dolorosa_12 | Entries tagged with asnacs

This past weekend was a long weekend in England, and Matthias and I went down to Devon to visit our friends C and L, and their two small daughters (aged four and six). We've been friends for a very long time; Matthias and L were best men at each other's respective weddings, and Matthias is godfather to their older daughter, but for various reasons, we haven't seen each other in person for a very long time. Thankfully, things worked out, such that we were able to stay with them from Friday evening until Monday afternoon.

It was a lovely few days. The weather cooperated (not always a given in that part of the world), and we spent a lot of time wandering around in pretty National Trust gardens, fruitlessly assisting the daughters as they waved a metal detector over the sand at a beach (although they had more luck filling buckets with shells), and answering endless questions that started with the word 'why'. It's actually relatively easy to find activities that suit both adults and small children, provided you're able to go outdoors, and this past weekend worked out well in that regard. (The two girls are very good walkers, particularly as their parents have a sneaky trick on any walk of giving the children a bucket each, and asking them to collect the ten 'most interesting things' they find on the walk.)

It was not exactly restful (I was exhausted every night), but I had a wonderful time. You'll get a feel for things via this photoset — golden sun, lush green vegetation, clouds hanging like cotton wool in the blue sky.

I returned a couple of days ago from a week's holiday in Portugal with my mum. It was glorious, restorative, and coming back to home and work was exhausting. We managed to escape what sounded like a miserable week of weather in the UK for sunshine, swimming, and plenty of time spent outdoors.

The first three days were spent in Lisbon, where we stayed in the old Alfama district in a hotel where we ended up being given an entire apartment (with living room, kitchenette and garden) as a free upgrade. We wandered around the narrow streets, dodging the tiny yellow trams that whizzed past every few minutes, visited an old castle filled with peacocks, and then visited an absolutely wild art collection left as a museum by an eccentric wealthy Armenian in the 1950s (this is very worth seeing, and is free if you visit after 2pm on a Sunday). We caught a ferry across the river and walked along the waterfront under decaying industrial warehouses covered with graffiti, and ate delicious meals in restaurants perched on hills overlooking the whole city.

Then we got on a train, and travelled south to Lagos, a seaside town focused on outdoor tourism. We stayed in a serviced apartment a little out of the town — but ideally located for accessing the nicest beaches and (the reason why we'd chosen this town to visit) excellent day hiking trails. We spent a couple of days there, interspersing our walks with lots of swims in various beaches. The water was clear, sparkling, and incredibly cold — every ocean has its own character, and my experience of the Atlantic was definitely bracing, but highly recommended! Again we ate incredibly well — I'd researched extensively beforehand, meaning we found the one decent cafe-with-good-coffee-and-breakfast-foods in town, the fun rooftop-bar-with-tapas (plus shop selling tinned sardines, ceramics, and expensive homewares downstairs), the nice winebar, and the 'expensive' fish restaurant on the cliff above our favourite beach ('expensive' being a relative term, since a meal for two including bottled water, two glasses of champagne, two glasses of wine, two oysters, two main courses and a shared dessert cost about €60).

Then it was time for our return train, and another 36 hours in Lisbon, where we stayed in a different district, took a daytrip out to Belém for pastéis de nata and a museum which presented Portugal's history of seafaring, navigation and colonisation in the most unbelievably uncritical light, and on to Cascais for more communing with the ocean.

I had to get up early and leave for my flight back to the UK, and Mum went on for three days staying with an Australian friend who owns a house in another part of Portugal. I returned to thunderstorms and torrential rain (and the second worst turbulence I have ever experienced on a flight in my life), and a visit from Matthias's and my friends L and V, who needed a place to stay en route back to Vienna after being in the UK for a relative's 90th birthday party. It was great to see them, especially since the weather had cleared up by then, and we were able to eat our meal of cheese, charcuterie and sparkling wine out on the deck under the fruit trees.

Mum will be back tomorrow, passing through, before we're visited by E, another friend of ours who'll be in this part of the world to campaign for the Labour Party for the upcoming election — as you can see, there's a lot of coming and going, which definitely explains my exhaustion!

I would highly recommend Portugal as a place to visit — there are so many different things to do, depending on your tastes, the people are incredibly friendly, and the food is excellent (and very, very cheap by western European standards). You can see my photos on Instagram (

ronnidolorosa), which give an idea of how beautiful everything is, as well. There is one big caveat here, though: I only recommend Portugal if you are able-bodied with no mobility issues (and I'd go as far to say that you need to be comfortable travelling on foot and reasonably physically fit). It is incredibly hilly, with Lisbon in particular made up of lots of steep hills with narrow streets, narrow footpaths, all paved with irregular cobblestones. This is parodic to the point of being a widespread meme: 'Google Maps said it's a ten-minute walk — but it's in Lisbon *insert video of people pushing suitcases up endless sets of near-vertical steps*' Accessible it is not. I even had to carry my mum's suitcase in my arms for fifteen minutes up such a set of hills when we arrived, because she had a four-wheeled suitcase that couldn't be dragged behind her, and it was literally impossible to push the suitcase along on its four wheels as intended because the hills were so steep — be like me and insist on two-wheeler suitcases!

I am practically vibrating with anxiety, these days, and it seems to be a permanent state of affairs, unfortunately. Let's try to distract me from this with a meme (via a friend on Facebook):

How many times have you moved house, and what was the reason for moving each time?

( 19 moves behind the cut )

This week's Sunday post will be fairly brief, since not a huge amount has happened, and I didn't even manage to read any new books since posting about Silver Under Nightfall on Wednesday. I didn't even manage to go to the gym for my Saturday classes, or to go swimming — I thought it best not to risk it due to being sick earlier in the week.

However, I ended up with most of Saturday free, and spent the time catching up on various lingering chores — clearing all the autumn leaves from the patio and deck in the garden, taking all the pots/pans/crockery out of the kitchen cupboards and wet-dusting the shelves, vacuuming, etc. This was hardly a thrilling way to spend my free time, but improved my mood a lot when it was done. I spent a lot of time on Saturday afternoon noodling around with fountain pens and catching up on Dreamwidth.

On Saturday evening, Matthias and I met up with several friends for a couple of drinks in our favourite local bar/cafe, which ended up being a good catch-up. We probably ended up staying for about an hour and a half, before everyone went their separate ways for dinner. I've been trying to be better about getting out of the house and seeing people, and I need to remember that it's usually worth making the effort.

The weather today has been wildly changeable — clear and warm this morning (warm enough not to need a coat), windy with gathering storm clouds now — but thankfully Matthias and I were swift enough off the mark to have made the best of it, doing a walk around the cathedral and river and sitting outside at the coffee rig in the market square for a warm drink, before heading home. Half the town seemed to have had the same idea, and there was a nice atmosphere, with the whole place filled with groups of chatting friends, families with toddlers and babies rugged up warmly, and dogs of all shapes and sizes wandering around.

After lunch, I might continue with my Benjamin January reread (this would be the second book), nominate some fandoms for

once_upon_fic, and otherwise relax. I hope you're all also having enjoyable weekends.

I spotted this on

blackcatofmisery's journal, and it looked like a lot of fun, so I thought to answer it myself!

( Questions and answers from A to Z )

Some weekends are slow, sleepy, nesting weekends, and some weekends are socialising weekends, and this weekend was definitely the latter. Our friends

notasapleasure and her husband, who were for so long our only local friends (and who ended up being our pandemic buddies, the only people we saw in person other than shop assistants for basically the whole of 2020), moved away last year. Visiting them is complicated due to the public transport situation (no direct trains, only buses), and we haven't seen as much of them as I would have liked.

However, this weekend, they came and stayed with us, arriving for dinner on Friday night, and leaving around lunchtime today.

The main purpose of the visit was to go into Cambridge (where we met up with another mutual friend, and one of his friends) for a beer festival that was happening across six different neighbouring pubs. I don't drink beer, but I'm perfectly happy spending an afternoon with friends in pleasant surroundings, and these pubs certainly qualify — most have nice outdoor areas, one of them had a roaring fire, and another was visited by two very friendly, very fluffy dogs. It was good to catch up with everyone, and just be out and about in one of my favourite parts of Cambridge.

Today I managed to get out to the pool for my regular 8am swim, and the town was shrouded in mist.

Much of the rest of my week has been taken up with adding a bunch of new newsletter subscriptions to make up for the impending Twitter collapse. I don't know why I didn't do this sooner — I much prefer longform writing, and newsletters are the next best thing to social blogging (I find that even if they have a comment function, they feel much more like blasts of information, or essays in magazines, and commenting feels intrusive). There are a lot of people writing great newsletters on a variety of interesting topics — I suppose I should do a roundup post at some point gathering them all together. What I'd really like to do is find a way to get a feed of each newsletter importing into Dreamwidth — I know this is theoretically possible for blogs hosted elsewhere, but I'm not sure if it works for Substack (or similarly platformed) newsletters.

We had a load of wood for the fire delivered at the same time as Friday's milk delivery, and this inevitably coincided with warm weather! I'm hoping the mist today is a sign of impending autumnal (or even wintry) weather — I can't wait for fires, and coziness.

Early on in the pandemic, my friend

thecelticist wrote a letter to her students (she's head of the department of the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth University) on her blog. What happened next was a weird kind of lucky serendipity that feels almost unbelievable: a literary agent somehow stumbled on the blog post, and was so entranced with what he read that he signed her — on the basis solely of the blog post — to write a memoir. This memoir then went on to sell for a six-figure advance to Penguin. Over the past two years, I've kept up with the progress of the manuscript, and, later, the various publicity and marketing activities organised by the publisher, as Lizzie has shared her experiences extensively via social media.

The book got the kind of feverish marketing push that only comes along when major publishers feel they have a bestseller on their hands — blurbs from Hilary Mantel and other major literary figures, huge amounts of publicity, vast quantities of money splashed on getting the book prominently displayed in all the major British and Irish booksellers (I saw a photo from today of the book in Grafton Street in Dublin in a display next to Colm Tóibín's latest, to give you some idea). The whole thing is like a fairy story, even more so given that Lizzie has published extensively — but only academic books and journal articles on medieval Irish history and literature, the sort of things where you certainly don't get paid, and basically no one reads it other than a small handful of fellow scholars.

I've picked up my copy of the book, but haven't read it yet. This review in the Irish Independent should give you a rough idea of what it's about: part pandemic memoir, part elegy for her father (who died in January 2020), part wide-ranging musings on her own tumultuous life, interspersed with allusions from everything to medieval Irish literature to black metal. I'm intrigued to read it, and still kind of astonished that someone I know could have this kind of publishing good fortune.

Today the house is filled with sunlight, and flocks of wood pigeons have descended on our garden, where they appear to be munching their way through our lawn, and the shoots on the tops of the cherry trees. It's still wintry, but change is definitely in the air.

Yesterday, Matthias and I headed into Cambridge to meet up with

notasapleasure and her husband, with whom we went to a museum exhibition of exquisite gold jewellery and other archaeological finds from the Saka nomads, who lived in what is now Kazakhstan. (They lived elsewhere as well, but what I mean is that these pieces were found in Kazakhstan.) The pieces — excavated by Kazakh archaeologists — were amazing, although I felt the exhibition itself was somewhat lacking in context, even by the standards of archaeology (which we always joke will fall back to assuming an object had 'ritual purposes' if its use isn't immediately apparent). It was more a collection of shiny pretty things — but it was a nice way to spend an hour or so. Since entry to this museum and exhibition was free, we followed it up with a quick look around another exhibition on medieval coins, partially the work of our friend

Rory_Naismith, who was a PhD student on the same programme as all of us.

Today is, as planned, a lot quieter: pottering around Dreamwidth, a bit of cooking, some yoga in the afternoon. Ideally I'd like to finish my current book, but I'll have to wait and see how that goes.

I can't see that I'm going to finish any more TV shows in the next two days, so I've written up my TV roundup for January a little early.

( The order written reflects order of completion )

Well, 2021 certainly was a year.

( Questions and answers behind the cut )

I really fell off the side of the world for a while — two weeks without posting or checking Dreamwidth is a long time for me! I'm slowly trying to catch up with posts from my circle, but I will probably have to let everything go by without comments. I have read your posts, though!

This term has really knocked me out. It feels as if every week when my colleague (who does the same job as me) and I have our catch up meeting, we say, 'well, things are hectic now, but they should calm down by next week.' And we've been saying this every week since September! There was one day when five people simultaneously asked me to do systematic review literature searches for five different research projects, and I just laughed out loud at the absurdity. It's nice to be valued and popular, but it is a lot of work!

In less exhausting news, Matthias and I went down to Devon last weekend for the baptism of

cait.de.roiste and

DrLRoach's two daughters. The whole thing was a lot of fun — we caught up with various friends, the baptism service was adorable (as with anything that involves small children, chaos ensued — the older daughter spent the whole time running around the church with a helium balloon, and the younger daughter spent the whole time eating the order of service), and everything was lovely and autumnal.

I'll finish the post with links to a couple of things that I've enjoyed recently:

Over on Tor.com, an actual San Francisco bus driver has thoughts on Shang Chi's bus fight scene

A behind-the-scenes featurette about the making of Cirque du Soleil's revived Alegría show. This is on Facebook but you can watch without a login.

As many of you know, although I am a librarian now, I used to be in academia. Before moving into librarianship, I did a PhD in medieval Irish literature, and was, during that time, pretty firmly ensconced in Celtic Studies academia — a multidisciplinary field that covers languages, history, literature and material culture, ranging in time from prehistory to the contemporary era.

We get a lot of cranks contacting us — people convinced they have evidence for a real, historical King Arthur, neopagans who think there is extensive evidence for pre-Christian 'Celtic' religious beliefs and practices documented in medieval literary texts (which is a whole other story, but suffice it to say the evidence is thin), Cornish nationalists who want to coopt us in their language revival debates, and so on. Most of the time, it causes a bit of grumbling and sighing, but it's relatively harmless, we do our best to gently correct these people's misapprehensions, and they wander off.

Unfortunately, there's also the far right.

( Cut for discussion of far-right nationalism )

I'm still extremely ill with this ghastly cold, but that didn't stop me enjoying the remainder of my holiday, which ended up being packed with nice things. These included:

notasapleasure staying with us for a few days while she wrapped up things in this part of the world. She made vast quantities of apple curd from our windfall apples, we watched melancholy Georgian (or really Georgian/French) films, and she left us with loads of chili plants.

Swimming in the outdoor pool in Cambridge under clear late summer skies.

Going out for a meal with Matthias at a gastropub we've only ever visited in the dark of winter. Going in the summer was a revelation: a gorgeous garden with a pond, fountain, trellises heavy with roses and wisteria, and birds everywhere. We could have sat out there drinking Australian shiraz all afternoon!

Meeting up with

DrLRoach and

cait.de.roiste, and their two lovely little daughters for Sunday roast in the beer garden of one of the village pubs nearby.

So, all in all it's been a week filled with sunshine, friends, and very good food. I'm exhausted and run down, but it was definitely worth it.

Hello and welcome to all the new people who have subscribed to my Dreamwidth as a result of

superborb's 'interesting people to subscribe to' post. It's lovely to see you here. I have a sticky introduction post which is pretty up to date. I'll just draw people's attention to the friending policy: Feel free to subscribe and add as you like. I generally won't add people back unless they introduce themselves (or unless we met in a friending meme or similar), so please do feel free to say hello, either in the comments of this post, or elsewhere.

(Obviously there is no pressure to comment and say hello, but I don't subscribe back unless people do so.)

*

I feel as if I've seen more people in person in the past few days than I have done in over a year. We had our first houseguest since moving into the new place, and it was Former Housemate D, with whom both Matthias and I had shared a house over a decade ago. And then, on Monday,

joey.josephine.13 came up from London. She's the daughter of one of my mum's best friends — our parents met before any of their children were born, bonding over the fact that they were Australians living in New York in the 1980s and very involved in the music scene. My sister and I very much grew up with

joey.josephine.13 and her older sister

coriburford, and the former has now moved to the UK to do a master's degree at Glasgow. She flew in from Australia to London, and, as I say, came to visit me for a day on Monday.

With both visitors, I did variations on the same thing — wandering along the river and watching the waterbirds and houseboats drift by (plus marvelling at the excellent dogs living in the houseboats), eating filled bagels and drinking cup after cup of coffee (the bagel bar is by far and away the best lunch spot, and does the best coffee in town), and, when available, soaking in the sunshine. With Former Housemate D, we also went to the tiny local art gallery (which, amusingly, had a sculpture by an artist who had been a housemate of D's in a different sharehouse), and with

joey.josephine.13 we did a tour of the magnificent and massive cathedral. I like hearing people point out interesting architectural features and tie them in with history (and the history of religion), but I was less impressed with the fact that the guide assumed both of us were Christians, which was a) incorrect on both counts and b) awkward. In any case, the cathedral was beautiful, filled with light making the stained glass windows dance, and had cows grazing in the field outside.

The garden continues with its late summer abundance. We are swimming in zucchini (thankfully, my absolute favourite quick and easy meal involves fried zucchini, tomatoes, and some form of alium served with a fried egg), the butternut pumpkin vines are beginning to grow fruit, and every time I go outside I help myself to a handful of fresh peas or some fennel seeds. Here's a photoset.

*

I've got just a couple of books to discuss since my last update in this regard, both very different!

Meg and Jo by Virginia Kantra is, as is probably obvious from the title, the first half of a modern retelling of Little Women. (I'm going through a phase at the moment of basically wanting to read every modern retelling of classic literature available, like the literary equivalent of all those '90s teen movies that transposed Shakespeare, Austen, or Nathaniel Hawthorne to American high schools.) It was a fun enough book, and I enjoyed the dual points of view and the ways various aspects of the original work were updated (Jo is now an impoverished journalist in New York, eking out a living working in a restaurant kitchen and writing a pseudonymous food blog in her spare time; Bhaer is a well known chef), although some changes made me raise my eyebrows (like the shift from Massachusetts to the US south). For the most part Kantra doesn't do anything particularly innovative with the source material, but it was a fun light read.

I've also finally got around to reading The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, pushed to do so by the existence of the TV adaptation. I assume the premise of the story is well-known — a young black woman in the US south escapes enslavement, fleeing on a literal underground railroad which takes her on a sweeping journey through several states, each of which represent different types of horrors done to black people in the United States during various points in history (and still ongoing). It's a harrowing alternate history, beautifully told, and I'm only sorry that I didn't read it sooner.

*

That's about it from me for now. I write this nestled at the top of the house, coffee in hand, looking out across a sea of green leaves, and the fruit of our apple and pear trees. Autumn is well and truly around the corner.

This has been a good weekend, with lots of nice things:

Fresh zucchini and beetroot from the garden, and lots of grazing — every time I go out there I help myself to blackberries from the neighbours' overgrown mess of a garden, and new peas from the vegetable patch, and fennel seeds from the herb garden.

Yoga every day.

Walking out with Matthias,

notasapleasure, her husband and their two giant rescue greyhounds to one of the nearby villages, where we sat out in the garden of the pub and ate Thai food for dinner. Here's a photoset.

ladybusiness linked to one of my old blog posts in a recent links roundup. Since I'm really struggling with longform blogging at the moment, it's nice that my older longform posts are still resonating with people.

But mostly, it's just been books, and books, and books. They've all been very different:

Grave Importance, by Vivian Shaw, the final book in her Greta Helsing trilogy, in which the heroine is a doctor to supernatural creatures, and everyone is competent and trying their hardest to do the right thing.

Daughters of Night, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, a historical crime novel set in 18th-century London. The tone and content reminded me a lot of the TV series Harlots.

'Enemies to Lovers', by Aster Glenn Grey, a f/f romance novella in which the two women are fandom nemeses. Enjoyment of this will depend on your tolerance for the presence of every fandom cliché in the book, but its evocation of transformative fandom rang true to me, although I found it almost quaint that the two characters' dislike of each other hinges on conflicting tastes in the portrayal of their favourite fic pairing, rather than moral panic over supposedly 'problematic' content vs a ship and let ship attitude.

A Ghost in the Throat, by Doireann ní Ghríofa, an autobiography that interweaves the author's experiences as a mother in twenty-first-century Ireland with the story of the (female) creator of an eighteenth-century Irish poem. My summary could not do this book justice — it's about 'women's work,' the quiet, painful ordinary labour of everyday life, about family, and about the act of creation (of art, and of life).

Cold Bayou, by Barbara Hambly, another of her Benjamin January mysteries. This one hinged on wealth, and inheritance, and the complicated family trees of the wealthy French families around which Benjamin and his own family orbit, and involved all my favourite characters (above all Dominique and Chloë) having to work together, so it's definitely among my favourites of the series so far.

The Light of the Midnight Stars, by Rena Rossner, a fantasy novel about sisters, survival and magic in medieval Hungary and Romania, drawing on fairytales, folklore, and Jewish mythology. I'll read pretty much any work built on these elements, and Spinning Silver and The Wolf and the Woodsman are among my favourite fantasy novels of all time, and The Light of the Midnight Stars occupies a similar space in terms of reclaimation of antisemitic tropes and painful history. However, I would say that it is much less hopeful in the conclusions it draws than these other two books, and allows its characters much less happiness.

I hope your weekends have been lovely!

Today I ended up having to teach two classes, even though I'm still on holiday, but it only took up two hours of the day and I don't mind too much. It's grim and grey, and the idea of leaving the house was not hugely appealling.

Today's book meme asks for:

9. A book that reminds you of someone

( My answer )

( The other days )

Yesterday, the sun was shining, and the water sparkled on the river, and it was pleasant to be outside. Today, Matthias and I are supposed to be going over for lunch outdoors (indoor gatherings are not currently allowed, and I wouldn't do so even if they were) at

notasapleasure and her husband's place.

Today, it is snowing. British weather, eh?

Today's book meme prompt asks for:

5. A book where you loved the premise but the execution left you cold

( My answer )

( The other days )

This has been a pretty good weekend, all things considered.

The light returned — and that was definitely the biggest contributor to the general sense of happiness in our house, I suspect. It was warm enough to go outside without a coat, the sun shone pretty much all day, it's still light and clear at 5.30pm, and there are flowers blooming on the quince trees in our back garden. The first of the bulbs planted by the former owners have begun to flower. Spring is definitely in the air.

Matthias and I reacted to this tangible changing of the seasons by buying a lot of seeds: zucchini, cauliflower, parsnips, peas, tomatoes, butternut pumpkin, multicoloured beetroot, etc. Next weekend, weather permitting, we will tackle the vegetable patches (which are getting a bit overgrown with weeds), and hopefully everything will be ready to go for March.

We managed to do a video chat with four of our friends (two couples) yesterday evening via Facebook — and when we actually looked at our group chat logs, we realised the last time we'd done something similar was in August! No wonder I'd been feeling isolated! One of the couples lives in Vienna, and the other in Ely like us, but of course since we only moved to Ely in December, we haven't been able to meet up in person — so they might as well have been in Vienna too! They did tell us the amusing news that the only two instances they spotted of people obviously breaking lockdown rules were a) a gang of teenagers smoking from a single joint in a bus stop and b) a bunch of middle-aged men shiftily doing hare coursing out by the river. Both strike me as pretty par for the course in East Anglia.

Today I've mainly been cooking, although I've also managed to get pretty stuck into a new book: Winter's Orbit, by Everina Maxwell. I knew that this was originally serialised on AO3 as tropey original fiction a few years ago, and then pulled to publish, but I never read the original so I can't compare it with the published version. In terms of the latter, it was exactly what I've come to expect from this kind of pulled-to-publish m/m sff romance: an arranged marriage, slow burn romance, very heavy on the character and relationship studies, and light on the supporting framework (intergalactic politics, handwavy science fictional elements, secondary characters who are basically there either to hinder or support the main couple's relationship). To be clear, I like this kind of thing when I'm in the mood for it (which I definitely am at the moment), ~~although what I really want is this kind of story and character dynamics, but with f/f or m/f couples, to be honest~~.

I feel as if this post isn't meandering so much as lurching wildly from topic to topic, so I might as well lean into that, and leave you with two unrelated links.

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have already seen this, but I had an absolutely epic baking disaster while attempting an extremely simple recipe yesterday, and I invite you all to laugh at me in my incompetence in this Twitter thread.

Finally, if you're like me, and vaguely aware of gossip and shenanigans going on in fandom at large, not just in your own active fandoms, you may be aware of an absolutely infamous fic whose wall of tags is notorious and somewhat inescapable. AO3 have kind of wrung their hands and said there's nothing they can do ... and so fandom has taken to mocking the offending fic to hilarious effect. I laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

I'm not having a good week, or really a good month.

( Cut for a lot of emotions )

We're on the final stretch now! Today, our marvellous friend E drove over to our place and, together with Matthias, moved three carloads of our belongings to the new house. These were the sorts of things that it's hard to move in typical moving boxes: cleaning equipment, open bottles of olive oil, fancy glasses still in their boxes, suitcases of clothes. Matthias and I don't drive (he has a license, but has never driven in the UK and hasn't driven in Germany for at least a decade, I have never learnt how to drive), and without friends with a car this would have been a complete nightmare. Obviously everyone was masked at all times, the car windows were open, etc, etc.

It ended up being very fortunate that this happened today, as we got notified by Virgin that they were sending the new equipment to set up internet at the new place today ... to the new place, even though we'd requested that they send it to our old house. So Matthias was able to wait there for the delivery, while E drove back to me to load and collect the last carload, and then pick Matthias up after the delivery had come.

Meanwhile, I packed up our entire house: seven bookshelves, all the kitchen stuff, and the remaining bedding and towels to cushion the glassware. I'm feeling particularly smug that I have saved every piece of bubble wrap every received in packaging for the past eight years — although we've stayed in this house a long time, I have moved house a lot in my life (including one month when I moved three times, three international moves, and the time when, aged eighteen, my fourteen-year-old sister and I basically packed up and cleaned the massive, four-bedroom, three-storey — plus study, family room, and separate laundry — family home in preparation for a move to another city, into a three-bedroom flat), and I never forget all the little things that make it slightly easier.

We've managed to get rid of two of the three large items of furniture we wanted to give away — via Facebook Marketplace. The third I will be advertising tomorrow, and I'm hoping it follows a similar pattern: multiple people interested, with someone able to collect it on the same day. With that gone, everything is ready for the removalists on Tuesday.

For obvious reasons, I am completely shattered. We deliberately tried to cram the remaining packing and moving of carloads into today, so that we could have tomorrow to rest, before going back to work on Monday, and then the move on Tuesday. I'm glad we finished everything, but it was exhausting!

The whole thing has completely broken my brain, so I will have to let the various posts I've seen on my feed pass me by. For those of you who saw in the new year in a happy way, I raise a glass of virtual champagne, and for those of you who summed up all the difficulties of your 2020s and all the hopes for your 2021s, I also raise a glass of virtual champagne. I hope this year is a kind one for you.

Now I'm off to sleep for many, many hours!

Welcome back to another Friday open thread — the second-last for the year! Today's prompt is from

likeadeuce:

Talk about the process of making friends or what takes a connection from casual to friendship.

( My answer behind the cut )

What about you?

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Beyond Selidor

A song with a mission

Entries tagged with asnacs

The blades of green, green grass

The sea, the tiles, the hills

Far from my home is the country I have reached; always coming home

Blowing the cobwebs away

Alphabet meme

Pulling the threads together

All those different fragments

Dressed in gold

I will be there, and you will be there, and we'll find each other in the dark: the 2021 meme

waves sleepily

The only possible reaction is weariness

Good things, in list format

The paths we follow, along the river road

Trying to catch your heart is like trying to catch a star

Tree self, daylight self

Bright lights, big city

The light gets in

Black and white visions, in echoed halls

collapses in a heap

Friday open thread: making friends