Beyond Selidor

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

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

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

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

Paige vs PTSD, with her usual feelings about battles.

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

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

Mario in the aftermath, reaching for a future.

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

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

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.

After a 36-hour journey from door to door, involving an inevitable rail replacement bus, and a train full of drunk, singing football fans, I've returned from my trip to Australia, sleepy, restored, and a little bit melancholy. It was my first time back in five years, due to the pandemic, and it was a very packed schedule, filled with family events, various bits of long-postponed life admin, and lots of communing with the ocean. I was in Sydney for the most part, staying with my mum and sister #1 (who has moved back after five years in Melbourne), apart from five days in Woodend in rural Victoria with my dad, stepmother, and all my sisters.

I felt it would be easiest to summarise the trip under various subheadings.

Family and friends

Lots, and lots, and lots of family dinners in Sydney with various combinations of aunts — at Mum's place, at my aunt's place down the road, at cocktail bars and restaurants in the CBD, etc

A daytrip to have lunch with my dad's two sisters and their partners and one of my cousins in Thirroul, which is about an hour away on the train

Visiting anya_1984 and meeting her younger son, who had not been born the last time I was in Sydney

Easter weekend in Woodend — the first time all five of us sisters have ever been in the one place at the one time, in freezing temperatures, with the fire going nearly constantly, various dogs and cats slumbering on our laps, catching up with one of my cousins, meeting his new partner (who gamely came along to an Easter Sunday dinner hosted by one of my stepmother's brothers, with about forty people there, mainly her relatives, but also random people that my stepmother's mother had met at the pub and invited along, etc), chatting chaotically around firepits, eating too much food and drinking way too much wine

Cocktails and dinner with anya_1984, who has known me since we were twelve years old, plus a gang of people with whom we went to uni, which ended up being an oddly intense experience due to the passage of time, and everyone's various private griefs and struggles being aired

Getting the unexpected chance to see all of my cousins apart from the one who lives way out in Sydney's west and works irregular hours and the one who lives in South Korea and the one who had just gone on a trip to Spain the week before I arrived

Life admin

Sorting out various banking and superannuation stuff that inevitably accumulate if one is a migrant who has spent half her working life in one country and half in another

Going through all the books, documents, paper diaries, old high school report cards, boxes of photos, primary school artworks etc which I had been storing in my mum's flat since I left Australia in 2008, and finally throwing away the stuff that had survived five purge attempts since 2002. The remainder is in the process of being shipped over to the UK, now that we finally own our own house and live somewhere with an adequate amount of storage

Food

Just generally revelling in the fact that Australia is really, really, really good at food. I always say that the UK has improved massively in this regard since I first moved here, and that's true, but Australia really is in another league, and my mum lives in a part of Sydney that is particularly good in terms of cafes, bars and restaurants (and within easy reach of other parts of the city), so we ate very well

I ate a lot of fish and other seafood. The UK has good seafood, but it's generally different types of fish, and prepared differently, so it was good to sample all the stuff I can't easily eat in the northern hemisphere

Australia also generally has better East and Southeast Asian food, so I was keen to eat that at every opportunity — of which there were several

Two tasting menu dinners at high end restaurants — this one with Matthias, and this one with sister #1 as a birthday present for the past five years of birthdays

Cafe breakfasts. Just Sydney cafe breakfasts

All that land and all that water

Various walks and swims with Matthias around different bits of Sydney Harbour — catching the ferry to Manly and then walking from Shelly Beach up North Head, and returning to swim, walking from my mum's place to Barangaroo, walking from Nielsen Park along the harbour all the way home, with a swim midway, and shorter walks to any available body of water I could reach

Lots and lots of swimming at andrewboycharltonsydney with my mum, and sometimes one of my aunts, with the smell of the cut grass on one side and the harbour on the other, watching the naval ships drift by, under the broad sweep of the sky

I read a lot of books during the plane trips there and back, but while I was in Australia I stuck to rereading my old childhood paperbacks, including Rain Stones and The Secret Beach by Jackie French (a short story collection and standalone novel collection respectively, both with French's usual focus on family history, memory, and the Australian landscape), Hannah's Winter by Kierin Meehan (preteen girl spends three months in rural Japan with an eccentric host family and — together with a couple of other kids — must solve a supernatural mystery quest), and Shadowdancers by Sally Odgers (a portal fantasy in which people from our world have doppelgangers in another, with whom traumatic experiences can force them to trade places — one of my very favourite books when I was a teenager, absolutely read to death, to the point that the paperback is extremely battered and had been dropped in the bath at least once).

The trip itself was wonderful, but emotionally wrenching in weird and unexpected ways due to the passage of time, and the near constant reminder that migration and building a life overseas causes the space you occupy to close up behind you. I made that choice, and I don't regret it, but it is confronting to be reminded that life goes on without you in places and among people that once felt like home. It was my own choice, but it was a choice that was not without weight, and consequences.

My Instagram — ronnidolorosa offers a rather incomplete record of the trip, heavy on the sea and sky, since those were — apart from the people — the thing I missed most, and which are so, so different to the sea, and the sky in these northern parts of the world to which I transplanted myself.

I don't know how it happened, but somehow it's been more than a month since I last posted on Dreamwidth, and several weeks since I last logged in. I'll try to read back over people's posts, but may not manage to work through the full backlog.

*

The main reason I've been so absent from these parts is that my mother came to visit. Due to the pandemic, this is the first time we've seen each other in person since June 2019 (whereas before she'd come over once a year, and I'd go back to Australia around every two years; the latter I've now not done since April 2018). She stayed for a month, and it was absolutely marvellous.

The big highlight of her visit (beyond just seeing her and being able to have conversations unmediated by a screen) was spending two weeks travelling around the Amalfi coast in Italy. Usually when Mum visits we do a hiking trip, walking from place to place for about a week, normally in the UK. This year, she was adamant that she wanted to spend time somewhere it was guaranteed to be warm and sunny (which in the UK is definitely not guaranteed), I suggested Amalfi, and she found a company that organised the itinerary and accommodation for self-guided hiking.

I don't want to give a blow-by-blow description, but suffice it to say that we started in Amalfi, ended up in Sorrento (with a side trip to Capri), and it was absolutely extraordinary. The hiking terrain is extremely mountainous, and the routes, while not particularly long by our standards (the longest was about 14km), were very tough and challenging, and we learned early on that if the tour company's route description designated the route 'medium,' we would find it hard, and 'easy' was for us medium. (One 'medium' route began with a climb up 1000 stone steps up the side of a mountain, for example.) The hotels we stayed in were all very nice, we ate extremely well, and, best of all for both of us was the swimming — whether in outdoor rooftop hotel pools, or in swimming holes off the rocks at the foot of cliffs, the beach that was essentially attached to our hotel in Positano — which we managed to do every single day. It's hard to explain, but the ocean has such a different quality in different parts of the world — the look and feel of the water, the way it moves. It's so restorative to the soul to swim in the sea, particularly if it is as beautiful as it is in that part of Italy. If you follow me on Instagram you will have seen the photos, and if you haven't, please feel free to have a look — ronnidolorosa is the username.

(Another bizarre highlight of the trip was randomly bumping into my Canadian sraffie friend alexiepedia, whom I hadn't seen in person since 2011 or so. We both realised from Instagram we were in the same part of the world, were messaging to arrange to meet up for a drink, and eventually realised that not only were we all staying in Anacapri, but that we were literally eating meals simultaneously at two different sections of the same restaurant.)

After returning from our adventures, Mum stayed with us for another two weeks, with all of us working (she's a radio journalist and had arranged interviews with various people in Cambridge and London for one of her programs), going for walks, and us showing her all our favourite spots in Ely — as we moved house and city last year, all this was new to her. She's just returned to Australia, and I miss her already, but given we're all going to be in New York in a few months for a wedding, and Matthias and I will hopefully be visiting Australia over Christmas, at least the gaps between seeing each other will be much, much less.

*

Inevitably, I've picked a day to return to Dreamwidth when Britain's domestic politics resemble an Armando Ianucci script. It's been a weird 48 hours.

I didn't participate in the most recent iteration of Festivids (vidding, icons, and basically anything to do with visual content seem like utterly inaccessible wizardry to me), but I did watch my way through everything that looked like fun in the collection, and now I come bearing recs!

( Four vids behind the cut )

Did any of you participate? What did you like in the collection?

Today is another January talking meme post, this time brought to you by montfelisky, who asked for a significant childhood memory.

Me being who I am, I couldn't narrow it down to one.

( When I was a child the world seemed so wide )

I could go on, but that's probably enough. I have a dreadful short-term memory, but my memories of distant childhood experiences are clear and vivid, and extensive.

I'm sure I've mentioned before that I was a competitive gymnast for the majority of my childhood and all of my adolescence. I was never naturally particularly good at it, but I trained at it for nine hours every week from the age of nine, and towards the end I was training twelve hours a week, and you don't train that long without becoming at least competent at something. I look back on my years as a gymnast with a great deal of affection and gratitude, because even though I never got good enough to make a career out of it, gymnastics taught me a lot of useful things about myself, and I find myself going back to it constantly whenever I want to understand important things about how I function. The same goes for a lot of the other things I did as a child and adolescent: piano exams and competitions, dance performances, drama productions, circus displays and even exams, class presentations and other public speaking. You'll notice that all these things have a strong performative element, and indeed necessitate performing well (in all sense of the word) in a public setting.

Looking back at all these things made me realise how productive an emotion fear has been in my life.

I want to be very clear here that this is a specific type of fear. It is not anxiety and it is not at all irrational. It may more correctly be understood as adrenaline, and the overall effect is to create a sort of calm clarity and certainty in my mind whenever I'm doing something that involves performing in public. I'll go back to gymnastics because it is the easiest to demonstrate.

Training in gymnastics involves a lot of different elements. Part of it is doing strength and flexibility exercises in order to increase those qualities (e.g. large numbers of situps, lifting weights, climbing up and down ropes without using your legs, or stretching). Part of it involves doing the actual gymnastics moves repetitively until you can do them consistently well, building up the degree of difficulty. For example, learning to do a backflip generally begins on a trampoline or soft mat with your coach helping you. Once you've mastered it there, you can move to the sprung floor, and from there you can learn to do it on the beam or in combination with other moves. Once you've built up enough skills, you train in putting them together into a routine and practice the routine repetitively until the routine as a whole is consistently performed well. So an average training session will involve strength and flexibility exercises, practicing routines, and learning new skills that are more difficult in order to work them into new routines. The point is that while doing all this, there's no pressure to perform publicly, except the knowledge that practice will make you perform better in competitions. The mental state is very different, and if you make mistakes, it's not a problem.

For me, once the competitive element was introduced, my mindset was entirely different. The best I can describe it is as a kind of fearful certainty: I got up on that beam, and knew I would not fall off, because my fear of doing so was greater than every other consideration. (Indeed, I very rarely fell in competitions.) In practice I occasionally 'baulked' at doing my vault routine (that is, I would run to the horse but stop before completing the exercise, usually because my run-up to the horse 'felt wrong'). I never baulked in competitions, even if the run-up 'felt wrong'. I know that some kinds of fear can be crippling, but this particular type produced in me a kind of clear certainty: I was so afraid of looking bad in public, of being scored badly, that I knew (in the same way that I knew my hair was brown or I lived in Canberra) I would not fall. That is not to say that I got amazing scores: like I said, I had no natural talent and was merely competent, the same way any able-bodied person would be if they trained for nine-twelve hours per week.

That is what I mean when I talk about 'productive fear', though. It worked the same in piano exams and competitions: I might've made mistakes in practice or occasionally lost my place in memorised pieces, but I wouldn't forget anything when it came to those competitive situations. Same goes for dance or drama performances: I was too afraid of looking bad to forget a move or a line. You might say that my prime motivation in all such situations was the intense fear of looking stupid or being thought badly of in public.

And the reason why I'm working so hard to draw a distinction between that kind of fear and other types is that it's actually quite a wonderful feeling. I never feel so much like myself, as if I'm in complete control of myself, as if I know myself completely, as when I feel that kind of fear.* It's as if the rest of the world around me is a blank space, within which I can move with confidence. It only lasts as long as the 'performance' (I've noticed, for example, that I feel it while giving conference papers, but not while answering questions afterwards). It makes my mind feel sharp and awake, and is the only time I feel truly alive.

I'm writing all this not to say 'be afraid more often! it's awesome!' but more for ongoing personal reference. A fearful nature is often viewed as being something of a hindrance, and I'm trying to articulate why this is not always something that needs criticism. It's clear to me that the type of fear I'm describing is almost indistinguishable from joy. It lasts as long as I need it to get where I need to go.

________________________
* Oddly enough, the same feeling arises when I do things which I have endeavoured to keep entirely non-competitive: ice-skating, rollerblading, skiing, jogging and swimming. My mind empties of everything except the certainty that I will not fall (in the case of skating or skiing), that I could run on forever (in the case of jogging) or that the ocean will hold me (in the case of swimming).

This afternoon, in order to clear my head, I walked out to Grantchester, which is a small village about half an hour's walk from Cambridge proper. It's a lovely little walk along the river, but one thing struck me: no matter where you go in Britain, you are within sight of signs of human habitation.*

In Australia, this is not the case. I grew up in suburbia, but there was a big national park just out of town, and my family frequently went hiking there with friends and the extended family. Later, I would hike there as part of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme, as well as in other national parks. These hikes were very challenging, because we didn't follow the paths, but went bush-bashing, navigating only with maps and compasses. We usually didn't see another human being for the duration of the hikes.

On other family holidays we went to the beach, usually to Broulee or Bawley Point down the south coast, but often to extremely rough camping areas - usually Mystery Bay or Pebbly Beach. These had no electricity, and Mystery Bay didn't even have hot water or flushing toilets. Although you saw other campers, there were no other signs of human activity - no shops, no visible houses or roads. There certainly weren't any people on the beaches beyond those who were swimming or walking.

Even within the big cities, there were areas of wildness. My grandparents lived in the northern suburbs of Sydney, and everything was very controlled and picket-fenced. However, just down the road was a patch of bushland, and if you walked for a minute or so, the houses disappeared from view, the sound of cars vanished and was replaced by birdsong and cicadas.

There was a wildness about nature that I haven't encountered in the UK. And I know East Anglia isn't really the place for it, but even in more remote areas I've visited, such as North Wales and Cornwall, everything seems smaller, tamer, with more evidence of human hands. And there's nothing wrong with that! But the feeling of swimming in the cold water at Pebbly in the autumn, tossed by waves, looking out across the grey sea and seeing nothing but water and a few small islands, salt-washed and exultant, is almost impossible to replicate.

Sometimes I just miss those landscapes.

_______________________________
*With the caveat that this only extends to places I've personally visited - there may be places in Britain that don't fit this description.