Beyond Selidor

It's the eve of the UK general election. Three articles I've read in the past two days sum up the state of the nation, and the general mood:

An (incomplete) list of every terrible policy the Conservatives have inflicted on Britain since 2010

For a deep dive into the effects of one such set of policies on one sector:

How the Tories pushed universities to the brink of disaster

As I immigrated to the UK to take up postgraduate studies two years before the Tories took power, then spent the following fourteen years of their government either as an international postgraduate student, or as someone working for a university, I witnessed almost everything described in the article in real time. And yes, even at the (extremely prestigious, extremely internationally well-known) university where I studied and now work, things are as bad as described.

‘Here comes the sun’: Zadie Smith on hope, trepidation and rebirth after 14 years of the Tories

This one is so good, and I really struggled to find a suitable segment to excerpt, because I wanted to just quote every word, which are like fire, written with a flaming sword, the burning writing on the wall which condemns this contemptuous grasping, malicious, joke of a 'government' to the scrap heap which it so richly deserves.

That’s the dark secret about this version of Conservatism: it doesn’t even work. That’s the joke of it all. What we have at this point is an unstable and dangerous mix of Thatcherite ideologues – determined to finish the job of dismantling a postwar social compact they despised from its inception – and shysters whose short-term thinking is so profound that they haven’t even the political will or energy to turn Britain into that fabled, deregulated paradise-for-some: “Singapore-on-Thames”. No, they’re too busy having lockdown parties or making secret millions off PPE contracts or betting on the date of the general election. They’re a whole new breed – and the good thing about that is their old defence tactics no longer work.

I’m afraid the papers aren’t going to swing it for you this time, guys. People have eyes. People have children. People pay rent. People go to the shops. People get sick. People go to work. The damage you have done is everywhere and in plain sight.

I will head to the polling station tomorrow morning in the light of dawn, with a spring in my step and a sense of steel and clarity behind my eyes.

Tonight, hope sits like a fluttering bird in my heart, in my throat. I hope, I hope, I hope.

Today is the first time this year that I have dared to hang my laundry out on the line in the garden — and I was delighted to discover (as I can see into the gardens of all the houses in our row of terraces) that almost every single neighbour had chosen to do the same. It's such a sign of the changing of the seasons, and it lifts my spirits every time.

After going to the gym on Saturday morning, and wrangling the landscapers who are continuing to work on our back garden, I spent the afternoon and evening in Cambridge with Matthias. The place was its usual chaotic weekend zoo; the centre of town was packed to the hilt both with tourists and with swarms of postgraduate students processing through the streets in gowns on their way to graduate, then spilling out into every restaurant, cafe and bar to celebrate with their families. Thankfully, Matthias and I had booked ahead in advance, and had an excellent dinner at the new high(ish)-end Japanese restaurant in town, enjoying sharing platters of sushi and sashimi, and cocktails.

We headed back to Ely fairly early on (hilariously, one shouty group of women on a hen party returning from London spilled off the train at Cambridge, to be replaced by another shouty group of women on a hen party returning from Cambridge, like some kind of one in-one out policy), and swung by our favourite cafe/bar for a nightcap, chatting to the women who run the place and slowly winding down.

Today, I've mostly been cooking, reading, doing laundry and so on, although I also managed to do quite a bit of work on my once_upon_fic assignment, and feel I've navigated my way through the thorns with which my recipient's prompts initially presented me. It should be much smoother going from now on.

It's been a good and varied reading week: some old favourites, this very good short story, which I saw recommended in a Dreamwidth friend's locked post as something doing something incredibly clever with the experience of being an immigrant (as an immigrant myself, I agree emphatically: this is exactly what it's like).

I also finished one new-to-me book, More Perfect (Temi Oh), a near-future dystopian novel which retells the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in a setting in which human beings are physically and mentally connected to the internet (and to each other) through neural implants, to the extent that no one with such implants is able to experience the mental privacy of their own minds. Obviously, this extreme surveillance state seems normal (and even desirable) to people who have never experienced anything different, and the book is in some ways the dawning realisation that their safe, interconnected utopia is a horrifying dystopia in which individual freedom is impossible and the sense of community which people's permanently connected minds promises is nothing but a sham.

The book does some things very well: Oh's depiction of the experiences of the children and grandchildren of immigrants (the immense pressure to succeed, the weight of expectation), and allusions to real-world British political events (there is a moment in which a group of people is watching the results of a contentious referedum be counted, with the slow realisation that their side has lost that is so visceral and painful to read as someone who lived through Brexit that I found it almost physically excruciating) are pitch perfect, as is the near-future technology and the logical societal consequences of its widespread adoption. However, some aspects of the worldbuilding didn't work for me: the constant references to present-day pop culture (the notion that teenagers in the 2040s and 2050s would all be familiar with Harry Potter or Beyonce struck me as unlikely), and the trope in which a public, worldwide revelation of the truth of people's oppression is enough to trigger a peaceful revolution and usher in a new dawn of civil liberties and democracy (beloved of 21st-century dystopian YA, naive at best in my opinion, especially given the current power of disinformation in our own times). I suppose in essence I recommend the book, with some serious reservations.

I'll close this post with a link I came across via vriddy: Cybersafety and Privacy (Particularly in Online Fandom) by thebiballerina, with lots of sensible tips. It's a good reminder that we owe no one in any context (whether online, in person at work, or in person in social settings) full access to every facet of our lives, and keeping some of those boundaries intact is a good idea from a practial, personal safety perspective.

It feels as if Sunday is almost over, but there are still a few more hours of daylight (and laundry-drying), and time to finish my current book, eat a quick dinner, and then head off with Matthias to watch The Holdovers at the community cinema, which will be a nice, cosy way in which to close the weekend. I hope you've all also been having an enjoyable couple of days.

It's my coffee break, I've got about half a day's work remaining for the year, and then I'm on holiday until 2nd January. In the past, Matthias and I have flown to Australia to spend three weeks with my family in December/January, but the astronomical post-pandemic costs of international flights have put paid to that forever. When we're not in Australia, we tend to travel to Germany to spend Christmas with Matthias's family. However, during the pandemic, everyone got very used to spending this time celebrating separately at home, and realised that although we enjoyed each other's company, doing the big family celebrations every year was exhausting, and we made the decision to alternate between being together in Germany, and going our separate ways (Matthias's sister and her husband and children are spending the holiday in Austria this year).

As a result, once I finish work today, there will be no day-long train trip across five countries (contending with the inevitable chaos of Deutsche Bahn), and instead I will have ten days of uninterrupted rest. I'll read (I've already made a start on my usual seasonal rereads — 'Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night,' The Dark Is Rising, and The Bear and the Nightingale), I'll cook, I'll work my way through the Yuletide collection, we'll go for walks, I'll go swimming and do yoga and set up my new bullet journal, and it will all be incredibly peaceful. All the various food and wine has already been bought, and other than a trip into Cambridge tomorrow, there will be no need to go very far.

All that is by way of preamble to today's open thread prompt: what does 'rest' look like for you?

As you might be able to tell, I don't think of 'rest' as doing very little, or sleeping in (I am physically incapable of sleeping in, and it's been like this all my life — even when I was a teenager, in prime sleeping in age, I never woke up later than about 7 or 8am, and even when I'm incredibly tired or ill, this tends to result in afternoon napping rather than staying asleep longer in the morning), but rather being in absolute control over my own time. Knowing when meals are going to happen and what each meal will involve, knowing that the shopping has been done and that every required item is accounted for, choosing when I want to exercise or read or write or clean or go outside for a walk, without any externally imposed demands: that, for me, is rest. It's restful for my mind, and this in turn affects how relaxed my body feels. I'm so fortunate to be able to be in a situation conducive to this kind of rest, for such an extended period of time.

How about you? What does it mean to you to rest?

The Friday open thread is back for another week. This week's prompt is all about points in your life where your choices diverged, and you chose (or fell onto) one path as opposed to another. But it's also about where you might have ended up if you'd chosen otherwise.

For me, there was one very clear moment in which my life branched off in a specific direction, and if things hadn't happened as that did in that specific moment, my life would have been very different.

( Two roads diverged behind the cut )

What about you? Can you identify specific points where you were faced with two (or more) diverging paths with profound effect on your life? And if you had taken another path at those points, what would your life look like now?

Happy Gravy Day, you marvellous people!



I hope you are close to exactly the people you want to be at this time of year, even if you (like me) are physically far apart.

On a related note, I can't figure out how I feel about this: the original Paul Kelly song is sung from the perspective of a man in prison, and this year it was covered by First Nations prisoners with Pitjantjatjara translation as part of a prison education program.

I've got shibboleths on my mind right now, for various reasons. The main reason is this humorous video of stereotypes about my hometown, which includes mention of one of Canberra's most obvious shibboleths: the pronunciation of the name of the suburb 'Manuka,' which instantly makes it obvious whether the speaker is a Canberran or not. (The local pronunciation is 'MAAH-nuh-kuh', the second two syllables being unstressed vowels.)



So my question this week is: do you have any favourite shibboleths (whether from your own country/city/town/region, or just in general that you know about) — and, if so, what are they?

Other than Manuka, I'd say that quite a few Australian placenames are shibboleths, at least insofar as almost every British person I've met seems to mispronounce them. Australians say 'CAN-bruh,' and 'MEL-buhn' (the last syllables being unstressed vowels), whereas a lot of British people I've met say 'CAN-beh-ra,' and 'MEL-born.' (In general, it's safe to assume that in most multisyllabic words, Australians will use as many unstressed vowels as we can.) I would assume New Zealanders can pronounce these place names correctly, though. I also kind of think the fact that Australians use the word 'chips' to describe both the hot fried potato dish, and the room temperature snack food — relying on context to know which one is meant, and, if necessary, specifying hot chips — is almost a shibboleth as well.

Of course, the UK's own placenames are rife with shibboleths, many of which have tripped me up in the past as an immigrant.

What about you? Do you have any favourite shibboleths?

Do you like fairytales, folktales, mythology, legends, or similar types of literature? Are you (like me), looking for a fic exchange that takes place in this half of the year? If so, you may be interested in once_upon_fic. Nominations close next Sunday (this may be Monday for you if you live in an eastern part of the world), and there are further specific requirements for a fandom to be eligible, so do check out the comm for more details. The tagset looks great already, and I'm super excited about all the things I've nominated as well, and hope they get approved.

This article interviewing 15 immigrant restaurant owners/chefs combines and celebrates two of my favourite things: immigration, and food. It made me feel a bit emotional, and it's also full of excellent recipes. And as a fellow foodie immigrant to Britain, I feel seen. Yotam Ottolenghi's introduction to the immigrants-and-food article is also worth a read.

This lengthy rant about the woeful political 'leadership' of Scott Morrison was so cathartic to read:

Our Prime Minister is unprepared habitually because he is uninterested in being prepared. He is a man capable only of feigning humanity, passive-aggressively and defensively, and only when pressed on whether he gives a shit about a particular something or not and the focus-grouped answer is yes, he does give a shit, so sincerely in fact he spoke to Jenny about it just the other night. He is a vortex of shirked responsibility, his tenure a policy wasteland and a bookkeeper’s nightmare. He leaves behind less a prime ministerial legacy and more a hole.

Call the election, dickhead.

Every so often, an article will cross my path that covers something so niche, so specific to a particular time and place — and so specific to a particular time and place when I was there and I remember exactly the thing being written about — that I'm astonished anyone considers it noteworthy, and delighted they did so. This article, about a particular subgenre of Australian music that is apparently called 'bloghouse', is about exactly such a niche topic. I saw it, I read it, and I remembered! All this music was happening at nightclubs just around the corner from where I lived with my mum and sister (and where my mum still lives) when I was an undergraduate in Sydney. I remember seeing it advertised with posters on lampposts and so on. Nightclubs really weren't my scene at that point in my life, but I loved that kind of music and listened to it all the time at the bakery where my sister and I worked on weekends, while running, and around the house. The article touches on something that I hadn't been aware of, which is that the popularity of this kind of music arose at exactly the same time that technology, and social media like MySpace enabled Australian musicians to punch above their weight in the global scene, leading to a brief, but interesting cultural phenomenon.

I'll leave you with some new-to-me music, which fulfills the secondary function of reminding how much I utterly love Berlin.

And so another Gravy Day has rolled around, and there's a strong sense of deja vu: again people are apart when they were expecting to be together, and again the world is facing down the prospect of another year in which griefs, triumphs, and rituals both religious and secular must be experience separated from many of the people who give our lives meaning. Paul Kelly's gorgeous, poignant, bittersweet Christmas song — sung from the perspective of a man in prison, reminiscing about and yearning for the typical chaotic, messy, loving Australian secular Christmas with his family — resonates again this year in ways that cut to the heart.

I've long felt that Paul Kelly is basically Australia's uncrowned poet laureate. He has a way of getting to the emotional core of things, telling stories in his songs which are deeply felt but never cloying, simple but never simplistic.

The version released this year made me break down in howling tears in my kitchen — a welcome catharsis.



Last year's version, which I can only find embedded on Facebook, brought together multiple Australian singers and musicians via Zoom, each recording their segment in videos which pointed to — with their myriad Indigenous nations and post-colonisation cities/towns noted in text — a shared emotion stretching across the length of the land.

The song is one rare instance where earnest sentimentality works as intended, and the result is deeply human and sincere. It resonates in these pandemic times, of course, but it has long resonated with me as an immigrant, and it speaks to other parts of my experience, too — my awareness that those childhood Christmases at my maternal grandparents' place are long out of reach, a moment in space and time to which we cannot return. And it gestures at human flaws and frailty, and our capacity for compassion and welcome and shelter. Goodness, the song sings, is not perfection, and the antidote to cruelty is not a cold and stark purity, but rather warmth, and fragility, and showing love through food and chaotic conversation.

I have a tradition of listening to this song on Gravy Day, and usually Kelly's TED Talk in which he explains the creative process behind writing the song (embedded below). I allow myself to feel the full force of grief at missing my family, at the weight of living my life across oceans and borders.



It speaks to me, every year, and I hope it speaks to you.

( Bonus: lyrics behind the cut )

I was in the bakery this morning, and the two women working there (from Finland and Spain respectively) and I had a long grumble with each other, which can be summarised, in brief, that pandemic+Brexit+Conservative government is absolutely wretched in a very personal and specific way if one is an immigrant. I don't think much more needs to be said, apart from to say that the best thing about being an immigrant is this strong sense of community and common ground among all migrants to Brexit Island, even if we don't appear to have very much in common on paper. (The worst thing, of course, is living under a government who treats us like a punching bag that can be wheeled out whenever they're slipping in the polls and give us a few twists of the knife to remind their voting base how much they hate us.)

Outside, the moon is rising in a clear sky, the vacant lot/field across the road is bathed in moonlit mist, and inside I'm surrounded by Christmas lights and candles and cards strung up across the window, and I suppose, for now, that will have to be enough.

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.