The quickest way to get to Harlem

Boy. A thousand words done this morning. It's barely lunch. I am just steam train. And that was with editing of the previous day's work, too.

Aladdin is still in at the moment. I might leave it to my beta readers. The competitors are Dick Wittington -- I did previously mention the Lord Mayor (he was having a big parade at the time) -- and Jack and the Beanstalk. I sort of like Wittington for being more obscure, but both are good Principal Boy roles and both are a rags-to-riches story which sort of vaguely tracks with other themes I have going on.

I did change the venue from Elephant and Castle to The Mudlarker and I'm going to add a storage locker proximate to the "under the London Bridge arches" original and future location of the Vauxhall Playhouse.

And I've done the last quoted excerpt from the diary. It was brutal. In that I had a dialog section within the diary, and since this isn't set out typographically with a scene break or italics this means quotes in quotes. I broke the rule of new paragraph per speaker last time I quoted from the diary, but that was what I had to do this time. And because of the rules of rolling quote, it looks like this:

“‘Rest. Recover,’ his mystery friend told him. ‘If you miss this war, there’s always another on the way.’ And without a change in his voice he turned to look up the stairs. ‘And I see you’ve already started training your own.’

“‘It isn’t like that. She’s a civilian.’

Yeah, my grammar checker is going to hate me. The mystery man with the Dick Tracey jaw is of course Orde Wingate. And once again a choice forced on me; I can't follow the proper last-names-only because then I'd have a Wentworth and a Wingate in the same conversation.

So Linnet is off to interview at Baker Street and in the final diary entry she'll reveal she is leaving for Bletchley Park or wherever. I've forgotten which of multiple addresses for SOE would be appropriate in early 1941. I've started looking stuff up while I get to it rather than try to keep track of it all now.

And another loss. I wanted to talk about pub names at some point and how a lot of the animal names "Red Lion," etc., whilst still rooted in heraldry and the partisan sympathies of publicans, are these days most often part of foreign-owned chains. Elephant and Castle being Canadian at present -- although I can't tell if they have any of the ones by that name in the UK.

All of this in aid of doing the title drop, of course. That, and I need to get around to pointing out that Vauxhall is or was quite plausibly Fox Hall. I had the thought today, too, of doing references to British children's books for the Part names. I already have two, you see. Well, time to see if I can't chase Fawkes back to his hole. Now that my intrepid pair knows who he is.

One slapstick sword fight coming up. I took today off work too. My boss is happy I'm taking some time off -- I was looking ragged, and things are as quiet as they are likely to get, and better yet, I have a bunch of vacation hours now and it looks to be many months before I'd be able to spend them in the proper way.

Perhaps by this weekend I'll finally have her exploring her first (approximate) tomb.