strange_complex | Entries tagged with family

I appreciate that I've basically stopped posting here other than WIDAWTW posts, but this is one small thing I can manage to keep up. A list of the books I read for leisure in 2024 and pictures of most of them. (Some were read on Kindle or returned to their owners before I got round to taking a picture.)

1. Tanya Kirk, ed. (2022), Haunters at the Hearth - Christmas ghost stories in the British Library Tales of the Weird series.
2. Simon Raven (1960), Doctors Wear Scarlet - the basis of the film, Incense for the Damned.
3. Matthew Lewis (1796), The Monk - a real page-turner, brilliantly arch and knowing, read on Kindle.
4. Susan Hill (1983), The Woman in Black - the novel, having read the play c. 25 years ago.
5. Bram Stoker, Dacre Stoker and Samantha Lee Howe (2022), Dracula: 125th Anniversary Edition - skim-read, mainly to pick out the textual variants between the original type-script and the published novel, as I haven't had the opportunity to 'read' the type-script before.
6. Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817), History of a Six Weeks' Tour - read online along with the relevant parts of Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont's journals, borrowed from the University library.
7. Florence Marryat (1897), Blood of the Vampire - vampirism as a racial curse.
8. Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston (1927), Dracula: the vampire play in three acts - 1960 performance edition published by Samuel French
9. Elizabeth Hand (2007), The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora's Bride - first-person account of the Bride's experiences after escaping from the fire at the end of the film.
10. Terry Pratchett (2007), Making Money - read mainly so that I could finally give it back to the person who lent it to me without taking into consideration the question of whether I actually wanted to read it.
11. Hamilton Deane, John L. Balderston and David J. Skal (1993), Dracula: The Ultimate, Illustrated Edition of the World-Famous Vampire Play - I skipped the 1927 edition of the play in this, as I'd already read it separately only a couple of months earlier.
12. Thomas Love Peacock (1818), Nightmare Abbey - I know it's meant to be satire, but the extended scenes of people trying to out-clever each other in drawing-rooms are just unbearable. The source of the phrase "ruinous and full of owls".
13. Adam Wood (2021), The Watchmaker's Revenge - about the husband of the woman whose jet mourning brooch I inherited from my uncle, who shot her and five other people (none fatally) and spend most of the rest of his life in jail for it.
14. Charlotte Dacre (1806), Zofloya or The Moor - written in the vein of The Monk but with a female central character who has no interest in even trying to behave morally from the start.
15. Jane Mainley-Piddock, ed. (2023), Casting the Runes: the letters of M.R James - this review was fair, but there are a few gems in there nonetheless.
16. Mike Ashley (2020), Queens of the Abyss - short macabre stories by female authors in the British Library Tales of the Weird series.
17. Simon Stern (2018), The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, Volume Three - borrowed from Joel and finished on the last day of the year.

Last time I travelled abroad: mid-January, to Denmark to speak at a conference on public space in Roman Britain (LJ / DW).

Last time I slept in a hotel: on the same trip to Denmark. It was the Scandic Aarhus City and it was very nice.

Last time I flew in a plane: same trip again! I flew with Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) from Manchester to Aarhus, via Copenhagen on the way there and direct on the way back. They seemed very good and had nice onboard food.

Last time I took a train: would you believe, to and from Manchester airport for the same trip.

Last time I took public transport: Wednesday 11 March. I walked to work that day, precisely to avoid it for coronavirus-related reasons, but caught the bus home as a) it was at a quieter time of day and b) I wanted to go to the supermarket on the way home, and the bus stops right outside it but my walking route takes me a different way.

Last time I had a house guest: New Year's Eve / Day. My friend

kantti and her husband stayed over for dinner, silly games and champagne.

Last time I got my hair cut: er, when I was about 15? Unless you count the occasional very minor trims which I get either my sister or

lady_lugosi1313 to do for me.

Last time I went to the movies: mid-November, to see the premiere screening of a film-of-an-opera which my colleague had acted as research consultant for (LJ / DW).

Last time I went to the theatre: 8 March, to see Robert Lloyd Parry doing Lost Hearts and A Warning to the Curious. It was the last weekend when doing that sort of thing seemed OK. He had a full house, actually. I have seen him do A Warning to the Curious before, but not Lost Hearts. It's one of my favourite M.R. James stories, and it was so good!

Last time I went to a concert: hmmm... There may be something I've forgotten, but judging from what I've recorded here there are two potential answers, depending on what you count: 1) live music from an Icelandic band called amiina accompanying a screening of Fantômas in April 2019 (LJ / DW) or 2) a performance of Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore when I was in Vienna at a conference with a colleague in September 2014 (LJ / DW).

Last time I went to an art museum: May 2019 during our DracSoc holiday to Germany, when I spent a whole day on the Museum Island in Berlin, split between the Altes Museum, Neues Museum and the Pergamon Museum. Since I never posted any pictures of their holdings here at the time, I will put one up now, though it's hard to choose what since the Altes Museum in particular was so full of amazing stuff. Probably the most exciting, though, was this famous tondo of the emperor Septimius Severus and his family, which is the only such painted ancient imperial portrait to survive:

Last time I sat down in a restaurant: 8 March, before the M.R. James performance the same evening, when I met up with

cosmolinguist and

HickeyWriter at Mod Pizza in Leeds city centre beforehand.

Last time I went to a party: 20 July 2019, when I went to my friend

Bavage's Moon Party to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing.

Last time I played a board game: arguably today, when I played Story Cubes over Skype with Eloise and Christophe. This is a game consisting of nine dice with pictures on each side, which you have to roll and then tell a story based on the nine pictures which come up, and I realised that we could play it remotely if Eloise rolled the dice and I wrote down what she said they showed. It was kind of chaotic, especially when Christophe joined in, but fun and a nice way to get some contact with them. If that game doesn't count because it doesn't strictly have a board, then New Year's Eve when I played Augustus with

kantti and her husband.

I thought filling all that in might make me a bit sad, but actually no - it was a nice way of reliving good memories. Here's to the days when we can do all this stuff without a care once again.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/661096.html

At the end of May, my friend

rosamicula posted this image on Facebook for a book meme designed to be played out during the 30 days of June:

Although I could see from the image that it had originally been designed as viral advertising for a publisher, and a poke around on Twitter revealed that it was four years old, the prompts instantly sparked lots of thoughts and ideas, so I decided to go for it. With a bit of careful forward planning, I managed to keep it going faithfully on both Twitter and Facebook every day throughout the month, despite the fact that I spent about a third of it away from home (on holiday in Scotland, visiting my family or in Swansea doing external examining), and I felt that it captured quite a faithful cross-section of my academic and personal selves. A little belatedly, and before the posts entirely disappear down the drain of social media, I'm now transposing the results here, so that a few different people can see them and I stand some chance of finding them again in future.

( Lots of books under this cut )

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/616466.html

I've just got five remaining 2017 film reviews to write now. I'm going to try to knock out one or two an evening this week, so that I can get on to the four films I've seen by now in 2018 by the weekend.

32. Dracula (1958), dir. Terence Fisher

I watched this on the weekend just before Halloween 2017, when my sister and her family came to stay. After the children were in bed on the Saturday night, I suggested an M.R. James adaptation, which is what we had watched on the same occasion the year before, but my sister said she'd like to see a Hammer horror film, and after some discussion we decided on this one. Obviously, I've seen it a few time before (previous reviews are indexed on my Christopher Lee list: LJ / DW), but this viewing offered me the opportunity of seeing it through the eyes of people who haven't flagrantly over-watched it. Charlotte (my sister) broadly knows the story of Dracula and reckoned she had probably seen this version once before during our childhood, but so long ago that she couldn't remember anything specific about it, while Nicolas (her husband) was coming to it pretty much cold. So I told them to share with me any thoughts or reactions they were having as they watched, and also periodically asked them questions to see what they were making of it.

Perhaps the most interesting outcome of this was their reading of the first encounter between Jonathan Harker and the vampire woman (who I just call Valerie Gaunt, because it's such a perfect name for a vampire) in Dracula's castle. Watching this, Charlotte announced her suspicion that Valerie must be a vampire straight away, and when I asked her why, she said she thought Harker had reacted with surprise because she was cold when he touched her – not something that's ever stated in the dialogue, but actually perfectly plausible within the terms of the story, since Tanya does notice that vampire!Lucy's hand is cold later on. Nicolas, meanwhile, wasn't at all convinced, arguing that she wouldn't be asking him to help her escape from Dracula's castle if she was a vampire. In other words, Charlotte read the scene correctly because she paid attention to the body-language, whereas Nicolas did not because he allowed himself to be taken in by the dialogue. I cannot help but observe that that's a very gendered split, although possibly Charlotte did have an advantage in the form of her slightly better knowledge of Dracula stories generally, which gave her a stronger expectation that there would be vampire women in Dracula's castle.

Other than that they followed the story much as you would expect, and seemed to enjoy it. With a bit of luck I'll be able to lure them further onwards into the series on future visits!

33. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014), dir. Peter Jackson

And this one was my last Lovefilm rental before their tragic closure. Perhaps not the best note to end that relationship on, actually, because this is how I had come to feel by about an hour and a half in:

Just watching Battle of the Five Armies on DVD. It's pretty, but they've now been fighting for what, an hour? Struggling to stay interested.
— Penny Goodman (@pjgoodman) November 4, 2017

In fairness, I should probably have anticipated that a film called 'The Battle of the Five Armies' might involve a fair amount of fighting. And it was pretty alongside the battles – the lake-town, the city near the mountain, the mountain façade, the icy mountain-tops. Plus it had Christopher Lee in it, at least for a little while, in one of his last few screen appearances.

Probably most interesting for me, though, was the strong inter-text between Luke Evans' portrayal of Bard the Bowman and his role as Vlad Dracula in Dracula Untold (LJ / DW). That is, both involve him leading a ragged band of desperate early-modern humans against a seemingly-unbeatable foe, shouting things like "Any man who wants to give their last, follow me!" and showing a tender concern for his family, set against a similar aesthetic of fortified cities, battles on plains surrounded by mountains and war-bats. The two roles overlap weirdly for him: judging from Wikipedia he'd already recorded all his scenes as Bard in both The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies before he began work on Dracula Untold, although Battle was released last (it's all rather complicated, primarily because of the way the Hobbit series was extended from two to three films part-way through). So that means he would have been playing Dracula in the knowledge of his completed performance as Bard, and I think the one probably did inform the other. And meanwhile, even before Battle's release it's not a stretch to imagine that Dracula Untold's production team was hoping to capture something of the feel of the Lord of the Rings / Hobbit films generally, and perhaps even specifically bits of Battle through general insider industry knowledge. It's always nice to put those sorts of jigsaw pieces together.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/599629.html

I have wanted to make this post for three days, but have been unable to do so until now because I could not load my LJ photo galleries. As multiple friends have noted, LJ has been shonky in a number of ways over the same period, and although it seems OK again now, the problems seem to be associated with a server move to Russia - and I must say I also feel very uncomfortable about relying on anything in Russia for the ongoing preservation of a journal I have been carefully curating for 13 years now. I've never felt so inclined to set up a Dreamwidth mirror... but then again something

nwhyte said in an entry earlier today made me doubt that Dreamwidth has proper picture-hosting facilities at all. It's all sadly ironic that this should happen just when people are genuinely popping up on LJ again, thanks I understand to a FB LJ-nostalgia community.

Anyway, here's what I actually wanted to post - a few pictures of our Christmas. We booked a cottage in the Cotswolds village of Bourton-on-the-Water this year - 'we' in this case being me, my Dad, my sister and her husband and children. None of us had ever done Christmas this way before, but we decided to try it on the grounds that it would be healthier and cheerier to do something new and different this year, rather than try to re-create our normal family Christmas but with one person missing. It would also allow flexible levels of participation for each person, in that everyone could choose whether to hang out with the other cottage residents, go out for a walk or simply lie on their bed reading a book. And I'm glad to say it worked really well. We did remember Mum of course, and Dad had a couple of tearful moments. But for a first Christmas without her, it was actually really nice and enjoyable and nothing like as difficult as I suspect it would have been in the family home, or even my sister's home (where Mum had also been for Christmas day a couple of times in recent years).

We arrived in the afternoon of the 23rd, in pretty rotten weather, and got settled in. We had brought a LOT of food, which took quite a bit of unpacking and putting away, while Christophe admired the (fake) Christmas tree which the cottage owners had supplied, and Eloise enjoyed The Snow Dog.

( Pictures start here )

Anyway, here we are in the Festive Perineum (h/t

inbetween_girl), which I found boring as a teenager, but has now become one of my favourite times of the year. The obligations of Christmas are all fulfilled, my work email account is blissfully free of people demanding things, and it is genuinely OK to sit around in my dressing-gown watching a Buffy marathon on SyFy and ordering the unpurchased items on my Amazon wish-list. I wondered about driving up to Allendale for their New Year's tar bar'l procession this year, as 2016 is a year which I feel pretty strongly could do with a good burning out. But the weather reports say it will be raining pretty heavily there right over midnight, so maybe not. I am open to other suggestions, if anyone has any?

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

OK, last meme entry. And again, although Boxing Day was awful, thankfully Christmas Day itself was all right, so I can describe it fairly normally.

I actually began Christmas Day at my sister's house in Warwick, because she had invited me and her old sixth-form friend Duncan over for the evening to keep up our old tradition of toasting in Christmas together at midnight. We had a lovely evening of canapés, drinks and chat, and did our little toast together at midnight (me with raspbery and cranberry juice), even though we were all yawning by that stage. Then Duncan and I bid them goodnight and headed off in my car, under a bright starry sky and taking care to avoid the (very few) other cars and people whom we saw pursuing their own rather drunken-looking paths home. I crept quietly into my parents' house with the benefit of much practice acquired during my teenage clubbing years, and sank into bed.

The next morning, we all got up, had breakfast, got ready and headed back over again to my sister's house in Warwick for Christmas Day itself. We arrived around 11am, and sat down with a round of coffee while we showered Eloise with presents. She is one and a half now, and has very definitely become a little girl rather than a baby:

She also genuinely manages to get even cuter every time I see her. The picture doesn't begin to capture that, because so much of it is about her lovely smiling animated face and her increasingly eloquent chatter, and nor does it even really show off the growing mass of blonde curls hiding at the back of her head. But I hope it gives some idea at least.

( Eloise's presents )

( Christmas dinner )

( Adult presents and Christmas TV )

A decent day all told - and a jolly good thing too, given what followed. :-/

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

OK, so my Christmas experience this year may have been pretty miserable, but I answered 23 out of 25 questions on this meme before family dramas intervened, and now I am damned well going to finish it.

I've given some indication of my answer to this question in the post for Day 15, where I explained the religious element which Christmas has for me, through the syncretism between Santa Claus and Saturn. It feels important to have a midwinter festival to cheer up the dark days of winter.

Christmas is also important to me because it is important to so many other people around me. I like it for the same reasons as I like the monarchy, and in fact looking for past LJ posts in which I have explained my reasons for liking the monarchy, I find that I have actually drawn the comparison between it and Christmas before. Whether we like either or not, and however we choose to relate to them, all of us in the UK (and many of us beyond) have those things in common. I don't think that means we need to treat them as sacred cows, but I do think it is valuable and useful - for example by giving us all a central point around which to position ourselves in relation to the institution itself and the other people who also feel some sense of a relationship with it.

Finally, Christmas is important to me because it is something we do every year, in more or less the same way. That makes it comforting and familiar, and helps me to maintain a sense of connection with my own past. The last few Christmases may have been pretty grim, but they haven't all been like that, and I want to remember the ones which were good by continuing to celebrate the festival. Also, the unchanging and cyclical nature of a festival like Christmas helps to set off the gradual changes which take place between one iteration of it and the next. Sadly for me, what it has shown this year is a sharp reflection of how much and how badly things have changed in the life of my family since Mum became ill - but while that has been painful, I think it is something I needed to see.

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

I'm answering this for my parents' house in Birmingham, because that's where I have always usually spent Christmas Day - although in fact this year we won't be doing so, as we are going to my sister's house in Warwick instead. I don't normally decorate my own house, although I did buy a wreath for the door last year, and will probably put that up tomorrow.

We usually have a tree in the front hall, standing on top of a side-table which is there throughout the year. This gets set up and decorated by me and my sister on Christmas Eve, except in the years when we have hosted a Christmas party, when we set it up in time for that instead. On the same day, I go out into the garden to collect sprigs of holly, ivy and other ever-green shrubs or winter-flowering plants, and then slot them into holes drilled into a log for me by my Dad, which is then set up on top of the mantelpiece in the lounge to create a wintry display. As it happens, I took pictures of both our tree and the mantelpiece display in 2006, so can show you what those look like:

My Dad also has two sets of those Swedish candle bridge style light sets, which he likes to set up in the windows half-way up the stairs and on the upstairs landing, and which do a great deal to make the house look cheery and festive from the outside. The upstairs landing window doesn't actually have a proper sill for them to stand on, so this involves some quite elaborate jerry-rigging with string and blocks of wood to support them. But in all honesty, I think that inventing clever methods to get the lights to sit where he wants them to in defiance of the design of the house is half the fun of those lights for my Dad.

Other than that, we put cards up on bookshelves, dressers and plate rails, occasionally put a wreath on the front door, and that's about it really. We did have some streamers and other paper decorations when I was a child, but those have long since outlived their natural lives, and I don't remember any member of the family protesting when they were quietly retired some ten or fifteen years ago.

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

Well, obviously this has varied between different stages of my life, but I can identify things which were typical in different periods.

As a child of course it was all about the excitement, finding myself shut out of rooms where parents were hastily wrapping presents, and not being able to get to sleep because I was too busy listening out for Father Christmas.

Later, from my mid-teens onwards, I quite often went out to pubs or clubs with friends on Christmas eve. This was a particular favourite activity of a guy I got together with shortly before Christmas in the year that I was 17. I think joining in on his typical Christmas eve out with his mates at the various rock pubs in the centre of Birmingham was one of our first or maybe second dates. By the next year, we'd broken up, but were still friends (occasionally with benefits), so I went along for the same thing - and at that age, something you've done twice already feels 'typical'.

I've pretty much lost touch with the guy since, but I've been out for drinks on Christmas eve at various other times since with different friends or my sister, so it was definitely reasonably typical for a while. I've always been mildly surprised by how few people seem to be out doing the same thing, but then again I haven't done it myself either for a fair few years now, so maybe more people have started going out on Christmas eve than I realise. Anyway, I always liked the feeling of liminal, non-standard time, with all normal activities on hold and a free rein to just sit around, drink and relax, and also the feeling of weaving my way home half-sozzled through the cold dark evening, ready to creep ever-so-quietly to bed and then wake up to Christmas in the morning.

In my mid-twenties, we began hosting family Christmas parties at my parents' house, at least one of which was on Christmas eve itself - though more often they ended up being held on the 23rd. Three got written up in my LJ, here, here and here, but they stopped in 2007 because shortly after that my Mum got cancer, and it became too much for us to manage after that. At least twice we also went to a carol service on Bournville village green on Christmas eve itself.

But in parallel with those traditions, and still continuing to this day, is the habit which my sister and I have developed of staying up until midnight on Christmas eve and toasting in Christmas together with a little drink of something. I'm not sure when we started this, but it has definitely become an annual fixture now. In fact, this year I will be driving all the way from Birmingham to Warwick and back on Christmas eve just to share it with her, in spite of the fact that I'll then be returning again the following day for Christmas itself (which we are holding at her house for the first time ever). But I think I will enjoy the epic journey through the still, cold wintry night as an experience in itself, and I am certainly looking forward to some (very restrained) toasting in front of her wood-burning stove. After all, Santa will just stay home if we don't raise a glass to him on his way around the world.

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

Oh, plural form of the word 'tradition' in this title, how I love thee! Because now I can just list all my favourite traditions without having to choose between them. Here goes:

Buying everyone candles to mark the Saturnalia, because I can, and people indulging me over it.
For the thirteen years that we did it, the annual Christmas dinner with my Bristol buddies.
Decorating the family tree with my sister while listening to CDs of cheesy Christmas music and trying to stop the cat chasing after all the decorations.
Going out into my parents' frosty, wintry garden to find sprigs of greenery, berries and winter-flowering plants, slot them into a log drilled with holes which my Dad made me for the purpose and make a winter display for the top of the fireplace.
Helping to host a Christmas party at my parents' house, including taking charge of the mulled wine, singing carols and enjoying getting all dressed up and into the festive spirit.
Staying up until midnight on Christmas eve to toast in Christmas with my sister.
Putting sherry and mince pies out for Santa, which I still do even though we stopped having stockings any more in 2005. I'll say more about why I do that when we get to day 15, 'Do you still believe in Santa Claus?'.
Bringing the presents from underneath the tree and into the lounge, sorting them out into piles according to who they're for, and then taking turns for each member of the family to open one present at a time, while sipping delicious coffee and eating chocolates.
Having angel chimes on the table during Christmas dinner.
Everything about the dinner itself.
Setting fire to the pudding! I'm not sure when this became 'my' job, but it is now, and I love doing it.
Sitting around afterwards with a roaring fire in the grate, drinking more coffee and playing with new presents.
Watching Doctor Who.
Staying up late after everyone else has gone to bed watching TV and catching up on other peoples' days, and opinions of Doctor Who via the internet.
Going to see my oldest friend Amy and her family on Boxing Day.

Now wouldn't it have been a pity to have to choose just one of those?

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

Obviously, in context, this means 'favourite Christmas memory'. And as other people doing this meme have said earlier today, it's a difficult one to answer, because it is in the very character of Christmas that you repeat the same things every year. That repetition makes it difficult to distinguish specific individual memories, and distorts the picture by merging different years' experiences into one.

I've always enjoyed the parties which my parents have held on either Christmas Eve itself or the 23rd December, for example, but I think the memory of those which is now in my head is a sort of amalgamation of all the best bits of all the parties we ever hosted. Since that was a good five or six of them, I don't really want to nominate any individual one of those parties as my favourite Christmas memory, because I am far from sure that the experiences I'm remembering really belong to one individual party.

So I'll go for a distinct moment which I really can remember, in large part thanks to it being recorded on my LJ. It's a quiet one, featuring me on my own, sitting up late after everyone else had gone to bed and watching Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone while wrapped up in a quilt just in front of a television turned down as low as possible in order not to disturb my mother in the bedroom immediately upstairs, while the embers in the fire sank slowly into the grate and there were copious chocolates lying on the lounge floor around me, all within easy reach.

That might not seem like a very sociable memory, but I've chosen it not just for the moment itself, but for the fact that the reason I enjoyed that experience so much was because it came after a really lovely family Christmas day, and indeed several days of festive jollity with all sorts of different family and friends beforehand. Sitting up late by myself at the end of it all, surrounded by warmth, comfort and indulgence, gave me the chance to look back over the previous few days, hug the memories to myself and appreciate how good it had all been. I was wrapped not just in my quilt, but in a hearty dose of the Christmas spirit - and that is why that moment now stands in my memory as a place which I aspire to get to at the end of every Christmas.

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

I'm taking this to mean best Christmas gift ever given, rather than best gift of any kind ever given, but must admit that I'm struggling to remember very many of them in that case. I can only hope my presents have been slightly more memorable for the recipients!

I did give one gift last year which went down very well, though, and that was a clear plastic tube containing a stack of six different-coloured toy bath ducks for Eloise. It was only something I grabbed on a whim while in the queue for the tills in the Kirkstall branch of Dunnes Stores, because it looked brightly-coloured and exciting, and also included one purple and one black duck, so was a good excuse to sneakily start training up my new niece in the ways of Gothdom. ;-) But she has had so much fun out of them.

A couple of times since I gave them to her, I have been lucky enough to sit in on the bath-time ritual and watch her playing with them, and looking back over what type of play she has used them for during the last year tells a small but distinct story about how she has grown and changed since last Christmas. When she first got them, she was only about 6 months old, so she mainly liked to wave them about, bashing them on the side of her little baby bath and occasionally sucking on them. But already by this August, at the age of about one-and-a-third years, she was more into trying to line them up neatly along the side of the bath, and picking them up again with great concern if they fell down. Apparently, more recently she has become a bit of a nightmare about undertaking bath-time at all, but thankfully I have been spared witnessing that!

As it happens, she also got very into ducks generally not long after I had given them to her, and in fact one of the first words she could securely say, at approaching the age of one, was 'duck'. She didn't enunciate the final consonant sound very distinctly, but from context that was very definitely what she was saying. What I found really amazing when she started this was that she would say it whether in the park looking at a real duck, at home looking at a picture in a book, or in the bath playing with the toy ducks - despite a huge range in colour, appearance and realism across the different contexts. I really didn't expect a baby who was under a year old to be able to recognise such disparate items as belonging to the same category, even with adult prompting and affirmation, and it was an incredible insight into the capacities of the human brain for me to realise that she could.

Anyway, babies and young children are very easy to please with presents, so having Eloise around should hopefully guarantee a good few more years of Christmas present hits. Apparently this year, she is all about elephants, helicopters and action play-sets which she can take pieces in and out of. So I guess the ideal present would be a toy helicopter with removable elephant pilots? Well, it's a bit unlikely, isn't it, but I'll see what I can do!

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

I'm pretty sure I'll never be more excited about a Christmas present than I was in the year (1985, I think) that my sister and I jointly received a My Little Pony Dream Castle from our paternal grandparents. This was at the height of the My Little Pony craze in the UK, and Dream Castle was the ultimate, top-of-the-range, much-coveted playset. Though we could buy individual ponies ourselves after a few weeks of patient saving up, Dream Castle was well beyond our wildest pocket-money dreams - so of course we had pined after it for weeks and could barely contain ourselves at the thought of actually owning it. And as our collection at that time was fairly small, consisting of perhaps 3-4 ponies each, receiving this huge exciting playset that was every MLP-loving little girl's fondest dream really did make a huge difference to the number of little characters we had to play with and the environments we could put them in.

It is of course symptomatic of what an expensive playset it was that even as a Christmas present it had to be shared between the two of us rather than given to either of us individually. I can report to our credit, though, that even though I was only 9 years old and my sister only 4, we did actually share it between us very fairly and politely, taking a week at a time to alternately 'own' the pony Majesty who came with it and her little pet dragon Spike. As an adult I suppose I could say that part of the reason I still remember that gift so fondly is that its shared nature symbolised what was really best of all about our My Little Pony play - that it made for a very successful bridge between two sisters who were quite far apart in age on a childhood scale, allowing us to come together in imaginative story-making and role-play, building cardboard houses, making clothes etc. But honestly as a child it was just all about owning the magic, and perhaps also having the prestige amongst our peers which came from having what was widely recognised as the coolest MLP playset on the market. If we had to share with each other in order to get that, then that was just a price worth paying.

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

It's hard to be entirely sure, of course, because there were so many childhood ones which have all blurred into one now, but looking back through my LJ it seems that Christmas 2004 was pretty much everything I could possibly ask for. I was in the middle of my year working at Queen's University Belfast at the time, and had had a gruelling first term there, but the Christmas vacation meant a welcome respite from that, and the general warm feeling of a return to the comforts of the childhood home. It also seems to have brought a perfect combination of Christmas activities and events as follows, which I really enjoyed throwing myself into:

Christmas meal with my Bristol undergraduate buddies in London
Travelling straight up to Birmingham afterwards for my Dad's 60th birthday, and finding that even though he'd been saying it wasn't important and he didn't mind if I wasn't there, he had saved opening all his presents until I arrived that evening
One of the best ever of the family Christmas parties which we used to host at my parent's home in Birmingham
A carol event on the village green opposite my primary school, complete with incredibly cute children from that school singing 'Away in a Manger' in Brummie accents
Roast duck, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on TV and actual snow on Christmas day

I guess it fell in that precious window when my sister and I were both grown-up enough to be participating in Christmas as full adults, and yet with few enough responsibilities for it to be an extended festive period rather than a few snatched days, while my parents were still both in full health and we had no reason to believe that that wouldn't continue to be the case for many years to come. Not, as it turned out, entirely true, but I am glad that we had such Christmases while we could.

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

Well, Christmas was lovely. We did our usual stuff - a leisurely breakfast, presents in front of the fire, a buffet-style grab-whatever-you-fancy lunch, dinner prep, Doctor Who and then the dinner itself in the evening. I got some great presents, including two Doctor Who DVDs (The Time Meddler and New Who season 3), various books which will get reviewed here eventually, two boxes of chocolates and some vouchers for Next and Marks and Spencer. And the presents I got for other people seemed to go down well, too. I gave Charlotte some posh tea-cups and a huge pampering lotions & potions set; Mum a voucher for concerts at the Town Hall and Symphony Hall in Birmingham and a waterproof radio which you can listen to in the shower; and Dad two jazz CD sets which he wanted. Plus a general package of chocolates, a Lindt Santa and a Saturnalian beeswax candle for each person.

A Christmas Carol ( took us to a different kind of Christmas )

( Overall impression and favourite bits )

( TV screens and meta-referentiality )

( Blurring the line between recording and reality )

Obviously you can't actually have Matt Smith popping up for real in every living room up and down the country, even on such a magical day as Christmas. But showing him within the story flipping back and forth between being a recording and a reality at least gave the boundary between the two a good old shake-up, and helped to create a thrilling little frisson of the feeling that, after all, he might just tumble down our chimneys too. That sort of stuff is at the absolute heart of why I like Doctor Who so much, and I was very happy to get a good hefty helping of it before tucking into my turkey.

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

I spent the weekend in Birmingham on a parental visit, vaguely structured around going to a concert in Warwick on the Sunday afternoon. Mum is looking slimmer and stronger every time I see her now that she has come off the steroids, though she is still slow and wobbly compared to how she was before she became ill. She likes going for walks around the neighbourhood to build up her strength, so on Saturday afternoon we walked along the local part of the Rea valley trail past playing-fields, dog-walkers and children on bicycles, while on Sunday morning we went up into Bournbrook to have a look at the massive demolition, river-culverting and road-construction works which are under way with the aim of completely changing the course of the main traffic flow through that area. It will definitely alter the landscape of my child-hood – but less so than I'd thought from what I'd heard about the project. In fact, as we walked around we passed my old piano-teacher's house, my old Brownie hall and even the row of purportedly-temporary huts on the University campus where my mother used to take me for the Mothers and Toddlers club when I was all of one year old. So I don't think I need to get too concerned about having my past erased.

The concert in Warwick ( is described under here )

Meanwhile, being in Warwick gave us a chance to drop in on Charlotte and Nicolas after the concert, which was great because I haven't seen their new house since the day they moved in. It's now looking a lot more cosy, with a lovely big soft sofa in the front room, a nice antique-looking coffee table and an iron-framed bed upstairs. We were also able to have a quick look through their wedding photo album, which our cousins (who did the photos) finally got round to putting together last month – only six months after the wedding. ;-) It's lovely, though – there are some absolutely gorgeous photos of Charlotte looking like someone out of a bridal magazine, all the standard shots you would expect of people processing out of the church and standing in groups, but also lots of lovely 'behind-the-scenes' shots of people who didn't know they were being photographed, laughing and smiling and playing silly jokes. It really captures the day very nicely, and I think was worth waiting for.

Click here to view this entry with minimal formatting.

Firstly, thanks to everyone for their comments on my last post. 'Cathartic' would be an understatement.

But secondly, because not everything is about doom and gloom, I have some lovely pictures to share. They are from two publications of the 1930s, and both were found in the family archive last weekend, where they'd obviously been preserved by my step-grandmother.

The first ones come from a page of the Daily Mirror, published on Monday September 17th 1934. It's the women's page (page 23), which she had torn out and kept, though we're not quite sure why. Anyway, it's an absolutely brilliant snapshot of feminine life in the 1930s. You've got recipes, fashion reports, household tips and (best of all) an article about Meg Lemonier, a 'charming little French actress' who is also a male impersonator. I've scanned it in four over-lapping parts, so that every article can be read in its entirety on at least one of the scans.

( Daily Mirror, 1934 )

The other side of the page is sporting news, but apart from a few pictures of very 1930s-looking rugby-players, it's nothing like so exciting. Teams win and teams lose in every era, and unless you're invested in their fortunes, it's pretty dull to read about.

Meanwhile, my second find was a souvenir programme printed to commemorate the centenary of the City of Birmingham being awarded a royal charter in 1938. The official content is again kind of dull - there's a great deal of stuff about centenary committees and awards, and a bit of stuff about decorations, floodlights and pageants put on to mark the occasion. Best of all by far, though, are the period adverts, which take up about 50% of the booklet. Click on each one to go to the gallery, and then again for the full-size version.

( Vintage ads ahoy! )

Click here to view this entry with minimal formatting.

So - we did it. In spite of everything, we had an absolutely lovely Christmas. There were presents, and dinner, and the Doctor Who Christmas special. And there were not tears, or arguments, or even too much gloominess about the future. Obviously it wasn't the same as most years. Mum had to take a back seat while the rest of us handled all the food preparation and so on, and even then the day clearly tired her out quite a lot. But she enjoyed it, and so did we, and that's what counts.

( And as for Doctor Who? )

Click here to view this entry with minimal formatting.

On Saturday, I reached the grand old age of thirty-two, and went on an outing to Castle Howard to celebrate. I had

redkitty23 and her partner, Vincent, as house-guests for the weekend (en route to a Primatology conference in Edinburgh), so we were able to pile into Anna's cute little retro-style Fiat 500, swoop

big_daz up from Wortley, and head off out into the countryside.

At first, we were guided on our way by 'Ken', the Australian voice on Anna's Tom Tom, but he unfortunately let us down by taking us straight into an all-but-stationary traffic jam going past York. Luckily, however, we had an alternative Yorkshire navigation system available to us: Daz Daz, armed with Local Knowledge and a road atlas. And so it was that we found ourselves bowling through Georgian brick-built villages and along sunlit country lanes, listening to The Cure while our hair whipped around in an invigorating breeze, and only got to Castle Howard half an hour later than Ken had said we would.

snapesbabe and

matgb, alas, were not so lucky, and despite gallant efforts to join us were eventually forced to turn back before they had even arrived. :-(

And this was a great pity, not only because it deprived me of the opportunity to lust over their new purple Ka, but also because Castle Howard is ace! It really is a stately home par excellence, with expansive grounds, beautiful formal gardens, fountains, peacocks, endless opulent drawing rooms, rococo furniture, plutocratic portraits and so on. But I think what I liked best about it was the extensive collections of Classical sculpture (which seemed to go on and on in every hallway and corridor), and the answering neo-Classicism of the building itself and the works of art which adorned it. It began to feel as though you couldn't turn a corner without seeing something Classical or Classically-inspired: which is quite frankly exactly how I think the world should be. ;-)

Anyway, a day like that is probably best told in pictures, rather than words, so ( here are some of my favourite photos from our outing )

... and if you liked those, you can see the full gallery here.

As we left in the late afternoon (Ken still relegated to the boot in favour of Daz Daz), Anna suggested that we should eat out in the evening. I'd planned to cook us a casserole, but who would cook on their birthday when friends were offering to take them out instead, eh? So we ended up at Jino's, where we guzzled delicious Thai food, and the waiters put a candle in my ice-cream when Anna told them it was my birthday, and then returned home to mine for frighteningly potent cocktails.

Presents were mainly books from my family, but Anna got me a beautiful orchid, while Daz (who clearly knows me far too well) got me an enamel K-9 pendant like the ones shown below (just one, though!), and my parents got me a Tiffany floor lamp to go in my dining-room:

( Presenty goodness )

So, all told, an excellent day, and some nice mementos of it to take away with me. So far, I'm enjoying being 32. It feels like a nice solid, self-confident age to be - properly into my 30s, in contrast to 31, which felt a bit apologetic about it. It's also a multiple of eight, which I've always thought of as being 'my' number - not necessarily my lucky number, but just the number that signifies me. As being born on the 2nd of the 8th and growing up in a house with the number 82 will tend to make you think...

Here's to my thirty-~~second~~third year on this planet, then. I intend to make the most of it.

This is a rather odd review to be writing, because the subject of this book is my step-great-great-grandfather, and its author is my mother. But, then again, I did finish reading it two nights ago, and I am blogging all my leisure reading again this year. So I guess I kind of have to, really!

Of course, the book itself, now that it has finally emerged into the world, is only the culmination of a project which I've been intimately aware of for many years. ( Origins )

( My own reading experience )

( A man of his time )

Naturally, I'm bound to conclude by saying that this book was brilliant, and that everyone should rush out and buy a copy. ;-) But I really did get a lot out of it, and not solely because it concerned a (step-)ancestor, or allowed me to get closer to the subject my mother has been working on for so many years. West's life gives us a genuine window into the world of a typical Victorian medic - and in this book I think my mother has done a great job of helping us to see through it. I'm deeply, fiercely proud of her achievement.

Meanwhile, in a brilliant stroke of timing, this seems like the perfect opportunity to plug once more the serialisation of West's last diary which I am undertaking to celebrate the publication of this book over at

jamesfraserwest. The first entry will in fact appear on Friday, since West for some reason did not start writing in his 1883 diary until January 11th (more details here). I know a lot of you have friended the diary already - but if you kind of meant to take a look last time I mentioned it and never quite got round to it, or thought you'd wait until it started up properly, now is the time to get over there and hit that add button! It's very much worth reading, and since it runs out in April when West enters his final illness, it really is a case of add now or miss out. Hope to see you there! :-)