Beyond Selidor

The weekend began with oppressive, 38 degree heat that didn't really leave the air until after 9pm, and the fright of my life when I — along with other residents of England and Wales, received a government emergency alert on my phone blaring uncontrollably at 7pm on Friday. The alert was warning of a total fire ban; I, in an Australian manner, had been quietly horrified all summer that such a ban hadn't been in place, since water restrictions and total fire bans in times of extreme heat and drought have been a routine part of the summer since my childhood.

( Small rant )

Right, let's move on to nicer things. I spent a lot of time yesterday out in the garden, sweeping up the mulch (which the resident blackbirds immediately hurled all over the garden path again, as they do every day), pruning the lavender plants and bundling the dried flowers into bunches tied with string (I now have hooks in the kitchen skylights where I hang massive bunches of drying herbs, slowly creating the cosy plant-filled kitchen of my dreams), picking apples and tomatoes, and doing other bits and pieces that I'd been putting off due to the extreme heat. I need to ferment some more tomatoes, as we have far more ripe on the plants than we'll ever be able to eat.

On Saturday evening, Matthias and I headed out to Saffron Walden for one of the planned day trips that I mentioned in a previous post. This was made more complicated by our train terminating abruptly at Cambridge, with all further trains in that direction cancelled due to a problem with a level crossing, but astonishingly in such circumstances, the railway staff had everything in hand by the time we left the cancelled train, and we were whisked into a (free) taxi, along with four people travelling to Stansted, and dropped at Audley End station only about ten minutes later than planned. We then walked the forty minutes into Saffron Walden, along a winding country road, past bleached wheat fields, stands of ancient trees, and old stone walls, until we found ourselves on the approach to the town centre. We wandered around a bit, admiring the various independent shops and historic wood-framed houses, and ended the evening having a fantastic dinner at this place, which has only been operating for six weeks, and which was outstanding. It's a tiny little space (apparently it was a former hairdresser shop), and only seats about fifteen people, all along a bar where we could see the food being prepared and hear the chef talking us through everything. The whole ethos is foraged/local food (right down to the herbs and spices, which are all things found in England), minimum waste (almost everything got used multiple times, such as a cream cheese that was infused with a kind of flavouring made from the peelings and scraps of vegetables eaten in other courses; there was a lot of fermentation and pickling and fruit and vegetables infused in alcohol), and limited storage (they only have two tiny bar fridges). Absolutely incredible! Some of the other guests there had spent the whole day in Saffron Walden, visiting a local winery for lunch, and staying overnight in a little hotel in the town centre, and I think both Matthias and I were keen to do the same thing at a later point.

I haven't really made much progress with reading, in spite of having ample spare time. I'm making my way painstakingly through a reread of a six-book series of Celtic fantasy that I loved in my early twenties, and am feeling embarrassed on behalf of my younger self. I can totally see why these books were among my firm favourites, but they are really, really not good at all. But I will save a detailed accounting as to why until I've finished all six. Those are my current work commute and lunch break books — I usually have another book on the go as 'reading at home' material, but this weekend, I've been a bit distracted.

Beyond that, it's just been a lot of pottering around at home and wrestling with the rather confusing Bulgarian rail tickets website in advance of our holiday. We will succeed eventually!

It's the end of my last day of holiday, and it snowed overnight! This was the absolute perfect end to what's been a delightful twelve days (made better by the fact that I didn't have to leave the house at 7am for a train commute that was likely to have been disrupted by the weather). I went to the pool for a final morning swim, and it was blissfully empty: I had the lane to myself, and swam 1km in twenty minutes. I also went for a little wander around town. All the children had congregated in Ely's sole grass-covered hill, and were tobogganing, having snowball fights, and making snowmen. Everyone was in a great mood. I took a lot of photos.

I skipped the second snowflake_challenge prompt, but I'm back for the third: Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

( Love is a verb )

Fruit trees have very much been the theme of this weekend. Someone was giving away pears from a box in their front garden on my return walk from the gym yesterday, and another person was giving away apples when I passed on my way back from the pool this morning. Yesterday afternoon Matthias and I scrambled around on a ladder, and even in the tree itself, picking all the bramley apples from the tree in our back garden. Now two shelves, plus the vegetable crisper in our fridge are entirely filled with apples. Last year they lasted us from August to March!

Everywhere in our house, there are little scattered clusters of fruit — a trio of pears and two large tomatoes ripening on the front windowsill, bowls of apples on the kitchen table, a handful of black cherry tomatoes on the kitchen windowsill in between the indoor plants — like votive offerings to household or harvest gods.

In general, the garden is making me very happy.

If that wasn't enough, after breakfast today, Matthias and I walked out to Little Downham, past hedgerows laden with sloes, rosehips and ripe blackberries, until we got to the community orchard, and filled his backpack with yet more apples and pears. The leaves are yellowing at the edges, and the air has that slightly crackly, woody autumnal scent, although it's still as warm as ever.

Last night, Matthias and I rewatched Casablanca, which I had last seen about twenty-five years ago. It really is that good, and I cried buckets, of course (although about the politics, more than the interpersonal stories). It's extraordinary to me that it was made not post-WWII, but in 1942 — an incredible act of hope and optimism, and faith in human effort turned collaboratively towards an existential struggle. It is of course incredibly emotionally manipulative, but sometimes I just want to see a bunch of traumatised exiles stand up to totalitarian bullies, you know?

( This week I finished three books )

In the time since I started writing this post, the UK government sent me its (scheduled, warned-for) blaring, vibrating phone test emergency alert, and the sky outside has turned from burning blue to cloud-covered grey. The weekend is winding down, and gathering itself in, like a blanket thrown over tired legs.

This weekend has been absolutely glorious: beautiful light, beautiful autumn leaves, and lots of time spent out and about.

I spared myself the prospect of two hours of Halloween-themed Zumba yesterday, and just went to the first hour of my regular fitness classes, which meant I was out of the gym by midmorning, rather than lunchtime, then met Matthias at the market, where we bought a bunch of vegetables, fruit, and cheese. It started to rain just as we were queueing at the coffee stall, but it was so mild that I didn't really mind, as we dashed home between the raindrops, clutching our hot drinks.

After lunch, I made a good start on my Yuletide assignment, which is coming together well. I have plans for at least four treats this year, so I'm going to need to be fairly disciplined in order to get it all done — it's my tenth year doing Yuletide, so I want to make an effort.

After dinner on Saturday, we watched the Wynonna Earp film, which I can't really recommend. It had some good quippy lines, it was nice to see the old gang back together, but the whole thing felt a bit hollow: underdeveloped character motivations, and relationships that didn't quite ring true to where the characters had been when the TV series ended. I had felt that the TV show's final season was incoherent fanservice, and this felt like more of the same. Like Veronica Mars, another beloved TV show with sharp writing, great chemistry between actors, and a cult following, it's been allowed to go on too long — rewarding fans' passion and loyalty, but not necessarily with a good result.

Today started will all the Sunday staples: swimming, yoga, stewing fruit, and cooking crepes for breakfast. Then Matthias and I lay around reading for a few hours, before our friends from our hiking group came to pick us up and take us to the starting point of this month's outing: a village called Brinkley, 25km or so away, where we met up with our other walking companions, and set out. It was a gorgeous day: the sky was clear and blue, the air was still, and the autumn leaves were vivid and crisp. We walked over gently undulating hills, through fields and little tracks between picturesque villages, and over a narrow and rather stagnant river. The theme of the day was fruit trees (we ate windfall apples from the ground under a line of trees by the side of the road, and they were delicious), horses, and dogs. The latter featured heavily at our final destination: the cute little village pub in Brinkley, which had two massive fireplaces, and a rotating cluster of locals gathered near the bar, with their various friendly dogs. It was a cosy and welcome end to the walk before the drive home (just to be clear, the drivers among us drank orange juice and non-alcoholic beer, respectively).

Now I'm back in my living room armchair, catching up on Dreamwidth while Matthias and I wait for our Indian takeaway to be delivered for dinner. I could do with one more day of weekend, but at least the two days I've had have been great.

It rained all week, and then on Saturday, the clouds rolled back, unfolding across the clearest, brightest winter skies. This was opportune and perfect, since Matthias and were joining friends (or, I guess at this stage, friends of friends would be a more accurate description) for their monthly walk. (In line with my aspirations to lead a slightly less restricted, hermit-like existence, this walking group seemed like the perfect, low key way to open up my world somewhat.) On the last Saturday of every month, they pick a local-ish hike, and whoever wants to come joins in.

Yesterday's walk was circular: 8km or so across the fields and woods near Stetchworth. Like everywhere in this area, it was a pretty flat landscape, and because it had been raining all week, it was muddy, soggy going — which made what would otherwise have been quite an easy amble somewhat tough going. My boots ended up caked in mud, and although it didn't feel physically challenging at the time, once I'd stopped moving, I realised my legs hurt a lot — in a good way. I imagine in summer it would be a very different experience, but mud is an occupational hazard in this part of the world at this time of year.

I could not get over the sun-drenched expanses of sky, sweeping above, clear blue interspersed with cottonwool dots of low-hanging clouds. After what feels like weeks of grey, the contrast was remarkable, and really did a lot to lift my mood (which has been very low for what feels like a very long time) — I imagine being out in the open air, with other people played its part as well. This photoset gives you a good idea of the whole vibe.

We had time for a quick drink in the garden of a seventeenth-century pub in Woodditton, trudged back across more fields and forests beneath the setting sun, and made it back to the carpark where we'd started in the last moments of daylight. As we were driven back to Ely, the moon rose, and hung, huge, yellow, and low to the horizon, looming above us as we made our way through the darkening fens, adding to the magical air of the whole journey.

Today was a more typical weekend day: swimming through sunshine first thing in the morning, river loop walk with Matthias ending up in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar eating food truck food for lunch, a challenging yoga class this afternoon just prior to opening up Dreamwidth and composing this post.

It's been another slow week, reading wise (my reading has not been helped in general by my low mood), but I did finish a single book: Lud-in-the-Mist (Hope Mirrlees), an early 20th-century fantasy classic that I'd always meant to pick up, and had the serendipity to find left out on the front step in a box of books being given away for free by a neighbour down the road. (This is a good street for such things — now that I've read the book, I'll give it away myself once I've gathered together a few more books I no longer want to keep.)

Lud-in-the-Mist is a strange, meandering, fable of a book — it's always interesting to read early fiction with fantasy elements published before the conventions of the genre were established (and indeed before fantasy was perceived as being a firmly distinct genre). It's set in an indeterminate fairytale world whose inhabitants have anxiously banished any thought of the magical and fantastic — to the point that it's a social taboo to even mention them — but, as in many similar stories, the fantastic continues to encroach on the human world, with potentially dangerous consequences. I always love reading stories in which the the otherworld and the human world bleed into one another, their boundaries porous and interwoven, their inhabitants interdependent in spite of their best endeavours. The fairies of Lud-in-the-Mist are uncanny and inhuman in the best folkloric tradition, and the story is told with a resonant, lyrical beauty.

Beyond that, I've been finalising my Once Upon a Fic signup (in the end, I went with the same fandoms as last year, since I still feel there are good stories to be told in those for which I've already received gifts, and some are fandoms which I've requested before without luck), and gearing up for the upcoming work week. I'm hoping the joy and light and hope of this weekend will be enough of a drastic reset to carry me through — the start of a springtime of the mind, as it were. For now, I'll build up some kindling in our wood-burning stove, turn on the string lights, and light some candles: warmth and cosiness, shining through from the end of one season and the tentative start of the next.

Look at me, keeping this revived Friday open thread thing going for a second week! Let's hope this sense of productivity and purpose continues throughout the year, given the enthusiastic response to this series' return.

Today's question is about the time of year where you are:

What is something you love, or always look forward to, about this time of year where you are?

'Where you are' can be as broadly defined as you like. It could be your very specific town, or street, or suburb, but equally it could be your country, or even a wider/unspecified geographical region such as 'North Africa' or 'my country in southwestern Europe.' In other words, please don't feel you need to go into a great deal of specificity about your physical location if you're not comfortable with that information being public.

My answer is the weather. I love both the crisp, clear, frosty mornings, when every branch and leaf and blade of grass is sparkling, and your breath is visible in the air, and the days when the fog lies heavy across the fields and fens and river well into the afternoon. I love the way the fog looks when the sky is dark. And I love seeing the bare branches of the trees against the clear winter sky, and the chaos of the wintry hedgerows. I love walking in the stillness of the early morning, when the light has just touched the ground, and it's as if every sound has been swallowed.

While it's not unique to the place where I live, I also feel a huge sense of productivity and purpose in January, as if the newness of the year gives me a kind of added energy and motivation, and living a well-rounded life seems easy. It's always a short-lived feeling (by February, the long months of short days and darkness have worn me down to exhaustion), but I always enjoy it while it lasts.

What about all of you?

And that's how it's done.

You can always rely on Lib Dems to do the most awkward-looking, dorky, heavy-handed stunts. [WINNING HERE.]

For context, I'm no Lib Dem voter, but I'm an anything-but-the-Tories voter who will vote tactically when required and yearns for electoral reform. (First past the post is the antithesis of democracy, and tactical voting and anti-Tory alliances are the only tools at our disposal to fight it.) At present I have no time for liberals fearmongering about the 'far left,' purity posturing from disgruntled Corbyn cultists, or anyone accusing people slightly to the right of them of being 'Blairites': there are fascists at the gates, and all of these ideological differences pale in comparison.

*

Meanwhile, Ely has big The Dark Is Rising energy today.

I've finished work for the week, the month, and the year, and I am determined to be happy.

Yesterday, Matthias and I returned after a week away on holiday by the seaside. We went to Southwold, on the Suffolk coast, which is an easy trip for us on public transport (2 hours on the train, half an hour on a bus). The two of us don't tend to holiday in the UK — in fact, apart from trips to visit friends elsewhere in the country, and occasional weekends in London, I don't think we have ever used annual leave to stay somewhere within the UK. Last year, of course, we didn't leave the country — but we didn't leave Cambridge, either! All our holidays were at home. We really couldn't face another year like that, and when we were planning when to claim our annual leave, Matthias remarked that he desperately wanted a holiday where we went somewhere, I remarked that I was desperate to see the ocean, and he (who is the booker and planner in our household) investigated a bit and suggested Southwold. It was a really good decision.

( What we did on our holiday )

I'll do another post in the next couple of days about the books I read while on holiday, because they were a great bunch, several chosen on the basis of reviews people in my Dreamwidth circle have posted.

After yesterday's post, Matthias and I ended up taking advantage of the sunshine to do a new walk — a huge loop that took us along the river in the other direction, and back through town. The whole thing was about 4km, and we saw cows by the cathedral, and a hedgehog wandering along the road (it was an empty road, and went into the undergrowth shortly after I took the photo).

This morning I've been doing meal prep for next week, while listening to old Massive Attack albums and just marvelling at how incredibly good it is. I want to just submerge myself in the lyrics for days.

Here's today's book meme prompt:

25. A book that answered a question you never asked

( My answer )

( The other days )

All the boxes are packed — barring the one which will hold our duvets and the last remaining crockery and water glasses — all the bookshelves are empty, and all the cupboards are bare. It's our final night in our little house under the ivy.

We've lived here for eight years. It was not the first place where we lived together: we lived for a year in a sharehouse with three of our friends. But it was the first place where we lived alone as a couple, it's where we lived when I finished my PhD, when we both fell into librarianship as a career, became UK citizens, Matthias completed his librarianship degree and I my teaching qualification, and where we lived when we got married. We've seen a lot of life in this house.

This past year, more than ever, I was profoundly happy to be living here. It's centrally located, it's got great shops around the corner (none of which closed during the pandemic and indeed a new one selling great bread, cheese and vegetables opened), and in general it was a nice place to be locked down and working with my husband across the other side of the dining room table. And, above all, it has so many green spaces just outside the door. I've talked a lot here about walking or running to Grantchester, which was great when I had the time, but not always possible in the middle of a working day. But for days when all we had time for was a quick stretch of the legs after lunch, we had Paradise.

This little nature reserve is literally just around the corner, and yet for seven years I had no idea of its existence. One morning, early in April, I wandered down a street I'd never been in, and there it was: ducks, swans, grazing sheep and all. During the summer we went there almost every single day.

It's been a bit too muddy in the winter to go there, but as it was our last day in the area, we trudged through the mud to see it one last time as residents. It started off cloudy, but as we rounded the final corner, the sun came out. The whole place is flooded — what was a field of sheep in the summer is now a lake filled with confused swans and seagulls. We drank in the earth, and all that water.

We would have loved to stay living in this part of the world, but sadly it is the most expensive part of Cambridge, and buying here would have been impossible. (For comparison, one of the other houses in the complex recently sold for twice the cost of what we paid for our new house.) And so, tomorrow, away we go, for new walls, new trees, and new adventures.