Beyond Selidor

I feel as if the whole month of August just ran me over like a train, between my mum's visit, trying to cram in a huge amount of work into a couple of weeks, two major renovation projects on our house (requiring dealing with contractors, etc), and then another holiday with Matthias. I've barely been around on Dreamwidth, and when I have logged in, I haven't felt I had the energy to comment on people's posts or reply to any comments that a post of my own might prompt. But now, finally, I have time to catch my breath — after returning from travel yesterday, dealing with the mountain of work emails that accumulated while I was away, and putting out various small fires caused by my own distractedness at work prior to the holiday. I've made a series of lists, which always makes me feel a whole lot better, and now I can sit here, and write about where I've been over the past week.

Matthias and I always try to have a holiday of at least a week together, away from home, doing something that's not visiting family (when both halves of a couple are immigrants, leave allocation often swiftly fills up with trips to visit family, since unlike people who live in the same country as their families, we can't very easily drop by and see our parents for a weekend). I've had an aim for quite a while now of travelling to at least one new-to-me country per year, although this is the first time since 2019 that that's been possible; while I travelled a lot last year, it was always to countries that I had visited before.

Matthias and I also have two friends who live in Vienna — and we last visited them in 2019 as well. We decided, therefore, to kill two birds with one stone, and go on holiday somewhere new-to-us that was reachable by train in a day from Vienna. After researching our options, we picked Slovenia, and booked a four-day stay in Ljubljana. We made our way there in fits and starts — an afternoon train trip to Brussels, a stay overnight in a budget hotel near the station, a day travelling across Belgium, Germany and Austria by train, and a weekend with our friends L and V in Vienna, during which time we wandered around the city, taking breaks from the heat in various cafes and restaurants, and took the train out to a village near the city, where we walked through vineyards and had lunch (and wine from those same vineyards), and finally a slow, six-hour train ride along rivers and mountains dotted with vineyards, sheep, and cornfields to Ljubljana. (We dubbed the train the 'Habsburg Express' because it started in Vienna, inched its way through Austria and Slovenia, and ended up in Trieste; travelling at about the speed you'd expect from a Habsburg-era train as well...)

The weather in Ljubljana was unfortunately not conducive to our preferred holiday activities — walking around an unfamiliar city, chatting with each other, and pausing for meals, coffee, or glasses of beer/wine — since it rained torrentially for the first two full days we were there. We made the best of it, however, and visited two contemporary art museums, walked along the river on both sides and in both directions whenever there was a break in the rain, and tried out almost all the restaurants, wine bars, craft beer bars, and cafes that had come highly recommended. My highlight in this regard was probably this cocktail bar, a tiny jewel of a place doing incredibly strange cocktails (or any classic cocktail on request) with exquisite attention to detail.

The highlights of the trip were definitely the restaurant in one of the turrets of the castle above the city, where we had a tasting menu with wine pairings (another thing we like to do in every new-to-us city), and the trip out to Lake Bled which we did on the one day in which there was no rain forecast. We walked around the lake (a flat paved trail of about 6km — easy walking, although quite crowded with families, tourists, and groups of cyclists), pausing to swim in the sparkling water, with the clouds and craggy mountains mirrored beside us — had lunch in a lakeside cafe, and made it back to Ljubljana in time for dinner. (If anyone is thinking of doing something similar, I'd recommend travelling by bus rather than by train as the train station is an hours' walk from the town; the buses leave every hour and are pretty cheap, although be warned you'll need to pay in cash.)

I took a huge bunch of photos on the trip, particularly of the lake, the water of which is full of the most unbelievable colours and textures. If you have an Instagram account, you can see them at ronnidolorosa.

The return journey was a quite a bit more stressful due to chaos and cancellations on behalf of Deutsche Bahn (the cursed corridor between Cologne, Aachen and Brussels seems to be a particular problem, as exactly the same thing happened to my mum in exactly the same area on her train trips to and from Berlin in early August), and although it used to be possible to travel from Vienna to Cambridge(shire) in a single day by train, I now wouldn't recommend it, and indeed wouldn't recommend trying to do any trip that involves train travel through Germany and a Eurostar connection in a single day. We will not make that mistake twice, and will always stay overnight in Brussels or Amsterdam and catch the Eurostar the following morning. Eurostar changed our booking without charging any additional costs (my advice here is to follow what we did and not try to rebook yourself online/through the app, but rather go to the Eurostar gate and explain the situation; the staff member rebooked us immediately and didn't ask for any payment of any kind) and we should be able to claim back the cost of the hotel booking necessitated by DB's chaos, but it made what had been — up to Cologne — a relaxing, chilled out time zooming through central Europe on fast moving, on-time trains into a tense, anxiety-inducing nightmare.

In any case, that was a long digression about trains, which was not the note on which I meant to end things! The holiday itself was lovely, and in general it's just been so wonderful to be able to travel internationally again. I feel incredibly lucky.

Yesterday, Matthias and I returned after a week away on holiday by the seaside. We went to Southwold, on the Suffolk coast, which is an easy trip for us on public transport (2 hours on the train, half an hour on a bus). The two of us don't tend to holiday in the UK — in fact, apart from trips to visit friends elsewhere in the country, and occasional weekends in London, I don't think we have ever used annual leave to stay somewhere within the UK. Last year, of course, we didn't leave the country — but we didn't leave Cambridge, either! All our holidays were at home. We really couldn't face another year like that, and when we were planning when to claim our annual leave, Matthias remarked that he desperately wanted a holiday where we went somewhere, I remarked that I was desperate to see the ocean, and he (who is the booker and planner in our household) investigated a bit and suggested Southwold. It was a really good decision.

( What we did on our holiday )

I'll do another post in the next couple of days about the books I read while on holiday, because they were a great bunch, several chosen on the basis of reviews people in my Dreamwidth circle have posted.

It is baking — or at least, with three consecutive days of more than 30-degree heat, the UK equivalent. Sleeping has been difficult, and tasks requiring a great deal of brainpower have been even more so.

Thankfully, it is the weekend, and other than repotting a herb seedling into the larger container garden outside, and hanging out laundry to sit limply in the still heat, I haven't had much to do that's required any exertion. We did make it out to Grantchester this morning (leaving the house before 8am), when the temperature was still only 16 degrees or so, but other than that I've barely left the wing chair, drinking iced coffee, eating frozen grapes, and reading.

( Books )

That's it, in terms of reading for this weekend. I'm going to try to find a very slow, gentle yoga class to do, check out the latest segment of the Lore Olympus webcomic (just released today), and try to avoid melting!

Britain — or at least my corner of it — continues to bake. It's been at least a month since it last rained, and for the past three weeks the temperatures have been in the high twenties or low thirties every day. Given that I'm Australian, I can cope with far hotter weather than this, except for the fact that I left Australia when I was twenty-three, and therefore only spent one summer there when I was working full-time. Every other summer I had been either a child, or a university student, and school and university shut down for good during the hottest weeks of the summer. Even when I was working at my part-time jobs (I had weekend jobs from the age of fifteen), these were in patisseries/bakeries run by European chefs, so we worked intensively in the two weeks leading up to Christmas, and then closed for about a month from Christmas Eve while the chefs went to Europe to visit their families. In other words, although I lived in a much hotter country, I spent the hottest weeks every year doing little more than sitting around reading, or swimming in our backyard pool or the ocean. My poor body and brain can't take doing proper work in these temperatures!

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So far I've coped by spending as much time outside as possible, and subsisting on a mixture of ice cream, iced tap water, iced coffee, and gin. The photos on my Instagram feed should give you some idea...

Today I joined my work colleagues for a meal out at a nice restaurant near my house. We're not the most sociable bunch outside of work, but we do do things occasionally when the mood takes us, and today's meal was really nice. It's likely to be my sole social engagement for the weekend, which suits me just fine as I'm about to head off to Cardiff for a professional conference, which I'm likely to find incredibly draining (so many people! so many awkward 'networking while drinking coffee during the breaks' sessions), so I need to store up my socialising energy!

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I've also managed to complete my Goodreads reading challenge for the year. While I do tend to set myself pretty low aims, given that it generally takes me about two hours to finish most books, I am pretty happy to have reached the target at just over the halfway point of the year. While I used to be a voracious reader before I moved to the UK, my reading tailed off for a while and I was concerned at one point that I'd never really get back to my old reading habits. Last year was probably the first time that I enjoyed reading the majority of the books I read in a given year, and this year was, if anything, even better. Two factors probably contributed to this.

Firstly, I made a decision about a year ago that I would stop stressing about what I was reading (the demographics of the authors, whether it was recommended highly or nominated for awards, and, above all, whether it was the shiny new thing that everyone was talking about), and focus solely on reading things I was likely to enjoy: subgenres or tropes I liked, certain types of character dynamics that appealed to me, authors whose previous work I'd enjoyed, or books people whose tastes alligned with my own were praising. Once I stopped stressing and agonising about, in a sense, performative reading, everything felt a lot more freeing and natural. Getting over the feeling that I needed to read every single hyped up new book was particularly helpful, because I often feel that in the pro-SFF circles in which I dip my toe, there's an emphasis on newness, on chasing after the next big thing, which, while understandable, is unsustainable for someone like me who can't afford to buy hundreds of new books a year.

Secondly, I had developed a really bad habit of eating breakfast while browsing through my various social media feeds. This had an appalling effect on my mental health, to the point that I was starting every day either burning with fury, or having a panic attack (usually about Brexit). It was unsustainable, and affecting other areas of my life. I made a decision (something of a new year's resolution, really) at the start of 2018 that I would ban myself from the internet during those early hours of the morning, and would instead start the day reading a book. The effect has been extraordinary. I still go through periods of intense despair about the state of the world, but at least I'm not starting every day on a really negative note — instead I'm immersing myself in fiction. I think the next step will probably be to ban myself from social media in the evenings as well, and read during those hours too.

In any case, my Goodreads 2018 reading challenge is completed, and I'm very pleased with how it went! Is anyone else doing the challenge, or has anyone else set other kinds of reading goals for 2018? How are you all going with your respective challenges/goals?

I'm determinedly ignoring British politics this weekend, which has meant that I've been able to spend the past day and a half in ignorant, productive, relaxing bliss. I know that I'm eventually going to cave and open up Twitter or the Guardian's politics livefeed, but I've been able to resist the temptation so far.

Matthias and I spent Saturday sorting out a few remaining wedding-related tasks. As a result, he now has a suit to wear on the day, and we have ordered our wedding rings, which is super exciting! There are only five weeks to go before the wedding, and the planning has gone fairly smoothly up to this point. It helped that we were almost the last couple in our circle of friends to get married, so we benefitted from the advice and experience of many other married couples. Other than paying for stuff (which will happen incrementally over the next few weeks), and sorting out a playlist to play after the reception, we're pretty much done, which is a huge relief.

After the wedding errands, the two of us met up with ienthuse, her husband, jimtheviking and BeccaMerkelbach in one of our favourite Cambridge pubs. It was a beautiful, warm afternoon, and we sat drinking gin or beer in the shaded, tree-filled beer garden, and generally had a wonderful time.

I'm planning a fairly lazy afternoon — I finally bought the ebook of A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers (the sequel to her excellent The Long Way to a Small and Angry Planet, which I loved), and am intending to spend the afernoon sitting out in the courtyard and reading it. It looks as if summer has finally arrived (although I realise that's probably an overly optimistic thing to say in the UK), so I might as well make the most of it!