dolorosa_12: (babylon berlin crowd 1)
I think I doomed myself by posting about travel mishaps on Friday's open thread, but more about that later. Yesterday, Matthias and I went to London, the main intention being to see dark electro group Rue Oberkampf perform live. Unlike on usual London concert adventures, we were completely unable to find a hotel cheap enough to justify staying overnight, and since the gig was in Islington, we decided to chance it and return home to Ely on the last train of the day.

We travelled down just before lunchtime, had a quick lunch at a new-to-us Mexican place in Coal Drops Yard behind the station (the food scene in the immediate surrounds of King's Cross Station these days never ceases to amaze and delight), and then hopped on the tube to see this art exhibition at the Royal Academy. It was very busy — a Saturday afternoon on the last weekend of the exhibition, so to be expected — but very worth seeing, although inevitably the new works engaging with the gallery's legacy and collection were much more interesting than the source material.

Then we headed across to Islington, dodging the rain, for drinks, dinner, and the concert. It was in my very favourite kind of venue — a tiny little club (this one on the top floor of a pub; the club was only open to ticketholders, the pub was open to whoever wanted to come in for a drink and pizza), with room for no more than sixty or so people. I can see the value in big spectacular arena concerts, but increasingly these days I'm much more interested in these tiny, small-scale events. This particular club seemed to be populated by every ageing goth in London ... and me and Matthias (I was certainly the only person wearing any kind of pastel colours in that room, that's for sure), and the gig was a lot of fun, just really relaxed and low key. We finished up just after 10.30pm, with plenty of time to get back for the last train.

So how do the travel problems come into all this? Well, just before the gig began, Matthias checked the National Rail app and saw that for some reason no trains were going to Ely, but rather stopping in Cambridge. 'Urgent track work,' allegedly. Further reading revealed that a bus would supposedly be there to take anyone needing to go beyond Cambridge, and in any case as long as we could get to Cambridge, a taxi beyond that would be expensive, but not the end of the world. We tried to relax, enjoyed the concert, and made our way to the station.

Things were at least as described, except that the train to Cambridge was slightly late, it was dark and devoid of rail staff, and no information about where this replacement bus would be. It was also pouring with rain. This, however, is not my first rail replacement bus rodeo, and I ensured we were among the first people out of the station, ignoring the crowd stampeding towards the queue at the taxi rank, and spotted a lone bus at the far end of the bus interchange. I dragged Matthias in my wake, it was indeed the bus we wanted, and after we got on (the only people who got on after leaving the incredibly crowded train), the driver ... closed the doors and left! So anyone else who waited in the station in confusion, walked more slowly, or had no idea the bus was a possibility was utterly out of luck!

We made our way meanderingly back to Ely through dark fields, torrential rain, and massive puddles of water that sprayed up alarmingly every time the bus drove through them, and got home only half an hour later than we would have done if the train had gone all the way through to Ely. All in all, not too bad, although I did feel terrible for the other people on that bus who needed to get all the way to King's Lynn!

Today, after not enough sleep, I went to pool first thing in the morning, and swam languidly back and forth for a kilometre while the rain poured down outside. Beyond that, I have not left the house, just lounged around, cooking, eating, and catching up on Dreamwidth. Signups opened for [community profile] rarepairexchange and I managed to write a letter and sign up, which (given my lack of sleep and slightly downcast current feelings around fanworks exchanges) is something of an achievement!

I hope you've all been having lovely weekends.
dolorosa_12: (sokka)
I have spent most of this week exhausted out of my mind: either travelling, working in Cambridge (much more frequently and with much more teaching of much larger groups of students than is typical), or suffering the ghastly effects of food poisoning. Today is the first day I finally felt able to catch my breath; I only worked in the morning and took the afternoon off as time in lieu for working two partial Saturdays at workshops/conferences. I taught my class, wandered around Cambridge market doing my grocery shopping, and then caught the train back home at lunch time. I spent the afternoon thoroughly cleaning both bathrooms, doing an hour-and-a-half-long yoga class, and taking a very long shower, and I finally feel relaxed.

Because of all the above, I wasn't going to do any open thread prompt this week (my Dreamwidth-ing has suffered in general and there are several people's posts on which I want to offer commiserations and/or congratulations to various life events — take this as a general expression of such sentiments if you have posted about things which warrant them). But then I saw someone in my Dreamwidth circle using a great prompt in another context, and felt compelled to borrow it:

What are your most memorable or notable travel-related mishaps?

I have many, and every single one of them was caused by my mother.

Details under the cut )

I'd love to hear your answers!
dolorosa_12: (amelie wondering)
The sun shone all day, I can hear birdsong outside my kitchen window, and the bulbs and fruit trees in the garden are starting to flower: dare I hope that spring is finally in the air?

This week's open thread prompt is sparked by my plans to watch the second Dune film in the IMAX cinema in Cambridge tomorrow:

What are your most memorable experiences of watching a film in the cinema?

(These do not need to involve IMAX or otherwise flashy set-ups — viewing a film could be memorable for a whole range of reasons.)

Both my answers involve films from the Lord of the Rings trilogy )
dolorosa_12: (winter branches)
It rained all week, and then on Saturday, the clouds rolled back, unfolding across the clearest, brightest winter skies. This was opportune and perfect, since Matthias and were joining friends (or, I guess at this stage, friends of friends would be a more accurate description) for their monthly walk. (In line with my aspirations to lead a slightly less restricted, hermit-like existence, this walking group seemed like the perfect, low key way to open up my world somewhat.) On the last Saturday of every month, they pick a local-ish hike, and whoever wants to come joins in.

Yesterday's walk was circular: 8km or so across the fields and woods near Stetchworth. Like everywhere in this area, it was a pretty flat landscape, and because it had been raining all week, it was muddy, soggy going — which made what would otherwise have been quite an easy amble somewhat tough going. My boots ended up caked in mud, and although it didn't feel physically challenging at the time, once I'd stopped moving, I realised my legs hurt a lot — in a good way. I imagine in summer it would be a very different experience, but mud is an occupational hazard in this part of the world at this time of year.

I could not get over the sun-drenched expanses of sky, sweeping above, clear blue interspersed with cottonwool dots of low-hanging clouds. After what feels like weeks of grey, the contrast was remarkable, and really did a lot to lift my mood (which has been very low for what feels like a very long time) — I imagine being out in the open air, with other people played its part as well. This photoset gives you a good idea of the whole vibe.

We had time for a quick drink in the garden of a seventeenth-century pub in Woodditton, trudged back across more fields and forests beneath the setting sun, and made it back to the carpark where we'd started in the last moments of daylight. As we were driven back to Ely, the moon rose, and hung, huge, yellow, and low to the horizon, looming above us as we made our way through the darkening fens, adding to the magical air of the whole journey.

Today was a more typical weekend day: swimming through sunshine first thing in the morning, river loop walk with Matthias ending up in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar eating food truck food for lunch, a challenging yoga class this afternoon just prior to opening up Dreamwidth and composing this post.

It's been another slow week, reading wise (my reading has not been helped in general by my low mood), but I did finish a single book: Lud-in-the-Mist (Hope Mirrlees), an early 20th-century fantasy classic that I'd always meant to pick up, and had the serendipity to find left out on the front step in a box of books being given away for free by a neighbour down the road. (This is a good street for such things — now that I've read the book, I'll give it away myself once I've gathered together a few more books I no longer want to keep.)

Lud-in-the-Mist is a strange, meandering, fable of a book — it's always interesting to read early fiction with fantasy elements published before the conventions of the genre were established (and indeed before fantasy was perceived as being a firmly distinct genre). It's set in an indeterminate fairytale world whose inhabitants have anxiously banished any thought of the magical and fantastic — to the point that it's a social taboo to even mention them — but, as in many similar stories, the fantastic continues to encroach on the human world, with potentially dangerous consequences. I always love reading stories in which the the otherworld and the human world bleed into one another, their boundaries porous and interwoven, their inhabitants interdependent in spite of their best endeavours. The fairies of Lud-in-the-Mist are uncanny and inhuman in the best folkloric tradition, and the story is told with a resonant, lyrical beauty.

Beyond that, I've been finalising my Once Upon a Fic signup (in the end, I went with the same fandoms as last year, since I still feel there are good stories to be told in those for which I've already received gifts, and some are fandoms which I've requested before without luck), and gearing up for the upcoming work week. I'm hoping the joy and light and hope of this weekend will be enough of a drastic reset to carry me through — the start of a springtime of the mind, as it were. For now, I'll build up some kindling in our wood-burning stove, turn on the string lights, and light some candles: warmth and cosiness, shining through from the end of one season and the tentative start of the next.
dolorosa_12: (city lights)
The weekend has been fairly routine and uneventful, but it was preceded by a busy day in London on Friday, so the chance to rest a bit before the new working week begins was welcome.

I was in London for an appointment to sort out a big stressful bureaucratic thing that's been a weight on my mind for several years now — so it was a huge relief to have the thing finally done. After that, I spent some time walking along the river around Battersea Power Station, before heading inland to meet [personal profile] catpuccino for lunch. We've known each other since the first day of secondary school (which is ... coming up for thirty years now, eek), and she ended up immigrating to the UK as well — she met a British guy, got married, and now lives in London. She's very plugged in to the food scene there, and suggested we go to [instagram.com profile] mercatometropolitano — a former industrial site now filled with static food trucks serving everything from Mauritian to Venezuelan food, plus coffee and various alcholic beverages. It worked well since we didn't have to agree on a single type of food, and all the stalls had £5 lunch specials, which is extremely cheap for London. [personal profile] catpuccino had Mauritian food and German food, and I had some really delicious Uzbek dumplings, and we sat outside chatting for hours. It was great to see her — apart from our long friendship and various shared interests, she's one of the few people who shares, understands, and is able to articulate my complicated tangle of emotions about Australia, and I always appreciate being able to talk about such things without being misunderstood, and knowing that the feelings are mutual.

After that, I headed across town to Bloomsbury to meet Matthias, so he could show me around his new (or new-to-me, since he's been in the new job since July last year) workplace — the library of a little research institute in a terrace house facing a square with a park. I met a couple of his library colleagues, and got to snoop around the building in relative anonymity, since the researchers and admin staff seemed to have left or be working from home.

We then travelled over to Hackney, for an extremely belated dinner celebrating my birthday (in December), and the stressful bureaucratic thing being done. The restaurant was [instagram.com profile] casafofolondon, and it was delightful — excellent food and wine, in convivial surroundings, which is all I want a restaurant to be.

In terms of books and media, it's been slim pickings with me for a while — by the end of the week, I will have only finished one book — but what I've read and watched has been excellent.

I paused my Roma sub Rosa and Benjamin January rereads to ... read the newest (twentieth) Benjamin January book, The Nubian's Curse. As always, it's got Barbara Hambly's characteristic blend of evocative, historic specificity (1840s New Orleans, plus some flashbacks to Ben's time in Paris fifteen years earlier), a mystery that hinges on the injustices and cruelties of that time and place, and — most importantly, what I read the books for — a celebration of Ben's messy, complicated family (expansive enough to encompass family both by blood and by choice, with an ever-growing cast of characters incorporated into it). As I always say when discussing this series, the books' setting is dystopian for its protagonist and most of the people he loves — their ethnicity and the racism of the society in which they live puts them in constant danger — and Hambly never shies away from that darkness and ever present sense of threat and fear, and yet somehow I find them extremely comforting to read. It's the warmth of Ben and his family, and their love and fierce protectiveness towards each other, and determination to live lives that matter and are full of love and meaning in spite of all the world does to grind them down, I suppose.

I don't always log the films I watch, but the one Matthias and I saw last night was so singular that I feel it should be recorded. The film in question was Neptune Frost, a riotous, surreal, dreamlike Burundian science fiction film. The dialogue is in multiple languages (but most often in song), and it's best summed up as the kind of anti-extractive capitalism, anti-colonial, afrofuturistic gender fuckery you'd get if Janelle Monáe decided to make a feature-length film-album about the monstrous evil that is the coltan industry that makes the computer on which I am typing this entry possible (and the devices on which you are reading it, and, and, and). The score is spectacular. Highly, highly recommended.

It poured with rain all morning (such that I felt I'd already had my morning swim solely by walking 20 minutes to the pool), and now the living room is drenched with sunlight. I'm going to take advantage of that, and head upstairs to do some yoga before it gets dark and melancholy again. I hope the weekend's been treating everyone well.
dolorosa_12: (sunset peach)
Overall it's been a quiet and restful weekend by my standards. Saturday was spent mainly at the gym in the morning for my two hours of classes, then at the market (the stalls on the Saturday open air market rotate on a fortnightly basis, and the iteration this particular weekend is better than what we'll get in a week) picking up vegetables, Greek deli items, bread, etc. I started today off with my usual early morning swim, and then Matthias and I bought some pastries from my favourite bakery, and hung around in the house for a few hours. I did a yoga class, finished my book, stewed apples for next week's breakfasts, washed laundry — all the usual Sunday morning stuff.

Then we hopped on a train for about half an hour, and got off in one of the villages along the train line between Cambridge and London. After a half-hour walk (not particularly exciting, and half of it was alongside a motorway, but at least the whole thing was on a footpath, which is not always a given in this part of the world), we ended up at our destination: [instagram.com profile] provenancekitchen, a restaurant I've been meaning to try out for years. Back in the day, they had a food truck that used to pop up at various outdoor events in Cambridge, and I remembered enjoying the food then, but since they bought the permanent location the food trucks have only come out for private hire at things like weddings or corporate events. And somehow I'd got it into my head that their restaurant was inaccessible except by car.

In any case, I managed to figure out that it was perfectly possible to walk there, we booked a table, and we had a great lunch. On Sundays they only do roasts — the quality of which can always be quite variable (I've had some awful pub roasts comprised of dry meat, soggy, overboiled frozen vegetables, and a tiny suggestion of gravy insufficient to flavour the whole meal) — which were excellent examples of the type! They came with a platter of roast potatoes, fresh roast vegetables (parsnip, carrot, fennel, beetroot, kale and beans), all with rich earthy flavours and perfect textures — plus a huge gravy boat filled to the brim, and fresh, handmade Yorkshire pudding. It was delicious food, in a lovely atmsophere, the trains were all on time, it didn't rain, and we returned home with a smug sense of an outing well-planned, in which everything had gone perfectly. On the return walk, I was better able to appreciate the scenery, which was the usual sweeping fenland panorama of flat, water-drenched soggy fields, hedgerows, clusters of snowdrops and daffodils, little villages with church steeples piercing the sky, wind turbines, and the first hints of sunset starting to bleed into the silvery-blue air.

It was possibly just slightly too much food, though, and I can't imagine needing to eat any dinner at all! That suits me just fine, though, as I have zero desire to cook, and would rather spend the next few hours slowly winding down, as the weekend draws to a close.

I hope everyone's been having equally enjoyable weekends.
dolorosa_12: (babylon berlin crowd 2)
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to do something I would never have expected possible: to see a revived version of a Cirque du Soleil show I first fell in love with as a child. You may recall that Matthias and I see Cirque annually whenever they're in London with whatever their touring show is that year — this is always in January/February in the Royal Albert Hall, which is perfect timing: a bright spot amid the post-Christmas, wintry grey of the new year.

This year, their touring show is a revival of Alegría, which I first saw as a teenager twenty-five years ago in Sydney. It wasn't my favourite Cirque show of that period, but I still loved it a lot, and had strong memories of the staging, music, costumes and acts. The revival sticks fairly close to the original — everything is tweaked and modified rather than made new, but to be honest, that suited me fine.

The story (such as it is when it comes to Cirque) is one of a decaying, corrupt Renaissance Italian city-state court; the 'joy' in the show's name is ironic — the kind of temporary, bittersweet freedom one finds in snatched, hoarded moments in difficult times. There are some fantastic acts — standouts for me include the 'fast track' X-shaped trampoline, across which acrobats launch themselves in tumbling rows, passing over and under one another, an act whose starting point is adagio but instead of involving pairs or groups of acrobats balancing on each other's arms, shoulders and bodies involves the fliers being hurled into the air from springy, narrow beams of wood set on the shoulders of pairs of human bases, with further balancing and acrobatics in groups standing/tumbling from and between the beams, and quite honestly one of the best group trapeze acts I've ever seen. (This last one was best enjoyed — at least from my perspective — right from our seats in the heights of the venue, because that gave the best vantage point for the logistics of it all: not just the technicians with their wires and pulleys, but also the various artists calling and signalling to each other in order to ensure they got the timing exactly right, which was essential in this act, and which they performed without a single problem. When I saw the same act in 1999, there were several failed catches in which performers fell into the net below, but not so this time around.)

In any case, it was a delight, and a huge improvement on several of the more recent Cirque shows I've seen (which have been ... fine, but not incredible).

As always when we go to concerts and performances in London, we stayed overnight and made a weekend of it, eating at several old favourites ([instagram.com profile] ogniskorestaurant, [instagram.com profile] mriya_neo_bistro) as well as a new-to-us Taiwanese bao place near Kings Cross Station. On Sunday we were able to see the British Library exhibition on fantasy fiction (which has an expansive definition of the genre and covers books, film, TV, comics, games, and fan culture, and groups all these things thematically — portal fantasy, fairytales, cosmic horror and so on). This was crowded, with slow moving people, but we made the sensible decision to move through the exhibition in reverse order — since we were there at opening time, we therefore saw the first half of the exhibition in entirely empty rooms before catching up with the crowd, but since it grouped the exhibits thematically rather than chronologically the order in which we saw things didn't really matter.

All in all, it was a lovely weekend, made even more pleasing by the fact that we somehow managed to get a hotel room in an incredibly nice (like, 4-star nice) hotel in central London on a Saturday night at a ridiculously cheap price, which was nothing short of miraculous!
dolorosa_12: (persephone lore olympus)
I'm just back from the pool, having done my final swim of 2023, it's getting close to the point where my friends and family in Australia start posting photos of fireworks, and the view from 2024, so let's do this.

In the spirit of breaking routines and habits that no longer serve me, this is going to be the last time I do this meme in its entirety. I think I've been using it as a year-end summary every year since I joined Livejournal in 2003, and I've been feeling for a while that many of its questions are more appropriate to a teenager, or an undergraduate student in their early twenties, and their answers don't really say anything fundamental about the shape of the year when the respondant is closer to forty than fifteen. Twenty years of this meme seemed like a good point to stop, and as of 2024, I'll cannibalise its questions and keep only the ones that I feel are relevant to my life.

Questions and answers behind the cut )
dolorosa_12: (autumn branches)
It's rainy, it's cold, when I tried to hang laundry outside this (sunny) morning the washing line broke in half, about which I'm now feeling oddly thankful since it meant I had to hang everything up inside from the start, rather than rushing outside in the rain to rescue everything. I've been swimming, I've made a start on my Yuletide assignment, and now I'm sitting in the living room with a takeaway coffee, catching up on Dreamwidth.

This week has been busy and eventful by my standards.

The high point was definitely Thursday, when I travelled down to London after work in order to go to the Go_A concert. You may recall a previous post in which this concert was announced serendipitously — I'd seen a video of one of their concerts at a festival, I'd just seen them announce a tour in central and western Europe, and I'd been mourning the fact that I'd probably missed my only chance to see them live in the UK (in 2022 they performed at Glastonbury and then did a couple of small concerts; I don't do festivals, and the concerts unfortunately coincided with my mum's annual summer visit), and virtually at that exact moment they announced a full European tour, including a concert in London that I would be able to attend. A few minutes navigating through Matthias's early-bird-through-O2-phone-contract stuff, and the tickets were in hand.

It was easily among the top three concerts I've ever attended. It was in a tiny venue in the O2 Arena — there were probably only a couple of hundred people there, maximum — and we were pretty close to the stage (although inevitably behind one of the tallest women I've ever seen), surrounded by one of the friendliest audiences I've ever experienced. It's quite hard to describe how emotional the whole thing made me feel — the band were amazing, they had great rapport and connection with each other, and with the crowd, and the overwhelming sense was one of generosity of spirit, open-heartedness, and just sheer, earnest empathy. It was two hours of non-stop dancing, singing, and screaming in joy, and by the time they'd come back for the encore (in which they had the whole room holding hands with strangers and dancing in concentric circles of 'Ukrainian magic'), my heart was full. We ended the night right up against the barrier at the front of the stage and therefore featured in social media videos posted by the band, which I screenshot for posterity. I've stuck up a photoset (plus videos) on Instagram, which you should be able to access if you have an account there.

Normally when we go to concerts in London, we book a hotel and stay overnight rather than trying to race for the last train home, and this time was no different, but was complicated by the fact that I had to teach a timetabled class in Cambridge on Friday, so couldn't take the day off as I had originally planned, and instead had to travel back to Cambridge early in the morning. (Matthias had an easier time of it since he now works in London, so simply commuted across town in the tube.) I didn't get enough sleep — my brain was fizzing after the concert and it took me several hours to fall asleep, and then I had to wake up at 6.30 — but it was at least atmospheric to zoom through fields and rolling hills in the morning mist. I don't think my students noticed that I'd only had three hours' sleep!

Normally that would be plenty for me for one week, but Saturday was packed as well — I was out at the gym in the morning for my two hours of fitness classes, then met Matthias at the busy outdoor market at midday, where we picked up fruit, vegetables, various dips and olives from the Greek food stall, various cured meats from the Spanish stall, a selection of cheeses, and a box of baked goods from [instagram.com profile] georges_bakery, whose over-the-top cakes were even more over the top in honour of Halloween.

We spent the evening at a Halloween silent disco, hosted by the coffee roasters who now own a venue serving food, hot drinks, and alcoholic beverages from various shipping containers grouped around a covered yard with outdoor seating. I'd been dubious, since it wasn't really the weather to be dancing for four hours outside, but they had heating, and in the end I danced so much that it was impossible to feel cold. I'm not sure I'd necessarily go again — it was good, but not amazing (the music was the requisite level of cheesiness, the bar staff had their own headsets and were dancing along with the rest of us, people wore costumes or not as the fancy took them), although possibly any social event was going to pale in comparison to the Go_A concert.

After all that (especially since the silent disco only finished at midnight, and I didn't get to bed until 1am), the extra hour of sleep after the clocks went back for winter was extremely welcome!
dolorosa_12: (hades lore olympus)
I had one day of leave left to use up by the end of September, and so I decided to make this a long weekend, and take Friday off. I'm glad I did, because it allowed me to go to London with Matthias to celebrate a friend's birthday at a party that had been organised in a very last-minute manner.

We made a London day trip of it, catching the train down in the late morning in order to have lunch at one of my favourite restaurants — a Malaysian one in north London — enjoying laksa and various shared snacks while watching the world go by. We then travelled out to an exhibition of contemporary African photography at Tate Modern, walking across and along the river in the afternoon sunshine, before heading over to the birthday party in the evening.

On Saturday I had to go into Cambridge for a couple of errands, which was made more complicated by a total rail strike (meaning no trains at all), which necessitated going in and out by bus. The buses between Ely and Cambridge only go about once an hour (sometimes only every two hours), and my past experience has been that if they're having to cope with rail commuters as well, they quickly become extremely crowded and delayed — so I was dreading the journey. In the end, I needn't have worried — both bus trips were on time, and I sped through the fields, watching the landscape unfold through the bus's top floor front window. Normally when I need to go into Cambridge on the weekend, Matthias comes with me and we go out for a meal at one of our old favourite restaurants or new places that have sprung up since we left, but because of the public transport complications we were too anxious to do that (and in any case the last bus leaves at 6.30pm), so instead we went out for dinner at the Turkish restaurant here. The meals at that restaurant are always massive, meaning I have lots of leftovers!

Today was my typical Sunday — swimming, cooking, yoga, household chores, and lots of reading. I've been working my way through a series of books I loved with fierce intensity when I was in my early twenties but haven't revisited since then (the arrival of all my childhood/teenage/undergrad library from Sydney after fifteen years apart has sparked a desire for endless rereads of old favourites) — Sara Douglass's epic fantasy Troy Game series. This four-part series has an amazing premise — the legendary settlement of Britain by Trojan refugees fleeing the catastrophic consequences of the Trojan War, interwoven with the myth of Ariadne and the Minotaur, magical labyrinths whose colossal power can be harnessed by trained individuals to protect (and destroy) cities, and the history of London from Iron Age times to the twentieth century. Each book features the same characters reborn at crucial periods of British history (the mythological founding of London in the wake of the Trojan war, the Norman invasion of England, the restoration of the monarchy after the Civil War, and the first years of World War II), locked in an endless cycle of shifting alliances and betrayals of each other, the labyrinthine power, the city of London, and the elemental powers of the land, doomed to be reborn until they've managed to settle their differences and make common cause. This central premise, and Douglass's seamless weaving of it with weird and forgotten corners of London's history, architecture and landscape, still hold up really well, but I hesitate to recommend the series due to the characters themselves. I used to think — when I read the books for the first time — that Sara Douglass was a bit of a misogynist, but now I honestly just think she was a misanthrope. The books are a ridiculous soap opera of murder, sexual violence, incest, and abuse: Game of Thrones has nothing on them! I kind of treat this like I treat mythology in general — it's stories of non-human and inhumane supernatural beings who are so detached from human morality that it seems pointless to try and apply it to them (the characters in the books start off human, but have become something very different as time goes by, picking up vast and varying supernatural abilities and identities as they go). But if you need characters who behave in a compassionate and admirable way in order to connect with a story (or if you just have a — perfectly reasonable — problem with endless fictional depictions of abuse and sexual violence and women falling in love with their abusers) I would urge you to stay away from these books!

I'll wrap up this post by linking to the five old newspaper book reviews I've managed to transcribe/back up on my long-form reviews blog this past month:

  • Reading war's unsung songs

  • Humour behind the absurd

  • Cruising through a sea of history

  • Seeing life in inspired ride on the wild side

  • Telling the stories of survivors before it's too late


  • I'm making fairly good progress with these, which is pleasing.
    dolorosa_12: (garden pond)
    Saturday was a day of motion, today is a day of stillness, which to be honest is my ideal division of the weekend. It suited the weather perfectly: yesterday was baking and cloudless — one of those days that feels like the last gasp of summer — while today has been covered with a thick blanket of greying clouds.

    Saturday morning was spent in yoga at home, then two hours of classes at the gym, after which point I met Matthias and we walked into Little Downham, a village a couple of kilometres away, following hedgerows covered in blackberries, and newly-harvested wheat fields. Our destination was one of the village's two pubs, which is run by a Thai family who make really nice Thai food — a great change from standard British pub fare. We ate lunch outside in the garden, surrounded by flowering rosebushes, marigold plants, and chili, tomato and capsium plants covered with ripe fruit. Every so often, people would ride past on horses.

    Today, everything was sleepy and slow — crepes with tea and coffee, a visit to the bakery to pick up fresh bread, and lazy hours reading in the living room. I did a 45-minute yoga class focusing on the upper body, and finished off a whole book in an hour. Dinner will be something slow-cooked, with chicken stock, and rice, and garlic and ginger: the return of autumnal food.

    I've read three books this week:

  • Moon Dark Smile (Tessa Gratton), which I somehow missed was the second half of a fantasy duology, but was comprehensible enough on its own. It's the story of an imperial heir, who sets out on a coming-of-age journey, accompanied by the palace demon (to whom her family owes its authority), which she has allowed to possess her so that it's able to leave the palace. It's also about cycles of revenge, the power of names in shaping identity, and finding confidence within yourself by understanding others. I'm always drawn to stories of consensual possession and weird love triangles (particularly those that involve three people but only two bodies), and Gratton writes these things so well here.


  • Red Smoking Mirror (Nick Hunt), an alternate history novel in which Islamic Spain (i.e. Al Andalus) never collapsed, and instead went on to 'discover' and colonise the parts of our world that became the Americas. This book is set some time after the initial voyage and colonisation took place, and an uneasy equilibrium has been reached by both old and new residents of the region — but the seeds are there to rupture and then shatter this state of affairs. The narrator is an ageing Jewish man, and the emphasis is very much on minorities, people on the margins, and people who translate and move between cultures.


  • Goodbye Eastern Europe (Jacob Mikanowski), a social and cultural history of that part of the world, mainly focusing on the nineteenth century onwards, and drawing on strands of thematic commonalities across regions and/or countries, rather than focusing on the political history of individual places. I found this to be a refreshing approach, as it emphasises interconnection rather than looking at individual countries (or regions) in isolation.


  • I might have time to pick up another book this afternoon, but I suspect that will be it in terms of completed reading for the week.
    dolorosa_12: (le guin)
    These Friday posts are making a tentative return. We'll see how long I can maintain the momentum.

    I've got journeys and transport on the brain at the moment due to my summer of train travel, and that's what's sparked today's prompt:

    What are some of the most memorable journeys you've undertaken? I'm not asking about the destination, I mean the journey itself, by any mode of transport.

    My answer )
    dolorosa_12: (summer drink)
    I feel as if the whole month of August just ran me over like a train, between my mum's visit, trying to cram in a huge amount of work into a couple of weeks, two major renovation projects on our house (requiring dealing with contractors, etc), and then another holiday with Matthias. I've barely been around on Dreamwidth, and when I have logged in, I haven't felt I had the energy to comment on people's posts or reply to any comments that a post of my own might prompt. But now, finally, I have time to catch my breath — after returning from travel yesterday, dealing with the mountain of work emails that accumulated while I was away, and putting out various small fires caused by my own distractedness at work prior to the holiday. I've made a series of lists, which always makes me feel a whole lot better, and now I can sit here, and write about where I've been over the past week.

    Matthias and I always try to have a holiday of at least a week together, away from home, doing something that's not visiting family (when both halves of a couple are immigrants, leave allocation often swiftly fills up with trips to visit family, since unlike people who live in the same country as their families, we can't very easily drop by and see our parents for a weekend). I've had an aim for quite a while now of travelling to at least one new-to-me country per year, although this is the first time since 2019 that that's been possible; while I travelled a lot last year, it was always to countries that I had visited before.

    Matthias and I also have two friends who live in Vienna — and we last visited them in 2019 as well. We decided, therefore, to kill two birds with one stone, and go on holiday somewhere new-to-us that was reachable by train in a day from Vienna. After researching our options, we picked Slovenia, and booked a four-day stay in Ljubljana. We made our way there in fits and starts — an afternoon train trip to Brussels, a stay overnight in a budget hotel near the station, a day travelling across Belgium, Germany and Austria by train, and a weekend with our friends L and V in Vienna, during which time we wandered around the city, taking breaks from the heat in various cafes and restaurants, and took the train out to a village near the city, where we walked through vineyards and had lunch (and wine from those same vineyards), and finally a slow, six-hour train ride along rivers and mountains dotted with vineyards, sheep, and cornfields to Ljubljana. (We dubbed the train the 'Habsburg Express' because it started in Vienna, inched its way through Austria and Slovenia, and ended up in Trieste; travelling at about the speed you'd expect from a Habsburg-era train as well...)

    The weather in Ljubljana was unfortunately not conducive to our preferred holiday activities — walking around an unfamiliar city, chatting with each other, and pausing for meals, coffee, or glasses of beer/wine — since it rained torrentially for the first two full days we were there. We made the best of it, however, and visited two contemporary art museums, walked along the river on both sides and in both directions whenever there was a break in the rain, and tried out almost all the restaurants, wine bars, craft beer bars, and cafes that had come highly recommended. My highlight in this regard was probably this cocktail bar, a tiny jewel of a place doing incredibly strange cocktails (or any classic cocktail on request) with exquisite attention to detail.

    The highlights of the trip were definitely the restaurant in one of the turrets of the castle above the city, where we had a tasting menu with wine pairings (another thing we like to do in every new-to-us city), and the trip out to Lake Bled which we did on the one day in which there was no rain forecast. We walked around the lake (a flat paved trail of about 6km — easy walking, although quite crowded with families, tourists, and groups of cyclists), pausing to swim in the sparkling water, with the clouds and craggy mountains mirrored beside us — had lunch in a lakeside cafe, and made it back to Ljubljana in time for dinner. (If anyone is thinking of doing something similar, I'd recommend travelling by bus rather than by train as the train station is an hours' walk from the town; the buses leave every hour and are pretty cheap, although be warned you'll need to pay in cash.)

    I took a huge bunch of photos on the trip, particularly of the lake, the water of which is full of the most unbelievable colours and textures. If you have an Instagram account, you can see them at [instagram.com profile] ronnidolorosa.

    The return journey was a quite a bit more stressful due to chaos and cancellations on behalf of Deutsche Bahn (the cursed corridor between Cologne, Aachen and Brussels seems to be a particular problem, as exactly the same thing happened to my mum in exactly the same area on her train trips to and from Berlin in early August), and although it used to be possible to travel from Vienna to Cambridge(shire) in a single day by train, I now wouldn't recommend it, and indeed wouldn't recommend trying to do any trip that involves train travel through Germany and a Eurostar connection in a single day. We will not make that mistake twice, and will always stay overnight in Brussels or Amsterdam and catch the Eurostar the following morning. Eurostar changed our booking without charging any additional costs (my advice here is to follow what we did and not try to rebook yourself online/through the app, but rather go to the Eurostar gate and explain the situation; the staff member rebooked us immediately and didn't ask for any payment of any kind) and we should be able to claim back the cost of the hotel booking necessitated by DB's chaos, but it made what had been — up to Cologne — a relaxing, chilled out time zooming through central Europe on fast moving, on-time trains into a tense, anxiety-inducing nightmare.

    In any case, that was a long digression about trains, which was not the note on which I meant to end things! The holiday itself was lovely, and in general it's just been so wonderful to be able to travel internationally again. I feel incredibly lucky.
    dolorosa_12: (ocean)
    I've been somewhat absent from these parts for the very best of reasons — a holiday in Italy with my mother. We enjoyed our trip to the Amalfi coast so much last year that we wanted more of the same — good food, interesting and challenging walking, daily swimming, all in beautiful places. Our trip to Amalfi had been organised by a company that specialises in hiking holidays, in which people travel from hotel to hotel on foot on routes organised by the company (but generally on designated walking tracks used by various people), and the company organises people's bags to be transferred from hotel to hotel separately. We organised a similar thing, but with a different company, around Lake Como, over three days, starting in Varenna and ending in Como with stops overnight in Menaggio and Bellagio.

    The hotels were lovely, the food was excellent (it's really hard to eat badly in Italy to be honest), and we swam every day either in the lake or in hotel swimming pools, but the organisation and walking itself left a lot to be desired. This company was a bit chaotic and unreliable (for example the pack of material such as maps, baggage tags enabling our bags to be conveyed to each hotel by taxi drivers was not delivered in time and had to be sent by FedEx to our first hotel), and the walks they'd organised were wildly uneven in terms of difficulty. (For example the first walk was close to 16km up and down steep mountain paths made of loose large stones — we bailed after about 4km due to the heat — whereas the second walk was listed as '6.5 miles' but would be lucky to have been 6.5km and was essentially a flat path along the lake used by old ladies walking their dogs.) My mum and I are pretty confident and resilient hikers, and were underwhelmed by the overall quality of the walks. I think it didn't help that the company was based in the US and possibly had never done any of the walks themselves, whereas last year's Amalfi organisers were based in the UK, had a team in Italy, and had members of staff who had done all the hikes whose experiences and suggestions were included in the instruction material. So, overall I liked the places we went to, but didn't much enjoy the main purpose of the trip: the hiking itself.

    Our time around Lake Como was bookended by a couple of days in Milan at each end. Both Mum and I had been there before and felt no need to do particularly touristy things again, so we spent most of our time walking around, eating in restaurants and cafes, and swimming laps in a beautiful and venerable indoor swimming pool — the oldest in the city.

    Our time in Italy was affected by a rail strike, and also a strike of airport staff that meant our original flight back to the UK was cancelled and the only available bookings directly to the UK were for three days later, so things ended with a rather desperate search for flights (including some ridiculous options such as a 21-hour flight with a stopover in Qatar, a flight with three changes and an overnight stay in Greece, etc), in which the best available option ended up being returning to London via Helsinki (and an overnight stay in an airport hotel). So the last 48 hours of the trip ended up being spent in a Milan laundromat while Mum washed her clothes and we both talked for hours with a young Mexican backpacker who was also washing all his clothes (sample anecdote: 'I went out in London with a bunch of Germans from my hostel and we almost got stabbed'), then in an endless chaotic queue at the airport with a bunch of confused and irritated Finnish people, then in Helsinki airport, with two three-hour Finnair flights that were certainly not originally part of the plan! I did get to bring home salty licorice, though, which was an unexpected and welcome bonus. International travel is wonderful, surreal, and always full of the unexpected, that's for sure!

    I do have a number of photos from the trip up on Instagram — if you have an account, you'll be able to see them there at [instagram.com profile] ronnidolorosa. All in all, it was a weird and wonderful time.
    dolorosa_12: (summer drink)
    I've had a very busy (by my standards) few days, to the extent that in some ways it feels as if the weekend was four days long, even though I had to work two of them. Due to a strange set of circumstances, I've ended up working in the library in Cambridge for three consecutive days (Wednesday-Thursday-Friday), and will be working another three consecutive days next week (Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday), whereas I normally only work in person on Wednesdays. I have no idea how I used to manage to work in person five days a week, week in, week out, because just three days in a row now feels incredibly draining.

    On Thursday evening, Matthias and I walked the 8km or so out to Littleport, a village to the north of us along the river, and had dinner at an Italian restaurant that had been recommended to me by a colleague. It was still pretty warm and humid, so the walking felt effortful, even at 6pm. The food at the restaurant was great, and incredibly cheap (less than £10 for a main course), and the waiter was what you might describe as 'a character,' discouraging people from ordering certain dishes on the menu, and chatting endlessly with the Irish family at the next table over. It's definitely the best place to eat in Littleport, so I'll certainly be back the next time we walk out there.

    On Friday evening I met Matthias in the centre of town, where there was the monthly food truck event happening. We had dinner, and then ended up at a '90s silent disco in the cathedral. The place was full of people mainly our age and older (and, as usual when events involving nostalgic '90s music take place, seemed to have attracted every Polish person in the region), although with pockets of zoomers whose presence baffled me given they weren't even alive when most of this music was a thing. There were three different DJs playing the three different channels on the headsets — '90s pop, '90s alternative, '90s hip hop — I flicked between the channels according to the song and my whim, danced my heart out, and generally had a wonderful time.

    On Saturday, we did another walk — this time around 8km through various villages into Haddenham, which was hosting a beer festival/community fair on the village park. The walk took us through the usual kinds of fenland landscapes — lots of flat fields of wheat, paddocks full of horses, hedgerows and brambles under skies filled with low-hanging fluffy clouds. I'm not a beer drinker, so beer festivals in general aren't hugely interesting to me, but I love these kinds of village community events from a sociological perspective, and had a great time sitting out in the open air, listening to some rather dreadful local music acts, and people-watching.

    Finally, we spent the middle of the day out at 'Aquafest,' a local fair thingy that involves various food and drink and tat stalls, fairground rides, and a race of homemade boats/rafts on the river. As we were walking home, I could see a group of four people struggling to stay afloat on their sinking craft, with one oar drifting away down the river, which probably gives you an accurate idea of the vibe of the whole thing. We ate soft tacos, wandered around for a bit, and then headed home.

    I've been so busy this week that I don't have any new books to log here, which is strange for me, but I suppose if you take all the above into account it's not all that surprising.
    dolorosa_12: (quidam)
    The sweltering, humid weather continues, so thank you very much to everyone who commented on my most recent Friday open thread post. There's some good advice about tricks to combat sleeplessness, and I learnt a lot, which I very much appreciate.

    I had to go into Cambridge for some errands yesterday, and as usual when this happens, Matthias and I made a day of it. Central Cambridge itself was heaving with people, so we avoided it for the most part, instead walking out across the fields for 5km or so into Madingley, where we ate lunch at the pub/restaurant there, sitting outside under a canopy, eating cold seafood, asparagus with potato dumplings, and heirloom tomato salad, washed down with crisp, white wine. It was lovely and relaxing, and the walk, while short and mainly across flat lands, was made more challenging by the heat. I stuck up a photoset on Instagram.

    Twitter has been actively triggering (and I do not use that word lightly) for me for similar reasons relating to at least three unrelated situations, and by Friday I realised I'd hit my absolute limit, and haven't been back since. I'm pretty good at avoiding the place for long stretches when I know it's necessary (the longest period probably lasted around nine months, a couple of years ago), so it's likely to be a significant period of time before I go back again. To calm down and restore some sense of equilibrium, I've been focusing on the sorts of Instagram accounts that I find soothing — a lot of cottagecore-ish stuff, and generally people who post beautiful things. Here is a short, but illustrative list:

  • [instagram.com profile] westcountry_hedgelayer: a man who builds and restores traditional hedgerows in rural Britain

  • [instagram.com profile] provencallife: a man who posts beautiful photos and videos from various parts of Provence

  • [instagram.com profile] boroughchef: soothing cookery videos of vegetarian meals

  • [instagram.com profile] redrubyrose: a woman who makes bags, wallets, purses and scarves using hand-dyed materials, with lots of photos of her inspirations from nature, and the process of creating the products

  • [instagram.com profile] alysonsimplygrows: gorgeous photos of gardens, interiors, and renovations

  • [instagram.com profile] momentsbyjemma: photos and reels of interiors, cooking and baking, gardens and farmland taken by a woman who lives on a working farm in the south coast of New South Wales in Australia

  • [instagram.com profile] theswissshepherdess: breathtakingly beautiful photos and videos by a woman who, together with her husband, herds sheep, goats, cows and horses in the Swiss alps


  • The combination of the heat, and everything else, has left me feeling fairly uninspired when it comes to reading, but I've been working my way through rereads of the more 'summery' books in Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series: so far I've done the two set in a Cornish seaside village (Greenwitch and Over Sea, Under Stone), and I'm just about to pick up Silver on the Tree. The first two make me yearn for the seaside, which I suppose is unsurprising. Silver on the Tree will likely irritate me all over again with that ending (if you know, you know), but we always have fanfic, of which I have contributed my share of fix its to this particular canon.

    I'll close off this post with a strong recommendation for the film that Matthias and I watched last night: Rye Lane, a romantic comedy about two young Black people in London, meeting in strange circumstances, telling each other their stories, revealing (and not revealing) truths about themselves, during a rambling, sweeping wander through the streets of London that in some way mirrors the rambling, sweeping way in which they both let one another into their lives. It's a glorious love letter to London — but a London seen through the eyes of an alternate universe version of Wes Anderson who is a Black, British, TikTok-using twentysomething, with a keen eye for the surreal and quirky. If you have Disney+, it should be available for you to watch as part of the subscription. It's compassionate and warm-hearted, made me laugh out loud in places, is sharply observed, and gorgeous to look at.
    dolorosa_12: (summer drink)
    Another weekend, another attempt to spend as much time as possible outdoors in the summery, sunlit air. The bakery was doing a wine-tasting event on Friday evening — all slightly sparkling, natural wines — so we went there for dinner, and nibbled on cheese and charcuterie and sipped wine in the courtyard garden. It's light until nearly 10pm here now, so we were under clear blue skies for most of the evening.

    Yesterday, the plan was to head off to Waterbeach, which is a village between here and Cambridge. Normally this would be very easy — just ten minutes or so on the train, of which there are plenty — but it was a train strike, meaning we were limited to the hourly buses, the last of which leaves Cambridge around 6pm. On top of this, Cambridge was hosting its annual Strawberry Fair event, which always draws in lots of people, so everyone who would normally have been on a train (which have between 4-8 carriages and go to Cambridge three times an hour) was crammed onto a single bus, which only runs once an hour. The bus going there was late by 40 minutes, and the one coming back was 20 minutes late, and very crowded.

    We were going to Waterbeach to visit the taproom of a beer brewery which only opens up for retail customers once a month. It's out in an industrial estate and isn't particularly pretty — all concrete and steel — but with a food truck, and a bunch of people sitting under umbrellas, and sunny, breezy weather, it ended up feeling pretty pleasant. I'm not a beer drinker, but I'm definitely a food truck appreciater, and this time it was a pizza place with a woodfired oven, which was very welcome.

    Our neighbours had their barbecue going last night, but the only nod to the outdoors at home that I've managed this weekend is hanging the laundry outside. We do have a terrace with a table and chairs, but even with the umbrella it's in full sun for most of the day, which is too bright and glary for me.

    After all the travelling (which really wasn't that far away, but took ages and was a bit stressful due to the aforementioned bus nonsense), it's been good to have Sunday at home, and catch up on reading. I gulped down an entire trilogy by Charlie N. Holmberg, who is an authors whose premises always sound like exactly my thing, but whose execution always seems to take a lot of the sting out of ideas that would work better if they were given just a bit more darkness. (I think she's just too timid and conservative to do so.) Her general thing is to set up a situation in which a young woman is being exploited in some way that is a) incredibly physically painful to her and b) erodes her sense of self in some manner, with a rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold love interest who ends up trying to save her in spite of his more mercenary impulses. (In this Numina trilogy, for example, the young woman is indentured to a criminal gang-leader who forces her to become possessed by demons.) The trouble is, I'm always entirely uninterested in the roguish love interests, and more interested in the heroine's relationships with the demons, monsters, and vengeful, implacable gods who are trying to possess and/or marry her. At this point, I've read at least five or six books by Holmberg, so I know what I'm getting in for, and try to read around the edges of the story actually there on the pages, and imagine I'm reading something else.

    Beyond reading and wandering, it's been a pretty standard weekend, with the usual chores and physical exercise, and a good mix between movement and stillness. I'm still not feeling great mentally, but at least the things I can control are generally happening in the way I want and expect.
    dolorosa_12: (summer drink)
    It's a long weekend here, and this has thankfully coincided with the appearance of the sun, after what was apparently a very cold, drizzly April. Matthias and I have been taking full advantage of this, spending as much time outdoors as possible.

    On Friday evening there was the monthly event with food trucks, and we had bagels with salt beef and pickles for dinner, sitting outside in the beer garden of our favourite local bar.

    Saturday began with my usual two fitness classes at the gym, which were a bit of a struggle after a month away in Australia where the only exercise I'd been doing was swimming and walking — but I survived. I then met Matthias in town, and we fought our way through the crowds and chaos to do our weekly shopping in the market. We followed this up by having lunch out at the annual 'eel day,' which is a local fair with food trucks, craft stalls, performances by local choirs, ballet students, etc. The eels come into it because there's an element of local/natural history, including all things fen eels. I've only ever been during pandemic semi-lockdowns, when I found this a rather depressing affair, but the non-lockdown version was loads of fun, sitting in the park by the river, eating South African food and drinking Pimms. We returned home in the afternoon via [instagram.com profile] bakeshop.generalstore, which has the most amazing suntrap courtyard garden, and a great variety of wines by the glass.

    I felt a bit slow and sleepy this morning, but made it out to the pool for my regular 8am 1km swim, before returning home to make crepes for breakfast and hang laundry outside (for the first time this year). Then Matthias and I walked 9km along the river to Littleport, having lunch outside on the deck by the water at the local pub. It was a gorgeous day, and the river was alive with boat traffic, walkers, bike-riders, and birds. We returned home on the train, and have just been back for half an hour or so. I'm going to spend the evening pottering around on Dreamwidth, reading, doing yoga, and so on.

    Tomorrow, the weather's meant to be terrible, so I don't think we're going to spend much time outdoors, besides possibly checking out the food fair that's happening on the lawns outside the cathedral. I'm going to cook a roast chicken, and snuggle up on the couch, and generally catch my breath before the working week begins.

    Honestly, I don't think I could have asked for a better long weekend — it's been perfect!
    dolorosa_12: (ocean)
    After a 36-hour journey from door to door, involving an inevitable rail replacement bus, and a train full of drunk, singing football fans, I've returned from my trip to Australia, sleepy, restored, and a little bit melancholy. It was my first time back in five years, due to the pandemic, and it was a very packed schedule, filled with family events, various bits of long-postponed life admin, and lots of communing with the ocean. I was in Sydney for the most part, staying with my mum and sister #1 (who has moved back after five years in Melbourne), apart from five days in Woodend in rural Victoria with my dad, stepmother, and all my sisters.

    I felt it would be easiest to summarise the trip under various subheadings.

    Family and friends
  • Lots, and lots, and lots of family dinners in Sydney with various combinations of aunts — at Mum's place, at my aunt's place down the road, at cocktail bars and restaurants in the CBD, etc

  • A daytrip to have lunch with my dad's two sisters and their partners and one of my cousins in Thirroul, which is about an hour away on the train

  • Visiting [livejournal.com profile] anya_1984 and meeting her younger son, who had not been born the last time I was in Sydney

  • Easter weekend in Woodend — the first time all five of us sisters have ever been in the one place at the one time, in freezing temperatures, with the fire going nearly constantly, various dogs and cats slumbering on our laps, catching up with one of my cousins, meeting his new partner (who gamely came along to an Easter Sunday dinner hosted by one of my stepmother's brothers, with about forty people there, mainly her relatives, but also random people that my stepmother's mother had met at the pub and invited along, etc), chatting chaotically around firepits, eating too much food and drinking way too much wine

  • Cocktails and dinner with [livejournal.com profile] anya_1984, who has known me since we were twelve years old, plus a gang of people with whom we went to uni, which ended up being an oddly intense experience due to the passage of time, and everyone's various private griefs and struggles being aired

  • Getting the unexpected chance to see all of my cousins apart from the one who lives way out in Sydney's west and works irregular hours and the one who lives in South Korea and the one who had just gone on a trip to Spain the week before I arrived


  • Life admin
  • Sorting out various banking and superannuation stuff that inevitably accumulate if one is a migrant who has spent half her working life in one country and half in another

  • Going through all the books, documents, paper diaries, old high school report cards, boxes of photos, primary school artworks etc which I had been storing in my mum's flat since I left Australia in 2008, and finally throwing away the stuff that had survived five purge attempts since 2002. The remainder is in the process of being shipped over to the UK, now that we finally own our own house and live somewhere with an adequate amount of storage


  • Food
  • Just generally revelling in the fact that Australia is really, really, really good at food. I always say that the UK has improved massively in this regard since I first moved here, and that's true, but Australia really is in another league, and my mum lives in a part of Sydney that is particularly good in terms of cafes, bars and restaurants (and within easy reach of other parts of the city), so we ate very well

  • I ate a lot of fish and other seafood. The UK has good seafood, but it's generally different types of fish, and prepared differently, so it was good to sample all the stuff I can't easily eat in the northern hemisphere

  • Australia also generally has better East and Southeast Asian food, so I was keen to eat that at every opportunity — of which there were several

  • Two tasting menu dinners at high end restaurants — this one with Matthias, and this one with sister #1 as a birthday present for the past five years of birthdays

  • Cafe breakfasts. Just Sydney cafe breakfasts


  • All that land and all that water
  • Various walks and swims with Matthias around different bits of Sydney Harbour — catching the ferry to Manly and then walking from Shelly Beach up North Head, and returning to swim, walking from my mum's place to Barangaroo, walking from Nielsen Park along the harbour all the way home, with a swim midway, and shorter walks to any available body of water I could reach

  • Lots and lots of swimming at [instagram.com profile] andrewboycharltonsydney with my mum, and sometimes one of my aunts, with the smell of the cut grass on one side and the harbour on the other, watching the naval ships drift by, under the broad sweep of the sky


  • I read a lot of books during the plane trips there and back, but while I was in Australia I stuck to rereading my old childhood paperbacks, including Rain Stones and The Secret Beach by Jackie French (a short story collection and standalone novel collection respectively, both with French's usual focus on family history, memory, and the Australian landscape), Hannah's Winter by Kierin Meehan (preteen girl spends three months in rural Japan with an eccentric host family and — together with a couple of other kids — must solve a supernatural mystery quest), and Shadowdancers by Sally Odgers (a portal fantasy in which people from our world have doppelgangers in another, with whom traumatic experiences can force them to trade places — one of my very favourite books when I was a teenager, absolutely read to death, to the point that the paperback is extremely battered and had been dropped in the bath at least once).

    The trip itself was wonderful, but emotionally wrenching in weird and unexpected ways due to the passage of time, and the near constant reminder that migration and building a life overseas causes the space you occupy to close up behind you. I made that choice, and I don't regret it, but it is confronting to be reminded that life goes on without you in places and among people that once felt like home. It was my own choice, but it was a choice that was not without weight, and consequences.

    My Instagram — [instagram.com profile] ronnidolorosa offers a rather incomplete record of the trip, heavy on the sea and sky, since those were — apart from the people — the thing I missed most, and which are so, so different to the sea, and the sky in these northern parts of the world to which I transplanted myself.

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    dolorosa_12: (Default)
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