I didn’t mean to consume this – the first episode was on during one of my vanishingly rare bouts of channel-surfing and I ended up watching it. It’s not the subtlest morality tale ever, but the characters are engaging and the plot cracks on entertainingly.

Frankly, there’s always something more immediately interesting to read. I haven’t given up, because I’m (a) hopeful of eventual payoff (b) on a promise to a friend. But it’ll probably take a long plane journey …

Went to see this against my principles and my better judgment; enjoyed it more than I thought I should. Probably because it was basically Alias: The Movie.

... but not as cringeworthy as that sounds. It’s no mean feat to tell the origin story over again without becoming tedious, but Waid pulls it off.

“Its translucent color so alluring and taste and aroma so gentle and mellow offer admiring feelings of a graceful lady. Enjoy soft and juicy Kasugai Muscat Gummy.”

First ate this in Tokyo six years ago. Still tastes like dry-cleaning fluid. But yummy gummy dry-cleaning fluid.

... tastes of nothing.

Tintin in the Congo, the second and most notorious of Tintin’s adventures, has a long and somewhat troubled history. First published in serial form between 1930 and 1931, it took sixty years for it to make its first appearance in English – and even then, it was as a facsimile of the black-and-white original, rather than the coloured and redrawn version prepared by Hergé in 1946. The latter version, which conformed to the standard format of the Tintin albums, remained available only in other languages.

It was the German edition, found in my school library, that first brought Tintin’s colonial exploits to my attention. Some of the book’s features, mostly the controversial ones, were readily apparent despite my feeble command of German; and they became more so after I picked up a second-hand copy of the 1970 French version some years later. (My French is much better than my German). But it was nonetheless difficult for me to formulate a reliable opinion of its qualities: how much might have been lost in my clumsy translation?

Last year, however, the coloured version was finally published in English, translated by the veteran team of Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner. (Actually, it’s derived from a 1976 version which substitutes an inoffensive alternative for the infamous page on which Tintin carelessly vaporises a rhinoceros with dynamite.) This “collector’s edition” comes with a brief foreword providing context and a belly-band explaining that it “completes the series of 24 Tintin adventures by Hergé”. I don’t know exactly why The Hergé Foundation has decided it’s finally time to publish, but evidently this is the definitive version of the boy journalist’s trip to the Dark Continent.

And that unflattering nickname is definitely appropriate for Hergé’s portrayal of the Belgian Congo. The book, even in its cleaned-up version, is steeped in the paternalistic attitudes of the time – attitudes which an embarrassed Hergé later explained as being endemic in bourgeois Belgian society when the story was first written. Harry Thompson’s superb literary biography contains more detail on how this adventure was shaped by the demands of Hergé’s publisher, as does Michael Farr’s companion to the books. Suffice it to say that Hergé was still young and naive enough to write in accordance with political dogma (as he already had when Tintin visited The Land of the Soviets and would again, to some degree, when he arrived In America).

The Africans in Congo are depicted as childish, simple-minded, superstitious and lazy; their portrayal is more ignorant and insulting than hateful, but it’s still jarring to read – particularly since Tintin is better known these days as an egalitarian globe-trotter. The colour version omits or moderates many of the original’s explicitly colonial episodes – for example, Tintin now teaches ignorant school-children simple arithmetic rather than lecturing them about the fatherland (“Belgium!”). But numerous others survive, such as the scene in which Snowy’s industriousness shames the foot-dragging locals into helping to put a train back on track, or a vignette in which Tintin hands down “the judgement of Solomon” by giving one African the brim of a disputed straw hat and another its crown.

In fact, there wouldn’t be much of a book left if all such scenes were omitted – and still less if Tintin’s cavalier attitude to the Congo’s wildlife were also to be toned down to suit modern sensibilities. As noted above, the exploding rhino is gone, but Tintin still plays at being the Great White Hunter, casually massacring his way through a wide selection of African wildlife. Most of these kills are simply cringeworthy to more eco-friendly readers, but some, particularly those that combine cartoonish fancy with animal cruelty, are more gruesome. At one point Tintin shoots and skins a nondescript ape … and then puts the skin on like a boiler suit. Ugh.

So what of the book’s redeeming qualities? Sadly, these are few. As in Soviets, Tintin is a crude, swaggering figure who seems a bit of a bully, far from the cool-headed everyman he would later become. The humour, such as it is, is mostly at the expense of Africa’s people or wildlife. The art pales in comparison with Hergé’s later ultra-realistic style, and is sometimes frankly unconvincing (the less said about the rubber-lipped African caricatures, the better). And the story is negligible, made up of a succession of set-pieces that betray its serial origins; the morsel of plot comes as rather a surprise when it arrives in the book’s final few pages, and is in any case basically a setup for America.

So Tintin in the Congo is probably not worth reading in its own right. But it does throw light on the Tintin phenomenon from unexpected angles. What should one make, for example, of the fact that this book might well have disappeared altogether if a Zairean newspaper hadn’t asked to reprint its depiction of “our ancestors” back in 1970? Is Tintin’s ambassadorial appeal so great that even this ersatz and somewhat offensive adventure is enough to provoke national pride? (Much as the unauthorised story of Tintin’s lewd adventures in Thailand is a consistent bestseller in Bangkok.) And the power of Tintin’s name can be deployed to other ends: today’s Congolese accuse outspoken Belgian critics of “acting like Tintin”, while remixed Tintin strips are used to criticise modern-day colonialism in the Middle East. Perhaps it was the right time to publish, after all.

Dalandan is apparently some kind of mandarin-like citrus fruit with a green skin. Makes for a pleasant drink, anyway – not as harsh as most orange sodas.

It’s like someone made my life into a reality TV show. Except my beauty was smarter than most (if not all) of the geeks. Perhaps I should know better, but as a geek-come-good myself (well, halfway there, anyway) I’m actually finding this quite affecting, god help me. It helps that it isn’t a dating show and both the beauties and the geeks are being portrayed a bit more like real people than the obvious route of gorgeous dimwits and dysfunctional dweebs. (For that matter, the beauties aren’t all that beautiful and the geeks aren’t all that geeky).

A program involving this much nerdiness was inevitably going to spill over on the interweb. Several of the geekshaveblogs. A number of the beauties haveportfoliosites, too. That’s the the power of personal publishing for you, whether babe or dweeb. But obviously the geeks go that bit further, popping up in onlinediscussions of the show. And Edmund Bolton, the undoubted star of the show, has a spectacular b3ta-style fansite ...

We picked one of the first really sunny days of spring to take a long walk to Gelateria Danieli in Richmond upon Thames, rated as Time Out’s third-best food & drink experience in London last year. There was a relatively small selection of flavours (although I’m guessing they change them fairly frequently) but all the ones we tried were exquisite; they made the run-of-the-mill gelato we’d had earlier in the day seem like toothpaste.