Beyond Selidor

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.

Saturday was full of ice, Sunday was a day of rain. Thankfully, that aligned with our plans for the weekend — travelling into Cambridge for Mill Road winter fair on Saturday, sticking much closer to home on Sunday.

Yesterday was crisp and cold. We arrived in Cambridge around midday, and walked the length of Mill Road, pausing to eat oysters and prawn toast, loaded fries (Matthias) and fresh woodfired pizza (me), and drink cups of mulled wine with free mince pies. We bought panettone and cheese to take home, and bumped into lowercasename, his fiancée, and several of their friends while we were queueing in the cheese shop. It was so cold that every time we had to pause to queue up somewhere, my feet became numb and I could feel the ice seeping up through the ground into my shoes.

About five minutes before we got on the train to head into Cambridge, we were notified that a parcel Matthias had ordered had accidentally been delivered to our old rental place there, so although walking 45 minutes across town (and back again) had not been part of the plan, it wasn't as catastrophic as it might have been if we hadn't already been in Cambridge that day. As it was, the new tenants were home, we could pick up the parcel, and we had a mildly nostalgic time dropping by all the small local shops that were previously our regular haunts.

We finished things up with an early dinner at a north African restaurant, and headed home on an incredibly crowded train.

Today started with a walk through the rain to the pool, then yoga and reading, and a few hours at a wine tasting down the road. We stocked up on what we'll drink over the Christmas-New Year's week (during which time both of us are on holiday), based on our favourites at the wine tasting.

We then came home for tea and mince pies, and I finished my book (These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs — a female-centric space opera filled with revenge, manipulation, twisty political machinations, and a fight for control of the resource necessary for speedy intergalactic travel), while the light left the sky, and the rain fell all around us.

I'll close off this post with two links relating to Shane MacGowan, whose death has left me uncharacteristically short of words — it's as if all my eloquence drained away at the prospect of that lyrical well running dry, and I find myself unable to convey what I want to say with any clarity. But these two articles — a series of reminiscences with Irish musical luminaries ('It’s ['Fairytale of New York's is] one the best songs ever written but Shane wrote songs better than that,'), and a gift link article about the process of writing 'Fairytale of New York' say a lot of what I'd want to say, if I could.

It's school holidays in my part of the world, and as I've been out and about a lot more than usual, the profound effect this has in various physical spaces is incredible. A short list:

Trains to and from Cambridge for work have been half empty, whereas normally I'm fighting for a seat in a heaving crush of people, especially in the afternoon

The footpath when I walk to and from work is completely empty, whereas normally I'm navigating around a seething mass of secondary school students

The roads in central Cambridge are completely empty, whereas normally they're gridlock

My bus ride home today (I caught the bus instead of the train) was in constant motion instead of being stuck in crawling gridlocked traffic

Most astonishingly, the swimming pool where I do laps four mornings a week has also been half full each time, even though my fellow swimmers are not school-age children, but rather other adults — most of them retirement-age

In other words, the contrast between life during school holidays and life ordinarily is stark, and immediately visible. It's what's inspired my prompt this week: can you think of a situation of similarly stark, concrete contrasts?

I'm still catching my breath from this weekend, which was unusually jam-packed by my standards, and the fact that every researcher in my faculty seems to have decided they need (individual, time-consuming, and complex) help from me this week specifically isn't helping matters. So that's why there was no weekend catch up post, and why I haven't felt able to give the comments section in Friday open thread posts the attention they deserve.

However, I do have a brief moment to write a little bit about all the various things I did over the weekend.

On Saturday, I needed to be in Cambridge for several errands. Whenever this happens, Matthias and I always go in for the day to try out new restaurants or go to old favourites, and just generally enjoy the wider range of stuff that's available in a slightly larger town. This time, we were also able to see a museum exhibition covering the material culture of Crete, Cyprus and Sardinia from prehistoric to Roman times. The exhibits ranged from prosaic day-to-day objects such as cooking and drinking vessels to elaborate sculptures and gold jewellery, and the emphasis was very much on the importance of the sea (as an avenue for trade, travel, political change, and the exchange of ideas) to these regions.

We returned home with enough time to watch a film — a rather ridiculous Michelle Yeoh martial arts movie called Reign of Assassins. It had a cardboard-thin plot (various individuals, gangs, or pairs of mentors and students team up or double cross each other to gain control of a MacGuffin which will supposedly give them mystical kung fu abilities) which is basically an excuse for lots of elaborately choreographed fight scenes.

On Sunday, I'd been invited (with a plus one) to the soft launch of a new food venue run by the owners of the bagel bar, and the best coffee roasters/cafe-which-is-actually-an-outdoor-rig in town. (To be clear, these two places are already run by the same people.) They've now got a permanent spot which incorporates a bar selling cocktails, beer and wine, a coffee cart, a kitchen serving hot food (mainly burgers and rotisserie with lots of vegan options), and another kitchen serving baked goods. All these back onto an outdoor seating area (with some tables indoors), and the idea is that you can pick and choose between all the various options and put together a meal to suit your own needs. (And obviously groups in which some people want to eat, some only want coffee, some drink alcohol and some don't can all sit together without any weirdness.) As is often the case with these launch events, they'd possibly invited too many people, leading to some hiccoughs and problems, but I can see this is going to be a good addition to the food scene here and I really hope it succeeds because it's very much my kind of thing.

We finished up at the launch with just enough time to grab dinner and head down to the community theatre to watch Tár, a film about a (female, lesbian) orchestra conductor slowly self destructing as various revelations about her emotionally and sexually abusive behaviour come to light. Cate Blanchett is amazing in the lead role (I'd never have thought I'd find a nearly three-hour-long film about abuse from the perspective of the abuser compelling) and the film makes the sensible choice not to show the abuse, but rather her increasingly desperate attempts to deny it and escape its consequences, and the bonfire it makes of her life in the process. Viewed in a vaccuum, the film is fantastic, although some components of its wider context are troubling, and I think Hollywood in general has a hard time telling honest stories about the abusive behaviour of people it's decided are 'artistic geniuses.'

So that's what I've been up to, when I haven't been working, these past few days.

Some weekends are slow, sleepy, nesting weekends, and some weekends are socialising weekends, and this weekend was definitely the latter. Our friends notasapleasure and her husband, who were for so long our only local friends (and who ended up being our pandemic buddies, the only people we saw in person other than shop assistants for basically the whole of 2020), moved away last year. Visiting them is complicated due to the public transport situation (no direct trains, only buses), and we haven't seen as much of them as I would have liked.

However, this weekend, they came and stayed with us, arriving for dinner on Friday night, and leaving around lunchtime today.

The main purpose of the visit was to go into Cambridge (where we met up with another mutual friend, and one of his friends) for a beer festival that was happening across six different neighbouring pubs. I don't drink beer, but I'm perfectly happy spending an afternoon with friends in pleasant surroundings, and these pubs certainly qualify — most have nice outdoor areas, one of them had a roaring fire, and another was visited by two very friendly, very fluffy dogs. It was good to catch up with everyone, and just be out and about in one of my favourite parts of Cambridge.

Today I managed to get out to the pool for my regular 8am swim, and the town was shrouded in mist.

Much of the rest of my week has been taken up with adding a bunch of new newsletter subscriptions to make up for the impending Twitter collapse. I don't know why I didn't do this sooner — I much prefer longform writing, and newsletters are the next best thing to social blogging (I find that even if they have a comment function, they feel much more like blasts of information, or essays in magazines, and commenting feels intrusive). There are a lot of people writing great newsletters on a variety of interesting topics — I suppose I should do a roundup post at some point gathering them all together. What I'd really like to do is find a way to get a feed of each newsletter importing into Dreamwidth — I know this is theoretically possible for blogs hosted elsewhere, but I'm not sure if it works for Substack (or similarly platformed) newsletters.

We had a load of wood for the fire delivered at the same time as Friday's milk delivery, and this inevitably coincided with warm weather! I'm hoping the mist today is a sign of impending autumnal (or even wintry) weather — I can't wait for fires, and coziness.

This weekend, I have swum a total of 3.5km in two days. I made the decision to book swimming sessions at the outdoor pool in Cambridge on both days — knowing that the weather would be really hot — and I am very pleased that I did so.

I had been planning to swim my normal 1km on Saturday and then stop, but I got to that point and felt I might as well swim another 500m, so I did. And then today my feeling was that if I'd managed 1.5km I may as well just push through to 2km, especially since it was so hot and I was in no hurry to get out of the water. I've never swum 2km in one go in my entire life, and I'm kind of shocked at how easy it was, especially since I haven't really done any swimming since August last year.

(For those to whom such things are meaningful and relevant, I swim freestyle, and the pool is 90m in length.)

Onwards to the fandom meme.

( Days 11-13 )

( The other days )

Well, that was a year. It seems to be a pattern with me that I experience each year as a time of great personal and professional success, set beside near-apocalyptic levels of malice, incompetence, incompetent malice, and destruction across the wider world. 2020 was, sadly, no different.

Let's do the year's-end meme.

( Questions and answers behind the cut )

My heart will not give up, my heart will not give out, my heart will not give in.

Just a brief update, as I have a lot of cooking to do.

I will write a longer recs post on 1st January, once author reveals happen, but I just wanted to flail about with happiness a bit regarding my Yuletide gift: nearly 10,000 words of plotty, character-driven problem-solving with my two favourite Benjamin January characters, Dominique and Chloë. This fandom was my greatest new discovery of 2020, and brought me a huge amount of happiness, and those two characters are my very favourite. It was as if the author reached into my mind and wrote a story to my exact specifications — the fic has everything I could possibly have wanted for this fandom, and these two characters. I am ecstatic. (I'm also really intrigued to know who wrote it!)

My own assignment and treats seem to have gone well so far. I wrote five things in total in this year's collection, and if any of you can identify them ... well, I don't know what I'll do, but it would amuse me. Obviously I'm not going to confirm or deny anything until after reveals.

Christmas so far has been quiet and relaxing. As Christmas Eve dinner is the main event for Matthias's family (as with other people from continental Europe), we unwrapped presents last night with my in-laws via Zoom, and then I cooked a dinner of salmon and roast vegetables. Today's going to be slower, and heartier, and with more grazing rather than a formal dinner — and then we'll eat all the leftovers for the next week or so!

There's been a huge amount of flooding here, to the extent that the paddling pool in the park (normally empty during winter) has completely filled with rainwater, the river has burst its banks, and all the fields are covered with water. This is a photoset from yesterday, and today's early morning walk out to Grantchester was pretty similar: Grantchester Meadows had become Grantchester Lakes, with a gaggle of very confused ducks, geese, swans and seagulls swimming around on what is normally a grassy field. There were a lot of other walkers out and about, and everyone was cheerful and friendly in spite of the dire state of affairs in the country at large. There is light enough, for now.

I hope everyone else who participated in Yuletide is enjoying their gift(s), has had a good reception for their own writing, and is in general having a good day. If you celebrate Christmas, I hope you are having a restful holiday, and celebrating in a manner which makes you happy.

Well, it has been A Week. I made the preemptive decision some time ago that I would refrain from going online from the point when I went to bed on Tuesday night (UK time) until when I felt in the right frame of mind to deal with the news coming out of the US. That meant no social media, no news websites, and, above all, no hysterical, frenzied, real-time speculation about the election result until the outcome was fairly close to certain.

As a result, instead of feeling like a gibbering wreck for the past few days, I have felt completely serene. I've read three books. I've cooked slow, warming food. I've gone running out in the fens, and done yoga every day. And, best of all, I went out walking at dawn in the eerie mist. Everything was still, and cold, and starkly beautiful, with cows looming out of the fog.

And so, my question to you all, for this week's open thread prompt, is as follows: how do you keep yourself calm? What activities help you maintain a sense of equilibrium? What soothes you?

This day of transition from daylight saving to standard time is my favourite of the year: I'm a morning person, I tend to wake up early, and I like waking to sunlight. The extra hour is always much appreciated as well. This time around, it meant that Matthias and I were up and off for our walk to Grantchester by about 7.30am, and back home — via the French bakery for a fresh, warm baguette and coffee — at about 8.30am. It was bright, crisp, and clear, and the cows were all gathered in the field closest to the carpark, ready to be moved out of their summer home, as always happens when daylight saving ends.

The rest of the morning was taken up with yoga (a fast flow sequence that was perhaps a bit more ambitious than I felt like, focusing heavily on core strength), a bit of food prep for dinner, cleaning empty fountain pens, and finishing up the final fifteen per cent of the book I'd been reading, Queen of the Conquered by Kacen Callender.

This was a book that was so ambitious and compelling in some regards, and so incredibly frustrating in other areas that I almost feel incapable of reviewing it. It's the first in a fantasy series grappling with the history of slavery and colonialism, particularly in the Caribbean, and it has really interesting things to say about revenge. It's essentially a revenge tragedy, and Callender does a great job of showing what it is to live a life solely motivated by revenge — how it corrupts and poisons everything, how it hollows out a person, and how it causes such a person to justify every injustice they perpetrate as working towards that ultimate end. I applaud Callender also for writing a book whose protagonist is so thoroughly contemptible (there are several things that she — the narrator, Sigourney — does that cross a moral line beyond which I am incapable of finding a character sympathetic) but for whom it is still possible to feel pity.

But at the same time, the book — which is supposedly adult fiction — was dreadfully let down by how closely it stuck to the typical US young adult novel formula. The first person present tense grated — I can see why the former was necessary, given the book was intended to bring its readers into uncomfortable proximity to the mindset of a woman so thoroughly convinced that 'the master's tools will dismantle the master's house', but present tense is almost never warranted, and certainly wasn't here. The obvious Designated Love Interest was unnecessary. And the twist at the end was so obviously telegraphed (it's basically Chekhov's Mind-Reading: if you have a narrator who has supernatural abilities to read people's minds, those responsible for the unsolved string of politically-motivated murders are going to be the people whose minds she refrains from reading out of respect, or dismissal of their importance, and I figured this out after I'd read about a third of the book). And from a structural point of view, it's really poor writing to have this great twist revealed in a huge infodump (secondhand, as the narrator reads someone's mind) for the final fifteen per cent of the book.

In other words, interesting ideas, shame about the execution.

My other recently read books have, with one exception, been a lot more satisfying.

( Two novellas and three novels behind the cut )

The rest of the weekend has been spent signing up for Yuletide, poking around the letters app (I now have a list of six potential requests I want to treat, and the only thing that's stopping me from starting is that I like to write my assignment first before committing to any treats), and trying to hunt down an elusive book which unfortunately has (to the best of my memory) an extremely generic name.

My obsession with fiction set in Al-Andalus (either when it was experiencing its glittering golden age, or in its dying days and collapse), particularly when the point-of-view characters are religious minorities, was kindled way back in my undergrad days, when my Jewish History/Religion/Culture lecturer assigned us an excerpt of a historical novel set in that period (alongside the typical academic books and journal articles). I'd always meant to track down this book, but its name eludes me, and while a lot of Googling by both Matthias and me yesterday unearthed an entire library of historical fiction books covering similar ground (now all added to my to read list), I still cannot find the book in question. Now my only hope is that all my photocopied course notes are still sitting in my old room in my mum's flat in Sydney, so that whenever international travel is possible again, I can go through said notes and find the reference to the book I'm seeking. At least I've got an interesting looking set of other books to read at some point in the future!

In the time it's taken me to write this post, the sun has completely disappeared. Any lingering hint of summer has definitely well and truly vanished!