'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

Monday night at the Salisbury: I am the first member of my quiz team to arrive. At the bar is a top financial pundit of my acquaintance, in the same position. We spot two adjacent tables and grab both, sat on the bench, chatting. I realise this is slightly irregular, but what comes next is still a shuddering breach of all canons of boozer behaviour. Three peons* turn up, and attempt to sidle into the end of one of the tables.
Us:"Sorry, we've each got a team coming for the quiz, we're going to need both tables."
(True: we ended up with 14 people between the two)
Peons: "This is our table, we just went out for ten minutes for a fag."
(Untrue: I had been there at least ten minutes by this point, m'learned colleage for 15)
Us: "Well, you can't just all wander off, then come back and reclaim your table."
Peons: "I beg to differ, but hey, I don't want to get in a fight about it."
Exeunt peons, muttering.
Now come on, that's not how pubs work, is it? Later I was briefly left minding both tables, while one lot were smoking and another buying drinks. But I was there, and so were various tokens of table taken-ness: drinks, books, coats. On Friday, after accidentally walking out of London, when I decided that I needed some food as well as a pint, I did leave my table unattended to order - but that was in a beer garden with spare tables a-plenty, and I left my 2/3-full pint *and* my book on the table, just to be clear.

Also annoying me on Monday: plot holes. Primeval merely required some of its characters to be uncommonly stupid (why did Dr Ethnic not think to ask who Helen was, or mention the woman she'd bumped into in the street after her pass turned out to have been stolen by a dead man? Why did nobody else think to show Dr Ethnic a picture of their arch-enemy as part of her induction briefing?), and tried to get too many genres into one show - on top of the usual dinosaur time-travel malarkey, 45 minutes gives you time to do either a story in the style of an MR James haunted house yarn, or the one with Jason Flemyng as an acknowledged tough cop cliche, but not both. But James Blish's third Cities in Flight book, Earthman, Come Home...well, the other three are all circa 130 pages long, and this is 230, and the length doesn't suit it, and it shows. The first one's a prequel, following a couple of strands through the stagnating Earth of fairly soon and showing us how in spite of that, humanity gets into space. The second is a bildungsroman, one Shanghaied spacer finding his way around the world of the stars in the manner of an early Heinlein. This one...it has more scope, more daring, more sense of what life is like in Blish's stars. It has prescient things to say about depressions in hi-tech societies, and a communication method which looks suspiciously like Twitter. The dubious gender politics, and the heteronormativity, I can forgive. Even the explanation of why pirates died out on Earth, asinine as it looks in the face of Somalia and the South China Sea, I can overlook. But the basic principle of these stories is that Earth's cities have become spacefaring itinerant labourers, trading on their inhabitants' technical know-how, with each city propelled through space by a Macguffin called a 'spindizzy'. Whose principles are so simple that even after Earth's government tried to suppress it, it was independently rediscovered by accident.
These endlessly resourceful space-faring technologists, who can take a whole planet for a joyride, can't manage more than a short-term jury-rigged repair on their own engines/life-support/way of life.
Now, if that were intended as a comment on the world of now, where we all rely on devices so far beyond our practical repair capabilities as practically to invoke Clarke's Law, then fair enough. But if so, no hint of that whatsoever. It's just a mechanism to get the protagonists to where the story needs them, and it will not do.

I always loved Charlotte Bronte's comment that "Miss [Jane] Austen being, as you say, without "sentiment", without poetry, maybe is sensible (more real than true), but she cannot be great.'' But I was still gladdened to discover yet another writer far better than Austen demonstrating similar wisdom: '"What is all this about Jane Austen?" demanded a baffled Joseph Conrad, writing to HG Wells. "What is there in her?"' If Wells did respond with anything more than a shrug, I think I'd rather not know about it.

Finsbury Parkers - or at least those of you on the Islington side of the street - apparently our MP is an associate of Holocaust-deniers. Fun.

*Just so we're all clear here - one of them's a white rasta.