Once again, I've come to the end of a sketchbook. Some highlights, all in their rough form, ie a bit fail.
( A Very Connor Christmas )
I don't know why I'm so tired, but I slept for eleven hours last night, and now I feel like a nap between breakfast and lunch would be quite nice. And my cold is still hanging around; it's not debilitating, but it's frustrating to wake up every morning with a dry cough and a throat so sore my voice is gone.
I am feeling faintly annoyed, because I bought a new book on Henry VIII, The Last Days of Henry VIII, and it is not entirely satisfying. It's not as frustrating, so far, as Alison Weir's biography of the queens -- which is quite good, except for all the sources she doesn't cite, and the sexism she adopts in the chapters about Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, and the weird contradictions like how, at the same time that Henry decides Anne B. wasn't a virgin when she become involved with him, Weir comes to the same conclusion, despite having argued otherwise a few chapters back.
Anyway, this other book seems marginally stronger on the history, but has weird prejudices of its own. Like a peculiar obsession with Henry's obesity. Yes, he was grotesquely fat, but it's not actually that relevant to the executions he was authorising. Also, I don't actually think Anne of Cleves spent even thirty seconds pining for Henry. By all accounts, she had a long (by the standards of the era) and contented life of singledom, and should be held up as a role model for romantically uninclined women everywhere.
I really need a Tudors icon that I didn't nick from Showtime. *opens Photoshop*
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peace_bloom and sajee, drinking wine and ... well, I'm sure we'll come up with other things to do. 
cesario, suburbannoir found the design here, bless her little red head. 
One of the less-comfortable aspects of The Tudors is the extent to which it's a glorified exercise in watching beautiful women be humiliated and degraded by a powerful man. That's the history, of course, and Henry VIII is a great argument for small-r-republicanism, but the show itself uses it as a marketing ploy, as you can see from the widget I grabbed from the official site. 
Okay, you all fail for not telling me that Sam Neill and Jeremy Northam were in The Tudors. I love Jeremy Northam! He's so handsome and dry and did I mention handsome? Also, Sam Neill! As Cardinal Wolsey! Hanging around in the shadows and pursuing his own agenda and leaving behind an architectural/artistic legacy after his schemes fall apart!
Fine, so I wanted to watch it because there are so many vaguely Tudorish elements in Gallifreyan costume, and then I found myself looking at hi-res publicity pics from The Tudors and it was all so pretty, and then I realised that the series opens with Sean Pertwee being murdered -- I can't say that I didn't pick it up for purely nerdish reasons. And I'm going to keep watching for purely nerdish reasons. (Because I'm sure as hell not watching for the accurate depiction of historical events!) But it's sort of fabulous in its own right, even though I hate Henry VIII and his many upholstery-based costumes.
The point is that I love Sam Neill, and his Wolsey is a scheming schemer who schemes quite a bit. And I love Jeremy Northam even more, and there's a scene where he takes his shirt off and prays in Latin. Shallow and easily satisfied? Moi? Um, yes please!
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winterfish
