Beyond Selidor

I made it to the pool and back this morning without being rained on, which, given the weather this weekend is something of an achievement. It's been showering on and off since late Friday night, including torrential rain that blew horizontally under our umbrellas (and under the stall's marquee) during the time Matthias and I were at the market buying vegetables yesterday. It's very much been a weekend in which to hunker down at home, and stay as cosy as possible. After I've finished writing this post, I'm going to start preparing dinner — a juliusroberts roast chicken which he calls 'epic tarragon chicken,' which seems like the perfect nourishing choice for a cold rainy Sunday.

Yuletide assignments are out, and I'm pretty pleased with mine — lots of interesting prompts into which to sink my teeth, and my recipient seems to like the same things in canon that I do. I'm going to let ideas brew for a few days before settling on a final choice for the assignment. (And as an aside, it does feel this year as if I were going into the exchange more blindly than usual. I may be imagining things, but it felt like there were fewer letters, and less buzz around adding them to the letters app, or post, and so on. That may be a false impression, but it's certainly the sense I got.)

I have been reading quite a bit, and all of it's been enjoyable.

Earlier in the week, I read Nocturne (Alyssa Wees), a YA novel set in 1930s Chicago which interweaves retellings of Beauty and the Beast, the Hades and Persephone myth, and Phantom of the Opera. The prose is lush (verging on purple), and the setting I felt was underdone (a sprinkling of cliches), but the author's evocation of the experiences of professional ballet dancers, and especially what it feels like as a performer to perform had the ring of truth. I'm not sure I can completely recommend it — I found it enjoyable, while essentially mentally averting my eyes from its many flaws.

I then reread Adèle Geras's Egerton Hall trilogy. These are books that I first read in primary school (when I was definitely slightly too young to take in everything they were doing), published in the 1990s but set in an English girls' boarding school in the early 1960s. Each book is narrated in first person by a different teenage girl — a trio of close friends in the boarding school — retelling the fairy tales of Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White respectively. I have been reading and rereading these books for the past thirty years, and have always been impressed by the ambition of what Geras was trying to achieve, and the fact that she was able to achieve it — in YA novels, in so few pages (each book is about 150 pages long). On one level, they are spectacular works of historical fiction, capturing vividly the mores and pop culture of a very specific time and place, in a way that plays on the senses. You can almost feel the candlewick bedsheets and rustling 1960s dresses, or taste the bland insitutional cooking in the boarding school and the hot chips and tea cakes smothered with butter ('real butter!' as the characters rhapsodise, as opposed to the margarine they get at school) eaten on Saturday trips into the village neighbouring their school. The prose itself is lovely — flowing and unobtrusive, with memorable turns of phrase that have stuck with me since I first encountered the books. But where Geras truly triumphs here is as a reteller of fairy tales: the rarefied lives of these upper middle class girls, tucked away in their boarding school or in carefully circumscribed social activities in which they are shielded from the complications and difficulties of the wider world are their own kind of fairytale unreality, making the bizarre sequences of events drawn from the source material feel plausible and solid. And I have seen a lot of Goodreads reviews criticising these books for their 'unbelievable' romance (the insta-love based on little more than a glimpse or a conversation) — but that to me is the most believable part of them. I wouldn't go so far to say they are universally representative of teenage female sexuality, but the intensity of emotion, the tendency to imbue minor events with epic, poetic, portentous significance — all of that is painfully familiar to me (in the sense of 'teenage me is in this picture, and she doesn't like it'). There's some stuff in the books that you just have to roll with (and if you can't get past it, you will not have much fun with them) — they are aggressively heterosexual, and there is the aforementioned insta-love, often with people we'd consider wildly innappropriate (the Rapunzel book is about a romance between a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl and the new 22-year-old lab assistant in her school; he's not her teacher, but it's obviously not a relationship most of us would be comfortable with). They are not romance novels, even though romantic love is the ribbon that runs through them — they are fairytale retellings, and among the best I've ever read.

Finally, I read (for the first time) The Throne of Caesar, the concluding book in Steven Saylor's Roma sub Rosa historical mystery series. I have read all the other books in the series many times, but at some point I stopped keeping up with the series, and until this year had no idea that Saylor had written this book, which focuses on the days immediately before and after the assassination of Julius Caesar. In his author's note, Saylor mentions that he had avoided writing about this period — even though it was the logical conclusion to his series, which starts during Sulla's dictatorship and follows the next few decades of the erosion and death of the Roman republic, with each book involving a mystery linked to key political events during that time period — because, as it was one of the most well-known political assassinations in history, he couldn't think of anything about it that could be a mystery for his ancient Roman sleuth to solve. In the end, he managed to find an angle — and a mystery — and wrapped everything up neatly. The series (most of which was published in the 2000s) is explicitly linked to Saylor's own sense of anxiety and despair at American national politics and international relations during the George W. Bush period, and this last book, which was written in 2014 (but published in 2018) seems as much to be closing a door on those previous political anxieties (which seem now so small, with the hindsight of what was to come) as on the series' characters. I can't help but wonder what they would have been like if he'd started the series a decade later.

It's been a varied weekend, with a good mixture of being out and about, and nesting at home.

Things started off on Friday evening after work, where I met Matthias for a drink at our favourite cafe/bar in town, then headed off to a silent disco in the cathedral. This is the third time such an event has been held here; there was a 90s music one last September, an 80s music one in the spring this year, and this third one was 80s, 90s, and 2000s music. As always, it was a great time — dancing under the vaulting ceilings to the cheesiest songs imaginable — a perfect three hours to kickstart the weekend. The organisers said they'd be back for another event next year, although I'm wondering about the music, since I don't think any earlier or later decades would have the same crowd-pleasing draw as those covered previously. We'll see.

Yesterday, I had errands to run in Cambridge, and, as is our preference, Matthias and I made a day of it. We tried out the new mini-Dishoom restaurant permitroomcambridge (typical Dishoom brunch until midday, after that small plates and cocktails, with live DJs in the evenings) for lunch, and found it delightful. I'll definitely be back, if only because I couldn't eat every dish that I wanted to try!

Central Cambridge other than that was as unpleasant as it always is on a Saturday — heaving with crowds of slow-moving tourists — and we got out of there as quickly as possible. It was very nice to head back to the part of town where we used to live, and other favourite residential/local shop areas, where things were much calmer, and filled only with residents out and about living their normal weekend lives. The cows were clustered around the path near the millpond, and everything felt warm and bucolic.

Today has had somewhat frustrating weather. I washed a load of laundry after getting home from the pool, hung it out — and then it began raining torrentially almost immediately. So then I hauled all the laundry inside again — only for the rain to blow over and the sky to become clear and sunny. So back out the laundry went for the second time. I was in such a bad mood, I went out for a walk to the market to clear my head, where the excitable dogs and children bouncing around did a lot to restore my mood. The piece of pistacchio tiramisu that I bought certainly helped as well!

Yesterday I bought a lot of vegetables, and today I cooked/preserved them. Between 10.30am and 2.30pm (with pauses for lunch, and the aforementioned walk), I did the following in the kitchen:

I stewed apples (from our tree!) in cinnamon for Matthias's breakfast porridge, and plums and strawberries to go with my breakfast muesli

I turned the massive bunches of parsley, coriander and dill into salsa verde

I cooked a huge bean/vegetable stew thing with rice, for our lunches for the first two days of the week, and Monday's dinner

I made pickles

I got started making a green and a red batch of this shatta (pickled chili paste)

I parboiled some potatoes in preparation for roasting them as part of tonight's dinner

I like doing this kind of stuff, but it was quite a lot!

Beyond that, I've been continuing my reread of both the Benjamin January and Roma sub rosa historical mystery series (set in 1830s New Orleans, and the Roman Republic/Empire respectively), both of which I find comforting and nourishing, in spite of the turbulent political times in which both series are set, and the dangerous personal circumstances their characters experience. The second series is one I began reading when I was still in secondary school (I stumbled upon it in my school library), while the first is something I discovered through Dreamwidth friends in the past few years, but they have a common emphasis on complicated, messy families both blood and chosen, which are for the characters a source of strength, and an oasis of community, support, and love — a shield against the despair their difficult circumstances might otherwise engender. Every book of course has a mystery which the protagonists must solve, and these are well-crafted and tied in well with the broader social and political context — but the true pleasure of these series very much lies in the depiction of their historical settings, and the characters and their relationships. I love them dearly.

Beyond reading, dancing, and cooking up a storm, my weekend has involved a lot of repetitively listening to this song, and I regret nothing!

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I'm talking about crime novels that explore contemporary political concerns (and more specifically, the erosion of freedom in pursuit of security) here. Spoilers for The Tiger in the Well, Farthing and the Roma Sub Rosa series abound.