Tammy’s Reviews > To Say Nothing of the Dog > Status Update

The newb is looking for cats while he is looking for the bird stump because he is afraid of the wrath of Lady Schrapnell. He does not want to be reassigned to jumble sales. Mr. Spivens returns and he starts talking to him and waxing poetically and BOINK he gets yanked back to Oxford.

Mr. Spivens is a dog! Why would they take a dog time-traveling? The new recruit is a newb. He’s amazed at the wonder of it all because he saw a black cat and cats are extinct in 2057. It looks like they went extinct in 2017. Ned wants him to shut up and get to work. It’s his first drop so he’s clueless. They find some twisted metallic but it’s a sand bucket and the verger cries because he hung it up the night before.

The verger tells them about a guy who lit a match the week before. Someone foolish could have led the luftwaffe there. The provost was there all night, heartbroken. The merger said someone has been on watch to catch looters except for a half hour for tea. Ned decides that no looter would steal a bishop's bird stump. He found a bulletin from the previous Sunday that mentioned flowers in the bird stump. Proof of life.

She gives them the same speech often. They find the screen that it was sitting in front of. Their next theory is the concussion of the blast blew it into the nave. Carruthers shows signs of tim lag. He sees a star and quotes sappy Victorian poetry. Time travel messes with the mind. He is also irritable. LS does not believe in time and place slippage nor lag. He thinks he should say it was there and call it a day.

The time travel device they are using is total garbage, setting aside the fact they actually can travel in time. Apparently, you end up in the wrong place or the wrong time or both. Not minutes off, but days off. The bird stump must be important (LOL) because several missions have gone. Ned was originally on teams that went to jumble sales (think yard sale) because the bird stump might have been sold before the raid.

Ch. 1 A merger is a church official who worries about the inside of a building. A torch is a flashlight. A nave is the part of the church where the aisles are. A vestry is where the robes and ceremonial items are stored. An apse is a semicircular or polygonal shaped recess at the end of the sanctuary for the bishop's seat. Ned Henry, Mr. Spivens, Carruthers, new recruit, and the merger. First four are time travelers.

Ch. 26 Mrs. Mersing -- Mrs. Bennet, twins separated by time. Ned is channeling his inner Poirot.

Ch. 25 At the very beginning of this chapter I caught a whiff of Pride and Prejudice and boy was I right. The events of this chapter -- without giving away spoilers -- is so deliciously hilarious. Oh, and it’s wonderful how everything as worked out because well there’s always redundancies. I could not stop laughing. If there wasn’t a mystery to be solved, I’d be satisfied with this as an ending.

Ch. 24 Big and small events on November 14. 1940. On one side of the pond Coventry Cathedral was being bombed; on the other side, my dad was being born. A frightening situation at the cathedral and an important clue given.

Ch. 23 A couple of eerie things. I have not read Doomsday Book yet but reading about a pandemic and churches being thought of as nonessential caught my attention. How fun that Ned is hoping that a sighting of him disappearing into the Net in the Middle Ages might be written off as an angel sighting. People saw angels then, ghosts in the Victorian era, and today aliens.