Beyond Selidor

I know a hidden town, high above the clouds

2026-05-25T11:23:04Z

I just came back from an incredibly frustrating and stressful swim at the pool — so much so that I had to bow out after 750 metres rather than my usual 1km. However, my walk home featured not one, but two cats that wandered up to me and wanted to be stroked and snuggled, which did a lot to restore my mood!

It's a long weekend, and it's been absolutely baking. The temperature gauge in our bedroom said it was 27C last night when I was trying to get to sleep, and it's meant to be 32C today — pretty extreme given it's still May! I've coped with this in the usual way: chilled infused water in the fridge, lots of ice cubes and frozen grapes in the freezer, salads for lunch (using chives and bitter salad greens grown in the garden!), avoiding leaving the house for much other than swimming and buying iced coffee at the bakery down the road. While confined indoors, we did at least manage to book our accommodation for our holiday in September, which always feels very satisfying and efficient.

Yesterday's swim was flawless: sun shining on the water, not a single other person in the lane for the entire 40 laps, and I just glided up and down the lane in pure, uncomplicated happiness, boundless in an unbounded world. It took me only 22 minutes to swim the entire kilometre. Today was pretty much the polar opposite. I'd seen when booking that only half the pool was going to be available to lap swimmers at the time I'd booked, but in that past when that's happened it's meant there is one fast lane, one medium lane, and one slow lane, and then the other half of the pool given over to lessons or free swimming. This time, two lanes were for lessons, two lanes were for free swimming, and then they'd widened the remainder into a double lane for medium speed lap swimmers, and another double lane for slow swimmers. Both were full with a scrum of people swimming up and down with almost no space in between each pair of swimmers. No fast lane at all. I attempted to swim up and down in the middle of the medium lane in between the other swimmers, but I was so much faster than everyone else that I basically overtook every single other swimmer every two lengths. Almost all of them were doing breaststroke, and I was kicked and hit repeatedly, including in the head and face, and including by someone wearing hand flipper things, which drew blood on my arm. I was so stressed that in the end I gave up. I could have been seriously injured.

I didn't expect them to rearrange the whole layout of the pool for one faster swimmer, but I do think it needed to be made clearer on the bookings website when 'half pool' specifically meant 'no fast lane,' and I'll be writing to the company that manages the sports centre and saying so!

Other than exercise (I also went to my two fitness classes, and I've been doing very slow, stretchy yoga classes in the shadiest part of the house), I've basically just been lounging around the house, reading, cooking, and eating.

I finished up Sister Wake (Dave Rudden), a standalone secondary world fantasy novel which essentially compresses 900 years of English colonisation of Ireland into 300. In the book, the Croí (the analogue for the Irish people) rise against their colonial rulers, against a chaotic backdrop in which the gods and supernatural beings of Irish mythology have burst forth to walk the island once more: gigantic, angry, animal-formed embodiments of sovereignty impossible to control and impossible to reason with. The book was packed with allusions to Lebor Gabála Érenn and other medieval pseudohistorical texts that I studied as part of my PhD, which I enjoyed immensely (I also enjoyed the fact that Rudden's use of Irish made semantic and grammatical sense, which is not always a given when authors decide to sprinkle it into their fantasy settings), but overall I struggled to get on with this book, for reasons on which I'm not entirely clear.

Yesterday, I gulped down Sunburn (Chloe Michell Howarth), an Irish novel of a very different kind. This is a coming-of-age story, set in a claustrophobically tiny rural Irish town (population around 300) in the early 1990s, with a teenage girl narrator who embarks on an all-consuming secret relationship with another girl from her friendship group. In the conservative environment of the village, any deviation from the expected path of graduation from secondary school, serious heterosexual relationship with another young person from the village, marriage, and stay-at-home motherhood is so outside the realms of possibility that it's not even contemplated, and Howarth's novel captures perfectly how horrific it is to be closeted in such a setting. It's the kind of story that brings the experience of adolescence crashing painfully back into focus: the repetitive limits of the world (school, home, chip shop, corner shop), the intense internal focus and (justified) sense that all your peers are observing and documenting your life, appearance, choice of clothes, and faults with journalistic rigour (as indeed you are doing of them), the anguish of every tiny thing taking on a significance of epic, life-altering proportions. Those more universal sensations take place in an exquisitely specific temporal and physical space, and Howarth's portrayal of this slice of her characters' lives is the richer for it. I thought this was fantastically done: earnest, painful, and rich.

(My one issue with the book was its choice to render dialogue like this:
'Blah blah blah.'
He says.

'More dialogue.'
Says Susannah.

And so on, always with that full stop and line break. It was wildly distracting.)

I'm now about one hundred pages in to A Treachery of Swans (A.B. Poranek), with low expectations, and much trepidation. It's a Swan Lake retelling, and I've already been primed by chestnut_pod and others that it's not great!

Other than books, Matthias and I watched Sirat last night: a meandering, melancholy road trip by a Spanish father and his young son through the deserts of Morocco, accompanied by a quintet of quirky ravers en route to their next rave, where the Spanish pair hope they'll find their lost daughter/sister. This is not a feel-good roadtrip movie — there are a couple of truly horrific, shocking moments — and it reminded me very strongly of medieval voyage tales, in which saints, or figures otherwise rendered outside of society (criminals, outlaws, etc) embark on journeys that are part free roaming, part panicked flight from their problems, and very soon find themselves in strange, supernatural environs outside the ordinary human world, and the whole thing becomes a sort of psychological metaphor for the spiritual journey of the soul. There's nothing so redemptive in Sirat, but it's that same kind of wasteland wandering, through bleak, empty deserts fringed by spectacular mountains (with an incredible techno soundtrack), all the characters in search of something that none are fully able to put to words.

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May TV shows

2026-05-24T13:19:15Z

Given my mum is about to arrive for an extended visit, I think it's highly unlikely that I will finish any more TV shows before the end of the month, so let's have the May wrap-up a week early! I finished three shows this month, and they were:

Miss Scarlet, a mystery series set in Victorian England in which the eponymous heroine works as a private detective, solving crimes alongside an array of allies and sidekicks, including a police inspector from Scotland Yard. This is silly, inoffensive fun — the sort of thing that doesn't challenge the brain much, in which the culprit is usually obvious from about ten minutes into each episode — perfect frothy Sunday night fare.

Season 2 of Deadloch, the comedic Australian crime drama. This one sees lesbian policewoman Dulcie ditch the eponymous Tasmanian small town of Season 1, and head to the Northern Territory to join the other half of her odd couple buddy cop duo, accompanied by her wife, and travelling in a campervan. Chaos, against a background of every Top End cliché imaginable, ensues, as various seemingly unconnected mysteries slowly reveal themselves to be interwoven. The humour, if anything, is even less subtle than in the previous season, and I feel that it's essentially making fun of the stereotypes the rest of us Australians hold about the remote parts of the Northern Territory (crocodiles wandering around, disappearing backpackers, impoverished Indigenous communities, packs of grey nomads living an extended holiday existence in caravan parks, plus various oddballs who have fled from other parts of the country to escape the authorities or otherwise live off the grid, spouting an assortment of conspiratorial beliefs, etc). There are some unexpected twists, and extremely hilarious lines, but I think it didn't quite reach the heights of the first season.

The final season of Daredevil: Born Again. I know, I know, I say every time that my monthly TV roundup includes a Marvel show that I'm burnt out and this is truly my last Marvel ever ... but then I found out that Krysten Ritter was coming back as Jessica Jones, and I had to watch. If you've seen previous Daredevil series, you'll know what you're in for: existential battle for the soul of New York between blind vigilante Matt Murdoch and his crime lord nemesis Wilson Fisk, who by this season has managed to get himself elected as New York's mayor. He uses this position both to enrich himself through various corrupt enterprises, and implement an anti-vigilante rein of terror that sees his super loyal armed branch of the police (unrestrained by any need to follow legal processes) rampage around the city, terrorising people. The allusions to real-world contemporary US politics are not subtle, which irritated me for two reasons. Firstly, I hate fantasy beings/superpowered individuals being used as a metaphor for real-world oppressed groups (since, you know, vampires are actually dangerous, and extrajudicial law enforcement is not a great thing, so equating this with real world marginalisations feels quite offensive in most instances). Secondly, because the show is constrained by the rules of its superhero comic book genre, the good guys are able to overcome all these metaphors for real-world iniquities in a way that is tidy, easy, and uncomplicated — which just ultimately feels insulting. But Jessica Jones was in it, and that was great!

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Friday open thread: hobbies

2026-05-22T16:32:43Z

The sun is shining, it's the start of a long weekend, and I can hear the teenage girls next door singing along enthusiastically to a medley of Disney songs. I feel — for the first time in a while — relaxed and happy, so long may that continue!

For today's open thread, I had the idea to do a modification of something we sometimes ask at work as a job interview activity (although obviously without that added pressure!): talk about one of your interests or hobbies, and why you like it. (If you want to make it really challenging, do it with the constraints we use in the job interviews: explain what it is as if to people who have never heard of this hobby/activity before, treat it like an elevator pitch where you have to 'sell' the benefits of this hobby, and do so with an extremely limited wordcount.)

Since I think it goes without saying that almost everyone here will recognise the value of a) social blogging, b) writing original fiction, fanfiction or both, and c) engaging fannishly with works of media, maybe pick a different hobby or interest?

( Picking things up, putting them down, and dancing to very cheesy music )

So, talk to me about your (non-fandom, non-writing, non-Dreamwidth) hobbies!

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Breathe in, breathe out

2026-05-17T14:28:20Z

It's been a cosy-ish weekend at home, with some gardening, some cooking, and more decluttering.

On Friday, in between bouts of torrential rain (and hailstorms) I managed to get rid of the remainder of Matthias's old books, plus some unwanted gardening equipment. People really will take everything off the street if we put it out on the footpath! There's still stuff to go, but everything feels a lot more manageable now, and we don't have boxes all over the living room floor.

Yesterday was fitness classes, vegetable and fruit from the market (the strawberries at the moment are amazing, and I've just discovered that the discarded strawberry tops can be added to tap water to infuse it in much the same way that I usually do with slices of lime or lemon — it tastes fantastic), momos from the Tibetan stall for lunch, then pottering around at home. Today I spent a lot of time in the garden this morning, mainly repotting seedlings: tomatoes, pickling cucumbers, and some chives. So far the only stuff that's actually ready to eat are the mixed salad greens, which are a variety of shapes and colours, and taste bitter and earthy. We've got unripe strawberries, cherries, apples and pears, but nothing edible at the moment.

Reading this week has involved a great array of books.

I picked up The Draw of the Sea (Wyl Menmuir) on chestnut_pod's recommendation, and I'm glad I did. It's a collection of nature writing, mainly about the Cornish coast (although there are diversions to Svalbard, and other waters), meandering from environmental and social commentary to meditations on surfing and freediving. As suspected, my favourite parts were about the psychological effects of ocean swimming. It paired nicely both with Dee Holloway's fantastic zine Lost Coast (an in depth exploration of the various watery threads connecting Susan Cooper's Greenwitch and the films The Fog and Enys Men), and this new-to-me music (electronic Breton mermaids).

Next was The Bloody Branch (Brigid Lowe), which did for me for the Mabinogi what Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls did as an Iliad retelling: a complex, nuanced reworking of the source material in a way that does it the courtesy of taking its characters' alienating worldviews and frames of reference seriously, while giving the female characters interiority, voice, and agency within the truly awful situations in which they find themselves. Lowe does an incredible job conveying the sheer weirdness of the original medieval Welsh material, which exists in its own strange universe of blurred lines and shifting boundaries — between human and animal, between the otherworld and the waking world above, between earth and sea, and so on. Her Blodeuwedd felt really believably made of flowers, and the horror at that unbounded floral existence being forced into the shape of a human woman is absolutely visceral; likewise her Arianrhod felt half woman, half ocean. It's a brutal, violent book, in which brutal, violent things are done to its female characters, and sometimes the only possible response is endurance, survival, and the ability to tell their own stories, in their own words. I absolutely loved it.

Finally, I devoured the final novel in Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan quartet of books, The Story of the Lost Child, which covers the later adult life of its pair of childhood friends. While the events of the earlier three novels took place in relatively tight timeframes, this one covers more than thirty years — motherhood, relationships (and their ends), careers, the demands of complicated extended families, and the complex mess of the characters' origins in an impoverished, violent neighbourhood of Naples, and the way they're never fully able to escape this. Both the characters — the narrator in particular — make some truly terrible decisions; the consequences of these decisions are so excruciatingly obvious that I was almost reading through my fingers in horror for the hundred pages or so until the characters caught up with me and realised the same thing. While the intense interiority of the other novels remains, the authorial gaze also sweeps outwards, to take in Italian politics and societal changes during the period, and the ever present struggles against corruption and organised crime, and the ways these brush up against the lives of the characters and their families. I'm so glad that I picked up this quartet of books at last: the hype is so incredibly justified.

I'm almost scared to pick up a new book, because the week's previous reading has been so good!

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Friday open thread: namedropping, I guess?

2026-05-15T10:58:50Z

This week's prompt is brought to you by a convoluted game of telephone (misshoijer told lauropea, who told Matthias, who told me) through which I discovered this morning that one of the alumni from my MPhil and PhD programmes (he was doing his undergrad degree in the same department at the time; the department was so small that postgrads and undergrads all hung out together) has subsequently gone on to become a comedian and actor, with his current major role apparently being to do impressions of Keir Starmer on the UK version of Saturday Night Live. Matthias and I were so flabbergasted by this, as we had no idea that he was involved in the student theatre scene at all during his time in our degree programmes, so although he's apparently been part of the UK comedy circuit for many years, the whole thing was brand new information to us.

So the prompt is as follows: are there any people from your university (or school) social circles who ended up in surprising or unexpected lines of work? If so, what?

Obviously if you're going to post about real people's identities, it's probably best to limit this to genuine public figures — hopefully you're able to use your own judgement about this.

( More answers here )

What about you?

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Decluttering the habitat

2026-05-10T12:37:33Z

This has been an extremely efficient weekend, on various domestic fronts.

When Matthias's father was visiting a couple of weeks ago, he brought multiple large boxes of Matthias's old stuff — books in English and German, magazines, school exercise books, DVDs, VHS cassettes and CDs — the sort of childhood ephemera that gathers and lingers in the parental home if one is an immigrant who has lived one's entire adult life outside the country of origin. I remember boxing all this stuff up about a decade ago and storing it in the box room at Matthias's parents' place, and there it's remained, even though the house is now owned by Matthias's sister, who lives there with her husband and their three kids. The last boxes of my own equivalent stuff arrived by mail two years ago — mainly my childhood and teenage books — so it was high time to deal with Matthias's belongings.

He's already been through the English-language books, shelved the stuff he wanted to keep, and weeded out the stuff to go (including duplicates of books I already owned). We put the unwanted books out on the street, and people have already taken most of them. Every time I've put books out on the street, everything goes eventually, and I'm pretty certain that will happen in this case as well.

(On top of that, we're transitioning in Ely in June to a new rubbish/recycling regime which means we no longer need the big black bin bags for non-recyclable rubbish. We hardly ever have rubbish to collect, so we tend to accumulate far more of these bags than we could ever possibly need. We periodically put rolls of the bags out in the street for others to take, and on Friday I put out the last handful, along with some clean, unwanted sturdy paper shopping bags — and they all went as well.)

We're a bit hampered with rubbish by the fact that we don't drive or have a car, so I was slightly concerned about all the VHS cassettes (which Matthias didn't want to keep), but we figured out that the recycling centre in Witchford would take them, and that this was an easy half-hour walk through public byways in the fields, so this morning, after breakfast, we each filled a backpack with VHS cassettes, plus some batteries that we also couldn't get rid of anywhere else, and walked them over to the tip. As we were on foot, we didn't have to wait our turn in the huge, backed-up queue of cars waiting for a slot, and were in and out, and back home within a hour of leaving.

We cleared out the big living room cupboard (where I'd shoved a bunch of appliance boxes when we moved in and never looked at them again), and moved them up into the loft. And now I can see Matthias going through the boxes of old newspapers and magazines, so those will be dealt with by the end of the weekend too.

In the garden, we constructed a covered archway over one of the vegetable beds to protect the seeds and seedlings, as we have enormous problems with blackbirds — as soon as we plant anything, they come and dig it up and eat it, and hurl mulch all over the footpath, and I'm sick of it! I also planted out some cucumber, parsley, dill and chard seedlings, planted amaranth, sunflowers and radishes, and scattered a few more packets of wildflower seeds around. After I've finished this post, I'm going to tie the self-seeded sweetpea plants to stakes, and that will be the garden tasks done for now. We're doing well when it comes to herbs and salad greens — and indeed ate home-grown mixed greens and chives in a salad for lunch today.

There's also been a lot of cooking, pickling and fermenting going on: stewed apples with cinnamon, plus cooked strawberries, to go with our breakfasts next week, sauerkraut (with cabbage, cucumber and fennel, plus caraway seeds), a jar of homemade pickles, and another jar of shatta (fermented chili condiment).

That's plus two hours of classes in the gym yesterday, and 1km swimmming on Friday and again this morning, and some decent, lengthy yoga classes at home.

I'd say all that feels pretty decent, and the decluttering in particular is extremely satisfying. I'm really glad we got all that done so efficiently (although in some ways it would have been better to have discarded all the stuff we gave away/recycled/threw away ten years ago in Germany, but given I behaved in a similar way with my own belongings in Australia, I find the extended hanging on to stuff that eventually just gets binned entirely understandable).

As a consequence, I have not had much time for reading or other media, although I did watch Send Help (a comedic thriller in which an overworked and underappreciated corporate office worker ends up stranded on a tropical island with her childish and unappreciative boss, where her hitherto unrecognised side hobby of outdoor survival in extreme landscapes of course comes in incredibly handy, with predictable results) last night. Hopefully next weekend will have a bit more time for proper relaxing, but I'm happy to have been able to devote so much of this weekend to getting all this stuff done so efficiently.

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Friday open thread: Dreamwidth

2026-05-08T16:38:36Z

After a challenging and tiring few weeks, the Friday open thread returns, with a prompt inspired by all the love and activity I've seen around 3weeks4dreamwidth. I haven't been able to be very engaged with this at all, as it coincided with a professionally and personally very busy time, but I was reminded again of what a singularly wonderful little corner of the internet we have here, and how happy I am that this is my primary social internet home.

Therefore, this Friday's prompt is: what is special for you about Dreamwidth, and why do you like it?

I could answer with all the usual things, like the fact that makes money solely from user subscriptions, rather than algorithmic feeds, ads, or selling user data, that it has an ethos built on privacy and persistent pseudonymy, that it's text-based and slower-moving, the icon culture inherited from LJ in which icon use becomes a whole visual language, that there are filtered levels of privacy controlled by the user on a post-by-post basis, and so on, but all that's been said by many people, many times.

As well as all of the above, the things that I find particularly special about Dreamwidth (and which solidified its place as my primary internet home many years ago) are:

The perfect balance that we, as a user community, seem to have built up over the years organically, between the personal and the communal — in the sense that posts and comments are built for conversation and discussion by default, and shared into all subscribers' (chronological) feeds by default, but we all have a very clear sense that a person's posts and journal are that person's individual space, where they have freedom in both form and content. While I'm not going to say this kind of thing doesn't exist here on Dreamwidth, I personally never see the kind of outraged 'why is nobody talking about this?' (or 'why is everybody talking about [this frivolous thing] instead of [this outrage]?'), or people berating one another over choices of style or topic (or trying to drive mobs of followers to descend in outrage on other people's posts). Not every post I encounter on Dreamwidth is of interest to me (and I'm sure that's the same for everyone reading this when they think about my own journal) — although I've discovered so many new interests, and read posts by people on topics that I would never have even thought about, but which are made interesting through the way the person writes about them — and that's totally okay, as the assumption is that people will just scroll on by when required. There's no expectation of constant engagement and paranoia around metrics and short attention spans.

This sounds counterintuitive, but I actually like that Dreamwidth is a bit user-unfriendly to people whose primary engagement with the internet is via very user friendly social media platforms with a low barrier to entry. Obviously I want Dreamwidth to continue to exist, so it needs a critical mass of people to use and fund it to remain financially sustainable, but I appreciate that it requires a little bit of effort (type at least a few words into a post, or into a comment), and that passive usage (scrolling, liking, or the equivalent of sharing/reblogging/retweeting with a single click of a button) is basically impossible. In my opinion, this slight barrier to entry (probably combined with the fact that image hosting is complicated) helps keep it a generally pleasant community space, because the kind of rage-baiting virality that targets people's psychological vulnerabilities would be such hard work here.

What about you? What do you appreciate about Dreamwidth? What keeps you here?

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Catching up, in bullet points

2026-05-03T15:06:08Z

I've been extremely busy, and consequently extremely tired, and haven't been around on Dreamwidth all that much in the past couple of weeks. Rather than one of my standard weekend wrap-up posts, I'm going to attempt to go through the various things that have been happening, in brief, in list form.

Two weeks ago, catpuccino came up to Ely to visit. She lives in London, we've known each other since the first day of high school, but what with one thing and another, I hadn't seen her in person since 2024. She's going through some tough stuff at the moment, so it was nice to be able to help her get away from all that for twenty-four hours, at least (and talk foodie things with someone who's even more plugged into that scene than I am).

Almost immediately after that, my father-in-law came over from Germany to visit for a week. He drove, and took the ferry, which meant he was a free agent, and could go out and do things while Matthias and I were at work, and he did catch up with some local friends a couple of times, but for the most part he seemed to just want to chill out in our garden, under the cherry trees. His regular daily life involves a lot of energetic grandchildren (my sister-in-law has three kids), and I think he viewed our place as something of an oasis of calm. My mother-in-law was the real Anglophile in the family — she came over to England on exchange as a teenager, fell in love with the place, and the two of them basically visited the UK almost once a year for their entire adult lives, barring the Covid years and my mother-in-law's increasingly fragile health. So coming back here alone after her death was a bittersweet experience for my father-in-law, stirring up a lot of complicated emotions, but I think he was pleased to have made the trip.

He left on Wednesday, and on that evening Matthias and I went to an author event with Andrey Kurkov, hosted by the local independent bookshop. (Ely is a sleepy small rural town, but it definitely punches above its weight in terms of literary events due to this fantastic bookshop.) He read from and chatted about his latest historical mystery novel (set in 1919 Kyiv), and answered audience questions with patience. (My favourite, somewhat left-field answer: '[In the final decade of the Soviet Union,] I graduated with a qualification in Japanese translation, and they wanted me to do my military service as a spy listening in to the Japanese in the Russian far east, but I didn't want to do this, since it would have prevented me from being allowed to leave the country. I asked my mother, who was a doctor, if she had any well-connected patients who could get me out of this, and one of her patients, who was a senior military figure, was able to instead transfer me to doing military service as a prison guard in Odesa. When the other guards found out I was a writer, one of them asked me to write his speeches for his meetings with the leadership, so I spent my military service reading propaganda magazines and rewriting the articles for him to reuse in his speeches.' This struck me as the absolute peak absurd Soviet experience.)

I've had a run of lots of timetabled, lecture-style teaching, which happens this time every year, but is always a bit exhausting: it's in a huge, echo-y wooden lecture theatre (when the students come through the doors, they slam loudly and make a massive amount of noise), it's to groups of 75 students, repeated three times to different groups, and it's with undergrads rather than the postgraduates and researchers I normally teach (who are a lot more work to keep focused), and I always feel completely flattened by the time the Friday class is over. The one nice thing is that these classes are in central Cambridge instead of out on the hospital site where I normally work, and I can buy decent food and coffee afterwards. I guess it's a good thing I don't normally work in that part of town, because I'd be so tempted to eat lunch out every day, and end up bleeding money.

I read Innamorata (Ava Reid), and with Reid I think at this point it counts as hate-reading, since my expectations are always so low, and they're always confirmed. This is her take on a gruesome gothic novel, complete with purple prose, and the literary equivalent of a child hopping up and down going 'look! look! did you see what I just did?' Did I see her obvious and intentional allusions to Mervyn Peake? Yes, yes I did. Am I shocked at all the gore, bodily fluids and shock value edginess? Shocked that I keep picking up Ava Reid books, maybe.

Then I read Almost Life (Kiran Millwood Hargrave) and Testament of Youth (Vera Brittain), and was a lot happier in my choice of reading material. The former is a novel about two young women who meet, hook up and fall in love in 1970s Paris, then go their separate ways, but continue to haunt and fall in and out of each other's lives, in a mess of intense emotions, difficult choices, and lost chances. The latter is both a memoir of the author as an individual (fighting the parental expectation to marry and instead attend Oxford as a young woman in the 1910s, then serving as a nurse in WWI and watching all the young men in her life be swallowed up into the maw of that terrible war), and a portrait of the absolute wrenching collective trauma experienced by her entire generation, and how impossible it was to go back to civillian life and go on living afterwards.

Then I read The Red City (Marie Lu), which had a great premise (clandestine underworld alchemist syndicates fight a global battle for dominance, operating much like real-world organised crime), and an absolutely wrenching depiction of intergenerational immigration trauma, but was written for absolutely no reason in third person present tense, which for me is the literary equivalent of someone chewing audibly near my ear. I only like present tense when it's used to evoke a sense of stream-of-consciousness-like immediacy, as if you're getting a glimpse inside a character's messy, unedited interior monologue (I prefer it much more in the first person), but when the whole story feels as if it could work perfectly fine in past tense, the use of present tense is distractingly grating.

Yesterday was Eel Day in Ely, which involves, among other things, a giant cloth eel on a frame being paraded through the town, trailed by an incongruous juxtaposition of local groups (think Morris dancers followed by a girls' rugby club, followed by musicians playing steel drums, followed by a Scout group, etc). We were in the market buying vegetables, so missed the actual parade, but did witness all these various participants marshalling in front of the cathedral beforehand. We did a quick swing around the stalls afterwards, but it was pretty hot, and we'd already eaten lunch, so we didn't stay long.

We watched the recent Wuthering Heights adaptation yesterday, and I regret to report that it was 90 per cent vibes and dramatic scenery, and I was not particularly impressed.

As it's a long weekend, there was a food and craft fair outside the cathedral today, and Matthias and I wandered around, eating lunch from one of the stalls, people- and dog-watching, before meandering on home, having picked up a box of macarons to eat over the course of the week with our tea and coffee.

We've made a start at booking tickets, etc for our summer holiday, which makes it start to feel a bit more real. I love the planning stage — investigating food, activities, transport, and so on, with the days of the holiday unfolding, and given greater shape.

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April TV shows

2026-05-02T10:44:30Z

It's been a busy month (about which more later in a further post), and that's meant I've only managed to complete three TV shows, all of which were fairly short in length. These shows were:

The latest season of The Capture, a BBC crime/spy/political thriller whose premise is that the British police and security services have been engaged in a clandestine programme of 'correction' — planting nonexistent deepfake evidence in order to convict people of crimes for which there is no real evidence, supposedly justified as serving some greater security or political good. At the end of the last season, this was all exposed and out in the open, and the latest season deals with the ongoing messy fallout (surprise surprise, simply revealing the shadowy iniquities perpetuated by the British political and security elite does not result in an immediate transformation of the country for the better). In this season, along with the deepfakes, there's generative AI to contend with, and everything proceeds at breakneck pace with terrifying consequences. The sense of not having a solid grip on observable reality, and the sickening ease with which the characters justify the unbelievably unethical things they do is terrifying. The acting and writing are as sharp as ever, and the show is the televisual equivalent of a page-turner, but I couldn't help but find the plot completely ludicrous: not because the UK police, military, or security services wouldn't be attracted to doing all the dodgy technological things they're portrayed as doing, but because their competence at doing so and seemingly bottomless funds to support these actions strained the bounds of credulity.

Kleo, a surreal, darkly comedic spy thriller set in the dying days of partitioned Germany, in which the titular Stasi assassin gets framed and thrown into prison by those above her in the chain of command, released several years later after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and immediately sets about trying to hunt down those responsible for the stitch-up and attempting to uncover the larger political reasons why it happened. The story barrels along on an international chase, zipping from a Berlin left reeling at the overwhelming political and social changes bursting forth, to Spain and Chile, filled with a fabulous cast of characters (the side characters are particularly fun), against a backdrop of crumbling modernist architecture and an absolutely glorious soundtrack. I enjoyed this immensely.

Midnight at the Pera Palace, a Turkish historical drama in which Esra, a struggling journalist, gets assigned to write a puff piece about the history of a (real) luxury Istanbul hotel, and gets sucked back in time to 1919, where she has to foil a nefarious British plot to assassinate Mustafa Kemal. I wanted to like this more than I did: it has all the seeds of a silly piece of popcorn TV (ludicrous premise, the potential for lots of humorous time-travel shenanigans — to be fair there were some of those, like the point at which Esra needs to read a plot-relevant diary, but can't, as it is in Arabic script, which got replaced by Latin script as part of the reforms introduced in the wake of the founding of the modern Turkish state — a gorgeous setting, and a glimpse back into the cosmopolitan world of this hotel in its heyday), but it was just a bit too melodramatic and overacted for my taste.

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Two final Hungarian politics links...

2026-04-15T18:44:18Z

... and then I'll stop, I promise!

This lengthy essay gives a blow-by-blow account of the staggeringly overwhelming non-stop series of shenanigans (autocratic regime and its external autocratic patrons) that voters had to deal with during the lengthy lead up to Sunday's vote. (This included: nonstop antisemitic propaganda campaign claiming the democratic opposition were stooges of Zelenskyy, recycled from a previous nonstop antisemitic propaganda campaign claiming the same thing about Soros, ham-fisted false flag attacks from Russian intelligence on an oil pipeline in Serbia which they tried to spin as a Ukrainian sabotage, intelligence operations targeting teenage opposition IT specialists, attempts to charge independent investigative journalists with espionage, etc.)

Plus:

systematic vote-buying: bribing people with bags of potatoes, cash, even drugs; local strongmen threatening to fire them from their jobs if they don’t vote Fidesz, or call child services on them; thugs accompany citizens into the voting booth — a full logistics chain of stealing the election.

As the author of the essay said, Hungary under Orbán was 'not a democracy with flaws, but an autocracy with elections.'

It took a lot to overcome that wall of horrors, and this thread by a Hungarian academic summarises it well.

What they were up against was unbelievable, and I am so immensely impressed. No wonder everyone took to the streets and partied as if they'd just won the World Cup.

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Dancing on the Danube

2026-04-13T17:50:33Z

The Hungarian election result is giving me life. I spent much time with the Guardian's livefeed of the election and its aftermath, just basking in happiness. My favourite moments were the thousands dancing along the shores and bridges of the Danube (including the health minister-to-be, whose dancing went viral), and the gleeful gloating of the Polish prime minister and foreign minister

People on the subway high fived each other as they passed on the escalators (third video in the carousel) and were pouring out glasses of champagne to strangers, and it was so crowded with people trying to get across the river to the victory celebrations that they couldn't fit into the subway carriages.

If it must be necessary, my favourite (sadly universal) experience of democracy is witnessing voters take to the streets to dance in relief and joy at having voted out corrupt, autocratic governments. Inject this straight into my veins, forever.

Apparently the partying in Budapest went on until 5am, and then everyone just floated deliriously into work on Monday morning, awash in the sense of their own political agency.

Edited to add, because I couldn't resist, Marie Le Conte liveblogging the celebrations in the streets of Budapest. Oh, my heart.

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Your ears and your eyes for the tears and the lies that I sing

2026-04-12T13:15:44Z

I've just rushed in to gather the remainder of the laundry, as it suddenly began bucketing down rain. Amusingly, the neighbours on either side sprinted out to their own gardens at exactly the same moment to do exactly the same thing, and we all gave each other rueful smiles. It's that time of year.

I was recovering from a fairly mild cold this weekend (the worst of it was on Wednesday and Thursday, so by Saturday I was just at the stage of sniffling a bit, and having constant nosebleeds), so things have been relatively quiet, even by my standards: no pool, no gym, very limited activities. I did go to Waterbeach with Matthias yesterday, to sit for a few hours in the taproom of the brewery that only opens up one Saturday a month (where we listened to the couple next to us plan their wedding, with much arguing over seating plans and whether or not to have a traditional fruit cake, but general agreement as to the — seemingly bottomless — quantities of alcohol they were going to serve their guests), and eat handmade pizza from the food truck next door.

Otherwise, the only eventful stuff this weekend has been gardening: readying a few containers with compost in order to transfer the mixed lettuce, dill, and spring onion seedlings out of the growhouse some time later in the week, and planting the next batch of growhouse seedlings (rocket, radishes, corn, zucchini, butternut pumpkin, garlic kale, red spring onions, giant cabbages, and peppermint chard). I'm feeling quite smug that we managed to get all this done this morning, before the rain began.

I think I've only finished two books this week — probably not helped by the fact that I spent Thursday in bed dozing — but both were relatively satisfying.

The first was The Rider of the White Horse, continuing my Rosemary Sutcliff reading with a big shift from her Romano-British trilogy to the time of the English Civil War, and from her resolutely male protagonists and worlds to a female protagonist: the wife of an aristocrat from the north of England fighting for the Parliamentary cause who follows him across the various battlefields as their fortunes wax and wane. As with other Sutcliff books, it has a very strong sense of place, as well as a strongly crafted depiction of life with an early modern army on the move: the muddy plains of battle, the besieged cities, with their populations' fate resting on the choices and consequences happening outside their walls, but here also with an additional focus of what this world might have been like for its women. The other feature that I've come to recognise as a Sutcliff staple — the sense of the catastrophic ending of a particular kind of world, and the disorienting horror felt by people as old familiar certainties are cast aside, unmooring them from former expectations and reference points — is also present and correct. The central relationship — between the protagonist and her husband — is an interesting authorial choice, in that it is an aristocratic arranged marriage which opens with one spouse (the wife) loving the other while knowing that this love is not returned, and over the course of the book, and all the pair experience together and separately, their feelings shift and change until their love for each other is mutual, and more mature, being based, at this point, on a deeper understanding of each other as people. In general, I found the whole book very solid, although it didn't resonate quite as strongly with current global politics as some of her previous fiction that I've read.

I followed this with Mythica, in which classicist Emily Hauser uses the women of and adjacent to Homeric epics as a jumping off point to explore the lives of women in the historical record, and in the material culture of west Asia and the eastern Mediterranean, with digressions into reception studies, and many millennia of literary criticism, historiography, and the shifting western literary canon (as well as some contemporary female character-centric Iliad and Iliad-adjacent retellings).

It's a good thing that although Hauser's name seemed vaguely familiar to me, I had forgotten that this was because she had written a Briseis-centric Iliad retelling that I absolutely detested, because if I'd remembered that detail, I would never have picked up Mythica. (In a very comical moment, she mentions her own retelling as one among many supposedly feminist recent takes on Homer's epic that restore interiority and agency to its women: you and I remember your novel very differently, Emily Hauser.) I'm not enough of a classicist or an archaelogist to know how solid her pulling together of the various threads was, but I felt that as a picture of a specific region in a specific moment in time, shedding light on its non-elite residents (women, enslaved people, ordinary artisans and traders) it did a pretty good job, although Hauser had a frustrating tendency towards certainty where I felt she could stand to be more equivocal when it came to the evidence available. When it came more to the literary and intellectual history of the many millennia of human engagement with Homeric epic, I found the book to be more superficial (is it really news to anyone that for most of recorded 'western' history, the male intellectual and political elite were either silent or misogynistic about the women of the Iliad and the Odyssey?), but possibly this is a reflection both of the type of fiction I tend to read for pleasure (I have a 'briseis fanblog' tag for a reason) and my academic background. Ultimately, I felt that the 'women of the Iliad and the Odyssey' framing of the book was a convenient structure and marketing gimmick for what in reality was an interesting and accessibly told survey of the history and material culture of the lives of ordinary people of the eastern Mediterranean (she does a particularly good job at emphasising the extent that the sea operated as a road, and how outwardly oriented everyone's lives were) that might otherwise have struggled to find a publishing foothold.

In the half-hour or so that it's taken for me to write this post, the rain has, of course, stopped, and my laundry — now laid out on every available surface of the house — is looking at me in a somewhat accusatory manner!

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Friday open thread: board game background

2026-04-10T16:19:36Z

This week's prompt was sparked by an interesting conversation with hamsterwoman in the comments to a previous post, in which we were discussing the extent to which we felt our childhood environments influenced our interest (or lack thereof) in playing board games as adults. And so:

Did you grow up regularly playing board games (either with your family, or in other contexts)? Do you feel that this affected the prominence (or lack of prominence) of board games in your later life?

( My answer )

What about all of you?

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A golden thread between hearts

2026-04-06T15:29:30Z

I'm just coming to the end of a fantastic four-day weekend, and I'm not ready for it to be over. I never travel over the Easter weekend — it always comes at exactly the point in the year when I need a lot of rest and recovery — and so, other than day trips, I stick fairly close to home. My rule is that I go the furthest away on the Friday, and then stay progressively closer and closer as the four days continue, and I find that this works well.

This time around, Matthias and I went out on the train to Bury St Edmund's on Friday. We pottered around in town for a bit, had lunch at this place (excellent), then wandered across the road to a pub that was having a mini beer festival, and sat around outside for a bit, although it was windy and cold and I had to ask them to turn on their outdoor gas heaters to keep me warm! Bury is fairly close, but I feel as if I've rarely gone there, in spite of living in this part of the world for many, many years now.

On Saturday, we had a day out in Ely — cheese platter for lunch this place, sushi for dinner at the fancy sushi restaurant, and more wandering around in between. It was again a bit too cold to be outdoors much, but the river was as pretty as ever, and dotted with various groups of people having cups of tea or rounds of drinks in the houseboats.

Yesterday we didn't leave the house at all. I did a bit of gardening, read, did yoga, and spent most of the day slow-cooking an Indonesian curry for dinner. The garden is slowly springing back to life. I have to spend much of my time chasing the wood pigeons away from the cherry trees, as if they're left to their own devices, they'll eat all the flowers and shoots and we won't have any fruit. The seedlings in the growhouse are coming along nicely, and I'm particularly pleased at the prospect of being able to make my own pickles from cucumbers I've grown myself this year.

Today began with a fairly slow start: the last of the hot cross buns, laundry, cleaning, more communing with the garden, and then a little walk through the park that rings our part of the town. After lunch, we went and sat out in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar for a bit, then picked up the first gelato of the year from the place that is only seasonally open (I think the owners go back somewhere warmer and more Mediterranean over the winter) on the way home. Once I've finished off this post, I'll gather in the laundry, do a last sweep of the garden, and start winding down.

You can see from this weekend photoset that I started out with some extremely ambitious reading plans, and I'm pretty pleased that I made it through five of these books. Five out of seven isn't too shabby! Those books were a wonderful mix of new-to-me and annual reread favourites, fiction and nonfiction, short stories and novels.

I started off with Is A River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane's latest. This is nature writing about rivers (including some of the world's last remaining chalk streams around the corner from my workplace in Cambridge), but also a look at the global movement to grant legal personhood to the natural world — in particular rivers — and the people and organisations fighting to make that happen. As with any nonfiction writing about the state of the environment, it's pretty bleak in places, although the relentless energy (and enthusiasm they have for frogs, fungi, beetles, snakes, bodies of water, etc) of the various people Macfarlane encounters is infectious.

Next up was Death and the Penguin, Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov's most famous work. Having familiarised myself with Kurkov through both his historical mysteries and his war memoirs, it seemed only fair to pick this one up when I could, and I'm glad I did. It's a blackly comic, surreal look at the chaos and disorientation of Ukraine in the early years of independence from the Soviet Union, with a hapless struggling author protagonist who winds up working for a newspaper as an obituary writer, only to realise that his obituaries (which, as is the case for all newspapers, are written in advance of their subjects' deaths) are serving as a hit list for organised crime. One of Kurkov's strengths as a writer is his talent for observing and cataloguing the minutiae of everyday life in very specific times and places, and this is on full display here in his evocation of 1990s Kyiv and the people who inhabit it.

Another author who excels at observing the specific is Elena Ferrante, whose third book in the series of novels about two girls growing up in inpoverished circumstances in post-WWII Naples, and their subsequent adult lives was next on my reading list for the long weekend. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay picks up the story in the early adult years: Lenu, the narrator, has graduated university, published her first novel, and is about to marry her university boyfriend, who comes from an educated upper middle class background, and much of the novel deals with the sense of anxiety and imposter syndrome she feels having achieved social mobility — out of place among the educated elite, but ill at ease whenever she returns to her childhood home. Meanwhile, her childhood friend Lina is dealing with the consequences of a series of spectacularly bad decisions made in the previous book. Marriage and motherhood is difficult for both women in different ways, and the book is particularly good at conveying the pain of being sort of disappeared into those roles, with no outlets for their restless, hungry, wide-ranging intelligence. As with previous books in the series, this third outing is also a vivid snapshot of a very specific time and place, although it moves beyond one single neighbourhood in Naples to take in the sweep of political and cultural change in late 1960s Italy as a whole — as the characters' worlds open up, so their view (and that of the reader) becomes wider. There's just one book left in the series, which (so far) really does live up to the extremely well deserved hype.

Easter is always the time for my annual reread of Susan Cooper's Greenwitch, my very favourite of her Dark Is Rising series. Seaside holidays, 200-year-old Cornish smuggling history bubbling up to haunt an entire village of the smugglers' descendants, weird children's folk horror, women having emotions near the sea, and the sea having emotions right back at women: what's not to love?

Finally, I've been reading my way through Seasons of Glass and Iron, Amal El-Mohtar's short story (and poetry) collection. I think I've read pretty much every item previously, as there is no new work, and most of it was published in online SFF magazines, or on El-Mohtar's own website, but it's lovely to see it all brought together in one place. As with all short fiction collections, I enjoy some stories more than others, but in this case everything works as a coherent whole. You can see her coming back time and time again to the same ground: language and multilingualism, the natural world (especially birds and bodies of water), books and writing and folk tales, cities and cafes and migration, and relationships between women in all their myriad forms. It's as if she picks up an idea, polishes it into an exquisite, self-contained gem, and then returns to pick it up some years later to polish again into a slightly different gem when she realises she has more to say, or a different understanding. There are few authors whose work I feel finds its most perfect expression in shorter form, but Amal El-Mohtar is one of them. This collection represents about twenty years' worth of fiction (it was interesting to see her talk in the afterward about the vanished world of SFF publishing/aspiring author Livejournal, and how this incredible community shaped her as a writer and nurtured so many of these stories into existence; I witnessed this from the periphery and it feels that this particular alchemy is an impossibility in a much louder, more crowded and fast-moving internet), and it's my fervent hope that we can look forward to a similar collection in twenty years' time — with the same favourite themes and imagery explored with even greater richness.

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This or that meme

2026-04-05T15:57:16Z

Fifty this or that questions, via svgurl.

( Behind the cut )

If you want a clean version of the questions without any answers, you can copy the code here:

<b>50 This or Thats</b>

1. Bagels or donuts? 
2. Bar soap or body wash? 
3. Being afraid or being embarrassed? 
4. Big bash or intimate gathering? 
5. Board games or video games? 
6. Bridgerton or The Crown? 
7. Cardio or weights? 
8. Carpet or hardwood? 
9. Clue/Cluedo or Monopoly?
10. Cook or do the dishes?
11. Damp socks or a pebble in your shoe? 
12. Dragons or unicorns?  
13. Family vacation or solo trip? 
14. Fork or spoon? 
15. General admission or assigned seats? 
16. Give or receive? 
17. Hot cocoa or hot cider? 
18. Iced tea or hot tea? 
19. Italian food or Mexican food? 
20. Long car ride or short plane trip? 
21. Mountains or beach? 
22. Movie candy or popcorn?
23. Musical theater or concert?
24. Nightlight or no light? 
25. Ninja attack or pirate attack? 
26. Outer space or bottom of the ocean? 
27. Painful truth or comforting lie? 
28. Pancakes or waffles? 
29. Passion or friendship? 
30. Phone call or text? 
31. Pizza or tacos? 
32. Play or concert? 
33. Playlists or podcasts? 
34. Puzzles or coloring books? 
35. Rain or snow? 
36. Ramen or pho? 
37. River or lake? 
38. Roller coaster or Ferris wheel? 
39. Roller skates or ice skates? 
40. Salt or pepper?
41. Singing in the shower or singing in the car? 
42. Skinny fries or thick cut? 
43. Sneezing or coughing?
44. Snowboarding or skateboarding? 
45. Snowmen or sandcastles? 
46. Spicy or mild? 
47. Street food or fine dining? 
48. Subtitles or dubbed? 
49. Wine or beer? 
50. Zoo or aquarium?

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Very belatedly: February and March TV shows

2026-04-02T12:56:19Z

I think the fact that I'm only getting to this TV logging now reflects the kind of month I've had. It's been busy — in a good way, but still busy.

There was, of course, time for TV — five shows finished in the past two months. Those were:

Under Salt Marsh, a waterlogged Welsh noir set on a fictional island (under threat from climate change-induced rising sea levels, and periodically cut off from the mainland when the causeway road in and out is covered by tidal waters), in which the death of a child dredges up connections with the death of a child a few years previously. As with this kind of story about supposedly idyllic close-knit communities, various wounds and tensions lie under the surface, and are brought into light by the shocking crimes.

The latest season of Industry, a sort of British Succession-esque show about terrible, selfish people working in the finance industry. Every season picks a real-world political upheaval and shows how it affects global finance, the people who work in it, and the slow shifts in UK politics it provokes, even if those are not immediately obvious in the moment. This season focused on attempts to regulate tech companies (particularly the real age-verification legislation passed by the current UK government), through the window of a company that previously made its money as a payment processor for the seedier side of the internet and is now attempting to clean up its act and present itself as a poster child for the new Labour government's anxiously pro-business posturing. As always in Industry, there's more going on beneath the glossy surface, and the appeal — such as it is — is watching terrible people destroy the world, and destroy themselves in the process, all the while thinking that they are succeeding. By the end, everyone gets what they deserve, and has convinced themselves that it's what they wanted all along, and viewers will feel as if they need a thorough shower to rid themselves of all the accumulated moral grime.

High Country, an Australian mystery miniseries set in a small town in the Victorian mountains, in which (you guessed it) a series of deaths and disappearances dredge up long-buried secrets and injustices that make a mockery of the town's genteel facade and close-knit community. The police officer in charge of solving this string of crimes is Indigenous, but was adopted by a white mother and Indigenous father (the father subsequently died shortly after her adoption), and that longstanding trauma of being cut off from one's roots, identity and community, which is such a strong and horrific throughline of so many Australian Indigenous people's experiences is an important component of the show. The setting is striking (with that common Australian undercurrent of unease in a hostile landscape), the cast is solid, but I think the pacing is a bit uneven.

The latest season of Bridgerton, which presumably needs little introduction. This installment adapts Benedict's (the second Bridgerton sibling's) book, which is a Regency Cinderella retelling of an ill-used illegitimate daughter of a nobleman exploited by her stepmother after her father's death. As with all previous seasons of Bridgerton, there's a sort of half-hearted attempt to make some deeper points about social justice (in this case class and the huge army of servants whose unnoticed labour allows the show's aristocratic characters to live their charmed and untroubled lives), but this is at odds with the frothy tone and nothing much comes of it. I enjoyed the central romance (the charm and chemistry of the two actors, who were clearly having a great time, did a lot to help with this), and I thought Bridgerton sister Francesca's subplot was handled very well (presumably setting things up for the next season), although in general I think there are too many subplots per season and some are very superficially served.

Sandokan, a deeply silly Italian (but mainly in English) Netflix adaptation of some nineteenth-century adventure novels about the titular character, a pirate operating around what is now Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and various other southeast Asian countries, along with his ragtag international crew of misfits. The show's tone swings wildly between (if we're taking pirate examples) Pirates of the Caribbean without the supernatural elements and Black Sails — it can't decide if it wants to be a swashbuckling adventure story or a serious exploration of the iniquities of colonialism and empire, and none of the actors (least of all the one playing Sandokan, an Italian actor of Turkish background, whose acting ability is far exceeded by his looks) is particularly equal to the task. Add to that some eyebrow-raising moments of uncritical orientalism, and you can probably see why I can't really recommend the show, although I found it endearingly silly, and kind of ended up loving it quite a lot.

I'm not going to be around enough tomorrow to do an open thread post, so consider this your open thread prompt one day early: what TV have you been enjoying recently?

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Further west than west

2026-03-29T12:26:09Z

It's been another homebody weekend, which I don't regret in the slightest. I did go out on Friday night to an event at the tiny local museum, which was a launch of sorts for its latest temporary exhibition. The museum is so small that the temporary exhibitions are housed in a single room about the size of my kitchen; this one was about the history of beer-making, and so the launch event involved talks and tasters from a trio of local breweries. We followed this up with a drink in our favourite cafe/bar, which was heaving with customers — always a good sign on a Friday night.

Other than that, it's been spring cleaning — I cleaned all the external windows and windowsills, including clambering onto the kitchen roof in order to get at our upper floor bedroom windows — classes and swimming at the gym, and batch-cooking. Matthias and I also spent half an hour or so this morning planting wildflower seeds in the front and back garden raised beds, plus beetroot seeds in the vegetable beds. The other seeds that I started off in the growhouse — chives, cucumbers, rocket, salad greens, and spring onions — are coming along nicely, even though it's been cold.

Other good things: Pretty Lethal, the ridiculous black comedy/luridly violent action thriller involving a troupe of American ballet dancers stranded in a Hungarian forest en route to a competition in Budapest, and swept up into a deadly showdown between two rival gangs of goons who want to kill them, one of which is headed up by bitter ex-ballet dancer Uma Thurman (sporting an indeterminate Eastern European accent). The soundtrack is all scores from famous ballets, and all the action scenes involve a sort of intersection of martial arts and ballet. It's as silly as it sounds, and made for a great Saturday night film.

I finished up my Earthsea reread over lunch with The Other Wind, which I think I've only ever read once or twice, but which remains achingly beautiful, like a dragon's half-remembered flight across a sunset sky. I think the peak of the series is probably Tehanu, though, which always renders me awestruck. I have read the Earthsea short story collections at some point, but I don't own copies, so those will have to wait if I want the reread to be fully complete. For now, though, I plan to turn to one of the books from my stack of five from the public library, or possibly Amal El-Mohtar's new short story collection, which I'd preordered and was delivered to me last week.

I hope you've all been having similarly cosy weekends.

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Friday open thread: icebreaker questions

2026-03-27T13:24:26Z

It's been a challengingly busy week (if I owe you comments, I will get to them at some point this weekend, sorry), and my brain is a bit rubbish at coming up with a prompt this time around, so I'm going with the following:

What is the most memorable icebreaker question you've been asked, in any context?

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When the smoke clears I'll still be small

2026-03-22T16:08:06Z

I've been ridiculously happy and full of energy all weekend — a side-effect, I assume, of the sunshine, warm spring weather, and abundance of flowers and birds. Whatever the cause, I've made good use of this uncharacteristic energy: throwing myself enthusiastically into my classes at the gym, swimming my laps so quickly that I managed 1km in twenty minutes this morning, and undertaking loads of spring cleaning and garden work. In the past two days, I have dusted all hard surfaces in the house, wet-dusted all the internal doors, swept the floors (this latter is something I do weekly anyway, but the dusting necessitated bringing it forward), swept the outdoor deck, weeded stinging nettles from the lawn, and gathered up all the bark mulch from the vegetable garden that the birds had hurled all over the surrounding patio. Inevitably, half an hour after I cleaned up the mulch, the same birds and returned and thrown it back over the path again. I'm glad that our vegetable garden is alive with worms and bugs that the birds want to eat, I just wish they wouldn't do so with such enthusiasm!

I've bought a bunch of heirloom seeds from this woman, and I had planned to sow them over the weekend as well, but the weather next week is going to be cold and frosty again, so I decided against it.

Yesterday Matthias and I had our first outdoor market food truck lunch of the year in the gorgeous patio beer garden of our favourite cafe/bar, in which every table was taken, with people and dogs of various sizes revelling in the sunshine.

In the evening, we watched Sentimental Value, the Norwegian-language film. It's both a movie about making movies (in well trodden Oscar nominee fashion), and abut dysfunctional family relationships — in this case, between an ageing screenwriter/director and his two adult daughters, who is trying to bring a comeback film to the screen dealing with his own complicated family history and mending the relationships with his daughters — with beautiful, functional Scandinavian architecture as the scenery. I liked it a lot, and particularly appreciated that this version of this type of story was capable of understanding that this kind of neglectful paternal relationship really messes up the children, and that immense talent and driven sense of vocation in the chosen career is no excuse (and in fact makes the hurt even worse, because it's so obvious to the children that their parent prefers being in his workplace setting, and is so immensely valued for what he is and does for all the colleagues and mentees in that setting, in a manner that he never demonstrates in the family). (Touching a raw nerve? The film touched all of them.)

Books this week have been a mixed bag in terms of genre and content, but all equally good. On a whim, I picked up Hostis (Vale Aida), a historically divergent (to put it mildly) take on Hannibal and Scipio which was tremendous fun. If you've read the author's fic about these two figures (including an In Space AU; I think it's fine to link the two identities since the author does so on AO3), you'll know what you're in for. I'm only sorry to see that so much time has passed since Hostis was published, since it ends on a huge cliffhanger, and I wonder if Aida experiencing any difficulties in writing the follow-up.

I then moved on to Three Years on Fire, the third of Andrey Kurkov's diaries about his experiences living through Russia's fullscale invasion of Ukraine. This one covers late 2023 up to early 2025. It's interesting (and sad) to read it so soon after the second volume, as the change in tone and expectation is so extreme — although fairly representative of shifts I've witnessed in Ukrainian society as a whole. There's less optimism, although still incredible resilience, and a sort of weary resignation that things will get worse, but that the only way out is through, and therefore they must keep enduring, as the only other option is to give up, and cease to exist as an independent nation where the chance at a future of democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech, and respect for human rights is possible. In spite of this heavier tone, Kurkov is still a forensic observer of the human condition, with a keen eye for little episodes and moments to serve as representative illustrations of life in the 21st century as a civilian in a country at war.

I was a bit at a loss as to what to read next. I'm still waiting on a bunch of library holds to come in, so I elected to start an Earthsea reread, having not returned to this series for a good ten years at least. It's not really the right time of the year for it — they feel like such autumnal books to me, although I guess The Tombs of Atuan has something of a vernal undercurrent, given that it's all about a young woman living buried beneath the earth, and bringing herself from darkness into light, under the open sky. The uncritical sexism of the early books aside, the series remains to me an incredible work of literature: gorgeous language, well-considered, meaty ideas concealed in simplicity, and beautiful, beautiful imagery that is at once uncanny and familiar. It's remarkable to me how good Le Guin is at creating such a strong sense of place for a place that does not exist.

Of course, to me, the strongest pull is all those other oceans, and all those sunsets and sunrises, just beyond the last known shore. My journal's title is 'Beyond Selidor,' after all.

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Post of links and music

2026-03-21T17:52:08Z

Rather than share each item individually, I'm just going to link to goodbyebird's mostly good news links roundup. There's some fantastic environmental and sociopolitical news there.

I'll add to all this with the news that you can now walk around the entire coastline of England. It's worth reading the article in full, because this undertaking is extremely impressive and future-focused.

Another good news story, via 2022 Ukrainian Nobel laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk: the tropical plants in the greenhouse of Kyiv's Hryshko Botanical Garden survived Russia's winter bombardment of energy facilities, thanks to the concerted efforts of staff and ordinary Kyivan citizens.

And I just find this latest batch of artistry from wisdm, in which he styles the celestial bodies of the solar system in high fashion clothing, to be breathtakingly good.

I've basically been immersively living in these two songs for the past week:

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Friday open thread: mass-produced vs hand-made

2026-03-20T17:04:44Z

The birds are singing, the evening light is beautiful, and my salad greens, herb, and cucumber seeds are sprouting in the growhouse. It's a lovely start to the weekend.

Today's Friday open thread prompt is courtesy of a suggestion from lirazel: what are some types of food that only taste good when handmade/made on a small scale (as opposed to the industrial scale supermarket version)?

My immediate response was 'what type of food doesn't taste vastly better when made on a small scale by hand?' but then I thought a bit more, and realised there were quite a lot of foodstuffs where the difference is non-existent (homemade chips where you chop up a potato and roast it in the oven or deep fry it are no more delicious than the fast-food equivalent), or where the effort involved to make it by hand far exceeds any reward in better flavour (condiments in particular: I'm not going to make my own soy sauce, harissa, dijon mustard, etc, you know?).

However, I'd say that beyond the 'too much effort required' category, in my experience most other types of food are better if they're made on a smaller scale. The biggest one for me is baked goods. There is no bread, cake, pie, biscuit, or pastry on Earth in which the mass-produced supermarket (or otherwise industrial-scale) version tastes better than, or even remotely equally good as, the homemade or expensive artisanal bakery version. (I admit to some significant bias here. I worked part-time from the age of 15-23 — the first years of my working life — in artisanal bakeries/patisseries, the first thing I look up in every place I visit is the most highly recommended bakeries/patisseries, and I'm just in general a massive baked goods snob, which is somewhat hilarious in that I'm a very good cook, and comically, catastrophically bad at baking.)

What are your equivalent foodstuffs, if any?

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The bees, adrift; the light, drifting

2026-03-15T16:16:12Z

Hot cross buns have reappeared at my favourite bakery in town (the time between them posting about this on their Instagram stories today, and me rushing out to the bakery to buy some was six minutes), everything is all wild garlic, all the time, and I hung my laundry on the washing line outdoors for the first time this year. All, in their way, are my personal markers of spring's return — although it began raining after lunch and I had to rush out into the garden to rescue everything before it had completely finished drying.

Yesterday I was in Cambridge for the afternoon. I went for a massage (the masseuse told me my shoulders and neck were the tensest she'd ever seen in a client), refilled my spice jars at the refill shop, and got my hair cut. My hairdresser, who is prone to belief in conspiracy theories and quackery, didn't even spout any nonsense this time around (apart from recommending black seed oil as a cure for all medical ailments), which was something of a relief.

After the haircut, I met Matthias for dinner at this restaurant, which was fantastic, and of course featured at least one dish involving wild garlic!

( I've read three books this week )

Today has been sleepy and slow: laundry, cups of coffee, hot cross buns, reading in the living room. For most of the morning I was following the sun around the room like a cat, basking. Now, I'm watching the rain on the windows.

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Friday open thread: spotted on public transport

2026-03-13T15:33:20Z

I had so much fun with the 'overheard on public transport' prompt last week, and trepkos's answer got me thinking of a follow-up question, which I hope people will enjoy just as much. This week's question is not about things you've heard, but rather about things you've seen:

What is the strangest thing you've seen someone wearing and/or carrying on public transport?

I don't actually have a particularly good response here. The most memorable thing I can think of is one of the times Matthias and I went down to visit our friends L and C in Devon during a public holiday weekend, and the return train journey was incredibly crowded, including, in our carriage, with an older couple who were carrying two newly-purchased antique chairs, and were accompanied by a giant dog, which lay down in the aisle. Between the dog and the chairs, the carriage became impassable. On another trip to that part of the world (with my mum, in order to spend a week hiking along the Southwest Coastal Pathway), we got off at the end of the train line and had to catch a bus to Tintagel — the last bus of the day — which left very late due to a guy with a massive surfboard begging and pleading with the driver to be allowed onto the bus with the surfboard, which was inevitably forbidden. But I don't think either of these things (the chairs+dog, or the surfboard) were particularly weird in the scheme of things — no doubt some of you will have witnessed much more bizarre stuff on journeys of your own.

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Six for gold

2026-03-08T15:48:48Z

I've got a cup of smokey black tea, I've got macarons, and I'm having a restful afternoon as the weekend wraps up. Other than my two daily trips out to the gym and pool, and a market wander during lunch today, I haven't been further than the bakery — where Matthias and spent an enjoyable time last night, drinking wine and eating a cheese platter with fresh slices of baguette for dinner. The bakery has been doing those wine nights for a couple of years now, but other than a flurry of visits when this was first starting out, I haven't really attended many. I should do it more — wine and cheese by candlelight: what's not to love?

My reading this week has consisted solely of a reread of Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows duology. This was prompted in part by my knowledge that she has gone back in and re-edited the books for new editions, 'correcting' authorial choices that she had felt were flaws or weaknesses of the books. I'm of two minds about this sort of thing — Samantha Shannon did it with the first three books in her dystopian Bone Season series — I understand why authors are itching to get out the red pen and fix weaker writing from earlier in their careers, but I personally wish they would leave things be and have the courage to just view problems in their earlier books as signs of how far they've developed as writers.

One of the things I know Bardugo was planning to 'correct' was to age up her gang of criminal underworld crooks so that the underlying premise (gangleading criminal mastermind aged 17, with his crew of similarly aged misfits, each of whom have equally improbable achievements for characters of their youth) was less ridiculous. I know she received a lot of criticism for this, most of which I felt was misplaced: it's a fantasy YA adventure series, and teenagers in improbable and unlikely positions of leadership and achievement are kind of to be expected in that genre. The absolutely absurd situations in which Kaz Brekker and his gang of unlikely allies find themselves is part of the ridiculous charm of the duology for me, and I have no interest in reading a 'corrected' version with older characters (especially since I imagine all their interpersonal relationships will remain very adolescent in character). For all past rereads of the series, I've relied on library copies, but this was enough to make me bite the bullet and buy secondhand copies of the older editions.

It's been a couple of years since I last read the duology, and I'm pleased to report it remains as enjoyable as ever. The heists and sleights of hand are spectacular and over the top, the stakes are high, the gang of mismatched misfits — all dispossessed in one way or another, almost all refugees or immigrants, all traumatised in one way or another — start out at odds, and ultimately find a sense of resolution, home and healing in each other. The other parts of Bardugo's imagined world in the Grishaverse (fake fantasy Russia, fake fantasy China, fake fantasy Scandinavia) are laughably cartoonish thin caricatures, but her Ketterdam: fake fantasy Amsterdam, a mercantile city of canals, warehouses, schemers, scammers and commerce remains a delightful creation. It's a place where everyone comes to make their fortunes, or to outrun their pasts — where at once no one is at home, and therefore it can be home for anyone. I always love coming back to spend time there. Other than my longstanding quibble with one character death that feels cynically done in order to ensure readers know the story's stakes are high (and Bardugo then having to wildly cast around for the one character she could safely kill off without risking a massive reader backlash or her planned spinoff sequel), I loved it from start to finish, and felt the reread was very worth doing. I'm glad I made the effort to get my hands on those older editions.

My tea is getting cold, so I'll leave things here. I hope everyone's been having restful weekends.

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Friday open thread: overheard on public transport

2026-03-06T17:24:04Z

I had to catch the bus home after work on Tuesday, instead of my regular train, but this longer, more frustrating journey was made somewhat enjoyable by the conversation two teenage boys were having behind me. They began the trip updating their respective mothers over the phone that they were going to be late home (with many repeated 'love you Mum! Yeah, love you Mum!' and so on), then pivoted to the epic online sleuthing they had undertaken when one of their friends claimed to have a new girlfriend but only provided photographic evidence of this ('It was so easy! All I had to do was reverse image-search the photo and it was obvious he'd just taken photos of a random girl on Instagram and Pinterest!'), then pivoted to the sort of inane philosophising that teenagers think is deep ('Religion is obviously just a tool for social control ... all wars in history were started because of religion — apart from economic wars'), and finally, having exhausted all other lines of conversation, started talking about how much they loved cheese and just naming different types of cheese ('Halloumi!' 'Gouda!' 'Do you know you can make your own mozzarella?' and so on).

I found the whole thing kind of endearing, and it certainly provided entertainment over the course of the 50-minute bus ride.

I never use headphones in public spaces as I like to stay alert, so I have overheard the most ridiculous things over the years, including:

A woman updating one of her friends about a family member who had just been released from prison

A guy spending the entire hour-long train ride from Cambridge to London instructing his letting agent on how to make a legal case for evicting a tenant from his property

A guy spending the entire Cambridge-London train ride talking through various complex financial market trades he was making

A young guy explaining to his girlfriend (I was sitting across from them on one of those sets of four seats around a table) that his afternoon had involved a) stealing a car, b) being chased by police as he attempted to steal said car, c) crashing the car in the police car chase and getting injured, d) the police attempting to take him to the emergency department at the hospital but refusing to go ('The car owner decided not to press charges, so I said to the police that if they weren't arresting me I didn't want to go with them to hospital') — all at absolute top volume such that the entire crowded carriage could hear every single word

I have also overheard so many specialist doctors call up their colleagues and convey huge amounts of sensitive patient information over the phone, in the reception area of our library, seemingly oblivious to the fact that a person sitting at a reception desk is actually a human being with functioning ears.

I find it absolutely excruciating to talk over the phone in public — anything more than arranging meeting times/places or letting someone know I'm running late and I'll basically immediately tell the person that I'll call them back when I'm at home — so it's always mind-boggling to me the amount of highly personal stuff that some people feel comfortable discussing at top volume in crowded public transport.

So, my question for this week's open thread: what is the strangest thing you've ever overheard on public transport?

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