Matthias has been away in Germany since Friday to celebrate his 25-year high school reunion, and the combination of being on my own with no plans other than some scheduled classes and swims in the gym, and the storm on Saturday gave me all the encouragement I needed to have a very cosy weekend. To be fair, I don't need much encouragement on that score — it worries me a bit how good I am at being on my own! Putting that aside, everything worked out perfectly. I felt particularly smug that on Saturday I was able to finish up at the gym at 11.45, dash home, dash out to the market and do all my grocery shopping, plus stand in an endless queue for Tibetan food from the food truck, pick up said food, and make it back through the door of my house at 1pm, at exactly the point that it started raining and howling with wind.

I didn't leave the house for the rest of the day, but simply lay around in the living room, with the string lights on, candles burning, drinking tea and rereading A Little Princess (Frances Hodgson Burnett), a massive childhood favourite of mine that I don't think I've revisited for at least fifteen years. The blunt racism and classism was as I remembered, but the story itself: of book-devouring, wise, and compassionate young Sara Crewe's riches-to-rags-to-riches-again fall and rise, against the backdrop of a cloistered Edwardian girls' boarding school run by the grasping, vulgar Dickensian villain Miss Minchin remained as compelling as ever. Sara's ability to escape her circumstances through the powerful world of her imagination was what spoke to me the most as a bookish child who lived very much in my own mind, and I enjoyed it immensely on this reread. Although it feels more like a winter book to me, I'd deliberately picked it up for this storm-tossed weekend, because in my memory, it's a book that plays heavily on the senses: warm fires and richly-described meals set against inadequately insulated attic bedrooms, and the dismal fog and biting cold of the streets of Edwardian London — and this indeed proved to be the case. I'm not sure if it's a book to pick up for the first time in adulthood, but if it was a childhood favourite, it's worth revisiting.

Other than reading sentimental childhood favourite books, I've spent a lot of time this weekend on a marathon catching up to all the episodes of the Rebecca Fraimow/Emily Tesh Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones podcast. (I'm only just at the start of season 2 — I was very much behind — and had hoped to make it to the 3-hour-long Fire and Hemlock episode, but that's not likely at this point since it's 3.30pm on Sunday afternoon.) I'm enjoying it immensely — the discussion hits the sweet spot of enthusiastic affection and depth of analysis in a way that I feel is rare in popular literary criticism at the moment, and it manages to make every episode engaging, even if you haven't read the source material (as I hadn't for most of the 1970s books — although now I want to). The two hosts are clearly having a great time, and the Hugo award for the podcast is very well deserved.

The podcast was the perfect accompaniment to the truly ridiculous amount of cooking I've been doing this weekend. This morning I went out into the garden and agressively pruned the tomato plants, including removing large numbers of green tomatoes (since I don't think there's much chance anything will ripen at this point). These I have put into preserving jars as three batches of fermented tomatoes — one type uses ripe red tomatoes, and the other ferments them while they're still green (for this I had so many tomatoes that I had to spread them across two massive 1L jars). I'm also slow-cooking a stew (my whole house smells of garlic and red wine), I made pickled cucumbers with chilli, and am going to infuse a bottle of bourbon with fresh peach (thanks for the tip, lyr). I'll update the post with a photoset once all the ferments are sorted out in their jars; the whole process has been incredibly satisfying. I may have had zero luck with growing anything other than tomatoes this year — but oh, what tomatoes they have been!

Update: gardening/preserving photoset here!

My four-day weekend has reached its final day, and although it hasn't been quite as relaxing as I intended, it has been a lot of fun. Matthias and I just came back from a little Sunday market wander in the rain, and I'm now curled up in the living room in my wing chair, a takeaway coffee in hand, watching people walk by and the raindrops fall. The sky is white, rather than grey, and it feels as if we are under cotton wool.

This weekend has involved two trips into Cambridge. On Friday night, Matthias and I had booked to attend a collaborative event between the upmarket wine sellers and one of the restaurants, with wine from Bordeaux and a French-ish five-course dinner. We've been to several of these types of events, although all the others have been in one of the wine seller's shops and more like a wine-tasting with canapés, rather than a full sit-down restaurant meal. I was amused to discover that the restaurant was actually run by the guy who used to manage the wine cellars and catering at my old Cambridge residential college (on one memorable occasion, I was invited on a tour of the extensive underground cellars, led by him, by virtue of the fact that I lived in a share house with a woman who was the head of the college's postgraduate student committee). He was already an older man when I knew him in college, so I'm amused that he's elected to spend his 'retirement' doing something as stressful as running a restaurant! In any case, the food was good, the wine was excellent, but the people organising things had clearly failed to consider the fact that not everyone attending actually lived in Cambridge — things went on until after 11pm, and we had to dash out to make the last train (which was inevitably delayed by half an hour), and didn't get to bed until close to 1am. I was not super thrilled to be waking up at 7am on Saturday morning to go to two hours of classes at the gym, that's for sure!

Our second trip in to Cambridge was somewhat spontaneous, as misshoijer announced on Thursday that she'd be in the city for a flying visit, and would anyone like to meet up on Saturday afternoon. She's a friend from my postgraduate days in Cambridge — she did her undergrad degree in the same department where I did my MPhil and PhD, and for three years, I sat in on her undergraduate medieval Welsh classes (by the third year, it was just her, one other guy, and me, and we grappled with medieval Cornish and Breton as well). She moved back to Sweden a couple of years ago and I hadn't seen her for ages, so it was good to catch up — and all done in a logistically straightforward way that meant I didn't have to go into central Cambridge on the same Saturday when all the students moved back in for the start of the new academic year: she, Matthias and I met in a pub that was literally on the train station platform, we had one drink, and then she went on to London and we went back to Ely, where we tried a new Indian restaurant for dinner. This restaurant is in somewhat cursed location on the high street — it used to be a nightclub (so the space is big) which closed down at some point during or immediately after the pandemic lockdowns, then it got turned into an extremely mediocre cocktail bar (we went once and were basically the only people there in a cavernous space — very depressing), which then closed down, and it had been sitting empty for several years when suddenly I saw that it was alive and kicking as an Indian restaurant. The food was excellent (and absurdly cheap) — southern Indian food from Kerala, which is probably my favourite. We were home by 9.30, and I was asleep by 10pm.

I've only finished one book this week, but what a book it was: Tori Bovalino's adult fantasy debut, The Second Death of Locke, which was much anticipated on my part, and definitely exceeded my high expectations. I should warn everyone that my enjoyment is entirely due to the fact that it is very much My Kind of Nonsense — self-indulgent in a way that really suits my particular tastes and preferences when it comes to character dynamic. (Amusingly, it also manages to involve two separate ideas that teenage me had for fantasy novels that never saw fruition at my hands — when I say it is my kind of nonsense, I'm not kidding.) This is a world in which magic springs from intense bonds between mages and their human sources (called 'wells'); the former draws on the latter for all manner of supernatural outcomes. It's also a world in which the source of magic is running dry, due to an act of betrayal some years previously in which the titular island and dynasty of Locke (from whence springs all magical power) was annihilated, save a lost heir whom all other powers in the land are fighting to locate and control as their magical power source puppet.

Into this chaos step our two focal characters: Kier, a mage fighting in the army of one of these countries, and Grey, his well and childhood best friend (she's an orphan and was in effect raised by his family; she's also secretly in love with him and has been pining unrequitedly for many years). When they're tasked with escorting a captured hostage teenage girl to a potential ally, this perilous quest risks exposing the pair's many dangerous secrets, with implications for the wider political and supernatural context in which they find themselves. The characters' absolutely intense bond is at the heart of the novel, and if you like stories where characters are loyal to one another to absurdly self-sacrificing degrees (barely a few chapters pass without either Kier or Grey putting themselves in life-threatening danger in order to save the other), you will find lots to enjoy here.

As with many current ostensibly adult fantasy novels, although the characters are in their twenties, it still does feel a bit YA in terms of the relationships, and the whole thing is a bit of a teenage girl power fantasy (at least for the kind of teenage girl I was), but I had an absolutely fantastic time reading it, and won't apologise for that! If I had read it slightly sooner, I would possibly have nominated it for Yuletide.

This morning has been absurdly productive — I've already been to the pool, done a load of laundry (hanging inside, much to my disappointment, due to the rain), done a yoga class, and, as previously mentioned, strolled around the market. I'm looking forward to a few hours spent lying around and doing very, very little. I picked up a copy of Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) from a free book exchange outside a house near the river, and I imagine it will feature heavily in this afternoon's plans. Next week is the start of the busiest few months of the year for me at work, and I'm hoping this weekend was enough of a reset in terms of my energy levels to leave me equal to the task.

I'm rolling both months into one, as August TV was sparse, and September less so. I finished six shows in total, which were as follows:

Karen Pirie, the second season of a Scottish police procedural in which the titular character investigates cold cases. This one involved the kidnapping of the daughter and infant grandson of an oil billionaire in the 1980s, and as the mystery unfolded, assumptions about the motives behind, and consequences of, the kidnapping slowly became eroded. I quite enjoy this series, while finding the fact that the characters all continue to have jobs completely unbelievable, given all the rules they break in order to uncover the truth.

The Handmaid's Tale, which I stuck with until the bitter end, despite diminishing returns. I really only liked this before the showrunners ran out of book to adapt (i.e. the end of the first season), since what I find compelling about this story is the claustrophobia and the psychodrama taking place within the confines of a single household which represents Atwood's dystopian society in microcosm. As soon as things opened up wider, it began to become unbelievable — not in the sense of the fundamentalist misogynistic Christian dystopia (which is of course all too believable), but that any of the central characters managed to survive the various dangers in which they find themselves. Their plot armour took things to ridiculous levels, and a lot of things hinged on different characters taking it in turn to be stupid and unobservant each episode. By the time we got to the final season ( spoilers )

The acting and interpersonal character relationships remained top notch until the end, but I can't exactly recommend sticking with the show for its duration.

For a complete change of pace and vibe, I also watched the second season of Surreal Estate, which is a very silly monster-of-the-week show about a real estate agency specialising in selling houses that are literally haunted. Our ragtag team includes scientists, exorcists, and a couple of characters with supernatural abilities, which come in handy when communicating with the various ghosts who are hindering the swift sale of the houses for which the agents are responsible. There are a couple of overarching character threads, but I'm in it for the smaller stories, which are wrapped up in a single episode. It's a lot of fun, and I tend to use it as a palate-cleanser after heavier televisual fare.

Season 2 of Wednesday was split by Netflix into two drops of four episodes at a time, and I have to say I much preferred the second batch than the first. I appreciate that gothic stories need to have a strong emphasis on the mistakes of the past bubbling up to haunt characters in the present, but I feel that this season overused Wednesday's parents and relied too heavily on events from their generation's school days, and things picked up when the focus shifted back to Wednesday and her gang of teenage supernatural misfit friends charging off on their own to try to solve this season's mystery.

Bookish feels like a show lab-designed to appeal to Anglophile Americans: Mark Gatiss plays the eccentric owner of an antiquarian secondhand bookshop 1950s London, with a sideline in solving mysteries. The tone is decidedly cosy, albeit with an undercurrent of grief due in part to the austere postwar setting, but in the main due to Gatiss's character's backstory: ( spoilers )

It's a very self-indulgent show, and all the actors are clearly having a great time. For me, it was the perfect Sunday night fare: a bit of confectionery with which to close out the week.

Finally, there was the third, concluding season of The Newsreader, an Australian historical miniseries about fictional TV newsrooms in the 1980s, and the cast of outsized, messed up personalities who worked in them. In this final season, we've moved into 1989, and, as before, each episode picks a real-world major news story (mainly global, but sometimes local to Australia), interweaving the characters' attempts to bring this story to air with their own significant individual and communal struggles. The first two seasons of the show were absolutely brilliant, and I think the third stuck the landing, in the sense that every character got what they deserved, in a manner heavy with poetic justice — although the degree to which the two incredibly damaged newsreader characters ended on their feet, in spite of everything, did somewhat strain credulity. For me — someone who grew up with an Australian TV journalist father in the 1980s and 1990s — all of this (including some of the terrible characters) was painfully familiar and achingly nostalgic. Amusingly, early on I expressed a desire to Matthias for crossover fanfic between this show and another fabulous 1980s-set TV miniseries, Deutschland 83, and by the end, such a crossover scenario was, if not plausible, at least theoretically possible!