Beyond Selidor

This is the last open thread of 2023, and unlike the cliché, this exhausting, difficult, complicated year has felt very, very long indeed. No rushing passage of time for me, no I can't believe it's almost 31st December, this year.

Today's prompt is the one that I always have on the mind this time of year:

What is something you want to carry forward with you into 2024, and what is something you want to leave behind?

One of the best revelations of 2023 was how good I was at building certain habits, and sticking to them. I supplemented what were already pretty solid habits — swimming four times a week, yoga every day, certain habits in relation to work — with additional routine activities. These included two hours of fitness classes at the gym — picking things up and putting them down (aka pump class) and very silly dances (aka zumba) — which have had a profoundly beneficial effect. I'd like to keep these things going, and add to them with further habitual activities.

I've also, finally, managed my relationship with social media in a way that protects my mental health. I left Twitter, and felt as if a weight had lifted from my shoulders, and made the decision not to replace it with any similar platform. I'm still on Facebook and Instagram, but the former is mainly friends and family posting updates about their daily lives (family photos, pictures of their pets, renovations, holidays and so on), and the latter is something I ruthlessly curate, and leave for weeks at a time if it's getting too much. All this is a very good thing, and I will definitely carry on with it in 2024.

One of the worst revelations of 2023 was the slow realisation that the pandemic has exacerbated some of my worst tendencies: inflexibility (and really bad reactions when this inflexibility is challenged), hermit-like retreat into my own, controllable little world, a gradual shrinking of in-person social activities to the point that they are basically non-existent, and tense anxiety hovering in the background at the slightest hint that this safe little bubble was pierced. It's led to the point that all this tension is written into my body: my jaw and shoulders are almost permanently tense (even when I sleep), and I had a massage last week which did nothing, because I tensed up involuntarily every time the masseuse touched me, and couldn't relax. My neck, shoulders and jaw are always painful.

I don't know yet what I need to change, but I know that something has to. It's hard to know exactly how to get the balance right — I'm someone who's very good at building and maintaining routines (and as I've said I want that to continue in certain areas), but I think I also take it to such extremes that my world has shrunk to a space that's entirely, rigidly bound by routines, and any spontaneity seems like a terrifying threat. I want to find a way to leave that behind — I want better coping mechanisms, and I want my life to open up in ways that I seem to have closed off without realising in the past four years. I just haven't landed on the right way to do so. I have some ideas, but nothing final — and I suppose, in some ways, that leaving this post inconclusive is exactly the kind of flexibility and openness that I'm trying to bring into my life.

Early on in the pandemic, my friend thecelticist wrote a letter to her students (she's head of the department of the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth University) on her blog. What happened next was a weird kind of lucky serendipity that feels almost unbelievable: a literary agent somehow stumbled on the blog post, and was so entranced with what he read that he signed her — on the basis solely of the blog post — to write a memoir. This memoir then went on to sell for a six-figure advance to Penguin. Over the past two years, I've kept up with the progress of the manuscript, and, later, the various publicity and marketing activities organised by the publisher, as Lizzie has shared her experiences extensively via social media.

The book got the kind of feverish marketing push that only comes along when major publishers feel they have a bestseller on their hands — blurbs from Hilary Mantel and other major literary figures, huge amounts of publicity, vast quantities of money splashed on getting the book prominently displayed in all the major British and Irish booksellers (I saw a photo from today of the book in Grafton Street in Dublin in a display next to Colm Tóibín's latest, to give you some idea). The whole thing is like a fairy story, even more so given that Lizzie has published extensively — but only academic books and journal articles on medieval Irish history and literature, the sort of things where you certainly don't get paid, and basically no one reads it other than a small handful of fellow scholars.

I've picked up my copy of the book, but haven't read it yet. This review in the Irish Independent should give you a rough idea of what it's about: part pandemic memoir, part elegy for her father (who died in January 2020), part wide-ranging musings on her own tumultuous life, interspersed with allusions from everything to medieval Irish literature to black metal. I'm intrigued to read it, and still kind of astonished that someone I know could have this kind of publishing good fortune.

( Pandemic ranting )



Onward to snowflake_challenge: In your own space, rec a fanwork (fic, art, vid, playlist, anything!) you did not create.

I'm going to share my Yuletide recs list from this year. It's got one of my own fics in it, but the remainder are by other people.

I'm not going to go through the list fic by fic and explain what I loved about each individual work (although if you click through to the comments on each fic on AO3, you'll see a comment from me pulling out the elements I particularly enjoyed. However, I will try to briefly summarise what I most enjoy seeing in fanfic, and what tends to be a common thread in all that I rec.

Firstly, I almost exclusively read fic in tiny fandoms — generally fandoms that only have a handful of works on AO3, generally book fandoms. Usually I'm not looking for works that try to mimic the writing style of the original (in fact I tend to find that distracting). Instead, what I enjoy is fic that makes prominent certain elements I enjoyed about the original: specific character dynamics, an underlying theme, a really strong sense of place. I find it even more impressive if the fic makes me take note of certain elements that the original canon only whispered in the margins, and brings those submerged elements to prominence. I generally prefer fic that has a lyrical, lush, or even portentous turn of phrase, unless it's a humorous canon/fic. And I really, really love fic that digs into the veins of fairytales, folktales, medieval literature, or mythology and finds a hidden seam of darkness, melancholoy, or just straight up weirdness to mine in fic.

What do you look for in fic, or in other fanworks?

It's been a tense few days. Matthias and I, with the foolish optimism of the pre-Omicron world, had intended to go to Germany and spend Christmas there with his family. We were meant to be travelling there on Tuesday 21st, using (due to having vouchers for lockdown-cancelled journeys bought in February 2020 that had to be spent by the end of 2021) the Eurostar via Brussels and then various Deutsche Bahn trains. This of course meant that we would have to take into account not only UK and German rules for pandemic travel, but also whatever rules applied in Belgium. When we booked the tickets, it was in a period of restrictions being lifted, and the only requirement was that we showed proof of vaccination status.

Over the past week, we watched as an increasing number of PCR tests were imposed as a requirement at various points throughout the journey, home quarantine upon returning to the UK was introduced, COVID cases in the UK skyrocketed, and one by one various western European countries slammed the door on entries from the UK. I was feeling an increasing sense of panic that even if the rules remained such that we would be permitted to travel, we might end up stuck there due to testing negative in the UK, picking up COVID at some point throughout the journey, and then testing positive while we were there. Finally, at 11pm last night, the German government put us out of our misery — a fortnight-long quarantine for all travellers from the UK made our intended week-long trip impossible. It's disappointing for all concerned, and Matthias's family are pretty sad not to see us for a second year running (although at least the brief window of relative safety during the northern summer meant that we've seen them in the past three months — whereas I haven't seen my Australian family for more than three years), but it's something of a relief to have the decision taken out of our hands.

In the past week, a friend in London — whose girlfriend is American — tested positive, two days before he was due to get his booster shot, scuppering their long-planned trip to visit the girlfriend's family in the US. And another friend is going to have to spend the next ten days isolating with her teenage daughter in the shared spare bedroom they're staying in at her stepmother's place — the daughter had a negative lateral flow test before joining the rest of the family for Christmas celebrations, but tested positive one day after arriving. None of these people were having irresponsibly raging social lives — they caught COVID on account of (in the first instance) living in London and doing a job which requires face-to-face working and travel on public transport and (in the second instance) being a teenager in a country which decided all students needed to be taught face-to-face in school with no mask mandate. Most of the other people I know who currently have COVID are healthcare workers.

I'm seeing a current trend in certain corners of social media to view a positive COVID test as a kind of individual personal moral failure, and it makes me want to beat my head against the wall, since the biggest risk factors at the moment seem to be a) being a frontline NHS worker or b) living in London. Meanwhile, an Australian guy on Twitter posed the (in my opinion very sensible) question as to why lateral flow/rapid antigen self-tests aren't made freely available in Australia (as they are in the UK, where they can be picked up in bulk from most pharmacies, at no cost), and the replies were full of other Australians catastrophising that self-adminstered tests would lead to faked results. My days of avoiding engaging about the pandemic with Australians who aren't a) my family, b) immigrants to other countries or c) family members of immigrants are certainly coming to a middle. Every time I catch a glimpse of this sort of thing, I just end up enraged and despairing.

In general, although I'm very fearful about the current trajectory of the pandemic and worried about my friends living in London, two weeks of somewhat enforced holiday at home isn't the worst possible thing that could happen. I'll cook a lot of slow, soothing food, we'll watch our backlog of TV series and go for walks in the misty fens, I'll read my way through Yuletide when it opens, and everything will be restful and calm. The darkness gathers outside, but we'll light candles inside.

I was fortunate enough to get my booster vaccine today — the hospital where I work opened up a drop-in vaccination clinic for university employees who work on site (I don’t work for the NHS, although NHS staff use my library, so we’re sort of NHS-adjacent).

I’m so relieved this was available to me. Even though it involved queueing for an hour, it was more straightforward than trying to book through the NHS website (which opened to my age group today and promptly crashed) or waiting to be called up through my GP (as I had done for the first two doses, but which definitely wouldn’t have been open to me until January), and I wanted the certainty.

As with my previous two doses, I’ve got a very sore arm and feel headachy and drowsy, so I’m going to dive under my weighted blanket and rest for the remainder of the evening. I’ll catch up on comments in the next couple of days.

( Anti-vaxxers making absurd and offensive analogies )

Meanwhile, the entire UK has been giggling at this story that's been doing the rounds of the local newspapers. I'll let the title speak for itself: Bomb squad called to Gloucestershire Royal Hospital after man gets WWII mortar stuck up his bottom. Apologies for all the various banner and popup ads — local papers all seem to be like this. (I'm assuming the man in question is okay, otherwise I wouldn't have shared the story, no matter how childishly funny I found it.)

And that's pretty much been my Friday, from the absurd to the ... absurd in a different way.

It's full-blown autumn, and the world has suddenly become laden with falling leaves, rosehips, and the sharp smell of woodsmoke. We picked the last of the pears from the pear tree, and today's storm seems to have dislodged the remaining apples, so I think that's it for the fruit harvest until next year. Everything feels very much as if it is simultaneously winding down (I want to lounge around in the house in oversized woollen jumpers in front of the woodburning stove) and building up (the inevitable chaos and busyness that the start of the academic year brings). I've just now signed up for Yuletide, although I need to watch the letters app and signup summary carefully to make sure that my offers go the way I expect.

In less good news, everyone around me keeps getting COVID — my coworker and one of her daughters, friends in other UK cities, family members of colleagues and so on. They're all getting it relatively mildly due to being vaccinated, but it is worrying and frustrating, particularly since the people who are mixing with the greatest variety of others — secondary school and university students — seem to be the most averse to wearing masks in public indoor spaces. I had to teach my first in-person class since March 2020 and my students were thankfully all masked up, but Matthias taught two back-to-back inductions in which all the students removed their masks and coughed the whole time. It's all very frustrating.

In even less good but inevitable news, Al-Jazeera has just published an investigative journalism piece revealing the appalling behaviour of one of the most senior academics in my former field. ( Cut for mentions of sexual harassment and abuse of power )

Let's move on to more pleasant things — a Reading Wednesday roundup on an actual Wednesday. My reading this month has very much been a mixture of soft and gentle rereads, and sharp, thorny stuff.

The former definitely includes my reread of Felicia Davin's Gardener's Hand trilogy — a fantasy adventure series set on a tidally-locked planet subject to unpredictable natural disasters, in which certain people possess supernatural abilities, and are feared, pitied, or valued for these powers, depending on the culture in which they live. But what it's really about is found family, in recovering from trauma and saving the world and building something beautiful in the process. The main trio of characters are all bisexual, and all in love with each other, and the resolution to this somewhat love triangle is extremely satisfying. I'm only annoyed that I didn't remember this series in time for Yuletide nominations, but there's always next year! I wrote about the series in more detail the first time I read it.

Sadly, my next book read — The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake — was less satisfying. This is the first book in a new series set in a magical secret society, and it's definitely part of the growing trend in dark academia/campus novels that's sweeping through fantasy literature publishing at the moment. Some of my favourite books are campus novels/dark academia (Possession, The Secret History), and I'm looking forward to some forthcoming publications in this subgenre (A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid), but I think I'm just a bit too picky when it comes to most dark academia. This one had unsympathetic characters, a badly telegraphed twist, and just in general felt like it was trying too hard to be mean and edgy, and the overall effect was something I struggled to connect with.

I'm now working my way through a reread of the first three Terra Ignota books. The fourth and final volume in the series was published yesterday, and Matthias and I had preordered it, but our copy hasn't arrived yet, so thankfully I have some time yet to get myself up to speed. (I normally buy ebooks or borrow from the library, but Terra Ignota is a series I would find impossible to read in any format other than a printed book.) It's definitely a series that rewards slow and careful rereading, and I'm picking up on so much stuff this second time around. Terra Ignota is also a series that asks uncomfortable questions of its readers, and I'm not always proud of my answers, but I'm always in awe of how ambitious Ada Palmer was with this — her first published fiction — and the degree to which her ability is worthy of that ambition.

I have pretty negative feelings about the Olympics going ahead, and they're warring with my ex-gymnast feelings of absolute delight at the excellent quality of gymnastics that we're going to get, particularly from the US women's gymnastics team. I feel lucky to be alive to witness the career of Simone Biles, and I expect her to equal or better her achievements in the last Olympics.

However, when I was a gymnast, my favourite apparatus — and the one I was best at — was uneven bars. Bars is Simone Biles's weakest apparatus (obviously this is not really saying much — her 'weakest' event is still incredible, she's just better at beam, floor and vault). But the US team also has Sunisa Lee, whose bar routine is so difficult, and so (mostly) perfectly executed that it leaves me speechless and filled with joy.



(There are various technical reasons why it's so difficult: mainly the many, many 'release' moves where she releases hold of the bar to either flip/twist and catch hold of the same bar again, or releases hold of one bar to move to the other. These are particularly difficult because they're done in quick succession, and because a lot of them involve rotating and/or losing sight of the bar she's meant to catch.)

As I say, the Olympics should not be taking place, but I'm still in awe at these gymnasts.

( COVID stuff, including mention of deaths (no one I know) )

Yes, it's another COVID post.

( Also featuring Australian and UK politics )

I've been promising to do a Day in the Life post for most of the pandemic, but what finally prompted me to do so was the prospect of life — as I've known it since March 2020 — being on the verge of changing a bit. Yesterday, I had a meeting with my two managers, where they told me that I would begin a partial return to the office in July. So far it's only going to be one day a week.

Therefore, I felt I needed to record an average working-from-home-in-lockdown day for posterity.

The post is text only, but I've been doing a parallel photo post over on Instagram, and I've saved the whole lot as a Highlight, but I'm not sure people without Instagram accounts will be able to view it.

( Lockdown librarianing behind the cut )