Catching up, in bullet points
May. 3rd, 2026 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I've been extremely busy, and consequently extremely tired, and haven't been around on Dreamwidth all that much in the past couple of weeks. Rather than one of my standard weekend wrap-up posts, I'm going to attempt to go through the various things that have been happening, in brief, in list form.
Two weeks ago, catpuccino came up to Ely to visit. She lives in London, we've known each other since the first day of high school, but what with one thing and another, I hadn't seen her in person since 2024. She's going through some tough stuff at the moment, so it was nice to be able to help her get away from all that for twenty-four hours, at least (and talk foodie things with someone who's even more plugged into that scene than I am).
Almost immediately after that, my father-in-law came over from Germany to visit for a week. He drove, and took the ferry, which meant he was a free agent, and could go out and do things while Matthias and I were at work, and he did catch up with some local friends a couple of times, but for the most part he seemed to just want to chill out in our garden, under the cherry trees. His regular daily life involves a lot of energetic grandchildren (my sister-in-law has three kids), and I think he viewed our place as something of an oasis of calm. My mother-in-law was the real Anglophile in the family — she came over to England on exchange as a teenager, fell in love with the place, and the two of them basically visited the UK almost once a year for their entire adult lives, barring the Covid years and my mother-in-law's increasingly fragile health. So coming back here alone after her death was a bittersweet experience for my father-in-law, stirring up a lot of complicated emotions, but I think he was pleased to have made the trip.
He left on Wednesday, and on that evening Matthias and I went to an author event with Andrey Kurkov, hosted by the local independent bookshop. (Ely is a sleepy small rural town, but it definitely punches above its weight in terms of literary events due to this fantastic bookshop.) He read from and chatted about his latest historical mystery novel (set in 1919 Kyiv), and answered audience questions with patience. (My favourite, somewhat left-field answer: '[In the final decade of the Soviet Union,] I graduated with a qualification in Japanese translation, and they wanted me to do my military service as a spy listening in to the Japanese in the Russian far east, but I didn't want to do this, since it would have prevented me from being allowed to leave the country. I asked my mother, who was a doctor, if she had any well-connected patients who could get me out of this, and one of her patients, who was a senior military figure, was able to instead transfer me to doing military service as a prison guard in Odesa. When the other guards found out I was a writer, one of them asked me to write his speeches for his meetings with the leadership, so I spent my military service reading propaganda magazines and rewriting the articles for him to reuse in his speeches.' This struck me as the absolute peak absurd Soviet experience.)
I've had a run of lots of timetabled, lecture-style teaching, which happens this time every year, but is always a bit exhausting: it's in a huge, echo-y wooden lecture theatre (when the students come through the doors, they slam loudly and make a massive amount of noise), it's to groups of 75 students, repeated three times to different groups, and it's with undergrads rather than the postgraduates and researchers I normally teach (who are a lot more work to keep focused), and I always feel completely flattened by the time the Friday class is over. The one nice thing is that these classes are in central Cambridge instead of out on the hospital site where I normally work, and I can buy decent food and coffee afterwards. I guess it's a good thing I don't normally work in that part of town, because I'd be so tempted to eat lunch out every day, and end up bleeding money.
I read Innamorata (Ava Reid), and with Reid I think at this point it counts as hate-reading, since my expectations are always so low, and they're always confirmed. This is her take on a gruesome gothic novel, complete with purple prose, and the literary equivalent of a child hopping up and down going 'look! look! did you see what I just did?' Did I see her obvious and intentional allusions to Mervyn Peake? Yes, yes I did. Am I shocked at all the gore, bodily fluids and shock value edginess? Shocked that I keep picking up Ava Reid books, maybe.
Then I read Almost Life (Kiran Millwood Hargrave) and Testament of Youth (Vera Brittain), and was a lot happier in my choice of reading material. The former is a novel about two young women who meet, hook up and fall in love in 1970s Paris, then go their separate ways, but continue to haunt and fall in and out of each other's lives, in a mess of intense emotions, difficult choices, and lost chances. The latter is both a memoir of the author as an individual (fighting the parental expectation to marry and instead attend Oxford as a young woman in the 1910s, then serving as a nurse in WWI and watching all the young men in her life be swallowed up into the maw of that terrible war), and a portrait of the absolute wrenching collective trauma experienced by her entire generation, and how impossible it was to go back to civillian life and go on living afterwards.
Then I read The Red City (Marie Lu), which had a great premise (clandestine underworld alchemist syndicates fight a global battle for dominance, operating much like real-world organised crime), and an absolutely wrenching depiction of intergenerational immigration trauma, but was written for absolutely no reason in third person present tense, which for me is the literary equivalent of someone chewing audibly near my ear. I only like present tense when it's used to evoke a sense of stream-of-consciousness-like immediacy, as if you're getting a glimpse inside a character's messy, unedited interior monologue (I prefer it much more in the first person), but when the whole story feels as if it could work perfectly fine in past tense, the use of present tense is distractingly grating.
Yesterday was Eel Day in Ely, which involves, among other things, a giant cloth eel on a frame being paraded through the town, trailed by an incongruous juxtaposition of local groups (think Morris dancers followed by a girls' rugby club, followed by musicians playing steel drums, followed by a Scout group, etc). We were in the market buying vegetables, so missed the actual parade, but did witness all these various participants marshalling in front of the cathedral beforehand. We did a quick swing around the stalls afterwards, but it was pretty hot, and we'd already eaten lunch, so we didn't stay long.
We watched the recent Wuthering Heights adaptation yesterday, and I regret to report that it was 90 per cent vibes and dramatic scenery, and I was not particularly impressed.
As it's a long weekend, there was a food and craft fair outside the cathedral today, and Matthias and I wandered around, eating lunch from one of the stalls, people- and dog-watching, before meandering on home, having picked up a box of macarons to eat over the course of the week with our tea and coffee.
We've made a start at booking tickets, etc for our summer holiday, which makes it start to feel a bit more real. I love the planning stage — investigating food, activities, transport, and so on, with the days of the holiday unfolding, and given greater shape.
catpuccino came up to Ely to visit. She lives in London, we've known each other since the first day of high school, but what with one thing and another, I hadn't seen her in person since 2024. She's going through some tough stuff at the moment, so it was nice to be able to help her get away from all that for twenty-four hours, at least (and talk foodie things with someone who's even more plugged into that scene than I am).
no subject
Date: 2026-05-03 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-03 03:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-03 05:07 pm (UTC)I too love the planning stage of a holiday. It's so fun to research and imagine. I also love planning the trip months in advance, then forgetting all about it and then rediscovering my itinerary when we actually take the vacation.
...was written for absolutely no reason in third person present tense, which for me is the literary equivalent of someone chewing audibly near my ear. Well said and YES.
no subject
Date: 2026-05-03 05:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-03 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-03 08:10 pm (UTC)It's always on the first Saturday in May, so plan your trip accordingly! 😂
no subject
Date: 2026-05-03 08:43 pm (UTC)I've never heard of Eel Day but it sounds absolutely delightful. I should put it on my list to try to visit some year.
no subject
Date: 2026-05-03 09:25 pm (UTC)