Tuesday 22 July 1662

July 22nd, 2025 11:00 pm
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Posted by Samuel Pepys

Among my workmen early: then to the office, and there I had letters from the Downs from Mr. Coventry; who tells me of the foul weather they had last Sunday, that drove them back from near Boulogne, whither they were going for the Queen, back again to the Downs, with the loss of their cables, sayles, and masts; but are all safe, only my Lord Sandwich, who went before with the yachts; they know not what is become of him, which do trouble me much; but I hope he got ashore before the storm begun; which God grant!

All day at the office, only at home at dinner, where I was highly angry with my wife for her keys being out of the way, but they were found at last, and so friends again. All the afternoon answering letters and writing letters, and at night to Mr. Coventry an ample letter in answer to all his and the Duke’s business.

Late at night at the office, where my business is great, being now all alone in town, but I shall go through it with pleasure. So home and to bed.

Read the annotations

oursin: Books stacked on shelves, piled up on floor, rocking chair in foreground (books)
[personal profile] oursin

Paging the ponceyness police, what?

It’s never been easier to build an impressive-looking library, especially if you’re mostly interested in the colour and size of your books. Is this necessarily a bad thing?

In an age of constant scrolling, there is social capital to be gained by simply looking as if you are a cultured person who listens to music on vinyl and reads lots of books. And creating an aesthetically pleasing bookshelf is now easier than ever, thanks to an increase in booksellers who trade in “books by the metre”.

You know, I would be just slightly more sympathetic with people who are about The Aesthetic of BOOOX if they would ever demonstrate a touch of quirkiness and have shelves of (okay maybe nicely preserved copies) old Penguins? or those rather nifty little volumes of The Traveller's Library. Or just something that would suggest that this is more than just a step up from manifesting your Posh by having a lovely set of Heron Books Collectors Editions (bound in sumptious leatherette).

I think that if you're going to have Randomly Chosen For the Decorative Vibe books scattered about your pad, you should actually have to read at least some of them. And be able to respond to somebody asking about them without having to resort to whatever garbled wifflewoffle some AI engine serves up.

Okay, I am now meanly recalling the complete set of the works of Bulwer-Lytton in very good condition that lurked on a shelf in a bookshop I used to frequent. And also wondering as to whether there are collected editions of CP Snow's yawn-worthy 'Strangers and Brothers' sequence.

On the other hand, they might pick up something that they enjoyed and found engrossing, and develop the habit of reading. I would be there for that, in fact.

My own aesthetic is, the books have taken over, what do you mean, curated? maniacal laughter.

sovay: (Jeff Hartnett)
[personal profile] sovay
Major props to the Somerville Theatre for accommodating the accessibility needs of my still-healing mother so that she could get out of the house tonight for the first time in a month and a half and watch the original 3:10 to Yuma (1957), which she first showed me in high school on rental VHS. It was my introduction to Glenn Ford and my second experience of Van Heflin and remains on the long list of movies I love and have never written about, but I had never seen it on a big screen, either, and its silver drought winter-for-summer looks like nothing else in the Western catalogue. It's full of tensions and strange tenderness, high-angle shots like the sky soaring back, sweat beading like the rain that doesn't fall. It's a film about failures and fisher kings: how could I not love it? My mother had a wonderful time. I am so glad she had a wonderful time. It was her first movie in theaters in five years.

Monday 21 July 1662

July 21st, 2025 11:00 pm
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Posted by Samuel Pepys

Up early, and though I found myself out of order and cold, and the weather cold and likely to rain, yet upon my promise and desire to do what I intended, I did take boat and down to Greenwich, to Captain Cocke’s, who hath a most pleasant seat, and neat. Here I drank wine, and eat some fruit off the trees; and he showed a great rarity, which was two or three of a great number of silver dishes and plates, which he bought of an embassador that did lack money, in the edge or rim of which was placed silver and gold medalls, very ancient, and I believe wrought, by which, if they be, they are the greatest rarity that ever I saw in my life, and I will show Mr. Crumlum them.

Thence to Woolwich to the Rope-yard; and there looked over several sorts of hemp, and did fall upon my great survey of seeing the working and experiments of the strength and the charge in the dressing of every sort; and I do think have brought it to so great a certainty, as I have done the King great service in it: and do purpose to get it ready against the Duke’s coming to town to present to him.

I breakfasted at Mr. Falconer’s well, and much pleased with my inquiries.

Thence to the dock, where we walked in Mr. Shelden’s garden, eating more fruit, and drinking, and eating figs, which were very good, and talking while the Royal James was bringing towards the dock, and then we went out and saw the manner and trouble of docking such a ship, which yet they could not do, but only brought her head into the Dock, and so shored her up till next tide. But, good God! what a deal of company was there from both yards to help to do it, when half the company would have done it as well. But I see it is impossible for the King to have things done as cheap as other men.

Thence by water, and by and by landing at the riverside somewhere among the reeds, we walked to Greenwich, where to Cocke’s house again and walked in the garden, and then in to his lady, who I find is still pretty, but was now vexed and did speak very discontented and angry to the Captain for disappointing a gentleman that he had invited to dinner, which he took like a wise man and said little, but she was very angry, which put me clear out of countenance that I was sorry I went in. So after I had eat still some more fruit I took leave of her in the garden plucking apricots for preserving, and went away and so by water home, and there Mr. Moore coming and telling me that my Lady goes into the country to-morrow, I carried my wife by coach to take her leave of her father, I staying in Westminster Hall, she going away also this week, and thence to my Lady’s, where we staid and supped with her, but found that my Lady was truly angry and discontented with us for our neglecting to see her as we used to do, but after a little she was pleased as she was used to be, at which we were glad. So after supper home to bed.

Read the annotations

sovay: (Silver: against blue)
[personal profile] sovay
[personal profile] sabotabby did me as a mermaid!

But why do they want to?

July 21st, 2025 06:12 pm
oursin: My photograph of Praire Buoy sculpture, Meadowbrook Park, Urbana, overwritten with Urgent, Phallic Look (urgent phallic)
[personal profile] oursin

Be respected literary novelists, that is?

Here be blokes going wah wah wah about the plight of the male novelist, lo, the voice of the Mybug B heard in the land, no?

Is this the death of the male novelist? The lonely life of a man writing fiction in 2025:

“Being a middle-aged white guy and working in this space today feels, to me, like what it must have felt to have been a poet at the end of the 20th century,” Niven tells me, laughing. “It’s a very niche, very recherché area, with a tiny audience. Men just don’t read fiction in anything like the same quantities they used to, and fewer of us, it seems, are writing it.”

You know, women are notably broader in their reading parameters? I'm not convinced by this argument:
He tells me a story about a friend – “with a big public profile” – who published his first novel a couple of years ago. “It was very good, but it was non-genre, and he’s a middle-aged white guy, so I did my best to manage his expectations.” The novel was turned down by every major publisher before eventually being picked up by a tiny independent. The book, once published, came and went, as so many do. “If it had been written by a woman, it would have sold six, seven times as many as it eventually did. But this is where we are today.”

Or maybe it just Wasn't All That?

And apparently at least one of the lairy 'scabrous, satirical, and vigorously male' novelists of the 90s who cannot catch a break these days:

["W]rites crime novels now. The last refuge of the scoundrel is the crime novel. And I get it! There’s a definable audience for crime fiction, but if you’re not writing genre fiction, then it’s difficult out there.”

Because the damselly laydeez never, ever dabble in the waters of crime or genre fiction....

Oh, wait.

I do wonder WHY they want to write SRS LTRY FIKSHUN??? is it all about the Kultural Kred? (Am currently reading Norma Clarke on Goldsmith and Grub Street, and how it was Not Gentlemanly to be a hack who wrote for filthy lucre, and the delicate balancing acts Georgian literary figures had to engage in.) And why are they all about being warty boys when they do so rather than being, oh, Henry James or Scott Fitzgerald or noted for their exquisite prose style? is it also about Macho Cred?

My own literary tastes among the Blokes of the Pen whose works you will tear from my cold dead hands have been discursed of here and they range widely. I can't help imagining several of them waxing satyrik about this lot.

andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker
The play park we're waiting for a dentist appointment in has WiFi.

(It's got a building in it owned by the council leisure service to sell ice creams and manage the tennis courts next door.)
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
Before the thunderstorm broke in such steel-drum sheets of solid rain that we realized only after the fact that we had accidentally driven through a washed-out bridge on Route 127, I lay with my face against half a billion years of granite cooled in the volcanoes of Avalonia and weathered across aeons of which the ice ages were only the finishing touch to a boulder as rough as rust-cracked barnacles: it pushed into my palms like the denticles of sharkskin, my hair clung to it in the wind that smelled of high tide and the slap-glass of waves coiling around the sunken cobbles and combers of weed. The stone itself smelled of salt. I found a fragment of gull's feather tangled afterward in my hair. [personal profile] spatch had driven me out to Gloucester for a bonanza of fried smelts and scallops eaten within sea-breeze earshot of the harbor while the clouds built like a shield-wall against the sunset and the thunder held off just long enough for us to get back to the car, following which we were theoretically treated to the coastal picturesque of Manchester-by-the-Sea and realistically corrected course back to Route 128 when we saw a taller vehicle than ours headlights-deep. The sunset that came out after the rain was preposterously spectacular: a huge cliff of cloud the peach-pearl color of a bailer shell, the gold-edged stickles of smaller reefs and bars, the mauve undershadow of the disappearing rain, all sunk to a true ultramarine dusk by the time we were doing the shopping for my mother back in Lexington. I used to spend a lot more time out in the world and I need to be able to again. It is self-evidently good for me.

Sunday 20 July 1662

July 20th, 2025 11:00 pm
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Posted by Samuel Pepys

(Lord’s day). My wife and I lay talking long in bed, and at last she is come to be willing to stay two months in the country, for it is her unwillingness to stay till the house is quite done that makes me at a loss how to have her go or stay.

But that which troubles me most is that it has rained all this morning so furiously that I fear my house is all over water, and with that expectation I rose and went into my house and find that it is as wet as the open street, and that there is not one dry-footing above nor below in my house. So I fitted myself for dirt, and removed all my books to the office and all day putting up and restoring things, it raining all day long as hard within doors as without. At last to dinner, we had a calf’s head and bacon at my chamber at Sir W. Pen’s, and there I and my wife concluded to have her go and her two maids and the boy, and so there shall be none but Will and I left at home, and so the house will be freer, for it is impossible to have anybody come into my house while it is in this condition, and with this resolution all the afternoon we were putting up things in the further cellar against next week for them to be gone, and my wife and I into the office and there measured a soiled flag that I had found there, and hope to get it to myself, for it has not been demanded since I came to the office. But my wife is not hasty to have it, but rather to stay a while longer and see the event whether it will be missed or no.

At night to my office, and there put down this day’s passages in my journall, and read my oaths, as I am obliged every Lord’s day. And so to Sir W. Pen’s to my chamber again, being all in dirt and foul, and in fear of having catched cold today with dabbling in the water.

But what has vexed me to-day was that by carrying the key to Sir W. Pen’s last night, it could not in the midst of all my hurry to carry away my books and things, be found, and at last they found it in the fire that we made last night. So to bed.

Read the annotations

Culinary

July 20th, 2025 07:44 pm
oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)
[personal profile] oursin

This weeks bread: a loaf of Dove's Farm Organic Heritage Seeded Bread Flour, v nice.

Friday night supper: penne with bottled sliced artichoke hearts.

Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, strong white flour - perhaps just a little stodgy.

Today's lunch: kedgeree with smoked basa fillets - forgot the egg due to distractions and basa cooking rather more slowly than I had anticipated, still quite good - served with baked San Marzano tomatoes (we entirely repudiate the heretical inclusion of tomatoes in kedgeree but they are perfectly acceptable on the side), and a salad of little gem lettuces quartered and dressed with salt, ground black pepper, lime juice and avocado oil.

Photo cross-post

July 20th, 2025 08:23 am
andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker


Sophia, it seems, just likes hanging around.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

andrewducker: (Needs More Robots)
[personal profile] andrewducker
I have an under-counter integrated fridge/freezer. (Integrated in this case meaning that it's got a door on it, and is embedded in the cupboards).

I want to replace it with a free-standing one - i.e. one that will simply sit in the gap.

The various places I've looked at so far that do a delivery and also take away your old fridge only have options to replace an integrated fridge with an integrated fridge. Or a free-standing with a free-standing. Apparently they use different teams for each of these.

AO.com told me that I need to entirely remove the old one. John Lewis told me that they'd just send it out and hope that the free-standing fridge people happened to have the right tools with them, which doesn't sound ideal.

So, I could do with some advice on getting an integrated fridge/freezer removed and taken away. Preferably in the form of "Call these guys, they are vaguely* competent and cheap."

Anyone got any experience?


*I'm willing to settle for vague competence when it comes to removing things. Installing things is a different matter...

Saturday 19 July 1662

July 19th, 2025 11:00 pm
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Posted by Samuel Pepys

Up early and to some business, and my wife coming to me I staid long with her discoursing about her going into the country, and as she is not very forward so am I at a great loss whether to have her go or no because of the charge, and yet in some considerations I would be glad she was there, because of the dirtiness of my house and the trouble of having of a family there. So to my office, and there all the morning, and then to dinner and my brother Tom dined with me only to see me. In the afternoon I went upon the river to look after some tarr I am sending down and some coles, and so home again; it raining hard upon the water, I put ashore and sheltered myself, while the King came by in his barge, going down towards the Downs to meet the Queen: the Duke being gone yesterday. But methought it lessened my esteem of a king, that he should not be able to command the rain.

Home, and Cooper coming (after I had dispatched several letters) to my mathematiques, and so at night to bed to a chamber at Sir W. Pen’s, my own house being so foul that I cannot lie there any longer, and there the chamber lies so as that I come into it over my leads without going about, but yet I am not fully content with it, for there will be much trouble to have servants running over the leads to and fro.

Read the annotations

Some v misc things

July 19th, 2025 03:47 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

The Case of the Missing Romani American History:

The history of Romani Americans is missing. Although the experiences of other marginalized and immigrant American groups are now well-represented in mainstream historical scholarship, Romani Americans remain absent from American history. This absence has detrimental effects to Romani Americans who are placed outside historical time. It also harms scholars whose work could benefit from the placement of Romani people in the histories they tell.

***

A ‘new Canterbury Tale’: George Smythe, Frederick Romilly and England’s ‘last political duel’:

In the early hours of 20 May 1852, six weeks before polling in that summer’s general election, two MPs travelled from London to woodland outside Weybridge in a bid to settle a quarrel provoked by the unravelling of electioneering arrangements in the double-member constituency of Canterbury. Frederick Romilly, the borough’s sitting Liberal MP, had issued a challenge to his Canterbury colleague George Smythe, whose political allegiances fluctuated and who had notoriously been embroiled in four previous prospective duels. The pair, accompanied by their seconds, who were also politicians, exchanged shots before departing unscathed. None of the participants faced prosecution but neither Smythe nor Romilly was re-elected.

A challenge to a duel was in fact by this time a common-law misdemeanour, and killing one's opponent counted as murder, though apparently there were few prosecutions in either case. It is perhaps disillusioning to the readers of romantic fiction to discover that politics seems to have figured so heavily as the casus belli.

***

Do not foxes have the right to enjoy the facilities of the public library system? London library forced to briefly close after fox 'made itself comfortable' inside - this was a London library, rather than the London Library.

***

Two entries in the People B Weird category:

Sylvanian Families' legal battle over TikTok drama:

Sylvanian Families has become embroiled in a legal battle with a TikTok creator who makes comedic videos of the children's toys in dark and debauched storylines. The fluffy creatures, launched in 1985, have become a childhood classic. But the Sylvanian Drama TikTok account sees them acting out adult sketches involving drink, drugs, cheating, violence and even murder.

(What next, Wombles porn?)

And

I'm 16 and live entirely like it's the 1940s (I bet he's not eating as though rationing is still in force, what?):

"I liked the clothing, how they dressed, and the style," Lincoln explained. "Just the elegance of how everyone was and acted... with the time of the war, everyone had to come together, everyone had to fight, and everyone had to survive together.
"Most people back then said it was scary, but it was quite fun to live then, and they could go out, help each other and apparently there's not that much stuff today that is similar to what that wartime experience was."
Lincoln said he loved the music of the time, including Henry Hall, Jack Payne and Ambrose & His Orchestra.
The teenager's wardrobe was also entirely made up of clothes from the era, which he said he preferred to modern-day clothes.
He even cycles on a 1939 bike when out and about researching and finding items for his collection.

We wish to know whether he gets woken up by a siren in the middle of the night to go and huddle in the nearest air-raid shelter. Singing 'Roll out the Barrel'.

Champagne with the Freemasons

July 21st, 2025 03:31 pm
shewhomust: (bibendum)
[personal profile] shewhomust
On Wednesday we went to what the Wine Society calls a 'walkaround' tasting. We don't often do this: the format offers the chance to taste wines from the Society's current list in an informal way, but it's quite an expensive way to sample wines which don't greatly excite us. Not necessarily bad value, but not good value for us. We look out for tastings which play to our interests (the most recent of these was the Languedoc Roussillon tasting eighteen months ago). Wednesday's tasting was in Durham, though, which should be encouraged; and it had a theme of sorts, "Wine Champions", wines which have scored highly in the Society's internal tastings. I was unconvinced, especially because it was on a Wednesday (quiz night), so the logistics were complicated, but [personal profile] durham_rambler was keen, and hope triumphed over experience.

Bearing those caveats in mind, it was a fun evening. It helped that the venue was the Masonic Hall, a building which I have passed many times but never entered. We walked there, retracing to a large extent the route we had taken home from the Gala, pausing halfway to sit on a bench in the Riverwalk to eat our sandwiches and enjoy the view of the Castle and Cathedral, and arrived just after the start time, without getting too hot and sticky doing so. We were shown into the downstairs hall, a large light room with decorative modern stained glass windows, and a door at the far end opening onto the garden. We headed for the table to the left of that door, where our wine - we started with the champagne, it seemed only polite - was poured for us by The Other Quizmaster (Retired), this, it turns out, being his day job. We took our glasses out onto the patio, and enjoyed the view of the racecourse (and eavesdropping on other participants, who can't have been all that local, because they all seemed to be discussing whether that could possibly be a race course; we didn't tell them what had been going on there last Saturday). This was a pleasant way to spend an evening; the wines were almost irrelevant.

Nonetheless, for the record: )

We had booked a taxi to take us from the tasting to the Elm Tree, which worked smoothly for us,though the taxi firm may have been confused. We arrived at the pub to discover that since we had not been there early to snaffle a table, we were reduced to squeezing onto the end of one occupied by our friends and rivals from the Physics department. Since neither team was at full strength, this wasn't really a problem. We did not do well in the quiz, but I don't think our performance was impaired by wine: there were just too many questions about things we didn't know (sport, mostly).
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
Obviously I am not at Readercon, but on the other hand I may have fixed our central air: it required a new filter, a section of insulation, and a quantity of aluminum tape, but the temperature in the apartment has in fact followed the thermostat down for the first time all week. Fingers crossed that it stays that way.

Although its state-of-the-art submarine is nuclear-powered and engaged in the humanitarian mission of planting a chain of seismometers around the sunken hotspots of the globe, Around the World Under the Sea (1966) plays so much like a modernized Verne mash-up right down to its trick-photographed battle with a giant moray eel and its climactic ascent amid the eruption of a newly discovered volcano that it should not be faulted for generally shorting its characters in favor of all the techno-oceanography, but Keenan Wynn grouches delightfully as the specialist in deep-sea survival who prefers to spend his time playing shortwave chess in a diving bell at the bottom of the Caribbean and the script actually remembers it isn't Shirley Eaton's fault if the average heterosexual male IQ plummets past the Marianas just because she's inhaled in its vicinity, but the MVP of the cast is David McCallum whose tinted monobrowline glasses and irritable social gracelessness would code him nerd in any era, but he's the grit in the philanthropy with his stake in a sunken treasure of transistor crystals and his surprise to be accused of cheating at chess when he designed and programmed the computer that's been making his moves for him. If the film of The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) had not made its inspired change in the nationality of its aeronautical engineer, McCallum could have knocked the part out of the park. "No, you don't get one," he almost gets the last word, distributing his sole precious handful of salvage among his fellow crew with the pointed exception of the captain played inevitably by Lloyd Bridges: "You blew the bloody submarine in half."

[personal profile] spatch and I have seen four films now by the husband-and-wife, director-and-editor team of Andrew L. and Virginia Stone and on the strength of Ring of Fire (1961), The Steel Trap (1952), The Decks Ran Red (1958), and just lately The Last Voyage (1960), the unifying theme of their pictures looks like pulp logistics. So far the standout has been the nail-biter noir of The Steel Trap, whose sprung ironies depend on an accumulation of individually trivial hitches in getting from L.A. to Rio that under less criminal circumstances would mount to planes-trains-and-automobiles farce, but Ring of Fire incorporates at least two real forest fires into its evacuation of a Cascadian small town, The Decks Ran Red transplants its historical mutiny to the modern engine room of a former Liberty ship, and The Last Voyage went the full Fitzcarraldo by sinking the scrap-bound SS Île de France after first blowing its boiler through its salon and smashing its funnel into its deckhouse without benefit of model work. The prevailing style is pedal-to-the-metal documentary with just enough infill of character to keep the proceedings from turning to clockwork and a deep anoraky delight in timetables and mechanical variables. Eventually I will hit one of their more conventional-sounding crime films, but until then I am really enjoying their clinker-built approach to human interest. Edmond O'Brien as the second engineer of the doomed SS Claridon lost his father on the Titanic, a second-generation trauma another film could have built an entire arc out of, and the Stones care mostly whether he's as handy with an acetylene torch as all that.

We were forty-four minutes into Dr. Kildare's Strange Case (1940) before anything remotely strange occurred beyond an impressive protraction of soap and with sincere regrets to Lew Ayres, I tapped out.

Friday 18 July 1662

July 18th, 2025 11:00 pm
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Posted by Samuel Pepys

Up very early, and got a-top of my house, seeing the design of my work, and like it very well, and it comes into my head to have my dining-room wainscoated, which will be very pretty. By-and-by by water to Deptford, to put several things in order, being myself now only left in town, and so back again to the office, and there doing business all the morning and the afternoon also till night, and then comes Cooper for my mathematiques, but, in good earnest, my head is so full of business that I cannot understand it as otherwise I should do.

At night to bed, being much troubled at the rain coming into my house, the top being open.

Read the annotations

Offer not valid in Lemuria

July 18th, 2025 07:16 pm
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
The first weekend in May, [personal profile] spatch and I day-tripped to the Coney Island Film Festival in order to catch the short film debut of Steve Havelka and Nat Strange's Pokey the Penguin (1998–), which I described at the time as "a five-minute delight of shyster shenanigans including an accidentally combination cathedral and DMV and an international offer cautioned to be void in Lemuria. It loses nothing and in fact gains an inventive layer of detail in the translation to traditional animation from all-caps MS Paint, e.g. a beet instead of a carrot for the nose of a fast-talking snowman who could outbooze W. C. Fields. Steal a seat if it comes to a film festival near you." Fortunately, it is now necessary only to steal a seat on the internet: The Animated Adventures of Pokey the Penguin Presents: The Lawyers' Lawyers (2025) is freely streaming and still a delight. Guaranteed even on mythical continents.
sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
During one of the four discrete hours I may have managed to sleep in my own apartment, I dreamed of a trio of dark-masked, clever-clawed, civet-bodied animals tumbling across the carpet of the front hall that I recognized finally as orries, which I realized I had never known were marsupials of the real world as opposed to inventions of the 1970's children's trilogy where I had encountered them in elementary school, the companion animals of the nuclear-winter breed of human traveling in secret across a post-rain-of-fire Australia, in some places reverted to a sort of colonially reconstructed medievalism, more indigenously enduring in others. I had so wanted an orrie of my own as a child reader, not least because they were a mark of the strange: bonding with one could get an adolescent suddenly exiled from their pseudo-medieval settlement, as had of course happened to one of the protagonists; they too were creatures of the fallen-out world. In this one, they were inquisitive and quick-moving, slithered themselves into the tub as eagerly as yapoks, and Hestia hissed at them. Awake, I am even sadder about their nonexistence than the more predictable fictitiousness of the books and their famous Australian children's author. I dreamed also of Stephen Colbert, I assume because I am worrying about him. It does not feel actually out of character that he had read much of the same random science fiction I had.
oursin: The stylised map of the London Underground, overwritten with Tired of London? Tired of Life! (Tired of London? Tired of Life!)
[personal profile] oursin

I don't know if anyone else has clocked this, which sounds like another of those vexatious cases brought by Christian homophobes, about the rainbow pedestrian - or as I was wont to call them in my youth, 'zebra' - crossings. The logic is, shall we say, convoluted.

Camden resident Blessing Olubanjo has told the local authority to get rid of the three blue, pink and white-painted pedestrian crossings... or else she would begin judicial review proceedings. She complained that the markings, installed in 2021 during Transgender Awareness Week, infringed her rights as a Christian and constituted “unlawful political messaging”. In a letter to the Town Hall, she said: “As a Christian and a taxpayer, I should not be made to feel excluded or marginalised by political symbols in public spaces.” Ms Olubanjo has been supported by Christian Legal Society, which has cited a section in the Local Government Act 1986 prohibiting councils from publishing material that appears to promote a political party or controversial viewpoint, and the crossings were a form of ‘publication’.

(Okay, it is part of the larger campaign which is about anti-trans actions and whingeing about not being allowed to pray harass women entering abortion clinics.)

But where is this that she is protesting?

Why, in the very heart of Bloomsbury, and not just Any Old Bit of Bloomsbury ('living in squares, loving in triangles') but Marchmont Street.

Where we may find the iconic Gay's the Word bookshop as featured in the movie Pride (inaccurately described there as being in Soho) and a blue plaque for Kenneth Williams, and close by one for Boulton and Park.

Anyway Camden Council '“entirely rejects” her argument, and [said] that the borough has “no place for hate”' and the views of local people taken by The Local Democracy Reporting Service were very much on the side of leaving the crossings be.

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