, Nan blamed Chewbacca and the others. Medically speaking this was unfair, although the sequel trilogy made me feel sick a couple of times if that counts.

Nah, as a kid in the early eighties, it was the aliens, robots and hardware that made Star Wars cool. Nowadays it's easy to appreciate other aspects of the films, like how Harrison Ford becomes a megastar before your very eyes ("I love you!" "I know." is one of the coolest moments in sci-fi history), or how there seems to be a whole back-story to the whole thing (I have a friend who thinks the Expanded Universe is better than the films; I don't altogether agree, but it's a fair position to take), or how good the costume design in Return of the Jedi is, but back in the day it was all about comedy robots, cool spaceships, and light sabers.

That covers a lot of its appeal - it's not a science fiction film, not in the strictest sense of the definition. Science fiction, as a genre, is about technology and scientific potentialities and their imagined impact on humans. That's not really Star Wars. Sure it's set in space, but that doesn't really make it science fiction, and while the hardware is seriously cool, that's pretty much all it is. No, Star Wars is a fantasy movie set in space, complete with naive farmhands, princesses, comedy servants, wizards, swords and magic. It's got the trappings of sci-fi, and it owes a massive debt to early movie serials like the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon adaptations, but at its heart it's a fantasy movie with spaceships, and I think that's a key component of its success. Fantasy, at least in the fairy tale guise that Star Wars taps into, is a bit more accessible than full-on science fiction; I think that's a big part of Doctor Who's success as well.

Another reason for the success of Star Wars is the way in which it lends itself to fandom; George Lucas has given his approval to fan films like Troops (Cops with Stormtroopers, basically - you can also join the 501st Stormtrooper Legion if you want ), you can have long arguments about why Chewbacca doesn't get a medal when he did just as much work as anyone else, and you can sing along to Livin' La Vida Yoda if you're feeling musical. Never under-estimate the importance of fandom fodder to the success of all things culturally geek.

A lot of this is rose-tinted glasses - there are aspects of the original trilogy that look pretty dated nowadays - but at the same time it's hard to see many blockbusters coming along nowadays that have half the impact of Star Wars; they may make more money, but I can't see people cosplaying Avatar or Titanic in thirty years time. Or maybe, and again this is rose-tinted glasses time, there was a moment in cinema, late seventies to mid-eighties, that saw the release of a bunch of blockbusters that caught the imagination of audiences; Star Wars, yes, but also the Indiana Jones films, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters... Star Wars, to me, just seems to be the king of that movement. Or maybe it's just because I loved all those movies as a kid.

That's the key, I think - Star Wars is for kids. And, of course, for adults who can accept it's for kids and enjoy it because of that. And yet it's also for the kids who once watched it on BBC or ITV every Christmas, and who had all the toys; for the kids who grew up and sold those toys because they grew out of them, even though they kick themselves because of what those toys are now worth to collectors; for the kids who, somewhere along the line, realised that, actually, there's no point in growing up if you can't pretend to have a light saber fight once in a while.

Because, for me and for a lot of Generation X, part of our imagination will always live in a galaxy far, far away.

(I originally posted this last year, but hey, if you can't cannibalise your own blog, who can you cannibalise?)

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It's been a dark, wet day, but my mood has been lifted by watching the new trailer for The Dark Knight Rises!

Well, not really. The film looks amazing, but it certainly doesn’t look fun. While The Avengers has marketed itself on a bunch of punch-the-air moments, TDKR has taken the opposite path – trading on the idea that this will be the last Nolan/Bale bat-movie, there’s a sense of impending doom and imminent devastation around the trailer – the end is coming, for Batman, for his allies, for Gotham itself.

This is a clever way of doing things, because while the Nolan films have been dark, they haven’t been hopeless – for my money, there’s actually more of a sense of Batman achieving something than there was in the Burton/Schumacher movies. In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne starts to bring hope back to a despairing Gotham; in The Dark Knight, the Joker’s plans are foiled by a prisoner making the moral decision to not play the bad guys games and refusing to kill innocents. The battle is long and hard fought, but while the question is raised as to whether the presence of Batman actually makes things worse, the films ultimately come down on the side of Bruce’s aching heroism. Before Batman you get the impression that very few people even bothered to ask why Gotham was such a hellhole.

“I haven’t given everything. Not yet,” Bruce says in the trailer, and that’s key to the character. He may be the biggest badass in town, but a part of him is still a kid, kneeling between the bodies of his parents. He dedicates his life to stopping the bad guys, but for him it’s never enough, he’ll never give enough. His dying thought will be regret over not saving just one more person, and it’s tragic but even if it makes you angry at the guy, it makes you love him too. He needs to give himself a break, but he never will, and if he does he stops being Batman and horrible things happen. Gotham needs Batman.

Now, whether or not that Batman will be Bruce Wayne at the end of all this is up for grabs, and I don’t know what to think at the moment. Part of me thinks he’ll win and continue with his mission (for me, Batman eventually dies as an older man, saving one little old lady from a mugger who gets off a lucky shot); another part of me wonders why Joseph Gordon-Levitt is getting so much exposure in the trailer – he’s not officially playing anyone we know, and yet he gets more screen time than Commissioner Gordon or Alfred. I’m convinced something’s going on there.

(Okay, I’ll admit it – I have a theory. I’m out of touch with online speculation, so this is probably completely unoriginal, but what if Gordon-Levitt is actually playing Richard Grayson? I know Nolan has sworn not to do Robin, but Grayson was only Robin as a kid – as an adult he’s a cop and heir apparent to the Batman legacy. And in TDKR, we have a mysterious cop and encroaching doom for Bruce Wayne. Maybe Bruce dies but Batman carries on? For what it’s worth, it certainly ties in with the last few years’ worth of comics...)

It’s just hit me that I haven’t mentioned the bad guys in all this (although I’m guessing Catwoman will walk an ambiguous path rather than being an outright villain); they look good, they’re played by good actors, but this feels like Batman’s story more than anything, with Gotham’s fate tied directly to what happens to Bruce. That’s how it should be – this is a Batman film, after all (something Burton and Schumacher often forgot), the last in a series. It should focus on Bruce. This is his story, and it’s what the Marvel films have got right – fun as the villains may be, the heroes are at the heart of the story and they’re interesting enough to carry things.

(Okay, you could argue that the Joker overshadowed things in The Dark Knight, but part of that was due to off-screen events and part of it was due to the Joker’s role in the mythos, an agent of chaos who screws around with how everything works in a Batman story – after all, it was the Joker who killed the second Robin and crippled Batgirl. The other character who pulled that off – once - is Bane, who of course is the Big Bad in TDKR.)

That said, building up the villains is a good thing, because it emphasises Batman’s badassery. Yes, the trailer is going for a doom-laden sense of hopelessness, but it can do that because we all know how cool Batman is. Maybe I’m informed more by the comics than anything else, but this is the guy who once figured out how to take down the biggest bad in the universe using a bow and arrow and a guy who can shrink. Sure the trailer seems downbeat – it’s so that the film itself can have its moment of triumph, one that’s possibly harder won than anything in The Avengers, but just as satisfying in its own way. If Bruce Wayne is going to fall, then we can be certain of one thing.

A Dark Knight will rise.

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Today is Obscura Day, an "international celebration of unusual places, full of expeditions, back room tours and explorations of the hidden wonders in your own hometown", run by the Atlas Obscura website (which is well worth checking out). This got me thinking about the stranger corners of my area.

It's not been that easy. I used the best example last year, so I've had to do some digging.

For instance, Dudley Castle. Not that obscure I admit, but there's something a little quirky in knowing that the castle saw the oldest excavated, um, condoms. This came as a bit of a surprise.

For a start, there’s the story of Bella in the Wych-Elm. Not Bella AND the Wych-Elm, Bella IN the Wych-Elm. See, in 1943, a group of lads hanging around in Hagley Woods came across the body of a woman in the hollow of a wych-hazel. The body, badly decomposed, was recovered by police who discovered it was missing a hand. They never figured out who she was – World War 2 was considered more important – but the story soon became a local meme; "WHO PUT BELLA IN THE WYCH-ELM?" graffiti started cropping up, mostly in the same writing. Did the author know the name of the victim? Was it a taunt? Was the murder connected with the War? Or black magic? We’ll never find out, but check out this picture of the Wychbury Obelisk – tell me that’s not freaky…

Less creepy is the fact that the anchor for the Titanic was made in Netherton. Apparently, local sarcasm says that it was the only bit of the ship that worked.

Sadly the Black Country can’t lay claim to one of the most outright insane areas of the West Midlands, Cannock Chase. This is ground zero for High Strangeness in the region, giving rise to stories of werewolves, bigfoots/bigfeet, mysterious big cats, mysteriously appearing koi carp, ghosts, UFOs and goodness knows what else. It’s fodder for an episode or six of Doctor Who.

All this is before we get onto Dudley’s ghost stories, or the Stourbridge cat grafitti / cat disappearances, or the Himley Hall connection with the Gunpowder Plot, or… Heck, I swear I once saw a llama in a garden in Brierley Hill. There’s probably enough material for something like the Hometown Tales podcast.

Other than these, I would have said The Pig On The Wall pub in Gornal, only it's long since been turned into a McDonalds and the whole thing was based on a fallacy in the first place. Bit disappointing that was...

So, does your home town have quirky corners?

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So, I’ve just seen The Avengers and indeed it is awesome. Maybe starts a little slow, but then someone loses his temper and from there on in it’s fantastic. Here’s my review; it contains spoilers, although I’ve kept them to a minimum as there are a few moments which you really don’t want to know about in advance. Also, I’ve chosen to review it through the medium of song...

“The hammer of the gods
Will drive our ships to new lands
To fight the horde, singing and crying
‘Valhalla, I am coming!’”

Technically The Avengers is a sequel to most of the films Marvel has released since Iron Man, but in many ways it’s mainly tied to Thor – the lead villain is Thor’s adopted brother Loki, and the main plot McGuffin was introduced in the earlier film’s end-credit sequence. Loki’s desire for power (and Thor’s decision to use power to protect innocents) sets events into motion and leads to some nice moments where that is punctured – in one comedy moment, which is too much fun to spoil, but also in a scene in Germany, where Loki’s demands that people kneel before him is challenged by a lone, elderly man. Given that even the actions of some of the good guys are driven by a fear of power (Sam Jackson’s organisation is scared that the growing superhero population is getting too strong to contain). Thor himself doesn’t get that much to do, other than be a powerhouse who gets to beat up other powerhouses, but Thor beating up powerhouses is fun. Everyone knows that extreme property damage is one of the guilty pleasures of the comic book industry.

“I am Iron Man!
Has he lost his mind?”

The Hulk gets the majority of the big-fun bits, but of all the actors, it’s Robert Downey Junior who’s the biggest scene stealer – not that you were expecting otherwise. Effortlessly poking and prodding the other characters, and generally coming across as the guy who knows he’s the smartest person in the room, he owns his scenes. It’s interesting that he gets to deliver a threat to Loki, pitching cut-glass English sarcasm against smart-ass Tony Stark. He’s not developed a whole deal, probably because there’ve already been two Iron Man films and therefore he’s the most established cast member anyway, but that doesn’t matter. No-one does the funny and charismatic thing better.

“Captain America’s been torn apart;
He’s a court jester with a broken heart.”

Well, no Axl, he’s not. Captain America is great in this – he’s the straight-laced one who (almost) everyone respects and loves, and while this might not sound particularly interesting, it works. As someone says, Cap may be old-fashioned, but maybe the world needs a little old-fashioned. Of all the characters, he’s probably the one genuine good and decent guy there. The film respects that – he’s the only one of the core three Avengers who doesn’t get undercut by a moment of slapstick. That’s a smart move – Thor’s Shakespearean pronouncements are crying out for a pratfall, and it’s always fun to see Iron Man suddenly paying for his cockiness, but if you mock Captain America too much, you lose the moral heart of the movie.

“Stop talking about comic books or I’ll kill you.
I don’t care if the Hulk can defeat the man of steel.”

Well, he couldn’t, so it’s a good thing Superman isn’t in this movie. But when people tell you that the Hulk steals the show, believe them. I know that’s hard to get your head around – the Hulk has been a difficult character to translate into movies – but he’s great as a supporting character/looming threat. Kudos also to Mark Ruffalo, who makes the nervy, quiet, restrained Bruce Banner an almost-likeable character who nevertheless you want to keep at arm’s length. The ever-present idea that he could lose control and create mayhem is played with genuine menace by the other characters, especially Scarlett Johansson, to the point where the Hulk’s inevitable emergence is almost a relief. Because that’s when the smashing starts!

In short, go see it. There isn’t really a weak link in the whole thing – Hawkeye gets a little punked, but there’ll be room for him in any sequels, and while I’ve concentrated on the more showy characters, it’s worth mentioning the Black Widow’s inventive use of a chair and Agent Coulson’s baseball card collection. I’m a DC fan, and my big disappointment of the night was that there wasn’t a trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, but Marvel are knocking their movies out of the park at the moment, and anything that gives superheroes a chance to shine is fine by me.

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We live in a culture of the remix and the remake, which is, frankly, a little annoying. I mean, does anyone think that the 3D Clash of the Titans is better than the original Harryhausen classic? Was there really any need to remake Psycho? Does anyone really want to see a new Ghostbusters without Bill Murray, or hear an X-Factor contestant murder a classic song about the agony of love?

However, there’s a part of me that’s attracted to the idea of remakes. I think it’s because they’re normally bad – are they bad because they’re fundamentally a bad idea, or are they bad because someone screwed up? Or is it simply a case of no-one having the single, brilliant idea that would make the remake stand on its own two feet and actually add something to the original? Getting Justin Bieber to cover ‘Hurt’ is a terrible idea. Getting Johnny Cash to cover it? Genius.

So I got thinking about this. Announce that you’re remaking, say, Star Wars, and the internet would break in two. But is there a way to make it work?

Well, the best I could come up with would be to make Leia the main character. She’s stuck on Tattooine, when she gets a message from Luke via R2-D2; he’s been caught up in the rebellion and now he’s being tortured and, by the way, you’re my long lost twin sister. The story plays out pretty much as before, only now Leia’s the one who becomes a Jedi and faces down Vader. Maybe give it all a steampunk aesthetic too. The bonus is that you bring the spark between Han and Leia into play almost immediately.

(Doing that effectively guts the most entertaining bits of The Empire Strikes Back, but there’s got to be a way around that...)

I don’t know. There’s so much that could go wrong. And some concepts sound more interesting on paper than they would in actuality. A remake of Back to the Future, where the ‘past’ of the remake is the ‘present’ of the original, therefore making it an eighties nostalgia-fest? Would this even work?

Then there are concepts that seem inextricably tied to a certain time and place. A British version of The West Wing would flounder because Britain lacks some of America’s optimism and would therefore result in a remake being far too cynical. Likewise, is it possible to imagine an American Doctor Who? That’s not to say it can’t be done, but the Doctor is, in many ways, a trickster figure, at odds with the prevailing corporate/military approach to much American TV science fiction. But it seems short-sighted to say that it couldn’t fundamentally be done... And we’ve had successful remakes of Sherlock Holmes (by moving it into the present day) and Battlestar Galactica (by acknowledging that we live in a post 9-11 world).

So, what remakes could you make a success?

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My first computer was a ZX Spectrum. It was a 48K model, I think, with rubber keys. You had to plug a tape recorder into it to load games from cassettes. This took minutes, accompanied by a screeching noise and a screen border that flashed primary colours. I'm remembering this now and it seems like prehistory, but back in the day this was the moment that computers really started to enter UK homes.

I eventually upgraded to the 128K model, with a built in cassette player. I think this may have been when I learned the only bit of code that I know, other than Wordpress HTML tags (which don't count):

10 Print "Hello!"
20 Goto 10
Run

This made 'Hello!' scroll up the screen forever, or at least until you stopped it. There are kids reading this thinking that this is the most pointless use of processing power ever encountered, but trust me, back when I was young this was awesome. It meant that the computer did what you told it to do. I swear, when the time comes to prevent the Technopocalypse, that bit of BASIC is really gonna come in handy.

And the games! Horace Goes Skiing (little blue man skis down a slope, but first he has to get across a busy road without getting run over!), Manic Miner (Miner Willy has to collect gems without getting killed by bizarre monsters!), Jet Set Willy (Miner Willy gets rich, throws a party, but then has to tidy up his mansion before he goes to bed!), Horace and the Spiders (Horace and some spiders!)... They were primitive and buggy (I'm not sure it was actually possible to finish Jet Set Willy) but they were addictive. Angry Birds makes them look like finger-daubed cave paintings, sure, but you've got to remember that this was all shiny and new and we loved it.

The next generation of games was my favourite, especially the stuff put out by Codemasters and the Oliver Twins. I pulled a few all-nighters trying to complete the Dizzy games - you can play Treasure Island Dizzy here. The Play button on my cassette deck fell off, and I had to load games by sticking a pencil into the mechanism. You can't do that nowadays...

Times moved on, PCs became more advanced, the internet took over and games now look like movies. But the Speccy is worth remembering, as a herald of today's networked world, and as gateway into technology and gaming and programming. On St. George's Day, don't forget to say happy birthday to a bit of technology of which Britain can be proud.

PS. I'm now going to be singing "Just Another Manic Miner" all day...

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So. St. George's Day.

I never know what to do with St. George's Day, seeing as the guy was Palestinian and had nothing to do with England. But then maybe there's something strangely English about that; we don't like making a fuss about things, but we'll talk about two world wars and one world cup forever more; we both invented and liberated concentration camps; we want a national saint, but we pick one that never got anywhere near our country. Being English is complicated.

It also doesn't help that, for a good few years, our national iconography got co-opted by a bunch of neanderthal racists, making it vaguely unnerving to see England's flag flying anywhere other than football matches. I know this is wrong, but it happened. Fortunately a sense of national pride has been reclaimed in recent years, which is a positive thing, and maybe in a couple of decades we'll have something approaching St. Patrick's Day. I wouldn't like to make a prediction here - I've only ever actively tried to celebrate St. George's Day once. We were in San Francisco, and we tried to find an English pub in which to celebrate. However, our taxi driver was unhelpful and we ended up in an Irish bar instead. Go figure.

We also share St. George with Spain, and I've got to say that I prefer some of Spain's traditions for the day. For instance, in Catalonia, gifts of books are exchanged, which is something I'm always down with. Why do they give books? Well, it's to remember that April 23 is also the birthday of that famous writer William Shakespeare. Who, of course, was English.

Yes, that's right. On St. George's Day, Spain has a tradition of commemorating England's greatest writer. Meanwhile, England doesn't. The whole thing's messed up.

That's also the reason today is World Book and Copyright Day, which I'm a little more inclined to celebrate. Only in the UK they moved it to March 1st this year because it clashes with our school holidays and, you've guessed it, St. George's Day. The latter seems a strange decision to me, as I'd've thought England has produced enough famous writers to celebrate both books and the country that produced them, but never mind.

There's another commemoration today - International Pixed-Stained Technopeasant Day, on which sci-fi writers are encouraged to post professional-quality work for free on the internet. Nothing to do with St. George's Day, of course, but it's worth noting that England has a fantastic science fiction heritage (H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Douglas Adams...), and the World Wide Web was invented by the English Tim Berners-Lee.

And talking of IT, today is also the 30th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum , one of the UK's earliest home computers. I owned a couple of these during my formative years, a 48K with rubber keys and a 128K with a built in cassette player through which it took an age to load games... But it left a legacy among the country's computing community, so maybe the humble Speccy is something else worth remembering today.

So yeah, I don't know what I want from St. George's Day. I want to be proud of my country - I am proud of my country, although not without reservations - but I'm not sure April 23rd helps me to do that. I suppose it's just because I get most patriotic when I'm watching the Last Night of the Proms (ironically, my favourite part of that is 'Jerusalem', a song that tries to co-opt as a national treasure another notable Middle Eastern figure who never travelled here...). And the aspect of England that I most admire, that has moved me to tears in the past, is the underplayed, stiff-upper-lip, quietly defiant response to times of national tragedy. After terrorists bombed London in July 2005, the refusal to be beaten and the dry sense of humour on display was proof enough for me that England is still somewhere that can be admired.

Anyway, happy St. George's Day. I'm going to have a cup of tea.

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And so it's Earth Day, but I confess I don't get outside enough.

That's something I've realised over the last few months. I've always labelled myself as an indoorsy type, but the more I think about it, the more I realise I'm impoverishing myself.

Part of this realisation was accidentally looking up at the night sky and realising that I could see Venus. The idea was a little overwhelming - being able to see another world while putting out the binbags? There's something amazing about that.

Then there's the sound of running water. It's relaxing, peaceful. My parents used to own a caravan next to a river, and I loved being able to sit on the bank and read and pray in the silence. Haven't done something like that for a long time.

And that reminds me - I once saw a mole there, digging away, and I watched him, fascinated, because the closest I'd come to seeing a mole before that was The Wind in the Willows.

Hippos. They fascinate me too. I was at the West Midlands Safari Park one and I was just mesmerised by the hippos. I can't even explain why, because they were smelly and they didn't do anything particularly entertaining, such as juggling, but still I stood there, staring at them.

Maybe there's a simple explanation. Maybe it's because, despite pollution and corruption and my naive discomfort with nature being red in tooth and claw, the world is a wonderful place. I've sailed close to Niagara Falls, heard the roar of the torrent, got my hair wet. It's amazing and beautiful.

So no, I don't go outside as much as I should. Maybe there's a part of me that thinks I don't need to. After all, I can see all the moles I want on the internet.

But that's the thing, isn't it? I go outside, I see something cool, I don't embrace the moment, I whip out my iPhone and start filming. Up goes the barrier between me and the natural world. Who'd've thought that, even when I'm outdoors, I'm still indoors somehow?

But I compost and recycle and grow tomatoes, and that makes me feel good and noble, and that slightly cancels out the fact that I don't know how half the food in my fridge actually gets there, not really. "A truck takes it to a shop" isn't really an adequate answer. But then I don't get outside enough.

I really should...

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History has some strange coincidences, unrelated moments that, when put into a wider context, take on extra significance or irony. For instance, it's April 20th, 1939, and in Berlin, the Third Reich is holding the largest military parade in its history.

All the pomp, all the stage-managed show of power, is to commemorate Hitler's 50th birthday, and repugnant as it is to modern ears, the man was loved, even deified. People sent him gifts, buildings were erected in his honour, and low alcohol beer and a new edition of Mein Kampf were released.

And yet despite this outpouring of adoration, his intentions were clear - countries such as Austria and Czechoslovakia had been annexed, and just a few months earlier, Krystallnacht had made the Third Reich's intentions towards the Jewish population quite obvious.

So, on one continent a show of power for a regime based on oppression and racism. Elsewhere...

Elsewhere, also on April 20 1939, Billie Holiday walks into the World Broadcasting Studios in New York and records 'Strange Fruit'. The first time a protest song really enters the 'mainstream', 'Strange Fruit' is devastating; written by Jewish poet Abel Meeropol, the song conjures a horrific image - bloated, rotting fruit hanging on trees in the southern states which turns out to be the victims of lynching. At the end of an evening out at a nightclub, patrons were confronted with the realities of race in America, and 'Strange Fruit' is now considered to be one of the most important songs ever recorded.

There's no direct correlation between Hitler's birthday parade and a Billie Holiday recording session, other than them taking place in the same day. But they seem to illustrate two extremes of human nature - on one hand hatred, oppression, intolerance backed up by numbers and firepower; on the other, righteous anger at the same. Two moments, two countries, two contexts, but somehow they speak to each other across the years.

So Hitler's parades remind us of the dangers of idolising dictators; 'Strange Fruit' helps bring those dangers right down to earth, focusing on individuals (a photograph of the bodies of lynching victims Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith was the inspiration behind the song) and serving as a terrifying reminder. The primary victims of racist madness in Germany were Jews, African-Americans in the US, but strange fruit hangs from trees throughout the world.

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If there's been one stand-out success story of the relaunched Doctor Who, it’s the career trajectory of David Tennant, a respected Shakespearean actor who took on the role of the Tenth Doctor and found himself catapulted to stardom. And, as it’s Mr. Tennant’s birthday, here’s my tribute to his Doctor...

The Tenth Doctor was a dashing, romantic lead, a man who’d finally been incarnated with good looks and social skills and who had therefore discovered he liked kissing. David Tennant was fantastic at playing this – a bit skinny, a bit geeky, but also loveable and a bit cool. And it worked – among a general audience, I’d be willing to bet that Tennant is the most popular Doctor, and much of that is down to the actor, who always comes across as a really nice guy in interviews and who was a huge fan of the show. Talent, charm and enthusiasm count for a lot.

I guess it doesn’t hurt that he’s a good looking guy as well.

And yet, while people remember the Tenth Doctor as being funny and attractive and romantic, there’s another side to the character, one that’s a lot darker than people tend to give the era credit for. The Tenth Doctor could be arrogant and hubristic. And it was those qualities that contributed to his downfall.

Look at his back story – the Tenth Doctor was born out of the ashes of the Ninth, who was a battle-scarred survivor wracked with guilt. His dying act was to engineer a win out of a no-win situation that paralleled his greatest sin. Maybe that’s why the Tenth Doctor could be over-confident – he was guy who could always find a way to win, because he was the Doctor, the man who beats the monsters. He started to believe his own publicity. He could backchat royalty and snog beautiful women throughout history.

This meant that, when he discovered he was going to die he railed against it, throwing petulant abuse at the man he would ultimately sacrifice himself to save. This was a shock, an out of character display from a character who had started to believe his own galactic legend. His last words were “I don’t want to go”, and while the sentiment is fair enough, it came from a man who had become touched by arrogance and hubris. His fate paralleled that of his people, the Time Lords, and so the Tenth Doctor had to die to himself in order to put aside those flaws and become a new man, one less likely to lose the core of his being.

That was the Tenth Doctor’s last act of heroism for the universe – not following the path of his people and becoming a monster, but identifying that darkness within and not succumbing. The legend willingly dies to save an old man, because everyone is valuable and because it’s the right thing to do. He becomes someone less cool, less dashing in the process, and maybe that was his penance,

Tennant’s Doctor was hugely popular and deservedly so – for all some would like Doctor Who to be a cult show, providing hard science fiction stories to a select group of aficionados, the fact is it’s meant to be a big, popular Saturday night highlight that resonates with a general audience while maintaining its geek roots. The Tenth Doctor was great at achieving that, and Tennant was a fantastic ambassador for the show. Even before he started in the role, pictures of him wearing t-shirt reading “Trust me, I’m a doctor” made me think he was going to be good. And he was.

Happy birthday David!

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My earliest Doctor Who memory is of a Fifth Doctor story. Ironically it doesn't feature Peter Davison - it's a scene from 'The Five Doctors' featuring Jon Pertwee getting kidnapped by a black proto-CGI triangle and it freaked me out.

Of all the Doctors, Davison, along with Patrick Troughton, probably had the toughest job. For seven years, Tom Baker had been the be all and end all of Doctor Who, a towering intimidating presence on-screen and off. For many viewers, Baker had been the only Doctor they knew. Peter Davison had the mammoth task of following that.

The Fifth Doctor was a recognisable figure, at least - my dad knew who he was because he liked cricket and All Creatures Great and Small. But more than that, Davison had the acting chops to create a new character that could follow Tom Baker but not emulate him. It was a 'smaller' performance than Baker's, but that was needed. Baker's Doctor died saving the universe; when it was time for Davison to move on, his Doctor died saving just one person. It's a significant difference. Maybe it's appropriate as well - Davison was one of two Doctors to have a companion die on screen, so it's fitting that he should sacrifice himself to save another. Maybe his regeneration is an act of absolution.

Anyway, given Big Tom's massive shadow, it's interesting that many of the current Doctor Who production team name Davison as their favourite, including David Tennant and Steven Moffat.

Maybe that's not really a surprise - the Fifth Doctor is something of a prototype for the relaunched version of the show, playing up the idea of an incredibly old man in a young man's body. The contrast is a potent one. The mini-episode 'Time Crash' draws attention to this: "You know, I loved being you." says the Tenth Doctor, "Back when I first started at the very beginning, I was always trying to be old and grumpy and important like you do when you're young, and then I was you. And I was all dashing about and playing cricket and my voice going all squeaky when I shout and I still do that! The voice thing, I got that from you... Because you know what, Doctor? You were my Doctor."

It's a beautiful moment, a love letter to an era. Some will point to Chris Eccleston and Billie Piper as the moment Doctor Who was reborn, but the seeds were there way back in the eighties, a young-old man wearing a cricket jumper and some celery.

Happy birthday, Peter.

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It’s a long time till November 5, with all its bonfires and fireworks and historical half-memory, so obviously today I’m going to write about Guy Fawkes.

There is actually a good reason for this – on this day in 1606, Fawkes was executed for his role in the Gunpowder Plot and, as a result, became more than just a terrorist/freedom-fighter – he became a symbol. This may overstate his importance to history – he wasn’t the leader of the Plot, despite our assumptions (that was Robert Catesby, who was shot and killed around three miles from where I live, down at Holbeche House), and even if he had been in charge, the whole thing is notable for being a failure. James i survived and the cause of Catholic Emancipation continued for another 200 years. And yet Guy is a more potent figure in Britain’s national consciousness than, say, Oliver Cromwell, who really was responsible for killing a king (well, at least partly).

So why is Guy Fawkes the focus of our commemorations? Maybe it was because he was caught red-handed, becoming a snapshot of the whole conspiracy. Maybe it’s because he survived to go to trial while many of the other Plotters were killed trying to escape. Maybe it’s because, in the Victorian era when the ‘accepted’ version of British history began to solidify, an author called William Harrison Ainsworth wrote a book in which Guy Fawkes was portrayed as a swashbuckling hero. And let’s face it, although Guy is now mainly celebrated through being burned in effigy, he’s still something of a folk hero – after all, he wanted to blow up the Houses of Parliament, and, well, no-one really likes politicians do they? It’s one of those symbols of comfortable Britishness that has its roots in protest – for another example, look at the second verse of ‘Jerusalem’ and its call for social reform, then try to square that with the climax of the Last Night of the Proms.

Nowadays, the image of Guy Fawkes has taken on a new edge. In 1982, Alan Moore and David Lloyd began their epic comic book series V for Vendetta, which received a big screen adaptation in 2005. The titular hero theatrically assassinates the representatives of a fascist dictatorship, all the while clad in cloak, hat and a stylised Guy Fawkes mask. That mask makes revolution anonymous and yet universal – anyone can resurrect Guy if they stand up against corrupt governments, you can’t be caught by their agents if they don’t know who you are, and turns a lone protestor into the embodiment of centuries of protest and revolt. V may have been born out of some very specific circumstances, but under the yoke of oppression, those circumstances aren’t entirely unique – everyone suffers, everyone has a responsibility to fight back.

That’s why, over the last few years, the mask used in the V for Vendetta movie has started to appear at protests, most notably concealing the features of Anonymous, the hacktivist group who have been making a splash with their Denial-of-Service attacks on corporate and government websites. They’re often seen in the crowds at Occupy campsites, which raises an interesting tension. Guy Fawkes and V both wanted change through violence and destruction – blow up the establishment and rebuild in a ‘better’ way – but Occupy is a non-violent movement. Occupy’s rallying cry is “We are the 99%”; the Guy mask is distancing, isolating, fitting Anonymous’s ‘persona’ as a vaguely threatening trickster figure, doing it for the lulz and telling its targets to “Expect us”. It's meant to be unnerving.

(Of course, the problem is that it's harder for authorities to dismiss, say, Scott Olsen, a former Marine who was seriously injured as the result of heavy-handed policing during a raise on Occupy Oakland, than it is for them to demonised a group hidden behind the face of a revolutionary. There are a generation of lawmakers and establishment figures who see the internet as either a Wild West that needs to be tamed or a dangerous fairyland - the threatening Other, and a Them-vs-us scenario fits right into their narrative. And when terrorism is used as an excuse to pass all kinds of legislation, it's a red rag to a bull to appropriate the image of, well, a terrorist... Sure, Anonymous and Occupy aren't the same thing, but in this age of protest, and when anti-protest agendas are in play, the boundaries can become blurred.)

Whatever the wisdom (or otherwise) of the V mask being appropriated for modern-day protests, Guy Fawkes still stalks our cities. He doesn't want to blow anyone up anymore, thank goodness, but he still wants the world to change, still wants to make a stand. And the history books will record if, this time, he was successful.

PS. Alan Moore has written a piece on this very subject for the BBC. You can read it here.)

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For as long as I've walked on this planet, space has worn humanity's footprints - satellites, Voyager, the bits and pieces left behind on the Moon by the Apollo missions. Neil Armstrong taking that small step has always existed in grainy black and white footage and we've always been a space-faring species, even if we've not quite passed the garden gate. It's always been this way, at least for my generation and the generations since.

And so today it's good that there are some many commemorations of Yuri Gagarin and his flight 51 years ago, a flight that lasted under two hours but which changed everything, opening up a whole new horizon as he became the first human being to go into space, the first to orbit the Earth.

It was a massive achievement - I think it's been overshadowed by the moon landings, and certainly I remember mutterings that the series Enterprise, with its opening montage of historic moments in spaceflight, had somehow managed to omit Gagarin. Oversight? Probably, but it just goes to show how easily we forget.

(Back in the day though, the news was huge. One thing I didn't know, and that came as a bit of a surprise, was that Gagarin visited Manchester on a post-orbit world tour. Thousands lined the streets in the rain, Gagarin insisting on riding with the top down so that he could wave to the crowds. It seems like the sort of thing that doesn't happen any more, certainly not for those who still travel into space. Eventually the final frontier starts to feel like a trip to the shops. Heck, now we can film it and put it on Youtube - check out the fantastic First Orbit, which recreates Gagarin's journey.)

Maybe that's because it was a different world back then, two superpowers eyeing each other warily, everyone else seemingly stuck in the middle, nuclear spectres stalking history and secrets and fears spinning the globe. Everything's changed now, and the space race now just feels like history, a bygone age of spies and empires, one of which is now dead, the other hanging on as everything changes around it.

But I'm having a bit of a personal response to this particular anniversary - I hadn't realised how young Gagarin was when he flew into orbit. 27 is nothing, heck, nowadays it's almost still adolesence. And yet there he was, changing the world in his mid-twenties. Seven years later he'd be dead, killed in a plane crash at 34, almost the same age I am now. It's stupid I know, but it makes me look at my accomplishments, or lack of them. 34 still seems young to me, but by that age some people had already changed the world.

But that's maudlin, and if you let it the idea of space exploration can do that to you, reminding you of your smallness and your fragility and your transitory nature. Instead I like to think of it was something liberating and empowering. Yes, the universe is big, but we can still look up and step out into it, sailing towards another destination, flinging peole out there and letting them poke around.

(Incidentally, that's why you can send all the robots you want to Mars, you're not going to really capture the public imagination until there are people heading there.)

So raise a glass to Yuri Gagarin, because 51 years ago he heralded the world in which we live. And look to the stars for they're in reach, even when we tell ourselves they're just too far away.

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