Beyond Selidor

Today I have made a start on a second Yuletide treat, read three-quarters of a book, cooked dinner for the next three nights, and walked out to Grantchester to clear my head. It's been a good weekend: a nice pause after a rather hectic couple of weeks. For various reasons I've been feeling a bit down, so it's good to remind myself of all the nice things that have happened.

The new Philip Pullman book was published. I was super nervous about reading it, but my fears were unfounded. You can read my thoughts over at Bridge to the Stars, my first online home, where my review is posted.

Matthias and I went to the opening night of Thirsty's wintergarten (part Christmas market, part beer garden, part rotating cohort of food trucks).

I also managed to see Thor: Ragnarok, and was absolutely delighted that it lived up to the hype. Thor is my favourite Avenger in the MCU, Taika Waititi is one of my favourite directors, so I had high hopes. The film was absolutely glorious: a lurid, hilarious, cheerful extravaganza that somehow managed to also say serious things about colonialism, family, indigeneity and exile, with a few little nods to antipodean pop culture, as well as Maori and Indigenous Australian culture and politics.

Matthias and I went to London, where we ate German food for lunch, Georgian food for dinner, and saw the British Musuem's exhibition on the Scythians.

I had my last day on secondment. While I enjoyed learning new skills and working a bit closer to home for two days a week, I was relieved to get back to my regular routine, and the secondment confirmed that my regular job is pretty much the ideal work for me.

Matthias and I saw The Death of Stalin with four of our friends. It was bleakly, darkly funny (although I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anyone who lived any part of their life in the USSR or other communist countries in Eastern Europe), brilliantly acted, and all the more disturbing because I knew that very little of it was exaggerated.

I was lucky enough to see Rebecca Solnit and Robert MacFarlane in conversation. Cambridge being Cambridge, I bumped into library colleagues from two different libraries, both of which Matthias and I have worked in, a friend I know from academia who now works for the Cambridge Literary Festival, and nymeth and her partner.

I finished off my main Yuletide assignment and one treat, the latter of which is a real departure from my usual type of fic and a challenge that I really enjoyed.

Now I'm just waiting for the various meals I've got simmmering away on the stove and in the oven to finish cooking. The last few hours of the weekend are going to be spent lounging about watching TV and finishing off the final quarter of my book, before getting an early night. I hope the rest of you have had equally enjoyable weekends.