Beyond Selidor

What I have seen, essentially wall-to-wall across social media, for the past week:
-'Why is no one talking about [this atrocity]?'
-'Why are people talking about [this injustice and not that injustice]?' (Often two different posts by two different people, in quick succession, with said injustices reversed.)
-'What you are doing in response to [this injustice] is insufficient.'
-'If you haven't mentioned [this atrocity] on your social media, you're part of the problem.'
-'If you've mentioned [this injustice and not that injustice] on your social media, you're a hypocrite and part of the problem.'
-'You're protesting the wrong way.'
-'Protesting when it's permitted by the state isn't real protest.'
-'These protests are all a bit cringe, aren't they?'
-'You're condemning [this atrocity], but not in the right way.'
-'You're condemning [this atrocity], but far too late.' (This coming, without irony, from the same people I witnessed several years ago saying, 'it's never too late to find courage and speak out publicly against [this same atrocity].')

What I have seen, in much smaller numbers — a little fragment struggling to stay afloat in the deluge:
-'[This injustice] is an injustice for these specific reasons, and here is something concrete that anyone reading/viewing this post can do to help.'

Needless to say, whenever I witnessed the latter, I actually did the things suggested, and felt much more of a sense of agency and purpose, than when I saw the former.

(And obviously I recognise the irony of being irritated by people complaining about what they see/don't see on social media rather than trying to offer concrete solutions to the consequences of major (geo)political injustices ... and then writing a whole post complaining about what I see/don't see on social media. But I am just. so. tired.)

As I mentioned in my previous post, Matthias was away for the weekend (his team didn't win, but a good time was had by all), and I basically spent the past two days doing exactly what I wanted. The weather was glorious and summery, and other than two hours in fitness classes in the gym yesterday in a studio where the air conditioning was broken (one of the other women in my class dubbed it 'bikram zumba,' and she was not wrong), everything was relaxing and good.

I went to the market, and bought flowers, and loads of fresh fruit and vegetables. I feasted on cherries and strawberries and asparagus and iced coffee, and cooked Singaporean food for tonight's dinner. I pottered around in the garden, and started a reread of Isobelle Carmody's post-apocalyptic YA series, in which a bunch of teenagers with X-Men style mutant abilities take on a totalitarian regime in a world nearly destroyed by nuclear catastrophe. (This was a huge favourite of mine as a child, but I haven't picked it to reread for some time. I still like it for nostalgia's sake, but I can see the flaws more clearly now.) I started this morning with a 1km swim at 8am when the pool opened, then picked up pastries at the bakery and sat watching the wood pigeons through the kitchen window. My laundry was thoroughly air-dried in the wind.

Next week is the start of a series of visitors arriving to stay with us, and various bits of national and international travel, so it was good to have those two days of rest, free of stress and mental clutter. Now Matthias is home, and the weekend is winding down.

This weekend has been a very welcome chance to catch my breath, after weeks of intense work, travel, and a lingering sense that I'd been trying to cram too many responsibilities into too little time. I feel physically and mentally rested for the first time in ages.

Of course, 'catching my breath' in my context still means that I went out three times to the market in the past two days, plus three times to the gym (or rather, two times to the gym and one time to the cinema which is in the same complex), did two loads of laundry, batch-cooked a bunch of stuff, and spent most of this morning doing little bits and pieces in the garden, so I haven't exactly been spending the weekend lounging around on the couch. I never want inactivity — I just want to feel that all this stuff fits easily into the time I have available.

Yesterday afternoon, Matthias and I did the time-honoured Australian hot weather activity of decamping to the air conditioned comfort of the cinema, and watched Sinners. This is probably the first time in a year I've seen a film in a cinema, and it was well worth it! It's been a while since I've seen a movie that works so perfectly on all levels — narrative, acting, visual and aural storytelling, and the seamless interweaving thereof — and this was an absolute feast for the senses. There's so much going on: it's a story about Black American history, culture, and music, it's about cultural appropriation (particularly of Black music of all genres), and of the tenacity of Black people throughout the entirety of their presence on the American continents in building and creating and clawing their way to success and prosperity in the face of the full force of racism that will impede them every step of the way, and tear down everything they've built whenever possible, with zero consequences. In particular, it's about the immense trauma at the heart of the Black experience in the United States — on both an individual and communal level — of the rupture of slavery, and the way it robbed the descendents of the enslaved of knowledge of their history, and the way that, in spite of that, there is this incredible cultural continuity, particularly when it comes to music, that transcends and survives this traumatic rupture, resulting in this most exquisite music, from whose roots pretty much every popular musical genre has sprung. (And of course, all this exquisite musical talent and innovation has been plundered and whitewashed by non-Black musicians ever since mass entertainment became a thing, a point which the film weaves throughout its narrative.)

It's also a vampire horror movie.

There were some scenes that I can't describe without spoiling what really should be seen unspoilt, but which were so visually striking and emotionally arresting that they took my breath away. The music is incredible, and made me want to dance in the cinema. In other words, I was immersed and entranced, and it took away my cynicism about film as a storytelling medium (which, after a big dose of franchise/reboot/blockbuster fatigue, had been pretty high).

Other than movies, I've been slowly reading through the only kind of reading material I can handle at the moment: Consort of Fire (Kit Rocha), an undemanding, tropey romantasy that feels like the equivalent of junk food for the brain.

Beyond that, it's been a weekend of gardening. Last year, I planted an sweet pea seedling, which grew absolutely gigantic, and was laden with flowers of varying shades of pink and purple. It made me so happy, I was planning to get another seedling this year — until I went out to the vegetable patches and realised I didn't have to, as about five new sweet pea plants had self-seeded from last year's. I spent a bit of time this morning constructing frames from bamboo, and training the new seedlings to the frames so they'll grow upwards. I also planted a bunch of seeds in propagator trays: radishes, chili, spring onion, rocket, dill, parsley, chives, peas, marigolds, and nasturtiums. It really is too late for all this — see above for how rushed and lacking in time I've felt for weeks on end — so I'm philosophical about how successful any of these potential plants is likely to be. If anything sprouts and grows, I'll count that as a success. Benign neglect seems to be the route to success in our garden — without having planted any, we have masses of strawberry plants (including one that self-seeded in the cracks between two paving slabs in the patio), a bunch of supposedly dead foxgloves in the front garden suddenly revived (these are not meant to be perennials) and covered themselves with budding flowers, and the unkillable mint died back as it always did in winter, and sprang to life in spring, filling the entire herb garden. The wood pigeons have, as always, stripped half the leaves and unripe fruit from one of the cherry trees, but in a month or so, there should be a veritable feast of pinkish-white cherries nonetheless.

It's nice to have had a good stretch of time to devote to Dreamwidth this afternoon. I've missed this place.

This is quite possibly the longest I've gone after the result of an election in one of my countries is known before writing up a post in response. This time, it was for good reasons: I was away visiting friends over the weekend (about which more in a later post), and, after a fretfully sleepless night of anxiety about the result, I woke up on Saturday morning UK time to find that my fellow Australian citizens had done me proud.

This is the first election since I turned eighteen in which I was not eligible to vote; I lost the right due to living overseas for too long, so I contributed literally nothing to the outcome.

Non-Australians wanting further context about our electoral system can read my post from the last election in 2022, which goes into more detail about all these things, but the crucial and decisive factors to my mind are: a) mandatory voting and b) preferential (ranked choice) voting, which lead to more moderate politics, and make it impossible for a party to win by appealling to a narrow base and assuming low turnout will do the rest for them. (I can only remember a single election in my lifetime that was won on what I'd term culture war issues.) I'm happy to answer further questions about Australian democracy, political parties, etc in the comments if you're interested.

In 2022, we voted in a Labor government on a razor thin majority after a decade of centre-right conservative government. I commented at the time that our centre-right parties (they always campaign and govern as a two-party coalition, and do not field candidates in 'each other's' electorates) had a choice: do some soul-searching, work out what went wrong, and try to course-correct in three years' time, or the opposite, which I termed as follows:

'Are we out of touch? No, it's the voters who are wrong'

I'm pleased to report that they did the latter, and, after a few tense months where it appeared this might have paid off, it became apparant that Australians do not currently want culture warring right-wing populism, and responded by reelecting Labor in an absolutely massive landslide. Peter Dutton, the creepy, far-right culture-warring opposition leader made history, but not in the way he wanted: he became the first opposition leader in Australia to lose his seat in an election. (The schadenfreude on Australian politics social media was absolutely off the charts.)

The two of my sisters who are adults are what we'd term in Australia 'true believers': die-hard Labor supporters, party members who spent this election as volunteers for their local Labor candidates' campaigns. Sister #1 was even briefly asked to stand as the candidate, but ultimately ruled it out, instead throwing her efforts behind the woman who did stand, in an unwinnable electorate where it was important to have someone from Labor on the ballot to make it harder for the conservative candidate to win against the 'teal' independent who was standing. Sister #2 appears to have run the social media accounts for her own Labor MP who was facing a very tough uphill battle for reelection which was ultimately successful. Both sisters are, as you can imagine, absolutely ecstatic.

The very first piece of legislation the reelected Labor government is going to pass will reduce student debts by 20 per cent.

I can't claim to have contributed anything to this result, but I've been floating on air for the past four days as a consequence.

I'll close this post with a few commentary pieces whose analysis teases out some of the issues that were in play this election.

Annabel Crabb on Dutton's toxicity with female voters

Crabb again, on the failure of culture wars to affect the result

The Murdoch press no longer has the power to sway voters

Edited to add two articles about the lengths to which the Australian electoral commission will go to ensure all voters have their ballots, and have no difficulties voting: one and two.

And, finally, one link and another, which provide context for the title of this post, and my 2022 election post as well.

A massive round of applause for all Australian voters.

This weekend has been absolutely glorious, albeit somewhat tiring. The sky is cloudless and cornflower blue, the breeze is warm and gentle, and Matthias and I have made the first efforts towards getting the garden into shape this year. I planted poppies, marigolds and cornflowers in the raised beds, he mowed the lawn for the first time since late autumn, and we both sealed the deck with two layers of oil — messy, tedious work that made my legs ache, but that I'll appreciate later on. Here's a photoset of various blossoming fruit trees and other flowers in our garden.

Yesterday's two hours of classes in the gym involved dance fitness (instead of the regular zumba), in which we spent the hour-long class learning an entire dance routine from start to finish, which left me feeling jubilantly ecstatic. It reminded me a bit of doing dance classes in high school and after school when I was a teenager, and made me wonder if I'd enjoy doing some kind of actual dance classes now. The main problem with this is that I dance like a gymnast: i.e. I am incapable of dancing in shoes, and (as a consequence of having ten years of gymnastics drilling into me that one's body should be held as straight and unyielding as a board when undertaking any physical activity) I am incapable of moving my hips or chest with any fluidity. A gymnastics background does have some benefits (I pick up routines quickly and have a good memory for movement, I have very good balance, and a good sense of how different parts of the body interact and work together), but is severely limiting when it comes to most styles of dance.

Other movement this weekend included swimming through liquid sunshine for 1km this morning at the pool, and yoga next to a sunlit, open window. It does feel a lot easier to move when the weather is like this, that's for sure!

Matthias and I continued making use of our current MUBI subscription, and watched Crossing, a Georgian- and Turkish-language film in which an ageing Georgian woman, accompanied by an aimless but enterprising young twentysomething guy travel from Batumi to Istanbul to track down the woman's trans niece in order to fulfil a promise she made to her dying sister (the niece's mother). Once in Istanbul, they have no luck finding the niece, but drift into the orbit of a found family of sorts: a trans Turkish woman working as a sort of all-purpose advocate at an LGBT nonprofit organisation, and a pair of impoverished children who eke out a precarious existence scamming and selling tat to tourists. The film's title is very pointed: crossings of various kinds (over borders, back and forth on the ferry between Istanbul's European and Asian sides, and of course from gender assigned at birth to living openly as characters' real gender) feature throughout. It's a beautifully made film about people who've never quite fit in, brushing up against the rough edges of the world, and finding unexpected softness in each other — and a reminder, again, that Istanbul is one of the most beautiful cities in the world (which makes me feel even more irritated that it's unlikely I'll be able to see it in person any time soon).

I only managed to finish two books this week: a Thousand and One Nights retelling, and a nonfiction work of political analysis that's already out of date.

The retelling is Every Rising Sun (Jamilah Ahmed), which I found worked in some areas and was weaker in others. She chose to set the retelling in medieval Central Asia (although her characters journey east via current day Iraq to join Saladin defending Jerusalem against the Crusaders), and I did enjoy reading a work of fiction whose geographical orientation was so different to how we normally perceive the world. I also appreciated the way Ahmed approached the source material (the frame narrative really does need to be retold as something of a horror story, rather than YA romance, which I've seen done before), and the folk stories told by her Shaherazade are fantastic. I take issue with some of the choices Ahmed made in order to finish the book with a sense of character growth and justice — I would have preferred something messier, I think.

The nonfiction work is Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy, a slim essay on the global growth of authoritarianism that suffers by being published in 2021, and therefore outpaced by current events. Her assessment of the far right authoritarian turn in Poland, Hungary, the UK, and the US (and the globally interconnected nature of far right authoritarianism) is sound and persuasive, and the personal anecdotes serve to humanise and contextualise what could otherwise be a fairly dry book. She opens the book with a New Year's Eve party she and her centre right Polish politician husband hosted in 1999, making the point that within the next five years, she was crossing the street to avoid half the guests, and those guests were likely to deny that they had ever been guests of Applebaum and her husband, such was the political rupture and divergence. She closes the book with another party held in 2019, making the point that although many of the guests were her usual crowd (political and intellectual elites of the centre right), her social circles and political allies had now been expanded to include a lot of similar figures from the centre left — her own politics hadn't changed, but 'the Right' had drifted so far to extremes, and embraced authoritarianism so wholeheartedly that she'd been left behind. The weaknesses of the book are the weaknesses of Applebaum's own political ideology: she's a conservative at heart and has been well served by existing social organisation and institutions, and so sees little need for large scale systemic, structural change, and she views the world through a prism of authoritarianism versus democracy, which leads her to equate things like left-wing Twitter mobs 'cancelling' people or protesting the presence of their ideological opponents giving speeches at university campuses, with the governments of Boris Johnson or Victor Orbán. (Although I think the former are often ill-informed, ill-advised, or counterproductive, to equate them with the latter is ridiculous, because it does not take account of important things like their relative power.) All in all, an interesting read, but confirming things I already believed and knew, and very much outpaced by political events of the past four years. It reads almost like an artefact (even though based on what I've seen Applebaum writing and saying these days, I think it still remains broadly her position on both national and global politics).

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.

I went into Cambridge after lunch today in order to get my hair cut, and witnessed quite possibly two of the peakest of Peak Saturday Train Experience™ ever. Bear in mind that this all happened within a roughly fifteen-minute period.

1. A group of tipsy young women, wandering around my carriage in confusion, carrying a bottle of sparkling rosé and plastic cups, trying to find their friends (so the whole group could break open the wine), who were allegedly on the same train. The confusion arose because a) this was the final carriage and b) the women had supposedly already walked the entire length of the train.

2. A group of young men who got on at Waterbeach, cracked open cans of lager, and attempted to drink their entire cans before arriving at Cambridge station (five minutes from Waterbeach). While this was going on, they talked with great earnestness and detail about a) what they were going to buy to preload before arriving at the pub (they finally settled on buying rum and Coke) and b) which pub they were going to go to (they finally settled on one of the roughest pubs in Cambridge, about which they also reminisced with great fondness about an altercation with the police they had had previously at the same pub).

None of this was in any way obnoxious, and I found it almost endearing. I hope both groups went on to have enjoyable Saturdays.

(The final alcohol-related event in the trifecta was the group of women — two middle-aged friends, and the young adult daughter of one of them — who showed up at the hairdresser to get their hair dyed and cut around 4pm with a bottle of prosecco that they'd bought at the nearby petrol station. As I was finishing up, they poured glasses for themselves, and my hairdresser — clearly this was going to be their Saturday evening out.)

The sun and warmth continues, and I've tried to spend as much time as possible outdoors and moving this weekend. The less said about the state of my mental health, the better — but there are still nice things.

Yesterday, Matthias and I walked for about 10km to the village of Sutton, which was having a beer festival. (I don't drink beer, but I like the vibes of beer festivals in new-to-me venues.) The first half of the walk is lovely: on a little public footway across the typical flat East Anglian fields, then through the village of Witchford (very picturesque), and past an excellent farm and gardening shop. After that, however, the second half of the walk is on a footpath/cycle path along a major motorway, and although it's not difficult to walk (flat footpath all the way), it's very noisy and cluttered with speeding cars.

The beer festival was — incongruously, to my mind — in a church, and was a fairly standard rural English affair: lots of families with little children running wildly around the church, a handful of older men who I see from time to time around Ely, dogs of various sizes, and a massive group of Morris dancers. Matthias and I stayed for a few hours, then caught the little bus back into town (which, astonishingly, arrived on time, and took exactly as long as it was supposed to take on the drive back to central Ely). The weather was so lovely that we stayed out in town, hanging out in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar (along with everyone else, it seemed), and then eating dinner out in a newish restaurant that we'd been wanting to try for a while.

We were home early, and I was already tired enough by 8pm or so to want to go to bed, but tried to keep myself awake until a reasonable hour ... and of course when I did want to go to sleep, it eluded me for hours, and then was filled with ridiculous anxiety dreams (the dream in which I struggled for what felt like hours to get Zoom to load to teach a class at work, after which point one of my dream!students remarked sourly that if their trainer was unable to get Zoom to work, they didn't trust me to be competent enough to teach the content of the class, seemed too much on the nose even for me).

This morning, I dragged my exhausted self off to the pool, and dragged myself through the sunlit water, then returned home for the usual Sunday morning crepes, and laundry (the sight of which, hanging outside, drifting gently in the warm breeze, did lift my spirits). Matthias and I wandered around town, browsing a few stalls at the market, and generally enjoying the sense of everyone enjoying the first stirrings of spring.

This afternoon will be yoga, and reading, and rest.

Reading this week has been almost exclusively rereads, as I continue my nostalgic way through 1990s Australian YA novels. This time, this consisted of two series by two different authors: Robin Klein's Melling Sisters trilogy (historical fiction about four sisters growing up in genteel poverty in rural 1940s Australia, with a scatterbrained, dreamy mother, and a credulous father who has a tendency to be taken in by all kinds of get rich financial scams — prospecting for gold, buying shares in struggling farms or factories), and Libby Hathorn's Thunderwith and Chrysalis, about a teenage girl taken in by her father and stepmother after her mother's death, struggling to find herself in a life marked by loss and unmooring changes. Both series were as good as I remembered them — Klein's historical fiction in particular, which strikes a perfect balance between wacky childhood hijinks and a serious examination of the pain and petty humilations that come from living so close to the edge of financial disaster — and although they covered serious subject matter, they were exactly the kind of rest my brain needed.

The other book I read — Victoria Amelina's posthumously published Looking at Women Looking at War — was an exquisite piece of writing, and I feel I can't do justice to it in my current state. I'm hopeful I may be able to come back to it later and say more.

The breeze drifts through the open windows. The garden is alive with flocks of wood pigeons, and pairs of blackbirds. There are pink blossoms on the quince trees. The daffodils are promising to bloom, any day now.

That may as well be the theme of this weekend, for various reasons. On Saturday, I headed down to London for a demonstration in support of Ukraine. We marched from the Ukrainian embassy to the Russian one, and then had about an hour or so of speeches — the event was organised by Ukraine Solidary Campaign, so the speakers were Labour MPs, representatives of various unions (my union was there, but no one from it spoke), Ukrainian activists representing various civil society organisations, and a heart-wrenching speech from a young man who (aged 16) lived through 75 days of the siege of Mariupol before escaping.

Weirdly, given the dark place we are currently in in terms of European geopolitics, I felt a lot better after being part of this. My own rule of 'the antidote to despair is concrete action (especially involving physical movement, outside, with other people)' held true, and it was particularly helpful to listen to the specific things the MPs were saying in their speeches. I'm not good at estimating crowd sizes, but I'd say the numbers were probably in the thousands, which isn't massive, but isn't terrible. Most drivers (including buses) that passed us beeped in solidarity. It's no hardship to march in support of something that I'm fairly confident is a mainstream position across the whole UK; support for Ukraine is not a partisan issue here, apart from at the absolute extremes of left and right (even if our power — even at a political leadership level — to do anything about it is limited), so this was a protest to keep the fire alive, to lift spirits, and to remind Ukrainians that they are not alone. I saw another Dreamwidth friend mention in one of their posts that political action is like a muscle that you have to keep exercising, and I felt this was very much the case here. And it was cathartic to yell at the Russian embassy. Here's a photoset of placards (no faces, of course), plus vyshyvanka-clad dog.

I've already described the journey home in my previous post, so won't discuss that further here.

Today, I dragged my exhausted body off to the swimming pool, and dragged it through the water for 1km, and felt better for it. After a few hours back at home, our friends collected us for this month's walk with the walking group: 6km or so through the Norfolk fields outside the village of Hilgay. All our walks seem to feature some theme (horses, apples in an orchard, mud), and this walk's theme very much was snowdrops, which absolutely carpetted the landscape, and kept popping up in unexpected places. There was also a lot of interesting fauna, including swans, ducks, a buzzard, and a stoat. We opted to skip the rather creepy pub in Hilgay, and drove instead a few kilometres towards home, and stopped for a post-walk drink in the much nicer pub in Southery, which had a fire going in a little wood-burning stove, and offered a cosy respite from the wind and the cold grey skies.

Now I'm back home, with Matthias fretfully watching the results roll in from the German election, attempting to finish the last fifty pages of Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance, which has been a great distraction this week. For obvious reasons, I've been finding it hard to focus on reading, but weirdly, a discursive, historical doorstopper, filled to bursting with interesting digressions and new-to-me corners of the past was exactly the right thing to pick up. Other than that, I've only finished one other book, a reread of KJ Charles's historical M/M romance novel, Band Sinister, which kept me occupied on the train to and from London.

I'll keep putting one foot in front of the other.

It would be accurate to say that this week was entirely ( politics ).

Other than all that, it's been a fairly standard weekend for me: gym-ing, swimming, cooking, yoga-ing, and reading. My legs and hips are still sore from yesterday's two hours in the gym, my upper body is completely relaxed from this morning's 1km swim, and I'm trying to decide whether I can fit in a walk in between this afternoon's various activities.

Matthias and I took out a discounted three-month subscription to MUBI (a film streaming platform), and are trying to make the most of it by getting through as many films hosted there in the next months. Last night we watched The Substance, the Oscar-nominated film starring Demi Moore as an ageing celebrity TV fitness instructor (à la Jane Fonda) who, at risk of being booted off her TV show and replaced by a younger model, signs up for a dubious experimental treatment which creates a better (younger, more flawlessly — uncannily — beautiful) version of herself. This is something of a devil's bargain, with predictably horrifying results, as the alter-ego slowly takes over her life in a grotesquely extractive way. The film's commentary on ageing and female beauty (and in particular the disposable way Hollywood treats all actresses over thirty) is about as subtle as a hammer to the head, but its real strength — as befits a story all about the surface of things — is in its visual storytelling, and how much it is able to say with set, costuming and make-up, rather than words. Be warned that the film involves visceral gore and body horror throughout, and it's a lot.

In terms of books, I managed a reread of a childhood favourite trilogy (The Plum-Rain Scroll, The Dragon Stone, and The Peony Lantern by Ruth Manley, a children's fantasy adventure quest series using Japanese mythology and folklore in a similar manner, and with a similar storytelling style, to Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain series' use of Welsh mythology), and, on the recommendation of vriddy, Godkiller, the first in an epic fantasy trilogy by Hannah Kaner. This novel is set in a world in which gods are tangible, numerous, and weird, with complicated relationships with the human beings who worship (or fear) them, and dangerous consequences when they are not appeased. Unequal bargains are part and parcel of life. Into this complicated situation step our heroes: a traumatised (female) mercenary, and a retired knight, who are forced into an uneasy alliance to protect a twelve-year-old orphaned artistocratic girl who has somehow become unbreakably bound to a god of white lies. All are harbouring secrets, and all of these are slowly revealed over the course of the book, which takes the form of a dangerous road trip across a continent scarred by previous years of civil war. I enjoyed this a lot, and will be collecting the sequel from the local public library as soon as the person who's borrowed it returns it!

I've now picked up Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance: a massive, doorstopper of a book, but written in a chatty, inviting style that I would find patronising in some hands, but in Palmer's (having seen her speak in public, and knowing something of her pedagogical approach to the classes she teaches as an academic historian) feels authentic and genuine. If you want to get an idea of the style and content of the book, the most recent backlog of posts at her exurbe_feed blog will give you a very good idea.

Looking at the time, I think I will be able to go on that walk after all, before returning home to a smokey cup of tea, slow-cooking Indonesian curry for dinner, and a very long, slow, anxiety-focused yoga session. A good, balanced weekend: at least within the four walls of my house (and the less said about the chaos outside, the better).