Beyond Selidor

I've been feeling increasingly run down this week — nothing approaching full-blown illness, just a scratchy throat and general tiredness. That, and the prospect of two named storms sweeping across Britain and Ireland this weekend made my decision for me: I cancelled all classes and swims at the gym, and hunkered down for two days ensconced under a blanket at home. Other than a quick dash out to the market on Saturday morning before the storm hit, Matthias and I stuck to this plan, and I'm very glad we did, since most of the remainder of the day involved howling winds and torrential rain lashing all the windows. It was extremely cosy indoors, however: orchard-scented candles, cups of tea and coffee, slow, lazy yoga in the spare room, reading my way through books and my weekend batch of newsletters, and watching North by Northwest for Saturday film night.

I think I was mainly exhausted by the amount of teaching I had to do last week, which was made particularly heavy by the number of classes I'm having to cover for another faculty's library (a one-off this year due to their short-staffing).

On Monday I had to do an induction session for the other faculty, and then a two-hour research skills session for undergrads about to start their third-year dissertation projects. Tuesday was a lighter load: just one online workshop teaching about some systematic reviews software. One Wednesday I delivered an online workshop as part of my library's research skills programme, then met a PhD student for advice on her literature review, then went out to teach a repeat of the third-year dissertation lecture. On Thursday I had to teach another online research skills class, then cover a dissertation research skills class for the other faculty, then I had a one-hour meeting with an incredibly overwhelmed Master's student. Finally, on Friday, I taught another online research skills class (this one was multidisciplinary and had 40 people attending), and the final repeat of the dissertation research skills lecture. I hauled myself and my laptop home through the rain, and basically collapsed in exhaustion.

Yuletide assignments came out this morning, with no surprises in terms of the fandom. I've got a couple of ideas that I'm going to let percolate alongside canon review, but I should be in a position to make a start later this week, which is great.

In terms of books, I've finished a reread of all six books of Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence series, loosely interconnected (I saw them likened to Discworld for this reason — they're not in any way comedic, but they do take place in the one universe, with recurring characters, and use a fantasy setting to deal with meaty, real-world ideas), and very hard to describe. They're about people living in the aftermath of a massive war that killed their (tangible, fundamental to the political and social structure) gods, and dealing with the consequent destabilising ruptures — but they're also about 2010s startup culture, the tech and finance industries, the Occupy movement and global financial crisis, academia, law, the effects of gentrification, etc, etc. Their world, and its cities, feel real and lived-in, rich, and strange, and yet recognisable, as if viewed through a cracked mirror. I love and admire them a lot.

I've also just finished up The Harbour of Hungry Ghosts (Eliza Chan), the first in a historical fantasy trilogy set in nineteenth-century Hong Kong, in which our heroine Kiamling is an apprentice to her grandmother (a rare woman working as an intermediary between the supernatural and human worlds, dealing on behalf of the community with ghosts, demons, and other supernatural beings), dealing with the challenges of the work, the shifting sands of British colonial rule and European economic exploitation of China, and family secrets and tensions. The presence of British colonial officials at a Chinese religious festival sparks an escalation of catastrophic events (Kiamling's grandmother gets trapped in the spirit world, European supernatural creatures start appearing in Hong Kong and bleeding into the Chinese supernatural sphere, etc, etc), and Kiamling, her younger sister Jingling, and their ragtag bag of misfit allies have to use all their skills and resourcefulness to deal with the situation. Chan's influences — which she cites in the acknowledgements and foreword — range from the real history of nineteenth-century China to classic Hong Kong and Chinese martial arts films and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and she's clearly had a fabulous time pulling all these disparate threads together; the setting, the family relationships, and above all the food descriptions really shine (a favourite detail of mine: Kiamling falls into working as a Cantonese tutor for a penniless British civil servant, and convinces him that the best way to improve his speaking skills is to use the language with as many locals as possible, which of course means buying her delicious food from a wide range of teahouses, restaurants, and street food sellers as possible — this is a heroine with the right priorities!).

Unfortunately, it also suffers from issues which I'm coming to recognise in so many recent fantasy publications: copyediting errors (things like 'His hair flopping over his eyes' treated as a complete sentence), a sense (in terms of the characterisation and character dynamics) that the author would have been more comfortable writing this as a YA story, but aged the characters up due to market pressures, and the kind of anxious writing that results in spelling everything out in too much detail in order to ensure that even the most inattentive reader could not mistake depiction for endorsement. (There's also a baffling decision to have sporadic switches in point-of-view, which as far as I can tell serves no real narrative need.) My ability to tolerate and overlook this kind of stuff is always very much dependent on how much I enjoy the specific book in question — in other words, on an inconsistent, case-by-case basis. In this instance, I found the overall setting and story so much fun that it bothered me less than it has done on previous occasions, but do be warned.

Other things: if you have an account on a Meta platform (Instagram, Facebook, and I'd assume Threads as well; WhatsApp is different — it remains end-to-end encrypted unless you've explicitly used the Meta AI tool within it), you have until 30th October to opt out of your public posts being used to train its AI tool. To do this (I'd recommend doing it on the app rather than web-based versions, as I couldn't get it to work properly via web-based Instagram), navigate to Settings&Activity, then Privacy Centre, then AI at Meta, then submit an objection request. I did this separately on Facebook and Instagram, and both were approved instantly. It works in the UK and EU — thank goodness for our strong laws around data protection! — and I've seen anecdotal reports that it works in Australia as well, but I cannot speak for other countries (besides knowing that there is no option to opt out in the US). I appreciate that this might be the final straw for many people, but if you do want to remain on these platforms, this is one (region-specific) thing you can do to fight back against the tide.

We've just had the second batch of Matthias's old academic books collected — two separate people came by today, taking close to 45 books, which is a relief in terms of shelf space freed up. I'm really happy they're going to good homes! I am also incredibly grateful that we got an extra hour as the clocks went back last night — this shift from daylight saving came at exactly the time I needed it, although I'm dreading the months of winter darkness with the sun set by 4pm. But that is what my string lights and candles are for!

One final link that I wanted to keep separate from the previous culture/sociological linkpost is this call to donate to a Ukrainian grassroots initiative in which a retired engineer has converted an old tractor so that it can be operated remotely to clear mined land more safely (i.e. with human operators removed to a safe distance).

Ukrainian authorities estimate that more than 30% of their country (179,000 square kilometres) is mined, making it the most mined country on Earth, so the task to clear the land of mines is obviously an incredibly daunting one.

One of the posts that didn't make the cut for the previous links round-up involved a lot of discussion in the comments section about what really constitutes hope, but for me, the answer (reinforced by what I've witnessed and experienced these past few years, and my own values) is clear. Hope is not a utopia: it is an action, both collective and individual, and in this action, we find the antidote to despair.

I cannot think of any clearer demonstration of hope than the work of the individuals involved in this minesweeping initiative, nor the organisation facilitating the fundraising.

I can vouch for the legitimacy of the individuals involved, and, as always, only share calls for donations in contexts in which I personally would be comfortable donating my own money (as I have done in this case).

Please feel free to share this post, or directly link to the fundraiser.

This week's thread is inspired by a moment on p.10 of Freya Marske's Bodies of Magic, which contains a throwaway paragraph referencing the (sadly now deceased) famous jacaranda tree on Sydney Uni's main quadrangle, in secondary world fantasy terms.

I was so delighted, because the section in the book about a tree in an academic institution's main quadrangle whose purple flowers herald impending exam season doom is such an obvious piece of Sydney Uni lore if you are one of its alumni or alumnae, and yet it will pass by like a piece of worldbuilding furniture if not. It sent me immediately to Wikipedia to confirm that Marske is indeed, like me, an alumna of that university.

So: what is an incredibly specific reference or allusion you've encountered in a work of fiction (in any medium), such that it's obvious to those in the know, and not at all obvious to those who don't share that specific background/set of experiences?

(Apparently I have a Sydney Uni tag, which is news to me.)

It's been another gradually building busy week at work, and another cosy autumnal weekend at home. I've spent this morning at the pool (the lane to myself again for 38 out of 40 laps — I feel extremely fortunate), and now I've paused to take in the absolutely glorious sunlight flooding in through the front windows and catching the leaves on the hedgerow over the road in notes of gold and amber. All in all, perfect.

This past week, I've taught an induction and searching skills class to a group of 40 NHS doctors who are spending the year undertaking research alongside their clinical work, I've met individually with three stressed out students, and I delivered two inductions to two separate cohorts of 25-ish MPhil students. (Amusingly, in the latter of these two inductions, I noticed the two academic course leads — who had sat in to watch me teach — assiduously taking notes. I love it when the existence of the 'library links' institutional login function in Google Scholar settings, browser extensions such as Lean Library or LibKey Nomad which tell your browser you have institutional access to journal articles, and/or the fact that free interlibrary loans are a thing is brand new information to senior academics who've been working at the university for decades!)*

On top of all of that, I've signed up for a year long professional development course offered to staff at the university, and had the first class for that on Thursday. It was fun to meet all the other participants, and in a really nice setting — I think the whole thing will go well, although it does involve my nemesis: long-term group projects. One of the other participants immediately wanted to compliment me on my jumper ('Is that Donegal wool?' 'I ... I think so?').

This weekend is one of the points in the year in which our town somewhat resembles an episode of Gilmore Girls: an apple/harvest fair on the grounds surrounding the cathedral, filled with stalls selling craft, food (both food truck stuff to eat there, and things to take home like fudge, cheese, preserves etc) and drink. Most of it has an apple theme (spiced apple cider fudge and so on), and the wider town gets into the swing of things with fringe apple-related stuff as well (the bakery was selling apple pies and apple crumble danishes, our former hiking group friend who sells sourdough bread out of his house was selling apple bread, etc). Matthias and I were there for a couple of hours yesterday, eating food truck food, drinking seasonally appropriate drinks (hot spiced lemon and ginger drink!), and wandering around the stalls, looking anxiously at the sky which seemed to threaten rain intermittently.

Last night we signed up to MUBI for a free trial so that we could watch Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schonbrun's follow-up to I Saw the TV Glow (which I thought was excellent) — a camp, meta, self-aware, queer story about viewers' relationship with slasher movies. In it, an early career filmmaker is tasked with reviving a franchise of 80s horror movies, and travels to the remote setting of the first film, where the ageing actress who played its final girl (played by Gillian Anderson) is living a reclusive life in the camp where her character survived the fictional carnage. But it's not really a slasher film itself — it's about the titular cinematic sex and death (the killer in the film franchise is literally called 'Little Death'; this is not a subtle movie), and our voyeuristic relationship with them, and about coming of age and queer awakening, and a lot about being trans, and how that might affect someone's relationship with their physical body, and the resonances of this with a viewer's relationship with bodies on screen, and so on. Fair warning that although it's not really a horror movie, there is a lot of exaggerated horror movie style violence and gore on the screen.

In terms of reading, I finished off Chronicle of a Life Mislaid, which I had thought was a memoir about Marina Warner's own life, but is really an (unreliable, as it says in the subtitle) memoir of her parents' marriage. Both led an extraordinary life — they met when Warner's father was among the Allied troops stationed in Italy during the final years of WWII; her mother and aunts (due to a childhood spent in the United States) spoke fluent English and sort of attached themselves to the Allied military as translators. After the war, she returned with Warner's father to England, and later to Cairo in the dying days of British colonial indirect rule of Egypt as part of the strange community of European, Middle Eastern and North African drifters who washed up in that part of the world from all over the Mediterranean, flourishing briefly in a kind of bubble of unbelievable privilege, and then drifting on when that world ended. While Warner doesn't go into full details, it's clear her parents' marriage was not a happy one — her father had aristocratic aspirations, but didn't have the budget to live that kind of life, and was a chronic and unsuccessful gambler and financial speculator (Warner includes some of his letters back to her paternal grandparents, which are always begging for money or hoping that this or that recently deceased relative will leave him a legacy), and those tensions seem to have weighed heavily. Warner weaves this personal family story with a wider critical look at the currents of class and empire that underpinned this particular moment in time, and their echoes at the point in the twenty-first century in which she was writing (Brexit looms large). I thought this was fantastic!

I'm still working my way through Hell's Heart (Alexis Hall), a lesbian retelling of Moby Dick IN SPACE. The book begins with quotes from (among other things) the Bible, and Jupiter Ascending, so you know pretty much what you're getting in for. I find it a lot of fun — almost every sentence is an allusion or reference to something else (and not just the book's source material), but I do somewhat wish that Hall had had the imagination not to default to a spacefaring far future in which every cultural force resembles an unsubtle and extreme version of contemporary right-wing values in the United States (prosperity gospel, rampant Ayn Rand-style individualism, worship of 'the market,' — and even a moment in which the 'face eating leopards' meme makes an appearance). I get that this all fits with the story that Hall is trying to tell (and maybe there is a corner of this book's universe in which the values of other, non-21st-century-United States cultures hold sway), but as a non-American, the uncritical lack of imagination in this regard did start to grate after a while.

The rest of my Sunday will probably involve a proper look through the Yuletide tag set and letters post, another swing through the apple fair (we need to get our yearly haul of rare varieties of apple!), making sloe gin with the sloes I picked from local hedgerows, and cooking soup for dinner. All very relaxing and cosy, and exactly what I need before another week of new academic-year busyness.

*If you are a current university student and want me to explain more about these things, ask in the comments — they will save you so many logins and apparent paywalls.

It's the end of the first week of the busiest time of year for me, and I feel spectacularly behind on everything other than work. Inevitably, this would happen at the same time that the Yuletide tagset is finalised, and everyone starts working on their letters before sign ups open next week.

With that in mind, let's talk about Yuletide in today's open thread. What are your plans this year? What looks good in the tagset in terms of your requests (obviously don't talk about what you're planning to offer since that would break anonymity)?

I have to admit that I've only barely made a start in going through all the nominated fandoms (that might be a task for the weekend), but I think I'm wanting to mainly request fic that's about various types of relationships between female characters. This is the first year since I began participating in Yuletide over a decade ago that every single one of my original requests has finally been fulfilled — it took eleven years of doggedly requesting the same fandoms and characters in some cases, but I got there in the end — and it feels very odd to be starting from such a blank canvas.

What about you?

Just three shows finished in the past month, which probably reflects how little time I've had in the evenings (and how frequently Matthias's trains home from London have been cancelled, or massively delayed). In any case, these were the shows:

This Is Not a Murder Mystery, a cosy mystery with an absurd premise: a bunch of real-world Surrealist artists are invited to an English country house for a few weeks to create works for an exhibition and auction in the house, organised by the eccentric aristocrat who owns it ... only for a series of murders to take place, each one seemingly staged and inspired by a now-famous work of art by the artists themselves. It's a Belgian production, but the dialogue is mainly in English, and you'd think that 'English country house murder' and 'Surrealist art' would be an impossible crossover premise, but somehow the whole thing works.

The Five Star Weekend, a soapy drama in which Jennifer Garner stars as a widowed foodie Instagram influencer who is trying to get her life (and her social media following) back on track after her husband's death by hosting a long weekend party for four of her female friends from different stages of her life (childhood best friend, university friend, mum friend, and new online Instagram friend) in her sprawling childhood home in Nantucket. She goes into the event expecting carefully curated Instagrammable food porn and a photogenic choreography of activities, but everything very quickly goes off script due to her own unprocessed grief, and various social and family tensions that all come bubbling to the surface. The resolution is of course tidy and heartwarming, but if you wanted gritty or ambiguous, you wouldn't really be watching this show.

Sterling Point — which, if I tell you involves the same showrunner as The O.C. should hopefully give you some idea of the vibes: a soap opera about ludicrously beautiful and wealthy teenagers having extreme emotions against a great pop soundtrack in a gorgeous location (in this case a Canadian island in a lake, whose residents are a mixture of mildly resentful locals working in tourism and hospitality, and the wealthy American tourists staying in holiday homes over the summer). We've got secret long-lost siblings, love triangles, neglectful parents, surprise revelations, loads and loads of angst, and all the classics. When you start watching, you will be overwhelmed with a lot of very logical questions ('how is this seventeen-year-old American girl able to buy an international airline ticket and travel to another country without her father's knowledge or permission?' 'why does internet connectivity seem to come and go on this island whenever the plot demands it?' 'how is a teenager able to purchase a DNA testing kit on a remote Canadian island seemingly in hours when it's been previously established that there are only a handful of limited local shops?' 'why does an underage teenage boy have a pilot license?'), but you have to just shrug and roll with it, and accept that logic is not really a genre requirement here. I loved it in all of its ridiculous glory.

This time last week I was eating lunch in a hipster cafe in Sofia in 30-degree heat, and getting ready to fly home. This weekend has been very much back to reality after a busy four-day week at work. It felt like many different kinds of maintenance — much needed, but not hugely exciting.

I removed the dead vegetable plants (no more corn or zucchini), picked a bunch of tomatoes to use for Saturday's dinner, and replaced all the mulch that the blackbirds had hurled all over the garden paths, and got rid of the most egregious of the weeds (mainly nettle). I watered all the garden beds, and then realised it was probably going to rain later today.

I ran two loads of laundry — and was delighted that it's still possible to hang things outdoors. I'm hoping this state of affairs stretches into October this year.

I tidied away various bits of clutter in the living room that had been piling up until I felt I had the energy to deal with them. I attached more hooks to the kitchen walls in order to contain one particularly rapacious houseplant, which has literally started growing up one of the walls towards the ceiling, and has long tendrils sprouting wildly in all directions. I finally attached another houseplant to a stake, after weeks of leaving it tipping over at a horizontal angle (it's very top-heavy), and now it looks much happier.

I planned all the meals up until next Friday, and trotted around the crowded Saturday market with Matthias, buying up all the fruit and vegetables we needed. Pears and plums are particularly delicious at the moment, and we have some very good local sources of both.

I went back to my two fitness classes after three weeks away, and my legs are definitely feeling it, in a good way. This morning, I went swimming and was the only person in my lane for the entire kilometre of laps, which left me feeling as if I'd won the lottery — I can't remember the last time that glorious state of affairs occurred. (Irrationally, I want the pool to be used heavily and remain a viable service ... but not when I'm swimming in it!) I did a long, slow yoga class in our newly refurbished spare bedroom, which has now become my preferred site for yoga. It has gorgeous light, and the best views in the house.

Matthias and I went out for a few hours after lunch yesterday, and sat under the trees in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar, which was heaving with customers. On the way back, we stopped by the bakery, where I was delighted to discover that its excellent manager (who had been away on maternity leave) had returned to work, just after Matthias and I had been idly wondering when she was due back (and whether she would come back at all). It was so wonderful to see her, and to hear how things were going with her little daughter.

What with all these bits and pieces, I haven't had time to read this weekend, but we did watch a great film last night, Godland, which is extremely loosely inspired by a series of wet-plate collodion photographs taken by a Danish priest — the first extant photos of the Icelandic landscape and people. The sparse dialogue is a mixture of Icelandic and Danish, and it's all about encounters between land, language and people, and the difficult, fraught emotions that emerge in the frictions of those encounters, and in the spaces between and beyond language. The beautiful but extreme Icelandic landscape (even harsher in the pre-industrial nineteenth century) obviously takes centre stage, and the cinematography is gorgeous and draws heavily on the photography that inspired the film. The land is unquiet, the characters are haunted, but the film doesn't fully explain the specifics, but instead enables its viewers to guess at many hinted possibilities. It's one of the few films I've seen recently which fully deserves its nearly 2.5-hour length.

No open thread this week, because I have links, rather than questions.

First up, a long Youtube interview with Giles Duley. I'd advise reading the Wikipedia biography I've linked here first if you don't know who he is — he's a very impressive person, and it will give the necessary context for the interview, which I also found incredibly impressive. His attitude when it comes to taking concrete action in response to various global challenges is entirely in line with my own, although I lack his persistence and stamina.

I found this account (a guest essay by political anthropologist Kristóf Szombati on historian Ruth Ben Ghiat's Substack) about how the new Hungarian government is attempting to undo the damage Victor Orbán did to their country, and hold Orbán and his associates accountable, to be very interesting reading.

Also on Substack, this essay on 'the Taylor Swift-ification of Sally Rooney and R.F. Kuang'.

I loved that one of Tal Lavin's recent 'notable sandwiches' was a deep dive into the yeast-based condiment of my people (and the best by far of all yeast-based condiments; sorry, British friends, I've lived here for nearly 18 years, I've got the citizenship, but Marmite just tastes like wrong Vegemite).

Finally, here's an article about popular (in this case romance) fiction in Ancient Rome.

Happy start of the weekend, everyone!

This has been a much needed homebody weekend, like a big breath in between bouts of busyness. Last week was A Lot at work — involving, among other things, sitting on the exam board for an MPhil course, which was a new experience for me, and unbelievably exhausting! My manager and I were involved as we graded one piece of assessment for this course, and it counted towards the students' overall grades (a first for us as a library). It was really interesting to meet the other examiners, and see the whole degree programme in full, since we're so used to just seeing and working with students for a small segment of it all. Next week will be busy in a different way, as all our first year medical students start their course, and I have to give lectures to all 300 of them, and then deal with them showing up in confusion in the library about various things in dribs and drabs as the week continues.

As planned, Matthias and I assembled the futon sofabed yesterday. It went about as well as expected: the instructions claimed that assembly would take 45 minutes, and it took us ... 1.5 hours, but at the end of it all, we have a functioning sofabed, and Matthias even lay down on it to test that it wouldn't collapse on contact. So far, so good.

Classes at the gym yesterday were hard. My attendance has been so haphazard over the summer, and while that's been for a range of good things (travel, visitors, etc) and I don't want to be the sort of person who organises her life around her fitness regime, it will be good to settle back into more of a routine as we move into autumn. One of the leg tracks in the first class involved lots of jumping up and down off a step, and I am definitely feeling it today (and I say this as someone who loves jumping)! The pool, on the other hand, was an absolute delight this morning, and I feel fortunate indeed to have ended up in a lane whose other swimmers essentially swam at speeds compatible with my own.

By the time Saturday film night came around, Matthias and I were too exhausted by our struggles with flatpack furniture to watch anything more demanding than The Mandalorian and Grogu, so that was our viewing fare. I wasn't expecting much, but it really was just a compilation of nostalgia throwbacks and tropes, and I found myself delighted in spite of myself. (Pander to me more, I said to Matthias when the credits rolled.)

Other than that, it's been a weekend of cooking (a loveleluu recipe last night, and one from labnoon this evening), reading, and dealing with the neverending glut of tomatoes that continues to burst forth in the garden. I'll finish with the books read, but I also wanted to flag a couple of fic I've enjoyed in the past week.

The first is not technically fanfic — author Rivers Solomon announced that they were going to be serialising a new original epic fantasy story on Ao3, and the first instalment is written already:

Once I Was Made of Earth (4814 words) by rivers
Chapters: 1/?
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Additional Tags: Angst, Fantasy, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Original Fiction, Nonbinary Character, Author Is Sleep Deprived, The Author Regrets Everything, Trauma
Summary:

Maybe you will knit the poem that makes the world where I might live

She flings herself into animals to see different worlds, and he writes tales that make and remake reality. In a land steeped in civil war and bids for power, they are prey.

And we've got another new Shetland fic from raven:

to pull wild mountain thyme (what we need is here) (7216 words) by raven
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Shetland (TV)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Duncan Hunter/Jimmy Perez, Alison McIntosh & Jimmy Perez
Characters: Duncan Hunter, Jimmy Perez, Alison McIntosh
Additional Tags: Slow Burn, Ghosts, Magical Realism, Romance, big swoony romance, I’m having a time
Summary:

This little house could be the world’s heart. This place, Duncan thinks, with awful wryness, is his heart.

(On music; ghosts; coming home.)

( On to the books )

I hope everyone else has been having lovely weekends!

I'm about a day-and-a-half into a three-day weekend, and so far it's been great. After months of drought and heatwaves, it would be the August long weekend that was filled with rain, but I was so sick of this new climate change normal summer that I greeted the rain with absolute delight. Matthias and I spent most of yesterday out on a day-trip to Bury St Edmund's, and managed to time things well, so that the rain only fell when we were under shelter.

We were there for a beer festival in the cathedral, where we scored the perfect table in the cloisters, and spent a fun few hours chatting, eating food truck food, and people watching. We followed that up with a great meal in this place, then caught the train home beneath dramatic sheets of black clouds, beating the rain again.

Today, I greeted the morning with a fantastic yoga class, taking advantage of our newly-empty spare room (the old furniture is gone, the new laminate flooring has been laid, but the new furniture hasn't arrived yet) to move and stretch with a gorgeous view of the rising sun and the birds and squirrels frolicking in the treetops and hedgerow surrounding the field across the road. Then it's mostly been cleaning and journalling, interspersed with reading (Four Aunties and A Wedding, Jesse Sutanto's fun sequel to her earlier comedic family drama Dial A For Aunties). I think the rest of the weekend will be more of the same, plus some swimming and slow cooking. All in all, it's been perfect so far.

( Further reading, plus a link )