Wild motion
Dec. 14th, 2025 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I've spent this morning at the pool, then fixing hooks to the living room wall from which to hang more string lights (the latest batch were made by hand in Shetland and each light is contained in a little glass, cork-stoppered bottle filled with tiny pieces of sea-glass), and now finally have a bit of spare time in which to write and catch up on Dreamwidth. It's a beautiful, crisp, clear wintry day, and I think Matthias and I will go out for a walk to take in the silvery-blue sky — and I might light the wood-burning stove for the first time this season.
Yesterday I had my final two classes for the year at the gym, which went well, as I was full of energy and determination. I've now been doing them both — power pump (basically lifting weights to music) followed by zumba (the cheesiest dances you can imagine, to the cheesiest music you can imagine; now that it's the lead-up to Christmas the trainer has added her warm-up routine set to a medley of Christmas songs that includes — I kid you not — an EDM-rap remix of 'The Little Drummer Boy') — for three years. The result of this is that I'm very strong, and my endurance and ability to dance in time with music without making mistakes (which have always been reasonably good) are satisfactory, but I still dance like a gymnast. I think I'm stuck with this for life. The hips don't lie, and in spite of it being twenty-plus years since I was a gymnast, some things never leave you, and therefore my hips don't move.
I also finally accepted reality and decided that (in spite of my usual track record) I will leave my contributions to Yuletide this year to my main assignment, plus the one treat I've already written. Usually I aim for at least four fics in the main collection, but I can't say that many of this year's prompts are really calling to me, and I don't think forcing things for the sake of arbitrary personal goals is going to result in decent writing.
That has left more time for reading, although the fact that I got so obsessed with one book this week that I reread it five times in succession (and then I reread it a sixth time yesterday) meant that I've only finished one other book this week: Night Train to Odesa (Jen Stout), a British freelance journalist's memoir of her time in Ukraine during the first year of Russia's full-scale invasion, and the various ordinary people forced to do extraordinary things (in the military, as civilian volunteers, in culture and the arts, over the border in Romania helping the first wave of bewildered and traumatised refugees) that she met. It's a well-told account covering ground with which I'm already familiar from other similar memoirs — raw emotions, injustice and atrocities, people rising with ingenuity, stamina and resilience to meet the moment because the only other option would have been to lie down, surrender, and cease to exist as free people of an independent nation — but I appreciated the features that made it unique. These included Stout's background (a journalist from Shetland who spoke fluent Russian and actually spent the first month of the war on a journalism fellowship in Russia — a surreal experience), and her familiarity with Ukraine (she had spent a lot of time there before, and has a particular love for Kharkiv city, and the frontline Donbas regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, and writes about their landscapes, urban architecture and people with deep affection).
I'm also making my way — for the first time — through The Eagle of the Ninth (Rosemary Sutcliff). Sutcliff is a glaring gap in my reading, and I'm on such a Roman Britain kick that I felt now was a good time to remedy it. Her books seemed like an appropriate winter reading project (the elegiac tone, the stark, austere landscapes), and I'm enjoying this first foray immensely, and wondering why I never tried them before now! (I have a vague memory of being given one book or the other in childhood and finding the dearth of female characters offputting, and that initial impression is probably the culprit for it taking me this long to pick them up.)
I'm going to pick up the talking meme prompt assigned for 15 December today, since I don't feel I'm likely to have enough time after work tomorrow to write anything. This one comes fromsenmut and is most unusual dining experience, and I have an absolute classic of the genre for this!
For context, I have run into a lot of problems over the years when travelling with my mum, due to her tendency (when returning to places that she's visited many times in the past) to want to revisit all the nostalgic places that she remembers fondly from her time in the 1970s or whatever. When she went to Paris in the 1970s and 1980s, she and my dad had always enjoyed eating meals in this place. She brought me and my sister back there when we went on two European trips in the 1990s, without issue. However (as you might be able to tell by the fact that the restaurant's website is in English), by the time she and I returned in the mid-2000s, this had become the sort of tourist trap that — as far as I can tell — had an exclusively tourist clientele who were the type of tourists who thought they were sole possessors of secret knowledge about a hidden gem of Paris, a remnant of a less overtouristed time. (This was pre-Trip Advisor, and pre-social media, so I can only imagine how much worse it's become now.) It's the sort of restaurant that got reverent articles written about it in the New Yorker.
Anyway, Mum and I showed up at dinner time, only to discover the place lit up from inside, with staff present, but the front door locked and a clutch of confused American tourists hanging around outside, apparently unsure if it was going to open at all. The staff inside were wandering around looking annoyed, and periodically came out to the door to tell us that they weren't sure if they were going to open, and when. (Looking back, I think they just wanted everyone to go away.) Eventually, they grudgingly opened the door, and we walked into the restaurant, to be greeted by what appeared to be the entire waitstaff standing around the central bar area, being yelled at and berated at some length by the head of the front-of-house staff.
After that auspicious beginning, we were treated to exactly the kind of dining experience you can imagine in a Parisian restaurant staffed by French waitstaff who a) were a bit disgusted with the fact that their clientele was exclusively English-speaking tourists and b) had started their evening's work in some kind of crisis that resulted in them being yelled at by their boss for about twenty minutes. I have a kind of passive understanding of French in food-related contexts, but my mum learnt French at secondary school, and bizarrely (even though she was close to fifty years out of secondary school at that point) can always dredge it back up enough to communicate in tourist French in contexts like ordering food, asking for directions, and so on, so she was communicating exclusively in French in this restaurant.
As well as our main meals, the two of us had ordered a bowl of green beans as a side dish which — in spite of the rest of the meal being served — never materialised. After being treated to irate service all evening, I just wanted to let this slide and leave, but Mum kept repeatedly calling waiters over and asking where the green beans were. Eventually, they were brought, grudgingly to the table (in my memory they were essentially slammed down unceremoniously).
Ever since, où sont les haricots verts? has become a family joke.
Other weird dining experiences include the time (as a child) I went to an Ethiopian restaurant with one of my aunts. The restaurant was in a basement, which meant that you couldn't see if other diners were already there before entering (and seemed to put people off going at all for this reason). We were the only people in the restaurant for the entire meal, and the staff kept playing and replaying an answering machine message of someone requesting a reservation 'for ten people,' perhaps as an attempt to reassure us that actually they were a vibrant and popular place with multiple ten-person bookings about to materialise that night. It was absolutely surreal. That restaurant closed soon after, and every other attempt to house a restaurant in that space was unsuccessful (for the same reason: people found it awkward to go into a space that they might discover to be empty), and I noticed on my most recent trip to Sydney that it's now a clothes and homewares shop.
Matthias and I also had an absolutely comical experience at a fancy tasting menu restaurant in Rotterdam. We love this kind of dining, and (now that we can afford it) try to go to tasting menus in every new city that we visit. Other than this one in Rotterdam, they've all ranged from competent to amazing, but this one was something else. As in many such restaurants, diners had the option of fewer or more courses (in this case five courses, seven courses, or nine courses), and we opted for the largest number. (Just for context, each course in this type of meal is usually just a few bites of food, not a fully loaded massive plate!)
Unlike in many other such restaurants, this choice in number of courses didn't have to be preselected when booking, and instead the waiter said everyone could start off with the five courses by default, and decide later in the meal how many more they wanted. That should have been our first red flag. Secondly, as in many such restaurants, diners had the option to add a wine flight to the meal — but they also had the option of a flight of beer pairings. (Again, wine pairings are very small glasses and you don't get a glass with every single course.) Matthias, stupidly, opted for the beer pairings, assuming small 1/3 or 1/2 pint glasses. Imagine our shock when we realised that this was going to mean an entire bottle or can of beer served with every single course!
We had started eating around 6pm, and usually these kinds of meals take about 3-3.5 hours from start to finish. We started to realise something was wrong when it got to 9pm and we'd only been served four courses, with five to go! The waiter again asked us if we were really, really sure we didn't want just the five-course meal, were we really, really certain that we wanted nine courses, etc. We should have just cut our losses, but we stubbornly hung on grimly until the end, even though it was clear that the restaurant staff basically expected everyone to opt for the five courses (even though they were not filling enough — think, a mouthful of foam). We were there until 11pm, and for the last hour of the meal, the staff were visibly closing and cleaning the kitchen, stacking tables and chairs, and so on.
It wasn't on the level of this place in Italy (my favourite negative restaurant review of all time), but it was excruciatingly awkward, involved not enough food, way too much alcohol, and poor choices all around. I definitely do not recommend it!
I have meals that were memorably good, but the comically bad ones stick more firmly in the mind.
I hope you've all been having relaxing weekends.
Yesterday I had my final two classes for the year at the gym, which went well, as I was full of energy and determination. I've now been doing them both — power pump (basically lifting weights to music) followed by zumba (the cheesiest dances you can imagine, to the cheesiest music you can imagine; now that it's the lead-up to Christmas the trainer has added her warm-up routine set to a medley of Christmas songs that includes — I kid you not — an EDM-rap remix of 'The Little Drummer Boy') — for three years. The result of this is that I'm very strong, and my endurance and ability to dance in time with music without making mistakes (which have always been reasonably good) are satisfactory, but I still dance like a gymnast. I think I'm stuck with this for life. The hips don't lie, and in spite of it being twenty-plus years since I was a gymnast, some things never leave you, and therefore my hips don't move.
I also finally accepted reality and decided that (in spite of my usual track record) I will leave my contributions to Yuletide this year to my main assignment, plus the one treat I've already written. Usually I aim for at least four fics in the main collection, but I can't say that many of this year's prompts are really calling to me, and I don't think forcing things for the sake of arbitrary personal goals is going to result in decent writing.
That has left more time for reading, although the fact that I got so obsessed with one book this week that I reread it five times in succession (and then I reread it a sixth time yesterday) meant that I've only finished one other book this week: Night Train to Odesa (Jen Stout), a British freelance journalist's memoir of her time in Ukraine during the first year of Russia's full-scale invasion, and the various ordinary people forced to do extraordinary things (in the military, as civilian volunteers, in culture and the arts, over the border in Romania helping the first wave of bewildered and traumatised refugees) that she met. It's a well-told account covering ground with which I'm already familiar from other similar memoirs — raw emotions, injustice and atrocities, people rising with ingenuity, stamina and resilience to meet the moment because the only other option would have been to lie down, surrender, and cease to exist as free people of an independent nation — but I appreciated the features that made it unique. These included Stout's background (a journalist from Shetland who spoke fluent Russian and actually spent the first month of the war on a journalism fellowship in Russia — a surreal experience), and her familiarity with Ukraine (she had spent a lot of time there before, and has a particular love for Kharkiv city, and the frontline Donbas regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, and writes about their landscapes, urban architecture and people with deep affection).
I'm also making my way — for the first time — through The Eagle of the Ninth (Rosemary Sutcliff). Sutcliff is a glaring gap in my reading, and I'm on such a Roman Britain kick that I felt now was a good time to remedy it. Her books seemed like an appropriate winter reading project (the elegiac tone, the stark, austere landscapes), and I'm enjoying this first foray immensely, and wondering why I never tried them before now! (I have a vague memory of being given one book or the other in childhood and finding the dearth of female characters offputting, and that initial impression is probably the culprit for it taking me this long to pick them up.)
I'm going to pick up the talking meme prompt assigned for 15 December today, since I don't feel I'm likely to have enough time after work tomorrow to write anything. This one comes from
senmut and is most unusual dining experience, and I have an absolute classic of the genre for this!For context, I have run into a lot of problems over the years when travelling with my mum, due to her tendency (when returning to places that she's visited many times in the past) to want to revisit all the nostalgic places that she remembers fondly from her time in the 1970s or whatever. When she went to Paris in the 1970s and 1980s, she and my dad had always enjoyed eating meals in this place. She brought me and my sister back there when we went on two European trips in the 1990s, without issue. However (as you might be able to tell by the fact that the restaurant's website is in English), by the time she and I returned in the mid-2000s, this had become the sort of tourist trap that — as far as I can tell — had an exclusively tourist clientele who were the type of tourists who thought they were sole possessors of secret knowledge about a hidden gem of Paris, a remnant of a less overtouristed time. (This was pre-Trip Advisor, and pre-social media, so I can only imagine how much worse it's become now.) It's the sort of restaurant that got reverent articles written about it in the New Yorker.
Anyway, Mum and I showed up at dinner time, only to discover the place lit up from inside, with staff present, but the front door locked and a clutch of confused American tourists hanging around outside, apparently unsure if it was going to open at all. The staff inside were wandering around looking annoyed, and periodically came out to the door to tell us that they weren't sure if they were going to open, and when. (Looking back, I think they just wanted everyone to go away.) Eventually, they grudgingly opened the door, and we walked into the restaurant, to be greeted by what appeared to be the entire waitstaff standing around the central bar area, being yelled at and berated at some length by the head of the front-of-house staff.
After that auspicious beginning, we were treated to exactly the kind of dining experience you can imagine in a Parisian restaurant staffed by French waitstaff who a) were a bit disgusted with the fact that their clientele was exclusively English-speaking tourists and b) had started their evening's work in some kind of crisis that resulted in them being yelled at by their boss for about twenty minutes. I have a kind of passive understanding of French in food-related contexts, but my mum learnt French at secondary school, and bizarrely (even though she was close to fifty years out of secondary school at that point) can always dredge it back up enough to communicate in tourist French in contexts like ordering food, asking for directions, and so on, so she was communicating exclusively in French in this restaurant.
As well as our main meals, the two of us had ordered a bowl of green beans as a side dish which — in spite of the rest of the meal being served — never materialised. After being treated to irate service all evening, I just wanted to let this slide and leave, but Mum kept repeatedly calling waiters over and asking where the green beans were. Eventually, they were brought, grudgingly to the table (in my memory they were essentially slammed down unceremoniously).
Ever since, où sont les haricots verts? has become a family joke.
Other weird dining experiences include the time (as a child) I went to an Ethiopian restaurant with one of my aunts. The restaurant was in a basement, which meant that you couldn't see if other diners were already there before entering (and seemed to put people off going at all for this reason). We were the only people in the restaurant for the entire meal, and the staff kept playing and replaying an answering machine message of someone requesting a reservation 'for ten people,' perhaps as an attempt to reassure us that actually they were a vibrant and popular place with multiple ten-person bookings about to materialise that night. It was absolutely surreal. That restaurant closed soon after, and every other attempt to house a restaurant in that space was unsuccessful (for the same reason: people found it awkward to go into a space that they might discover to be empty), and I noticed on my most recent trip to Sydney that it's now a clothes and homewares shop.
Matthias and I also had an absolutely comical experience at a fancy tasting menu restaurant in Rotterdam. We love this kind of dining, and (now that we can afford it) try to go to tasting menus in every new city that we visit. Other than this one in Rotterdam, they've all ranged from competent to amazing, but this one was something else. As in many such restaurants, diners had the option of fewer or more courses (in this case five courses, seven courses, or nine courses), and we opted for the largest number. (Just for context, each course in this type of meal is usually just a few bites of food, not a fully loaded massive plate!)
Unlike in many other such restaurants, this choice in number of courses didn't have to be preselected when booking, and instead the waiter said everyone could start off with the five courses by default, and decide later in the meal how many more they wanted. That should have been our first red flag. Secondly, as in many such restaurants, diners had the option to add a wine flight to the meal — but they also had the option of a flight of beer pairings. (Again, wine pairings are very small glasses and you don't get a glass with every single course.) Matthias, stupidly, opted for the beer pairings, assuming small 1/3 or 1/2 pint glasses. Imagine our shock when we realised that this was going to mean an entire bottle or can of beer served with every single course!
We had started eating around 6pm, and usually these kinds of meals take about 3-3.5 hours from start to finish. We started to realise something was wrong when it got to 9pm and we'd only been served four courses, with five to go! The waiter again asked us if we were really, really sure we didn't want just the five-course meal, were we really, really certain that we wanted nine courses, etc. We should have just cut our losses, but we stubbornly hung on grimly until the end, even though it was clear that the restaurant staff basically expected everyone to opt for the five courses (even though they were not filling enough — think, a mouthful of foam). We were there until 11pm, and for the last hour of the meal, the staff were visibly closing and cleaning the kitchen, stacking tables and chairs, and so on.
It wasn't on the level of this place in Italy (my favourite negative restaurant review of all time), but it was excruciatingly awkward, involved not enough food, way too much alcohol, and poor choices all around. I definitely do not recommend it!
I have meals that were memorably good, but the comically bad ones stick more firmly in the mind.
I hope you've all been having relaxing weekends.
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Date: 2025-12-14 02:45 pm (UTC)The Rotterdam place sounds like something out of a comedy.
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Date: 2025-12-14 03:12 pm (UTC)It really was comedic — even at the time we were just laughing and laughing (mainly at our own stupidity).
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Date: 2025-12-14 05:53 pm (UTC)Which is your favourite of her books?
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Date: 2025-12-15 01:50 am (UTC)(I won't go into why I loved MotHL here, because, spoilers!)
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Date: 2025-12-14 10:45 pm (UTC)I read (& repeatedly reread) The Eagle of the Ninth as a child and I absolutely adore it. I wasn't as keen on The Silver Branch but I must have borrowed Dawn Wind at least a dozen times from the library.
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Date: 2025-12-18 04:54 pm (UTC)