Month: Jul 2024

228: magic and moonlight

This week’s tube journeys have been accompanied by Joanne Harris’s latest novel, The Moonlight Market, which is being marketed as ‘Neverwhere meets Stardust‘ (the marketing team at her publishers are probably cursing themselves). I love both those books, and also am a huge fan of everything else by Joanne Harris, so that I was going to read this was a given.

But…it’s also set in London. London Below, London Before, London today – the London we see in front of us, the London that might be waiting for us down one of those intriguing little alleyways that the older parts of the City (and the city, I suppose) do so well, the London that might be there if you catch it in the corner of your eye. Clerkenwell and Farringdon have many of these, and I am easily distracted by the thought of magic and adventure.* I blame growing up with books where statues came to life in gardens; where forests grow in naughty children’s bedrooms and you can sail away to the land where the wild things are; where there was a permanently frosted world through the back of a wardrobe; and a house full of Civil War ghost children, ebony mice that come to life and lost jewels.

You might say London has enough stories to be going on with, without making up more, but one of the best things about a city with more than 2000 years of stories and people is that there will always be room for more. London, as Peter Ackroyd and Edward Rutherfurd have proved, is enough of a story in itself.

However, people do keep writing these stories, for which I am profoundly grateful. The Moonlight Market is a story about a London man who works in a camera shop on Caledonian Road (‘the Cally’, as it’s known locally) who falls suddenly, unexpectedly in love with a woman who is (of course) more than she seems. A photographer himself, he discovers that his negatives show things that can’t be seen in daylight, and his search for these places and people lead him to the Moonlight Market on a London Bridge that only exists on moonlit nights. Threaded through this is a fairytale about the doomed affair between the Moth King and the Butterfly Queen, and the resulting war between the Silken Folk of the day and night courts. Like her Chocolat series, magic exists and co-exists with the mundane world, and sometimes crosses over – all the best urban fantasy is filled with possibility, of course, and Harris’s books are filled with it.

If you love urban fantasy and London, here’s a few more worlds you can explore:

  • Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series
  • Mike Carey’s Felix Castor novels
  • Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (I am extremely disappointed in recent revelations about him, but I still love this book)
  • Benedict Jacka’s Alex Verus series
  • Paul Cornell’s Shadow Police series
  • Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May series
  • Sarah Painter’s Crow Investigations
  • Neil Blackmore’s Soho Blue (not magical, but worlds colliding and some of the most evocative writing about post-war London I’ve ever come across)

A good writer makes the setting as much a part of the story as the characters and the action. I first understood this when I did a module at uni called ‘The City in the American Mind’, which introduced me to Sara Paretsky’s Chicago through the eyes of V.I. Warshawski. I’d probably be terribly disappointed if I visited – in my head Vic’s office is in a classic noir setting in ‘the Loop’ , there’s vast tracts of post-industrial wasteland, and there’s a Great Lake smack in the middle. Similarly, Dave Robicheaux’s swampy, louche and lush Louisiana (James Lee Burke is the author here) would not live up to my visions, and if I go to San Francisco I want it to be in Armistead Maupin’s 1970s rather than today. Clearly I need a time-travelling Doctor….but again, that’s another story.

*This probably explains why I get lost a lot on the way back from meetings….if I walk down there, surely it will lead to there (it often doesn’t, but what possibility of magic and adventure would there be if I just walked straight down St John Street to the office?

Other things making me happy this week:

  • Coffee with Brian on his last day ever at Museum of London. Hashtag end of an era or something.
  • Trip with some of the team to the Tower Bridge Experience. Team now convinced I know people EVERYWHERE as one of the bridge hosts is a double-ex colleague from both MoL Docklands and V&A.
  • Finishing week four of C25K without injury. Crossing fingers, touching wood etc, and sticking everything together with RockTape.
  • Finishing a sashiko-stitched cat bag
  • Being able to sit in the garden and work surrounded by plants and sunshine. My Beloved’s new garden shelter is coming on well.
  • Taking the lovely Matt Shaw round the site in preparation for a new project, watched by this pretty fox.
  • Cinnamon buns for breakfast courtesy of Thing 2

Things making me fall about laughing this week:

The Museum of London’s new logo. Sorry, London Museum. I can see what you were thinking but sparkly guano and a discombobulated flying rat aren’t doing it for me.

Still, I spotted the model when I was out with the team at Tower Bridge:

What do they want, glitter on it?

Today I am off for a swim with Isla, and I might even make something. You never know….

Kirsty x

Cover image: Network Rail

What I’ve been reading:

The Life of a Scilly Sergeant – Colin Taylor

The Secret Hours – Mick Herron

The Children of Green Knowe/The River at Green Knowe/The Chimneys of Green Knowe/An Enemy at Green Knowe – Lucy M. Boston

The Moonlight Market – Joanne Harris (Audible)

227: Tasmanian Devil mode engaged

This week I am feeling a little more human – thank you to all the lovely people who reached out to me after last week’s post via Facebook, WhatsApp and so on. It was much appreciated. Thanks also to my Dad, who told me to get on a plane next time and he’d pick me up at the airport for some time off from responsibility. The thought is very tempting, especially on evenings like Thursday when I got home from work at about 8.30 having been to a leaving do and no one had bothered to cook.

I had a couple of days off this week, with the intention of relaxing – it’s probably an indicator of how bad a state I was that it was a real effort to slow down and not feel as if I HAD to finish everything I started. In retrospect, a nine-patch quilt wasn’t the best choice of lazy project. It lends itself to chain piecing for the patches, strips and blocks so you work almost on autopilot. I decided when the blocks were pieced together that I’d make it Quilt-As-You-Go rather than continue in automatic mode which meant some slower focus on keeping my stitching the ditch neat. You can see the quilted blocks here., and Bailey inspecting my work.

So that was the weekend and Monday. My brain was still in overdrive, so when on Tuesday I got up, put my table up and caught myself going into autopilot I made the conscious decision to slow down. So I put the table away, picked up my book and decided to have a lazy day instead. And it was lovely! I had a lunchtime nap, watched some Doctor Who with Thing 2, read my book and later in the day I did some cross stitch and caught up with the temperature tracker which had been sadly neglected since the end of April.

I wasn’t completely sane by the time I went back to the office on Thursday but I was definitely feeling the benefit of some time out. The quilt isn’t finished, but that’s OK – it’s not going anywhere and will still be there when I’m ready to work on it.

Things making me happy this week

  • Thing 2 becoming hooked on Doctor Who and asking for it to be put on in the evenings. We have just come to the end of David Tennant and Matt Smith has landed.
  • Having an 18 year daughter – where did the time go?
  • Sunshine (until it got too hot)
  • Dinner with London sister and Cardiff cousins on Saturday night
  • Making it to Week 4 on the Couch to 5k. Five minutes of running doesn’t sound like a lot….
  • Making business card holders for my lovely business cards. With pocketses!

Same time next week, dear readers! The ironing awaits and I have run out of trousers….

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Spook Street/This Is What Happened/The Secret Hours – Mick Herron

Hot Water – Christopher Fowler

Down Under – Bill Bryson (Audible)

226: a visit from the hound

Full disclosure: this is not a post about actual dogs. Sorry. Especially to my cousin who really, really likes dogs.

It became increasingly obvious by the end of last week that I was in the middle of a fairly serious wobble, on a scale that I haven’t experienced for a while. I should probably have spotted it earlier in the week, when being in a room with people was too much, I was heading to bed at 8.30pm with a book to avoid the sensory overload of the TV, completely unable to concentrate at work and going round and round one piece of work that I just couldn’t get past, and seriously contemplating calling in sick and sitting in silence all day.

When I am on a downward spiral I have a tendency to make questionable decisions and while in my head I know that I should refrain from making them, that same head is the one causing the problem in the first place so those filters are not necessarily in place. At one point I even gave in and had a rest in the office on the giant beanbag (this is a thing! We are allowed to do this!) because I couldn’t keep going. I tried taking an afternoon off on the Friday but spent most of it waiting outside a lock-up to drop off our festival kit, as the person who was supposed to be there to meet me wasn’t, so that didn’t work. My Saturday was taken up with an extended family barbecue which meant I had to be sociable – not that I don’t love them all but I just didn’t have the capacity for it. Sunday was Cally Road Festival so I had to be extrovert all day when my entire being was fighting it…

Even a good long stomp through the fields on Monday morning in a ‘forced restart’ attempt didn’t help: I couldn’t hit my pace and felt like I was wading through treacle physically as well as mentally. The paths were sticky and swampy after several days of torrential rain, and the final straw was stepping on a tussock of grass which turned out to be disguising an ankle deep puddle.

When you’re (allegedly) a functioning adult with a responsible job and a family and several cats and a never-ending pile of laundry, you don’t feel you have luxury of giving in to a wobble – which means that you add denial to the load you’re carrying. Twenty plus years of dealing with depression should have taught me that this is a tactic which never works – a breakdown isn’t like a Teams meeting that you can schedule in between another couple of meetings, and unlike a piece of work you can’t block out a day in the diary to get it out of the way. I described it to a colleague as feeling like I was juggling axes and someone had just thrown me a chainsaw.

As the official office Mental Health First Aider (with a certificate to prove it!), if anyone came to me and said they were feeling like this I’d have taken them off for a cup of tea and a chat, helped them speak to their line manager, signposted all the things we have in place to support them, and probably encouraged them to take a few days off to rest. As the person having a mental health crisis this week, I forgot to do this for myself…there is an MH First Responder as well, but I forgot that in the moment and also she’d have had to refer me back to me….

Depression is also a terrible liar and tells you that you’re being silly and making a fuss and you’ll just be bothering people if you go and tell them how you’re feeling….so you don’t.

I am very lucky in that our organisation is inclusive and open and run by people who actually want you to thrive, rather than others I have worked in where you felt were dispensable as there would always be a stream of people waiting to work there. I felt confident enough on the Friday to say to my boss that I was struggling (probably so that she could sense-check my questionable decisions) and she checked back in with me on the Monday morning to see how I was doing and to work with me to put a plan in place for the week – an extra day at home if I needed it, time to rest etc. I think I am coming out of the other side now, and have booked a couple of days of me-time this week (plan: read books, turn fabric into other things, sleep). I think (I hope) that I am past the days when the first thing you do every morning is wonder whether this is going to be a good day or a bad one (now I just wonder which bit of me is going to ache most) but it was an unpleasant reminder that every so often the Black Dog can still put his paws on my shoulders.

Things making me happy this week

  • An England football game that wasn’t 119 minutes of tedium (including extra time) with 90 seconds of excitement. I miss Gareth Southgate’s waistcoats. I like Gareth Southgate and would like him to win the Euros except for the fact that if this happened English fans would bang on about it for the next 60 years.
  • Things 2 & 3’s sports day on Friday. I loathed sports day as a pupil, detested it as a teacher and hated it as a parent but felt guilty if I missed it even though there are two parents in this household. Now they are in secondary school I don’t have to go and I don’t have to feel a single SMIDGE of guilt about it.
  • New business cards which means I have an excellent excuse to make a new business card holder, which my Beloved thinks is unnecessary but what does he know?
  • Handing over the community part of my job to our lovely new Community Partnerships Producer
  • Thing 1’s brownies and Thing 2’s S’more Cookies
  • Getting a date for Thing 3’s foot surgery that’s not months and months away – don’t panic Mother, it’s an ingrown toenail
  • Not having to work this weekend and a lovely swim in a weedless lake with Sue and Rachel on Saturday morning
  • Discovering a quilting technique – Kawandi – I haven’t tried yet but which looks like fun.

Today I get to spend some time with GrandThing 1 while my Beloved helps Timeshare Teen 1 move house before GTs 3 and 4 arrive, and I’m looking forward to my time off! Thing 1 is 18 on Monday so I must also make a cake and wonder how that happened….

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Going Rogue – Janet Evanovich

The Secret Hours – Mick Herron

The New Iberia Blues – James Lee Burke

Down Under – Bill Bryson (Audible)

225: party like it’s 1997

So, this week was the General Election and – to no one’s surprise – the Conservatives are out and Labour are in. I don’t know about the rest of you, but to me this doesn’t feel quite as momentous an occasion as it did when Labour got in in 1997. Back then there was cake and early morning partying in the staffroom. I think, as teachers, we really believed that Tony Blair and his ‘education, education, education’ would make a difference to us – the National Curriculum (a cupboard full of files and not a single word about fun, as my teacher mentor Mr Deakin told me when I first said I was thinking about teaching) might be overhauled, the workload might be decreased, there might be some proper thinking about what children needed to know for the 21st century rather than what they needed to know to pass a SAT. They made a start with the Rose Report, and were doing great things for early years like Sure Start and the children’s centres, but all these things vanished into the ether when they got voted out again in 2010.

Perhaps we are all more jaded about politics, post-Brexit, post-Partygate, post-pandemic. Post Johnson and his constant lies and calculated buffoonery*. Post-Liz Truss and her failure to outlast a lettuce. And now, post-Sunak after his drowned rat announcement of a snap election soundtracked/derailed by D:Ream’s Labour anthem, his well-timed Euros gaffe in Wales, his inability to read a room and his total lack of understanding of life for non-billionaires in a cost-of-living crisis. Or – as I read this week – ‘cossie livs’. Dear gods. This did at least provide meme fodder during the campaign – poor Rishi and his lack of a satellite dish! When I was teaching in Hackney the kids thought I was poor as I only had five channels on my telly, so Rishi’s family must have been really broke.

The more cynical pundits have suggested that Sunak was deliberately trying to lose the election – you can’t offload a government in the way you would a business, after all, and he is at heart a businessman. Bowing out gracefully isn’t really a Tory thing, so perhaps the most he could do was call this election and hope for the worst (or the best, depending on your point of view).

The constant banging on about migrants and small boats (although legal migration dwarfs illegal by many, many thousands even post-Brexit: 29,437 illegal vs 685,000 legal in 2023) has precipitated the rise of the Reform Party resulting in the inevitable election (at his 8th attempt) of the loathsome Farage in, unsurprisingly, Clacton. The blue wall of Essex took a serious dent this week, in fact, although sadly the Conservative hold on Epping Forest and Brentwood and Ongar was maintained. Reform came in second in Brentwood and Ongar and I’ve never been so grateful to a Tory before – despite there being a credible Labour candidate and, as a first, leaflet campaigns by all the parties. Wales, bless them, have booted out all the Tories at last – perhaps they noticed the lack of funding post-Brexit when those EU roads stopped being built?

Anyway, as the song says – things can only get better, if only because they couldn’t really get worse. Also, Larry the Cat has been all over social media and he’s outlasted the lot of them.

*The sly characterisations of fictionalised politicians in Mick Herron’s Slough House series are excellent – read them!

Cover image: https://www.sadanduseless.com/funny-hedgehog-cakes-gallery/

Things making me happy this week

  • Using some scraps from a Bazaar grab bag and some Indian fabric to patch a bag for a try at Kantha stitching
  • A lovely afternoon with the extended family for Timeshare Teenager 1’s baby shower – the actual showers held off for the afternoon after 24 torrential hours
  • An excellent parent’s evening for Thing 2. We shall keep her another year then.
  • Not the football, that’s been extremely boring
  • A lot of reading

And that’s it for the week – hope election Santa brought you what you wanted this week! Today I am off to Cally Road Festival with our lovely illustrator and Thing 2 – please wish for good weather!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Taken – Robert Crais

Slough House/Bad Actors – Mick Herron

Down Under – Bill Bryson (Audible)

Shadowstitch – Cari Thomas