Beyond Selidor

Two final Hungarian politics links...

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:44:18 GMT

... 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.

comments

Dancing on the Danube

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:50:33 GMT

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.

comments

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

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:15:44 GMT

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!

comments

Friday open thread: board game background

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:19:36 GMT

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?

comments

A golden thread between hearts

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:29:30 GMT

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.

comments

This or that meme

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:57:16 GMT

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?

comments

Very belatedly: February and March TV shows

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:56:19 GMT

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?

comments

Further west than west

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:26:09 GMT

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.

comments

Friday open thread: icebreaker questions

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 13:24:26 GMT

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?

comments

When the smoke clears I'll still be small

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:08:06 GMT

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.

comments

Post of links and music

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 17:52:08 GMT

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:

comments

Friday open thread: mass-produced vs hand-made

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:04:44 GMT

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?

comments

The bees, adrift; the light, drifting

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:16:12 GMT

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.

comments

Friday open thread: spotted on public transport

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:33:20 GMT

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.

comments

Six for gold

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 15:48:48 GMT

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.

comments

Friday open thread: overheard on public transport

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 17:24:04 GMT

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?

comments

A linkpost for the northern spring

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:22:18 GMT

I spent a delightful day working from home with the sunlight streaming in through all available (open!) windows, watching birds frolic around our new bird feeder. This latest batch of links has a similarly spring-like feeling — not all are cheerful and light-hearted, but there is a common theme of emerging into light and life.

The first three are all Ukrainian, sparked by the complicated emotions around the four anniversary of Russia's fullscale invasion, on 24th February:

The Kyiv Independent team — journalists, videographers, adminstrative staff and more — took readers behind the scenes to show the ingenuity and determination it took to survive this winter's Russian-inflicted energy crisis and carry on bringing their reporting to the world.

From Ukrainian Institute London, a panel discussion on 'culture as security'

And from chef and campaigner Olia Hercules, a video conversation with Dima Deinega, founder of an (excellent) UK-based Ukrainian vodka company, which ended up being one of the most life-affirming discussions I've experienced.

On other topics:

An interview in the Guardian about being a professional chef in Antarctica

Via tozka, the Persephone Letter, which, to quote tozka, They're subtle marketing, more about vibes, focused on sharing things similar to Persephone Books/the people who enjoy them then about blasting sales info or whatever. If I must be marketed to, I'd rather receive it in this manner: rambly, meandering newsletters or blog posts sprinkled with links to interesting things that give a fuller picture of the person or organisation behind it, rather than just a list of things to buy now.

(Incidentally, the Antarctica link came from a similar newsletter, this one from the Vanderlyle restaurant, which takes a similar approach.)

I think that's it for now.

comments

Just banging tunes and DJ sets

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:17:17 GMT

The weekend kicked off in delightful style with the silent disco on Friday night. It was the usual joyful chaos of crowds dancing and singing their hearts out to the cheesiest music imaginable. Usually the three DJs are split thematically, with one channel playing pop, one alternative music, and one hip hop and rnb, but this time they split up across the decades. I think if I counted every song up, the '90s channel probably slightly won out for me, but I was too busy happily jumping around to count. My face literally hurt from smiling so much and so widely. Amusingly, there was a bit of confusion at the beginning when one of the DJs announced that somehow his channel was being transmitted at Ely train station. I have no idea how this would even be possible, but if true, the commuters heading north or south at 8pm would have had a rather disorienting experience.

Although — in deference to the cathedral location and the fact that most attendees are over forty — the event finished at 11pm and I was home about five minutes later, three hours straight of dancing followed by not enough sleep did take its toll, and my two hours at classes in the gym on Saturday morning were even more exhausting than usual. I made it through, hauled myself into town to meet Matthias at the market, and whipped around doing the grocery shopping at top speed in order to escape the impending rain. We made it into our favourite cafe/bar, amazing food truck cheese, sauerkraut and pickle toasties in hand, just as the first drops began to fall.

Spring is finally starting to show its face — dark pink flowers on the quince tree, crocuses blossoming purple in the raised beds, and other bulbs emerging from the ground. I bought a bird feeder, filled it with mixed seeds, and hung it up in the back garden, although I haven't noticed any birds making particular use of it so far. This year, I'm starting my fermentation plans early, and made a test batch of this sauerkraut yesterday. It needs a few days left alone in a dark cupboard, and then I'll test the results.

This morning was swimming, crepes, river and market wander, with coffee from the rig in the market square. I've just returned downstairs after a very lazy yoga class, and I plan to spend the rest of the afternoon slowly winding down, with my crysanthamum flower tea in hand, catching up on Dreamwidth.

I read two books this week, both in their way dealing with trauma recovery, one with staggeringly better results than the other. The difference in quality is so dramatic that it almost feels unfair to compare them, and yet I can't help doing so due to their thematic overlap.

First up was Deerskin, Robin McKinley's retelling of the 'Donkeyskin' fairytale, which was the remaining recommendation from my post requesting fairytale/mythology retellings. This dark and unsettling fairytale has incestuous rape at its heart, and so for obvious reasons doesn't get included very often in anthology collections. McKinley handles this difficult subject matter with perception and sensitivity, telling a story in which physical and mental flight, and space and time (in a sense outside of space and time) experiencing the cyclical and linear growth of the natural world allow her heroine to return back to herself, in healing, bravery, justice and human connection. One thing I always feel McKinley does very well is convey the full richness of all the senses, and this is on full display in Deerskin: the bite of the winter cold, the softness of a new puppy's first fur, the welcome intense taste of food after a long period of hunger, the way fear and trauma are felt in the body, and so on. The whole thing is just staggeringly well done — McKinley at her absolute best.

The second book was A Theory of Dreaming, Ava Reid's follow-up to her dark academia A Study in Drowning. The former was originally intended as a standalone, and certainly drew its characters' stories to a satisfying close, but given it ended up being a breakaway success almost solely due to TikTok word-of-mouth and reviving its author's career, I assume a sequel was more or less inevitable. Dreaming sees its central couple Effie and Preston return to university, uncovering more shocking secrets about the great canonical works of literature that underpin their two warring nations' origin myths, contend with more institutional sexism, classism and xenophobia, and try to shore up their relationship in the face of Effie's ongoing mental illness and trauma. The problem, as always with Reid, is the complete absence of any subtlety; everything is overexplained and beaten into the reader's head with the clunkiness of a hammer blow. Reid is one of the worst culprits for a kind of fearful authorial overexplanation, as if writing in anticipation of a social media mob ready to descend at the slightest hint that depiction might equal endorsement, spelling out her books' central messages over and over again like a streaming-era TV show putting clunky plot and thematic exposition into its dialogue in case its audience gets distracted by mobile phones and misses something crucial. The rarefied ivory tower privilege of her fictionalised university, the unsophisticated exploration of war, the resolution to all the various injustices piled up on Effie — everything is anxiously spelt out, and then spelt out again, and then concluded in the most 'and then everyone applauded' Tumblr post manner imaginable. As with A Study in Drowning, the inspiration from AS Byatt's Possession is clear (and acknowledged), but honestly, that just made me want to reread Possession again.

I have another Ava Reid book making its way to me at some point via library holds, and I know it's likely to irritate me in similar ways. Her first couple of books had promise, but I feel everything since has been a serious step down in quality, and yet I keep trying.

comments

Friday open thread: activities in incongruous places

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:44:43 GMT

Tonight I'm going out to the next iteration of the silent disco (80s/90s/2000s music — the cheesiest you can imagine), which as always is taking place in the cathedral. There's always a weird moment of disorientation when you enter the cavernous space of this ancient medieval cathedral ... and it's full of dancing people of all ages, dressed in lurid fluoro colours, stage lighting, and DJs.

So my prompt for this week's open thread is:

What examples of activities taking place in wildly incongruous spaces have you encountered?

comments

Sunshine on my window

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 15:17:15 GMT

I'm really tired, and don't feel in any way prepared for the upcoming working week, but I've been trying to mitigate that with a very lazy Sunday. I had grand plans to plant the first of the spring seeds and start germinating seedlings in the growhouse, I had plans to go out for a walk with Matthias (the weather today is gorgeous), but instead I've spent the whole day vegetating in my wing chair in the living room, watching the tail-end of the Winter Olympics from the corner of my eye, watching Olia Hercules cook borshch on a BBC cooking show, scrolling around on Dreamwidth, and so on.

Matthias and I saw Marty Supreme at the community cinema earlier this week, and we'll be heading out to see Hamnet tonight, so it's definitely been a film-heavy time by our standards. I'm anticipating a lot of cathartic crying tonight.

I've continued to make my way through mythology/fairytale/folktale retellings recommended by you on a previous post. This week it was Girl Meets Boy (Ali Smith), a slim little novella in conversation with Ovid's Metamorphoses, concerned with fluidity in gender, gender presentation, sexuality, and so on. It felt very, very, very of its time and place (the UK in the 2000s), but that's not to say that its specificity was a bad thing.

I also read The Swan's Daughter (Roshani Chokshi), a lush, surreal fairytale of a book in which the titular daughter (one of seven sisters born to a power-hungry wizard and his swanmaiden wife) finds herself caught up in a competition to win the hand of the kingdom's prince in marriage. Chokshi's previous books have been very melodramatic and earnest, and she's relished the opportunity here to shift the tone to something much more humorous and knowing, while still digging into her favourite big themes: the tension between love and vulnerability, genuine love requiring an embrace of uncertainty, and the interplay of love and monstrosity made literal.

It reminded me so much of one of my very favourite books — The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (Patricia McKillip) — although the latter is portentous and serious where Chokshi is whimsical and humorous that I picked up the McKillip for yet another reread. I've written about it here before, so suffice it to say now that it remains an incredible book — sharp and perceptive, devastating and beautiful.

I'll leave you with this fantastic link to a Shrove Tuesday tradition in which contestants dressed in costumes race through central London while flipping pancakes in pans. It's as delightful as you might imagine.

comments

The education meme

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 15:48:32 GMT

I've been seeing this doing the rounds for a couple of weeks now, and have found everyone's different responses really interesting. I particularly appreciated people who are parents answering each question twice — once about their own experiences, once about those of their children, and teasing out the commonalities, continuities, and changes.

[This took me three hours to write so I'm not going back in and editing all the typos.]

Before I launch into my answers, I think providing some context is helpful.

( A lot of context )

Now, on to the questions!

( Meme questions )

Wow, that took a really long time to fill in! I had a lot to say! On balance, my entire experience of education as a child was a very positive one, due to various privileges that are presumably obvious from my answers to all those questions. The fact that I had an excellent education at pretty well resourced public (state) schools in a country where the divide between public and private schooling has continued to grow in the intervening years shows that good state education can be done, if it's adequately resourced. It's also left me with a bit of a chippy lifelong belief that (outside of disabilities that public schools are not resourced to support, and a small handful of other cases) private education shouldn't exist, and if it has to exist, it should be very rare.

comments

Friday open thread: fundamental changes

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 13:33:37 GMT

I wasn't sure how to title this week's open thread, but hopefully it will become clear what I'm asking.

Today's prompt is inspired by an article I read in my hometown's local newspaper, looking into the history behind Australia's adoption of decimal currency, which happened 60 years ago. They interviewed a woman who works at Australia's national mint (Canberra being Canberra, I — like virtually every Canberran school child — went on a school trip to the mint at some point, and it's also located on the same street as a) the pool where I learnt to swim, b) the location of my gymnastics club (although this moved to another venue two years after I started gymnastics classes), and c) the place where I did first aid training when I was working in child care), and the whole thing is a great snapshot of a moment of fundamental change in the way Australians lived their day-to-day lives.

Similar changes I can think of include Sweden shifting to driving on the right-hand side of the road, Samoa shifting into a different time zone in 2011, various countries changing to the Gregorian calendar, or massive political shifts such as a country gaining independence or having its borders redrawn (e.g. German reunification, the breakup of Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union, etc), or becoming part of the EU or similar international groupings.

So my question is: are there any similar fundamental changes that took place in your country? Were they within your own lifetime?

comments

The snow on the earth, the snow on the branches

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 14:24:50 GMT

This weekend has been calm, relaxing, and wintry. Yesterday's skies were clear and blue, and it was a real pleasure to walk out to the gym for my two hours of classes, watched through the windows by myriad cats as they observed me make my way through the freezing air. After lunch, Matthias and I assembled the growhouse we bought for germinating this year's vegetables. All things being equal, I'm hoping to start with tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, and some herbs by the end of the month.

In the evening, we went out for a meal at this place — a former stately home that's now a boutique hotel and events venue, just slightly out of town near the village of Stuntney. It's not reachable by public transport, and the last time we ate there we got taxis back and forth, but this time around we decided to try walking. It's not the most picturesque walk: you walk along a paved footpath next to a main road for about half the trip, then you have the option of continuing along the main road with no footpath (i.e. walking on the verge), or going slightly out of the way into Stuntney village, walking the length of the village and then rejoining the main road when the village ends. We went with the latter (the idea of walking along the verge of a main road in the dark did not appeal), and the whole thing took just under an hour. It was definitely a good way to work up an appetite! It was lovely to sit in the bar next to an open fire, drinking champagne, before moving into the restaurant for the meal, which was fairly solid gastropub-type food, in a conservatory with views back across the fens to the cathedral, and a woman singing covers of various pop songs. The whole experience was so warming and cosy.

It was meant to start raining and snowing at 1am, but in actual fact this only really arrived in the light of the morning — drenching me when I ducked out to the bakery to pick up pastries for breakfast. We had deliberately planned to spend the whole of Sunday indoors, and the advent first of heavy rain, and then of snow, confirmed the wisdom of this decision! The snow was intense: fat flakes that danced through the air, and settled all over the trees, roofs, and ground. It lasted for a couple of hours, although it's all well on the way to melting now, and turning to slush. While it lasted, it was a beautiful backdrop to some slow yoga, watching the Olympics, and lots of reading.

You may recall that a few weeks back, I was asking for recommendations of fairytale/mythology/folktale retellings, and this week is when I've made proper efforts to start with some of the books you recommended. This somehow worked out as being two very different Eros/Cupid and Psyche retellings: The Sharpest Thorn (Victoria Audley) and Till We Have Faces (C.S. Lewis), both doing very different things with the myth, both doing them well.

( Cut for some (positive) remarks on The Sharpest Thorn, as I know the author here on Dreamwidth and this gives the choice whether to read my remarks or not )

As for the Lewis, I went into this with some trepidation that I'd tried to overcome due to my general trust in the taste of the people who'd recommended it. I last read Lewis more than twenty years ago, when I was assigned That Hideous Strength to read for a university class during my undergrad degree, and felt the book's misogyny with an almost physical force. It remains one of only two books that made me so angry that I literally hurled them at the wall, and I had determined then to never, ever read another C.S. Lewis book again.

I genuinely cannot reconcile the writing of women (from a woman's first-person perspective, even) in Till We Have Faces with the seething, misogynistic contempt of That Hideous Strength. It's almost as if the books are written by two entirely different people. This retelling tells the story of Cupid and Psyche from the point of view of one of Psyche's sisters (who, in the original versions of the tale, out of jealousy of their sister's material circumstances, convince her to break her divine husband's taboo on viewing him, sparking Psyche's exile, misery, and ill-treatment), and what it's really concerned with is the gulf between the human and the divine, and how the former are only able to perceive the latter dimly, through darkness. I'm not doing it full justice with that description — really, it's something that has to be read to experience fully — but I'm just in awe, really. It's one of the few works of fiction that really conveys the yawning gulf between mortal and immortal ways of being, seeing, and experiencing existence. Per Lewis, ordinary human beings are for the most part so incapable of understanding the divine that they fill in this chasm with darkness, with symbols, with metaphor, and with monstrosity. What an incredible book (although I couldn't help rolling my eyes indulgently at the whole Golden Bough of it all — oh mid-twentieth-century authors with interest in comparative religion, never change).

In the time since I've started this post, the snow has now melted fully, and that silvery snowlit quality in the sky has been replaced by soggy grey. The afternoon is, I suppose, somewhat running away from me. This cosy conclusion to the weekend, however, holds nothing more complicated than some slow-cooking Iranian food for dinner, cups of smoky tea, and a fire in the wood-burning stove. It's been a good two days all around.

comments

Friday open thread: rewatching

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:27:05 GMT

It's cold, it's rainy, and a flock of wood pigeons has descended on the back garden. Let's do this week's open thread.

Today's open thread concept came to me when I was thinking about how frequently I reread books (there are certain books within my line of sight right now that I'm pretty sure I have probably reread several hundred times), and how rarely in comparison I rewatch films or TV shows. I definitely rewatched stuff a lot more when I was a teenager — this was the 1990s, when video rental shops were still a thing, and my friends and I used to have sleepovers almost every weekend, where we'd borrow three or four movies and fall asleep in someone's living room while watching them. We had a rotating series of favourites that we'd watch again and again — the first Matrix film and The Fifth Element were firm favourites, as were a bunch of the classic 1990s slasher films, plus the usual suspects among 1990s teen romantic comedies, The Craft, etc. My sister and I also used to rent and watch the same films over and over again.

But other than a couple of Buffy and Angel rewatches at various points in the past twenty years, and Matthias and I occasionally rewatching previously viewed films as part of our New Year's Eve themed movie nights (e.g. all three LotR films), rewatching is definitely less common for me than rereading. I assume this is because it's much more of a timesuck — in general I read much more quickly than I can watch a film or a TV show, and I have more control over how much I read in a single sitting, whereas viewing is dictated by the lenghth of the film or the TV episode.

What about you? Do you return to longform audiovisual media for repeat viewings? Has this changed over time? Is this different to your approach to rereading books?

comments

Bottles are emptied, to be filled up with tears

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 15:34:58 GMT

I spoke with sister #1 on Friday morning, and for various reasons the conversation left me with lingering miserable feelings for most of the weekend, and a real lack of motivation to do much. Nevertheless, I persisted and tried to do happy things in spite of myself.

Yesterday, Matthias and I caught the train and then the bus out to St Ives for another beer festival held in a church. The weather outside was miserable, but the atmosphere indoors was bubbly and cheerful. People brought their small children, and dogs of various sizes, and sat around chatting in the pews. We bumped unexpectedly into R and K, two former students from our niche subject department in Cambridge (the pair started their undergrad degrees the same year I started my MPhil, and I attended all the undergrad medieval Welsh classes at the same time as R) and their toddler son. They live in Windsor now, and I don't think I'd seen them since before the pandemic, so it was somewhat surprising to see them at a random beer festival in St Ives! The world is at once big, and small.

Matthias and I finished up our St Ives excursion with a drink in a tiny cocktail bar (the whole space only has about twelve seats in it), then a very hasty dinner in a restaurant in order to catch our bus back and make it home at a reasonable time. I do enjoy these days out to nearby towns and villages, and should remember to do things like this more often.

Today — because I was trying to be kind to myself and my bad mood — I cancelled my 8am swim and had what passes for me as a lie-in (i.e. I still woke up without an alarm at 7am but lay around in bed until 8am instead of immediately getting up), before going on a walk with Matthias. Without a car, there aren't many options in terms of walking (there are about four routes we can take), so it was the same loop walk we did on New Year's Day, which goes along the river, then through leafy suburban streets, before ending up in the market square, taking just over an hour. We drank hot drinks from the coffee rig, and sat in the crisp wintry sunshine, watching the world go by.

Other than that, it's been a day for pottering about at home with the Winter Olympics on in the background. I haven't really been able to focus on reading (although I did finish a reread of Vanessa Fogg's beautiful little fairytale of a novella, 'The Lilies of Dawn,' while eating lunch, and I enjoyed Rebecca Ferrier's The Salt Bind — nineteenth-century smugglers, miners and Cornish folklore, with the sea an ambivalent and constant presence — earlier in the week), and in general I just feel a bit scattered and unfocused. But I've got hibiscus tea, later I'll light the wood-burning stove, and yesterday was the first evening of the year in which the sun set at 5pm, and that's enough light and softness on which to build.

comments