Following the power lines

[dolorosa_12]

The sun and warmth continues, and I've tried to spend as much time as possible outdoors and moving this weekend. The less said about the state of my mental health, the better — but there are still nice things.

Yesterday, Matthias and I walked for about 10km to the village of Sutton, which was having a beer festival. (I don't drink beer, but I like the vibes of beer festivals in new-to-me venues.) The first half of the walk is lovely: on a little public footway across the typical flat East Anglian fields, then through the village of Witchford (very picturesque), and past an excellent farm and gardening shop. After that, however, the second half of the walk is on a footpath/cycle path along a major motorway, and although it's not difficult to walk (flat footpath all the way), it's very noisy and cluttered with speeding cars.

The beer festival was — incongruously, to my mind — in a church, and was a fairly standard rural English affair: lots of families with little children running wildly around the church, a handful of older men who I see from time to time around Ely, dogs of various sizes, and a massive group of Morris dancers. Matthias and I stayed for a few hours, then caught the little bus back into town (which, astonishingly, arrived on time, and took exactly as long as it was supposed to take on the drive back to central Ely). The weather was so lovely that we stayed out in town, hanging out in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar (along with everyone else, it seemed), and then eating dinner out in a newish restaurant that we'd been wanting to try for a while.

We were home early, and I was already tired enough by 8pm or so to want to go to bed, but tried to keep myself awake until a reasonable hour ... and of course when I did want to go to sleep, it eluded me for hours, and then was filled with ridiculous anxiety dreams (the dream in which I struggled for what felt like hours to get Zoom to load to teach a class at work, after which point one of my dream!students remarked sourly that if their trainer was unable to get Zoom to work, they didn't trust me to be competent enough to teach the content of the class, seemed too much on the nose even for me).

This morning, I dragged my exhausted self off to the pool, and dragged myself through the sunlit water, then returned home for the usual Sunday morning crepes, and laundry (the sight of which, hanging outside, drifting gently in the warm breeze, did lift my spirits). Matthias and I wandered around town, browsing a few stalls at the market, and generally enjoying the sense of everyone enjoying the first stirrings of spring.

This afternoon will be yoga, and reading, and rest.

Reading this week has been almost exclusively rereads, as I continue my nostalgic way through 1990s Australian YA novels. This time, this consisted of two series by two different authors: Robin Klein's Melling Sisters trilogy (historical fiction about four sisters growing up in genteel poverty in rural 1940s Australia, with a scatterbrained, dreamy mother, and a credulous father who has a tendency to be taken in by all kinds of get rich financial scams — prospecting for gold, buying shares in struggling farms or factories), and Libby Hathorn's Thunderwith and Chrysalis, about a teenage girl taken in by her father and stepmother after her mother's death, struggling to find herself in a life marked by loss and unmooring changes. Both series were as good as I remembered them — Klein's historical fiction in particular, which strikes a perfect balance between wacky childhood hijinks and a serious examination of the pain and petty humilations that come from living so close to the edge of financial disaster — and although they covered serious subject matter, they were exactly the kind of rest my brain needed.

The other book I read — Victoria Amelina's posthumously published Looking at Women Looking at War — was an exquisite piece of writing, and I feel I can't do justice to it in my current state. I'm hopeful I may be able to come back to it later and say more.

The breeze drifts through the open windows. The garden is alive with flocks of wood pigeons, and pairs of blackbirds. There are pink blossoms on the quince trees. The daffodils are promising to bloom, any day now.

Comments

[kore]

Ooh, the Melling Sisters trilogy sounds neat.

[dolorosa_12]

It's such a good series, and holds up really well (I don't think I'd reread it in over 20 years, but it was even better than I remembered). It's written like a series of vignettes, each focused on one of the sisters (or their melodramatic, Hollywood-obsessed cousin), and each is self-contained (one of the sisters has a birthday party, the cousin is grumpy because there's a new, more glamorous girl at her Catholic high school, one of the sisters visits an old lady in poor health and learns a story from the old lady's girlhood, etc) but also part of a wider narrative arc about the family's economic struggles that spans the entire trilogy. It's very well done, and I particularly appreciate its historical and geographical specificity, even if the rural town in which it is set is fictional.

[lirazel]

Nature! I am so envious of British footpaths. Would that I could wander through fields! I'm glad you had a nice time on Saturday and I hope all your childhood rereads are providing you with comfort!

[dolorosa_12]

With some exceptions (routes between villages that expect you to walk along the overgrown verge of a major road), Britain is fairly well served when it comes to walkability. That said, it's all relative: I remember one of my Swedish friends complaining bitterly because we don't have the equivalent of their 'right of public access', and many private farms restrict passage.

To me, however, it feels very walkable.

[lirazel]

I suppose it's all relative--the UK seems vastly more encouraging of walking than the US, at least.

[dolorosa_12]

Yes, absolutely.

[chestnut_pod]

💛🌼

[dolorosa_12]

🪻🌷🌼🌺🌻

[blackcatofmisery]

A church is a great gathering place but for a beer festival??? Interesting. It's not like there isn't a long history of alcohol production and consumption related to the church and monasteries, though...

I'm jealous you're seeing shoots and blossoms already. There's none of that here, yet. It's my favorite part of spring.

=^..^=~

[dolorosa_12]

It's a reasonably common occurrence — my husband has been to at least one other beer festival held in a church. I think it reflects the increasingly secular nature of the UK — this is not a country of regular Sunday church attendance, and yet every village has its own Anglican church building (the ones around here are old and massive, reflecting the fact that this region was very wealthy in the medieval and early modern periods). They struggle to raise the funds to maintain the buildings, and increasingly open them up for all kinds of incongruous events. (The big cathedral in my town regularly hosts silent discos, for example.)

Spring definitely came very early this year, although we've now gone back to frosty temperatures and misty rain, so it may have been a false start.

[svgurl]

The walk and the beer festival both sound nice! Seems like a pleasant weekend, outside the anxiety dreams. That would stress me out too.

[dolorosa_12]

It was lovely — at least all the parts where I could get outside and escape from my own head.

[lynn82md]

Walks, especially in nature, are great stress relievers in my opinion. I do like to walk around the village with my son too.

Beer festival sounds fun!

[dolorosa_12]

Absolutely — there's nothing like a walk for clearing the mind and lifting the spirits!

[lokifan]

Sounds nice! Daffodils are blooming here now, probably with you as well?

After uni at Norwich, churches seem like a perfectly normal place to have a beer festival, haha. Since it's full of deconsecrated churches doing various things. Was the beer festival place still an active church?

[dolorosa_12]

There are lots of blooming daffodils around town, although those in my garden have not yet opened up.

I think I may have been to some of those events in Norwich (and my husband definitely has)! This specific church was still active (or at least as 'active' as a church can be in a small village in a country that's so secular can be).