reading list

There's a blackbird that's taken to standing on the kitchen roof (just below our bedroom window), singing its heart out every morning around 6am to greet the dawn. It's like a natural alarm clock, and it's such a gentle introduction to each new day that I can hardly begrudge it.

I didn't know I needed a four-day weekend so badly until I had one, with four days stretching gloriously ahead of me, every hour my own to do with as I chose. It ended up being the perfect balance and mixture of activities, planned in such a way that everything worked out seamlessly, with even the weather cooperating. I'm good at this — organising holidays at home — but I so rarely have the opportunity.

I've described everything below in words, but have a representative photoset, as well.

This extended weekend's events can be grouped under a series of subheadings, as follows:

Movement
I swam 1km at the pool, three times: on Friday, Sunday, and today, gliding back and forth through the water, which was blissfully empty today and Friday, but too crowded for my liking on Sunday morning. On Saturday, I went to my classes at the gym, and then Matthias and I walked 4km out to Little Downham (about which more below), through fields lined with verdant green trees and flowering fruit orchards, watched by sleepy clusters of cows and horses, and then returned home the same 4km way. I did yoga every day, stretchy and flowing in the sunshine, listening to the birdsong in the garden. Yesterday, Matthias and I walked along the sparkling river, and then back up through the market, which was full of the usual Sunday afternoon of cheerful small children and excitable dogs.

Wanderings
As is the correct way of things on long weekends, we roamed around on the first two days, and stuck closer and closer to home as the days wore on. On Friday night, we travelled out into the nearby village of Whittlesford (via train and rail replacement bus), and on Saturday we did the walk to Little Downham, but beyond that I went no further than the river, the market, and the gym, and I was glad of it.

Food and cooking
The Whittlesford trip was to attend a six-course seafood tasting menu with wine pairings, which was delicate, exquisite, and a lovely way to kick off the weekend. In Little Downham, we ate Thai food for lunch at the pub, cooked fresh, redolent with chili, basil and garlic. I made an amazing oliahercules fish soup for dinner on Saturday, filled with garlic and lemon juice and briny olives and pickles. Last night I spent close to three hours cooking a feast of Indonesian food: lamb curry, mixed vegetable stir fry, slow-cooked coconut rice, and handmade peanut sauce, and it was well worth the effort. We'll be eating the leftovers for much of the rest of the week. We ate hot cross buns for breakfast and with afternoon cups of tea. We grazed on fresh sourdough bread, and cheese, and sundried tomatoes, and olives.

Growing things
On Sunday, we picked up some seedlings from the market: two types of tomato, cucumber, chives, and thyme, and I weeded the vegetable patches, and planted them. I was delighted to see that the sweetpea plant from last year has self-seeded, with seedlings springing up in four places. The mint and chives have returned, as have the various strawberry plants. Wood pigeons descend to strip the leaves from the upper branches of the cherry trees, and the apple blossom buzzes with bumblebees.

Media
The fact that we picked Conclave as our Saturday film this week, and then the Pope died today seems almost too on the nose (JD Vance seems to have been to the Pope as Liz Truss was to Queen Elizabeth II: moronic culture warring conservatives seem to be lethal to the ageing heads of powerful institutions), but I enjoyed it at the time. It reminded me a lot of Death of Stalin: papal politics written with the cynicism and wit of Armando Ianucci, and at the end everyone got what they deserved, and no one was happy.

In terms of books, it's been a period of contrasts: the horror and brutality of Octavia Butler's post-apocalyptic Xenogenesis trilogy, in which aliens descend to extractively rake over the remains of an Earth ruined by Cold War-era nuclear catastrophe, in an unbelievably blunt metaphor for both the colonisation of the continents of America, and the way human beings treat livestock in factory farming, and then my annual Easter weekend reread of Susan Cooper's Greenwitch, about the implacable, inhospitable power of the sea, cut through with selfless human compassion. Both were excellent: the former viscerally horrifying to read, with aliens that feel truly inhuman in terms of biology, social organisation, and the values that stem from these, and unflinching in the sheer extractive exploitation of what we witness unfold. It's very of its time (for something that's so interested in exploring non-cis, non-straight expressions of gender and sexuality, it ends up feeling somewhat normative), and while the ideas are interesting and well expressed, I found the writing itself somewhat pedestrian. It makes me wonder how books like this would be received if they were published for the first time right now. Greenwitch, as always, was a delight. Women/bodies of water is basically my OTP, and women and the ocean having emotions at each other — especially if this has portentous implications for the consequences of an epic, supernatural quest — is my recipe for the perfect story, so to me, this book is pretty close to perfect.

I've slowly been gathering links, but I think this post is long enough, so I'll leave them for another time. I hope the weekend has been treating you well.