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dolorosa_12I went back to the pool this morning, after having been away for over a week due to being unwell, and then the sports centre's Christmas closure. It was almost completely empty when I started my laps, and had filled up massively by the end; this is a strange time of year, when I can never judge how other people are planning to fill their time.
mific asked me to talk about seasons, any aspect of them, any one of them.
I like living in places with four distinct seasons — this is not always a given in Australia, but it was in Canberra, where I grew up, which is located inland in tablelands at some elevation, so you get scorching dry summers of frequent 35-40+ degrees, winters when it drops below zero at night and the place is blanketed in frosty fog in the mornings, and absolutely vivid autumns and springs. The contrast between seasons isn't so extreme in this part of the UK, but it's there.
Now that I have my own garden and make more than a token effort at growing things, I notice the change in the seasons more sharply. There is spring, when all the bulbs are blooming, and the trees are alive with blossoms — deep pink on the quince trees, soft cherry pink on the cherry trees, creamy pink-and-white blowsy flowers on the pear and apple trees, and, later, soft spears of light purple all over the lilac bush. This is the point at which I start sowing most seeds, either out in the garden beds, or in seed trays all over the house. In summer, all the fruit trees are covered in fruit, various vegetables tart bursting out of the ground, and the sky stays light until close to 10pm, warming the dry earth. Autumn is when the abundance arrives, and I fill my cupboards with fermented vegetables and my fridge with green bramley apples; this will all last until well into the next spring. Now we're at the fallow time: long, cold nights, frost covering the hard ground, austere bare branches — and robins and blue tits lurking in all the shrubbery. If we're lucky, fog blankets the flat fenlands for days on end — my very favourite kind of weather. And, I was out in the front garden looking at the raised beds, and noticed that the bulbs were already starting to push their way out of the earth, ready for the whole cycle to begin again.
Other than the very low-effort books I mentioned in my previous post, I've read very little, although I am working my way through The Story of A New Name, the second book in Elena Ferrante's acclaimed Neapolitan quartet, and finding it as excellent as the first. This book covers our narrator's late teens and early adulthood, with that same mix of tightly observed specificity (the impoverished residents of a single block of apartments in 1960s Naples) and more universally relatable observations on the excruciating experiences of being a young woman.
I also read Motherland (Julia Ioffe), a memoir-history in the mode of Jung Chang's Wild Swans which follows the author's family through four generations of the twentieth century in what are now Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Being Jewish people in that part of the world during the Holocaust, World War II, and the Soviet Union's existence and collapse was obviously not easy, and Ioffe's various ancestors navigated these treacherous waters with ingenuity, resilience, and persistence. As well as being a family history, Ioffe attempts in the book to write a social history of 'Russian' women (inverted commas very much needed, because she has a frustrating habit of treating 'Russian' as synonymous with 'other regions of the Russian empire,' 'Soviet', and so on), from the birth of the Soviet Union to current times. Here, although she highlights some extraordinary people and episodes in history, I feel the book is weaker, because (other than the women of her own family), she focuses for the most part on elites — wives of Soviet leaders, Stalin's daughter, wives and mistresses of Putin and his oligarchs, Yulia Navalnaya, and so on — and although her thesis is that such women offer a sort of mirror into the changing society, I can't help but feel that they're not exactly representative.
And that's it in terms of reading for now. I picked up a couple of silly sounding romantasy ebooks, I've still got two Rosemary Sutcliff books out from the library, and Matthias returned from today's grocery shopping with an unexpected book gift for me, but I'm not sure how many of these I'll make it through before the year's end. In any case, my focus is still the Yuletide collection at the moment.
mific asked me to talk about seasons, any aspect of them, any one of them.I like living in places with four distinct seasons — this is not always a given in Australia, but it was in Canberra, where I grew up, which is located inland in tablelands at some elevation, so you get scorching dry summers of frequent 35-40+ degrees, winters when it drops below zero at night and the place is blanketed in frosty fog in the mornings, and absolutely vivid autumns and springs. The contrast between seasons isn't so extreme in this part of the UK, but it's there.
Now that I have my own garden and make more than a token effort at growing things, I notice the change in the seasons more sharply. There is spring, when all the bulbs are blooming, and the trees are alive with blossoms — deep pink on the quince trees, soft cherry pink on the cherry trees, creamy pink-and-white blowsy flowers on the pear and apple trees, and, later, soft spears of light purple all over the lilac bush. This is the point at which I start sowing most seeds, either out in the garden beds, or in seed trays all over the house. In summer, all the fruit trees are covered in fruit, various vegetables tart bursting out of the ground, and the sky stays light until close to 10pm, warming the dry earth. Autumn is when the abundance arrives, and I fill my cupboards with fermented vegetables and my fridge with green bramley apples; this will all last until well into the next spring. Now we're at the fallow time: long, cold nights, frost covering the hard ground, austere bare branches — and robins and blue tits lurking in all the shrubbery. If we're lucky, fog blankets the flat fenlands for days on end — my very favourite kind of weather. And, I was out in the front garden looking at the raised beds, and noticed that the bulbs were already starting to push their way out of the earth, ready for the whole cycle to begin again.
Other than the very low-effort books I mentioned in my previous post, I've read very little, although I am working my way through The Story of A New Name, the second book in Elena Ferrante's acclaimed Neapolitan quartet, and finding it as excellent as the first. This book covers our narrator's late teens and early adulthood, with that same mix of tightly observed specificity (the impoverished residents of a single block of apartments in 1960s Naples) and more universally relatable observations on the excruciating experiences of being a young woman.
I also read Motherland (Julia Ioffe), a memoir-history in the mode of Jung Chang's Wild Swans which follows the author's family through four generations of the twentieth century in what are now Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Being Jewish people in that part of the world during the Holocaust, World War II, and the Soviet Union's existence and collapse was obviously not easy, and Ioffe's various ancestors navigated these treacherous waters with ingenuity, resilience, and persistence. As well as being a family history, Ioffe attempts in the book to write a social history of 'Russian' women (inverted commas very much needed, because she has a frustrating habit of treating 'Russian' as synonymous with 'other regions of the Russian empire,' 'Soviet', and so on), from the birth of the Soviet Union to current times. Here, although she highlights some extraordinary people and episodes in history, I feel the book is weaker, because (other than the women of her own family), she focuses for the most part on elites — wives of Soviet leaders, Stalin's daughter, wives and mistresses of Putin and his oligarchs, Yulia Navalnaya, and so on — and although her thesis is that such women offer a sort of mirror into the changing society, I can't help but feel that they're not exactly representative.
And that's it in terms of reading for now. I picked up a couple of silly sounding romantasy ebooks, I've still got two Rosemary Sutcliff books out from the library, and Matthias returned from today's grocery shopping with an unexpected book gift for me, but I'm not sure how many of these I'll make it through before the year's end. In any case, my focus is still the Yuletide collection at the moment.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-27 04:51 pm (UTC)Ah, thanks for the year-long tour around your well-loved. garden
no subject
Date: 2025-12-27 05:06 pm (UTC)