Beyond Selidor

Today's post is a bit of a blissed-out sunny mish-mash. It's been a lazy weekend, almost like taking a deep breath before the frantic business I'm anticipating (for various reasons) for the next couple of weeks.

Yesterday I met Matthias at the market after my two hours of classes at the gym, picked up the final things we needed, then headed home, gulped down lunch, and headed out immediately again for the little outdoor fair outside the cathedral (which was raising money for the boys' choir). It was the usual mix of food trucks and craft stalls — although the draw for us (and the thing which brought us out of the house again, despite the grey skies and gusty winds) was the chance to buy champagne and little bowls of strawberries and cream, which we consumed on a park bench and tried not to be blown away. We might have lingered longer (or walked to the other side of town where two friends of ours were holding their annual plant sale in their garden), but the weather drove us home. I slowly cooked Burmese food for dinner, and then we tucked ourselves into the armchairs in the living room, where I read Leigh Bardugo's latest book (The Familiar, of which more later) in a single sitting.

Today, we woke naturally at about 5.30am due to the sunshine, and dozed on and off until it was time for me to walk to the gym for my 8am swim, which genuinely felt like swimming through liquid sunlight. I spent the morning after my return from the pool picking away at my rarepairexchange assignment, which finally unlocked for me after many weeks of difficulty.

But the weather was too nice for us to remain sequestered indoors, so out we went again for food truck food from the market (Tibetan for me, Greek for Matthias), sitting under the trees in the courtyard garden of our beloved favourite bar/cafe. When we arrived, the place was empty, and after about ten minutes, every table was taken — such is the characteristic behaviour of British people when the sun finally deigns to shine.

Now I'm trawling through Dreamwidth, and trying to decide whether I should go out again for gelato or stay in the house — I suspect the gelato will win! I've been gathering Dreamwidth links like a magpie, and will share them with you:

Via vriddy: the Japanese Film Festival Online in which 'a variety of 23 films will be delivered during the first two weeks, followed by two TV drama series for the subsequent two weeks. These will be streamed for free with subtitles in up to 16 languages, available in up to 27 countries/regions.' I imagine this may be of interest to some in my circle.

Some steps to take to ensure any eligible British voters in your life have the requisite ID and voter registration required by the deadlines to vote in the upcoming 4th July general elction, via thissterlingcrew. There are particular concerns about younger voters, so do pass these details on to any 18-24-year-olds you know.

Staying with politics (in this case US), this Timothy Snyder essay really resonated with me, as his commentary and analysis generally does. Voting, for me (and treating elections seriously), is like the bare minimum tax we pay for the enormous unearned good fortune of being citizens of (albeit flawed) democracies.

On a lighter note, I just went on a downloading spree from these gorgeous batches of icons from insomniatic (here) and svgurl (here); perhaps you'll see something you like too.

And then I took a bunch of photos of all the fruit trees in our garden.

And finally, on to reading, and Bardugo's wonderful The Familiar. This is a standalone adult fantasy novel set in Spain during the early years of the Inquisition, and its focus is on the paranoid, terrifying antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-any-non-normative-Catholic-Christianity atmosphere of the era. Its protagonist, Luzia, is a young Jewish conversa, born into a family which for several generations has maintained its Jewish identity in secret, following religious and cultural practices as best as they can while removed from the Jewish community so necessary for those practices to find full expression. In addition to this dangerous heritage, Luzia is able to perform magic (in a stroke of genius, the mechanism for doing so is Ladino refranes or proverbs, and the act of speaking, and language as a kind of cultural and personal magic, are at the centre of the novel), which brings her to the attention of Madrid's aristocratic elite. This fame brings Luzia (and those around her) nothing but grief, and the novel as a portrait of the constant anxiety sparked by attracting the notice of the powerful is a brilliant, stressful piece of writing.

The Familiar really does feel at last like Bardugo's novel of the heart: my reactions to her previous fiction range from adoration to being left cold, but all have felt to me to have been written to the market, hitting on a winning trend at exactly the right moment in exactly the right way. She has, of course, been incredibly successful while doing so, and I would assume wrote with some degree of affection for this previous output — but The Familiar definitely feels like the first of her books that was written not to satisfy a specific trend in genre fiction, but solely for Bardugo's own need. The soul sings stories to us, and some of us are lucky enough to be able to give those stories voice, and sing back.