It’s week three, and in an attempt to not repeat myself, all I’m going to say about tonight’s episode of Doctor Who is that it’s nice to see that their rip-offs are getting slightly more surreal, if no more obvious- this week, they decided to treat us to a remake of kids TV show THE DEMON HEADMASTER. And I think the kids TV show actually did it better…

I stormed through the majority of the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion this week- it’s a genuinely barmy piece of animation art that starts out as a “young boy and a giant robot” adventure that’s very typical of the Japanese genre known as Mecha, and yet ends up transforming into a totally loopy tale of psychology, dysfunction and the Apocalypse that’s brimming over with some fantastically sacreligious iconography that’s from both Christianity and Kabbalah. It’s also got some utterly stunning uses of classical music, although for some bizarre reason, the biggest and most genuinely head-trippy scene in the final movie “The End of Evangelion” is accompanied by a chirpy (and some might say slightly bland) pop song. And, just to make it even harder to ignore, it’s in English while the rest of the dialogue is in Japanese. Still, it’s crazed, it’s violent, and it’s crammed full of all kinds of images that I’m going to find very difficult to get out of my head.

The book is stumbling slightly, but that’s only because I’ve gotten to a tricky, exposition-heavy part of the story. I think I’ve worked out which piece I need to crack, and I’m going to start trying to sort it out tomorrow. If I can get this bit right, I’ll be able to proceed, and start kicking along with the rest of it, because the previous week, despite its problems, has proved to me that this is absolutely what I want to do. And I really want to find out exactly what happens in the end…