I meant to do a number of things this weekend, and accomplished a few of them, mostly shopping- and computer-related. But I’m only firing on a couple cylinders. Either my cold is still hanging on, or I’m in the process of succumbing to a second malady, possibly H1N1 or the King’s Evil. I hope that’s not the case, because I’d hate to cancel my appearance for the Chesterton Society in Fargo on Saturday.

I just picked up some Airborne®, which some of the Vikings recommend. Just like the Fizzies we used to enjoy when I was a kid, except less sweet and they’re supposed to be good for you.

Again I spent Sunday at home (I was beginning to fear I was contagious), and I ended the day as has been my custom recently, watching one of the Inspector Lewis mysteries on PBS.

Inspector Lewis (as all Mystery aficionados know), is the former Sergeant Lewis who played sidekick for so many years to Inspector Morse in the splendid series based on Colin Dexter’s whodunits. Lewis has had an interesting character arc. In the original mystery in the series, as written in the book Last Bus to Woodstock, Inspector Morse had two sergeants assisting him. One was named Lewis, and was described as short and stocky. The other (whose name I’ve forgotten) was tall and thin. When the series was televised, the producers conflated the two sergeants and gave us a tall, thin officer named Lewis. In the books that followed, the author just rode the wave. He made Lewis the regular assistant, and never (as far as I noticed) described him again, so the reader was free to think of him as looking like Kevin Whately, who still portrays him on television.

There’s an interesting religious subtext in the new Inspector Lewis series (Dexter killed off Inspector Morse with a heart attack in The Remorseful Day in 1999). Lewis had been (though inconsistently) portrayed as a churchgoer in the Inspector Morse stories. Now we’re told that his wife has been killed in a senseless traffic accident, and that he has become an atheist. His assisting sergeant, however, is a former seminarian who still believes to some extent. The question of God’s existence intrudes regularly in the stories, as it did in this week’s episode, which involved an Oxford don who writes bestselling books, Richard Dawkins-style, about atheism.

But what struck me most in this episode was the presence of the actress Jenny Seagrove. My heart knew a nameless dread when I saw her name on the credits at the beginning. “What have the years done to Jenny?” I asked myself. “Will she be a skin-tightened, botoxed android, like so many other actresses her age?” Continue reading Sea-ing the grove for the trees →