What's the vector, Victor?

Finally got to the Battersea Power Station sequence.

Not even sure I'm looking forward to it at this point. I've reached that point in the book -- I recognize it from two previous books now -- where it has become a total slog.

And I'm really concerned by how much shit there is in it. A cast full of Brits being verbally clever. Yeah, that will go well. Everyone is dropping local references constantly. Yeah, I suppose that would happen anywhere and a good writer would probably cut them out. Dialog is, after all, selective. It is an edited experience, a more focused version of what actually happens. Like everything in fiction.

So I got done with the scene when there are protesters outside (there's too much redevelopment happening in the area, mostly foreign money too), there are survivors from the time of the war and their family and reporters and someone from IWM London and they are all swapping stories about wartime London. And then they find what looks like a UXB.

At the moment, as generally happy as I am with that chapter, I consider it a greater gain that this is the last we'll see of Helen and Martha and poor old Douglas, Nyovani Brent from the museum and Marc the photographer. And Sir Anthony Robinson, but he was only there for a walk-on and one stupid joke. "Don't worry, mate. I'm sure she has a cunning plan."

(Yes, that's another unexplained English pop-culture reference. What did I say?)

***

And now I'm into the chapter where Penny is hooked up with a bunch of Urbex folk who are breaking into Battersea Power Station and one of them is the person who shot at her. So, yeah, it's Eiger Sanction with glowsticks and goth make-up.

Sort of. The Urbex folk are showing off and will be talking up a storm about their own mysterious world of sloaps and toads (Temporary, Obsolete, Abandoned or Derelict Spaces.) But they are also making a compelling case that by breaking in and taking photographs of abandoned spaces they are in their own way opposing the mindless bulldozing of redevelopment and helping to preserve a memory of the past.

So the first thing I needed to do was the meet-up. And that was thirty minutes of Google Map, the NOAA Solar Position Calculator, and TimeandDate, which I've been finding a little easier to work with lately than the Weather Underground. And, no, they can't do the Animals album cover, but the Urbexers can at least pose against the twilight sky with the power station a black silhouette behind them.

***

The damned name-drops are not going to stop. Once the excursion is done, the next is the Black Cab Chase (which since I don't have The Knowledge is not going to get well described) then a talk about a talk about comparing some themes in pre-war Pulp SF with famous sieges from mostly Western history. With two different undertexts going on.

And THEN I get to visit a theatre just long enough to get Pantomime explained, before running off to have a sword fight at the Globe.

The next chapter after that I hope I will have finished reading up on the "BRO" by then because that's when my protagonist finally figures out about the stash of guns and incendiary devices under the Nine Elms station. And her fellow reenactor babbles about ropey types pranging a cheeseeye kite on bumps and circuits but that's a nothing. I'm cribbing the one famous one and will leave it.

Although same scene we are also going to explain why a pig's ear, the sweeney, and nice bristols.

Japan. Japan is going to be way different.

Pity the long plan says Templar Secrets in Paris next....