Beyond Selidor

This weekend has been absolutely glorious, albeit somewhat tiring. The sky is cloudless and cornflower blue, the breeze is warm and gentle, and Matthias and I have made the first efforts towards getting the garden into shape this year. I planted poppies, marigolds and cornflowers in the raised beds, he mowed the lawn for the first time since late autumn, and we both sealed the deck with two layers of oil — messy, tedious work that made my legs ache, but that I'll appreciate later on. Here's a photoset of various blossoming fruit trees and other flowers in our garden.

Yesterday's two hours of classes in the gym involved dance fitness (instead of the regular zumba), in which we spent the hour-long class learning an entire dance routine from start to finish, which left me feeling jubilantly ecstatic. It reminded me a bit of doing dance classes in high school and after school when I was a teenager, and made me wonder if I'd enjoy doing some kind of actual dance classes now. The main problem with this is that I dance like a gymnast: i.e. I am incapable of dancing in shoes, and (as a consequence of having ten years of gymnastics drilling into me that one's body should be held as straight and unyielding as a board when undertaking any physical activity) I am incapable of moving my hips or chest with any fluidity. A gymnastics background does have some benefits (I pick up routines quickly and have a good memory for movement, I have very good balance, and a good sense of how different parts of the body interact and work together), but is severely limiting when it comes to most styles of dance.

Other movement this weekend included swimming through liquid sunshine for 1km this morning at the pool, and yoga next to a sunlit, open window. It does feel a lot easier to move when the weather is like this, that's for sure!

Matthias and I continued making use of our current MUBI subscription, and watched Crossing, a Georgian- and Turkish-language film in which an ageing Georgian woman, accompanied by an aimless but enterprising young twentysomething guy travel from Batumi to Istanbul to track down the woman's trans niece in order to fulfil a promise she made to her dying sister (the niece's mother). Once in Istanbul, they have no luck finding the niece, but drift into the orbit of a found family of sorts: a trans Turkish woman working as a sort of all-purpose advocate at an LGBT nonprofit organisation, and a pair of impoverished children who eke out a precarious existence scamming and selling tat to tourists. The film's title is very pointed: crossings of various kinds (over borders, back and forth on the ferry between Istanbul's European and Asian sides, and of course from gender assigned at birth to living openly as characters' real gender) feature throughout. It's a beautifully made film about people who've never quite fit in, brushing up against the rough edges of the world, and finding unexpected softness in each other — and a reminder, again, that Istanbul is one of the most beautiful cities in the world (which makes me feel even more irritated that it's unlikely I'll be able to see it in person any time soon).

I only managed to finish two books this week: a Thousand and One Nights retelling, and a nonfiction work of political analysis that's already out of date.

The retelling is Every Rising Sun (Jamilah Ahmed), which I found worked in some areas and was weaker in others. She chose to set the retelling in medieval Central Asia (although her characters journey east via current day Iraq to join Saladin defending Jerusalem against the Crusaders), and I did enjoy reading a work of fiction whose geographical orientation was so different to how we normally perceive the world. I also appreciated the way Ahmed approached the source material (the frame narrative really does need to be retold as something of a horror story, rather than YA romance, which I've seen done before), and the folk stories told by her Shaherazade are fantastic. I take issue with some of the choices Ahmed made in order to finish the book with a sense of character growth and justice — I would have preferred something messier, I think.

The nonfiction work is Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy, a slim essay on the global growth of authoritarianism that suffers by being published in 2021, and therefore outpaced by current events. Her assessment of the far right authoritarian turn in Poland, Hungary, the UK, and the US (and the globally interconnected nature of far right authoritarianism) is sound and persuasive, and the personal anecdotes serve to humanise and contextualise what could otherwise be a fairly dry book. She opens the book with a New Year's Eve party she and her centre right Polish politician husband hosted in 1999, making the point that within the next five years, she was crossing the street to avoid half the guests, and those guests were likely to deny that they had ever been guests of Applebaum and her husband, such was the political rupture and divergence. She closes the book with another party held in 2019, making the point that although many of the guests were her usual crowd (political and intellectual elites of the centre right), her social circles and political allies had now been expanded to include a lot of similar figures from the centre left — her own politics hadn't changed, but 'the Right' had drifted so far to extremes, and embraced authoritarianism so wholeheartedly that she'd been left behind. The weaknesses of the book are the weaknesses of Applebaum's own political ideology: she's a conservative at heart and has been well served by existing social organisation and institutions, and so sees little need for large scale systemic, structural change, and she views the world through a prism of authoritarianism versus democracy, which leads her to equate things like left-wing Twitter mobs 'cancelling' people or protesting the presence of their ideological opponents giving speeches at university campuses, with the governments of Boris Johnson or Victor Orbán. (Although I think the former are often ill-informed, ill-advised, or counterproductive, to equate them with the latter is ridiculous, because it does not take account of important things like their relative power.) All in all, an interesting read, but confirming things I already believed and knew, and very much outpaced by political events of the past four years. It reads almost like an artefact (even though based on what I've seen Applebaum writing and saying these days, I think it still remains broadly her position on both national and global politics).

It's been a while since I've had both the time and the energy to do one of these regular weekend catch up posts, which became a victim to my various travels, various visitors, my busyness at work (which seems doubly unfair since it's meant to be a quieter time of year), and then a stretch of time when either Matthias, or I, or both of us were ill. For the time being, we're better, and things are calmer.

We spent a few hours yesterday out at Haddenham — a nearby village — for its annual beer festival. We went for the first time last year, walking there through sunlit fields for several hours, but elected this time around to take the bus both ways, since large stretches of the walk are on main roads with no footpaths and no verge, which is stressful. The beer festival itself is more like a village fete — a couple of tents set up serving drinks, a scattering of food trucks, and stalls selling things like raffle tickets to raise money for the Scouts, face-painting for children, and homemade cakes by parents at the local school. The event takes place on the village playing field, which gets partially fenced off, and guests sit in groups having picnics on the lawn, or under the shade of marquees, listening to a variety of not-great local bands play cover music. (For the segment of time that we were there, we kind of lucked out and ended up listening to two groups of high school student bands — it's an extremely surreal feeling to see groups of fifteen-year-olds, dressed as you and your peers were dressed as teens in the 1990s, playing covers of all the big alternative rock hits of your own youth, that's for sure!) The sky was cloudless, the atmosphere was relaxed and summery, and the whole thing was a lot of fun.

Today, I've been swimming, cooking, and finishing off my rarepairexchange assignment. Due to all the busyness, travel and sickness I mentioned previously, I've gone a couple of weeks without sticking to my normal exercise routine, and Friday was the first time I'd done any kind of movement (other than walking) for quite some time. It feels fantastically good to be back in the water, to be doing daily yoga, and just to be moving my body again: it's disturbing how quickly the effects of a lack of exercise begin to be felt. I hope things will be able to settle back into a routine in this regard for the next little while.

The rest of the day should be fairly relaxed: slowly cooking dinner, finishing off my book, and resting in preparation for what is likely to be another full on week (made more complicated by the fact that Matthias and I decided to take Friday off in order to stay up on Thursday and watch the election results unfold, which means I have to cram quite a lot of work into only four working days). But a breeze is gently blowing through all our open windows, the garden is in full bloom with poppies, cornflowers, sweet peas and foxgloves, and I'm going to wander out to the bakery for an iced coffee, so I really can't complain.

After a few false starts, summer is truly here in earnest. Matthias and I spent part of the morning in the garden, planting corn, peas, nasturtiums, chives, zucchini and butternut pumpkin, and pulling out handfuls of weeds. The tomato, rocket and radish seedlings I've been growing in the kitchen are off to a good start. We ate breakfast this morning on the deck under the umbrella (and the fruiting cherry, apple and pear trees) for the first time this year.

I've been drinking a lot of iced coffee, and listening to a lot of Miami Horror.

Yesterday (or really the middle of the night on Friday), the Once Upon a Fic collection went live, and I spent most of Saturday afternoon reading through it, and commenting on the stuff I enjoyed. I'll do a full recs post once authors are revealed, but I am very happy with my own gift, my assignment was well-received, so I'd say the exchange has been a success from my perspective.

Other than the usual cooking (a new-to-me Indonesian recipe last night), reading (just more of my Benjamin January reread) and gym/swimming, Matthias and I managed to finish booking all the accommodation and most of the flights/transport for our Finland and Baltic countries summer holiday. The latter half of this is something we've been planning vaguely for a while; the Finnish component is happening because one of Matthias's old school friends is getting married there this summer to his (Finnish) fiancée, which gave us the push we needed to finally make concrete plans for the other countries in the trip. It's a bit complicated (because of the location of the wedding, we ended up needing to stay in five different places for the first five nights), but as long as trains and ferries run as anticipated, it should work out smoothly. I will post more details later on a post just about the trip.

This afternoon will be slow and sleepy: catching up on Dreamwidth, a yoga class, a bit more reading, taking the laundry in, lazily cooking risotto. We are going out to the community cinema to see Challengers this evening, but beyond that it's been a pretty low-key weekend, which was definitely welcome.

It's the fourth day of the four-day weekend, and life is good. Four days travelling is great, but four days catching my breath at home is better, and, in this case, was exactly what I needed. I got so much done, but not in a way that made anything feel rushed and frenzied.

It feels easiest to break things down into subheadings.

Gardening

When I left you on Friday, I was crowd-sourcing advice on things to plant in our recently landscaped back garden. Taking all your suggestions on board, Matthias and went to the market and gardening shop on Saturday after lunch, and returned with a truly ludicrous number of seeds and seedlings (plus there was a woman selling indoor plants so I ended up with four more of those). We spent a hour or so on Saturday, and another hour this morning starting to sow seeds and transplant seedlings. So far we've planted beetroot and parsnips in one of the vegetable patches, a few rhubarb in 1/4 of another vegetable patch, and scattered a mixture of seedlings (mainly flowers, but also a fern, and two strawberry plants) and wildflower seed mix across the raised beds in the front and back garden. It's meant to rain this afternoon (and for much of the next week), so it was a good time to get all this done.

Movement

We've been on several little wanders around the cathedral and the river — nothing too lengthy, but enough to feel the fresh air and smell all the flowering plants. I've been to the gym for my usual two hours of classes, plus 1km swim per visit on three consecutive days. And then there's been yoga — slow, restorative, stretchy classes, with the bedroom window open and the warm breeze filling the room.

Food and cooking

I won't list everything eaten this weekend, but highlights include the lamb shoulder I made yesterday (marinated in a dry spice rub overnight, then slow roasted over a bed of fennel, onions, garlic and white wine, served with a roasted red capsicum salad; I made stock out of the lamb bones this morning), today's lunch (potato salad with asparagus, radishes and cucumber, dressed in a handmade lemon-garlic-mustard dressing — no gloopy mayonnaise for me — plus some cold seafood spontaneously bought at a little pop up stall near the river), multiple hot cross buns, toasted under the grill and served with melted salty butter (the last of which we will eat with our afternoon cup of smoky tea), and the first iced coffee of the season, picked up and drunk during this morning's wanderings.

Reading

I'm working my way through Kate Elliott's Furious Heaven, the second in her gender-flipped (and very, very queer) far future Alexander the Great space opera trilogy, and loving it a lot. Like all Kate Elliott books, it's a massive doorstopper, and it takes at least 100-200 pages to work itself up to the main plot, after which point things carry on forward at a page-turning clip for the remaining 500+ pages. The worldbuilding and secondary characters are excellent.

I was also reminded (via my Goodreads feed) that the Easter long weekend is the correct time of year for a Greenwitch (Susan Cooper) reread, since the book's action takes place over a week during the Easter holidays, in a fictional Cornish seaside town. It remains my favourite book in the Dark Is Rising sequence — melancholy and haunting, with the successful completion of its child characters' quest hingeing on people's (and in particular women and girls') symbiotic relationship with the sea. (In other words, is it any wonder that this one is my favourite?) I've got about forty pages to go, and I'll finish them during the aforementioned afternoon cup of tea.

Apart from all the other activities mentioned previously, Matthias and I spent a good bit of time sitting outside — at the riverside bar yesterday, and several visits to the courtyard garden of our favourite local cafe/bar. It really does lift the spirits to be able to eat and drink outdoors again, and it only remains for us to clean our garden furniture and deck — and then we can do so in our own garden, under the flowering (and later, fruiting) trees.

Idyllic really is the only word to describe how things have been these past four days.

Saturday began with an early morning train into Cambridge, in order to lead a workshop for a bunch of nurses, midwives, and physiotherapists. I don't normally work on Saturdays, but I'll do so on occasion if people ask me to present/do a training session at their conference or workshop. In the end, things worked out well: the workshop venue was just a twenty-minute walk from the train station, and the timing of my spot on the programme coincided perfectly with the IMAX schedule for Dune (the IMAX cinema also being about twenty minutes' walk from the workshop), so I could meet Matthias afterwards and immerse myself in audiovisual spectacle.

Dune itself was an aural and visual feast, and overall I enjoyed it a lot, but I have to say that the pacing didn't work. I rarely say this — I'm usually of the opinion that films should be cut and edited down, or should have been a TV miniseries instead — but this really should have been split in two, to give all the plot and characters introduced in what felt like the last half-hour of the film time to breathe. There even was a natural stopping point at which these hypothetical two films could have been split! In any case, I mostly got what I was expecting: drama and spectacle and terrible, manipulative people being dramatic and destructive on a galactic scale, and it was well worth watching in the IMAX cinema — but it could have been even better if I'd been in charge of editing!

After that, Matthias and I made our meandering way back to Ely, rounding off the day by watching the Melodifestivalen final (Sweden's Eurovision selection competition). We don't watch the national selections religiously, but watch Melfest from time to time if it's scheduled at a convenient time, simply because Sweden takes the whole thing so seriously and the result is always a fun couple of hours of glittery pop music.

Today has been filled with relentless rain, which left me with zero interest in leaving the house (although I did go out to the swimming pool first thing); thankfully my only plans for this afternoon are to potter around on AO3 and Dreamwidth, and eventually cook dinner. (I got overexcited when I spotted that there were now six The Silence of the Girls fics, and then extremely deflated when these were all revealed to be The Song of Achilles crossovers; people can write whatever they want to write, of course, but I find it dispiriting when my tiny fandom-of-one that's all about the interior lives of the women of the Iliad ends up wall-to-wall crossovers with the Achilles/Patroclus megafandom, focused solely on that pairing, and to be honest their The Silence of the Girls tag feels like false advertising. The solution, of course, is just to write the Briseis/Chryseis epic for which I'm always fruitlessly searching.)

I feel as if that's a slightly sour note on which to end this post, so I'll close instead with all the little things making me happy: daffodil and freesia bulbs just beginning to flower, the perfectly calibrated caffetiere of coffee that I made this morning, the landscapers making good progress on the work for which we hired them in our back garden, lazy Sunday afternoon yoga, chatting with my mum on FaceTime as she travelled home on the ferry across Sydney Harbour, turning the camera around to show me the bridge, the Opera House, and the lights on the inky black water. They all feel like little pockets of happiness — bursts of candle flame held against grief and frustration.

I've just ordered a lot of wintry-scented candles online (and if anyone in the UK feels like doing the same, let me know, because I have a link through which, if others place orders, I get a discount), and that's basically what sparked this week's open thread prompt:

What, if anything, makes your house (flat/room in shared house/dwelling place whatever its specifics) feel like home?

I'm not talking about general decor preferences, but rather am talking specifically about physical objects (or concrete effects on the senses, like ... I don't know, the smell of freshly baked gingerbread or something), rather than house layout or location or overall vibes. For me, the basic elements are as follows:

Candles

String lights

Physical books

Flowers (fresh or dried)

Indoor plants

Throw rugs and other blanket-like coverings on couches, armchairs, etc

Taking things up to a slightly higher level (in the sense that I love them and they make houses feel like home, but if I don't have them all the time I don't feel completely bereft), I would add:

A decent collection of spices (ideally organised on a spice rack)

When seasonally appropriate, some outdoor plants that provide sustenance — even if it's just mint, thyme and rosemary, which are the hardiest of herbs

I always love seeing balconies in Mediterranean countries, and countries in south-eastern Europe, because so many of them are full of practical growing things on every available flat surface: tomatoes, chili, capsicum, cucumber and various herbs, even if the person otherwise lives in quite a tiny flat. (I assume this sort of thing goes on in other parts of the world, but that's region with which I've familiar in which it seems to be almost ubiquitous.)

In any case, what about you? What makes your home feel cosy?

Every year (since I moved to the northern hemisphere) February just knocks me flat, physically and emotionally, and every year I'm surprised and unmoored by this, even though I really should be used to it at this point. (It does beat life back in Australia before I emigrated, when instead of this state of affairs happening for the last month of winter, I essentially lived through whole years of continuous Februaries. I do not recommend it!) It saps my strength and drains me of all the promise and focus that I tend to feel in January. This year, February was a long one, and leaked into March. Unfortunately, the only way out is through.

Weirdly, what snapped me out of it was a throwaway line in an article that really had very little to do with my situation (an opinion piece about ordinary citizens in Taiwan finding ways to cope with their anxieties about invasion and annexation by China) — one of those moments where someone explains something in a few simple sentences that I've always understood subconsciously but never really bothered to articulate. Namely, that the best thing to do in the wake of either inexplicable anxiety, or anxiety caused by things beyond one's control, the best response is to do something potentially helpful that causes physical movement. In my case, this ended up being aggressive cleaning of the bathrooms, and a lot of gardening — weeding two garden beds, covering the weeded areas with mulch, and planting peas, beans, rocket, tomatoes, zucchini and radishes in little pots in the kitchen. It's too early to tell if this is enough to break the 'February' spell, but it's certainly had a temporarily energising effect.

In addition to using the garden as a receptacle of anxiety, I've been to the gym twice — to my fitness class on Saturday morning, and lap swimming today — and done a couple of longer yoga sessions at home. Sometimes Matthias and I go for longer walks on weekends, but this time the furthest we really went (apart from my solo trips to the gym) was down the road to the bakery, where I delighted in chatting with one of the sales assistants about Australia. I've never really sought out other Australian immigrants in my years in the UK, but when I meet them it tends to be nice, and I like having someone with whom to discuss incidental Australiana just down the road.

As is possibly obvious from the opening paragraph of this post, my reading has really suffered recently, but I did finally break the drought with a book that's long been on my to-read list, The Embroidered Book (Kate Heartfield). I really enjoy the premise and worldbuilding of the book — that two of the Habsburg princesses, sent off to further their family's political ambitions through marriages to the French and Neapolitan kings respectively, have been practicing magic in secret since childhood, and in very different ways end up forging connections with an underground community of powerful magic users, with unintended and sometimes terrible consequences. The magic system itself is clever — achieving one's aims through magic requires a very significant sacrifice, usually of a memory that matters, or of one's love for another person, which results in devastating loss of loving connections or terrifying gaps in characters' memories, meaning that the old platitude that 'all magic comes at a price' is given horrifying weight. The storytelling is sweeping and ponderous — Heartfield really lets things breathe, trusting readers to stick with her as things slowly unfold. And yet there is one consequence of the story's premise that really bothers me: the idea that all the major events of European (and, one assumes, world) politics are the result of the machinations of a secret group of powerful magic users robs ordinary people of their agency, so that, for example, the dire economic situation that in part sparked the French Revolution is now caused by the Neapolitan magic users refusing to share their spells for providing plentiful harvests and food. This could hardly be otherwise — if your story is about secret communities of magic users in and around centres of political power eighteenth-century Europe, this will be the obvious consequence, but it's too close to conspiratorial thinking for me. I think I really just dislike stories about secret societies, or any implication that political or social change is the result of shadowy underground networks of people operating without accountability outside the reach of ordinary individuals. In stories in which magic or the supernatural exists, I want everyone to know about it, and for its use to be out in the open and within the reach of all.

And that — with the addition of lots of cooking, a bit of once_upon_fic writing, and nice Indian takeaway food last night — has been my weekend. Let's hope this recaptured vibe can carry through into the upcoming working week, and beyond!

It's been an icy, sparkling weekend: winter is here with a vengeance, all crispy, frost-covered leaves and silvery fog blanketing the fens and hovering over the river. We went for a walk first thing this morning, and it was absolutely spectacular: the cathedral disappeared into the sky, mist curled around the houseboats, and the frost — which first came on Tuesday — never left the ground. I took photos of the garden as well, in an attempt to capture the moment.

This week has been difficult. Matthias and I both had food poisoning last Sunday night, which was, as you can probably imagine, incredibly unpleasant. It feels as if it took the whole week to recover, and yesterday was the first time that I really felt happy eating anything other than crackers and water. Most of the time, I just felt incredibly tired, and everything felt as if I were swimming through honey, and I tried to conserve my strength and do the bare minimum. Thankfully, I now finally feel fully recovered.

The weekend has been all about the written word: putting the finishing touches on a couple of Yuletide fics, and a gift for fandomtrees which just poured out of me in a couple of hours.

I also finished one book: Frances Hardinge's latest, Unraveller, an absolutely glorious piece of YA writing in which all Hardinge's considerable strengths are on display. As with all her books, it's richly imagined with an incredible sense of place, set in a world in which curses are real, and inescapable — and manifestations of people's pain, and grief, and anger. Her protagonist has the power to lift (or unravel) curses, and he roams through the world, digging into people's problems, figuring out who they might have wronged, mending what has been broken, but heedless as to the difficulties the secrets and tensions he uncovers may cause. It's written with exquisite empathy, as all of Hardinge's books are, shot through with compassion and understanding for human frailty and the moments of pain and weakness that might cause someone to turn their rage outwards and irrevocably hurt others, and its ultimate conclusion is that anger should not be avoided, but rather listened to and dealt with honestly. There's also a fabulous thread of inspiration from both weird British folklore and the Andersen version of the Six/Wild Swans fairytale, which of course appealled to me immensely.

At this time of year, I crave a routine that fits the season, and I have a lot of wintry books that I reread. Today it was time to return to The Bear and the Nightingale, the first in Katherine Arden's magnificent fantasy trilogy inspired by medieval Russian history and folk tales, and it was as perfect as ever. I snuggled up under my weighted blanket, and outside the frost dug into the garden, and I sank back into Arden's glorious story of Vasya, and the winter-king, and the supernatural interweaving and overlapping with the domestic, wars between gods sitting easily beside smaller familial tensions, and the ice, and the snow, and the cold.

Is there anything better than a seasonally appropriate book?

It's been a good long weekend so far. Have an activities log, in bullet point form. Over the past three days I have:

Read two books: The Bronzed Beasts (the third in Roshani Chokshi's anti-imperialist heist novel trilogy, in which a band of hyper-competent, emotionally stunted misfits go around stealing the mystical objects plundered by empires), and The Devil Makes Three (a YA novel by Tori Bovalino in which two teenagers at a prestigious US prep school accidentally summon a devil in their school library).

Met up with cait.de.roiste and DrLRoach and their two little daughters. We wandered around the market, and ate takeaway bagels in the courtyard garden of our favourite bar.

Ate my body weight in hot cross buns from the best bakery in town.

Gardened a little bit, watched some TV, and filled the house with flowers from the garden.

Finished my once_upon_fic assignment. I'm now wondering whether I have it in me to write a treat for this exchange as well.

I feel pretty drained and tired, but it's been a good weekend so far.

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

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

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

I hope you've all been having restful weekends.