Victorianitas

I'd have loved to do this last year, but never quite got round to it. The idea is to cover a year of your life, in photos, one per day (and I know, I know, it's a leap year, but 'Project 365' is just what it's called now). I love the idea of recapping a year in images, especially since the year ahead is a little... blurry, shall we generously say? - in terms of plans, and I have no idea who or what I'll be at the end of it. My Project 365 blog is at Victorianitas365.

There's a lot of grumbling I could do about the small town I come from, but I can't fault it for reminding me why I'd never be happy settled down for good in a city.

That photo's from the traditional family Christmas Day walk (featuring also the traditional family Christmas Day short-cut in which my uncle always ends up trying to scale a close-to-vertical footpath as his siblings stand back rolling their eyes, the traditional family Christmas Day moment of panic as somebody realises that several of the children have headed off in a completely separate direction, and the traditional family Christmas Day complaints by by southern relatives that it's so very cold up on the hills, which must by right of ancient tradition be accompanied by copious mockery from the rest of us.)

At the top of that hill, people have been carving their initials into the stone for a long time. This is less interesting when it's anything from the past twenty years or so, especially since this is a small town and the mysterious initials are less mysterious and more 'oh, isn't that Diane's brother's son?', but the oldest ones are worth looking at. 'G M', whoever he was, must have spent a long time on this:


But 1908 is nothing compared to the land around it. It's very, very old here. Some of it's old in a pleasantly rustic way, but up on the hills, scattered with standing stones from a long, long time ago, it's beautiful in a way that turns bleak and creepy very fast. Our best local author is Alan Garner, who writes about the landscape as something ancient and magic; if you want a feel for how disturbing this can be, I can't phrase it better than this.

Page 135 of the thesis read-through, and things are looking up. And down. Sort of. I still feel like a complete and utter fool for not catching all the typos, but the thing as a whole is turning out to be a lot more interesting and readable than I remembered it being. (Admittedly, 'readable' always sounds like a backhanded compliment for academic prose.) Maybe all I needed was several months of not reading the damn thing, after all.

And perhaps a bit more time spent in my favourite city bookshop with a coffee, a stack of things I haven't read yet, and unlimited WiFi. That helped.

My supervisor e-mailed me today with a list of things I should do to prepare for my viva. What I wanted to do was run away to sea, but we don't have a sea, and so instead I took my camera and walked down to the river to spend a few hours in the fresh air.



It didn't feel too much like winter (defined in via a two-stage process: a) how far away from your front door you can get before realising you forgot your gloves, and b) whether or not you can be bothered with the effort of walking all the way back up 61 steps to get them once you do), at least until I got out of the shelter of the buildings and down to the river, at which point it was suddenly very cold indeed. But it was a good walk, with just me and a man walking his dog and a few bemittened children stamping on frozen puddles in the whole world.



Here's what puzzled me, though. I haven't walked that way for years, and at one point on the riverbank, there was a new council sign bolted to the railings saying "In the interests of safety, no golf allowed." Hmm. There was a fair-sized stretch of grass and trees, but it was very lumpy grass and quite a lot of trees, and golf doesn't seem like the sort of game you can play just anywhere. Admittedly, my experience with the sport is limited to waitressing in a golf club one summer, but I would've thought you needed a golf course. Or at least some holes in the ground, into which golf balls can be hit.

Also, it's possible that the members of the club where I worked were doing it wrong, but golf never came across to me as the kind of game that needed safety warnings, except a) to spectators ("FORE!") and b) in the event of thunderstorms, because golf apparently addles the part of the brain that warns the rest of us not to stand outside holding a large metal pole in the air when there's lightning. (I am not joking. People needed repeated warning about this.)

Also, even assuming there is some small kind of Extreme Golf that a) can be played in areas that do not resemble a golf course and b) is a danger to public safety, has this really been a common enough problem for the council to put up a warning sign? Well, yes, apparently. Yes, it has.

There weren't any golfers out today, though. All was peaceful.