You in the city lights
Oct. 9th, 2022 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Matthias and I spent the weekend in London. The initial reason was to see a gig (experimental techno DJs SHXCXCHCXSH), but although it's theoretically possible to get back home after a concert ends, it's very stressful and unpleasant — and for this reason, Matthias and I always stay overnight in London in these circumstances. This time around, it would have been genuinely impossible, as there were train strikes, and the last train back to Ely left London at 5.30pm.
The gig itself was excellent — it was in a tiny nightclub in Brixton, there probably weren't more than thirty or forty people there, and I could dance to my heart's content without being crushed or needing to compete for space. As we were queuing outside, a horde of metalheads streamed past to another gig in the Brixton Academy, and I was reminded how much I intensely love London.
We'd had the strange experience of being unable to find a single hotel room anywhere in central (or even semi-central London) for less than £200 for the night — and indeed most such hotels didn't even have rooms available at that ridiculous price. However, we had the brilliant idea to try airport hotels, and were able to get a room at Heathrow for a much more reasonable price. We've stayed out there before while en route to early morning flights, and although it meant we had to travel for an hour on the Tube, it was comfortable enough, and saved us a lot of money. I have no idea what was going on with London hotel availability — I've never seen anything like it.
We made our way home via a fantastic lunch at![[instagram.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/profile_icons/instagram.png)
mriya_neo_bistro, which was a restaurant I'd long been eyeing on Instagram. The food was delicious, and (while this doesn't matter to me, it is a bonus) the decor, cutlery and crockery were beautiful. We'll definitely be back again. I stuck up a photoset on Instagram.
I finished up two books this week — mainly train reading.
The first was Storyland (Amy Jeffs), a gorgeously presented book full of woodblock prints by the author. The author is an academic (although in art history rather than medieval literature), and her book is a collection of retellings of medieval Welsh, English, Scandinavian and Irish stories, all of which between them tell the pseudohistory of Britain (and to a lesser extent Ireland and Scandinavia). Due to my own academic background, many of the tales were familiar to me, although some were new, and I wouldn't say Jeffs did anything particularly left-field with them — they're essentially pared down retellings, with the same sense of allusion that is so common in medieval literature. My general frustration when people bring medieval literature into the pop cultural sphere is that they are either too universal in their assumptions (i.e. they assume that ninth-century English tales are interchangeable with twelfth-century Irish ones), or they are too specific (and assume that their own pet region is somehow unique and superior in terms of its culture, and that its literary output is a perfect reflection of the attitudes of every single representative of the culture). Weirdly, I felt that Jeffs's book was both. It wanted to tell the history of Britain (and surrounding regions) and its medieval inhabitants' understanding of history, and their relationship with the land, and with the wider literary landscape, and so it tried to tidy a whole collection of stories into a coherent whole, and present it as if it weren't disparate in terms of space and time. I wrote a PhD on medieval Irish pseduhistorical texts, so maybe no work of fiction on this topic is ever going to satisfy me.
I have far fewer thoughts about the second book — The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea (Axie Oh), a YA fantasy novel that draws on the Korean folktale 'The Tale of Shim Cheong'. It's the story of a teenage girl, Mina, whose people have a tradition of sending young women beneath the waves as brides to appease the Sea God and prevent storms, floods and other chaos from ravaging their lands. Once in the supernatural realm of the spirits, Mina discovers that all is not as it seems, and she realises that things will never be safe on land until she has mended what is broken in the kingdom beneath the sea. I quite enjoyed this novel, and it introduced me to a new-to-me folktale, which is always a bonus.
All in all, it's been a good weekend.
The gig itself was excellent — it was in a tiny nightclub in Brixton, there probably weren't more than thirty or forty people there, and I could dance to my heart's content without being crushed or needing to compete for space. As we were queuing outside, a horde of metalheads streamed past to another gig in the Brixton Academy, and I was reminded how much I intensely love London.
We'd had the strange experience of being unable to find a single hotel room anywhere in central (or even semi-central London) for less than £200 for the night — and indeed most such hotels didn't even have rooms available at that ridiculous price. However, we had the brilliant idea to try airport hotels, and were able to get a room at Heathrow for a much more reasonable price. We've stayed out there before while en route to early morning flights, and although it meant we had to travel for an hour on the Tube, it was comfortable enough, and saved us a lot of money. I have no idea what was going on with London hotel availability — I've never seen anything like it.
We made our way home via a fantastic lunch at
mriya_neo_bistro, which was a restaurant I'd long been eyeing on Instagram. The food was delicious, and (while this doesn't matter to me, it is a bonus) the decor, cutlery and crockery were beautiful. We'll definitely be back again. I stuck up a photoset on Instagram.I finished up two books this week — mainly train reading.
The first was Storyland (Amy Jeffs), a gorgeously presented book full of woodblock prints by the author. The author is an academic (although in art history rather than medieval literature), and her book is a collection of retellings of medieval Welsh, English, Scandinavian and Irish stories, all of which between them tell the pseudohistory of Britain (and to a lesser extent Ireland and Scandinavia). Due to my own academic background, many of the tales were familiar to me, although some were new, and I wouldn't say Jeffs did anything particularly left-field with them — they're essentially pared down retellings, with the same sense of allusion that is so common in medieval literature. My general frustration when people bring medieval literature into the pop cultural sphere is that they are either too universal in their assumptions (i.e. they assume that ninth-century English tales are interchangeable with twelfth-century Irish ones), or they are too specific (and assume that their own pet region is somehow unique and superior in terms of its culture, and that its literary output is a perfect reflection of the attitudes of every single representative of the culture). Weirdly, I felt that Jeffs's book was both. It wanted to tell the history of Britain (and surrounding regions) and its medieval inhabitants' understanding of history, and their relationship with the land, and with the wider literary landscape, and so it tried to tidy a whole collection of stories into a coherent whole, and present it as if it weren't disparate in terms of space and time. I wrote a PhD on medieval Irish pseduhistorical texts, so maybe no work of fiction on this topic is ever going to satisfy me.
I have far fewer thoughts about the second book — The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea (Axie Oh), a YA fantasy novel that draws on the Korean folktale 'The Tale of Shim Cheong'. It's the story of a teenage girl, Mina, whose people have a tradition of sending young women beneath the waves as brides to appease the Sea God and prevent storms, floods and other chaos from ravaging their lands. Once in the supernatural realm of the spirits, Mina discovers that all is not as it seems, and she realises that things will never be safe on land until she has mended what is broken in the kingdom beneath the sea. I quite enjoyed this novel, and it introduced me to a new-to-me folktale, which is always a bonus.
All in all, it's been a good weekend.