Beyond Selidor

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 ronnidolorosa. All in all, it was a weird and wonderful time.

It's been a strange weekend so far, mainly due to the coronation, which was unavoidable even if you didn't watch it on TV (which I didn't). The whole thing has been a cacophony of limp, waterlogged bunting, flopping forlornly against people's foliage in the torrential rain. There were several moments of peak Britain that left me helpless with laughter, but the one that took the cake was the giant, water-drenched, ugly handmade crown, displayed in the centre of St Ives in a fenced-off area at the foot of a statue of Oliver Cromwell, as if the statue were a zombie that might come to life and go on a beheading rampage at the sight of the crown.

Matthias and I were in St Ives in order to walk out to a nearby village for lunch, and although we got a bit rained on, the food was good, the pub had a fire going in the wood-burning stove, and the whole thing was worth it. I stuck up a little photoset on Instagram.

Today things have been a bit more routine — the regular early morning swim, crepes for breakfast, and a quick walk into town to get lunch from one of the food trucks at the market. I'm attempting to finish my current book (one of the Comfortable Courtesan series) and catch up on Dreamwidth, but other than that nothing hugely eventful.

I have started a new project, though. Between 2001 and 2012, I was a newspaper book-reviewer for several Australian broadsheet newspapers, mainly reviewing YA, but also adult SFF, historical fiction, and the occasional work of autobiography and author interview as well. My first article was published because — at age sixteen — I took extreme exception to the Sydney Morning Herald's literary editor's review of Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass and wrote her an incredibly pompous and angry letter accusing her of not having read the books she reviewed. Rather than ignoring my unhinged rantings, she wrote back, saying if I felt she'd done a bad job, did I think I could do better, and offered me the chance to review three books as part of a 'summer reads' round-up by various reviewers.

This review with the SMH was kind of a one-off, and I didn't pitch any reviews to any papers until early 2003, when an off-hand conversation I had with my mum about the fact I felt J.K. Rowling owed a debt to Roald Dahl in terms of his influence on her work caused Mum to encourage me to pitch this idea to a bunch of newspapers. The Canberra Times took me up on this offer, and I ended up writing for them for the next ten years.

My vibe, at least in those early days, was that I was an actual teenager reviewing the books aimed at my age group, but it really was another world in terms of how reviewing worked. It was made very clear to me that — although I was a teenager — I was not writing reviews aimed at other teenagers or the readership of the books, but rather for parents who were deciding whether or not to buy such books for their teenage children. At least for the first half of the time I wrote for the papers, book blogging wasn't really a thing (to say nothing of social media), and Australian and other publishers had a much more extensive and well functioning marketing infrastructure, even for debut or midlist books. Likewise, newspapers still had a flourishing arts/features ecosystem — for the entire time I wrote, The Canberra Times had a full- or part-time books editor on staff whose main responsibility was to solicit and edit book reviews and interviews with authors. I wasn't paid particularly well — 10 cents per word (apart from the handful of times I wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age, which paid 60 cents per word), but it was a lot more in terms of hours worked than I got in my other high school/uni jobs in the food/hospitality industry! And I used to sell the review copies of the books on to a secondhand book shop for a reasonable amount of money too.

In any case, all this is by way of preamble to saying that over the decade I worked as a reviewer, I wrote tens of thousands of words, and none of it survives in any digital form as the newspapers weren't fully online at that stage. I have some of it in Word files on a usb stick, but the majority of my reviews and interviews only exist as printed copies which I've stored in a hanging file at my mum's place in Sydney for the past twenty years. I've now decided I'm going to gradually copy these over onto dolorosa12, my longform reviews blog, for the sake of digital preservation.

I haven't been able to track down that 2001 Sydney Morning Herald piece, so I've started with the first two articles I wrote for The Canberra Times, the Dahl-Rowling piece, and an extremely pompous and negative review of the 2003 shortlisted nominees for the Older Readers Children's Book Council of Australia award. Obviously, these were written a long time ago, and my understanding (and thankfully, mode of expression) has developed a lot since then — what's obvious in those first two articles is a tendency to assert broad claims as fact without any evidence, or treat my own tastes and preferences as facts rather than opinions. And, when it comes to the Dahl and Rowling piece, it goes without saying that my feelings about both authors and their works has changed a lot since 2003! (That being said, I think I was correct in noticing the connection between the two, it's just that the real reasons why they are similar are not those I highlighted in my article. It's their bigotry and mean-spiritedness, which finds expression in a sense in their fiction that the world is full of adults who are arbitrarily cruel to the children in their care, and the world is indifferent to the plight of those children, whose only recourse is cleverness and resourcefulness, but which is much more vicious and nasty than these superficial narrative similarities.)

In any case, I am linking to these two old 'reprinted' articles here, but I really want to emphasise everything I've said above. I was eighteen years old when I wrote them, and I was a very young, very pompous eighteen-year-old, with the kind of self-righteousness that can only come from never really being challenged or stepping outside of a particular set of experiences. (Being given a paid reviewing gig for a national broadsheet before I even had the right to vote or had started university, and treated like a precocious prodigy for reviewing the books aimed at my own demographic honestly didn't help in this regard.) I hope my reviews slowly improved over the decade or so that I wrote for the paper, but that remains to be seen as I continue to repost them on my blog.

The reviews' titles are the ones given to them by subeditors when they were published in the paper:

Rowling owes a debt to Dahl
'Worthy' short-list, but not much fun

I woke this morning to thick frost, and thick fog blanketing the fens, and had an atmospheric walk to the swimming pool at dawn. Everything is freezing, and there's a sense of the land being locked in a kind of frozen sleep. Matthias and I have three very busy weekends coming up, so we took advantage of this last bit of free time to do exactly what we wanted.

This has meant, as always, a good variety of activities — several times out at the gym/pool, daily yoga, take-away for dinner last night, a new-to-me Indonesian recipe for dinner tonight, a film on Saturday night, and lots of reading. We also did a little walk in the wintry sunshine today, looping down past the cathedral and along the river, pausing to look at the new exhibition in the local art gallery, and picking up Tibetan food from a market stall to eat while we had a couple of drinks in our favourite local bar/cafe. You can see a photoset on Instagram.

I've read two books this weekend: Foul Lady Fortune (Chloe Gong), a spin-off from her Romeo and Juliet retelling set in 1920s Shanghai, and the first part of a multi-volume coffee table book history of the Caucasus (Christoph Baumer). The former moved the action into the early 1930s, dealing with the political turmoil in China as the Kuomintang and Communists tussled with each other and tried to cope with the looming threat of Japanese annexation. As a spy thriller, it's quite fun (if you ignore the implausibility of the fact that all the characters are teenagers), but I found myself frustrated by the fantasy elements, which felt unnecessary — it could have stood on its own as a work of historical fiction. It's also got some really distractingly glaring copy-editing errors. The second book is a very sweeping, broad-brush approach to the history of the region, starting in pre-historical times and concluding in the twelfth century, and my overall impression is that the people living in this part of the world seem to have been eternally cursed by their extremely unfortunate geographical location — always treated as some great power's 'buffer zone' or 'sphere of colonial influence.'

As I mentioned above, Matthias and I also watched a film last night — this time The Pale Blue Eye, which is a piece of gothic horror involving Edgar Allan Poe teaming up with a private detective to solve a series of grisly murders taking place at West Point military academy in the 1830s. The film has really bad reviews, but I actually thought it was quite fun, at least for the first 3/4 — there's an unfortunate twist at the end that felt really unnecessary. Bizarrely for a film set in the United States, the entire cast appears to be British.

I'll leave you with a handful of interesting links.

I enjoyed this interview with Sarah Michelle Gellar. I'd had no intention of watching Wolf Pack (because a) I bailed on Teen Wolf after three seasons and b) Jeff Davis), but this interview is testing my resolve!

vriddy always gathers fantastic collections of links relating to online platforms, fannish communities, and similar issues, and the latest batch is no different. I particularly appreciated this post by elwinfortuna about warning signs of fannish cults/scammers/grifters. I find it grimly dispiriting that not only can I think of at least five or six notorious people from back in the day to whom these warning signs apply, there are also several current fannish grifters of whose existence the post reminded me. Fandom's susceptibility to this sort of thing is depressingly eternal.

Because I don't want to end this post on such a low note, I will conclude by reminding everyone about once_upon_fic, which is still accepting nominations. If you like fairy tale/mythology/folklore retellings, this is the exchange for you!

I hope you've all been having nice weekends.

It's a new year, and it's time for a new Friday open thread post.

This post's prompt is inspired by the beginnings of 2023: what is something you have enjoyed about this year so far?

( My answer )

It's been an icy, sparkling weekend: winter is here with a vengeance, all crispy, frost-covered leaves and silvery fog blanketing the fens and hovering over the river. We went for a walk first thing this morning, and it was absolutely spectacular: the cathedral disappeared into the sky, mist curled around the houseboats, and the frost — which first came on Tuesday — never left the ground. I took photos of the garden as well, in an attempt to capture the moment.

This week has been difficult. Matthias and I both had food poisoning last Sunday night, which was, as you can probably imagine, incredibly unpleasant. It feels as if it took the whole week to recover, and yesterday was the first time that I really felt happy eating anything other than crackers and water. Most of the time, I just felt incredibly tired, and everything felt as if I were swimming through honey, and I tried to conserve my strength and do the bare minimum. Thankfully, I now finally feel fully recovered.

The weekend has been all about the written word: putting the finishing touches on a couple of Yuletide fics, and a gift for fandomtrees which just poured out of me in a couple of hours.

I also finished one book: Frances Hardinge's latest, Unraveller, an absolutely glorious piece of YA writing in which all Hardinge's considerable strengths are on display. As with all her books, it's richly imagined with an incredible sense of place, set in a world in which curses are real, and inescapable — and manifestations of people's pain, and grief, and anger. Her protagonist has the power to lift (or unravel) curses, and he roams through the world, digging into people's problems, figuring out who they might have wronged, mending what has been broken, but heedless as to the difficulties the secrets and tensions he uncovers may cause. It's written with exquisite empathy, as all of Hardinge's books are, shot through with compassion and understanding for human frailty and the moments of pain and weakness that might cause someone to turn their rage outwards and irrevocably hurt others, and its ultimate conclusion is that anger should not be avoided, but rather listened to and dealt with honestly. There's also a fabulous thread of inspiration from both weird British folklore and the Andersen version of the Six/Wild Swans fairytale, which of course appealled to me immensely.

At this time of year, I crave a routine that fits the season, and I have a lot of wintry books that I reread. Today it was time to return to The Bear and the Nightingale, the first in Katherine Arden's magnificent fantasy trilogy inspired by medieval Russian history and folk tales, and it was as perfect as ever. I snuggled up under my weighted blanket, and outside the frost dug into the garden, and I sank back into Arden's glorious story of Vasya, and the winter-king, and the supernatural interweaving and overlapping with the domestic, wars between gods sitting easily beside smaller familial tensions, and the ice, and the snow, and the cold.

Is there anything better than a seasonally appropriate book?

Yesterday, we spent half the day in the garden. I weeded the two remaining vegetable patches (the others had been lying fallow for the past six weeks or so, once the plants in them stopped yielding crops) and covered them up for the winter, collected all the windfall apples from the ground, and aggressively swept the footpaths around the house. Matthias mowed the lawn, and cut back all the nettles and brambles which endlessly encroach from the next-door neighbours' garden. We've still got apples and quince on the trees, and the tomato plants are still squeezing out fruit, but there is a real sense of things starting to wind down for the winter. I didn't realise how much the woeful state of the garden had been bothering me until the paths were swept clean, and my vague state of irritation disappeared.

Today, we set out in the midmorning on a 10km looping walk that took us through the lush green grass of the local private school and golf course, winding through fields and holloways, to the village of Little Thetford, and then back along the canals and earthworks beside the river and railway to Ely. The quality of the light, dancing on the water, and bouncing off the red, gold and brown leaves, was gorgeous. I didn't want to stop moving, because the walk was so lovely, but I did manage to pause long enough to take at least four photos.

I'm just pausing to catch up on Dreamwidth posts and comments over a cup of tea, and then I'll do a yoga class (Sundays are for slow and stretchy classes, winding down before the working week starts up again), and start thinking about dinner. Normally, that would be it for the day (and the weekend, and the week), other than watching a bit of TV, but today we'll be off to the community cinema (which operates sporadically in the town's mixed-use events space) to watch See How They Run, which as far as I can tell is a pastiche of an Agatha Christie-esque mystery story. I quite enjoy watching films in this venue — it's unsuitable for big blockbusters, but comfortable and cosy for all other genres, almost as if you're watching things from your own living room, glass of wine in hand. All in all, the perfect way to spend an autumnal Sunday night.

Generally speaking I tend to spend weekends in something of a collapsed heap of exhaustion, and I need to remember that I do actually have the energy levels to do more than that. These past two days have certainly been a reminder of the benefits of making the effort to do more.

Today I awoke to exactly the kind of weather I most enjoy: a blanketing fog that didn't lift until at least midday. I took a bunch of photos on my way to the pool, revelling in the arrival of autumn.

It's not been a great month for reading (to be honest, I've been too stressed about the grim political situation in far too many parts of the world), but I did manage to finish a couple of other books before the close of September.

Those books are:

The Community (N. Jamiyla Chisholm), a memoir about the author's experiences growing up in a cult. The cult in question drew on elements of militant Black separatism in the US, Islam, and a jumble of conspiracy theories, and resulted in the inevitable toxic mix of abusive isolation from the outside world, paranoia, financial exploitation of cult members, child sexual abuse, etc. It was an interesting book, and but it wasn't quite what I wanted to read — it focused much more on the author's relationship with her parents and thoughts about her own childhood, whereas I wanted a fuller focus on the cult itself, and the socio-cultural factors which shaped it and made it attractive to its members.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club (Malinda Lo), a work of historical fiction set in 1950s San Francisco, as seen through the eyes of Chinese-American (and closeted lesbian) teenager Lily Hu. The racism, sexism and homophobia of the period all get a look-in, as well as the major political currents of the era (McCarthyism, the space race, Cold War fears of spies and infiltration, the communist revolution in China). Against this backdrop, the book tells a coming-of-age narrative, as Lily falls in love (with a girl, with a nightclub, with a vibrant, clandestine queer community) and tries to contend with the dual challenges of familial and community expectations, and her own hopes and aspirations. As a snapshot of a time and place, Last Night at the Telegraph Club is fantastic — the hidden queer community is particularly well done — although I felt the book as a whole seemed to leap from episode to episode rather than telling a flowing story (and it ended in a manner that was both abrupt, and far too tidy). My absolute favourite part, however, was its multiple mouth-watering descriptions of Chinese food, in all its regional specificity — this is definitely not a book to read when you're hungry!

Let's hope I can be a bit better at reading regularly in October!

Our wedding anniversary was on Friday, and Matthias and I had decided a while back that we wanted to do something nice. The idea was that we'd pick a nice hotel, somewhere within easy reach of public transport, and somewhere with the kind of rooms and other spaces that we'd enjoy hanging around in — as well as decent food. Basically we wanted to have a weekend away where we could relax and do nothing, in pleasant surroundings. We chose Tuddenham Mill, as we'd been there in the past for lunch, and enjoyed the food and venue.

It was a lovely little trip! The hotel has packages which include accommodation, a tasting menu in their restaurant for dinner, and breakfast the next day. Given the whole thing was already pretty pricey, we elected to stay in one of their nicest rooms, which had a private balcony up in the treetops, a gorgeous bathroom with a huge waterfall shower, a massive (and extremely comfortable bed), a living room with a huge TV (and a fireplace, although it being summer we didn't use it), and — the selling point for me — a giant bath. This wasn't a holiday where we were going to be out seeing the sights — we wanted to be in a space that would be pleastant to hang around in, and that room certainly fit the bill!

We arrived in the early afternoon, and spent a bit of time settling in, drinking tea on the couch and reading in the sunshine. Then we strolled around the hotel grounds, which are in the site of an old watermill, surrounded by farmland. We had a pre-dinner drink outside by the millpond , followed by the tasting menu for dinner in the restaurant. After dinner, I made use of the bath, while Matthias watched TV, followed up by a sleepy nightcap with the complimentary little bottle of sloe gin provided in the room.

After breakfast, we had time for a brief wander around the village where the hotel is located (a fairly standard East Anglian village, but it was nice to stretch our legs), before making the return journey.

This is where things started to get interesting. The trip is a fairly brief, uncomplicated train journey from Kennett to Cambridge and then Cambridge to Ely. On Saturday, we had looked up the times for the returning trains, to make sure that we arrived at Kennett at the right time. It showed a series of trains running every two hours, with nothing amiss. However, when we arrived at the station, there were no trains on that line at all due to engineering works, and they weren't even running a rail replacement bus! I spent ages on the phone fruitlessly to National Rail and Greater Anglia, both of whom swore that these engineering works had been planned for weeks and that they had been up on both websites for over a month. This was, obviously, nonsense.

However, fortunately the engineering works were actually happening in that very station, and the workers could see that we were very confused and stranded. They were about to finish up work for the day, and two different workers offered to drive us home (or to a station where trains were running). We gratefully took up one guy's offer, since he was himself driving to Ely, and we ended up getting a lift right to our front door — an unexpected kindness in a rather frustrating situation.

So, all in all it was an excellent weekend — relaxing holiday, delicious food, beautiful venue, and entirely undeserved kindness of strangers. The whole trip was such a restorative, restful gift. If you're local (or have your own car), I highly recommend tuddenhammill if you want to have a similar kind of weekend away. Just don't travel via Kennett train station!

Miracle of miracles: I'm finally over my reading drought, and have had success with a pretty good run of books. The thing that unlocked my desire to read again was a comfort reread of one of my oldest favourite trilogies — Gillian Rubinstein's Space Demons series — which I picked up as a way to calm my nerves on the day of the Australian election.

I followed that up with a trio of library books, which were as follows:

Idol, by Louise O'Neill — a glossy, fast-paced page-turner of a book about a successful Instagram influencer whose glittery life comes crashing down around her ears in the wake of relevations from her youth in small-town suburban America. It's the sort of thing that I could imagine working really well as a prestige miniseries starring Reese Witherspoon, a la Big Little Lies or Little Fires Everywhere.

Blood to Poison, by Mary Watson — a fantasy YA novel set in contemporary South Africa, involving witchcraft, family tensions, and a family curse.

Palmares, by Gayl Jones — a sweeping, lyrical doorstopper of a saga set in 17th-century Brazil.

So it was three very different books, each excellent in its own way, and all a vastly preferable way to spend the time rather than panicked doomscrolling. Long may this trend continue!

I walked to the swimming pool this morning accompanied by a dawn chorus of birdsong: wood pigeons, sparrows, and blackbirds. When I emerged for the return journey, Ely was shrouded in misty rain, and the cathedral was disappearing into the sky.

Everywhere there are signs of spring.

Today's open thread is, quite simply: what are the flowers like where you are? Here, we've got cherry and plum blossom, daffodil bulbs emerging from the soil, flowering rosemary, and buds just starting to appear on one of the quince trees. Here's a photoset I put up on Instagram.

Please feel free to share photos or descriptions of your own floral scenery in the comments. For those of you in the southern hemisphere, flowers are probably going to be harder to come by, so instead: what is the plant life doing as things turn autumnal?