It's Always More Complicated

Subsequent to the ereader issue (I am yet again having to go through marking books as finished, with additional 'did I ever read that?' vibes), this morning when I turned on my desktop I got Not My Usual LockScreen Picture and then after a certain delay a message that Windows was failing to login to my account. Try again.

So I tried again and it just hung so I switched it off, and next time I turned it on it came up a bit slowly but behaved itself.

Hmmmmm.

So, looking back over last year:

Apparently read the usual 220+ books, exclusive of works read for review purposes.

In being an Ancient Academick:

Had 3 reviews published, one and a fairly extensive essay review somewhere in journals publishing pipeline.

One chapter in an edited volume appeared.

Actually got out and attended 2 conferences (did miss one due to sudden health issues), one of which involved Going Away, and the other of which involved Doing a Keynote (at rather short notice....)

Project in which I have been involved for some years didn't exactly crash and burn but due to various issues (including email errors meaning I was out of the loop for several months) changed and mutated and I may yet decide to Just Send That Article to relevant journals and see what they say.

There was the whole Honorary association with Institution of Highah Learninz not being renewed after over 2 decades because after 1 person who was Honorary Lecturer doing Awful Thing Bringing Institution into Disrepute, they viciously tightened up the protocols. This involved me scurrying around and applying for and getting an Honorary Fellowship at an entirely appropriate and esteemed institution just down the road therefrom.

And am giving a paper to the Fellows' Symposium in the spring.

There is also the possibility re BBL and myself editing the ms of important work of recently prematurely deceased friend and scholar.

So, not quite irrelevant yet...

In more general life stuff:

This was the year of engaging with physiotherapists! On the whole the results have manifested positive results.

I in fact started pursuing that because, following that Routine Health Check last year, I was doing resistance band exercises and noticing some problems. Anyway, have been, cautiously, continuing these and have even moved up from The Really Wimpy Pink One to the Green One. This, plus daily walks, and probably doing my physio exercises, has seen some reduction in weight, and sleep improvements, though whether there's been any benefit re blood pressure, cholesterol etc, who knows.

This has also been the year of tentatively poking my nose out of my hole, both, see above, attending conferences and going to more social events at New Institution, and more general social interactions.

I only finished and published 1 volume in The Ongoing Saga but I'm currently well-advanced in the next one.

Hesitant to say My Plans For This Coming Year, which there are, but I don't like to say, because I think they have been plans before and not happened.

(Actually this also sounds as though it's timetravelled from An Earlier Day and the improving literature thereof.)

‘They’re beautiful’: 13-year-olds lead audacious project to save harvest mice in Devon:

Best friends Eva Wishart and Emily Smith had become devoted to harvest mice, and were upset, a couple of years ago, to find out the species is threatened in England due to farming practices and habitat loss.
The two girls took matters into their own hands and decided to replenish local harvest mice stocks themselves. In the two years since, they have bred dozens of the tiny rodents in their garages and on Wednesday they released 250 of them into a nature reserve near Wishart’s home.

It totally has elements of heart-warming Britflick though -

Wishart and Smith, the two young naturalists, raised the mice in 27 tanks in their homes, with some sourced from a tip by Smith’s mother. Honeysuckle and hazel, plants the mice love to climb, were harvested from Wishart’s garden to place in the tanks.... The pair managed to finance the project, including buying the mice and commissioning the enclosure, with £4,000 crowdfunded from the public. They reached their goal after a boost from the well-known nature presenter Chris Packham, who shared it with his millions of nature-loving social media followers.

Wishart’s first foray into mice husbandry almost ended in disaster: “I was given four mice by ecologist Derek Gow, but we kept them in enclosures outside and the neighbour’s cat ate three of them. We saved the fourth, which was pregnant and had some pups.

Why a walk in town can be just as good for you as a stroll in the countryside (Duh).

I was boggled by this: 'I have lived and worked in central London for decades and so I struggle to come up with anywhere new', because it tends to be that one develops runlines like an animal in the jungle, also, there is ALOT of London? I felt quite elated when the rather banal matter of medical appointments took me to Belsize Park and its teeny wildflower meadow beside the walkway to the Royal Free Hospital.

But I am all for urban walking and one of my current woez - has been for some years ahem - is that my urban flaneusing across the Atlantic has been on hold, and even if all the other factors no longer pertained, I am so not going at this present moment.

Sigh.

(Though I have just been looking back to see how long ago were my last visits to a) New York and b) Chicago (that was not just O'Hare for onwards transit) and it was Quite A While. Last Madison for Wiscon trip was 2019.)

I have had text and email from the Physio Services people about my upcoming appointment (next week), and logged in to see that apparently they do not require me to complete Yet Another Bloody Questionnaire (I think I've already done 2 online as well phone interview). Nor I am given the chance to review and change it.

And bopping about the site I saw there was a section of Exercises, which had the ones I have got and been doing for neck and shoulders -

- But also some Ankle and Knee ones WOT which apparently came to an end in June, year unspecified, and if these are not Somebody Else Entirely's, maybe they are exercises I was prescribed at the time of the sudden OW on the trip to see the Bosch exhibition in '16, but I was never told about being online and downloadable???

So I was trying to see if I could reconstruct when I saw the physio on that occasion - for lo, I think back in those halcyon days one did not have anything like such a wait - by going back over my old DW entries, but don't see that I posted anything about it within the putative period.

But anyway, skimming through my entries from that era, nearly a decade ago, what did I notice as issues coming up as being Panicked On In The Meedja?

Woezing about teh MENZ - as a certain fellow-historian in the field has been groaning lately, 'Masculinity, always in crisis'.

Weirdness about READING.

I will concede to a certain observer bias here, perhaps.

But honestly.

See also, rediscovery of some 'forgotten' woman: no, duckie, your not having heard of her before doesn't mean you have Now Rescued Her From Obscurity.

New teeth -

Gradually settling down to these, which felt quite awkward at first, possibly due to there having been a gap for a considerable while.

New glasses -

So far, rather an improvement over the last ones, let's see if this continues or if they start annoyingly slipping down my nose. Also prescription definitely seems better.

Further to the discussion with GP over general health and cholesterol, I have been a) taking a brisker pace during my usual constitutionals and b) undertaking some of the resistance band exercises recommended by Versus Arthritis. Even using the wimpiest level of resistance band, and building up very slowly and cautiously, I am Noticing A Difference.

Yay?

Deploying the hearing aids rather intermittently.

Among the issues addressed by that invaluable enterprise, The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Mrs Man: Why do women take their husbands’ surnames?:

It was never mandatory in England for a woman to take her husband’s surname. There are historic cases of married women retaining their birth name as a professional name. Ann Fisher (1719-78), the daughter of a Northumberland yeoman, wrote books on education. She continued to publish as A. or Ann Fisher after her marriage (age 32) to the printer Thomas Slack (age 28), and throughout their personal and professional partnership of more than a quarter of a century in a Newcastle printing house. There were even circumstances where a husband would take his wife’s surname, if her wealth was substantially larger than his.

***

Also on 'more complicated' about women's status in Teh Past: “To wring the widow from her customed right”: the debate about the ‘widow franchise’ in nineteenth-century Britain:

Women’s suffrage campaigners in the 19th century argued bitterly that parliamentary and ‘judge-made’ laws had indeed deprived widows of their long-held right to the franchise. Although the same arguments applied to single women, the widow franchise was emphasised, partly because of the numbers – a substantial majority of women enfranchised by their property ownership would be widows – and partly because, in the eyes of many commentators, widows had fulfilled the designated function of women by marrying and possibly bearing children.
....
Women could, however, vote in parish polls. My analysis of the polls for the election of an assistant overseer of the poor in Lichfield in 1843 and for the municipal corporation of Basingstoke in 1869 demonstrates that around 75% of women voters were widows, with the remainder unmarried. Women voters tended to be older – the average age for Basingstoke voters was 57 – but they ranged across the socio-economic spectrum.

I don't care how fit they are, this makes them sound like Terribly Poor Stuff as actual partners and parents, and one might rather be a widow: ‘I’m like a single parent for months while he trains’: the partners of fitness fanatics who are left holding the baby:

“He once did an insane 100-mile run through the night,” Julia says. “You’re supposed to do it in a relay team, but he wanted to do the whole thing himself. He collapsed at the finishing line and was in bed for two days. There was a lot of, ‘You’re a bloody legend’ from our friends. Meanwhile I had to do all the school runs and even serve him dinner in bed because he couldn’t walk downstairs for days. And when he stops drinking on New Year’s Day until the London marathon in April, it’s just tedious.”

'It was a different time': ‘A distressing scene’? The corpse in the nineteenth-century working-class home:

Chadwick argued that the English working-classes kept the body for so long for economic reasons and that as a result of living in close quarters with a corpse they picked up negative associations with death and suffered moral decline. This paper overturns this assumption by using evidence from nineteenth-century folklore collections and working-class autobiography to argue that the long-standing tradition of keeping the body in the home and rallying round to prepare it for burial held a deep significance for rural working-class people.

***

I suppose all those do have some sort of connection, but I just stick this in because it sounds utterly fab - especially if you know the tunnel from South Ken Tube it must be AMAZING to emerge into this wonderland: inside the Natural History Museum’s mind-boggling new garden:

This mineral gorge makes for a striking entrance to the museum’s £25m, five-year overhaul of its gardens. Five acres of underused lawns and shrubs have been transformed into an immersive odyssey through the history of life on this planet – and a living laboratory for how it is adapting to our rapidly changing climate. Designed by architects Feilden Fowles with landscape firm J&L Gibbons, it is a captivating evolutionary stroll through deep time from the earliest mosses and liverworts, to the emergence of tree ferns and carboniferous forests, and on to the arrival of flowers, savannahs and finally woodland, surrounding a lush pond that teems with wildlife.

Out upon my daily perambulation, getting in touch with grass, walking among trees, etc and experiencing the beneficent powahs of nachur - and I think these little bosky groves in the local parks and gardens are less likely to be ye primeval forest of the lande that what was stuck up on bombsites in the late 1940s now relatively mature woodland -

Anyway, breathing the healthful airs conveyed by growing things and the imposition of ULEZ (we are in favour, yes we are, the waterways may be full of muck but let us at least have cleanish air, in a reversal of the Victorians, wot) -

I passed beneath a horse-chestnut tree and noticed, lying on the ground beneath, not merely the spiky seed cases but a considerable number of lovely shiny red-brown conkers that were inside them.

If one was that sort of person, one could, I daresay, do a lot of woezery about Modern Timez and Yoof of Today that had left these lying there, neglected, upon the ground rather than picked up, polished, hardened by various means, and strung on strings to play Trad Game of Childhood, Conkers. Wo Wo Deth of Civ, they are probably all playing virtual conkers on their phones etc etc etc.

We are inclined to suspect - second verse, same as the first - that way back comics, the movies, trashy cheap plastic toys, take your pick, would have been blamed for DECLINE.

Just to point up IRONY, we note that the horse-chestnut is a non-native tree:

Horse chestnut is native to the Balkan Peninsula. It was first introduced to the UK from Turkey in the late 16th century and widely planted. Though rarely found in woodland, it is a common sight in parks, gardens, streets and on village greens.

We also observe that there are Elf'n'Saftee myths about conkers and school playgrounds:

Realistically the risk from playing conkers is incredibly low and just not worth bothering about. If kids deliberately hit each other over the head with conkers, that's a discipline issue, not health and safety.

Went for a brief wander in the sylvan vales and bosky dells of the very small park out back.

***

In other news:

Dept: Suspicions:

I discover that the publishers I was not keen to enter into an arrangement with are even more dubious than I supposed - saw on Twitter over the weekend that some of the people/works they publish are seriously sus.

Yet Another Simulated Phishing Attack on Former Workplace Email, which I caught.

Those rather dodgy followers have vanished.

***

Dept: Gratifying but a bit aaargh:

Proposal for volume for which I perhaps rashly said I would do a chapter has been accepted; could they have drafts by end of Sept? (I find on enquiry that there is some wiggle room on this.)

I mentioned the other week that the lower back thing had been kicking up a bit, and then it seemed to quieten down again and then it has been baaaack, with adverse consequences on sleep over the past few nights, sigh, because not only is there the lower back thing, there is the, if I lie on the side less likely to set it off, that may upset the shoulder on that side...

I am feeling sufficiently deleteriously underslept that I actually asked to reschedule a BBC radio recording I was due to do today (yes, I was really surprised to be asked, but it is a subject where I am am somewhat of a niche expert, in fact niche expertise, c'est moi, what?)

I did, however, leave the house today, to post some things which cannot be sent virtually, and also took a turn round the pocket park (bluebells!).

***

To provide some more content-type content, and as these seemed to somewhat resonate:

Being a female artist five centuries ago was a rarity, but Fontana carried it off with such confidence and coolness she made it seem natural to her contemporaries. One likes to see women artists getting their due, but me, I would like to interrogate a bit further the concept that she was a rarity, before I got round to codfish-thrashing Jonathan Jones, who, are we at all surprised, leans heavily on the 'she painted NUDE BODIES' angle. Will no-one paint him as one of the Elders in Susannah and the?

Via landofnowhere, a fascinating article about Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and how the story about her is All More Complicated and not a simple tale of 'She Was A Suppressed and Erased Lady Composer'. Some of it was about class, and family respectability, and the default to stock narrative tropes. (The author's critique more generally of certain approaches to the biographies of past women of achievement does remind me of the problematic 'strong woman' trope in fiction.... Not all women composers have to be Ethel Smythe.)

Okay, I will concede that a common theme around these parts is, what do these people mean by [whatever it is they are claiming/defining/saying does not exist/is neglected/etc].

Sometimes one thinks that the reason is, boy, you don't really get out much, do you? or at least not past a particular demographic.

Here am I, introverted as anything, haven't been out for yonks, but I am online, I read the paper, I read books, etc etc, and I sit here in my hermitage going IT'S ALL MORE COMPLICATED everything counter, original, spare, strange, &C&C.

Woez woez people [for some categorisation of 'people'] don't have hobbies any more. In fact, hobbies that most people have are not things that require the kind of time and effort commitment that hers does, and - I cite Clare Langhamer's book on women & leisure in C20th Britain - often comprised things that could be picked up and put down and fitted in to odd corners of the day, especially for women. Men could go to their sheds and tinker, maybe but women had to put down the knitting to deal with cooking (e.g.).

The author does go somewhere towards looking at the gender issue:

Women, in particular, find it difficult to “ask” for the time necessary to train, or do anything that requires significant and regular time investment. The answers to my parenting burnout survey from earlier this summer came back to this point again and again: their male partners felt justified in spending an entire Saturday golfing, or attending a football or soccer game every week through season tickets. But the women didn’t have hobbies that took took an entire day.

Also on 'have you met many other readers, duckiekins?': O.C. author searches for other authors to invent new literary genre for her new bookhouse:

Elizabeth Conte loves 19th century literature. There’s just something about it, Conte said in a recent interview. Works of that time had a certain drama, romance and a literary flair that she’s not seen replicated in most modern fiction. She said she loved what that period of literature gives, but also realized that the average reader probably doesn’t chase after authors like Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell.

She is a specshull reading snoflaek:

“I’m an intelligent woman. I read a lot. I just couldn’t find what I wanted. I don’t think what I’m asking is stupid or I’m out there. There’s other people who’ve gotta be like me,” she said.

That was the impetus for her to not only write her own book — “Finding Jane,” released in March — but also to take the beginning steps to establishing her own publishing house, Jane Writes Press, which she said is in-between traditional and independent.

She said she isn’t a fan of the pacing in the modern romance novel, adding that many books don’t make her feel a sense of escapism. “A woman like me isn’t going to read a romance novel. They meet; they fall in love; something happens; they find their way back to each other,” said Conte. “I like long, developed stories and things that make me think that aren’t told to me. I like the drama, I guess.

So she's writing something called 'literary romance', which I guess is like literary sff, thrillers, mysteries, etc?(I.e. reinventing the genre wheel.)

(I will concede that I particularly gritted my teeth over this: 'her book, however, “fell through the cracks” as it didn’t seamlessly fit into the romance category or historical fiction'. Ahem. As one who has been falling backwards through the cracks....)