Beyond Selidor

This weekend has been absolutely glorious — exactly the right balance between being out in the world, and indoor cosiness. Saturday started with my usual two hours of classes at the gym, and then I returned home for lunch, through crisp, clear, biting cold air. I spent most of the afternoon cooking — stewing fruit for our weekday breakfasts, and preparing an absolutely massive quantity of northern Thai-style dal, a new-to-me recipe that involved cooking ginger, garlic and shallots under the grill until they were blackened on the outside and took on a smoky flavour.

In the evening, Matthias and I caught the train out to one of the little villages around Cambridge, where — after a half-hour walk through fields in the dark — we had a Burns Night-themed dinner at the local gastropub. The food was great, the fires were lit, people had dogs in the bar area, and in general everything was wintry and lovely.

This morning was spent swimming and doing yoga, and then we headed out after lunch for our monthly walk with our walking group. This time, the walk was around Ely, so we didn't have to be driven there and back, which was great. The weather was terrible — strong winds, scatterings of freezing rain — but it was still great to be out and about, chatting and catching up with everyone. The walk ended at the pub at the end of our street (after everyone walked past our house and gave us tips on how to prune our lavender plants; some of the group are professional gardeners, and the others have allotments and are very knowledgeable about all things botanical), and Matthias and I have just returned home, for a few hours of chilling out until the weekend draws to a close.

I've only finished one book this week, This Woven Kingdom (Tahereh Mafi), the first in a YA fantasy series inspired by Iranian mythology. Honestly, I have to say that it's fairly mediocre — tropey and formulaic, with insta-love between its protagonist and her love interest (who are, of course, Romeo and Juliet-style figures from opposite sides of a supernatural and political conflict), the heroine is super super special with powers and abilities possessed by no one else, the lost heir to a supernatural dynasty, living the life of an unappreciated, much abused drudge, in obscurity, etc, etc. The worldbuilding is paper thin. My tolerance for this kind of thing is very dependent on my mood — and because I was in a good mood this week, I responded far more favourably than the book probably deserved. It's trash, but it's my kind of trash. I certainly can't recommend it, unless you're in the mood for this kind of tropey mush.

I have, however, been reading a lot of other interesting things online, and I will leave you with some links.

I liked this piece on Max Gladstone's newsletter, which I felt had a handy analogy for the challenges of our current moment:

Jiu-jitsu this week gave me a useful opportunity to reflect on defense.

The first instinct when someone’s on top of you, aiming for a choke hold or a submission, is to get that guy t.f. off. You want out of here. The adrenaline hits; you buck, you roll, you twist and kick. Full-on animal spirits.

The trouble is, you spend a lot of energy thrashing about. And, if you aren’t much stronger than the other grappler—who, remember, has gravity on their side—you’re not likely to get anywhere, if your opponent has the faintest clue what they’re doing. Even if you are stronger in general, one or two failed maximum-strength attempts to break free will wear you out. A common first step is to establish frames: defenses that work by structure rather than strength. If you get your arm inside a choke hold that works by isolating your neck, the other guy will have a hard time. The structure of your arm, the bone fact of it, protects you. You can save your strength to seize a later chance.

The author Susan Dennard, who left social media for good in 2022, and slowly weeded out any further opportunities for scrolling aimlessly through any form of digital content (to the point that she now only uses the internet to post long-form writing, read some longform stuff, and communicate via email or videoconferencing/messaging platforms). She's written a recent essay reflecting on the various effects of these choices, which I found to be very relevant to the discussions I've been witnessing around leaving social media, or reframing one's relationship with it.

This piece by Talia Lavin, another in her 'notable sandwiches' series of essays, really encapsulates why I'm glad to have subscribed to her writing. It's about a sandwich, it's about The Count of Monte Cristo (and all its many adaptations), and it's also about this:

But the real fantasy at the heart of Monte Cristo—and what makes me keep returning to it along with all those playwrights and filmmakers and artists and animators—is the fantasy of justice. It’s the wronged man, the victim, rubbing the faces of his abusers into their own crimes; it’s the refusal to be cast away, the combination of the ability, the means, and the desire to right such a fundamental wrong. From a man who cannot even see the sky from his dungeon, Dantes becomes a bolt of vengeance sent from heaven. And because injustice continues, and multiplies; because those who wrong others continue to benefit from it; because the cruel use any means to perpetrate their cruelty—well, the fantasy of destroying them utterly, these ordinary heartless men, has endured for nearly two hundred years. The fact that fantastic resources are needed to enact such justice against the powerful is, amid all the fantastical elements of the story, apropos. The scales are so cruelly tipped that it takes a wonder-tale to reverse them.

Finally, here is an article about Ukrainian scientists researching whether radioactive fungi from the Chornobyl site might be able to function as a radiation shield for journeys to Mars.

I hope your weekends have been filled with nice things.

I returned home yesterday via four trains (and a rail replacement bus, ugh) through four countries and two sets of border control, over seven hours. Absurdly, there were fewer transport connections getting from Amsterdam to London than there were getting from London to Ely (and the latter leg of the trip took longer in hours than the trip from Brussels to London).

Christmas with Matthias's family was busy and tiring — the usual chaotic whirlwind — but it was nice to see everyone and I think our presence there was appreciated. We managed to spend one evening at the really good Christmas market one town over, which is my favourite part about being in that part of the world at this time of year, so I'm glad.

The two of us broke our return journey with 36 hours or so in Amsterdam, which provided a good kind of mental divide between the frantic busyness of family Christmas and our return to the familiar stillness of home. I'd been to Amsterdam once, nearly twenty years ago, but Matthias had never been (apart from transiting through the train station), and we packed a lot into the two days we were there: visits to the Rijksmuseum and a fantastic modern/contemporary art gallery, a canal boat tour, and two really great restaurants (one was quite possibly the best Indonesian food I've eaten in my life, the other was an exquisite tasting menu with wine flight on the final evening). What I remembered most about Amsterdam, however, was how much it rewarded walking around. Every canal is beautiful, and every little lane is like a jewellery box of surprises — a quirky shop here, a great Scandinavian bakery there. I'm glad my memory proved correct (and current, twenty years later) — we had a marvellous (if cold) time, wandering, and discovering, letting our feet and whims lead us on.

And then it was back on the trains, to collapse with relief into our own bed.

I've now got four days of blissful, blissful rest and stillness. We've picked up supplies for our customary New Year's Eve activities of grazing and watching films, and other than going for a couple of swims and walks (and out for drinks with walking group friends tonight) I don't plan to leave the house until I have to go in to Cambridge to work next Monday. I'll be cleaning, reading (undemanding rereads like the last Benjamin January mystery, which I'd forgotten was set during the time between Christmas Eve and the first days of the new year, and The Dark Is Rising, which I'd been unable to start on the solstice due to travelling), doing long, stretchy yoga classes, setting up my 2025 bullet journal, and above all resting my mind and my body, which are both absolutely exhausted.

I'll talk more about it in my reveals post on 1st January, but I couldn't close this post without at least mentioning what an absolutely perfect Yuletide it's been this year. As a writer, my three fics (the main gift and two treats) have been very well received — all three received absolutely rapturous, detailed comments by the recipients, and one of them seems (by my standards at least) to have become something of a hit. When I was signing up, I was aiming to get assigned to any of these three specific recipients (and then write treats for the other two), so I'm really pleased that my intentions proved well founded.

In terms of my own gifts, I feel particularly grateful this year. My main gift was for a fandom (and pairing) that I've been requesting fruitlessly for ten years in ever exchange in which it's been eligible, since the first time I signed up for Yuletide. I'd almost given up hope of anyone ever wanting to write it, so the notification in my inbox on 25th December was extremely welcome — and the actual fic itself is fantastic. And if that wasn't enough, for the first time ever, someone chose to write an extra treat fic for me, about characters from one of my first, dearest, and oldest fandoms of the heart — something about which I have been fannish for close to thirty years. It was absolutely wonderful to receive this lovely piece of writing whose author clearly shared a lot of my own feelings about these characters, and this canon. I'll post them all properly with more comments in the reveals post on Wednesday, so that the authors can receive proper credit.

The one drawback about all the travel (and my general mental state) is that I have had literally no time to read beyond my own two gifts in the collection, and am unlikely to have the chance before reveals. I may come back and dip in, since normally I read and comment widely, and put together a recs post, but I don't want to promise anything given how utterly, utterly exhausted I am.

I will leave you with a couple of photosets from my travels: wanderings in Amsterdam, and the fog in the hills above my father-in-law's place in Germany, plus some Amsterdam spillover photos. I cannot emphasise how utterly fog-blanketed everything was for the entire time we were in western Europe (including the train journeys through Belgium and France). I love that kind of weather: it's as if winter is draping the world in a soft blanket, telling us to slow down and rest.

It rained all week, and then on Saturday, the clouds rolled back, unfolding across the clearest, brightest winter skies. This was opportune and perfect, since Matthias and were joining friends (or, I guess at this stage, friends of friends would be a more accurate description) for their monthly walk. (In line with my aspirations to lead a slightly less restricted, hermit-like existence, this walking group seemed like the perfect, low key way to open up my world somewhat.) On the last Saturday of every month, they pick a local-ish hike, and whoever wants to come joins in.

Yesterday's walk was circular: 8km or so across the fields and woods near Stetchworth. Like everywhere in this area, it was a pretty flat landscape, and because it had been raining all week, it was muddy, soggy going — which made what would otherwise have been quite an easy amble somewhat tough going. My boots ended up caked in mud, and although it didn't feel physically challenging at the time, once I'd stopped moving, I realised my legs hurt a lot — in a good way. I imagine in summer it would be a very different experience, but mud is an occupational hazard in this part of the world at this time of year.

I could not get over the sun-drenched expanses of sky, sweeping above, clear blue interspersed with cottonwool dots of low-hanging clouds. After what feels like weeks of grey, the contrast was remarkable, and really did a lot to lift my mood (which has been very low for what feels like a very long time) — I imagine being out in the open air, with other people played its part as well. This photoset gives you a good idea of the whole vibe.

We had time for a quick drink in the garden of a seventeenth-century pub in Woodditton, trudged back across more fields and forests beneath the setting sun, and made it back to the carpark where we'd started in the last moments of daylight. As we were driven back to Ely, the moon rose, and hung, huge, yellow, and low to the horizon, looming above us as we made our way through the darkening fens, adding to the magical air of the whole journey.

Today was a more typical weekend day: swimming through sunshine first thing in the morning, river loop walk with Matthias ending up in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar eating food truck food for lunch, a challenging yoga class this afternoon just prior to opening up Dreamwidth and composing this post.

It's been another slow week, reading wise (my reading has not been helped in general by my low mood), but I did finish a single book: Lud-in-the-Mist (Hope Mirrlees), an early 20th-century fantasy classic that I'd always meant to pick up, and had the serendipity to find left out on the front step in a box of books being given away for free by a neighbour down the road. (This is a good street for such things — now that I've read the book, I'll give it away myself once I've gathered together a few more books I no longer want to keep.)

Lud-in-the-Mist is a strange, meandering, fable of a book — it's always interesting to read early fiction with fantasy elements published before the conventions of the genre were established (and indeed before fantasy was perceived as being a firmly distinct genre). It's set in an indeterminate fairytale world whose inhabitants have anxiously banished any thought of the magical and fantastic — to the point that it's a social taboo to even mention them — but, as in many similar stories, the fantastic continues to encroach on the human world, with potentially dangerous consequences. I always love reading stories in which the the otherworld and the human world bleed into one another, their boundaries porous and interwoven, their inhabitants interdependent in spite of their best endeavours. The fairies of Lud-in-the-Mist are uncanny and inhuman in the best folkloric tradition, and the story is told with a resonant, lyrical beauty.

Beyond that, I've been finalising my Once Upon a Fic signup (in the end, I went with the same fandoms as last year, since I still feel there are good stories to be told in those for which I've already received gifts, and some are fandoms which I've requested before without luck), and gearing up for the upcoming work week. I'm hoping the joy and light and hope of this weekend will be enough of a drastic reset to carry me through — the start of a springtime of the mind, as it were. For now, I'll build up some kindling in our wood-burning stove, turn on the string lights, and light some candles: warmth and cosiness, shining through from the end of one season and the tentative start of the next.

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

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

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

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

It's my coffee break, I've got about half a day's work remaining for the year, and then I'm on holiday until 2nd January. In the past, Matthias and I have flown to Australia to spend three weeks with my family in December/January, but the astronomical post-pandemic costs of international flights have put paid to that forever. When we're not in Australia, we tend to travel to Germany to spend Christmas with Matthias's family. However, during the pandemic, everyone got very used to spending this time celebrating separately at home, and realised that although we enjoyed each other's company, doing the big family celebrations every year was exhausting, and we made the decision to alternate between being together in Germany, and going our separate ways (Matthias's sister and her husband and children are spending the holiday in Austria this year).

As a result, once I finish work today, there will be no day-long train trip across five countries (contending with the inevitable chaos of Deutsche Bahn), and instead I will have ten days of uninterrupted rest. I'll read (I've already made a start on my usual seasonal rereads — 'Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night,' The Dark Is Rising, and The Bear and the Nightingale), I'll cook, I'll work my way through the Yuletide collection, we'll go for walks, I'll go swimming and do yoga and set up my new bullet journal, and it will all be incredibly peaceful. All the various food and wine has already been bought, and other than a trip into Cambridge tomorrow, there will be no need to go very far.

All that is by way of preamble to today's open thread prompt: what does 'rest' look like for you?

As you might be able to tell, I don't think of 'rest' as doing very little, or sleeping in (I am physically incapable of sleeping in, and it's been like this all my life — even when I was a teenager, in prime sleeping in age, I never woke up later than about 7 or 8am, and even when I'm incredibly tired or ill, this tends to result in afternoon napping rather than staying asleep longer in the morning), but rather being in absolute control over my own time. Knowing when meals are going to happen and what each meal will involve, knowing that the shopping has been done and that every required item is accounted for, choosing when I want to exercise or read or write or clean or go outside for a walk, without any externally imposed demands: that, for me, is rest. It's restful for my mind, and this in turn affects how relaxed my body feels. I'm so fortunate to be able to be in a situation conducive to this kind of rest, for such an extended period of time.

How about you? What does it mean to you to rest?

I woke this morning to thick frost, and thick fog blanketing the fens, and had an atmospheric walk to the swimming pool at dawn. Everything is freezing, and there's a sense of the land being locked in a kind of frozen sleep. Matthias and I have three very busy weekends coming up, so we took advantage of this last bit of free time to do exactly what we wanted.

This has meant, as always, a good variety of activities — several times out at the gym/pool, daily yoga, take-away for dinner last night, a new-to-me Indonesian recipe for dinner tonight, a film on Saturday night, and lots of reading. We also did a little walk in the wintry sunshine today, looping down past the cathedral and along the river, pausing to look at the new exhibition in the local art gallery, and picking up Tibetan food from a market stall to eat while we had a couple of drinks in our favourite local bar/cafe. You can see a photoset on Instagram.

I've read two books this weekend: Foul Lady Fortune (Chloe Gong), a spin-off from her Romeo and Juliet retelling set in 1920s Shanghai, and the first part of a multi-volume coffee table book history of the Caucasus (Christoph Baumer). The former moved the action into the early 1930s, dealing with the political turmoil in China as the Kuomintang and Communists tussled with each other and tried to cope with the looming threat of Japanese annexation. As a spy thriller, it's quite fun (if you ignore the implausibility of the fact that all the characters are teenagers), but I found myself frustrated by the fantasy elements, which felt unnecessary — it could have stood on its own as a work of historical fiction. It's also got some really distractingly glaring copy-editing errors. The second book is a very sweeping, broad-brush approach to the history of the region, starting in pre-historical times and concluding in the twelfth century, and my overall impression is that the people living in this part of the world seem to have been eternally cursed by their extremely unfortunate geographical location — always treated as some great power's 'buffer zone' or 'sphere of colonial influence.'

As I mentioned above, Matthias and I also watched a film last night — this time The Pale Blue Eye, which is a piece of gothic horror involving Edgar Allan Poe teaming up with a private detective to solve a series of grisly murders taking place at West Point military academy in the 1830s. The film has really bad reviews, but I actually thought it was quite fun, at least for the first 3/4 — there's an unfortunate twist at the end that felt really unnecessary. Bizarrely for a film set in the United States, the entire cast appears to be British.

I'll leave you with a handful of interesting links.

I enjoyed this interview with Sarah Michelle Gellar. I'd had no intention of watching Wolf Pack (because a) I bailed on Teen Wolf after three seasons and b) Jeff Davis), but this interview is testing my resolve!

vriddy always gathers fantastic collections of links relating to online platforms, fannish communities, and similar issues, and the latest batch is no different. I particularly appreciated this post by elwinfortuna about warning signs of fannish cults/scammers/grifters. I find it grimly dispiriting that not only can I think of at least five or six notorious people from back in the day to whom these warning signs apply, there are also several current fannish grifters of whose existence the post reminded me. Fandom's susceptibility to this sort of thing is depressingly eternal.

Because I don't want to end this post on such a low note, I will conclude by reminding everyone about once_upon_fic, which is still accepting nominations. If you like fairy tale/mythology/folklore retellings, this is the exchange for you!

I hope you've all been having nice weekends.

It's been an icy, sparkling weekend: winter is here with a vengeance, all crispy, frost-covered leaves and silvery fog blanketing the fens and hovering over the river. We went for a walk first thing this morning, and it was absolutely spectacular: the cathedral disappeared into the sky, mist curled around the houseboats, and the frost — which first came on Tuesday — never left the ground. I took photos of the garden as well, in an attempt to capture the moment.

This week has been difficult. Matthias and I both had food poisoning last Sunday night, which was, as you can probably imagine, incredibly unpleasant. It feels as if it took the whole week to recover, and yesterday was the first time that I really felt happy eating anything other than crackers and water. Most of the time, I just felt incredibly tired, and everything felt as if I were swimming through honey, and I tried to conserve my strength and do the bare minimum. Thankfully, I now finally feel fully recovered.

The weekend has been all about the written word: putting the finishing touches on a couple of Yuletide fics, and a gift for fandomtrees which just poured out of me in a couple of hours.

I also finished one book: Frances Hardinge's latest, Unraveller, an absolutely glorious piece of YA writing in which all Hardinge's considerable strengths are on display. As with all her books, it's richly imagined with an incredible sense of place, set in a world in which curses are real, and inescapable — and manifestations of people's pain, and grief, and anger. Her protagonist has the power to lift (or unravel) curses, and he roams through the world, digging into people's problems, figuring out who they might have wronged, mending what has been broken, but heedless as to the difficulties the secrets and tensions he uncovers may cause. It's written with exquisite empathy, as all of Hardinge's books are, shot through with compassion and understanding for human frailty and the moments of pain and weakness that might cause someone to turn their rage outwards and irrevocably hurt others, and its ultimate conclusion is that anger should not be avoided, but rather listened to and dealt with honestly. There's also a fabulous thread of inspiration from both weird British folklore and the Andersen version of the Six/Wild Swans fairytale, which of course appealled to me immensely.

At this time of year, I crave a routine that fits the season, and I have a lot of wintry books that I reread. Today it was time to return to The Bear and the Nightingale, the first in Katherine Arden's magnificent fantasy trilogy inspired by medieval Russian history and folk tales, and it was as perfect as ever. I snuggled up under my weighted blanket, and outside the frost dug into the garden, and I sank back into Arden's glorious story of Vasya, and the winter-king, and the supernatural interweaving and overlapping with the domestic, wars between gods sitting easily beside smaller familial tensions, and the ice, and the snow, and the cold.

Is there anything better than a seasonally appropriate book?

Today I awoke to exactly the kind of weather I most enjoy: a blanketing fog that didn't lift until at least midday. I took a bunch of photos on my way to the pool, revelling in the arrival of autumn.

It's not been a great month for reading (to be honest, I've been too stressed about the grim political situation in far too many parts of the world), but I did manage to finish a couple of other books before the close of September.

Those books are:

The Community (N. Jamiyla Chisholm), a memoir about the author's experiences growing up in a cult. The cult in question drew on elements of militant Black separatism in the US, Islam, and a jumble of conspiracy theories, and resulted in the inevitable toxic mix of abusive isolation from the outside world, paranoia, financial exploitation of cult members, child sexual abuse, etc. It was an interesting book, and but it wasn't quite what I wanted to read — it focused much more on the author's relationship with her parents and thoughts about her own childhood, whereas I wanted a fuller focus on the cult itself, and the socio-cultural factors which shaped it and made it attractive to its members.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club (Malinda Lo), a work of historical fiction set in 1950s San Francisco, as seen through the eyes of Chinese-American (and closeted lesbian) teenager Lily Hu. The racism, sexism and homophobia of the period all get a look-in, as well as the major political currents of the era (McCarthyism, the space race, Cold War fears of spies and infiltration, the communist revolution in China). Against this backdrop, the book tells a coming-of-age narrative, as Lily falls in love (with a girl, with a nightclub, with a vibrant, clandestine queer community) and tries to contend with the dual challenges of familial and community expectations, and her own hopes and aspirations. As a snapshot of a time and place, Last Night at the Telegraph Club is fantastic — the hidden queer community is particularly well done — although I felt the book as a whole seemed to leap from episode to episode rather than telling a flowing story (and it ended in a manner that was both abrupt, and far too tidy). My absolute favourite part, however, was its multiple mouth-watering descriptions of Chinese food, in all its regional specificity — this is definitely not a book to read when you're hungry!

Let's hope I can be a bit better at reading regularly in October!

I'm happiest when my days are filled with a good mixture of stuff, and that's certainly been true this weekend. In list format, in no particular order, I've done the following:

Read so many books, in a variety of genres (about which more in a review post later in the week)

Done a variety of yoga sessions ranging from the intense to the stretchy to the restorative

Roamed the outdoor market in the rain, picking up vegetables, fruit, bread and cheese

Swum a kilometre

Pottered around on Dreamwidth, overwhelmed by, and grateful for, the response to both my snowflake_challenge posts and the return of my Friday open threads

Walked out through the muddy fens with Matthias, under clear skies

Now I've got curry simmering, fragrant on the stove, and I'm winding down, and resting.



Today's snowflake_challenge prompt is: In your own space, talk about an idea you wish you had the time / talent / energy to do.

( Unfinished visioncloths behind the cut )

It's remarkable what a difference crossing several long-lingering items off my to-do list has on my mental health — and this was certainly the case this weekend. I've had more energy — and done a greater variety of things — over the past two days than throughout the whole of November. Matthias and I weeded the entire garden, my Yuletide assignment is nearly complete, I started today with a 1km swim, I've done yoga both days (for the first time in months), and I finally cracked open a book and finished the last 200 pages of The Will to Battle in several hours.

I'm just hoping this newfound energy and purpose will last until the end of the year. Work is busier than I'd like, but unfortunately it's always like this in December, with every academic in the university and hospital suddenly deciding it's imperative they complete their project by the Christmas break and calling on me for help. One such request is fine, but twenty starts to get a little overwhelming.

I don't think I'll ever adjust to the northern hemisphere completely — as strange as it sounds, after thirteen years it still feels wrong that Christmas isn't happening in summer — but I do enjoy the cold, the dark, and the winter nights illuminated by the lights and decorations glimpsed through people's windows. I went into town last night to pick up our takeaway dinner, and the Christmas tree in the market square — a strange blend of cheerful and desolate — lifted my spirits. There is light enough for me.