Beyond Selidor

The sun and warmth continues, and I've tried to spend as much time as possible outdoors and moving this weekend. The less said about the state of my mental health, the better — but there are still nice things.

Yesterday, Matthias and I walked for about 10km to the village of Sutton, which was having a beer festival. (I don't drink beer, but I like the vibes of beer festivals in new-to-me venues.) The first half of the walk is lovely: on a little public footway across the typical flat East Anglian fields, then through the village of Witchford (very picturesque), and past an excellent farm and gardening shop. After that, however, the second half of the walk is on a footpath/cycle path along a major motorway, and although it's not difficult to walk (flat footpath all the way), it's very noisy and cluttered with speeding cars.

The beer festival was — incongruously, to my mind — in a church, and was a fairly standard rural English affair: lots of families with little children running wildly around the church, a handful of older men who I see from time to time around Ely, dogs of various sizes, and a massive group of Morris dancers. Matthias and I stayed for a few hours, then caught the little bus back into town (which, astonishingly, arrived on time, and took exactly as long as it was supposed to take on the drive back to central Ely). The weather was so lovely that we stayed out in town, hanging out in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar (along with everyone else, it seemed), and then eating dinner out in a newish restaurant that we'd been wanting to try for a while.

We were home early, and I was already tired enough by 8pm or so to want to go to bed, but tried to keep myself awake until a reasonable hour ... and of course when I did want to go to sleep, it eluded me for hours, and then was filled with ridiculous anxiety dreams (the dream in which I struggled for what felt like hours to get Zoom to load to teach a class at work, after which point one of my dream!students remarked sourly that if their trainer was unable to get Zoom to work, they didn't trust me to be competent enough to teach the content of the class, seemed too much on the nose even for me).

This morning, I dragged my exhausted self off to the pool, and dragged myself through the sunlit water, then returned home for the usual Sunday morning crepes, and laundry (the sight of which, hanging outside, drifting gently in the warm breeze, did lift my spirits). Matthias and I wandered around town, browsing a few stalls at the market, and generally enjoying the sense of everyone enjoying the first stirrings of spring.

This afternoon will be yoga, and reading, and rest.

Reading this week has been almost exclusively rereads, as I continue my nostalgic way through 1990s Australian YA novels. This time, this consisted of two series by two different authors: Robin Klein's Melling Sisters trilogy (historical fiction about four sisters growing up in genteel poverty in rural 1940s Australia, with a scatterbrained, dreamy mother, and a credulous father who has a tendency to be taken in by all kinds of get rich financial scams — prospecting for gold, buying shares in struggling farms or factories), and Libby Hathorn's Thunderwith and Chrysalis, about a teenage girl taken in by her father and stepmother after her mother's death, struggling to find herself in a life marked by loss and unmooring changes. Both series were as good as I remembered them — Klein's historical fiction in particular, which strikes a perfect balance between wacky childhood hijinks and a serious examination of the pain and petty humilations that come from living so close to the edge of financial disaster — and although they covered serious subject matter, they were exactly the kind of rest my brain needed.

The other book I read — Victoria Amelina's posthumously published Looking at Women Looking at War — was an exquisite piece of writing, and I feel I can't do justice to it in my current state. I'm hopeful I may be able to come back to it later and say more.

The breeze drifts through the open windows. The garden is alive with flocks of wood pigeons, and pairs of blackbirds. There are pink blossoms on the quince trees. The daffodils are promising to bloom, any day now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am back on Dreamwidth after two weeks' or so self-imposed internet blackout (as I warned was likely on my previous post). That meant no social media, no news websites, deleting Substack/etc emails from my inbox with subject lines left unread, no blogs, and no Dreamwidth — essentially no internet that wasn't essential for work, life admin, or communicating with loved ones.

It was essential for my mental health, and I feel a lot better for it.

I'm now slowly easing my way back in, with Dreamwidth being the first phase. (I'm not looking at real-time social media until December.) I'm planning to read back through entries from the past two days or so, but I'm not reading further back than that (and I will be skipping over any posts related to US politics or its global consequences, since my state of mind is still too fragile to handle it). If there's anything that happened (other than politics stuff) to which you want to draw my attention, please do feel free to link to the post in the comments (or if it's access-locked you can share via Dreamwidth messages).

Life without non-work internet has been a mixture of productive, relaxing, and strange. In bullet point form, the main things that happened:

I spent the last weekend in London for Matthias's birthday. We ate some great food, I met some of his work colleagues, and we went to two fantastic exhibitions (the Silk Road one at the British Museum, and the Medieval Women one at the British Library — both excellent, but so crowded).

I read a lot of books and watched a lot of TV.

I finished my Yuletide assignment and wrote one treat, with hopefully more treats finished soon.

Our boiler broke and leaked water all over our ceiling (it's in the loft of the house) for three weeks before the engineers were able to replace it. We had to keep going up into the loft via a very unstable ladder and bail out the leaks with buckets of water, and it was incredibly stressful.

I found being offline incredibly lonely. I mostly work from home, and Matthias generally doesn't get home until after 7pm, so often I will be on my own from 7am-7pm in the house with zero human interaction. I didn't realise the degree to which I relied on passive online presence for a sense of human connection until I cut it out completely, and found myself going out on lots of walks and running unnecessary errands to the bakery so as to have at least those tiny moments of interaction. It was weird.

I'm so glad to be back here with you all.

I'm just back from the pool, having done my final swim of 2023, it's getting close to the point where my friends and family in Australia start posting photos of fireworks, and the view from 2024, so let's do this.

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

( Questions and answers behind the cut )

This Saturday was the first time in over two weeks when I felt relaxed enough, and my brain felt uncluttered enough that I was able to open a book, and read it cover to cover. The book in question was The Promise by Damon Galgut, literary fiction following a multigenerational Afrikaans-speaking white South African family over the thirty years from 1986-2016, using the conceit of the family brought together for a funeral roughly every ten years to highlight the changes in South African society during that time. Those with some knowledge of South African history will know that the changes over this time period (and indeed from decade to decade within these thirty years) have been immense, and although I found the book's premise somewhat contrived, it did a good job of conveying the political and social landscape in all its fractures and flaws.

Other than reading and doomscrolling, I've spent most of the weekend exercising: swimming this morning, yoga every day, and a lot of exercises advised by my physiotherapist to try to fix the ongoing problems with my wrists and ankles. It will all hopefully help me sleep, if nothing else.

At some point, I'll need to turn my attention to our garden, which is starting to come out of its winter hibernation. Bulbs are emerging from the soil, the daffodils in the front garden are in full bloom, and some of the fruit trees are starting to blossom. I'm starting to consider seeds for the vegetable patches: last year we had a lot of success with zucchini, beetroot and peas, less so with parsnip and romanesco cauliflower. This year, I think we'll repeat the zucchini, beetroot and peas, but add spring onions, corn, and maybe some kind of leafy greens to the mix. It's all a bit of trial and error, but when it works, the results are delicious!

I hope you've all been having restful weekends.

I ... kind of disappeared again. I spent the previous two weeks in the kind of miserable fog that I always fall into when I make the mistake of reading news websites or going on Twitter. I always think I can handle it in small doses, and I'm always wrong, and fall into terrible patterns that end up basically being like deliberate self-harm.

In any case, I am now at the point where I recognise these patterns, and eventually drag myself out of them using the usual tricks:

Making daily to-do lists and crossing them off

Walking outside every day, even on days working from home

Yoga every day

Cleaning every day

Regular exercise

Avoiding Twitter and news websites like the plague, and instead reading soft and comforting books

The vaguely irritating thing is that all this stuff actually works. Who would have thought that moving one's body, cleaning one's living space, and nourishing one's mind would lead to better mental health than spending the whole day scrolling Twitter and feeling furiously enraged about Brexit and Sarah Everard? (Sarcasm, obviously.)

Two other things that have done a huge amount in improving my mood are my resumption of regular swimming, and my visit to a physiotherapist to finally deal with the intense pain that I've been feeling since January whenever any pressure is put on my wrists and ankles. I have a high tolerance for pain and a rather stupid relationship with aches and pains in my body due to my history as a gymnast — my assumption is always to ignore the pain and assume it will eventually go away or I'll stop noticing it. Obviously, this is a bad attitude, and in this case was profoundly unhelpful.

The physio's diagnosis was pretty much Peak Ronni. There is, apparently, nothing actually wrong with my wrists and ankles. Rather, I am so utterly incapable of relaxing any muscle in my body that the tension in my arms and legs has caused this knock-on effect on my wrists and ankles. (This led to an amusing moment where the physio was trying to move my wrists to check they weren't injured, and kept telling me to relax my arms ... no, really relax he said, but I was incapable.) I'd kind of always known I did this, but it was good to have it confirmed by a medical professional.

And that's basically been my week. I'm sorry not to have responded to comments, or commented on people's posts, but I just haven't felt up to it.

In other news, the new premier of New South Wales is a) someone I went to university with (he was a perpetually failing student politician who — if memory serves — kept trying to get elected as the leader of the student union) and b) a raging homophobe and conservative Catholic. (It feels to me that we've sleep-walked into a situation where Australia's politicians are disproportionately conservative, fundamentalist Christians of various denominations, despite the fact that the country is extremely irreligious; the prime minister is a Pentecostal Christian who belongs to a church that believes in the prosperity gospel, and many of his cabinet are evangelicals as well.) So, we finally get someone of my generation into a position of political leadership ... and we end up with this guy? (I told my mother he went to uni with me, and she was like, how can he be your age? He has six children? Well, he's older than me, but younger than Matthias. The six kids are, of course, the consequence of conservative Catholicism.)

This feels like a negative note on which to end this post, so I'll leave you instead with a photo of the cathedral hidden in the mist.

I swore to myself that I had hardened my heart against a lifetime of caring, hopefully, about the results of elections, and yet I opened Instagram, of all places, this morning to a wave of anxiety that's ensconced itself behind my ribs and refused to leave. I resent that I resemble this Guardian opinion piece by a fellow Australian.

I had made plans for tomorrow — more preemptive heart-hardening — to avoid the internet entirely, not just the blue hellsite that is Twitter. I was going to buy the next Benjamin January book and just wallow in a cone of silence until the internet had screamed itself out, whatever the result (or, more likely, whatever state of inconclusiveness things are in 24 hours after polls close). I spent so much time preparing for the aftermath that I forgot to prepare for this dreadful sense of unease that now creeps up on me on any kind of election day, in multiple countries, like a bucket of icy water. (That's my secret. I'm always anxious.)

Thankfully, I've got a rather tedious task ahead for most of today at work: running searches for a systematic review, which at least involves repetive, focused activities that should last several hours. I'll stick on a Tiësto live set and hope that the noise drowns out the noisy clutter in my own head. It should work as something of a bandaid solution, at least for a little while.

I'm sending hope to all of you, across oceans.

I woke up this morning feeling a rumbling sense of anxiety, and the feeling didn't really dissipate for the entire day.

( Cut for COVID talk )

In slightly better news, I opened my work inbox yesterday to discover that the students had nominated me for a teaching award. These are entirely student-nominated, and the text they'd written in support of my nomination was so nice! It was a really lovely piece of news with which to start the week, and it felt fabulous to see my work recognised in this way.

I'll close this post out with some music — an absolutely beautiful live performance by Four Tet, in the Sydney Opera House, which was just about the only thing that made a dent in my anxiety today. Music, as always, is one of the few things that quietens my noisy mind, and soothes the sea inside.

General COVID fretting behind the cut.

( I'm worried )

This has been a weird week.

I discovered, after the fact, that Boris Johnson had come to my workplace (or at least one of the departments in the hospital site on which my library is located) for a campaign visit. The press weren't told, most people working in the hospital weren't told, and the people who were there as props to this particular campaign stunt were told they weren't allowed to talk to him. However, the amazing SJimons, a medical student at Cambridge, delivered a spectacular, spontaneous rant immediately afterwards, all the more impressive because she managed to say everything necessary with clarity, concision, and righteous anger. You can watch her here. I recognise her from around the library, but have never spoken to her beyond issuing or returning books — next time she's in I must applaud her!

I have to wonder why Johnson was in Cambridge at all. This constituency is a two-horse race between Labour and the Lib Dems, and has been since the late 1980s. Furthermore, it had pretty much the highest Remain vote in the entire country. Unless he was hoping to be booed out of the site by a chorus of angry patients, I'm not sure what he was trying to achieve.

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Yesterday Matthias and I braved the rain and went out to the cinema to watch Official Secrets, which made me a) furious all over again with Tony Blair, and b) have a panic attack in the cinema because one of the characters was threatened with deportation. #migrantlife, I suppose. The film featured just about every British actor ever, and was a competently told political/investigative journalism drama, and I'm glad I saw it, although I hadn't expected to be hyperventilating in a darkened cinema on a Saturday afternoon due to a panic attack!

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I've spent most of today doing calming things: yoga for an hour, gentle amounts of cleaning and decluttering (if anyone in the Cambridge area wants two used desk lamps, get in touch!), and reading Any Old Diamonds by KJ Charles (lovely and cheerful, although not my favourite of her books) while drinking tea. I've achieved some sort of equilibrium, I suppose.

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I know there are at least a couple of fellow Australian migrants subscribed to my Dreamwidth, so the following may be relevant to your interests: ABC iView is now available overseas, provided you download the appropriate app. More details here. I've always appreciated that the ABC removed the region lock on its news streaming channels during elections and similar big political events, but it's nice that we'll have access to this coverage all year round now. I can combine my stress about UK politics with more stress about Australian politics! It's worth noting that although the press release I've linked talks mostly about access to the news and current affairs content, it appears international viewers will have access to all ABC content on iView, including sport, comedy, drama, documentaries, children's programming, and other entertainment.

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I finalised my Yuletide signup yesterday; anyone who hasn't yet signed up has a few hours yet. Details can be found at the yuletide_admin comm.

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I've noticed a couple of new people subscribed to my journal recently — feel free to say hello in the comments if you want to introduce yourselves!