It's Always More Complicated

Partner's substituted veggie burgers had to be panfried rather than ovencooked (we actually usually spend a fair amount of time making sure that they can) and have RUINED the frying pan with some adherent substance which scrubbing and soaking has failed to shift.

Fortunately we live in the future and I was a) able to consult Which about the best frying pans (they have quite recently surveyed these, yay) and b) order one for same day click and collect at the local Argos.

Even if we entirely failed in entering the details to get our Nectar points on the transaction.

In other news, it appears that there was SNOW some time earlier today or last night which was still lying in shadowed spots when I went for my walk. Bitterly cold out but very bright.

Parakeet disporting around the back gardens and adjacent park.

We have not seen anything more of the fox which came right up the steps from the garden to the back door, after a leisurely descent left its marker on the garden fence, and then got into it with next door's cat, which was sitting on the back fence going 'come and 'ave a go if you think you're 'ard enough'.

Last week was definitely a trifecta of Electrical Stuff.

Okay, I had been suspecting for some time that the fan heater in the front room was an ex-fan heater, and plugging it into a different socket (rather than an extension cord) confirmed this.

Have now ordered a convection heater (Which Best Buy), allegedly arriving tomorrow.

Last Tuesday around 6 am there was a power cut - it only lasted about 90 minutes, but involved a certain amount of resetting appliances which had become confused - also UKPowerNet only finally alerted me about this event by text several hours after things were back to more or less normal.

What I had not expected and accounted for in resetting things was that my clock alarm had decided that the time my alarm was set for was 6 am, so I got a rude awakening the following morning.

The other thing - and this was positively sinister - was that my electric toothbrush suddenly started buzzing away all by itself on the bathroom window ledge and was very very reluctant to be switched off. How is it not scary when this sort of thing happens?

Anyway, next morning it was apathetic about being switched on and is now an ex-toothbrush. A new one - not a top Which Best Buy as those are hugely expensive, but about third on the list which is on promotion at various outlets - currently expected. I have a backup but would rather this had not happened the week I am due for a trip to the dental hygienist.

There are a whole lot of human activities about which I am the equivalent of, Your Kink Is Okay, It's Just Not My Kink, but I have to say, I get totally beswozzled by the way people get about weddings.

One reads all the angsting in advice fora about wedding-related shenanigans and really, Is There An Anthropologist or an Ethnographer in the House, or would the problem be better addressed by a Family Therapist?

Because people get So Weird: apart from the spending vast amounts of moolah on the whole thing, of which this cites particularly egregious instances: Would You Pay to Attend a Wedding? As wedding costs continue to increase, some couples are charging guests to attend their special day. - this is on top of the cost to get to it, if it is a 'destination wedding', buy appropriate clothes (sometimes there's A Theme?) - and that's not even if a person is part of the wedding and involved in bridesmaidly or groomsmanly ancillary activities.

Why would people CARE:

The couple hired a double-decker bus that took guests to New York landmarks that were significant in their love story. The first stop was the legal ceremony at the cathedral. Other stops included Hudson Yards, where Mr. Styles, 31, proposed, and the 42nd Street AMC theater, where they played a video of their journey together. The final stop was the reception, which was held at a private event space on the 102nd floor at the One World Observatory.

There are the brides who have a Vision of Their Perfect Wedding, such that e.g. Bestie Boosom Friend from childhood days/Little Sister does not get to be a bridesmaid because she does not fit the Image. Is there some ritual purpose to this (which seems a bit pointless in this dayn'age, really)?

On the other hand there are clearly families who perceive weddings as A Gathering of the Clans so that you have to invite everybody include people with whom there have been longstanding and justified estrangements, because.

(That memorable TV critic Nancy Banks-Smith used to quote the ominous phrase 'There was enough said at Aunt Edie's wedding': I now discover this was in fact 'our Edie's wedding' and was a catch-phrase of the Northern radio comedian Al Read.)

Lo, I am over here boggling like boggling is going out of style:

From bone china to rare whisky, Advent calendars open doors to more luxuries: Some countdown-to-Christmas offerings from stores and brands now cost hundreds, and even thousands, of pounds

Beauty advent calendars: 10 of the best

From serums to sex toys, why the craze for luxury advent calendars just won’t stop

(Is there one that at least manifests some Spirit of the Season by doing products based around gold, frankincense and myrrh?)

Are these pre-Christmas Christmas prezzies that one gives to friends and loved ones, or are they things that people buy for themselves to get them through these long dark shortening days? That third link suggests they're part of a culture of 'little treats', and I am all for little treats, going to treat myself to a margarita later on, but this is ??? -

Part of my discomfort is that, should it be tacked on to the tradition of advent calendar devised by devout German Lutherans in the nineteenth century? Especially ats Advent was originally a Fasting season!

Though I suppose should know about the mutation and repurposing of traditions - moseys over to find Ronald Hutton's Stations of the Sun. Just not sure about marketing in the making of Ye Folke Practices...

*One of the tracks on the Bogglemen's Boggling Xmas Album, a bit of a collector's item these days.

Partner's cataract op has been deferred yet again (okay, we place the blame where it is due and not on overworked and underpaid docs, but this is still very annoying).

Waitrose delivery was massively delayed (apparently there was a van broke down and this threw the whole system out?) and we did not get our order until over 2 hours later than our maximum expectation. Still we got it, and no major other problems.

I also had some rather irksome tech things which I think I have sorted.

I am feeling v tired which I think it is this VERY HOT and humid weather.

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In other news, saw on one or other social media site (these are getting to the point of too menny) a bloke (pretty sure from the user name and the attitude it was a bloke) going 'Large home libraries are lame.... haven't been a status symbol for 200 years.... Donate your book after reading it instead of making wallpaper out of it'.

Has this person, we ask, ever read a book? Have they, in fact, ever met another person?

This seems to me one version of that thing where people think people doing something that they don't/wouldn't do is somehow Doing It At Them, rather than, you know, doing their own thing, and we feel that reading books might have created a rather less judgey mindset into the harmless avocations of other people.

This strikes me as exaggerated and rather narrowly-focused woezery: How the MFA swallowed literature: On the total world-domination of workshopped fiction.

It's very much about a very specific kind of novel written by a very particular kind of writer and doubtless sold to members of the same cohort who got jobs in publishing and praised by those members of the cohort who got jobs as critics, but it's really only a niche, surely? even within literary fiction.

I also wonder about the credentials of somebody who can write recent research shows Woolf took some classes in the classics and literature but was mostly homeschooled - um: has he read anything by Woolf in which she herself talks angrily about the kind of educational opportunities open to 'the daughters of educated men' in her day? Hardly recent research, in fact I think this might possibly have been covered in perhaps the earliest study, the one by Winifred Holtby? (who did go to Oxford).

We feel that this is perhaps not a person who reads terribly broadly and for pleasure?

On another paw, I have a certain sympathy for this: It’s not true that everyone’s got a book in them: give writing back to the writers. Do we not grimace rather when somebody who is famed for something which is not writing novels, and has not previously demonstrated any wish to take up the authorial writing implement, is announced to be writing A Novel (or maybe a Children's/YA Book) for megabucks advance and promotional budget?

There is surely something between only these highly-trained ethereal beings can do it and just anybody can do it. In fact quite a lot of territory.

One notes that there are, in fact, a great number of books coming out, in all genres, both from trad publishers, independents, and self-published, written by people not all of whom are making their primary living by it. But who, on the other hand, are making some kind of commitment to their writing because it's one of the things they do. They tell stories, they weave words.

And this wild land, I suspect, is where the works that are still going to be read in 100/200/etc (if anyone is still around to read) will come from. Not the exquisite inward-looking products of a narrow school, and not the ghost-written or at least highly editorially-assisted works of celebrities and politicians beloved by marketing departments.

What we've lost through the digitization of music.

(Confession: I thought, when clicking on this, that it was going to be technical nerdery about how the sound quality is just Not That Grate compared to Ye Older Technologies.)

But no, it is nostalgia for the record shops and music of his youth, and okay, I can see, Well something's lost: but something's gained, In living every day.

(See wot I did thah.)

And I do think that assumes you could find the things you were looking for, the previous albums and so on, supposing you even had access to the record shops.

I have surely commented in the past about that business of reading series out of order because those were the volumes they had in the library or the bookshop to which one had access, and scouring secondhand shops for years to make up the set and so on - to reframe this in terms of my own particular interests.

And if you missed seeing a movie on its release, well, maybe it eventually came on the telly, or a rerun -

- or if you missed an episode of a TV show -

Access to these things has got significantly improved.

Maybe it's different with music, or maybe, you know, it's that things happen differently these days and he is no longer au courant. Or just that he is hearking back to the days when bliss it was in that dawn to be alive because he was young and easy, and green and carefree.

Will confess that my own musical taste is seriously retro and has been for some decades and there was a point where I suppose I just stopped Keeping Up, if I ever was, particularly.

I would have thought that the whole point of buying one's cocktails premixed in a bottle was, you know, so as not to faff around with mixing the ingredients, doing the poncey shaker thing, straining the stuff into an appropriate glass, but just sticking an appropriate measure into a glass, with or without ice, to taste.

However - the other week, when, O! Calamity! Waitrose were, little tins of Moth Margarita, no can haz, I discovered that M&S via Ocado did a thing called 'The Marksologist Verdita Margarita', in a bottle. While I thought this looked like a perhaps somewhat jazzed-up take on the basic recipe, it seemed acceptable, so I put a bottle in our order.

The instructions for serving are, you measure it carefully into your cocktail shaker (WHUT), with ice, and shake it up (baby), and then strain it into a glass, and only then do you sip it.

Y O Y.

Plz 2 B sending mixologist along as well? Sigh.

Were I into the mixy-shaky-strainy thing, I would, surely, be ordering the tequila and other ingredients separately (along with the, you know, shaker, and probably speshul glasses to boot - maybe bendy straws and little umbrellas?)

I am not sure if this is terribly decadent or just not decadent enough.

The very minor niggles of North London supermarket customers.

Looking back (I'm not doing one of those lists that assume that life is more or less NORMAL, not that they ever particularly match the lifestyle of a Crabby Ol' Bat Hedjog.

Best thing I got during the year: 2 A-Z + 1 Pfizer vaxxes.

Best things I bought during the year: new computer, it really does show up how massively, massively sluggish the old one was. In the realm of small pleasures, discovered Molton Brown vetiver and grapefruit bodywash, which is wonderful. Let us also praise M&S joggers for contributing to the comfort of the Crabby Ol' Hedjog.

Most expensive thing I bought during the year: replacement of the back steps to the garden, which has been something needing doing for a while, and was something that could be worked in with the ongoing downstairs work going on, so we did it.

Dept of, Life in the Old Dame Yet: there is a chapter in a book that was supposed to be published this year, but like everything else, delayed. A chapter in what one hopes is final edits... Two pieces for a web project that I have signed off on, in final readying for online publication. Being still relevant: asked to referee articles, read book manuscripts, review grant applications, be involved in projects, etc. Revived the old academic blog.

Published 4 volumes in the ongoing saga, plus a small treat, as well as a new tale on the blog currently in prep to publish, and another in consideration.

According to Goodreads, 272 books read and finished over the course of the year.

So it wasn't quite the deep blankness and real thing strange (hat-tip to W Empson) that it often felt like. Even if any light at the end of the tunnel was invariably the headlights of an oncoming train.

Augusta Fells Savage, a talented sculptor who had faced obstacles due to her sex and race at every turn:

[L]ittle of Savage's work survives today. Because she couldn't afford bronze, she often had to make her sculptures out of plaster; most of these have crumbled over time. Other works, like The Harp, were destroyed because they could not be moved or stored, while some of her work has simply disappeared. In 1988, the Schomburg Center in Harlem held a retrospective of her work, but could only locate 19 pieces. Throughout her career, Savage fought to help African American artists publicize their work. "She was keen on creating an infrastructure for black artists," says Wendy NE Ikemoto, curator at the New York Historical Society. "She put a lot of thought and energy into creating these intellectual spaces and networks for the work of black artists." In addition to the students she fostered during the Harlem Renaissance, Savage devoted much of her later life to teaching children and summer art camps, mostly in Saugerties, New York.

And perhaps a similar story about evanescence and the role of marginality and material culture: a woman author who wrote in a marginal genre in cheap magazines: 'the Reclusive Woman Who Became a Pioneer of Science Fiction'.

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But these often fragile suffrage publications have been preserved and are now digitised: Women's Rights Collection at LSE.

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Luke Hodgkin, 1938-2020: Son of Nobel laureate and radical historian who forged his own path as a mathematician and activist remembered - okay, I am entirely there that Mum, Dorothy Hodgkin, got mentioned first, but hello, he was a scion of a long dynasty of Quaker scientists and reformers (though not a direct descendant of Thomas Hodgkin of the disease and the Aborigines Protection Society) including the pioneer metereologist Luke Howard:

He also had plans for a book called Mathematics, Money, Drugs and War designed to “demonstrate how mathematics, with its claim to exact results, has become a central instrument of control” used, for example, not only to design drones for military purposes but to “prove that their workings are effective – and in particular to deny the existence of civilian casualties”.

And thinking about the Quaker connection and anti-slavery and ethical consumerism etc, this sounds like a fascinating book: Not Made By Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition - short interview with the author.

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The wife of a celebrated naval captain had been accused of seducing her formerly enslaved nineteen-year-old Black footman:

Though John initially testified against his mistress, Ann Inglefield, he later recanted this testimony. He had been terrified of his ‘master’, he now claimed, and had lied in court because Captain Inglefield had pressured him.

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This strikes me as a quite amazingly obtuse failure to read the room: Johnson trying to set up charity that could fund Downing Street flat revamp: No 10 does not deny reports that scheme could cover costs of works by PM’s fiancee, Carrie Symonds.