Beyond Selidor

I've just come back downstairs after finishing today's yoga class — 35 minutes of slow, calming stretches, tucked up in the bedroom, watching the bare branches sway in the breeze and the clouds slowly fill the sky. This morning was much clearer — by the time I returned from swimming at 9am, the streets were full of people out and about and enjoying the bright winter weather.

It's been a weekend of good food. Matthias and I went out for our semi-annual joint birthday/Christmas present to each other: a meal at restaurant22_cambridge. These are tasting menus with wine pairings, and a really nice treat, in a lovely restaurant located in an old terrace house in Cambridge. This particular iteration was delightful, and for once getting in and out of Cambridge by train went as smoothly as it's possible to go, which was very pleasing.

Other than going out for dinner, it's been a typical weekend with the usual array of Saturday morning fitness classes, buying groceries at the open air market, the aforementioned Sunday morning swim, yoga and so on. I suppose this will be the last time for this specific weekend routine for the year — next weekend I'll be in Cambridge all day on Saturday, and then Sunday will be a whirlwind of Christmas meal preparation, cleaning, and so on, and I'm not yet sure what will be going on on the New Year's Eve weekend. In any case, I'm pretty happy with the normal shape of my weekends, the result of various changes and habit-forming behaviour I implemented at the start of the year, all of which I plan to continue.

I'm satisfied, too, with my contribution to this year's Yuletide collection. At the final count, I've written my main assignment, and three treats, the last of which I finished editing earlier today. Hopefully they'll be well received. I have an idea for a fic for Fandom Trees, but it's not yet ready to post, and hopefully I'll be able to make at least one more contribution to that fest on top of that (since the expectation is that each participant should receive two gifts, I try to contribute at least an equal amount back).

It hasn't really been much of a weekend for reading — too much time spent out of the house for that — but I did pick up a copy of Emily Wilson's Iliad translation from the local independent bookshop, and have made a start on that. This is I think my third attempt to actually read the Iliad in translation — on every other occasion I'd get bogged down and bored in the endless lists of names, and give up — but I really loved Wilson's Odyssey translation, so I have high hopes that this third time will be the charm. I've always felt vaguely bad that as someone who spends so much fannish energy devoted to the sort of fanfic Briseis I've created in my head, and who has such strong opinions about various Iliad retellings and reimaginings, I've never managed to read the actual original epic poem that launched these thousands of other things.

As well as this doorstopper of a book, I'll be turning my attention to various seasonal rereads that I always do around this time of year: Cooper's The Dark Is Rising, Katherine Fabian and Iona Datt Sharma's novella 'Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night' (which I try to read on the actual day/night of the solstice), and The Bear and the Nightingale, the first, most frozen and wintry book in Katherine Arden's Winternight trilogy (which really is suited to a much colder climate than these mild East Anglian winters). And then it will be time for Yuletide to open, and I'll bury myself in the collection, and read all the wealth of small book fandom fanfic that appears at this time of year like my own personal winter harvest.

Can you tell that, although I have a week more work to go, I'm already somewhat in holiday mode?

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.