Three links for a snowy afternoon

I will follow this linkpost with something of an update (which should hopefully represent a return to more regular writing here), but for now, have some links to things which have been delighting me recently.

I tend to use Instagram as an oasis of calming and beautiful things, so I'm always on the lookout for accounts which fit those criteria. Two new-to-me accounts, which you may enjoy, are as follows:

urhanoglukozdekunefe: a Turkish bakery making variants on baklava. It's basically loads of videos of the baker (who looks as if he's a time-travelling member of a '90s boyband) baking things on an open stove.

theswissshepherdess: should be fairly self-explanatory from the name. Lots of videos of sheep, dogs and other farm animals running around snowy mountains.

The third link made me laugh a lot, but possibly requires a bit of context. Basically, singer Amanda Palmer (who I tend to find pretty insufferable) claimed that after the US inauguration, she went into her local cafe (she's currently living in New Zealand) and was spontaneously applauded by everyone there. This was greeted with a lot of justifiable skepticism and eye-rolling.

The response was incredibly New Zealand — this hilarious 'fact-checking' article, which made me laugh and laugh.

Dashing through the snow

We've been in the new house for just over two weeks, and we're ... getting there. I'm discovering skills which I never knew I had (stringing and hanging pencil-pleat curtains, rethreading a broken roller blind and reattaching it to the window, etc).

The plumbing in the new house was in pretty dire straights when we got here, which is sadly par for the course in the UK (I don't know what it is about this country, but every house I've lived in and a fair few I've visited have had indiosyncratic toilet flush mechanisms that were always on the verge of breaking, and showers for which the process of turning them on and achieving hot water required a lengthy explanation, rather than simply turning a couple of taps anticlockwise). This has meant several visits from a plumber, which weirdly wasn't that difficult to organise, even during lockdown. Things are pretty close to being sorted (toilets all functioning properly, cracked electric shower still needing to be replaced).

Today, I made a start on the garden, raking the leaves from the various fruit trees and revealing a whole garden bed full of sprouting tulip bulbs. I was very surprised to discover them, along with daffodil bulbs in the front garden, but it's nice to see signs of life and growing things.

The herb garden is bursting with abundance, but the vegetable patches are full of weeds and will need to be dealt with when the ground isn't icy and frozen. More of an issue is the next-door neighbours' garden, which is half midden of rubbish (unsightly, but not really a problem) and half completely covered with blackberry brambles. These are flowing over our side fence and threatening to take root in our garden. I tried to clip some of it back this morning, but it's pretty challenging, and I'm extremely resentful that our neighbours' complete lack of responsibility is going to mean that this will be something we will have to constantly, vigilantly deal with. We bought this house in part because of the beautiful garden (five or six fruit trees, herb and vegetable patches, a great deck and patio), so we were expecting to spend a lot of time gardening, but I don't really feel that dealing with our neighbours' uncontrollable, invasive weeds had been part of the plan!

Other than house stuff, I've been working from home, reading a bit, and not doing much else. It's been cold and snowy, and not conducive to outdoorsy things.

Reading-wise, it's been a mixed bag, both in terms of quality and genre. When we were still in the process of moving house and settling in, I wasn't up to reading anything more demanding than the Bridgerton romance novels, so I read the first two in quick succession. I followed that with Louise O'Neill's incredible psychological thriller, After the Silence, which takes one of my very favourite tropes (a tiny, insular community witnesses the unsolved murder of a young woman, and the resulting fallout implicates everyone, and lays bare everyone's secrets) and uses it to say interesting things about domestic abuse, the relationship between the Gaeltacht with the English-speaking majority of Ireland, and the relationship between Ireland and Britain.

I then moved on to Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, which I had gone into entirely unspoiled, for which I was incredibly grateful. I'd had no idea ( spoilers )

The final book I've read so far (other than a reread of The Will and the Wild by Charlie N. Holmberg) was Barack Obama's new memoir, A Promised Land, which I had not really intended to read during the lead-up to Joe Biden's inauguration, but it somehow happened anyway. I'm not really sure what to say about the book that hasn't already been said — he writes really well (unsurprisingly), is frank about the challenges of his presidency (particularly the fact that he was saddled with messianic expectation by one side, and viewed as the antichrist by the other side, and neither perspective leaves much space for a real, human being to just try to pragmatically do the job), and probably treats his opponents with more empathy and good faith than they deserved. The highlight for me were his perceptive and concise little portraits of the various individuals — other world leaders, US politicians, and various members of his cabinet — who played a role in the various moments of the book.

It's been snowing on and off all day, and I'm looking forward to finishing the weekend with tea, catching up on my rather neglected Dreamwidth feed, and slow, wintry cooking. I hope everyone's been having a good weekend.