Beyond Selidor

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.

This week's open thread prompt is sparked by the sad news that, when I was walking to the pool, I realised that the council had cut down my favourite tree in Ely! I love trees: they're one of my favourite things to look at and photograph, and I get very attached to them. They're like familiar old friends, and they're one of the first things I notice when I'm in a new place.

So: talk to me about the trees that have meant the most to you.

( Arboreal talk behind the cut )

Today I awoke to exactly the kind of weather I most enjoy: a blanketing fog that didn't lift until at least midday. I took a bunch of photos on my way to the pool, revelling in the arrival of autumn.

It's not been a great month for reading (to be honest, I've been too stressed about the grim political situation in far too many parts of the world), but I did manage to finish a couple of other books before the close of September.

Those books are:

The Community (N. Jamiyla Chisholm), a memoir about the author's experiences growing up in a cult. The cult in question drew on elements of militant Black separatism in the US, Islam, and a jumble of conspiracy theories, and resulted in the inevitable toxic mix of abusive isolation from the outside world, paranoia, financial exploitation of cult members, child sexual abuse, etc. It was an interesting book, and but it wasn't quite what I wanted to read — it focused much more on the author's relationship with her parents and thoughts about her own childhood, whereas I wanted a fuller focus on the cult itself, and the socio-cultural factors which shaped it and made it attractive to its members.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club (Malinda Lo), a work of historical fiction set in 1950s San Francisco, as seen through the eyes of Chinese-American (and closeted lesbian) teenager Lily Hu. The racism, sexism and homophobia of the period all get a look-in, as well as the major political currents of the era (McCarthyism, the space race, Cold War fears of spies and infiltration, the communist revolution in China). Against this backdrop, the book tells a coming-of-age narrative, as Lily falls in love (with a girl, with a nightclub, with a vibrant, clandestine queer community) and tries to contend with the dual challenges of familial and community expectations, and her own hopes and aspirations. As a snapshot of a time and place, Last Night at the Telegraph Club is fantastic — the hidden queer community is particularly well done — although I felt the book as a whole seemed to leap from episode to episode rather than telling a flowing story (and it ended in a manner that was both abrupt, and far too tidy). My absolute favourite part, however, was its multiple mouth-watering descriptions of Chinese food, in all its regional specificity — this is definitely not a book to read when you're hungry!

Let's hope I can be a bit better at reading regularly in October!

I'm happiest when my days are filled with a good mixture of stuff, and that's certainly been true this weekend. In list format, in no particular order, I've done the following:

Read so many books, in a variety of genres (about which more in a review post later in the week)

Done a variety of yoga sessions ranging from the intense to the stretchy to the restorative

Roamed the outdoor market in the rain, picking up vegetables, fruit, bread and cheese

Swum a kilometre

Pottered around on Dreamwidth, overwhelmed by, and grateful for, the response to both my snowflake_challenge posts and the return of my Friday open threads

Walked out through the muddy fens with Matthias, under clear skies

Now I've got curry simmering, fragrant on the stove, and I'm winding down, and resting.



Today's snowflake_challenge prompt is: In your own space, talk about an idea you wish you had the time / talent / energy to do.

( Unfinished visioncloths behind the cut )

At last, my cold seems to be receding (fought off, as far as I can tell, by a combination of hot lemon/honey/ginger, and congee), and I no longer feel as if I'm drowning in my own lungs. That was a particularly nasty one, and I'm glad to see the back of it.

For those of you who enjoy nature writing, there's going to be a (free) Zoom event this Saturday with Robin Wall Kimmerer, Robert Macfarlane, and David Haskell. The event will be recorded and shared later, so if you can't make it at the advertised time, you should still be able to access it later. This is the event description:

In August 2021, Orion Magazine released Old Growth, an anthology of essays and poems about the lives of trees. It's a dynamic cross section of Orion's long history of engagement with arboreal culture, featuring work by Ursula K Le Guin, Terese Marie Mailhot, Michelle Nijhuis, Michael Pollan, and Arthur Sze, and printed as gently as we could manage -- using 100% recycled paper, processed without chlorine, and free of plastic.

To celebrate the release of the book, Robin Wall Kimmerer (who contributes the foreword) will hold a public discussion with Robert Macfarlane and David Haskell. These authors bring a unique perspective on the legacy of trees in deep time, which they explore in their recent books Braiding Sweetgrass, Underland, and The Song of Trees,respectively. Together, they will discuss the idea of the personhood of trees, root communities, and the ways in which humans might foster the growth of our canopy. Moderating the event is Mary Evelyn Tucker, co-author of Journey of the Universe.

You can register here.

For large parts of this past plague year(-and-a-half), my fandom has basically been the cookery empire of Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, so of course I was delighted to watch a panel discussion with Tamimi, Tara Wigley (the co-author of his Falastin cookbook), and representatives of the Zaytoun food import company, talking about Palestinian cooking. It's viewable on Youtube, and inevitably made me hungry.



The Vengaboys (yes, you read that right) have just released a new single, and the video clip is the most lurid, kitsch, 90s-nostalgic, self-referential thing I've ever seen. I am delighted.



(In a sentence that is possibly the most late-90s Australian thing ever: I once won a free Vengaboys CD at the launch event of a new under-18s nightclub; the launch event was sponsored by Impulse deodorant and hosted by several cast members of Home and Away. And yes, fourteen-year-old Ronni attended said launch event wearing a) bell-bottomed leggings that had a miniskirt attached b) a baby blue singlet top with a glittery rhinestone butterfly on it c) my hair basically in this style d) bright blue platform sneakers and e) body glitter. I can still remember all these details because the entire event seemed like the most serious business ever at the time.)

Today is, apparently, all about the online author events. Having watched the recording of Roshani Chokshi's Instagram Live event last night, I'm now alerted to the fact that Zen Cho is doing a similar event in about half an hour today. Since this will fall right at the start of my working day, I'm also going to watch it later, and will update this post with the link to the recording so you can all do the same. [Updated to add the link to the recording.]

I will, however, be able to watch Amal El-Mohtar's keynote speech at Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations live on Youtube this afternoon, as it's due to stream at 5pm British Summer Time, which is exactly when I stop work. This may be of interest to some of you as well — check what time it is in your timezone, or come back to the same link to watch asynchronously, as it will be available for a little while afterwards. El-Mohtar is a great public speaker — she's brilliant whether in a podcast, a panel, a kaffeeklatsch, or doing a keynote address, so I highly recommend this event.

Reading-wise, I've been firmly ensconced in Egypt these past few days, with P. Djèlí Clark's short story 'The Angel of Khan el-Khalili' (about feminism, justice, and the workers' movement (including a scenario evocative of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire), set against a version of 20th-century Egypt where steampunk automata are part of every home, and angels and djinn talk to people who dare to seek them out), and then Mara, Daughter of the Nile by Eloise Jarvis McGraw, a work of historical children's fiction that I read after lirazel used it as the answer to one of the thirty-day book meme prompts. I think if I'd read this as a child, as lirazel did, I would have enjoyed it uncritically. However, while I love the overall story and setting (a teenage girl, enslaved and chafing against her situation, winds up working as a spy and embroiled in the dangerous politics of ancient Egypt in the time of Hatshepsut), the book is very much of its time, with some very unfortunate 1950s implications which soured things a bit for my twenty-first century eyes.

Onwards to the last book meme prompt:

30. A book you detest that people are surprised by

( My answer )

And that's the final post in my series of answers to a great set of questions about books and reading. I've really enjoyed answering them, and I'm happy that I managed to do this across every single day of April without any gaps!

I'll leave you with some photos and a video of the beautiful blossoms in our garden! Have a great weekend!.

Yesterday was pretty much close to perfect. Matthias and I had been talking for ages about going on longer walks around Ely — I never feel at home in a place until I've gone wandering, and given there's little else that can be done outside the house as a social activity, it seemed a good idea. But we've always been either too busy, or the weather has been appalling, and we kept putting it off.

In any case, we finally did the 12km round trip to Little Thetford. To make it a round trip (rather than simply walking there and walking back), you do the first half through the fields (boggy, with dark, rich earth scored deeply by tractors, waiting for the seeds for this year's harvest), then carry on beyond the village until you reach a marina filled with houseboats. At this point, you turn around and walk back along raised paths beside the River Ouse. It's so flat here that the cathedral looms out of the landscape, wherever you are, reflecting the sunlight. The walk was windy, and filled with birds, and very, very satisfying. I've put up a photoset over at ronnidolorosa.

Then it was back home for Thai take-away for dinner. We followed that with our annual watch-through of all the Eurovision songs for this year's competition. As always, it was a mix of the ridiculous and the sublime, interspersed with the utterly inexplicable. (Prime candidate for the latter is Finland's entry this year — inexplicably, they sent a nu metal band, which Matthias inevitably dubbed 'Helsinkin Park'.)

My favourites (or at least the ones that made me the happiest) were:

( Cut for embedded videos )

I really need some Eurovision icons.

We went for our last walk to Grantchester for the immediate future. (The house we have bought is nowhere near where we currently live, meaning Grantchester is not on our doorstep.) I prefer it when the whole place is shrouded in mist and waterlogged, but given it was a farewell of sorts, I'm glad today it was flooded in sunlight. Here's a photoset. We took our time, and loitered by the alpacas for a while, and generally used the walk to stretch muscles that had been made tired by all the packing yesterday. It was glorious.

Then it was back home for a breakfast from the French patisserie (for understandable reasons, we basically have no food left in the house), and my attempts to get rid of the last unwanted items of furniture on Facebook Marketplace. A nice Czech guy took the massive open-fronted wardrobe that I'd really been worrying about (mainly because it's too big to fit in a standard car, but he showed up with a screwdriver and disassembled it in the carpark, which I found charming), and a nice Chinese guy took the removable towel rails (which hang from the radiators) and hanging frames that hang off the doors (you can hang coats, bags, or in our case toiletries bags in the bathroom from them). As you can probably tell, our current rental house has virtually nothing in the way of inbuilt storage — not even towel rails in the bathroom — so all these things were ways to get around that. The new house, thankfully, is overflowing with inbuilt storage, including bookshelves, which was to a large extent why we wanted to buy it (the other main reasons: a recently renovated kitchen, and DOUBLE-GLAZED WINDOWS), so all this stuff is unnecessary.

I'm still feeling pretty frazzled, meaning it's been impossible to focus on anything, either reading or writing. I realised last night, when I was struggling to stop myself from mentally packing the remaining boxes and bags while I was trying to get to sleep, that I absolutely cannot cope with tasks left unfinished at the end of the day. It's why I only list daily tasks in my bullet journal and gave up with the 'future log' or monthly list of tasks after about one month when I first started bullet journalling: I just get really stressed if I think of these longer term things. Obviously there are a lot of long-term projects (both professional and in my personal life) that cannot be finished in a single day, but I've always preferred to break them down into smaller things that can be finished in a day ('write 1000 words,' 'email this person,' 'book this one thing'). When the task is something that cannot be broken down in this way ('pack up your whole house, including things that you will need to use right up to the final morning,') it just weighs on my mind, consuming all my thoughts.

I do feel massively relieved to have got rid of everything we were planning to give away before the move — all that remains will be to give away the boxes, packing tape and bubble wrap to someone else moving house, once we've unpacked at the new place.

At least the end is in sight!

This day of transition from daylight saving to standard time is my favourite of the year: I'm a morning person, I tend to wake up early, and I like waking to sunlight. The extra hour is always much appreciated as well. This time around, it meant that Matthias and I were up and off for our walk to Grantchester by about 7.30am, and back home — via the French bakery for a fresh, warm baguette and coffee — at about 8.30am. It was bright, crisp, and clear, and the cows were all gathered in the field closest to the carpark, ready to be moved out of their summer home, as always happens when daylight saving ends.

The rest of the morning was taken up with yoga (a fast flow sequence that was perhaps a bit more ambitious than I felt like, focusing heavily on core strength), a bit of food prep for dinner, cleaning empty fountain pens, and finishing up the final fifteen per cent of the book I'd been reading, Queen of the Conquered by Kacen Callender.

This was a book that was so ambitious and compelling in some regards, and so incredibly frustrating in other areas that I almost feel incapable of reviewing it. It's the first in a fantasy series grappling with the history of slavery and colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, and it has really interesting things to say about revenge. It's essentially a revenge tragedy, and Callender does a great job of showing what it is to live a life solely motivated by revenge — how it corrupts and poisons everything, how it hollows out a person, and how it causes such a person to justify every injustice they perpetrate as working towards that ultimate end. I applaud Callender also for writing a book whose protagonist is so thoroughly contemptible (there are several things that she — the narrator, Sigourney — does that cross a moral line beyond which I am incapable of finding a character sympathetic) but for whom it is still possible to feel pity.

But at the same time, the book — which is supposedly adult fiction — was dreadfully let down by how closely it stuck to the typical US young adult novel formula. The first person present tense grated — I can see why the former was necessary, given the book was intended to bring its readers into uncomfortable proximity to the mindset of a woman so thoroughly convinced that 'the master's tools will dismantle the master's house', but present tense is almost never warranted, and certainly wasn't here. The obvious Designated Love Interest was unnecessary. And the twist at the end was so obviously telegraphed (it's basically Chekhov's Mind-Reading: if you have a narrator who has supernatural abilities to read people's minds, those responsible for the unsolved string of politically-motivated murders are going to be the people whose minds she refrains from reading out of respect, or dismissal of their importance, and I figured this out after I'd read about a third of the book). And from a structural point of view, it's really poor writing to have this great twist revealed in a huge infodump (secondhand, as the narrator reads someone's mind) for the final fifteen per cent of the book.

In other words, interesting ideas, shame about the execution.

My other recently read books have, with one exception, been a lot more satisfying.

( Two novellas and three novels behind the cut )

The rest of the weekend has been spent signing up for Yuletide, poking around the letters app (I now have a list of six potential requests I want to treat, and the only thing that's stopping me from starting is that I like to write my assignment first before committing to any treats), and trying to hunt down an elusive book which unfortunately has (to the best of my memory) an extremely generic name.

My obsession with fiction set in Al-Andalus (either when it was experiencing its glittering golden age, or in its dying days and collapse), particularly when the point-of-view characters are religious minorities, was kindled way back in my undergrad days, when my Jewish History/Religion/Culture lecturer assigned us an excerpt of a historical novel set in that period (alongside the typical academic books and journal articles). I'd always meant to track down this book, but its name eludes me, and while a lot of Googling by both Matthias and me yesterday unearthed an entire library of historical fiction books covering similar ground (now all added to my to read list), I still cannot find the book in question. Now my only hope is that all my photocopied course notes are still sitting in my old room in my mum's flat in Sydney, so that whenever international travel is possible again, I can go through said notes and find the reference to the book I'm seeking. At least I've got an interesting looking set of other books to read at some point in the future!

In the time it's taken me to write this post, the sun has completely disappeared. Any lingering hint of summer has definitely well and truly vanished!

The prompt for sunshine_challenge today is 'green'.

Green is my very favourite colour, and being out among green and growing things is one of the surest ways for me to restore a sense of calm and happiness if I'm feeling down. When I'm not able to go out and look at trees and fenlands, I do the next best thing: scroll through the numerous gardening, flower farmer, or otherwise outdoorsy nature-focused Instagram accounts that I follow.

I've deliberately kept Instagram as the sole oasis of social media calm: apart from online and 'real life' friends and family, the only accounts I follow are those which post about beautiful, calming and pleasant things. And for my response to today's challenge prompt, I am going to recommend a few of my favourite accounts. Most of them are based in the UK (or northwestern Europe), as that's where I live, and there are a handful of accounts from Australia, as that's where I'm from.

sigridsminde: a woman with an incredible farm and garden in the Danish island of Ærø.

aseasonalharvest: a woman with a great garden in a huge block of land in the south coast of NSW in Australia.

my_urban_edible_garden: does what it says on the tin — an amazing urban garden in Sydney.

milliproust: a flower farmer in the UK.

botanicaltales: a woman in the UK who runs a business selling dried flowers. Also has a great allotment garden and green roof in her house.

foxgloveandivy: beautiful photos of the English countryside.

thewildwoodmoth: lovely photos of the Dorset coast.

ouririshstory: gorgeous photos of the west coast of Ireland.

oakandclaw: incredible nature photography, mainly in the north of England.

lobsterandswan: beautiful photos of flowers, plants, and interiors.

petalspapyrus: lots of photos of flowers from a woman in Japan.

Looking at photos and Instagram stories from these accounts always soothes me.