Beyond Selidor

I've been hoarding links over the past week — mainly via the same two sources, which are blogs of meaty-but-light-touch, longform criticism, pop cultural commentary, and book reviews — the kind of stuff that's what I most miss about the old-school, pre-social media internet, and which I was delighted to discover still exists, if not in quite the same volume or prevalence.

First up, two reviews specifically of Travis Baldree's Legends and Lattes and more broadly commenting on the 'cosy' SFF trend. I'm not sure I'd be quite so firm in my conclusions (sometimes, you just want to read gentle, low-stakes fiction, and that's okay), but I thought both made some interesting, and persuasive points. Review number one is by Liz Bourke, and review number two is by Wesley Osam.

Also by Osam, this post on extractive AI, and a review of Tone (Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno), which is another reminder that I really do need to read through Samatar's entire bibliography.

If any of you contributed to the Kyiv Independent's fundraiser for small local media outlets in Ukraine (in the wake of the US government's freezing of international aid; I posted about this a few months back), you might be interested to know the results of your contributions: there's an update on the Gofundme page outlining all the fantastic things the three organisations (in the frontline regions of Sumy, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv) have been able to achieve thanks to the donations.

I've also just really been appreciating Timothy Snyder's newsletter, which helps me continue to feel like I'm not losing my mind in this terrible, unmoored world, but I assume that anyone who vaguely shares my politics is already aware of it.

This weekend was a long weekend, as I was on leave on Thursday and Friday — booked ages ago in order to make use of Matthias's birthday present to me. (My birthday is in December close to Christmas, at which point all I did in celebration was go out to dinner in London the night before we travelled to Germany for Christmas with my in-laws; having the 'main' celebration several months later was very deliberate.)

The present was an overnight stay at this extremely nice spa hotel in the Cotswolds. This is very much not the sort of place at which we can afford to stay as a regular thing, but as a one-off to celebrate a big birthday, it was a fantastic treat. The package we got included breakfast the next day, and a tasting menu dinner.

We travelled by train to London, and then onward to Moreton-in-Marsh on Thursday, where we were collected by a very chatty Hungarian taxi driver, who drove us through a series of picturesque villages to the hotel, which was itself on the edge of another picturesque village. It was the sort of place that had log fires in almost every public space, copies of Country Life and House and Garden in the rooms, and a room specifically to store muddy riding boots, which possibly tells you everything you need to know about the normal clientele. We arrived around 3pm, and then checked into our room, which had a bottle of champagne on ice for us. I spent the afternoon in the spa (which had an infinity pool, outdoor hot tub, sauna, steam room, and ice shower), and lounging around in the room in a robe, drinking champagne, before getting ready for dinner.

This was an absolutely exquisite experience. They limit the tasting menu dinners to 12 guests at a time, and it starts with cocktails and canapes in one of the lounges, after which point everyone is taken into a little private kitchen, where they are seated in a horseshoe-shaped bench around the chefs' working area. We watched them prepare the food, and listened to them explain the courses, all of which were delicious. In such a setting you of course get to know your fellow diners, and by the end it felt as if we were all guests at the same dinner party, rather than four separate groups, even if I didn't feel that I had much in common with any of them. I also just really appreciate experiencing the work of people who are talented and creative and at the peak of their profession — cooking as an art and a craft.

We left on Friday after breakfast, spending a bit of time wandering around Moreton-in-Marsh. I had remarked to Matthias the previous day that I could absolutely guarantee there would be posters up somewhere in the town in support of some form of NIMBY-ish campaign, and the town did not disappoint: rows of posters proclaiming that the town was opposed to 'overdevelopment.' (So not even any specific target of their ire, just against development in general. Absolute Peak Picturesque English Village.)

We finished Friday with a few hours in London, during which time I picked up new leaf tea and coffee from my favourite little shop in Soho, and had a light dinner at kinkally, a Georgian restaurant I'd been meaning to try for ages (highly recommended).

Saturday was spent doing usual Saturday things, and today we were out for our monthly walk with the walking group: a muddy trek from Soham to Wicken and back again, during which time we saw many blossoming flowers and little dogs, and were accompanied by a melodious soundtrack of birdsong. It rained a bit, but not as much as I'd feared. I do love these Sunday walks — being outside, with people, for a few hours is incredibly good for the soul — but they do basically eat up all the day, and tire me out in a way that is disproportionate to their actual difficulty and distance.

I have read some interesting books this week, but I'm already feeling quite mentally tired, so I'll try to save them for another post.

I went into Cambridge after lunch today in order to get my hair cut, and witnessed quite possibly two of the peakest of Peak Saturday Train Experience™ ever. Bear in mind that this all happened within a roughly fifteen-minute period.

1. A group of tipsy young women, wandering around my carriage in confusion, carrying a bottle of sparkling rosé and plastic cups, trying to find their friends (so the whole group could break open the wine), who were allegedly on the same train. The confusion arose because a) this was the final carriage and b) the women had supposedly already walked the entire length of the train.

2. A group of young men who got on at Waterbeach, cracked open cans of lager, and attempted to drink their entire cans before arriving at Cambridge station (five minutes from Waterbeach). While this was going on, they talked with great earnestness and detail about a) what they were going to buy to preload before arriving at the pub (they finally settled on buying rum and Coke) and b) which pub they were going to go to (they finally settled on one of the roughest pubs in Cambridge, about which they also reminisced with great fondness about an altercation with the police they had had previously at the same pub).

None of this was in any way obnoxious, and I found it almost endearing. I hope both groups went on to have enjoyable Saturdays.

(The final alcohol-related event in the trifecta was the group of women — two middle-aged friends, and the young adult daughter of one of them — who showed up at the hairdresser to get their hair dyed and cut around 4pm with a bottle of prosecco that they'd bought at the nearby petrol station. As I was finishing up, they poured glasses for themselves, and my hairdresser — clearly this was going to be their Saturday evening out.)

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.

This weekend has involved more putting one foot in front of the other. The weather has been freezing, but gloriously sunny, and I've tried to spend as much time as possible outdoors.

Matthias and I caught the train to Waterbeach (the next village down the train line) yesterday afternoon, and walked for about half an hour until we got to the little brewery in an industrial estate on the outskirts of town. This brewery opens up roughly once a month — usually in summer — but had for whatever reason elected to open on the first weekend in March. There was a food truck selling bao, the place was heaving with people, and it was a nice change of scenery. We wandered back at around 5.30, breaking the journey home with Nepalese food and some of the most comically incompetent service I've ever experienced in a hospitality venue. The food was nice, and I was more amused than annoyed, but it was a bit ridiculous.

This morning I was out at the pool, and then took great pleasure in hanging laundry outside for the first time this year, under the blue, clear sky. Other than that, I've been reading, wandering around town, and preparing tonight's dinner, which involves marinating a whole duck according to a recipe which my Indonesian cookbook assures me is Indonesian, and which my Malaysian cookbook assures me is Malaysian, and which I will therefore settle on describing as 'southeast Asian'.

In terms of reading, this week I finished four books: one much-anticipated new release, and three rereads of Australian YA novels from my youth.

The new book was The Dark Mirror, the fifth in Samantha Shannon's dystopian Bone Season series which involves individuals with clairvoyant powers being persecuted by their dictatorial government, and the various growing revolutionary movements seeking its overthrow. As with every new book in the series, The Dark Mirror expands this alternative world (here we spend time in free countries that have not yet been taken over by the authoritarian regime: Poland, Czechia, and Italy), and moves into a new genre (in this case, it's definitely a war novel). And as with all the other books in the series, the strongest elements are the things that drew me to it in the first place: the relationships, the thoughtful and nuanced way that Shannon portrays people who are surviving trauma, and her heroine's slow transformation from fugitive criminal to revolutionary leader. Shannon has been criticised in the past for info-dumping in these books, and I have to admit I lost patience for this in places (there are about five or six different organisations/networks, all of which have their own slang and jargon for everything, not all of which needs to necessarily be listed in detail on the page), but in general I found this a solid addition to the series.

The rereads were as follows:

Mandragora (David McRobbie), a haunting, supernatural story about two teenagers in a small Australian town who uncover lost artefacts from the 19th-century shipwreck whose survivors founded their settlement — artefacts which, when exposed to view, begin to curse the town in the same way they cursed the ship previously.

Witch Bank (Catherine Jinks) — the name, if you are Australian, is an absolutely groan-worthy pun — in which a mousy young teenage school-leaver takes up secretarial work in the head office of a big bank, and becomes part of a network of women with magical powers. (As a side note, the absolute specificity of this was delightful to me: it's not just set in Sydney, it's set in very, very specific parts of Sydney, such that I know exactly which bank building the fictional office in the book is meant to stand in for, and such that the literal street where my mum and sister live gets name-checked in places.)

Beyond the Labyrinth (Gillian Rubinstein), in which a troubled, choose-your-own-adventure-stories-obsessed teenage boy, and the daugher of a family friend encounter an alien anthropologist who's been sent to their small coastal town to study the local Indigenous population pre-European settlement, but somehow ends up arriving two hundred years later. This was, quite honestly, really really weird. I had no memory of any of it (other than the choose-your-own-adventure stories element), and clearly only read it once when I was a child, unlike other Rubinstein books which I've reread obsessively for over thirty years. It's very subtle — the boy's dysfunctional family is written in a way that doesn't immediately leap out at you, but creeps up disturbingly over the course of the book — in a way that I feel wouldn't pass muster in contemporary YA publishing.

Two things which struck me really forcefully when reading all these three books back to back: they rely on a cultural understanding that is highly specific to Australian society at a very specific time (all these small regional towns with local history museums with paid curators and public libraries and paid local government jobs and thriving high streets, all those administrative jobs in the bank that could be taken by school-leavers with no qualifications, and so on), and there is so much casual racism that thankfully would probably not get past the editorial stage these days (so many instances where every character who is not a white Australian of British origin gets described in racialised terms while the white people don't, plus a whole lot of benevolently intended noble savage stereotypes in Beyond the Labyrinth). Time most definitely marches on.

I finished three TV shows this month, which ran the spectrum from 'staggeringly good' to 'mediocre, but in a beautiful landscape'. They were:

After the Party, a New Zealand family drama miniseries about a middle-aged woman who accuses her husband of sexually abusing a teenage boy (which she discovers at the titular party), and then has to contend with the fallout, first after the boy refuses to confirm her accusations and her husband leaves, and then, after he returns, several years later. It's incredibly tense to watch, and the multigenerational dysfunctional family relationships make a tense, painful situation even more so. My genuine worst nightmare on an interpersonal level is being disbelieved by the people to whom I'm closest, so I almost watched this between my fingers, it was that stressful — but it was also warm, and even funny at times. The writing and acting are superb.

An t-Eilean, a crime drama set in the Hebrides, done multilingually in Scottish Gaelic and English. At its heart is a dysfunctional aristocratic family, and when one of them is murdered in the first episode, all the tensions and secrets come bubbling to the surface. As I said in my preamble, the setting is gorgeous, and the fact that it's partly in Gaelic (although, to my ear, the actors sounded slightly lacking in fluency; my very rusty knowledge of Irish came rushing back, and it was pleasing to see how mutually comprehensible the two languages are) is great, but I felt the show itself was clichéd and soap operatic.

Unforgotten, the latest series of this crime drama in which a police unit solves long-dormant cold cases. The formula for this series is that a body is discovered, and viewers follow three or four other characters, all of whom have a connection with the murder victim, all of whom have secrets, and at least one of whom is guilty of the murder. I generally like this, although I found that the stories of the various characters (a university lecturer at risk of being 'cancelled' by her students for alleged racism, a gay Afghan refugee, an autistic youth who was at risk of being radicalised by the incel alt-right manosphere, and a far-right TV celebrity working on a stand-in for GB News or similar) rather superficially done compared to previous seasons. (A review described them as being 'the embodiment of a Daily Mail comments section,' which was apt.)

And that's February's viewing.

That may as well be the theme of this weekend, for various reasons. On Saturday, I headed down to London for a demonstration in support of Ukraine. We marched from the Ukrainian embassy to the Russian one, and then had about an hour or so of speeches — the event was organised by Ukraine Solidary Campaign, so the speakers were Labour MPs, representatives of various unions (my union was there, but no one from it spoke), Ukrainian activists representing various civil society organisations, and a heart-wrenching speech from a young man who (aged 16) lived through 75 days of the siege of Mariupol before escaping.

Weirdly, given the dark place we are currently in in terms of European geopolitics, I felt a lot better after being part of this. My own rule of 'the antidote to despair is concrete action (especially involving physical movement, outside, with other people)' held true, and it was particularly helpful to listen to the specific things the MPs were saying in their speeches. I'm not good at estimating crowd sizes, but I'd say the numbers were probably in the thousands, which isn't massive, but isn't terrible. Most drivers (including buses) that passed us beeped in solidarity. It's no hardship to march in support of something that I'm fairly confident is a mainstream position across the whole UK; support for Ukraine is not a partisan issue here, apart from at the absolute extremes of left and right (even if our power — even at a political leadership level — to do anything about it is limited), so this was a protest to keep the fire alive, to lift spirits, and to remind Ukrainians that they are not alone. I saw another Dreamwidth friend mention in one of their posts that political action is like a muscle that you have to keep exercising, and I felt this was very much the case here. And it was cathartic to yell at the Russian embassy. Here's a photoset of placards (no faces, of course), plus vyshyvanka-clad dog.

I've already described the journey home in my previous post, so won't discuss that further here.

Today, I dragged my exhausted body off to the swimming pool, and dragged it through the water for 1km, and felt better for it. After a few hours back at home, our friends collected us for this month's walk with the walking group: 6km or so through the Norfolk fields outside the village of Hilgay. All our walks seem to feature some theme (horses, apples in an orchard, mud), and this walk's theme very much was snowdrops, which absolutely carpetted the landscape, and kept popping up in unexpected places. There was also a lot of interesting fauna, including swans, ducks, a buzzard, and a stoat. We opted to skip the rather creepy pub in Hilgay, and drove instead a few kilometres towards home, and stopped for a post-walk drink in the much nicer pub in Southery, which had a fire going in a little wood-burning stove, and offered a cosy respite from the wind and the cold grey skies.

Now I'm back home, with Matthias fretfully watching the results roll in from the German election, attempting to finish the last fifty pages of Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance, which has been a great distraction this week. For obvious reasons, I've been finding it hard to focus on reading, but weirdly, a discursive, historical doorstopper, filled to bursting with interesting digressions and new-to-me corners of the past was exactly the right thing to pick up. Other than that, I've only finished one other book, a reread of KJ Charles's historical M/M romance novel, Band Sinister, which kept me occupied on the train to and from London.

I'll keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Actually, it's not really soup season ('high soup season'?), given that it was 16 degrees celcius today and the crocus bulbs are starting to bloom. However, this has been a very soup-heavy winter, and a prompt like this is about all I can manage at the moment, and thus:

What are your favourite types of soup?

My favourites are definitely the flavour- and texture-rich soups of southeast Asia: laksa, pho, and so on. I'm not such a fan of cooking them myself, however — but if they're available, I will almost always eat them.

When it comes to soups I can cook myself, I have various variants of chicken-noodle soup (Chinese, Malaysian, and Indonesian recipes) which I enjoy a lot. I also love various Turkish soups involving lentils, minestrone soup, a variety of takes on borsch, and a nostalgic, vegetable-and-legume-heavy soup that my mum used to make in industrial quantities throughout the Canberran winter when I was a child (ingredients included dried mixed legumes, potato, green beans, parsnip, carrot, leek, and barley), which I ate for lunch at school in a thermos flask, and as afternoon tea to fuel an evening of gymnastics training, and which a friend of mine with whom I used to carpool to gymnastics still raves about, because she ate so much of it at my place en route to the gym.

I could probably go on, but I think that's enough of a starting point. Talk to me about soup!

It would be accurate to say that this week was entirely ( politics ).

Other than all that, it's been a fairly standard weekend for me: gym-ing, swimming, cooking, yoga-ing, and reading. My legs and hips are still sore from yesterday's two hours in the gym, my upper body is completely relaxed from this morning's 1km swim, and I'm trying to decide whether I can fit in a walk in between this afternoon's various activities.

Matthias and I took out a discounted three-month subscription to MUBI (a film streaming platform), and are trying to make the most of it by getting through as many films hosted there in the next months. Last night we watched The Substance, the Oscar-nominated film starring Demi Moore as an ageing celebrity TV fitness instructor (à la Jane Fonda) who, at risk of being booted off her TV show and replaced by a younger model, signs up for a dubious experimental treatment which creates a better (younger, more flawlessly — uncannily — beautiful) version of herself. This is something of a devil's bargain, with predictably horrifying results, as the alter-ego slowly takes over her life in a grotesquely extractive way. The film's commentary on ageing and female beauty (and in particular the disposable way Hollywood treats all actresses over thirty) is about as subtle as a hammer to the head, but its real strength — as befits a story all about the surface of things — is in its visual storytelling, and how much it is able to say with set, costuming and make-up, rather than words. Be warned that the film involves visceral gore and body horror throughout, and it's a lot.

In terms of books, I managed a reread of a childhood favourite trilogy (The Plum-Rain Scroll, The Dragon Stone, and The Peony Lantern by Ruth Manley, a children's fantasy adventure quest series using Japanese mythology and folklore in a similar manner, and with a similar storytelling style, to Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain series' use of Welsh mythology), and, on the recommendation of vriddy, Godkiller, the first in an epic fantasy trilogy by Hannah Kaner. This novel is set in a world in which gods are tangible, numerous, and weird, with complicated relationships with the human beings who worship (or fear) them, and dangerous consequences when they are not appeased. Unequal bargains are part and parcel of life. Into this complicated situation step our heroes: a traumatised (female) mercenary, and a retired knight, who are forced into an uneasy alliance to protect a twelve-year-old orphaned artistocratic girl who has somehow become unbreakably bound to a god of white lies. All are harbouring secrets, and all of these are slowly revealed over the course of the book, which takes the form of a dangerous road trip across a continent scarred by previous years of civil war. I enjoyed this a lot, and will be collecting the sequel from the local public library as soon as the person who's borrowed it returns it!

I've now picked up Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance: a massive, doorstopper of a book, but written in a chatty, inviting style that I would find patronising in some hands, but in Palmer's (having seen her speak in public, and knowing something of her pedagogical approach to the classes she teaches as an academic historian) feels authentic and genuine. If you want to get an idea of the style and content of the book, the most recent backlog of posts at her exurbe_feed blog will give you a very good idea.

Looking at the time, I think I will be able to go on that walk after all, before returning home to a smokey cup of tea, slow-cooking Indonesian curry for dinner, and a very long, slow, anxiety-focused yoga session. A good, balanced weekend: at least within the four walls of my house (and the less said about the chaos outside, the better).

This weekend has been a much needed reset after a very, very tiring week. Everything happened efficiently, without much effort on my part. Heavily limiting social media use also probably helped.

I began Saturday with my usual two hours of classes at the gym (my body is still in pain — in a good way — twenty-four hours later), and detoured home via the market, where I picked up Greek and Spanish deli items from their two respective stalls, and Tibetan food for lunch. I then spent the remainder of the afternoon slow-cooking a Burmese pumpkin curry for dinner, doing yoga, and chatting with people via Dreamwidth comments, before meeting Matthias — who had been out all day — and our friend E at our favourite cafe/bar. When I got there, they were sitting outside in the terrace garden, which was dark and bracing, but fine for an hour or so. I'm out of the habit of sitting outside in frigid British winter temperatures, although I used to do it all the time during the lockdown years.

This morning, I did yoga as the sun rose, ate a leisurely breakfast, prepared various bits and pieces for meals next week (stewed fruit, making up a fresh batch of muesli, etc), and drifted around the house aimlessly until Matthias and I decided to make the most of the clear winter sunshine, and go for a walk. The market square was as busy as it always is in such circumstances, and I had to queue for ages to get a coffee, but it was nice to be outside, and wander along the river, watching the geese, ducks, and swans frolic about.

I've been somewhat distracted this week, and my reading has suffered as a consequence — I only finished two books. The first, My Throat An Open Grave (Tori Bovalino), is a YA fantasy novel by an author I normally enjoy, retelling the Labyrinth film's story as a contemporary Appalachian gothic, with folk horror and commentary on the abysmal state of reproductive rights in the US. I feel as if I wish this had been better than it was: interesting ideas, let down by pedestrian execution and authorial timidity. (And why did it need to be told in first person present tense?). The other book was a reread: This Book Is Haunted (David McRobbie), a collection of ghost stories by an author who was a big deal in Australia when I was growing up. The book is from my childhood collection, and I had read it before, so none of the twists in the stories were shocking to me, but I did admire McRobbie's very broad interpretation of haunting. Very few of these are ghost stories in the classic sense: in many cases the characters are haunted by guilt, by stories unearthed on cassette tapes, by mysteries in old photographs, by advertisements in the Classified section of local newspapers, or by echoes of memories in buildings, landscapes, or artefacts. He has a particular interest in haunting journeys, as if trains and railway stations and ferry terminals evoke particularly vivid emotions, and in investigative journalism, and a magpie-like imagination, with an ability to find a story in everything. I really enjoyed the collection, and wondered if it would be possible to publish something like it — for a YA readership — today.

Now the remainder of Sunday stretches ahead, invitingly. At some point I'll need to start marinating the mackerel for tonight's dinner (spiced, seared, and served with a tomato-dill-lemon-garlicky sauce), but beyond that, I have absolutely no demands on my time, which is wonderful. Next week, I have the immense good fortune to be working from home four days out of the five, and I'm hoping that that, combined with the ease and calm of this weekend, will be enough to tackle the grinding exhaustion that has been such a major theme of this year.