Livre d'Or

Mostly diary stuff. ( last couple of weeks )

I try to avoid new year resolutions, but I've been having a January of getting round to stuff and learning new skills, and I'm hoping to continue with it. A big help was ceb who organized a usefulness party.

( examples )

A few of my circle made resolutions to post every day in 2018, and having daily journal type updates is just making my DW so much happier. I can't plausibly post every day, but I'd like to aim for once a week, which is more than I've managed since I started the new job.

( misc life stuff )

I have some thinky posts planned, too, possibly one about orientalist board games, possibly one about bullying and social justice (which may overlap with the free speech stuff that isn't quite coalescing into a coherent post yet).

I'm really enjoying the resurgence of people doing little potted summaries of what goes on in their day-to-day lives, so I think I might give that a go.

( stuff ) Anyway, term ends Friday, I'm heading back to Cambridge for a full three week block, and I am looking forward to Blue Christmas and Christmas and Chanukah and just relaxing with my people without any more travelling for a while.

Recently acquired:

• A wild sheep chase, by Haruki Murakami. Valentine's present from ghoti, since she's a fan of Murakami and I haven't read anything of his yet, and I like sheep-themed stuff because of my offline name, and also I often notice the cute ears in animated films we've watched together, and this book has a girl with exquisite ears, apparently.
  
  
• The secrets of enduring love by Meg John Barker and Jacqui Gabb. This was a present from me to all of my quad collectively. There are too many combinations to make it very practical to celebrate VD in couples, so both this year and last year we've mostly done something along the lines of all of us celebrating eachother. (Last year we were really new, mind you.) And I am a massive fan of Barker, because of their really unique approach to studying and discussing relationships, sexuality, and identity. For one thing they seem to blend rigorous academic scholarship with personal involvement and activism in a way that seems really unusual, though it fits in with their general approach to avoiding binarist thinking. And secondly, because they don't do inclusivity starting from a default model of straight, monogamous, dyadic couples but then make sure to mention that not everybody fits this default, rather they treat all relationships genuinely as equal. So I'm particularly interested in a popular account of their research into long-lasting relationships which seems to include a wide range of what is called a "relationship", not even necessarily assuming romantic and sexual, let alone straight and monogamous.

Recently read: Not a lot, various miscellaneous internet things but nothing that I'm burning to share with you. So have the always worthwhile Debbie Cameron on Crap apps and female email, where she takes down the idea that sexism is caused by women being too feminine, particularly in their style of communication.

Currently reading: Ghost spin, by Chris Moriarty. The third in a trilogy where I loved the first two, but I'm dubious about this final book because so far the first chapter has killed off my favourite character. I suspect he's going to turn out to be complicatedly dead, but I dislike Gandalf plots where the vitally important character isn't dead after all nearly as much as I dislike my fave characters dying, so I'm suspicious. Given how much I loved the first two books I'm not giving up yet, though.

Up next: Don't know, I've only just started the Moriarty. Probably one of my exciting valentines presents.

In other news, I had a weekend I crammed way too much into, but the scraps of time I got with my people were really good. I had a sort of rushed semi-date with ghoti late Friday night and Saturday morning before breakfast and the day's obligations. And then the afternoon at Andreas' fourth birthday party; I've not recently had enough young children in my social circles to do that much, but I do enjoy parties that are based on playing and food and where you get a party bag to take home.

In the evening I managed to go out for a meal with jack, at The Plough, a local gastropub we're quite fond of. But again, only a fragment of a date, really, and we had to leave early on Sunday morning to squeeze in a brief visit to my grandmother, her daughter who is my aunt and who is currently visiting from Australia, and my brother Screwy who is Granny-sitting while parents are travelling. Which was rushed mostly through my own fault because I also wanted to see doseybat and pplfichi at the latter's birthday party, and before Bat goes abroad for fieldwork for some weeks.

Lots of my people are going through hard times right now, and I'm helplessly sad about it. If I talk about it at all it'll be in locked post, but it's getting me down a bit even though my direct actual life is really good at the moment.

Recently acquired The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble, from the giveaway shelf at work. I sometimes like Drabble and sometimes don't, but I find it hard to resist free books. And if I don't get on with it I'll put it back on the giveaway shelf.

Recently read

Via khalinche, The lonely death of George Bell, by NR Kleinfield. One of those really excellent pieces of non-fiction writing which takes a single individual who's not particularly famous or exceptional, and conveys their character and situation. This is a portrait of what happens when someone dies having no real social connections, while also showcasing a bit what the bureaucracy manages to discover about Bell.

And from the other pole of human life, Parenting and pronouns, by Dorian at Beyond the Binary. Some really interesting observations about what happens if you actually take seriously the idea that you can't guess a baby's gender by looking at its genitals, an experience some of my friends are are also going through.

Currently reading The Dervish House by Ian McDonald. I'm reading this slowly, because it's dense, but in a good way. I love the world-building of near-future Turkey, seen through the eyes of disparate characters who have the sorts of totally coincidental connections that only happen in fiction. As with some of McDonald's other stuff, it's SF in that it has nanotech and political extrapolations, but the atmosphere feels more like fantasy in some ways, partly because magical things happen and it's very ambiguous whether there's an underlying scientific explanation, and partly because the language is really lush and poetic.

Up next Not sure; I've got a bit under a third of The Dervish House still to go. I'm kind of pining to read Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie, partly cos the whole internet's talking about the third in the trilogy and I'm behind! The main reason I didn't get to it sooner is because jack lent his copy to someone and we can't remember whom, and I'm irrationally reluctant to buy it again when I "could" just borrow it from J. Except that's silly, because obviously I can't borrow it if we don't know where the copy is, and I'm rich enough these days that it won't hurt me to buy the same book twice and I'm happy to support Leckie, she's writing good stuff and seems like a really nice person.

Today I did good adulting. I saw the nurse practitioner at the campus GP practice, and endured her telling me off for being two years behind on dealing with minor medical stuff, in exchange for her prescribing me some non-expired asthma inhalers and administering a flu vaccine. And I have another appointment for a proper asthma review, which will be tiresome as I've been taking the same medication for 25 years and I know it works for me, but I understand why they want to do this with a new patient, and the nurse agreed to combine (!) this with a cervical smear, which I'm also overdue for and won't be any fun, but hey.

And I dealt with some email, and other generally useful but boring work tasks, and I showed my face at the Remembrance service in chapel this morning. They got about a hundred people, I think, some of them in military uniform. And the Catholic (with a red poppy) and Free Church (with a white one) chaplains did one of those very Keele ecumenical services which was sweet and sincere and generically theistic rather than intensely Jesus-y, and definitely not about glorifying war and brave soldiers' heroic sacrifices etc.

I'm doing our Remembrance in synagogue this Friday; I usually try to do it the Friday before Remembrance Sunday, but I ended up just picking the closest Friday to the actual date of the 11^th without looking up when the official commemoration was going to be. My Facebook is absolutely lousy with arguments pro and contra marking the day at all, and honestly the people whose politics are generally most congruent with mine are against it. There's not really any question that I'm going to mention it in synagogue, because it's something we've always done since 1918, you don't change the community's customs based on how you feel about Cameron versus Corbyn. But I think it's time for some Sassoon; he was at least arguably Jewish and it feels like this year is his year, everybody's quoting him.

I am in fact totally fine, but my life has a lot more inconvenience in it than I'd prefer.

( slightly scary, mostly boring domestic stuff )

Anyway, the upshot is that I'm annoyed rather than injured, and I have the most awesome friends. But grr, this I could really do without. Strangely enough, I feel much less inclined than I did last night to poke at my newly acquired pyromania game, Little Inferno, that I just acquired from the Humble Bundle. It's almost enough to make me superstitious.

Yesterday I bought a £100 pair of trainers. ( English people find money talk embarrassing )

My brother the poet expresses this much better: If you suspect it, report it. That's a video with his performance of his poetry as the audio track, and works well as a whole piece beyond just the words of the poem. I'm happy to transcribe it if you can't watch videos, but I don't want to put the transcription right here, because he has a book out and I don't want to hurt his sales, that wouldn't be very sisterly of me!

A couple of days ago, I got the chance to take part in an opinion poll. It's something I'd always wanted to do, cos I like being asked my opinion about stuff, and I sort of want my opinions to be part of the national scene.

( it was a bit of a mixed experience ) So anyway, now my views about elected police commissioners and switching between banks are part of the pile of data that people will look at to decide things, and that's quite cool, even if it was a bit more of a waste of evening than I would really have liked.

On Thursday a colleague invited a couple of us to dinner in a part of town I haven't been to before. I misunderstood the travel website and the map I looked up and ended up catching a bus in the wrong direction. I only realized my mistake when the bus arrived at the terminus in Hanley. Unluckily, it turned out that the bus didn't immediately turn round and go back, but set off on a different route. So I had to wait in the bus station for 45 minutes for the bus going back in the direction I'd intended.

Hanley bus station is honestly not the greatest place to be alone after dark; I immersed myself in Dickens and tried not to notice the similarities between his descriptions and my surroundings. Anyway, the bus duly showed up, and in fact it was the same physical vehicle I'd arrived on, with the same driver. I explained to him that I'd made a mistake and was actually trying to go to a particular suburb. He proceeded to spend the whole journey to my real destination loudly berating me for being so stupid that I got on at the wrong bus stop, and telling me that I should have asked him for advice at the start of the journey and avoided going out of my way. I think he was trying to be friendly, just going about it in a slightly abrasive way. I just kept apologizing and trying to avoid sounding irritated at his retroactive advice; after all, I had made an error.

The whole conversation (well, him shouting at me and me apologizing from the back of the bus) was a bit farcical. I think my accent grew more and more southern English RP the more times I had to repeat my apology, while his grew more and more intense Potteries dialect. My accent climbs the social scale when I'm nervous, and it's unavoidable that my accent in general is much more prestigious than the local one. Plus I have loads of training at projecting my voice and speaking clearly, while the bus driver was both mumbling and shouting, having no real idea how to make himself heard over the engine noise while speaking to a passenger sitting a few seats behind. I think his repeatedly calling me stupid was a sort of defence against my implicitly pulling rank, though that wasn't my intention, it's just that I happen to have the accent and speech patterns I have.

On Friday the bus home is always slow because it's mega-rush hour. You usually end up waiting at the bus stop while 2 or 3 stuffed full buses go past, and then you get stuck in traffic. On top of this expected delay, the bus sat around in Newcastle for 20 minutes for no obvious reason, and then the bus driver, distracted, took a wrong turn and had to go round in a loop to get back to his intended route. In this case the bus driver was clearly "in the wrong", though he'd made a completely understandable and not dangerous mistake. The bus was full of students who were quick to castigate him; they're teenagers who are just finding their feet in the world and learning how to get good service by projecting authority. They're also people who (like me) expect to go through life receiving service and having their burgeoning authority respected. As on the previous day, the bus driver was getting stressed and becoming increasingly unintelligible, which in this case was particularly unhelpful as he was trying to give us information about how he would get us to our destinations.

In the end the worst consequence to me was that my commute took about 85 minutes instead of the usual 40. But it also made me think about how it comes about that "people like me" don't generally take buses; people take buses because they can't afford private cars. I love public transport, and it's partly a matter of principle that I've resisted learning to drive. In these instances, I would have wanted the bus drivers to behave differently (not calling me stupid / driving along the correct route), but I also didn't want to throw my weight around. The expected middle-class response I suppose is to write to the bus company and complain, but the consequences of that on the bus drivers would be out of proportion to their original missteps. But if lots of people who took buses (other than that one route between the university and the smart area of town, which not coincidentally has newer shinier vehicles and a more frequent, reliable service than pretty much anywhere else) were the sort of people who expect decent service, then public transport would not suck anywhere near as much as it does.