It's Always More Complicated

Dept of, inventing the city: Fake History: Some notes on London's bogus past. (NB - isn't Nancy murdered on the steps of a bridge in the 1948 movie of Oliver Twist? or do I misremember.) (And as for the Charing Cross thing, that is the ongoing 'London remaking itself and having layers', surely?)

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Dept of, smutty puns, classical division: Yet More on Ancient Greek Dildos:

Nelson, in my opinion, has made a solid argument for his conclusions that, while “olisbos” was one of many ancient Greek euphemisms for a dildo, this was not its primary meaning, nor was it the primary term for the sex toy. Rather, this impression has been given by an accident of historiography.

Dept of, not silently suffering for centuries: The 17th-century woman who wrote about surviving domestic abuse.

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Dept of, another story involving literacy (and ill-health): Child hospital care dates from 18th Century - study:

"Almost certainly she was taught to read and write while she was an inpatient."
He suspects just as part of the infirmary's remit was to get its adult patients back to work, by teaching children to read and write it would increase their employment opportunities.

Dept of, I approve the intention but cringe at certain of the suggestions: How To Raise a Reader in an Age of Digital Distraction:

Active engagement is crucial. This doesn’t mean turning every book into an interactive multimedia experience. Rather, it means ensuring that children are mentally participating in the reading process rather than passively consuming. With toddlers, this might mean encouraging them to point to pictures, make sound effects, or predict what comes next. With older children, it involves asking questions that go beyond basic comprehension: “What do you think motivates this character?” “How would the story change if it were set in our neighborhood?”

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Dept of, not enough ugh: Sephora workers on the rise of chaotic child shoppers: ‘She looked 10 years old and her skin was burning’

The phenomenon of “Sephora kids” – a catch-all phrase for the intense attachment between preteen children, high-end beauty stores and the expensive, sometimes harsh, products that are sold within them – is now well established.... The trend is driven by skincare content produced by beauty influencers – many of whom are tweens and teens themselves.... skincare routines posted by teens and tweens on TikTok contained an average of 11 potentially irritating active ingredients per routine, which risked causing acute reactions and triggering lifelong allergies.

Actually, I can't find that the article by Molly-Jong Fast in today's Guardian Saturday is currently online, alas - clearly she had a sad and distressing childhood, even if I was tempted, and probably not the only one to be so tempted, to murmur, apologies to P Larkin, 'they zipless fuck you up...', the abrupt dismissal of her nanny, her only secure attachment figure, when Erica J suddenly remarried (again) was particularly harsh, I thought. No wonder she had problems.

And really, even if she does make a point of how relatively privileged she was, that doesn't actually ameliorate how badly she was treated.

Only the other day there was an obituary of the psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien, who wrote Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the “Privileged” Child.

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Another rather traumatic parenting story, though this is down to the hospitals: BBC News is now aware of five cases of babies swapped by mistake in maternity wards from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Lawyers say they expect more people to come forward driven by the increase in cheap genetic testing.:

[V]ery gradually, more babies were delivered in hospital, where newborns were typically removed for periods to be cared for in nurseries.
"The baby would be taken away between feeds so that the mother could rest, and the baby could be watched by either a nursery nurse or midwife," says Terri Coates, a retired lecturer in midwifery, and former clinical adviser on BBC series Call The Midwife.
"It may sound paternalistic, but midwives believed they were looking after mums and babies incredibly well."
It was common for new mothers to be kept in hospital for between five and seven days, far longer than today.
To identify newborns in the nursery, a card would be tied to the end of the cot with the baby's name, mother's name, the date and time of birth, and the baby's weight.
"Where cots rather than babies were labelled, accidents could easily happen"

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A different sort of misattribution: The furniture fraud who hoodwinked the Palace of Versailles:

[T]his assortment of royal chairs would become embroiled in a national scandal that would rock the French antiques world, bringing the trade into disrepute.
The reason? The chairs were in fact all fakes.
The scandal saw one of France's leading antiques experts, Georges "Bill" Pallot, and award-winning cabinetmaker, Bruno Desnoues, put on trial on charges of fraud and money laundering following a nine-year investigation.
....
Speaking in court in March, Mr Pallot said the scheme started as a "joke" with Mr Desnoues in 2007 to see if they could replicate an armchair they were already working on restoring, that once belonged to Madame du Barry.
Masters of their crafts, they managed the feat, convincing other experts that it was a chair from the period.

I am really given a little hope for an anti-Mybug tendency among the masculine persuasion: A Man writes in 'the issue is not whether men are being published, but whether they are reading – and being supported to develop emotional lives that fiction can help foster'

While Geoff Dyer in The Books of [His] Life goes in hard with Beatrix Potter as early memory, Elizabeth Taylor as late-life discovery, and Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets as

One of those perennially bubbling-under modern classics – too good for the Championship, unable to sustain a place in the Premier league – which turns out to be way better than some of the canonical stalwarts permanently installed in the top flight.

But sometimes things do work the way they're supposed to, and in a fairly if not wholly frictionless way, and maybe I am just aware of this because of seeing hither and yon People Having Issues with Banks over what one would assume are contingencies that must surely arise really often in the course of business that banks have to do with -

Admittedly this did not have to do with financial institutions, and was indeed about that maligned sector of Public Services.

Anyway, I mentioned the other day that due to Changes we were obliged to apply for new paid-for parking vouchers for visitors, mutter groan, but, honestly, I filled in the online form and uploaded my scanned documents to confirm address and age one evening, and the very next day they got back to say acceptable and registered on the system, so I was able to apply for vouchers at discounted cost for the OLDZ. And lo and behold they arrived the very next day.

Let's hear it for the much maligned People's Republic of [North London Borough] Council, eh?

Who were also entirely expeditious a few weeks ago about getting out our postal votes for the various local elections.

Then yesterday I set off for my Audiology appointment at hospital I think I last visited when I was in a research programme some years years ago. And I was seen without undue waiting, in fact possibly even a bit earlier than scheduled time, and I was not sent home for not having had my ears syringed, but given a very thorough hearing test. And I indeed I do qualify for hearing aids, but because there is a differential hearing loss between ears the audiologist is also making a referral to ENT to look into that.

I may also remark that the Tube runs with perfect adequacy, and admirable frequency, and okay, there was one lift not working at one station, but the others were.

Maybe it's just that at present one sometimes feels that the glass is falling down and down for ever, and the evidence that some things are still actually functioning in spite of everything is cause for note?

I think it was actually in comments elsewhere I mentioned that Partner was coming up for a cataract operation.

Following a certain amount of angsting, having this done privately as NHS waiting times are massive.

My Old Time impression of cataract operations was that they involved lying with head held rigidly still and eyes totally covered for a significant period (or maybe this was some other ophthalmic operation?), but these days it's done as a day operation, in and out. And also, one eye at a time, the other eye is next week.

It was being done at Moorfields, flagship teaching hospital, f. 1805 as the London Dispensary for curing diseases of the Eye and Ear, and involved getting up at an ungodly hour, even though the actual op was scheduled for mid-morning.

Anyway, my contributions included working out how to set the alarm on his phone, and going over to collect him some hours after the operation was concluded.

Fortunately it is well-signposted from the nearest Tube station (Tranport for London as usual wanted to involve buses as well, YOY, there is a direct Tube line), and fairly easy to find relevant part of hospital.

Also, a taxi waiting in the adjacent rank when we came out, so I didn't have to see whether the taxi app on my phone actually works.

To be repeated next week.

What I read

Finished Revolutionary Imaginings in the 1790s, which was very good, given that not my period and somewhat outwith my usual academic disciplinary interests. The pdf format a bit irksome. Anyway, the notes alerted me to a biography of Charlotte Smith published by Palgrave which I was able to snap up before the end of their cybersale, as if I don't have a virtual tbr stack already...

Took a brief break part way through to re-read John D MacDonald, Darker than Amber (1966) - one of Travis McGee's bleaker outings, I thought.

Also off the non-fiction virtual tbr list, Wendy Moore, Endell Street: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran World War One's Most Remarkable Military Hospital (2020) - and at first I wasn't sure if I was going to stick with this, because unprecedented medical horrors and organisational incompetence in dealing with same (chapter one, pretty much) was not entirely what I felt in the mood for, but I did stick with it, and okay, the ending is pretty much a downer because: a) after running a really successful military hospital the flu epidemic came upon them with devastating effect and b) that whole thing of women having done amazing things that were acknowledged at the time and then completely forgotten about appallingly fast. But it is very good - immense kudos for the amount of material she found, personal accounts and so on (even if she does acknowledge the work of a preceding scholar in the field) and pulling it all together.

On the go

The references in Endell Street to their pioneering use of BIPP for wound infection reminded me that this was name-checked in AS Byatt's The Children's Book (2009), which I have been meaning to re-read. So that's in progress.

Still keeping up with Catherine Fox's Tales from Lindford.

Up Next

There's a new Jane Smiley forthcoming but not until the end of next week, I think. So dunno.

For reasons I have been thinking about legal/illegal abortion over the last few days.

And the fact that making abortion illegal doesn't make it vanish.

It either makes it go elsewhere (O HAI, Ireland/Northern Ireland)* or it makes it go underground and dangerous and exploitative*.

But presumably people who want to do that do so so that they can feel pure and righteous?

And this made me think about people who privilege some imagined ideal pure state (in the past or the future) (or, indeed, non-existent, yet, persons) over the here and now and dealing with what you've got and actual people and their problems and suffering.

*At a level that's not about actual illegality but does seem to me to be about enduring stigma issues, encountered the fact that most abortions in England (not Scotland) are carried out not within NHS hospitals but via commissioning services by NGOs, mostly bpas (British Pregnancy Advisory Services) and Marie Stopes International, and this is a problem because it means lack of opportunities for training and getting experience within NHS.

**Heard somebody banging on about 'the abortion industry', as if this was some vast profit-grubbing enterprise: well, the time when there was a vast profit-grubbing enterprise around abortion was when it was illegal, when certain gynaecologists and psychiatrists in Harley Street and environs were making a nice little packet cash in hand and off the books doing more-or-less, sort-of-legal under existing case-law abortions, but very discreetly so as not to be investigated (and indeed, even before the judgement in the Aleck Bourne case in 1938 opened up that leeway, evidence suggests.). See Paul Ferris, The Nameless, (1966). And while I daresay a lot of backstreet abortionists were pretty much Vera Drake, not all of them were.

This afternoon I went down to see my father in hospital, as he was considered unlikely to be discharged until the end of the week.

(A not too unbearable hi-speed rail service from a mainline station very accessible to me, but then taxis to/from the hospital, which is well out of town.)

I hadn't intended stopping more than an hour or so, because on previous occasions that seems about as much as is reasonable without tiring him, but today although he seemed fairly lucid, though tired, when I arrived, he was mostly in a somewhat confused and possibly hallucinating state - with a very fast heart rate, problems with swallowing - so I thought I'd better stick around until my sister and b-i-l came in the early evening.

Couldn't do much but hold his hand, liaise with nursing staff, etc.

By the time sister and b-i-l arrived he was on diuretics and something to slow the heart-rate and they were giving him oxygen but still seemed pretty much out of it.

And then I came home.

Discovered while looking at Facebook latish yesterday evening that my father (94) had been taken to hospital, was being given oxygen, and waiting for assessment by a doctor.

Latest news this a.m. however is that he should be cleared for coming home some time today.

‘Mother of modern witchcraft’s personal collection to be displayed for the first time.

And this, which seems related in terms of the discovery/invention of tradition: The Surprisingly Short History of Popular Yoga, and what work that idea of long tradition is doing.

And from the Department of SRS Woowoo: Sex Dust – 'an etheric potion from the cosmos to save the human race'.

I like this: Watching Downton Abbey with an Historian: In Sickness and in Health.

A little cluster of links on women writers:
Plunging into Reality: Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair and Adventures in Practical Mysticism
Ursula K. Le Guin, Paris Review The Art of Fiction No. 221 - do we think that Ursula sounds just a leeetle tired at some of those questions?
An archive of letters written by Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing to an “erstwhile lover” was opened by the University of Sussex on Thursday 3 March.

So, today was about visiting my father in hospital and also seeing the rest of the family (of my generation) while we were there.

And he seemed rather better than might have been expected from the earlier reports, though still on oxygen and somewhat tired.

However, the scan they did yesterday showed several small blood clots in his lungs and he is on blood thinning medication as well as antibiotics.

But he knows who he is and where he is (there was one old gentleman on the small ward who was clearly very confused).

I feel far tireder than seems justified from taking the very expeditious train to the town on the outskirts of which the hospital is situated, and sitting about for several hours before coming back.

MANY thanks to everybody who expressed their concern and sent sympathy and good thoughts etc on yesterday's post.