Beyond Selidor

There's a blackbird that's taken to standing on the kitchen roof (just below our bedroom window), singing its heart out every morning around 6am to greet the dawn. It's like a natural alarm clock, and it's such a gentle introduction to each new day that I can hardly begrudge it.

I didn't know I needed a four-day weekend so badly until I had one, with four days stretching gloriously ahead of me, every hour my own to do with as I chose. It ended up being the perfect balance and mixture of activities, planned in such a way that everything worked out seamlessly, with even the weather cooperating. I'm good at this — organising holidays at home — but I so rarely have the opportunity.

I've described everything below in words, but have a representative photoset, as well.

This extended weekend's events can be grouped under a series of subheadings, as follows:

Movement
I swam 1km at the pool, three times: on Friday, Sunday, and today, gliding back and forth through the water, which was blissfully empty today and Friday, but too crowded for my liking on Sunday morning. On Saturday, I went to my classes at the gym, and then Matthias and I walked 4km out to Little Downham (about which more below), through fields lined with verdant green trees and flowering fruit orchards, watched by sleepy clusters of cows and horses, and then returned home the same 4km way. I did yoga every day, stretchy and flowing in the sunshine, listening to the birdsong in the garden. Yesterday, Matthias and I walked along the sparkling river, and then back up through the market, which was full of the usual Sunday afternoon of cheerful small children and excitable dogs.

Wanderings
As is the correct way of things on long weekends, we roamed around on the first two days, and stuck closer and closer to home as the days wore on. On Friday night, we travelled out into the nearby village of Whittlesford (via train and rail replacement bus), and on Saturday we did the walk to Little Downham, but beyond that I went no further than the river, the market, and the gym, and I was glad of it.

Food and cooking
The Whittlesford trip was to attend a six-course seafood tasting menu with wine pairings, which was delicate, exquisite, and a lovely way to kick off the weekend. In Little Downham, we ate Thai food for lunch at the pub, cooked fresh, redolent with chili, basil and garlic. I made an amazing oliahercules fish soup for dinner on Saturday, filled with garlic and lemon juice and briny olives and pickles. Last night I spent close to three hours cooking a feast of Indonesian food: lamb curry, mixed vegetable stir fry, slow-cooked coconut rice, and handmade peanut sauce, and it was well worth the effort. We'll be eating the leftovers for much of the rest of the week. We ate hot cross buns for breakfast and with afternoon cups of tea. We grazed on fresh sourdough bread, and cheese, and sundried tomatoes, and olives.

Growing things
On Sunday, we picked up some seedlings from the market: two types of tomato, cucumber, chives, and thyme, and I weeded the vegetable patches, and planted them. I was delighted to see that the sweetpea plant from last year has self-seeded, with seedlings springing up in four places. The mint and chives have returned, as have the various strawberry plants. Wood pigeons descend to strip the leaves from the upper branches of the cherry trees, and the apple blossom buzzes with bumblebees.

Media
The fact that we picked Conclave as our Saturday film this week, and then the Pope died today seems almost too on the nose (JD Vance seems to have been to the Pope as Liz Truss was to Queen Elizabeth II: moronic culture warring conservatives seem to be lethal to the ageing heads of powerful institutions), but I enjoyed it at the time. It reminded me a lot of Death of Stalin: papal politics written with the cynicism and wit of Armando Ianucci, and at the end everyone got what they deserved, and no one was happy.

In terms of books, it's been a period of contrasts: the horror and brutality of Octavia Butler's post-apocalyptic Xenogenesis trilogy, in which aliens descend to extractively rake over the remains of an Earth ruined by Cold War-era nuclear catastrophe, in an unbelievably blunt metaphor for both the colonisation of the continents of America, and the way human beings treat livestock in factory farming, and then my annual Easter weekend reread of Susan Cooper's Greenwitch, about the implacable, inhospitable power of the sea, cut through with selfless human compassion. Both were excellent: the former viscerally horrifying to read, with aliens that feel truly inhuman in terms of biology, social organisation, and the values that stem from these, and unflinching in the sheer extractive exploitation of what we witness unfold. It's very of its time (for something that's so interested in exploring non-cis, non-straight expressions of gender and sexuality, it ends up feeling somewhat normative), and while the ideas are interesting and well expressed, I found the writing itself somewhat pedestrian. It makes me wonder how books like this would be received if they were published for the first time right now. Greenwitch, as always, was a delight. Women/bodies of water is basically my OTP, and women and the ocean having emotions at each other — especially if this has portentous implications for the consequences of an epic, supernatural quest — is my recipe for the perfect story, so to me, this book is pretty close to perfect.

I've slowly been gathering links, but I think this post is long enough, so I'll leave them for another time. I hope the weekend has been treating you well.

I mentioned in a previous post that I had a particularly successful Yuletide this year, in terms of both the gifts written for me, and how the fic I wrote was received. (I was completely overwhelmed by travel and visiting my in-laws, however, and didn't have a chance to read anything else in the collection besides my own gifts, so for the first time since I participated in Yuletide, I unfortunately won't be able to include recs from the collection here.)

This year, I received not one, but two gifts, which I can now see were written by the same author.

The main gift was Paige/Arcturus fic for The Bone Season — a pairing and fandom which I have been requesting for ten years in almost every single exchange in which I participated. I'm so delighted that someone chose to write it for me at last, and to have dug into so many things that I love about these characters and this pairing.

Adamant (1024 words) by cher
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Bone Season - Samantha Shannon
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Paige Mahoney/Warden | Arcturus Mesarthim
Characters: Paige Mahoney, Warden | Arcturus Mesarthim
Additional Tags: POV First Person, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma Recovery
Summary:

Paige vs PTSD, with her usual feelings about battles.

Every year, I've hoped (while knowing that no one is entitled to such things) that someone might choose to write an additional treat for me, and for the first time in ten years of Yuletide participation, someone did! I feel very grateful and privileged, especially since the fic is for a tiny (even by Yuletide standards) fandom of which I thought I was the only person who felt fannish: Gillian Rubinstein's Space Demons trilogy. Again, the fic really got to the heart of what I love about this canon, characters, and pairing — right down to the nostalgic 1990s tech and internet!

futurism (1259 words) by cher
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Space Demons Series - Gillian Rubinstein
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: pre Mario Ferrone/Elaine Taylor
Characters: Mario Ferrone, Elaine Taylor, Ben Challis
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Mario in the aftermath, reaching for a future.

( My three fics — The Dark Is Rising, and the Winternight series )

So that was my Yuletide. I have today and tomorrow remaining as holidays, before returning to work (from home) on Friday. I'm going to ease my way gently into 2025 with a long yoga class, doing the final bits of set up of my bullet journal, and starting a new book. I hope the first hours of the new year have been kind to you.

After a sleepy taxi ride to the airport through the slumbering streets of Vilnius, an early-morning Ryanair flight that left miraculously on time, and an (even more miraculous) sail through Stansted, we arrived home before midday, to a hot, stuffy house, and a dry and feral garden that had somehow managed to not just survive two weeks without us, but also to grow fruit and vegetables in astonishing abundance. (Benign neglect is clearly the way to go with this garden!) Matthias and I have spent the past two weeks on holiday in the Baltic countries — a whirlwind tour that took us through eight cities (or rather six cities and two small towns) in four countries (moving at such a pace at the beginning that we spent the first seven nights of the trip in seven different hotels). This is the longest we've ever been away apart from trips back to visit my family in Australia, where we essentially stay put, so it was very exhausting — but well worth it!

The reason for the whole trip was the wedding of one of Matthias's school friends, who lives in Finland and was getting married to his Finnish fiancée; we decided that this was the perfect opportunity to add a visit to Tallinn, and then decided that when would we next have the chance to be in that part of the world, and added on some time in Latvia and Lithuania as well! We did the whole thing (other than the flights at either end) via public transport: ferry, trains (and an unintended rail replacement bus), which was logistically complicated (especially the trains between Estonia and Latvia, and Latvia and Lithuania, of which there are only one per day on each respective route), but a great experience.

Since I always regret not doing so when travelling, I put pen to paper every day with a few sentences in my paper journal, so I'd remember all the various things we did. I'm very happy to expand on anything noted here, especially if you are considering visiting the same places and want advice or recommendations.

( On the worldroad )

And that about sums it up. That was a lot of transcribing, so I'm going to ignore any typos that I discover later! I feel really fortunate to have had such experiences, and particularly appreciate that Matthias and I are such keen walkers, since it allows for a kind of sponteneity and serendipitous discovery that balances well with my own impulses to plan and schedule everything to a rigid degree. Walking means you can revel in the unexpected, encountered en route to the planned activities!

I have a few final impressions of the trip and region as a whole, but I will leave that to another post — but as I say, I'm happy to expand on anything mentioned here in the comments! I also have extensive photographic documentation of everything documented in writing above, over at Instagram (ronnidolorosa, where I'm always happy to be added by people from Dreamwidth, although give me a heads up if your username there is different to your Dreamwidth one, otherwise I won't add you back).

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!

It's another long weekend here in the UK, although this time around I have to work on the Monday, so it's just a regular old weekend for me. We've managed to pack quite a bit into the two days nonetheless.

On Saturday morning, Matthias and I headed off fairly early into Cambridge in order to see Furiosa in the IMAX cinema. I'm glad we did so from an audiovisual perspective, since it was a great spectacle, and was served well by the format, but my feelings about the film as a whole are quite mixed. When I first heard George Miller was making a prequel about Furiosa, my immediate reaction was one of Do Not Want — and all those misgivings were confirmed. Fury Road was pretty much close to flawless (it's my favourite film), precisely because it left so much about its world and its characters unexplained, operating in an almost mythic space in which viewers fill in the blanks according to their own experiences. I didn't need Furiosa's backstory, I didn't need to know every little detail about the social structure of the lives of the inhabitants of the wasteland — and in general I'm kind of fed up with this perception that fannishness of a particular fictional universe equates to a desire to see every blank spot fleshed out and every plot hole filled in. The chase scenes, as always, were incredible, visually it was beautiful, the world felt vivid, three-dimensional and lived-in, and Chris Hemsworth was clearly having the time of his life playing a character who was essentially Thor, but evil — but overall, this was not a film that I needed to exist.

We were out of the cinema in time for a late-ish lunch at a Korean restaurant, then sat for a while under the trees in a pub beer garden before heading back to Ely. It was warm and clear enough for us to eat dinner outside on the deck, which was wonderful.

I'm writing this post a bit earlier than I would usually do on a Sunday because we will be heading out after lunch for the monthly walk with our walking group. Unfortunately the lovely clear weather of Saturday has blown away, and it's been raining on and off all morning, with thunderstorms promised. We'll see how that goes. The walk itself will be flat and easy (there's no other kind of walk in this area, given the landscape), along the river and through fields in a loop of about 5-7km. An easy Sunday stroll, and hopefully without rain!

The other thing that happened this weekend was author reveals for once_upon_fic, so I'll stick my recs for the collection in this post, now that I'm able to give credit to the authors.

I must start, of course, with my lovely gift, which gave me exactly what I wanted in terms of character dynamics from Tochmarc Étaíne fanfic:

Carried by the Wind (1468 words) by Nelja-in-English
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Irish Mythology
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Étaíne/Fúamnach (Tochmarc Étaíne)
Characters: Fúamnach (Tochmarc Étaíne), Étaíne (Tochmarc Étaíne)
Additional Tags: Canon Rewrite, Love Potion/Spell, Metamorphosis, Dreams, Magic, Temporary Character Death, Mentions of Midir and Aengus
Summary:

Fúamnach tells the story, this time. And when it gets away from her, she gets help.

I also enjoyed these other fics in the collection:

Gold Tree by water_bby (I assume the user has archive-locked it so I can't embed it)

Blush-Rose (2893 words) by RussetFiredrake
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid | Gold Tree and Silver Tree (Fairy Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Craobh-Òir | Gold Tree & An Darna Bean | The Second Wife (Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid), An Darna Bean | The Second Wife/Am Prionnsa | The Prince (Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid)
Characters: Original Female Character(s)
Additional Tags: Fairy Tale Retellings, First Kiss, Curiosity, Bisexual Female Character, implied threesome
Summary:

A prince's new bride fears she is in a story where her curiosity will be her downfall. She finds herself in a different tale altogether.

A Rose of a Different Form (1438 words) by BardicRaven
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: La Belle et la Bête | Beauty and the Beast (Fairy Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Belle | Beauty & La Bête | Beast (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Belle | Beauty's Brothers(La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Belle | Beauty's Sisters (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Le Marchand | Merchant (La Belle et la Bête)
Characters: Belle | Beauty (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | The Beast (La Belle et la Bête), Le Marchand | The Merchant (La Belle et la Bête), Belle | Beauty's Brothers(La Belle et la Bête), Belle | Beauty's Sisters (La Belle et la Bête)
Additional Tags: Redemption
Summary:

As soon as sundown came on the day that the merchant was to have brought his daughter and no-one had darkened his doors, the Beast knew that the merchant had lied

Grant Me Clemency (4039 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Bertilak de Hautdesert & Gawain
Characters: Bertilak de Hautdesert, Gawain (Arthurian), King Arthur - Character
Additional Tags: time loops, A Game of Questions, Rash Actions Lead to Rash Consequences, Ruminations
Summary:

Sir Gawain is trapped in an endless cycle of repetition, from Arthur's hall to the green chapel, attempting to find a way out of his predicament, but he has no earthly idea what he is supposed to change, or who is responsible for this cycle. So he plays the game again, hoping this time might be the one that finally breaks it.

when you return, go to the sea (14840 words) by celaenos
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Selkie Bride (Folk Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Selkie's Children (The Selkie Bride), Selkie Wife (The Selkie Bride), Human Husband (The Selkie Bride), Original Characters
Additional Tags: Once Upon a Fic Exchange 2024, Sister-Sister Relationship, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Family Feels - Struggling To Be A Good Guardian, Family Feels - Fraught Sibling Relationship, Fairytales & Folklore, One Shot, Original Character(s), Fic Exchange, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Abuse
Summary:

She learns about her ma three days after her seventh birthday—but she doesn’t learn the whole of it until many years after that.

My own assignment was another fic for 'The Selkie Bride' folk tale. Women/the sea: my ultimate OTP.

Ripples (2035 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Selkie Bride (Folk Tale)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Selkie Wife (The Selkie Bride), Selkie's Children (The Selkie Bride)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Selkies
Summary:

The sea takes, and the sea gives back its own unexpected gifts.

Two of the selkie's daughters try to find their way through uncharted waters in the wake of their mother's departure.

And now the sun has come out! Let's hope the weather holds during our walk.

I'm just back from the pool, having done my final swim of 2023, it's getting close to the point where my friends and family in Australia start posting photos of fireworks, and the view from 2024, so let's do this.

In the spirit of breaking routines and habits that no longer serve me, this is going to be the last time I do this meme in its entirety. I think I've been using it as a year-end summary every year since I joined Livejournal in 2003, and I've been feeling for a while that many of its questions are more appropriate to a teenager, or an undergraduate student in their early twenties, and their answers don't really say anything fundamental about the shape of the year when the respondant is closer to forty than fifteen. Twenty years of this meme seemed like a good point to stop, and as of 2024, I'll cannibalise its questions and keep only the ones that I feel are relevant to my life.

( Questions and answers behind the cut )

I've been somewhat absent from these parts for the very best of reasons — a holiday in Italy with my mother. We enjoyed our trip to the Amalfi coast so much last year that we wanted more of the same — good food, interesting and challenging walking, daily swimming, all in beautiful places. Our trip to Amalfi had been organised by a company that specialises in hiking holidays, in which people travel from hotel to hotel on foot on routes organised by the company (but generally on designated walking tracks used by various people), and the company organises people's bags to be transferred from hotel to hotel separately. We organised a similar thing, but with a different company, around Lake Como, over three days, starting in Varenna and ending in Como with stops overnight in Menaggio and Bellagio.

The hotels were lovely, the food was excellent (it's really hard to eat badly in Italy to be honest), and we swam every day either in the lake or in hotel swimming pools, but the organisation and walking itself left a lot to be desired. This company was a bit chaotic and unreliable (for example the pack of material such as maps, baggage tags enabling our bags to be conveyed to each hotel by taxi drivers was not delivered in time and had to be sent by FedEx to our first hotel), and the walks they'd organised were wildly uneven in terms of difficulty. (For example the first walk was close to 16km up and down steep mountain paths made of loose large stones — we bailed after about 4km due to the heat — whereas the second walk was listed as '6.5 miles' but would be lucky to have been 6.5km and was essentially a flat path along the lake used by old ladies walking their dogs.) My mum and I are pretty confident and resilient hikers, and were underwhelmed by the overall quality of the walks. I think it didn't help that the company was based in the US and possibly had never done any of the walks themselves, whereas last year's Amalfi organisers were based in the UK, had a team in Italy, and had members of staff who had done all the hikes whose experiences and suggestions were included in the instruction material. So, overall I liked the places we went to, but didn't much enjoy the main purpose of the trip: the hiking itself.

Our time around Lake Como was bookended by a couple of days in Milan at each end. Both Mum and I had been there before and felt no need to do particularly touristy things again, so we spent most of our time walking around, eating in restaurants and cafes, and swimming laps in a beautiful and venerable indoor swimming pool — the oldest in the city.

Our time in Italy was affected by a rail strike, and also a strike of airport staff that meant our original flight back to the UK was cancelled and the only available bookings directly to the UK were for three days later, so things ended with a rather desperate search for flights (including some ridiculous options such as a 21-hour flight with a stopover in Qatar, a flight with three changes and an overnight stay in Greece, etc), in which the best available option ended up being returning to London via Helsinki (and an overnight stay in an airport hotel). So the last 48 hours of the trip ended up being spent in a Milan laundromat while Mum washed her clothes and we both talked for hours with a young Mexican backpacker who was also washing all his clothes (sample anecdote: 'I went out in London with a bunch of Germans from my hostel and we almost got stabbed'), then in an endless chaotic queue at the airport with a bunch of confused and irritated Finnish people, then in Helsinki airport, with two three-hour Finnair flights that were certainly not originally part of the plan! I did get to bring home salty licorice, though, which was an unexpected and welcome bonus. International travel is wonderful, surreal, and always full of the unexpected, that's for sure!

I do have a number of photos from the trip up on Instagram — if you have an account, you'll be able to see them there at ronnidolorosa. All in all, it was a weird and wonderful time.

Thank you for everyone who posted reassuring comments and helpful and interesting suggestions in my last post. My in-laws have been and gone, and are currently sitting at their departure gate at Stansted, and I think a reasonably good — if tiring — time was had by all. Unfortunately I had worked myself up into such a state of stress that I lay awake all night last night until 5.30am, and managed a grand total of forty-five minutes of sleep, so for obvious reasons I've felt as if I were swimming through treacle all day. My grand plans to respond to all your in-depth comments this afternoon are for obvious reasons going to have to be put on hold, and this is therefore essentially a check-in post.

I did manage to drag myself out to the pool this morning and do my usual 1km swim in spite of the lack of sleep, and it helped somewhat, and I'm hoping following this up with a very slow, quiet yoga class with lots of poses close to the ground will help some more, but beyond that I'm just going to park myself under my weighted blanket and try to stay awake until a reasonable bed time.

Miraculously, I did manage to finish one book this weekend — The Oleander Sword (Tasha Suri), the second book in her epic fantasy trilogy inspired by Mughal history and with a f/f romance at its heart. I felt in the past that this series was a real step up from Suri's previous writing, and the second book is itself a step up from the first — I feel as if I've had the rug pulled out from underneath me in the best possible way. I thought I was reading one kind of story, and it's turned out to be something quite different, in a way I find really intriguing. The romance and the two women involved are allowed to be messy and complicated and painful in a way that makes sense for the characters and the very different things that motivate them, but in a way that makes me feel fairly certain that it won't end in death or tragedy. In other words, I'm now avidly anticipating the third book in the series!

I really am incredibly sleepy, so I'm going to leave things there. I hope everyone's had nice weekends!

It's always a very satisfying feeling when you're able to make a connecting train you'd assumed would leave too close to your previous train's arrival time. This situation yesterday meant that Matthias and I arrived back from Germany before midnight, rather than closer to 1am, which would have been the case if we'd had to take our originally planned connecting train home.

Yesterday was the hinge point between the two sections of our winter holidays, a demarcation line spent travelling on trains/hanging out in railway stations for twelve hours, separating the (fun, but exhausting) part of the holiday spent with my in-laws in Germany from the burrowing-in-and-relaxing stage that we will now spend at home until we start work again on Tuesday. International train travel delights me, and we are particularly fortunate that our journey to and from Germany, crossing five countries, only requires three trains from door to door.

As you've possibly gathered, spending Christmas with Matthias's family (his sister, her husband, their three kids aged six and under, plus his two parents) is quite full on. We stayed with his sister and her family, and the kids are a lot of fun, but also quite a lot of work — the older two are not particularly independent, as they are happy to play alone but want constant observation and interaction with an adult while this is happening, and the youngest kid is a one-year-old baby who obviously needs fairly hands-on attention most of the time. I have now learnt far more about Minecraft than I ever wanted to know, I spent close to seven hours assembling an unbelievably over-the-top Playmobil princess castle, and I — who find babies extremely calming presences — hung out with the baby while he burbled around the house playing with whatever fleetingly captured his interest. This is the first time we've been with my in-laws for Christmas in three years, and the first time in Germany with them in four (in 2019 they came to us), and it was rather like being hit with by a train in terms of exhaustion!

For obvious reasons, therefore, I haven't had much time to work my way through Yuletide (or really do anything that wasn't looking briefly at social media), and other than commenting on my own lovely gift, I haven't done much with the collection. I wrote four fics this year (I'll be astonished if anyone can guess which ones), and so far the treat that I wasn't sure about seems to be getting the best reception. I hope those of you who participated had a successful exchange this year, and that those of you who read the collection found stuff you liked.

Due to all the above, my reading time has basically been limited to international train travel, and I deliberately kept things fairly simple in terms of the books selected. During my trips into and out of Germany, I managed to reread the second two books in Katherine Arden's Winternight trilogy (The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch), which I have written about several times here and which remained as lovely as ever. Other than that, I stuck to novellas — a seasonal reread of Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night (Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma), Volume 2 of the Lore Olympus webcomic (a Christmas present), and three novellas best described as regency romances in fantastical alternate versions of Britain (Curse of Bronze and Tea and Sympathetic Magic, both by Tansy Rayner Roberts, and Snowspelled by Stephanie Burgis). These latter had been given away as free ebooks as part of a end-of-year promotion, and although I enjoyed them, I don't think I would have acquired or read them if I had had to pay. But they were perfect low-energy train reading.

This time of year, particularly the days after Christmas, is a weird one for me. I don't much enjoy New Year's Eve — it makes me morose and melancholy, although I've found ways to counter that in recent years — but I really love New Year's Day, and the sense of energy and purpose and clarity that it brings. I'm trying to spend these last few days of holiday getting into the right state of mind — swimming every day the pool is open (today's laps were the perfect way to clear the travel cobwebs away), long yoga classes, setting up my new bullet journal, cleaning and re-inking my fountain pens, reading cozy books, meal planning, cleaning, and just generally doing the things that will get me in a mental state to start as I mean to go on. Every day is getting lighter, and it feels as if the world is slowly waking up.

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.