Beyond Selidor

It's the end of another working week, and that means it's time for a new open thread prompt. I was inspired this time by a series of 'Friday 5' questions that I saw several Dreamwidth friends answering last week — feel free to answer all five questions, or just use the spirit of all five in a more general way:

Talk about your engagement with news media, past and present.

( Original five questions, plus my answers )

Honestly, looking at everything I've written behind the cut, I think my relationship with the news was a lot healthier back when I engaged with everything in print, in a circumscribed manner, even though a) I'm the daughter of two journalists, and lived in a house in which political news reporting was literally spread out across the breakfast table every morning and b) I came of age during the 'global war on terror' era (9/11 happened when I was 16) and my entire early adulthood felt like one long raging fury about American foreign policy and its repercussions and reverberations in Australian politics.

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 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 )

I was feeling very worn down and deflated today, for a variety of reasons — the chief of which being the seemingly neverending set of things in the house which need fixing or changing. These are all the sorts of things that in a rental property I would have treated like endurable petty annoyances, and things that I couldn't change, but now that we own the house feel like an endless stream of wrongness that needs to be worked on until they're fixed.

And then a box of my old books from Australia arrived in the mail. You may recall that I spent some time when I was back in April clearing through the bookshelves in my old room in my mum's flat. She has been sending everything that survived the cull in batches — first my old paper journals, photo albums, and various other things like that, and now the books. This first box was mainly filled with middle grade books, which to be honest is about where my brain is at.

So I picked up six of these books — a series of illustrated children's portal fantasies, each no longer than about 90 pages — and read them all during my lunch break. The editions I have, from the mid-'90s, are written by 'Mary-Anne Dickinson,' but as my family suspected at the time, this was a nom de plume for Australian author Emily Rodda (itself a nom de plume for Jennifer Rowe), and Goodreads lists the books as being written by Rodda. The other amusing change is that the six I have were the extent of the series (named in the books as the 'Storytelling Charms Series'; each book came with a little charm that attached to a charm bracelet, which I also found when clearing out my room), but the series on Goodreads is listed as the 'Fairy Realms Series' and seems to have four further books and a number of short stories.

In any case, these are extremely undemanding children's portal fantasy — a little girl named Jessie discovers that her beloved grandmother is the ruler of a magical realm who left this otherworld to marry her human artist husband, the gateway to this realm is in her grandmother's garden, and Jessie travels into the otherworld in each book to solve various low-stakes magical crises which resonate with various low-stakes human crises she's having at home. The books are sweet, and warm-hearted, and ultimately what they're really about is the fact that for many children, grandmothers are a bit magical, and visiting the grandparents' house is a bit like travelling to a special fairy otherworld — at least if your grandparents are kind people. It certainly brought up warm and nostalgic memories for me of visiting my maternal grandparents, who were wonderful and open-hearted people (and, as I discovered as a teenager and in adulthood, open-minded and never afraid to reevaluate the norms and values of their youth and early adulthood), which is the most human kind of magic.

I was chatting to my mother earlier, and the result was a rather amusing misunderstanding.

I was talking to her about how (apparently, according to Australian author Catherine Jinks), there is no market any more for children's historical fiction, and it's impossible to publish it, because no publisher will pick it up.

Mum: That's really surprising to me, given the popularity of that TV show.

Me, struggling to think of any popular children's historical fiction TV show: What show do you mean?

Mum: Oh, that really popular historical one ... it's not really historical, it has fantasy elements.

Me, confused, but remembering that there was a Narnia TV show when I was a kid: Do you mean ... Narnia?

Mum: No, not Narnia. That recent TV show!

Me, at last realising what she meant: Do you mean Game of Thrones?

Mum: Yes, yes, that's the one I meant!

Me: *falls over laughing*

That well-known children's historical fiction TV show, Game of Thrones!

I don't know how it happened, but somehow it's been more than a month since I last posted on Dreamwidth, and several weeks since I last logged in. I'll try to read back over people's posts, but may not manage to work through the full backlog.

*

The main reason I've been so absent from these parts is that my mother came to visit. Due to the pandemic, this is the first time we've seen each other in person since June 2019 (whereas before she'd come over once a year, and I'd go back to Australia around every two years; the latter I've now not done since April 2018). She stayed for a month, and it was absolutely marvellous.

The big highlight of her visit (beyond just seeing her and being able to have conversations unmediated by a screen) was spending two weeks travelling around the Amalfi coast in Italy. Usually when Mum visits we do a hiking trip, walking from place to place for about a week, normally in the UK. This year, she was adamant that she wanted to spend time somewhere it was guaranteed to be warm and sunny (which in the UK is definitely not guaranteed), I suggested Amalfi, and she found a company that organised the itinerary and accommodation for self-guided hiking.

I don't want to give a blow-by-blow description, but suffice it to say that we started in Amalfi, ended up in Sorrento (with a side trip to Capri), and it was absolutely extraordinary. The hiking terrain is extremely mountainous, and the routes, while not particularly long by our standards (the longest was about 14km), were very tough and challenging, and we learned early on that if the tour company's route description designated the route 'medium,' we would find it hard, and 'easy' was for us medium. (One 'medium' route began with a climb up 1000 stone steps up the side of a mountain, for example.) The hotels we stayed in were all very nice, we ate extremely well, and, best of all for both of us was the swimming — whether in outdoor rooftop hotel pools, or in swimming holes off the rocks at the foot of cliffs, the beach that was essentially attached to our hotel in Positano — which we managed to do every single day. It's hard to explain, but the ocean has such a different quality in different parts of the world — the look and feel of the water, the way it moves. It's so restorative to the soul to swim in the sea, particularly if it is as beautiful as it is in that part of Italy. If you follow me on Instagram you will have seen the photos, and if you haven't, please feel free to have a look — ronnidolorosa is the username.

(Another bizarre highlight of the trip was randomly bumping into my Canadian sraffie friend alexiepedia, whom I hadn't seen in person since 2011 or so. We both realised from Instagram we were in the same part of the world, were messaging to arrange to meet up for a drink, and eventually realised that not only were we all staying in Anacapri, but that we were literally eating meals simultaneously at two different sections of the same restaurant.)

After returning from our adventures, Mum stayed with us for another two weeks, with all of us working (she's a radio journalist and had arranged interviews with various people in Cambridge and London for one of her programs), going for walks, and us showing her all our favourite spots in Ely — as we moved house and city last year, all this was new to her. She's just returned to Australia, and I miss her already, but given we're all going to be in New York in a few months for a wedding, and Matthias and I will hopefully be visiting Australia over Christmas, at least the gaps between seeing each other will be much, much less.

*

Inevitably, I've picked a day to return to Dreamwidth when Britain's domestic politics resemble an Armando Ianucci script. It's been a weird 48 hours.

Well, 2021 certainly was a year.

( Questions and answers behind the cut )

Everything's been a bit of a low energy, foggy blur recently. I've barely felt capable of reading, and watching TV shows has at times felt like a trudge, even if I enjoyed the material. At times all I felt capable of was lying around with the Olympics on in the background, and to a great extent the only thing about which I felt normal levels of enthusiasm was the gymnastics (and endless gymnastics documentaries that I found down the Youtube rabbit hole).

However, there has been nice stuff, too:

My mum is fully vaccinated (joining my father, stepmother, various step-relatives, and sister #2), my maternal aunts all have their second doses booked and happening in the next couple of weeks, and sister #1 had her first dose of AZ today (she's in her thirties, but elected to request AZ from her doctor rather than waiting around indefinitely for Pfizer which is arriving at some unspecified future point in time).

Matthias and I basically walked and ate our way through London, and I didn't realise until I got there how much I had desperately missed proper cities.

Fresh summer fruit, and gelato.

My beautiful garden ruin.

There's light enough, I guess.

I was talking to my mother and sister via FaceTime this morning and Mum was telling me all about her radio programme this week (she's a radio broadcaster who does a programme which takes events that are making headlines and does a deep dive into the history behind them, interviewing historians, economists, commentators, activists, archivists etc). The progamme this week is all about studies into using psychodelic drugs to treat mental health conditions. After a while, Mum fell to reminiscing about the '70s, and my sister and I were sitting there in amusement at a number of anecdotes that began 'and that time [ex-boyfriend] and I were taking magic mushrooms/acid/etc'.

I had the dual realisation that a) my parents had a way more adventurous youth than I did (I'd known about most of this stuff already, but it's not exactly something I think about actively) and b) if I wanted to obtain illicit drugs in the UK, I would have no idea who to ask, whereas I know at least twenty people in Canberra and Sydney I could ask, should I want to do so. My social circles in Australia are as equally filled with high achieving nerds as they are in the UK, so I'm not really sure how to explain the discrepancy. I should make it clear that I have zero desire to acquire illicit drugs, I just found the contrast amusing.

*

On a completely different note, the complicated Australian bureaucracy thing I was dealing with last week led me to another bizarre realisation. I remember when I met lowercasename for the first time, he told me that his parents (who emigrated from Russia to Australia in the 1980s and spoke only Russian to each other, and him, at home) had left Russia before various technological things were invented, and as a result of being isolated from other Russian-speakers had no idea of the Russian names of such things. Therefore, his family basically invented their own Russian words for various pieces of software and commonplace computer hardware, and no other Russian speakers use the same terminology.

My situation is slightly different. I lived in Australia long enough that I had a tax file number, did paid work and filed tax returns, and had to contribute towards the rent and bills of a shared house — but I did all this at a time when everything was entirely analog, and on paper. My wages were paid directly into my bank account, but I never had internet banking, I filed my tax returns on paper and got my tax refunds as cheques which I had to deposit physically in the bank, and when I needed to transfer rent money to my housemate I withdrew cash from my bank account and filled in a paper deposit slip and deposited the money in person at a branch of her bank. I existed entirely on paper.

And of course, since I've lived and worked in the UK during the years when such things were increasingly done online, I know how to navigate all this stuff in a UK context, I know the UK terminology, and I am as close as it's possible to be to a 'digital native' ... in the UK, and its various pieces of bureaucracy. But in Australia, I have no idea! I don't even know the names for government web platforms, or technical terminology (someone over the phone was like 'you can pay it via BPay,' and I was like 'what's BPay?').

It's as if I'm a time-traveller from an age of paper. It's not an insurmountable problem (I can eventually figure out most of this stuff via context or Google), but it is an oddly disorienting feeling.

I found out today that one of my cousins was actually in the US for work, covering the election (he works in TV news). He was mainly based during this time in Pennsylvania, so very much right at the heart of things. Bizarrely, he claimed he felt safer (in terms of the pandemic) in the US than he does in his home of Melbourne, which I just boggle at, given the comparable difference in cases, even when Melbourne was at its worst. I wonder if the strict Melbourne lockdown made him feel more uneasy, compared to the (sadly) relaxed situation in the US, even though the former of course makes things way safer than the latter.

*

I've finished the first draft of my Yuletide assignment. I'm going to let it sit a while before coming back to it for edits, and spend some time working on a couple of treats. Last year I managed five works in the main collection (my assignment and four treats), but I suspect I'm not quite going to manage a comparable number this year. We'll see.

*

Every so often, I'm reminded sharply how glad I am to have left academia in general, and Celtic Studies specifically. The most recent thing to have brought this home to me: two senior scholars in the field, who reviewed the work of a recently-deceased academic. This posthumous publication was mainly written while the latter was dying of cancer — in other words, in extremely trying circumstances. And yet these two senior academics spent their entire review — a whole 34 pages!!! — picking this person's work apart in the most vicious of tones (right down to nitpicking about comma placement). The whole thing is extremely cruel. And yes, that's par for the course in the field, unfortunately.

*

Like everyone else in my social circles, I've been completely consumed by the US election, and the stressful fallout, and it's rather affected my reading. That being said, I've tried to get things back on track, and have begun a reread of the entire Dark Is Rising sequence. These books to me are so deeply evocative of very specific physical locations, and very specific times in the year that to have begun the reread in November seems incongruous: Over Sea, Under Stone is such a story of summer, of sun-drenched seaside holidays that to read it in the dying days of autumn feels almost inapprorpriate. And of course if I go straight on to The Dark Is Rising it will be too early! I suppose nothing is stopping me from revisiting each book again at a more appropriate time of year.

*

Tomorrow is Matthias's birthday, and both of us have taken the day off work, meaning we'll get a long weekend. Obviously we're in lockdown, so it's not as if we'll be going anywhere (other than perhaps a nice walk), but it will be good to have a bit of a rest, given that I fell asleep for two hours yesterday afternoon, then slept for ten hours last night, and still feel somewhat exhausted.

*

I'll leave you with this highly seasonally appropriate short story by Iona Datt Sharma, 'Heard, Half-Heard, in the Stillness'.