Stories that make sense
… this pantechnicon.
While we acquired the cargo bike last year, I was very pregnant at the time, and I only began to be comfortable trying to ride it this May. It’s actually surprisingly easy to get used to, once you’ve got the hang of the steering. For town errands, it’s quite a bit handier than a car: just as well, since I can’t, and (for health reasons) shouldn’t, drive one.
I still have another page from a dead notebook to share with you, but this isn’t it. This, as you see, is an old envelope with a bit of knitting pattern written on it. Indeed, it fell out of a knitting book earlier today as I was finishing a baby hat – this hat:
Experienced knitters will see that this hat and the pattern on the envelope have nothing to do with each other. Indeed, as with the last post, I can remember exactly what I was trying to do: lengthen a short-sleeved blouse to turn it into a cycling jersey. I didn’t finish that; it’s still sitting at the bottom of my knitting bag.
I’m a bit of an intermittent knitter, you see. At the moment I am possessed with a wild enthusiasm for it, am telling myself that I am going to make all the socks in Cute Knits for Baby Feet, and plenty for myself as well. Since socks are a lot quicker than blouses I may even get a few finished. As you see, I have most definitely finished that hat.
Then I turned the envelope over, and I found something quite different:
Daisy’s friend is called Pippin.
The alien actress is bewildered by people mistaking her stage name for her real name or vice versa
I know exactly what that’s about too. Or, rather, exactly what those are about: these are two separate notes about two separate stories.
The first one is Daisy’s Yarn. (Here, have a PDF.) That got finished, rejected by whatever call for submissions I originally wrote it for, shopped around a bit, and picked up by a podcast that now seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. Fairly standard.
The second one is a Book Bus Story. Or it’s going to be a Book Bus Story. I don’t really have a proper link for that yet, but it’s going to be something like this, except a book. There’s a draft of that story on the page – it’s inspired, by the way, by the way that transport enthusiasts often make a careful note of 3267’s 1970 British registration number and ignore the real story – but I’m not happy with it yet. My hope is to get Book Bus Stories done so that I can sell it at next year’s Ventnor Fringe. Will that happen? Who knows? I have a lot of writing hopes and at the moment most of them just aren’t happening.
That’s not all there was to the envelope.
Invitations to my first and – so far – most glamorous literary prize event. I swanked about that quite enough back in 2017, so I won’t repeat myself now. All the same, it was quite a boost to my self-esteem to remember that I was there and I did that.
I don’t know if I can save the alien actress story. There are more words to it than that line, but there isn’t much more substance, and I have no idea what it needs. I’m almost certainly going to frog that blouse. Tony gave me one of his cycling jerseys and it fits me fine, and anyway, I haven’t been out on my road bike for well over two years.
That’s not really the point, though. The point is this: all the years when I wasn’t doing any knitting aren’t relevant now, when I am, when I’m finishing hats and socks all over the place, and looking forward to trying cables for the first time. I was knitting, and then I wasn’t, and now I am again. So I might as well trust that it’s going to be the same for writing, that I’m going to get back into it, writing notes to myself and turning them into stories within months or weeks.
Maybe there’ll be more glamorous prize nights. Or any sort of prize nights. I don’t mind. At the moment I’d just like to be sure that I’m going to get another book done – and I can’t be sure, because the only way to get a book done is to do it, and at the moment I’m not doing it. But I’m glad this particular fossil came to the surface: it makes me believe that I can.
As you might have guessed, I haven’t been writing much recently. At first I didn’t have the brain. I’ll write more about that, some time, maybe. Then I didn’t have the time. Still don’t, often. I get about ten minutes at the computer at a time before people start howling. If this post turns out very short, you’ll know why.
Instead, I’ve been exercising my creativity in more three-dimensional forms. I’ve been going for projects that I can pick up and put down again without their unravelling completely, and at the moment I’m tackling my mending pile and posting about it on Instagram under the #MendMarch hashtag. The picture on this post shows a mend on top of a mend; the new one features a long white stripe in between cypress green and terracotta, in honour of the Strade Bianche which you might just be able to make out on the TV in the background.
But I did manage to put together a list of the five best cycling novels for Shepherd. I think I’ve remarked before that there aren’t very many to choose from, and I suspect everybody puts The Rider at the top. No shame in that. It’s a brilliant book.
As for the literal bike, I’ve been out once on my faithful red town bike to go to an ultrasound appointment that didn’t happen (long story) and had a few goes on the cargo bike, which may or may not be being recalled (boring story). It’s all a bit of a waiting game, really, but we’ll get there in the end.
It is a decade, more or less, since I decided that if I was moving to Cambridge then I really needed to learn (again) to ride a proper bike. I achieved this by riding one round and round Woking park. Now I am doing the same thing, round and round, trying to get used to the cargo bike. (It really helps, I have found, not to think about how huge it is out front.)
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.
Out and about. It is very good to not have Covid any more. It is also fun to have the use of a car.
People are thinking of me! Which is lovely. But they all want to know how I am doing. Which is difficult, because there is very little to tell, and I tend to find that a problem shared is a problem doubled because I then feel that I have to deal with their feeling bad for me on top of the feeling bad myself. For this reason I am mostly hiding, at least from people I know.
Heat + waiting + hearing about other people’s relevant and irrelevant experiences and opinions = getting stressed and scared
Also, heat = dehydration = a horrible headache that had me worrying all night about pre-eclampsia. And eventually being very sick.
Also, something has been eating my legs and I don’t know whether it’s mosquitoes getting in at night or whether there are still fleas in the sofa.
Airplane mode. Except I do need to know when the midwife wants to see me, so that’s not an option today…
And having a good cry or three. And yawning.
Continuing with Clorinda’s circle, because they are good friends and, while many distressing things happen, they mostly do so off-screen and also I already know about them all.
This morning I started Beryl: in search of Britain’s greatest athlete (Jeremy Wilson): very good so far.
I did a bit of work on Don’t Quit The Day Job but have mostly Not Been In The Mood (must try taking laptop into the garden; half the trouble is that my study is too hot).
I finished the two-flannels-and-a-popper thing and can now use the very very ends of bars of soap.
Some Wimbledon. Some Tour de France. Some Giro Donne. But my concentration is not great at the moment and I am finding it difficult to get engaged, so not very much of any of them these last few days.
Threads Through Creation (twelve panels of silk appliqué representing the Genesis creation stories) at Ely Cathedral. Medieval art and Mediterranean embroidery at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. Local history at Ely Museum.
Also, Ben’s Yard, which is a new shopping village between Ely and Soham. Rather underwhelming so far, although the climbing frame (in the shape of Ely Cathedral) is magnificent.
Baked gnocchi from the Roasting Tin book (I have concluded that our oven runs ten degrees cooler than advertisted).
A Fitzbillies Chelsea bun. A dismal chickpea curry at the pub (I suspect the efficacy of curry is a myth, but it’s a good excuse, if the curry is good – which this wasn’t).
I got PomoFarm on the grounds that it’s four quid and worth a shot. I haven’t yet decided whether it’s working for me. (I’m not sure whether the pomodoro method itself works for me.)
A tiny door (there are a few around Cambridge) made to look like that of No. 10 Downing Street, with purple tentacles emerging from around the edge. (Well, it would explain a lot…)
I have started work on the front garden. Two passion flowers to grow up the railings, one rosemary plant, and six lavender plants (Lidl were doing boxes of three for four quid). That row will be finished by bringing one of the bay trees round to the front, but it’s going to take more, stronger people (I can barely manage a watering can at the moment), possibly with a trolley of some sort. The good thing about the horrible slate chippings is that they’re on top of plastic sheeting which can be pulled up a bit at a time.
In the back garden, the runner beans are just beginning to flower; so are the tomatoes; and one of the chilli plants has produced a flower. I have forgotten which chilli was which, which may have been a mistake.
The cat’s been very sociable these last couple of days. It’s been nice.
Plants, as detailed above. Also a new lampshade for the sitting room, in what turned out to be a perfect match for the barszcz coloured wall. This means that we can replace the hideous ribbon-and-plastic-crystal one in my study/the nursery with the boring but inoffensive lilac one we previous haddown there.
In the Emmaus charity shop: a large reel of black yarn which I intend to use for darning; a cafetière (sometimes one needs to provide more than one person at a time with decent coffee); and a paperback copy of Madam, Will You Talk?
And, in hankerings fulfilled (well, almost), a garden table (currentlyh in bits) and a filleting knife. I must go and buy another fish somewhere.
Really I just want this baby to show up.
I remember loving this line (from ‘Had we never loved sae kindly, we had ne’er been broken-hearted’ in A Man of Independent Mind) the first time round, too.
O my dear, says Clorinda with a tearful laugh, sure ’tis no matter upon which one may make mathematical calculations of degrees of infelicity.
Mostly I’ve been moving things around, but this bit’s new:
And sure, the Tour de France is never going to be an option for me, for any number of reasons. But I could quite easily get to a standard where the London to Brighton ride was a realistic proposition. I’d just need to put the miles in. It’s exactly the same principle with writing, and with a much smaller chance of road rash.
I intend to hide, mostly. How many how are you? questions can I avoid?
Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!
Attending the Clausura (closing service) for Ely Cursillo #37. While the church wasn’t packed, people-wise, it was absolutely suffused with joy. It is such a privilege to lead this… movement? group? Community.
And now, winding up and winding down. After a very hectic month, this has been a nice peaceful week. I’m slowing down physically, but this feels appropriate rather than frustrating. Things are taking longer, and that’s fine. Walking thirty-five minutes to a routine ten minute appointment is an opportunity to be out in the sunshine; work tasks are taking as long as they take and the next time they happen it won’t be me doing them. But on the other hand, things that have been hanging over me for ages and which I thought were going to take ages have been tidying themselves up with remarkably little effort. We made a list of things to do this long weekend and got ninety per cent of it done on Friday.
And my concentration seems to be improving. It’s just taking a little effort now to settle down to an activity without trying to do three other things at the same time and check my phone every five minutes.
The weather is gorgeous, but I am getting so hot.
I stubbed my toe on a chair at work. It bled a little at the time, but I thought nothing of it. Now I find that I have split the nail a long way down and half of it is flapping around, or would be if I hadn’t stuck a plaster over it. I have acquired some gauze and micropore tape, with which I hope I will be able to rig up something that will allow it to breathe and heal without catching on things. We’ll see.
Immersion in water – whether by putting my feet in a plastic box full of cold water to cool them down, or by putting my entire self into a swimming pool.
I finished Seven Ages of Paris. Depressing (and, I can’t resist saying, not enough about the buses; though I don’t think that I had known that they parked them at fifty metre intervals down the Champs-Élysées to frustrate a German aerial troop landing: much good that did anybody) and, I feel, not entirely unbiased. But also entertaining and informative, and All Gall now makes much more sense to me. (I often feel that any study of mid-twentieth century history is a process of gradually getting more and more of Flanders and Swann’s references.)
And this piece on Soul Survivor (it’s mostly not about the recent revelations of horrible stuff, which does not feel like something that I have any standing to talk about), which made me feel very much as if I’d dodged a bullet. I never went to Soul Survivor, though two of my brothers did. I can see exactly how, in my late teens, I’d have been vulnerable to getting peer pressured into having a significant pseudo faith experience. Even at the advanced age of 37 I found I had a lot of Doing Faith Wrong monsters on the loose this week.
Sewed a button back on.
Still the Giro d’Italia. My goodness, that time trial! I think, that if there had to be a dropped chain in there somewhere, this was the most satisfying way for it to work out. But all the same, argh.
Today is Licence to Queer’s Donate Another Day. I have places to be this morning (specifically, church, and not Our Lady of Smolensk) so I got ahead by watching GoldenEye last night. It’s my favourite of the Brosnan Bonds (and Brosnan is my Bond): such fun, and Natalya is great. Anyway, everyone else kicked off at ten today, and Tomorrow Never Dies starts at one, so join in if you like Bond, and chuck a tenner at Unicef.
Yesterday I gutted and scaled and filleted a fish (a sea bream, to be precise) for the first time. I failed to get some of the flesh along the top side, but I think I’d do better with a proper filleting knife. Maybe I’ll get one. Made stock from the head and bones: risotto tomorrow.
Then I put a slice of prosciutto on top, sprinkled it with breadcrumbs, parsley, and parmesan cheese, and cooked it alongside roast courgette, pepper and onion (recipe from The Hairy Dieters). It was extremely tasty.
See above. Also (for I am not on a diet, hairy or otherwise) yellow-stickered Waitrose cream buns. I am getting massively hungry at the moment.
Swimming. Pilates (this happens every week, but usually on a Tuesday, so I’ve forgotten about it by the time I get to this post. This week’s session was yesterday).
Three small deer (one fawn, and presumably two parents) on the path behind our house. Muntjacs, maybe? I’m not very good at deer.
A train in GWR livery at Cambridge station – rather a long way from home, one would have said.
I weeded one raised bed and put in three tomato plants. The other one didn’t need so much in the way of weeding; I put runner beans in it. And I found space for five cosmos plants around the garden.
The first rose is blooming. I think this bush is my favourite, aside from its habit of trying to revert to the rootstock; it has a lovely, faintly lemonish, scent.
Time. Focus. Other people’s gardens.
I finally gave in and ordered three frocks from Joanie. One of them looks more like a tablecloth than I’d anticipated; one will do very nicely for the autumn; and one is fabulous and I’m wearing it now. (I don’t think I mind looking like a tablecloth, but the dress in question doesn’t fit. Yet. I think I’m just getting to the end of the phase where taking my usual size and ensuring it has a very full skirt is working. Still, only another month or so to go…)
From plant stalls outside people’s houses: two chilli pepper plants (one cayenne, one Hungarian something or other); three tomato plants (one Garnet, one Roma, one I’ve forgotten); and a honeysuckle.
Well, a filleting knife, now.
From Rosemary Hill’s piece Consulting the Furniture in the last London Review of Books. (It is about time I went back to Kettle’s Yard. Maybe in a couple of weeks when I am on maternity leave…
Kettle’s Yard’s particular kind of austere elegance suits Cambridge and its Puritan, parliamentary history. It could never have happened in Oxford.
Bank holiday. A committee meeting. Some family coming to see us. And, I hope, I’ll get the study sorted.
Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!
We had a weekend at a spa! I had never done this before, having mentally classified it under ‘not for the likes of us’ and also been nervous about getting it all wrong and exposing myself as a total fraud, but the in-laws suggested it as a nice thing to do before the baby appears and we disappear into a mountain of laundry, and I had to admit they had a point. So we booked into Quy Mill, just outside Cambridge, for one of the few free weekends we have this summer.
Anyhow, the conversation somehow moved from ‘haha, we could cycle there!’ to ‘actually, we could cycle there!’ and our successful excursion to an antenatal class in Littleport demonstrated that taking the Bromptons on the train and cycling to our destination was perfectly practical. (I know this in theory, but it had been a while since I’d put it into practice.) So we decided to cycle there. And then the purchase of a cargo bike happened rather faster than we’d anticipated, and suddenly it made sense for Tony to pick that up on the way. Fortunately it is large enough to hold one folded Brompton, so he was able to cycle to pick up the new bike and then cycle onwards on the new bike carrying the old one. (Yo dawg, I heard you liked cycling, so I put a cycle in your cycle so you can cycle while you cycle…)
This made it possibly the most Cambridge spa trip imaginable, even if we hadn’t then cycled over to Anglesey Abbey the next day.
It was very pleasant. There was extremely nice food; I had a lot of stress massaged out of my back; I also had my toenails painted. I went swimming twice. And we avoided most of the coronation hoohah. (I am what you might call a pragmatic monarchist: I can quite see that you need someone to cut the ribbons and all that, but my patience for the breathless commentary had been wearing very, very thin.)
Other good things this week: the political news was encouraging; the antenatal class was very interesting; the garden is flourishing.
I generally enjoy thunderstorms, but not when I’m trying to get somewhere. I spent quite a long time sheltering in the underpass beneath the A14, 300 metres from my destination, but also 300 metres from the last lightning strike.
Also I got lost in Fen Ditton. This is becoming a habit and I could really do without it. I think I’d have beat the thunderstorm had it not been for that extra two kilometres.
I haven’t quite got the hang of ‘winding down’; or, rather, I’m doing OK at the doing less, but not so well at the feeling OK about it.
Being outside. Using the Brompton rather than the (heavy) town bike.
I’m keeping on with Seven Ages of Paris (Alistair Horne). Have reached the twentieth century. No mention of the buses yet but it may yet happen (we have had the taxis of the Marne). Began Towers in the Mist (Elizabeth Goudge) – more appropriate than I’d realised, since the action begins on May day.
Finished Black Gay British Christian Queer (Jarel Robinson-Brown): very good indeed. Also God’s Lovers in an Age of Anxiety (Joan M. Nuth); Julian of Norwich continues to be the best.
Read Miss Marple’s Final Cases and finally ran out of steam with Agatha Christie with Murder is Easy.
Never Say Never Again was on telly on bank holiday Monday, so I joined in the Licence To Queer watchalong. I think it’s rather underrated, actually, and I much prefer it to the original Thunderball (omits the coercion and a lot of the tedious shark stuff).
I have been watching the Giro d’Italia with Tony. And we managed to turn on the telly at exactly the right moment to hear the new Vivats in I Was Glad (and then to be irritated by the commentators talking over the rest of it and confirm our decision not to watch any more coronation stuff).
The Last Supper, a set of sculptures by Silvy Weatherall, at the cathedral. These are abstract busts made from broken crockery stuck together with gold, kintsugi style. While I could see what she was getting at, I failed to get beyond my initial reaction – which was ‘Doctor Who monsters’.
‘Asian-style aromatic pork’ from one of the slow cooker books – OK but not particularly exciting.
Quy Mill did very nicely by us. I was particularly impressed by the slow-cooked lamb and the (remarkably light) sticky toffee pudding. Last night we went to the White Hart in Fulbourn, and I had a Mediterranean vegetable pizza.
Cycling – nothing further than 8km, but quite a few short journeys. (It’s rather galling to have someone on the exact same bike whoosh past you, but I don’t think he was seven months pregnant…) And swimming.
Nesting swans on Ditton Meadows (when I rode past on Friday evening, the one that wasn’t in charge of the nest was blocking half the cycle path; today, it was swimming in the ditch). A wagtail at the hotel this morning. Very vocal blackbirds. The same graffiti on the Chesterton railway bridge that’s been there as long as I can remember.
Loads of apple blossom, and bees enjoying it. Plenty of wisteria flowering too. The white rose that always flowers first has five buds; the others are beginning to think about it.
A four-day week. A weekend of mild hedonism.
I have mentioned the cargo bike – not that I shall be riding it for another couple of months. A couple of small fripperies in the shop at Anglesey Abbey.
We’re considering some garden furniture – the main problem being that ‘big enough to eat dinner off’ and ‘small enough to fit sensibly under the pergola’ are incompatible specifications. Some thought required…
From the London Review of Books, here’s Sam Rose on Clive Bell:
it’s hard to feel very sorry for a man who insisted on having it all, got more than his fair share, and spent his life increasingly embittered about the little that had been denied him.
Another bank holiday, another antenatal class, some travel that’s become rather more complicated than it needed to be, and, most excitingly, a wedding.
Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!
Cherry blossom. Mozart. Seeing a book with one of my stories in on a real shelf in a real bookshop. The fact that I do not have to deal with any of the difficult stuff on my own.
Chaired a meeting yesterday. It seemed to go OK – at least, other people keep telling me so – but I am feeling very flattened.
This has really not been a good week in terms of physical and mental health. I’ve been feeling gloomy and depressed, lonely, and tired. On Friday night I tripped over a paving stone (I assume) on the Euston Road and scraped my left knee and twisted my right ankle, both very painfully, and had the usual crowd of concerned bystanders asking ‘Are you all right?’ one after another when I wasn’t at all sure and none of them had anything actually constructive to offer. And of course when one is pregnant there is a whole load of worry about potentially having hurt the baby on top of the consciousness that I’m going to be a dreadful liability when I’m a little old lady. (Baby is flailing around happily, so far as I can tell.) Today I was tired and headachey.
Remembering to pump up my bicycle tyres. I also wrote down all the projects I theoretically have on hand, from the review of Ely Cursillo’s printed publications to clearing my father’s house to three novels and producing a baby. I’m not sure that I can say this worked, as such, as very few of them are much forrarder as a result, but it did put it all into perspective and made me feel better about the fact that they aren’t all done yesterday. I genuinely do have an awful lot going on.
Got caught up on Wildfire at Midnight. Started Bad To The Bone (James Waddington). Gave up on several articles because they were just too depressing (this says more about me than it does about them). Today I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
A little bit on Starcrossers.
I finished Our Flag Means Death; it is good fun.
Ely Choral Society singing the Mozart Requiem and Haydn’s Salve Regina. (The latter was a little awkward because nobody in the audience seemed to have heard it before, and we didn’t know when to clap. But I very much enjoyed the concert overall.)
More Maintenance Phase, mostly for company on lone WFH days.
Chicken drumsticks glazed with honey/mustard/curry powder.
Friday was going to be a takeaway night even before I did my lower limbs in; I had some very nice fried sea bass in a lemon/chilli/cashew nut sauce from one of the two Thai places.
This afternoon I walked into town to go to a shop which turned out not to be open on Sundays; so I made up for it with a cornet of cassata siciliana (candied fruits) from the gelato shop instead.
The cherries are doing their thing (well, it is still Eastertide, so they are only a little late). I keep seeing goldfinches.
Things are blooming away with very little help from me. This includes a load of dandelions, but at least they’re cheerful.
The people who do things. I am not, after all, making all of this – any of this – happen by myself.
I have a new mouthguard to keep me from grinding my teeth in my sleep. I also get a very accurate model of my lower teeth. I am not entirely sure what to do with this, but it’s quite impressive, particularly since it was created by the dentist waving a camera round my mouth. For the moment I’ve put it in the bathroom cabinet, from which it will no doubt fall and scare me at the worst possible moment.
When I went to pick it up I popped into Gay’s The Word, and came away with Tales of the City and Illness as Metaphor.
I have reached a state of dissatisfaction with most of my shoes (this before I fell over, too) but don’t really know what I want to replace any of them with.
From this article from The Road Book:
If you didn’t see it, well, after 267km of a typical Amstel route – apparently based on the trajectory of a very angry fly trapped against a small window – the final was clearly boiling down to a sprint between Julian Alaphilippe and Jakob Fuglsang.
I’m enjoying the chance to let Starcrossers have some breathing space, and to put in some backstory and worldbuilding that there just wasn’t space for when it was going to be a short story. Though I’m not sure yet which of those this bit’s going to be:
Alone in my quarters, I let myself think of the one who could no longer be named. This was an infringement in itself. I ought to have forgotten her already. That, I’d been told as a child, would ease the pain. It was the only way.
A lot of dashing around, mostly family-related. And then (whisper it) absolutely nothing over the bank holiday weekend.
Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!
Very enjoyable evening watching The Yeomen of the Guard with one of my brothers (and seeing his partner and son, hurriedly). More on that distributed through this post. Also, a work thing I’d been dreading turned out to be surprisingly fun.
Meanwhile, the Society of Authors’ AGM (for which I’d submitted my proxy vote) saw off two motions, one mealy-mouthed faux-motherhood-and-apple-pie maundering about free speech, one gloves-off nasty attack on Joanne Harris, the chair of the management committee. I think the most useful summary of what actually goes on in the SoA is this thread by Dawn Finch.
The Torygraph (and, to a lesser extent, the Grauniad) is of course reporting this as a victory for cancel culture. Interesting how it’s only cancel culture when it’s a particular set of views that encounter a robust rebuttal.
I often feel like a bit of a fraud as a SoA member, because writing isn’t and probably never will be my main source of income, but I came by my membership honestly and I’m very glad that the Society can continue to standing up for my fellow authors with, I hope, less of this infuriating distraction from a tiny but loud single-issue pressure group.
Thursday got dreadfully complicated. It should have been a London day, but I ended up with a mid-morning appointment in Ely. That was positive and useful (and I didn’t particularly mind the half hour walk each way in the rain; I’d have cycled if I had) but it meant a dash down to London at the end of the work day, which meant cycling through an unholy combination of school run and Christmas fair traffic, again in the rain. And a late night, but that was always going to happen (and Tony had forgotten to leave the latch down for me, so I had to phone him to get him out of bed again).
Pleasingly, I got to Wagamama just as J and family got to the front of the queue.
My horrible noisy front mudguard. I must take a spanner to it. Again.
And I have very limited brain at the moment, and I’m finding it incredibly frustrating. I can get one or two useful/creative things done per day and that’s it.
Well, not the bit of string that’s holding my mudguard in place, I can tell you that much. Hmm. Canned soup is proving very useful, though.
Not a huge amount (see: not much brain). I’m leading the readthrough of Destination Unknown (Agatha Christie) for my online romantic suspense reading group; it’s good fun and extremely of its time (touchingly naive about the McCarthy initiatives, for example). I started reading Meet Cute (ed. Jae), an anthology of extracts from various sapphic books; unfortunately it’s often more like Meet Cringe and hits my embarrassment squick hard. Although it has reminded me that I’ve occasionally thought of giving Vicki and Gianna from A Spoke In The Wheel their own book.
I returned to the Romeo and Juliet thing on Monday, but haven’t done much since.
Mystery patchwork. One down, five to go.
The Yeomen of the Guard (English National Opera, London Coliseum) with my brother J. We were rather tight on time (Wagamama took a while to serve us) and got there half way through the welcome, and excoriation of Arts Council cuts, from the director. Which is not bad timing really.
Yeomen isn’t my favourite of the Savoy operas, but this production mitigated most of the reasons I don’t like it. They’d taken most of the thees and thous out of the dialogue (pastiche Tudor: not one of Gilbert’s strengths) and set the action in the febrile post-war period, with Colonel Fairfax a brilliant scientist and suspected spy. (I couldn’t help thinking of Destination Unknown.) This made sense both as an update on his alleged dalliance with the dark arts and of his character: he remains terribly poor stuff, but the ‘asshole genius’ treatment makes sense.
Most importantly, I think, they let it be what it always has been when you scratch the surface: a show about miserable people making terrible decisions. Pretty much everybody would end up happier if nobody took any of the actions they take. Except Fairfax, and he is, as I say, an asshole, not to mention pretty philosophical about dying until someone gives him an alternative.
They threw in the patter trio (except they somehow made it a quartet) from Ruddigore as a replacement for Rapture, rapture. I can’t say that Rapture, rapture is much loss. If they’d just skipped it altogether I might have got home half an hour earlier. On the other hand, I’m probably never going to object to the patter trio from Ruddigore.
There was some excellent singing (I was most impressed, I think, by Sergeant Meryll, and he was an understudy), some clever staging, some good acting (Jack Point, in particular), and, in among the misery, a lot of genuinely funny moments.
Tagliatelle con cipolle, out of the Diane Seed book. I somehow managed to cook about half the tagliatelle that two reasonable people would want, so we ate in two phases.
Ginger chicken udon at Wagamama. Not bad, though I had to eat it too fast. Gingerbread fudge from the fudge shop in Ely (very nice; there’s black treacle, or something like it, in there, which makes it taste definitely like gingerbread as opposed to just like ginger). Last night I was too tired to cook so we got Indian delivered: I had chicken tikka makan palak with Bombay aloo.
Duolingo. Well, I’ve been doing it for ages and have a 600+ day streak, but this week I got the update that everyone’s been whingeing about. I don’t hate it, actually. It’s not as disheartening as the one that added five levels to every skill. I did in fact stop using it for a few years after that one, and then picked it up again when I was bored in lockdown.
Long-tailed tits in the pear trees. A squirrel munching away on a bunch of ash keys.
A strange sound from the dolls’ house, which turned out to be the cat getting into the loft. I got a picture of two green eyes peering through the top window, and another of the descent of Ceiling Cat, but neither of them was as good of the one of her in the bathroom, at the top of this post.
The NHS. Affordable opera tickets, dammit (here’s the petition to get the ENO’s funding reinstated). The fact that you can phone people up and pay them money and they will bring you food.
New bras arrived.
I subscribed to The Marginalian recently. This week they sent me some John Muir:
The scenery of the ocean, however sublime in vast expanse, seems far less beautiful to us dry-shod animals than that of the land seen only in comparatively small patches; but when we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.
From the Romeo and Juliet thing:
‘I’ve seen him before. Only once, I think.’ She glanced at the closed door, drew a packet of cigarettes from her skirt pocket, and lit up.
This was promising. ‘When? Where?’
Rosa thought that it might have been at somebody’s party, though, now she thought about it, perhaps it was at some club somewhere. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m afraid he didn’t make as much of an impression on me as all that.’
‘Do you know who he is?’
‘Haven’t the foggiest.’ Rosa inhaled deeply and blew the smoke out again before she continued. ‘The odd thing is, he does seem familiar, but I can’t think how I would know him. We’ve certainly never been introduced.’
Tidy things up at work before I take a week’s leave. Apart from that, not much. I might try to get to the Alexander the Great exhibition at the British Library. And maybe I’ll move the dolls back into the dolls’ house. Will Twitter fall over?
How about you? Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!
Kathleen Jowitt 