dolorosa_12 | Entries tagged with my favourite philologist

Matthias is in Berlin, for reasons that will resonate if you’re a fan of specific sports teams (a character trait that passed me by), but is also just something straight out of an underdog Hollywood sports movie. He’s been a fan of his local football (soccer) team for his whole life — unless you know Germany and German football well you won’t have heard of the city or the team — which is generally pretty thankless. Comparably, they’re not a very good team, and yo-yo back and forth between the first, second and third divisions.

This year they are in the third division which is like only a few steps above being amateurs. But the third division also competes with the higher division teams for the cup (although normally in practice the lower division teams get knocked out early on by better teams), and this year, for some bizarre reason, his team beat the then-highest first division team in the cup quarter final. (To translate this to your own context, think of any competitive thing you can think of, and imagine a semi amateur person/team beating the best professional person/team in that event, that’s how unlikely this was.)

Everyone thought it was just a fluke, but then they won their semi final as well, so now they’re competing in the cup final in Berlin today. If they win this they get to compete at European level next year against all the more famous European teams you might have heard of, while still only being in the second division (since they were promoted due to also doing well within their third division competition, but you can’t be promoted from third to first division). It’s very unlikely they win today, but if they do, Matthias always said he would go to their first ever European game, no matter where it was (so, have fun going to Baku, I guess).

He's currently hanging out in Berlin with his sister and nephew, and waiting to meet up with their other friends, having travelled — since it was bizarrely cheaper and more convenient — via Poznan in Poland (where he stayed with another of our friends overnight) and an early train from Poznan to Berlin this morning.

Another nice thing that's happening alongside all this is that the local MP from their home region — knowing that lots of families would be in Berlin for the game — arranged to give a free tour of the German parliamentary building for a bunch of children who were there for the game, including our nephew.

The whole thing is quite surreal.

This weekend was a long weekend, as I was on leave on Thursday and Friday — booked ages ago in order to make use of Matthias's birthday present to me. (My birthday is in December close to Christmas, at which point all I did in celebration was go out to dinner in London the night before we travelled to Germany for Christmas with my in-laws; having the 'main' celebration several months later was very deliberate.)

The present was an overnight stay at this extremely nice spa hotel in the Cotswolds. This is very much not the sort of place at which we can afford to stay as a regular thing, but as a one-off to celebrate a big birthday, it was a fantastic treat. The package we got included breakfast the next day, and a tasting menu dinner.

We travelled by train to London, and then onward to Moreton-in-Marsh on Thursday, where we were collected by a very chatty Hungarian taxi driver, who drove us through a series of picturesque villages to the hotel, which was itself on the edge of another picturesque village. It was the sort of place that had log fires in almost every public space, copies of Country Life and House and Garden in the rooms, and a room specifically to store muddy riding boots, which possibly tells you everything you need to know about the normal clientele. We arrived around 3pm, and then checked into our room, which had a bottle of champagne on ice for us. I spent the afternoon in the spa (which had an infinity pool, outdoor hot tub, sauna, steam room, and ice shower), and lounging around in the room in a robe, drinking champagne, before getting ready for dinner.

This was an absolutely exquisite experience. They limit the tasting menu dinners to 12 guests at a time, and it starts with cocktails and canapes in one of the lounges, after which point everyone is taken into a little private kitchen, where they are seated in a horseshoe-shaped bench around the chefs' working area. We watched them prepare the food, and listened to them explain the courses, all of which were delicious. In such a setting you of course get to know your fellow diners, and by the end it felt as if we were all guests at the same dinner party, rather than four separate groups, even if I didn't feel that I had much in common with any of them. I also just really appreciate experiencing the work of people who are talented and creative and at the peak of their profession — cooking as an art and a craft.

We left on Friday after breakfast, spending a bit of time wandering around Moreton-in-Marsh. I had remarked to Matthias the previous day that I could absolutely guarantee there would be posters up somewhere in the town in support of some form of NIMBY-ish campaign, and the town did not disappoint: rows of posters proclaiming that the town was opposed to 'overdevelopment.' (So not even any specific target of their ire, just against development in general. Absolute Peak Picturesque English Village.)

We finished Friday with a few hours in London, during which time I picked up new leaf tea and coffee from my favourite little shop in Soho, and had a light dinner at

kinkally, a Georgian restaurant I'd been meaning to try for ages (highly recommended).

Saturday was spent doing usual Saturday things, and today we were out for our monthly walk with the walking group: a muddy trek from Soham to Wicken and back again, during which time we saw many blossoming flowers and little dogs, and were accompanied by a melodious soundtrack of birdsong. It rained a bit, but not as much as I'd feared. I do love these Sunday walks — being outside, with people, for a few hours is incredibly good for the soul — but they do basically eat up all the day, and tire me out in a way that is disproportionate to their actual difficulty and distance.

I have read some interesting books this week, but I'm already feeling quite mentally tired, so I'll try to save them for another post.

This is my first year trying out a slightly new format and set of questions for the year-end meme; I made the decision this time last year to retire the previous format (which I'd been using for close to twenty years, since the Livejournal days), the questions of which seemed in many cases more suited to a teenager or undergraduate university student. I've taken this set of questions from

falena.

( I'll sing a story about myself )

This long weekend was exactly the reset I needed after all the tiring travel, so although it wasn't deliberately timed, I appreciated it.

Saturday was filled with bucketing rains, and I trudged resolutely through the deluge to my fitness classes at the gym — which were incredibly challenging after such a long break (this summer has been very disruptive to routines), but worth doing. I trudged through more rain to collect groceries from the market, where most of the traders had given up, or never shown up to begin with. Some British friends of Matthias's family had just returned after visiting his family in Germany, and dropped by to deliver a bunch of stuff that had been sitting at his sister's place for several years, waiting for someone with a car to drive it back to the UK. It was mainly books, but also some vases, a decanter, and decorative flower pots, for which I was pleased to be able to find homes in various parts of the house. The family friends stayed for a cup of tea, while the rain continued to lash at the windows.

It was the perfect weather to snuggle up inside and watch a film after dinner: Civil War, which has a ludicrous premise, and fails as a war movie in the political and logistical sense (both of which you have to handwave and ignore), but works very well as a road movie, and as a movie about journalism.

The remaining two days of the long weekend had much clearer weather, which made starting both Sunday and Monday with a 1km swim in the pool even more enjoyable than usual. We've made the most of the warmth — yesterday we picked up food truck food from the market and ate lunch in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar in town, today I've been doing odds and ends in the garden, and both days we've done loads of laundry — the backlog from our time away. We've been eating a lot of fresh tomatoes and zucchini from the garden, and generally making the most of this last gasp of summer.

The remainder of the afternoon will be spent on various pastimes: I'll read a bit more of my book (a reread of The Palace of Impossible Dreams, the third in an epic fantasy series by Jennifer Fallon that I remembered perhaps more fondly than it deserved from when I first encountered it in the 2000s; now I keep being slapped in the face by a variety of unfortunate authorial implications and am questioning my past judgement), do some yoga, and wander back into town with Matthias for a late afternoon gelato.

All in all, not a bad weekend, although I could really do with one more day off!

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).

My weekend started (on Friday evening) meeting Matthias at his workplace in Keir Starmer's constituency, moving on for dinner and a concert (on which more later) in Jeremy Corbyn's constituency, then sleeping overnight in a hotel in Diane Abbott's constituency: the peak north London experience.

Dinner was a bunch of Malaysian starters at the always excellent

sambalshiok, but we weren't able to linger, because we had to head down the road to a tiny (but cavernously ceilinged) venue for the gig. Uncharacteristically, we were there for the support acts —

nnhmn_ and

minuitmachine — and hadn't even heard of the main event,

rebekawarrior. The former are female-fronted dark electro acts, the later a dark electro dj (and by the time we got to her set, I was astonished that I'd never heard of her), we danced our delighted, exhausted hearts out, and a fabulous time was had by all. We made our way into the night, and back to our hotel via the overground, and collapsed into sleep.

Saturday dawned cold and cloudy, and I was able at last to try the pastries at

pophamsbakery for breakfast — a patisserie I've long been following on social media — and was pleased to discover that they lived up to the hype. We finished our 36 hours in London up with a visit to the British Library, to see their exhibition on Black British music (from Tudor times to the present), which I highly recommend. It's always a bit tricky to do a physical exhibition on a topic that relies so heavily on aural experiences, but they did a good job of telling this complex story. It would have been great if there had been a way to accompany the exhibition with a multipart documentary, just so that the music could have told more of its own story in sound, but I enjoyed things all the same.

After the exhibition, and a quick lunch, we headed back to Ely on the train, and had a lazy Saturday afternoon and evening at home.

Today has also been fairly lazy (apart from both of us doing a bunch of household chores) — slow cooking, slow yoga, lying around reading (Elusive, the second book in Genevieve Cogman's published self-insert Scarlet Pimpernel vampire AU trilogy, which was as swashbuckling good fun as the previous book, with the same reluctance to examine the inherent flaws of the source material's premise while adopting a smugly self-congratulatory assumption of having done so), and restoring energy before the advent of the next working week. I'm severely behind on Dreamwidth, but I'm going to do my best to catch up on my reading page before I go to bed tonight.

I hope everyone's had lovely weekends.

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.

Today's post is a bit of a blissed-out sunny mish-mash. It's been a lazy weekend, almost like taking a deep breath before the frantic business I'm anticipating (for various reasons) for the next couple of weeks.

Yesterday I met Matthias at the market after my two hours of classes at the gym, picked up the final things we needed, then headed home, gulped down lunch, and headed out immediately again for the little outdoor fair outside the cathedral (which was raising money for the boys' choir). It was the usual mix of food trucks and craft stalls — although the draw for us (and the thing which brought us out of the house again, despite the grey skies and gusty winds) was the chance to buy champagne and little bowls of strawberries and cream, which we consumed on a park bench and tried not to be blown away. We might have lingered longer (or walked to the other side of town where two friends of ours were holding their annual plant sale in their garden), but the weather drove us home. I slowly cooked Burmese food for dinner, and then we tucked ourselves into the armchairs in the living room, where I read Leigh Bardugo's latest book (The Familiar, of which more later) in a single sitting.

Today, we woke naturally at about 5.30am due to the sunshine, and dozed on and off until it was time for me to walk to the gym for my 8am swim, which genuinely felt like swimming through liquid sunlight. I spent the morning after my return from the pool picking away at my

rarepairexchange assignment, which finally unlocked for me after many weeks of difficulty.

But the weather was too nice for us to remain sequestered indoors, so out we went again for food truck food from the market (Tibetan for me, Greek for Matthias), sitting under the trees in the courtyard garden of our beloved favourite bar/cafe. When we arrived, the place was empty, and after about ten minutes, every table was taken — such is the characteristic behaviour of British people when the sun finally deigns to shine.

Now I'm trawling through Dreamwidth, and trying to decide whether I should go out again for gelato or stay in the house — I suspect the gelato will win! I've been gathering Dreamwidth links like a magpie, and will share them with you:

Via

vriddy: the Japanese Film Festival Online in which 'a variety of 23 films will be delivered during the first two weeks, followed by two TV drama series for the subsequent two weeks. These will be streamed for free with subtitles in up to 16 languages, available in up to 27 countries/regions.' I imagine this may be of interest to some in my circle.

Some steps to take to ensure any eligible British voters in your life have the requisite ID and voter registration required by the deadlines to vote in the upcoming 4th July general elction, via

thissterlingcrew. There are particular concerns about younger voters, so do pass these details on to any 18-24-year-olds you know.

Staying with politics (in this case US), this Timothy Snyder essay really resonated with me, as his commentary and analysis generally does. Voting, for me (and treating elections seriously), is like the bare minimum tax we pay for the enormous unearned good fortune of being citizens of (albeit flawed) democracies.

On a lighter note, I just went on a downloading spree from these gorgeous batches of icons from

insomniatic (here) and

svgurl (here); perhaps you'll see something you like too.

And then I took a bunch of photos of all the fruit trees in our garden.

And finally, on to reading, and Bardugo's wonderful The Familiar. This is a standalone adult fantasy novel set in Spain during the early years of the Inquisition, and its focus is on the paranoid, terrifying antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-any-non-normative-Catholic-Christianity atmosphere of the era. Its protagonist, Luzia, is a young Jewish conversa, born into a family which for several generations has maintained its Jewish identity in secret, following religious and cultural practices as best as they can while removed from the Jewish community so necessary for those practices to find full expression. In addition to this dangerous heritage, Luzia is able to perform magic (in a stroke of genius, the mechanism for doing so is Ladino refranes or proverbs, and the act of speaking, and language as a kind of cultural and personal magic, are at the centre of the novel), which brings her to the attention of Madrid's aristocratic elite. This fame brings Luzia (and those around her) nothing but grief, and the novel as a portrait of the constant anxiety sparked by attracting the notice of the powerful is a brilliant, stressful piece of writing.

The Familiar really does feel at last like Bardugo's novel of the heart: my reactions to her previous fiction range from adoration to being left cold, but all have felt to me to have been written to the market, hitting on a winning trend at exactly the right moment in exactly the right way. She has, of course, been incredibly successful while doing so, and I would assume wrote with some degree of affection for this previous output — but The Familiar definitely feels like the first of her books that was written not to satisfy a specific trend in genre fiction, but solely for Bardugo's own need. The soul sings stories to us, and some of us are lucky enough to be able to give those stories voice, and sing back.

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.

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.

I think I doomed myself by posting about travel mishaps on Friday's open thread, but more about that later. Yesterday, Matthias and I went to London, the main intention being to see dark electro group Rue Oberkampf perform live. Unlike on usual London concert adventures, we were completely unable to find a hotel cheap enough to justify staying overnight, and since the gig was in Islington, we decided to chance it and return home to Ely on the last train of the day.

We travelled down just before lunchtime, had a quick lunch at a new-to-us Mexican place in Coal Drops Yard behind the station (the food scene in the immediate surrounds of King's Cross Station these days never ceases to amaze and delight), and then hopped on the tube to see this art exhibition at the Royal Academy. It was very busy — a Saturday afternoon on the last weekend of the exhibition, so to be expected — but very worth seeing, although inevitably the new works engaging with the gallery's legacy and collection were much more interesting than the source material.

Then we headed across to Islington, dodging the rain, for drinks, dinner, and the concert. It was in my very favourite kind of venue — a tiny little club (this one on the top floor of a pub; the club was only open to ticketholders, the pub was open to whoever wanted to come in for a drink and pizza), with room for no more than sixty or so people. I can see the value in big spectacular arena concerts, but increasingly these days I'm much more interested in these tiny, small-scale events. This particular club seemed to be populated by every ageing goth in London ... and me and Matthias (I was certainly the only person wearing any kind of pastel colours in that room, that's for sure), and the gig was a lot of fun, just really relaxed and low key. We finished up just after 10.30pm, with plenty of time to get back for the last train.

So how do the travel problems come into all this? Well, just before the gig began, Matthias checked the National Rail app and saw that for some reason no trains were going to Ely, but rather stopping in Cambridge. 'Urgent track work,' allegedly. Further reading revealed that a bus would supposedly be there to take anyone needing to go beyond Cambridge, and in any case as long as we could get to Cambridge, a taxi beyond that would be expensive, but not the end of the world. We tried to relax, enjoyed the concert, and made our way to the station.

Things were at least as described, except that the train to Cambridge was slightly late, it was dark and devoid of rail staff, and no information about where this replacement bus would be. It was also pouring with rain. This, however, is not my first rail replacement bus rodeo, and I ensured we were among the first people out of the station, ignoring the crowd stampeding towards the queue at the taxi rank, and spotted a lone bus at the far end of the bus interchange. I dragged Matthias in my wake, it was indeed the bus we wanted, and after we got on (the only people who got on after leaving the incredibly crowded train), the driver ... closed the doors and left! So anyone else who waited in the station in confusion, walked more slowly, or had no idea the bus was a possibility was utterly out of luck!

We made our way meanderingly back to Ely through dark fields, torrential rain, and massive puddles of water that sprayed up alarmingly every time the bus drove through them, and got home only half an hour later than we would have done if the train had gone all the way through to Ely. All in all, not too bad, although I did feel terrible for the other people on that bus who needed to get all the way to King's Lynn!

Today, after not enough sleep, I went to pool first thing in the morning, and swam languidly back and forth for a kilometre while the rain poured down outside. Beyond that, I have not left the house, just lounged around, cooking, eating, and catching up on Dreamwidth. Signups opened for

rarepairexchange and I managed to write a letter and sign up, which (given my lack of sleep and slightly downcast current feelings around fanworks exchanges) is something of an achievement!

I hope you've all been having lovely weekends.

I'm writing my usual weekend post today, instead of Sunday, because I'm likely to be too busy and tired to write anything substantial tomorrow, for reasons that will soon become apparent. This weekend is an unusually busy one for me, after an uncharacteristically tiring work week, and I feel as if I've barely had time to catch a breath.

Last night, Matthias and I went to an '80s silent disco in the cathedral. We'd done something similar nine months ago (that was a '90s music silent disco though), and enjoyed thing so much we were very happy to go again, and spent a delightful three hours dancing to (and screaming along with the lyrics of) three hours' worth of '80s cheese. As before, the headsets came with three channels, one per dj — broadly separated into rock, pop, and hip hop — and a good time was had by all. I always feel a bit weird about these events being held in a beautiful, massive medieval cathedral that is still a house of worship (they sell alcohol, etc), but since I'm not a Christian it's not really my call. There's going to be a follow-up event in September with '80s, '90s and noughties music, and I'll definitely go to that.

We were supposed to be heading into London today (via a very convoluted, time-consuming route due to trackwork on the railway line) for a gig — Swedish industrial electro singer Rein — but last night we were notified that the concert was postponed, which to be honest was a bit of a relief, since going from the silent disco one night to live music the next followed by a tiring Sunday is too much for me these days. We saw Rein live in the same venue five years ago — a tiny nightclub inside a former industrial warehouse in Islington — and hopefully we'll be able to see her again at a rescheduled event later in the year.

So instead my Saturday has been a bit more low-key: I cleaned the garden furniture and outdoor windowsills, I went into the market to shop for fruit and vegetables, and I lay around in bed finishing off a book. Now I'm cooking risotto and pottering around on Dreamwidth, and feel a bit more recharged.

Tomorrow, Matthias and I are heading off on another walk with our friends and their walking group, who generally do a hike in a different place once a month. We've only been to two walks with them so far, and have enjoyed it a lot. It's not particularly strenuous, since everything is local (and the landscape here is extremely flat) and the group tends to walk slowly and stop a lot, but it's nice to be outdoors and doing things with other people, and I always feel great afterwards.

I've finished one book so far this weekend: Scarlet (Genevieve Cogman), which was undemanding and silly. I admire the author's chutzpah in writing the vampire AU, Mary Sue Scarlet Pimpernel fanfic of her wildest dreams, and then getting Tor to publish it. That description really does sum the book up — the author is clearly having a great time, and as long as you're prepared to switch off your brain in relation to some of the more ludicrous elements (and to the fact that Cogman clearly thinks she's critiquing some of the issues inherent in the premise of her book's source material, when she really only does so in a halfhearted way), it's quite a lot of fun.

Finally, a couple of links:

As is often the case, Marie Le Conte's recent post about being an immigrant really spoke to me.

Perhaps most importantly, “roots” can mean different things to different people. Some trees will have few of them but they will burrow deep into the soil to find what they need. Others will stay near the surface but spread and spread. Everyone does what they can, and as they must, in order to keep going.

Insinuating that people who have moved around a lot have less interest in sincere human connection and the places they live in is both offensive and missing the mark entirely. I couldn’t pretend to speak for everyone whose life has been similar to mine, of course, but I’d argue it’s the opposite.

'Live your life so that the good folks at Bellingcat won't have cause to spend a lot of effort geolocating you through photos of the reflection of the back of your head in hospitality venues' social media posts' would seem to me to be a sensible admonition. I mean, on the one hand I admire the work Bellingcat does immensely ... and on the other, it's kind of terrifying.

And on that note, I will draw this post to a close, and go and check on my risotto.

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.

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.

I am practically vibrating with anxiety, these days, and it seems to be a permanent state of affairs, unfortunately. Let's try to distract me from this with a meme (via a friend on Facebook):

How many times have you moved house, and what was the reason for moving each time?

( 19 moves behind the cut )

The weekend has been fairly routine and uneventful, but it was preceded by a busy day in London on Friday, so the chance to rest a bit before the new working week begins was welcome.

I was in London for an appointment to sort out a big stressful bureaucratic thing that's been a weight on my mind for several years now — so it was a huge relief to have the thing finally done. After that, I spent some time walking along the river around Battersea Power Station, before heading inland to meet

catpuccino for lunch. We've known each other since the first day of secondary school (which is ... coming up for thirty years now, eek), and she ended up immigrating to the UK as well — she met a British guy, got married, and now lives in London. She's very plugged in to the food scene there, and suggested we go to

mercatometropolitano — a former industrial site now filled with static food trucks serving everything from Mauritian to Venezuelan food, plus coffee and various alcholic beverages. It worked well since we didn't have to agree on a single type of food, and all the stalls had £5 lunch specials, which is extremely cheap for London.

catpuccino had Mauritian food and German food, and I had some really delicious Uzbek dumplings, and we sat outside chatting for hours. It was great to see her — apart from our long friendship and various shared interests, she's one of the few people who shares, understands, and is able to articulate my complicated tangle of emotions about Australia, and I always appreciate being able to talk about such things without being misunderstood, and knowing that the feelings are mutual.

After that, I headed across town to Bloomsbury to meet Matthias, so he could show me around his new (or new-to-me, since he's been in the new job since July last year) workplace — the library of a little research institute in a terrace house facing a square with a park. I met a couple of his library colleagues, and got to snoop around the building in relative anonymity, since the researchers and admin staff seemed to have left or be working from home.

We then travelled over to Hackney, for an extremely belated dinner celebrating my birthday (in December), and the stressful bureaucratic thing being done. The restaurant was

casafofolondon, and it was delightful — excellent food and wine, in convivial surroundings, which is all I want a restaurant to be.

In terms of books and media, it's been slim pickings with me for a while — by the end of the week, I will have only finished one book — but what I've read and watched has been excellent.

I paused my Roma sub Rosa and Benjamin January rereads to ... read the newest (twentieth) Benjamin January book, The Nubian's Curse. As always, it's got Barbara Hambly's characteristic blend of evocative, historic specificity (1840s New Orleans, plus some flashbacks to Ben's time in Paris fifteen years earlier), a mystery that hinges on the injustices and cruelties of that time and place, and — most importantly, what I read the books for — a celebration of Ben's messy, complicated family (expansive enough to encompass family both by blood and by choice, with an ever-growing cast of characters incorporated into it). As I always say when discussing this series, the books' setting is dystopian for its protagonist and most of the people he loves — their ethnicity and the racism of the society in which they live puts them in constant danger — and Hambly never shies away from that darkness and ever present sense of threat and fear, and yet somehow I find them extremely comforting to read. It's the warmth of Ben and his family, and their love and fierce protectiveness towards each other, and determination to live lives that matter and are full of love and meaning in spite of all the world does to grind them down, I suppose.

I don't always log the films I watch, but the one Matthias and I saw last night was so singular that I feel it should be recorded. The film in question was Neptune Frost, a riotous, surreal, dreamlike Burundian science fiction film. The dialogue is in multiple languages (but most often in song), and it's best summed up as the kind of anti-extractive capitalism, anti-colonial, afrofuturistic gender fuckery you'd get if Janelle Monáe decided to make a feature-length film-album about the monstrous evil that is the coltan industry that makes the computer on which I am typing this entry possible (and the devices on which you are reading it, and, and, and). The score is spectacular. Highly, highly recommended.

It poured with rain all morning (such that I felt I'd already had my morning swim solely by walking 20 minutes to the pool), and now the living room is drenched with sunlight. I'm going to take advantage of that, and head upstairs to do some yoga before it gets dark and melancholy again. I hope the weekend's been treating everyone well.

This week's Sunday post will be fairly brief, since not a huge amount has happened, and I didn't even manage to read any new books since posting about Silver Under Nightfall on Wednesday. I didn't even manage to go to the gym for my Saturday classes, or to go swimming — I thought it best not to risk it due to being sick earlier in the week.

However, I ended up with most of Saturday free, and spent the time catching up on various lingering chores — clearing all the autumn leaves from the patio and deck in the garden, taking all the pots/pans/crockery out of the kitchen cupboards and wet-dusting the shelves, vacuuming, etc. This was hardly a thrilling way to spend my free time, but improved my mood a lot when it was done. I spent a lot of time on Saturday afternoon noodling around with fountain pens and catching up on Dreamwidth.

On Saturday evening, Matthias and I met up with several friends for a couple of drinks in our favourite local bar/cafe, which ended up being a good catch-up. We probably ended up staying for about an hour and a half, before everyone went their separate ways for dinner. I've been trying to be better about getting out of the house and seeing people, and I need to remember that it's usually worth making the effort.

The weather today has been wildly changeable — clear and warm this morning (warm enough not to need a coat), windy with gathering storm clouds now — but thankfully Matthias and I were swift enough off the mark to have made the best of it, doing a walk around the cathedral and river and sitting outside at the coffee rig in the market square for a warm drink, before heading home. Half the town seemed to have had the same idea, and there was a nice atmosphere, with the whole place filled with groups of chatting friends, families with toddlers and babies rugged up warmly, and dogs of all shapes and sizes wandering around.

After lunch, I might continue with my Benjamin January reread (this would be the second book), nominate some fandoms for

once_upon_fic, and otherwise relax. I hope you're all also having enjoyable weekends.

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to do something I would never have expected possible: to see a revived version of a Cirque du Soleil show I first fell in love with as a child. You may recall that Matthias and I see Cirque annually whenever they're in London with whatever their touring show is that year — this is always in January/February in the Royal Albert Hall, which is perfect timing: a bright spot amid the post-Christmas, wintry grey of the new year.

This year, their touring show is a revival of Alegría, which I first saw as a teenager twenty-five years ago in Sydney. It wasn't my favourite Cirque show of that period, but I still loved it a lot, and had strong memories of the staging, music, costumes and acts. The revival sticks fairly close to the original — everything is tweaked and modified rather than made new, but to be honest, that suited me fine.

The story (such as it is when it comes to Cirque) is one of a decaying, corrupt Renaissance Italian city-state court; the 'joy' in the show's name is ironic — the kind of temporary, bittersweet freedom one finds in snatched, hoarded moments in difficult times. There are some fantastic acts — standouts for me include the 'fast track' X-shaped trampoline, across which acrobats launch themselves in tumbling rows, passing over and under one another, an act whose starting point is adagio but instead of involving pairs or groups of acrobats balancing on each other's arms, shoulders and bodies involves the fliers being hurled into the air from springy, narrow beams of wood set on the shoulders of pairs of human bases, with further balancing and acrobatics in groups standing/tumbling from and between the beams, and quite honestly one of the best group trapeze acts I've ever seen. (This last one was best enjoyed — at least from my perspective — right from our seats in the heights of the venue, because that gave the best vantage point for the logistics of it all: not just the technicians with their wires and pulleys, but also the various artists calling and signalling to each other in order to ensure they got the timing exactly right, which was essential in this act, and which they performed without a single problem. When I saw the same act in 1999, there were several failed catches in which performers fell into the net below, but not so this time around.)

In any case, it was a delight, and a huge improvement on several of the more recent Cirque shows I've seen (which have been ... fine, but not incredible).

As always when we go to concerts and performances in London, we stayed overnight and made a weekend of it, eating at several old favourites (

ogniskorestaurant,

mriya_neo_bistro) as well as a new-to-us Taiwanese bao place near Kings Cross Station. On Sunday we were able to see the British Library exhibition on fantasy fiction (which has an expansive definition of the genre and covers books, film, TV, comics, games, and fan culture, and groups all these things thematically — portal fantasy, fairytales, cosmic horror and so on). This was crowded, with slow moving people, but we made the sensible decision to move through the exhibition in reverse order — since we were there at opening time, we therefore saw the first half of the exhibition in entirely empty rooms before catching up with the crowd, but since it grouped the exhibits thematically rather than chronologically the order in which we saw things didn't really matter.

All in all, it was a lovely weekend, made even more pleasing by the fact that we somehow managed to get a hotel room in an incredibly nice (like, 4-star nice) hotel in central London on a Saturday night at a ridiculously cheap price, which was nothing short of miraculous!

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 )

This is the third time Matthias and I spent Christmas at home together (as opposed to travelling to visit one of our respective families), and the first time this was done entirely by choice. In 2020, it was the first lockdown Christmas, and it also coincided with us moving house, and the attendant logistical chaos that ensued. In 2021, we were meant to go to Germany, but in the days before we were due to travel, various Covid testing and quarantining requirements were imposed, which rendered our plans impossible — so we stayed home. That year, our fridge broke down, and we had to contend with dealing with that — lots of perishable food ended up being stored in iceboxes outdoors; thankfully it was quite a cold winter. So, in a sense, this is the first Christmas since my childhood that I have spent doing exactly what I wanted to do, with no unexpected dramas to deal with.

How do I spend this time when it's entirely within my control? I read (both books and Yuletide fic), Matthias and I watch cosy TV together, I do lots of yoga, and, above all, I cook. We ate cold seafood, fresh raw vegetables, pickles, and fresh bread on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas Day I roasted a cockerel, plus roast vegetables, kale fried with leeks, handmade gravy and cranberry sauce made to a recipe handwritten by my dad at some point in the 1980s and sent to me as a photo by my mum. A lifetime of deciphering my parents' incomprehensible handwriting ended up serving me well during my time in academia, whenever I had to do paleography, that's for sure! In any case, as intended, we only ate a fraction of the cockerel last night, and the rest has already been segmented up for future meals (I assess we'll probably get three or four more from what remains), and the bones set aside to make stock. Tonight, we'll eat various cheeses, chutney, and crackers, with some red wine.

Today, we went for a longer walk along the river. The sky was clear, the weather was warm, and the path and parks were full of other people taking advantage of all this — families with young children testing out new bikes or scooters, dog-walkers, joggers, watched by flocks of geese floating placidly on the river. The smokey smell of the houseboats was friendly and inviting. We wound our way back towards town, and finished the morning off with hot drinks at the coffee rig in the market square, blinking in the bright sunshine. I've put together a little photoset covering the past three days, on Instagram.

Slowly, over the next few days, our world will open up, with swims at the pool, a longer walk with some local friends and their hiking group, New Year's Eve festivities, and so on. I already feel extremely refreshed, and incredibly happy to have been able to carve out this little space to pause, and rest.

Profile

a million times a trillion more

Geata Póeg na Déanainn

June 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Style: Bold Dances for Dusty Foot by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jun. 29th, 2025 12:29 pm

Beyond Selidor

A song with a mission

Entries tagged with my favourite philologist

Underdog stories

I roam around

I'll gladly tell you about dreams

How the flowers bloom, how the branches rustle

New shorelines, new seas, new rivers running through me

Better keep your fingers double-crossed

To drum beats — in motion — I'm feeling

Nothing is ever just one thing

Drowned in a sea of sound

Mirrored in your swimming pool

Touch your vibrant heart once again

I'm running and I won't touch ground

It eludes you just the same

Stitching up the circuit board

Far from my home is the country I have reached; always coming home

Set your sights for the sun

Blowing the cobwebs away

Alegría means joy

I'm not going to let you down, but I'm not going to help you up: the 2023 meme

How do these hearts unfold