Category: writing

Handiwork

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Mushroom shaped glass stopper caged in gold coloured wire with green and white beads

Here’s one of this year’s Christmas decorations. They’re a bit experimental: I picked up a box of decanterless stoppers in a charity shop and have been caging them in beaded wire crochet. The solid ones are going to be a bit heavy for trees, but should be just about okay hung close to the trunk. I’m going to hang a big bead from the bottom.

I’m finding that I’m not terribly interested in writing at the moment, and I’m very much enjoying making things in three dimensions instead. Having finished my fishpond skirt, I’ve moved on to these beaded things and am thinking too about picking up my knitting needles again, and finally getting around to trying out my new big darning loom, and I’d like to do some patchwork too… Meanwhile, writing… meh, as they used to say on the internet. I expect I’ll get caught up by it again sooner or later, but for the moment it seems to belong to another life.

Why I haven’t been writing

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Top of the list, most obvious, there’s the tiny hungry person who’s currently asleep in my lap.

Also, we’re between new moon and full moon, and I never write between new moon and full moon. Well, hardly ever. Well, not much. Not more than a sentence per project per day. Recently, it’s been very much less than that. (This started out as a way to give myself a break and has become something like a discipline. I keep thinking I’ll revisit it, but I haven’t yet.)

Then there’s the news I’ve been waiting for, and, while I could have been writing while waiting, the other factors combined and meant that I wasn’t. It’s good news. I’ll probably say more about it soon. In the meantime, it’s going to be one of those pleasing and harmless secrets, to be carried around and smiled at when I think about it.

Eleventh hour

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Or minus eleventh hour, I suppose. Anyway, the Bikes In Space Kickstarter has eleven hours left to run, is very nearly funded (it’ll be extremely annoying if it doesn’t quite get there), and has a brief interview with me on the updates tab. Go and have a look, and, if you were thinking of backing the project, now is very much the moment to do so.

The Bicyclist’s Guide to the Galaxy – Kickstarter live now

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People cycle on a wide path across a grassy common towards a church spire

It’s that time again… this year’s Bikes in Space Kickstarter is live. In fact, it’s been live for a few days now and is already over halfway funded. You have ten days in which to join the party: backing the crowdfunder is by far the easiest way to get your hands on a copy of the book, and there are various other rewards to tempt you as well.

This year’s edition is The Bicyclist’s Guide to the Galaxy, with a theme of books and bikes. My portal fantasy story, The Ride for the City, is first in the table of contents. It’s a tribute to Cambridge, that strange city of contrasts – and to the power of books, even terrible ones, to bring people together. This book, however, is not terrible. Quite the contrary.

Support the Bikes in Space Kickstarter

Week-end: imitate the actions of

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Fluffy black and white cat flopping on a piece of cardboard (which shows some evidence of her having attacked it with her claws); both forelegs and one hindleg stuck straight out in front of her

I am done. I realised this on Monday when I arrived in the office. I am ready to just sit in the garden now. Or possibly upstairs, with the air conditioner on. I’m imitating the actions of the flopcat. Probably the world number one expert in flop.

The good

Useful appointment with the midwife. The infant is aligned optimally. We shall see what happens next, and when.

Jolly gin-tasting (tonic-drinking, for me) evening with colleagues.

And a blessedly joyful, joyfully blessed Ultreya yesterday to welcome the new members from our most recent Cursillo. People had to keep putting out more chairs! Afterwards we sat in the churchyard and ate our sandwiches and chatted, with swifts (maybe housemartins?) swooping overheard.

The mixed

Excitement and apprehension, wanting to sit down and rest but also to catch up with everyone while I can…

The difficult and perplexing

I’ll probably be saying this every week until September, but I’m so hot. It did rain a little bit this morning, but the forecast thunderstorms didn’t materialise.

What’s working

The air conditioner, which we have had since about February, but which as of yesterday afternoon is installed and functioning.

And the cargo bike, in which one can transport quite remarkable quantities of stuff. I am looking forward to being able to ride the thing myself.

And filling a washing up bowl with cold water and sticking my feet in it.

Reading

Keeping on with The Third Policeman, which continues to be utterly bizarre and really quite charming. Nearly there with The Chronicles of Count Antonio, who is no match for a bargain basement Milady de Winter (spoiler: he gets away with this due to her turning very feeble).

A couple of lovely blog posts: this, on food and fellowship, and this, on compassion and clarity and miracles.

Out loud: the second lesson this morning, which was the apostle Paul at his most snide.

Writing

Keeping on with Don’t Quit The Day Job, which, ironically enough, has proved impossible to finish while doing the day job. We’ll see if maternity leave can sort it out. (There is quite a large section on when you can’t bloody well write – oh, I read a good blog post on that this week, too.)

Watching

I returned to Detectorists, but mostly I’ve been watching the Critérium du Dauphiné. Mountains, and people working harder than me.

Cooking

An Instant Pot risotto variation with broad beans and spring greens. Not bad, though it needed something to give it a bit more zing. Maybe lemon juice? Also, I have decided that life is too short to double-pod broad beans.

Today, lamb in dill sauce from Slow Cooking Just For Yourself. The sauce refused to thicken despite the use of both cornflour and egg yolk, but it was very tasty nonetheless.

Eating

What I should have done was pretend to be vegetarian when I signed up for the (not) gin tasting, as the keynote edible offering was a charcuterie selection which mostly looked off-limits to me. But I did quite nicely on crisps and nibbles and leftover vegetarian bits.

Today, for lunch: a Krakower bacon and cheese sausage from the German sausage cart at the market, followed by a pomegranate gelato on the way home. Not bad at all.

This evening I took my lamb in dill sauce out into the garden and ate it off our new blue metal table. I did feel a bit like Shirley Valentine drinking her wine alone at the edge of the sea, but it was very pleasant.

Moving

People seem to be impressed that I’m still cycling. Look, once I’ve got up the hill (and I gave up trying to ride up Back Hill several months ago) the rest is easy.

Noticing

Swifts, I said, and there was a dragonfly briefly hovering outside the church yesterday morning. A spotted brown butterfly and a few little blue ones. And a large woodpigeon landing on a very slender birch bough, which swayed most entertainingly.

Just now, a spider – fortunately before it crawled inside my dress.

In the garden

We spent last Sunday afternoon getting rid of the annoying willow tree. (I like willows, in their place – which is not our tiny back garden. I don’t know what the previous owners, or the ones before them, were thinking.) This gives more space to a sad morello cherry tree, some raspberry canes, and a couple of self-seeded hollies. My current thinking is that I’ll let the big one of those stay and take the other one out, but we’ll see.

I’m having to be rather more cautious with watering than I’ve been in previous years, because even with the watering can only half-full I can feel my back complaining, but most things seem to be surviving so far. There is one rose on each of the three bushes. My favourite is still the white one, but I do appreciate the way the pink one is so unashamedly out there, being a rose. And the peony, far from being dead, has flowered! Only one flower, and I think it will stay that way, but it’s a proper bright pink cheerful blowsy peony and I am very pleased with it.

Appreciating

The outpouring of love and encouragement and support from the Cursillo community. Tony, who is willing to cart all sorts of paraphernalia around for me and set up air conditioners while I’m snoozing on the sofa. I have excellent people in my life.

Acquisitions

A bottle of gin. For future reference, you might say.

Line of the week

From Havi’s piece on Loving Clarity:

I love Loving-Kindness for its poetic feel, and I love it as the translation to an impossible-to-translate feeling, something warmer than Mercy, sweeter than Grace, kinder than kindness, an enhanced kindness.

Sunday snippet

All my books are really written for myself, but this bit in particular is me writing what I need to read:

And I think that what it comes back to is this: writing is not easy. It won’t just happen, particularly not in a time-environment that’s crowded with other projects and priorities. Therefore, you have to choose to make it happen, over and over, word by word. Sometimes the choice is easy; sometimes it disappears entirely. You won’t always choose writing – and that may be because you want to meet up with a friend you haven’t seen in years, or it may be because you’re too tired for anything but a pizza and whatever happens to be on telly. You don’t have to choose writing all the time. You only have to choose it often enough.

This coming week

… is my last week at work! It contains one session in which I attempt to train some colleagues on the use of the learning management system, one regular training session, further efforts at clearing my desk, and some frivolities. At least, that’s the theory. We’re already well on the way into the great unknown.

Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!

Week-end: I think the cover was blue

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White pear blossom and young green leaves against a red brick wall

The good

It’s been an excellent week. I have slept a lot; I got a load of cat-herding and yak-shaving done on Monday and Tuesday and am now much less stressed about all the things that were formerly stressing me; I had a long phone conversation with one friend and went out for tea with two others. I logged into my work email once to see what the news was, and I liked it. I had my hair cut and I liked the result.

The mixed

April showers! Only one of them seriously inconvenienced me, though, and I got a lift home.

A visit from a hedgehog! (I was very glad to see the hedgehog, and it’s certainly good news that it’s got through hibernation, but it shouldn’t have been in the garage.)

I’m still slightly despairing about the state of the study. And I would have liked to have got more writing done.

The difficult and perplexing

Honestly, it’s mostly been good. Woke up too early this morning. That’s about it.

What’s working

Setting deadlines (for other people). Just doing things. And, on occasion, not doing things.

Reading

I was very zonked on Wednesday morning, so collapsed first on the bed and then on the sofa with After the Funeral (Agatha Christie). (My copy has a cover consisting of stills from the – very loose, by the looks of it – adaptation Murder at the Gallop, starring Margaret Rutherford. It looks bizarre.) Yesterday I read through all of the Heartstopper webcomic (Alice Oseman) that currently exists. I shall now do my best to forget about it for six months, as I know from bitter experience that waiting eagerly to read three panels once a fortnight (or whatever) is the quickest way for me to fall out of love with a canon. (It happened most spectacularly with Check, Please!, though I think Heartstopper is more coherent in tone and certainly less eyebrow-raising in its attitude to coming out. All the same, I’m not going to take the risk.) Anyway, I read the Nick and Charlie novella today and that ties things up nicely.

Writing

I wrote 700 words of what’s probably going to turn out to be a blog post on wanting things. I moved some things around in and made some additions to Don’t Quit The Day Job. And I typed up a bit of Your Household’s Rancour that I’d apparently forgotten about. As I said above, I’d have liked to have got more done. Pa used to swear that he couldn’t write if he didn’t smoke, and I’m half-tempted to wonder if I’d concentrate better if I were back on the coffee. (But I have rather gone off coffee.)

Most definitely not writing: The Long Lent, which would be the Stancester gang versus early Covid. I am not sure that anybody wants to read about early Covid. And it would mostly be about Will, and I’m not sure that anybody wants to read about Will, either. It doesn’t have much of a plot. It occurred to me that it doesn’t have to be a full-length novel. All the same, I found myself rereading a lot of The Real World when I was awake too early this morning, and trying to work out what jobs people would have been doing by 2020, and then at lunchtime I was looking for the Pergolesi Stabat Mater, which I think would form a sort of structure. I couldn’t find it. I’m sure it has a blue cover.

But anyway, I have two novels on the go, another one to expand from a short story, and the workbook that is in theory my principal project. I’m not convinced that this isn’t a ploy by some twisty part of my brain to stop me finishing anything.

Watching

I finally got through the world figure skating championships. I was glad I left the ice dance until last; it just got better and better and better through the last couple of groups.

Cooking

Indian masala carrots with coconut lentils.

Eating

Leftover bigos for lunch through the first half of the week. (It was OK, but it really needed belly pork; the meat was a bit dry.) Pizza, with various meat products, on Wednesday night. (Apparently my blood pressure is a bit low, which may explain my recent preoccupation with ham sandwiches.) Easter chocolate. Yesterday I got some rum and raisin fudge from the fudge shop: a rare treat.

Moving

Swimming. My new bathing suit arrived and seems perfectly satisfactory.

Noticing

As mentioned above, a hedgehog in the garage. (I was not, in fact, the first person to notice it; it triggered the motion sensor and Tony saw it. But I was the person to see it in its prickly reality and, protected by a pair of gardening gloves, get it out.)

There have been a lot of goldfinches around lately. Robins and blackbirds, very vocal. And one of our resident woodpigeons has discovered that it can sit in a bush and eat from the seed feeder just above it, which looks most comical, like a student doing a yard of ale.

In the garden

The tulips are most definitely out and it’s all got a lot brighter. The pear blossom gets more luxuriant by the day. I chopped some dead bits off the palm tree (it’s not a real palm tree, but I can’t remember the name of it). I’m not convinced it liked the cold weather earlier this year. Can’t blame it.

Appreciating

Friends who have been in my life for getting on for twenty years. A week to do more or less exactly what I wanted.

Acquisitions

Theatre tickets! We are going to see Opera della Luna’s Sweeney Todd. It is not often that you get to hear your great-great-great-grandfather’s music done live by pros (well, depends on who your great-great-great-grandfather was, I suppose, but mine has slipped into obscurity). I am very excited about this.

Hankering

I still have my eye on the teapot dress, but there’s no point buying it yet. As it is, I’ve been trying on various dresses in my wardrobe and doing calculations along the lines of if I expand by one centimetre every week and the wedding is in a month was it worth paying a tenner for a dress that was a size too big in January and how much extra time do I have to allow to go shopping in Portsmouth and what on earth do I do about a bra?

Line of the week

From After the Funeral:

It was a nice painting of white satin and pearls. The human being round whom they were draped and clasped was not nearly so impressive.

Saturday snippet

From Don’t Quit the Day Job

The challenge is remaining in that [writer’s] mindset when I’m back in London and the phone’s ringing and I have five spreadsheets to convert into a report. Writing on the commute helps. So does reading in my lunch break. I also like to wear one or other of the pieces of jewellery that I associate with my writing identity. (A current favourite is a pair of earrings featuring glass beads in the shape of coffee beans.)

This coming week

Back at work. In fact, it’s a perfectly normal week before things start getting absolutely ridiculous next Saturday, and remain so for the subsequent month.

Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!

Week-end: fasting

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A large model cow, painted lilac and decorated with hearts in the colours of various Pride flags and words associated with LGBTQ+ identities, standing on a rainy pavement.

The good

Daffodils. Birds. Loads of writing. The satisfaction of getting shot of some stuff that was cluttering up the place.

The mixed

My short story got rejected. But it was for exactly the reason I expected: it’s way too long and really it wants to be a novel. And the editor really liked it apart from the fact that it was way too long. So. I now find myself with several projects that are well on the way to being something substantial, and I probably need to prioritise.

The difficult and perplexing

Fasting glucose tolerance test. No food from 10pm on Thursday night, train to Cambridge, blood test, glucose drink, hour’s wait, blood test, hour’s wait, blood test. Not my idea of a fun Friday morning, and I felt a bit skew-whiff all the rest of the day. Now we wait to see if I have gestational diabetes. I really hope not.

Train delays at the most inconvenient moment possible. And a decision that was going to result in awkward questions whichever way it went.

What’s working

Early nights. Bathing/showering in the evenings. Saying what I’m not prepared to do.

Reading

Last week I remembered to report my Sunday reading and forgot about the weekdays, in which I finished Death in Cyprus. It was rather an unsatisfactory read: I wanted to slap pretty much everybody; it was incredibly cruel to the older, unattractive character; and the resolution pulled an element out of (so far as I could see) absolutely nowhere. I think Death in Berlin was better.

Still persevering with These Violent Delights.

And I got through most of the latest London Review of Books in between blood tests.

Writing

More on Don’t Quit The Day Job. It’s quite easy writing: at the moment I’m just expounding on my own writing process in an extremely self-indulgent fashion. I’ve only just got all my longhand typed up this evening. What I must do on Monday is rearrange things to fit the new structure.

Thinking about

The myth of the heroic intervention. This came up three times in two days and I think it probably needs a post.

Making

I have the house to myself at the moment and have taken advantage of that fact and got out the sewing machine to do some American-style patchwork. I think my original plan was somewhat overambitious but I’m having fun with the modified pattern.

Mending

Darning a pair of socks, very slowly.

Looking at

An exhibition about the history of Addenbrooke’s after my fasting glucose test.

Cooking

Soup! I adore soup and it is a thousand times less faff in the pressure cooker. I made one with cauliflower and parmesan on Thursday and one with red lentils and Swiss chard this evening.

Eating

The above, plus various things excavated from the freezer. Having got the yoghurt to work last week, I’ve been adding apple sauce, plums, etc. And I made the remains of some roast pork into a sort of stew.

Moving

I managed what used to be my usual walk without having to sit down at least once this week! And I have been getting out for it every morning I’ve been working from home.

Noticing

Robins all over the place, sitting in trees and announcing their presence. Blackbirds, too, and (I think) a bullfinch. And I don’t know whether the decorated cow (whose name, I learned from the information sheet, is Moosha P. Cambridge) has only just arrived outside Sessions House, or if I haven’t been that far along the road, but either way I only noticed her today. Isn’t she magnificent?

In the garden

Got my act together and removed some compost from the Hotbin (the top end was steaming away very happily). Also, not exactly the garden, but I sowed some herb seeds in a pot in the conservatory. Maybe this is the year I get fresh parsley to survive…

Appreciating

Increased energy levels. Soup. Refilling a jar with ground coriander for 32p.

Acquisitions

A bird feeder, the sort made of square mesh to hold peanuts, with a cage around it to keep squirrels out. On getting it home I discovered that we do not in fact have any peanuts. I was sure we did. Never mind. I also got some herb seeds and a nice terracotta pot with multiple holes (see In the garden).

Line of the week

From Theirs and No One Else’s (Nicholas Spice) in the London Review of Books:

There’s a performance of the Prelude to Lohengrin, conducted by Claudio Abbado towards the end of his life, where the orchestra moves like water weed in the current of a river or grassland in a breeze.

Saturday snippet

I wrote and I kept going, wrote and gave up, wrote and wrote and despaired and regained hope and started writing again.

This coming week

I have vague ambitions to Get The House Sorted Out and Get Those Things Drafted and also to Do Some More Patchwork. I also have an appointment to see the midwife and, as mentioned above, should get the results of my glucose test.

Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!

Hard to get (unless you know where to look)

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A narrow curlicued Art Nouveau building sandwiched in between two angular brick and plate glass edifices.

A friend messaged me a couple of weeks ago to say that she wanted to buy a copy of Speak Its Name as a present for somebody, and it was out of print on Amazon: was it still available?

It is; it just isn’t on Amazon. The same goes for The Real World. A Spoke In The Wheel is there at the moment, but may not always be there. As for my short stories, well, their availability is entirely dependent on the whim of whichever publisher controls the anthology they happen to be in.

(If anyone didn’t get Stronger Than Death in the Rainbow Bouquet anthology before Manifold Press shut up shop, keep an eye on I Read Indies over Hallowe’en, by the way. And you can get Prima Donna in Upstaged from Smashwords for free at the moment. Meanwhile, if you want my Victorian bicycling witch midwife story Layings Out and Lyings In, your best bet is to back the Bicycles and Broomsticks Kickstarter, which has just under three days left to run.)

I didn’t exactly mean to become an eccentric literary recluse, but it seems to have happened anyway. I took most of my books off Amazon to make them cheaper, but of course it’s had the unfortunate side-effect of making them harder to find.

Then there’s the undeniable fact that the project that’s currently firing my imagination the most is the one that’s designed specifically to be sold in one single bookshop that only exists for a week every year. For Book Bus Stories, exclusivity is going to be a selling point. It’s a limited edition, except it’s limited by space and time instead of by numbers.

And it’s true, there is something about being hard to get that’s rather glamorous and intriguing. You have to know where to look. You won’t find me sliced, diced and discounted in The Works. (I do occasionally leave a copy on a café table or a railway book swap shelf, though. I like letting chance play its part.)

What I suspect is actually happening, though, is that people who genuinely do want to buy my books are googling, hitting the Amazon link, seeing that it’s unavailable, and assuming that it’s unavailable everywhere. Which is not ideal, seeing as it’s not true.

Unfortunately I’m not sure that’s going to change any time soon. Every time I think that I really should look at putting my books back on Amazon through Kindle Direct Publishing, I hear another story about what a pain it is. Somebody I know has quoted some inoffensive passage by good friend Anonymous that’s been in the public domain for centuries and been kicked off for assumed plagiarism. Just this week, one of the Zoe Chant authors got unjustly banned, apparently by AI, and with nobody to appeal to but other AIs. They’re back now, but really. Every time I decide that it all sounds like far too much hassle.

I’m very busy and very tired, my day job’s paying the bills, my admin bandwidth is mostly being taken up by Cursillo, and selling books just isn’t a priority at the moment. My limited book time is going on creating new ones. (And writing blog posts explaining myself, obviously; but this is a half hour’s job, compared to something that could easily eat up a morning or more.) So I’m just going to keep limiting my editions. And people who really want to buy my books can do so using the links below:

Speak Its Name – paperback on Lulu

Speak Its Name – ebook on Smashwords

The Real World – paperback on Lulu

The Real World – ebook on Smashwords

A Spoke In The Wheel – paperback on Lulu

A Spoke In The Wheel – ebook on Lulu

A Spoke In The Wheel – on Amazon

Bicycles and Broomsticks – Kickstarter live now

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Bicycles in a museum display

Bikes in Space is back! This is a more-or-less annual publication by Microcosm Publishing, and aside from the bicycles and the speculative fiction implied by the series title there’s always a strong feminist theme. This issue’s theme is bicycles and broomsticks.

And I am back in it. My story is called Layings Out and Lyings In, and features a couple of no-nonsense witch-midwives, one of whom is an early adopter of that marvellous invention the safety bicycle. I had a good deal of fun writing this one.

This is all, well, kicked off by a Kickstarter campaign, and backing the Kickstarter is certainly the quickest and probably the easiest way of getting hold of the book. I should also say that, the more the Kickstarter campaign raises, the more I get paid for my story – so, if you were planning to get it anyway, getting it earlier is more profitable for me.

Unfortunately international shipping is getting ever more ruinous and prohibitive, but readers outside the US can at least get the book itself posted to them, and liaise directly with the publisher to work out other add-ons. Those inside can add on all sorts of goodies (personally I’m casting an envious eye at all the Bikes in Space back issues). Either way, here’s the campaign page. Take a look.

(The bicycles in the picture are in the transport museum at Dresden, which is well worth a look if you’re ever in that neck of the woods.)

Week-end: pale green, tastes faintly of liquorice

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Glass jug of water containing springs of mint and round and long seeds

The good

I had some news about a short story that’s coming up for publication next year. (More news on that in September or October.) That was a welcome interruption to the you never do ANYTHING, you are a failure as a writer chorus. And I learned the theme for the next-but-one anthology, and over the next couple of hours an entire plot and some basic worldbuilding unspooled itself in my head. In the words of Billy Joel, that hasn’t happened in the longest time.

My premium bonds came up. Well, one of them did. Twenty-five quid; thank you, ERNIE.

The mixed

The trains have been all over the place this week. There have been delays and cancellations because of overhead wire failures and points failures and speed restrictions and warm weather, and every day I’ve travelled by train this week there has been some kind of disruption.

However, every train I’ve ended up on has had a seat for me and working air conditioning. This is peak ‘mustn’t grumble’, but still, mustn’t grumble.

The difficult and perplexing

I really don’t like the heat. And seeing everything shrivelled up and yellow is depressing. Ugh. Please could governments and industry take some action on climate change, rather than leaving it all to overworked and guilt-ridden individuals?

My feet continue to discover new and frustrating ways to be painful. Most of this week it’s been the ball of my right foot, as if I’d stood on a drawing pin (I’m sure I haven’t); that’s now eased, but I think I’ve been compensating elsewhere, because now my left knee is very grumbly, particularly when I go up and down stairs.

Reading

If you’re going to be stuck on a train you will do well to have a book with you. For me, Monday’s shenanigans (sitting outside Stevenage for a good hour) provided an opportunity to return to Neither Present Time (Caren J. Werlinger), which I’d started a while ago but abandoned when it turned out I wasn’t in the mood for being shown not told an emotionally abusive relationship. It was actually very readable once I got past the stuck point, and was much better structured than the only other book I’ve read by this author.

I also read European Stories, a freebie from that time I went to the London Book Fair. It’s a collection of five short stories by previous winners of the European Union Prize for Literature, published with an English translation alongside the original text. I had a brief go at reading the original of the one in German, but I wasn’t up to that. I wouldn’t quite say that it filled me with Remourner sadness, because a lot of it was dealing with themes like racism and xenophobia that we know are a problem inside the EU just as much as they are out of it, but there’s definitely a sense of regret about being on the outside of a creative, collaborative project.

And I revisited some stories I wrote about a decade ago. I can in fact write fascinating amoral villains and witty narrators and plot. If I recall correctly, the secret there was not giving a damn what anybody else thought.

Writing

A thousand words yesterday on the new story mentioned at the top of this post, and today a thousand words on the Romeo and Juliet thing. (Current working title: Your Households’ Rancour.)

Making

Still working on the secret patchwork project…

Watching

… the Commonwealth Games (yes, I know they’re over. BBC iPlayer is working hard).

Eating

A very few tiny wild strawberries, straight off the plant.

Looking at

The Breaking the News exhibition at the British Library. This was arranged by theme rather than chronologically, so footage of the aftermath of the Grenfell fire appeared next to a newspaper report on the Tay Bridge disaster, which in turn was next to a report on the Great Fire of London. And so on across Scandal, Celebrity, War, Fake News, etc.

Over the last few years I’ve become increasingly aware that we live in history (and not at the very end of it, either), that today’s news is tomorrow’s history just as today’s history is yesterday’s news. Even so, there seemed to be a lot of history in this exhibition that I remember happening at the time, that time being the last five years or so. I suppose it’s compensation for not remembering the fall of the Berlin Wall. And there has been a lot of history going on.

Drinking

A recommendation from a colleague: water chilled with mint (or cucumber, but we have mint), coriander seeds, fennel seeds, and cumin seeds. It’s pale green, tastes faintly of liquorice, and really does have a cooling effect. More so than plain water? I don’t know. It’s certainly more interesting. I recommend pouring it through a tea strainer.

Other ways of staying cool, incidentally: shutting doors and windows and curtains before the inside gets as hot as the outside; taping silver foil over the window that doesn’t have a curtain; putting feet in a basin of cold water; a wet towel around the back of the neck.

Moving

I went swimming today for the first time… since the pandemic? It might well be. It was certainly my first time at our local swimming pool. It’s not the same as a rainy Tuesday morning at Jesus Green Lido, but it was extremely pleasant on a day such as today.

Acquisitions

A different colleague has been clearing out some Body Shop stock, and I have relieved her of some perfumes: White Musk L’Eau, White Musk Flora, and Indian Jasmine. The latter is pretty powerful and indeed very jasminey. I haven’t tried the others yet.

Line of the week

From Out of the Woods by Luke Turner, which I’ve been reading a chapter per week except for when I haven’t been at home on Sundays, and which is therefore taking a while:

The forest and newspaper archives tell of riots, unlicensed preaching, political agitation, robbery, drunkenness, illegal gherkin sellers, poaching, blinding songbirds to use as decoys to attract and then cage more, gambling, prog-rock concerts, female boxing, children trampled by a donkey derby gone out of control, dogging, wiccan rituals, biker meets, an unnatural act with a sheep near Debden, poaching, crazed Aunt Sallies, perverts on bicycles, teenage catapulters of swans, the first motocross race.

This coming week

People! Lots of people! And some fandom, which is made of people.

I’d like it to be less hot, please. Maybe we could have some rain.

I want to keep riding this story wave. And I also want to get the patchwork to a state where I can start quilting it this weekend (in among the fandom and the people, yes).