Matthias and I got back from London about an hour ago. We had a great time, but the Saturday portion of the trip was beset by an almost comical calvacade of chaos. (It's worth noting that we planned everything over a month in advance, with military precision — National Rail website and Google Maps open, planning every event with ample time in mind.) In list form:

The restaurant where we were booked to eat on Saturday night sent Matthias an email at 6am on Saturday saying that 'due to circumstances beyond our control,' they were 'closing permanently' as of Saturday.

When we opened the National Rail website to check that our train was still running (something we had checked and confirmed, as trains on this line on weekends are not always a given due to various pieces of track work), it showed no trains going to London at all. After some trial and error entering different start and destination points, we realised we'd be able to go to Cambridge North, then get on a train going to London Liverpool Street, get off at Tottenham Hale, and get the Tube on to our original destination. But this was going to make us late to our first booked exhibition at the British Museum.

I tried to phone the British Museum to check if being late would be a problem, but their phone box office is only staffed Monday-Friday.

Every seat on the train filled up at Cambridge North, and by the time we got to Cambridge main station, which was packed with a scrum of people wanting to go to London, all available standing spaces were filled. At each new station, I could see the crowds of people (for whom this is normally a very uncrowded train in to London) visibly spotting how full the train was and their faces falling in horror. We got later and later as more and more passengers tried to Tetris their way in at each new station.

We ran through the Tube, then found our way partly blocked by the weekly protest about Gaza, which I'd forgotten always started around Russell Square.

The British Museum had massive snaking queues to get through security. (Our original itinerary had us arriving there about forty-five minutes early, with time to get through the queue, which we knew would be long on a Saturday, drop off our bags, and amble into the first exhibition.) By the time we made it in, dropped our bags and coats in the cloakroom, and got to the first exhibition, we were half an hour later than intended.

We then whipped our way through the two exhibitions at absolute breakneck speed, so that we wouldn't be late to our lunch reservation (where I had had to provide card details when booking, so I knew they would charge me if we didn't show up). Half an hour per exhibition wasn't really enough time, but I'm impressed we managed it at all!

Lunch and the next exhibition at the Tate Modern were both fine, and happened as planned (I was particularly pleased that we managed to walk from Bloomsbury to the Tate, make it inside before it started raining, and emerge about an hour and a half later to find the rain had moved on, just in time for us to walk for forty minutes to our hotel! I now return to the ongoing chaos:

I always have a list of restaurants lined up that I want to try, so when we got the email cancelling our previous reservation I had another one in the list. This one didn't take reservations at all, but said that if no tables were available, you could get a drink at their bar or give your number to waitstaff and they'd phone you when a table became free, but I had forgotten that a) this was a stupid thing to risk in Soho on a Saturday night and b) that this place had become massively overhyped on social media, so when we got there, there was a queue of about fifteen groups lining up outside the door — no chance even to get inside and get a drink as promised! — and it was about to start raining again.

Some very quick work with my remaining list of restaurants and I managed to snag a booking for a place at 6.30pm at a pasta restaurant I had wanted to try. The only problem — at that point it was 6.25pm, so we sprinted down the street in the rain, and made it there in time to take the reservation.

And then they accidentally gave my dinner to a woman at the table next to us, and her dinner to me! This was rectified in about fifteen minutes, but it was definitely the crowning glory in a day that was characterised by chaos from start to finish.

Sunday, in contrast, was calm and lovely — breakfast in a little cafe with views of the Thames, the Lee Miller exhibition at Tate Britain (spectacular — if you have the ability to be in London before it closes, go if you can), where we inevitably bumped into a former colleague of Matthias and her husband, lunch in a sort of upmarket food court a minute away from Liverpool Street Station, and then a much less crowded train ride home.

I'm glad we went, but that was a lot more everything than I had expected! And I still haven't managed to try the hyped viral Thai restaurant in Soho...

It's been a good weekend after a tiring and emotionally difficult week. Saturday was filled with the kind of icy clear wintry skies that I love, and it was wonderful to wander around the market gathering vegetables, eggs, and other bits and pieces, before retreating to the house. I made a batch of ginger-, lemon- and honey-infused water to use as a sort of tisane on cold nights, and lay around catching up with podcasts and Dreamwidth comments. On my walk out to the pool this morning, almost every second window had a cat slumbering on the windowsill, and the hedgerows were filled with clouds of twittering sparows. I put in even more effort than usual in the pool this morning and at the classes in the gym yesterday, and my body feels pleasantly tired. Now, I'm sitting in the living room with softly foggy skies outside and a whisky-scented candle, while a noorishbynoor Bahraini-style dal simmers on the stove in the kitchen for tomorrow's dinner. Everything feels sleepy and slow.

I'll start things off with some very good news. Some of you may recall my post last week about Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, with suggestions of ways to help. This included a fundraiser to buy large, expensive batteries for Kyivan families so that they had reliable sources of power in the wake of constant blackouts, and loss of heating and hot water in their homes. These batteries cost $3400 US apiece, and when I posted about the fundraiser last Saturday, the organisers had bought two so far. As of this week, they now have nine, and you can see some photos of Anastasiia Lapatina, the journalist who organised the fundraiser, with the delivered batteries, in her latest Substack newsletter update. Thank you to everyone who donated or spread the word of this fundraiser: you contributed to this, and you can see concrete proof of your actions. It's a small thing in light of the overwhelming horrors going on all over the world, but it is genuinely, unambiguously helpful. The fundraiser is ongoing, so please feel free to continue to share my original post or donate if you are able. Other concrete ways to help are the Ukrainian government's fundraising initiative for air defence or Come Back Alive's fundraising campaign for drones to use as air defence against other drones — helping civillians cope with the attacks on energy infrastructure is good, but preventing those attacks from happening at all is obviously better.

Reading this week has mostly been rereads, with the only reread of note being Amal El-Mohtar's The Honey Month poetry and short fiction collection. This was a project she undertook in 2010, when a friend spent the month of February sending her different samples of honey each day, and she wrote a poem or short story in response to the look, smell and taste of each sample. Each creative piece of writing is preceded by a description of the sensory experience of that specific honey, vividly captured so that the reader is brought along for the ride. Although this is an early piece of El-Mohtar's work, it has all the hallmarks that I've come to expect and appreciate in her later writing: lyrical, fairytale storytelling, with each item in the collection an exquisite, self-contained gem. Her writing is always a rich feast for the senses — one does not just read her stories and poetry, but rather tastes, smells, and touches the little worlds she creates within them — and this collection really plays to those strengths.

I'm also about a quarter of the way through Long Live Evil, Sarah Rees Brennan's adult fiction debut, in which a young woman with terminal cancer is offered a chance to save her life if she elects to be transported into the fictional world of the wildly successful series of fantasy novels of which she and her younger sister are fans. The only catch — she finds herself in the body of one of the series' villains, who is slated for execution, and must therefore rely on her knowledge of the series' plot, and wider genre knowledge in general, in order to wriggle her way out of things. Rees Brennan herself was diagnosed with cancer in her thirties, and went through a long, painful recovery, and the fear and rage of that experience is conveyed with real vulnerability, deftly sitting next to the book's gleeful, quippy humour. It's written with real affection for both transformative fandom and the way that experience of collectively engaging with fiction transcends the sometimes questionable quality of the source material (if a work of fiction is meaningful, that's all that matters), and I can tell it's going to be a wild ride from start to finish.

I've got laundry to hang out (in the kitchen, as outdoor laundry will not be possible until at least late March), and more reading to do, and then Matthias and I will be heading into one of the villages south of Cambridge for a Burns Night dinner in one of the gastropubs we frequent sporadically. I'm expecting tartan, bagpipes, and whisky, the latter of which will be a bit of a shock to the system as I have been refraining from alcohol for the past month. But it will be good fun!

There is no Friday open thread this week, because the snowflake_challenge backlog was stressing me out so much that I needed devote a whole post to catching up with it. That said, if you want to use any of the challenges as a prompt, and respond in some way to it in the comments (either by linking to your own snowflake_challenge post, or by answering it fresh), do feel free to treat it as a Friday open thread.



( Challenge 10 )

( Challenge 11 )

( Challenge 12 )