Beyond Selidor

The weekend has been fairly routine and uneventful, but it was preceded by a busy day in London on Friday, so the chance to rest a bit before the new working week begins was welcome.

I was in London for an appointment to sort out a big stressful bureaucratic thing that's been a weight on my mind for several years now — so it was a huge relief to have the thing finally done. After that, I spent some time walking along the river around Battersea Power Station, before heading inland to meet catpuccino for lunch. We've known each other since the first day of secondary school (which is ... coming up for thirty years now, eek), and she ended up immigrating to the UK as well — she met a British guy, got married, and now lives in London. She's very plugged in to the food scene there, and suggested we go to mercatometropolitano — a former industrial site now filled with static food trucks serving everything from Mauritian to Venezuelan food, plus coffee and various alcholic beverages. It worked well since we didn't have to agree on a single type of food, and all the stalls had £5 lunch specials, which is extremely cheap for London. catpuccino had Mauritian food and German food, and I had some really delicious Uzbek dumplings, and we sat outside chatting for hours. It was great to see her — apart from our long friendship and various shared interests, she's one of the few people who shares, understands, and is able to articulate my complicated tangle of emotions about Australia, and I always appreciate being able to talk about such things without being misunderstood, and knowing that the feelings are mutual.

After that, I headed across town to Bloomsbury to meet Matthias, so he could show me around his new (or new-to-me, since he's been in the new job since July last year) workplace — the library of a little research institute in a terrace house facing a square with a park. I met a couple of his library colleagues, and got to snoop around the building in relative anonymity, since the researchers and admin staff seemed to have left or be working from home.

We then travelled over to Hackney, for an extremely belated dinner celebrating my birthday (in December), and the stressful bureaucratic thing being done. The restaurant was casafofolondon, and it was delightful — excellent food and wine, in convivial surroundings, which is all I want a restaurant to be.

In terms of books and media, it's been slim pickings with me for a while — by the end of the week, I will have only finished one book — but what I've read and watched has been excellent.

I paused my Roma sub Rosa and Benjamin January rereads to ... read the newest (twentieth) Benjamin January book, The Nubian's Curse. As always, it's got Barbara Hambly's characteristic blend of evocative, historic specificity (1840s New Orleans, plus some flashbacks to Ben's time in Paris fifteen years earlier), a mystery that hinges on the injustices and cruelties of that time and place, and — most importantly, what I read the books for — a celebration of Ben's messy, complicated family (expansive enough to encompass family both by blood and by choice, with an ever-growing cast of characters incorporated into it). As I always say when discussing this series, the books' setting is dystopian for its protagonist and most of the people he loves — their ethnicity and the racism of the society in which they live puts them in constant danger — and Hambly never shies away from that darkness and ever present sense of threat and fear, and yet somehow I find them extremely comforting to read. It's the warmth of Ben and his family, and their love and fierce protectiveness towards each other, and determination to live lives that matter and are full of love and meaning in spite of all the world does to grind them down, I suppose.

I don't always log the films I watch, but the one Matthias and I saw last night was so singular that I feel it should be recorded. The film in question was Neptune Frost, a riotous, surreal, dreamlike Burundian science fiction film. The dialogue is in multiple languages (but most often in song), and it's best summed up as the kind of anti-extractive capitalism, anti-colonial, afrofuturistic gender fuckery you'd get if Janelle Monáe decided to make a feature-length film-album about the monstrous evil that is the coltan industry that makes the computer on which I am typing this entry possible (and the devices on which you are reading it, and, and, and). The score is spectacular. Highly, highly recommended.

It poured with rain all morning (such that I felt I'd already had my morning swim solely by walking 20 minutes to the pool), and now the living room is drenched with sunlight. I'm going to take advantage of that, and head upstairs to do some yoga before it gets dark and melancholy again. I hope the weekend's been treating everyone well.