Beyond Selidor

It's been a pretty quiet weekend, but the main highlight was that Matthias got his first dose of the vaccine! The whole process was extremely well organised and straightforward (the benefits of it being managed by the NHS, as opposed to some Tory donor or ill-qualified friend of Matt Hancock's from the local pub). Matthias was notified by text about a week ago that he was up for the vaccine, he had to go to a website to choose a slot, and then he just had to show up at the venue (a medical centre on the other side of town, about 35 minutes' walk away) at the appointed time. The whole vaccination, from arrival to departure, took about five minutes, and apparently involved lots of people in high-vis vests sending people to various tables.

He had the AstraZeneca vaccine, and had no side effects yesterday, but said today his arm felt sore, and he had flu-like symptoms and was very sleepy.

I'm not eligible for the vaccine yet (and won't be for some time, as people in their thirties with no chronic health conditions are — rightly — at the bottom of the list), but it's reassuring to know that everything is working really smoothly.

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We have a fantastic little florist around the corner, and I've been buying a lot of flowers from her since we moved in (as well as fruit and vegetables, as she's started selling those as well). However, what I'd really been wanting was indoor plants. Our old house didn't have enough suitable surfaces to keep them (the one suitable windowsill I used to grow tomatoes), but this house has a plethora. I'm loving slowly filling the house with greenery, and I have the photoset to prove it.

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Given that Matthias was feeling very under the weather today (and that we can't really go anywhere anyway), I curled up on the couch and spent most of the day reading.

The book in question was incredible: Irish author Deirdre Sullivan's Savage Her Reply. It's billed as a feminist retelling of the myth the Children of Lir, and it is that, but what it really is is a story about women's anger, told in lush, poetic language that devastates like the crash of waves against the shore. It's a book told by someone who clearly has a deep and wide ranging love of medieval Irish literature (although its presentation of that literature and the context in which it was written hews more to the popular understanding than accepted scholarly consensus), but also someone who recognises — and is wounded by — the deep misogyny at its core. (It's a book that achieves what I was trying to do in this fic, and in the numerous fics I've written which attempt to reclaim the story of Tochmarc Étaín for the women it renders voiceless.)

It's a story about power — and about the ways men will use the women and children around them as weapons to be wielded when seeking that power — and the tools left to the powerless, and how those tools are demonised. It's also about the damage that hurt and powerless people will do, to themselves and others, and about the way that stories, and history, and the written record become a way to assert authority, and hide unwelcome truths.

Every line cut like a knife:

'What a pleasure, to show you and everybody else what happens when people who do not deserve power try to use it, for what? You desired to anger Lir with your cruelty? I will shake the very world with mine. And I am king, so people will remember it as justice.'

All in all, an amazing book. Not easy to read, and not gentle, but reverberating with power.