Beyond Selidor

I went back to the pool this morning, after having been away for over a week due to being unwell, and then the sports centre's Christmas closure. It was almost completely empty when I started my laps, and had filled up massively by the end; this is a strange time of year, when I can never judge how other people are planning to fill their time.

( Another December talking meme prompt and response )

Other than the very low-effort books I mentioned in my previous post, I've read very little, although I am working my way through The Story of A New Name, the second book in Elena Ferrante's acclaimed Neapolitan quartet, and finding it as excellent as the first. This book covers our narrator's late teens and early adulthood, with that same mix of tightly observed specificity (the impoverished residents of a single block of apartments in 1960s Naples) and more universally relatable observations on the excruciating experiences of being a young woman.

I also read Motherland (Julia Ioffe), a memoir-history in the mode of Jung Chang's Wild Swans which follows the author's family through four generations of the twentieth century in what are now Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Being Jewish people in that part of the world during the Holocaust, World War II, and the Soviet Union's existence and collapse was obviously not easy, and Ioffe's various ancestors navigated these treacherous waters with ingenuity, resilience, and persistence. As well as being a family history, Ioffe attempts in the book to write a social history of 'Russian' women (inverted commas very much needed, because she has a frustrating habit of treating 'Russian' as synonymous with 'other regions of the Russian empire,' 'Soviet', and so on), from the birth of the Soviet Union to current times. Here, although she highlights some extraordinary people and episodes in history, I feel the book is weaker, because (other than the women of her own family), she focuses for the most part on elites — wives of Soviet leaders, Stalin's daughter, wives and mistresses of Putin and his oligarchs, Yulia Navalnaya, and so on — and although her thesis is that such women offer a sort of mirror into the changing society, I can't help but feel that they're not exactly representative.

And that's it in terms of reading for now. I picked up a couple of silly sounding romantasy ebooks, I've still got two Rosemary Sutcliff books out from the library, and Matthias returned from today's grocery shopping with an unexpected book gift for me, but I'm not sure how many of these I'll make it through before the year's end. In any case, my focus is still the Yuletide collection at the moment.

I did my last teaching of the year last week, I had meetings with four separate students today — and no more 1:1 meetings remaining — and I just have one half-day of work remaining for 2025. Between work and illness, I feel almost flattened with exhaustion, so it's a real relief to have my upcoming holiday almost in touching distance.

Today's December talking meme prompt is from lokifan, favourite places to visit around Cambridge.

I could talk about so many, but I will limit myself to three(ish), in three different categories. You'll get lots of guides to Cambridge highlighting the beautiful old colleges and grounds, the standard walk out to the village of Grantchester along the river, punting tours and so on, so I'll stay off this beaten track.

My favourite museum/gallery in Cambridge is Kettle's Yard, which is a contemporary art gallery with a difference. It started out as the home of Jim and Helen Ede, art collectors, who hosted frequent open house events for students to view and tour their collection, and was later gifted by the Edes to the university. Now, the former living space is preserved essentially as it was — filled with objects from the Edes' collection, plus lots of lovely indoor plants — and students can come in and use it as a quiet study space. Other visitors to the gallery get a guided tour of the space, and then can move on to the extension, which is an exhibition space displaying temporary exhibitions. It's an absolutely beautiful, jewel-like little oasis of calm, and rewards return visits. This is a photoset of photos I took there many years ago.

My favourite outdoor space in Cambridge was somewhere I discovered serendipitously during the first days of the pandemic lockdown in early 2020. I had leapt into working from home with enthusiasm, and had deliberately built a whole bunch of routines into the day out of a mistaken fear that Matthias and I would be stressed or irritated or find things monotonous, and one such deliberate routine was my obsession with having short walks outside after lunch, to ensure we moved and saw the sunlight. One day, I made a spontaneous decision to go down a little street I'd never ventured before, and I ended up, quite literally, in Paradise (Nature Reserve). This is Paradise. We had lived with this beautiful, green, jungly place just around the corner from us for eight years and had never known. For the last year we lived in that little house under the ivy, it became a favourite spot. Walking into it was like inhaling deeply.

Foodwise, my favourite high-end places are this one (entirely vegetarian tasting menus; they also have a wonderful newsletter that gathers together curated links on all things foodie, crafty, cultural and local), this one (seafood), and this one, and in general I love the Mill Road area, which is home to two of the previously linked restaurants, but also a great cocktail bar, some excellent cheaper restaurants and takeaway places, and all the Asian, Eastern European, South Asian, Middle Eastern etc grocery stores in the city.

It was a good place to live — and it became more interesting, especially in a culinary sense, during the thirteen years that I lived there.

Tomorrow is my birthday, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to use this week's open thread as a chance for all of us to do some good. Behind the cut, I'm going to recommend some concrete political actions for causes that matter to me — charities, campaigns, resources — and if you feel so moved, please do take the suggested actions.

Alternatively, use this prompt as a way to highlight in the comments causes and actions that matter to you. Two requests if you do take this latter option:

Be specific when describing your causes. If they are focused on a particular country or region within that country, name it, rather than expecting people to intuit that your cause is US-specific, limited to rural Australia, or whatever.

If you are asking people to part with their money, only recommend initiatives to which you have personally donated or would be comfortable donating. Organisations rather than individual fundraisers are generally safer in this regard.

( Charities, campaigns, resources )

Please do recommend your own actions in the comments.

This is my second time taking a December talking meme prompt and using it for a Friday open thread. Today's prompt comes from thatjustwontbreak and is: talk about your earliest experiences using the internet and how it felt to you.

( They looked towards the sun, and walked into the sky )

I imagine it won't be as ... so much as all that, but what about you? How do you define your first time using the internet, and what did it feel like?

Today's December talking meme prompt is from edwardianspinsteraunt and it is: places which have had the greatest impact on you as a person, or which you strongly associate with a particular period in your life.

I think it will surprise no one to discover that I'm someone who feels a lot of intense feelings about specific landscapes and places, so when I saw this prompt, I felt a) very enthusiastic and b) a bit daunted, as there are so many places I could talk about here! So I've decided — to keep things manageable — to limit this to one type of place per decade of my life.

( Cities and oceans )

This weekend ended up being a lot less eventful than originally planned, due to the combination of the week-long slow build-up to a cold finally descending with a vengeance upon me, and the relentlessly rainy weather (it's currently pouring). Other than a quick trip out to the market for food truck lunch and mulled wine yesterday, therefore, I've mainly been ensconced in the house, watching a film (The Killer, the absolute definition of style over substance in which a contract killer in Paris baulks at killing an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire of a hired hit job, and things spiral from there), reading, editing Yuletide fic, and watching biathlon.

( This week's reading )

I have another talking meme prompt for today, this one from vriddy: an anecdote involving an animal or pet.

( This is a very Australian story )

I do also have a bunch of stored up links, but I think I might leave that for a later post. I hope everyone's been having nice weekends!

This was my first full weekend back home after returning from Australia, and it was very much a return to normality in the best possible way. Yesterday rained on and off (the BBC weather website, which always errs on the side of apocalyptic, had been making dire warnings, but in the end there were just a few short bursts of heavy rain), unfortunately coinciding with the times I was walking to the gym, to the library, and home. Today was clear, still, and bitterly cold.

While I was struggling through my first fitness classes in the three weeks (today, my arms and legs ache), Matthias was struggling through the rain to pick up this year's Christmas wreathe, which is now hanging on the front door, bright with happy bursts of red berries. Other than those morning excursions, we spent the remainder of Saturday indoors, with the biathlon on in the background, grazing, and drinking Australian coffee (me) and Australia tea (Matthias).

Saturday night films are back on the agenda with a bang: The Menu, a blackly comedic horror film about a small group of people transported to an isolated island for an exclusive degustation menu with a celebrated chef, who end up getting a lot more than they bargained for. Horror is not my first-choice genre, but this was excellent and very, very clever (if not at all subtle). As well as the constant threat of violence, the true horror of the story is the characters unmoored and bewildered by the excruciating situation of social conventions overturned. ( Possibly spoilerish? )

This morning I walked through the chilly stillness of the morning to the pool, which was uncharacteristically empty for a Sunday morning: I had the fast lane to myself for the entire 1km swim, which has never, ever happened to me. That good start seemed to set me up for the day, which mostly involved working on the first of my planned Yuletide treats, interspersed with yoga, and a walk along the river with Matthias.

The evening promises cosy cooking, and cosy TV: the perfect close to a great couple of days.

I'll finish this post with a couple of fannish events whose sign-up periods are closing soon.

The first is the reccing event that goodbyebird is running:

Welcome to Rec-Cember, the month long multi-fandom reccing event. Let's recommend some fanworks! Let's appreciate and comment on those fanworks!

rec_cember . intro . sign ups

Sign-ups close today.

Second is fandomtrees, the multifandom gift fest that runs over the end of this year and the start of the next. The sign-up post is here, and you have until 5 December to sign up.

I wanted to post separately about the flight out to Australia, which involved an almost comedically bad sequence of virtually everything that could go wrong on a plane journey going wrong one after another, to the point that it felt almost ridiculous.

My preferred airline and route to Australia is Singapore Airlines and Heathrow-Singapore-Sydney, because the former is just far and away the best of all available airlines flying from Europe to Australia, and the latter breaks up the journey in a way that suits me (plus Changi airport is just about the only major international airport in which it feels almost enjoyable to spend a few hours when you're sleep-deprived, dazed, and in physical pain from spending 10 or more hours sitting down). However, due to a variety of factors, this time around Matthias and I went with Emirates, with the stopover in Dubai. (The deciding factor was that Emirates fly some flights out of/into Standsted airport, which is only 45 minutes away from us by train, whereas Heathrow and Gatwick involve a long time on public transport getting into London, then another hour and twenty minutes on the train back to Ely on a train line that frequently has rail replacement buses for some or all of the line on weekends, and we knew that we would appreciate a quicker and easier return home after the long flight.)

The flight from Stansted to Dubai is only 6.5 hours, and it was completely uneventful. It was only when we moved on to the connecting flight to Sydney that the troubles began.

This started with an announcement on the plane that three passengers had checked in to the flight, but not boarded, so their luggage was going to have to be removed, and we'd need to wait fifteen minutes while this happens. This sort of thing is par for the course on long-haul international flights, so I wasn't too concerned at that point. But then fifteen minutes passed, and another announcement came: there was a big cloud of sand all over Dubai (I'd noticed this as we'd flown in on the preceding flight), and air traffic control were spacing out departures and arrivals for safety reasons, so we'd have to wait another 45 minutes.

The 45 minutes passed (indeed an hour passed), and then another apologetic announcement was made: they'd discovered a leak in one of the galleys, and so engineers needed to come in and fix it, or we might run out of water somewhere over the Indian Ocean. A gaggle of guys in high viz vests trooped in to solve the problem. By this stage I, and a handful of other passengers had moved to stand at the front of the plane, so that we could hear what the flight attendants were saying (delays don't bother me, but being kept in the dark as to the cause and length of the delay really does). They were telling me that these kinds of problems came up fairly regularly on flights, but they'd never experienced them all at once!

After some time, the high viz guys left the plane, and I noticed the flight attendants were having whispered, stressed-looking conversations. The source of their stress was soon revealed: two separate passengers were having medical emergencies (one of whom being a woman who had a milk allergy who had for some inexplicable reason requested and drunk a cup of tea with milk in it!), and a doctor would need to be called. This happened swiftly, and thankfully both sick passengers were checked, treated, and deemed safe enough to fly, so the doctors departed, we were all sent back to our seats, and the flight left, three hours late.

I fell asleep, and woke up somewhere over Western Australia. Normally this means another four hours or so, flying in a straight line across the middle of Australia until Sydney. However, after a little while, there was an announcement over the plane intercom: were there any passengers who spoke French, and if so, could they make themselves known? A couple of older French guys appeared, and were whisked away. A further announcement was made: was there a medical doctor on the plane? Another passenger emerged, and he and the two French guys were moved away to deal with yet another medical emergency! This was a third woman (different to the two previous passengers who had had medical emergencies at the gate in Dubai), and the French passengers were needed in order to translate for her.

At this point, I'd been watching the onboard flight tracker, and had noticed with some concern that it had suddenly switched from saying 'Dubai-Sydney, 2.5 hours remaining' to 'Dubai-Adelaide, 1.5 hours remaining'! I could actually feel that the plane shifted course and turned south, rather than keeping its course flying in a straight line from west to east along the middle of the country. If you look at a map of Australia, Adelaide is in the middle of the country on the southern coast. Sydney is on the middle of Australia's eastern coast, and a flight from the UAE to Sydney should not even pass over Adelaide, as it is too far south.

I asked a passing flight attendant about this change, and whether we were making an emergency landing in Adelaide to get medical care for the sick passenger. He said that it was a possibility, but the captain hadn't yet made up his mind whether this was necessary! For about an hour, the flight tracker definitely thought we were going to Adelaide, and both my brother-in-law and mother (who were tracking the flight online) told us later that online tracking websites had definitely said that our flight was going to land in Adelaide, but thankfully after about an hour heading south, the pilot shifted the plane's course north, the onboard tracker started saying 'Dubai-Sydney' again, and we landed in Sydney as intended, only two hours late. Ambulance workers met us at the gate, the sick passenger was taken off to get medical care, and all was well.

I have actually had much worse flights (including one back from Sydney where we had to make an emergency landing in Kuala Lumpur due to a failure of the plane's computer system, and knowing of the existence of this failure while we were flying over open ocean for several hours, which was absolutely terrifying), but all these things going wrong in succession was something else! The flight itself was actually calm and peaceful (other than the woman with the medical emergency and the possible diversion to Adelaide), and the airline staff handled everything with incredible poise and professionalism; I mean to write to Emirates and compliment their handling of the situation, since it can't have been much fun for them. I'm actually terrified of flying, but I was so busy worrying that we might have to divert to Adelaide that I forgot to be afraid for the entire waking duration of that flight!

The only eventful thing about the return journey was that 10 hours out of the 14 from Sydney-Dubai were so turbulent that the pilots kept the fasten-seatbelt sign on, and at times required the cabin crew to sit in their own seats with seatbelts on as well. This was extremely unpleasant and scary, but — as I kept reminding myself — not on the level of the equivalent flight I'd taken in reverse two weeks earlier!