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No shelter from the storm
May. 24th, 2020 01:47 pmI have lived in this country for more than a decade, and I have still not learnt the fundamental lesson: when planning to be outside for any length of time, first check the weather.
Yesterday Matthias and I, wanting to take advantage of the time afforded us by a four-day weekend, decided to spend the morning doing a long walk along the river. The walk itself would take more than two hours there and back. We left the house to sunny, windy weather — warm enough to wear t shirts, and spent the way out meandering among the cows, houseboats and bird life. Here's a photoset.
About a minute after the last photo was taken, when we were essentially the furthest it was possible to be from our house, it started pouring with rain, which lashed us horizontaly due to the howling wind. There are several pubs along the river, but of course due to lockdown they are all closed, so there wasn't even that option of waiting inside for the rain to ease — all we could do was trudge forward, in our t shirts, for an hour and a half until we arrived home. We were miserable and frozen, and I immediately ran a hot bath to warm up. By the time I'd thawed sufficienty, I was exhausted, and I ended up doing nothing between 3-6pm but lie in bed. This was, as you can imagine, not the way I had been planning to spend my Saturday!
Sunday so far has been a vast improvement — an extraordinarily lazy morning, eating crepes and tea for breakfast, chatting with my mother and sister via FaceTime (they're still in isolation in Sydney together, working from home, but Australia is gradually relaxing most of the lockdown restrictions, and I have to say I feel a bit of envy at them being able to sit in cafes, and, as of 1st June, go to the pool), and reading.
I've somehow ended up signed up for a programme through the publisher Hodderscape which gives UK resident participants their choice of a selection of free ebooks at set intervals throughout the year. (If you want to participate, you can sign up here — my understanding is that this is limited to UK residents only, but it might be worth double checking.) My first book was Honeycomb by Joanne Harris, a collection of weird, whimsical fairytales, most of which had an underlying bite. It's not a subtle book — there's a running strand of Animal Farm-esque political fables which are recognisable as parables about the rise of Trump and right-wing nationalism, aggrieved Gamergate types screaming that they're being silenced, and so on (one is even about the 2010 Lib Dem/Conservative coalition government in the UK, that's how unsubtle and specific they are) — but I enjoyed it a lot. 80 per cent of it is an unfolding series of stories about otherworldly beings, and their quests, lives, and loves, as they roam in and out of the human and other worlds, and the remaining 20 per cent is filled by those political fables. Often when modern authors try to invent or adapt fairytales the result is too syrupy for my tastes, too kind, but these keep that unearthly wildness, and that refusal to explain the workings of their world. Fairytales shouldn't require explanations: things within them just are, and you either accept that as a reader or not.
I discovered, through![[instagram.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/profile_icons/instagram.png)
roshanichokshi, the existence of a webcomic called Lore Olympus, which as far as I can tell is a modern retelling of the Hades/Persephone story, so I guess that's what I'll be reading this afternoon!
What's everyone up to this weekend (not that time has any meaning in these times of lockdown)?
Yesterday Matthias and I, wanting to take advantage of the time afforded us by a four-day weekend, decided to spend the morning doing a long walk along the river. The walk itself would take more than two hours there and back. We left the house to sunny, windy weather — warm enough to wear t shirts, and spent the way out meandering among the cows, houseboats and bird life. Here's a photoset.
About a minute after the last photo was taken, when we were essentially the furthest it was possible to be from our house, it started pouring with rain, which lashed us horizontaly due to the howling wind. There are several pubs along the river, but of course due to lockdown they are all closed, so there wasn't even that option of waiting inside for the rain to ease — all we could do was trudge forward, in our t shirts, for an hour and a half until we arrived home. We were miserable and frozen, and I immediately ran a hot bath to warm up. By the time I'd thawed sufficienty, I was exhausted, and I ended up doing nothing between 3-6pm but lie in bed. This was, as you can imagine, not the way I had been planning to spend my Saturday!
Sunday so far has been a vast improvement — an extraordinarily lazy morning, eating crepes and tea for breakfast, chatting with my mother and sister via FaceTime (they're still in isolation in Sydney together, working from home, but Australia is gradually relaxing most of the lockdown restrictions, and I have to say I feel a bit of envy at them being able to sit in cafes, and, as of 1st June, go to the pool), and reading.
I've somehow ended up signed up for a programme through the publisher Hodderscape which gives UK resident participants their choice of a selection of free ebooks at set intervals throughout the year. (If you want to participate, you can sign up here — my understanding is that this is limited to UK residents only, but it might be worth double checking.) My first book was Honeycomb by Joanne Harris, a collection of weird, whimsical fairytales, most of which had an underlying bite. It's not a subtle book — there's a running strand of Animal Farm-esque political fables which are recognisable as parables about the rise of Trump and right-wing nationalism, aggrieved Gamergate types screaming that they're being silenced, and so on (one is even about the 2010 Lib Dem/Conservative coalition government in the UK, that's how unsubtle and specific they are) — but I enjoyed it a lot. 80 per cent of it is an unfolding series of stories about otherworldly beings, and their quests, lives, and loves, as they roam in and out of the human and other worlds, and the remaining 20 per cent is filled by those political fables. Often when modern authors try to invent or adapt fairytales the result is too syrupy for my tastes, too kind, but these keep that unearthly wildness, and that refusal to explain the workings of their world. Fairytales shouldn't require explanations: things within them just are, and you either accept that as a reader or not.
I discovered, through
roshanichokshi, the existence of a webcomic called Lore Olympus, which as far as I can tell is a modern retelling of the Hades/Persephone story, so I guess that's what I'll be reading this afternoon!What's everyone up to this weekend (not that time has any meaning in these times of lockdown)?