Victorianitas

Ah, the sparkling turquoise seas and golden beaches of the Caribbean:



Or, as this actually was, the sparkling turquoise seas and golden beaches of a small island on a more northerly latitude than Moscow. Yeah, you can keep your crowded beaches and your twelve-hour flights; we got a tiny little propellor plane to the Outer Hebrides, and woke up to this view every morning. Oh, yes.

Although, the plane? Tiny. Tiny tiny tiny. I've been on small propellor planes before, but none where Row A was empty because that's where the pilots left their bags. Left their bags so that they could reach for anything they wanted without leaving the cockpit, that is. But, that's how it can land at airports that look like this:



(That's a different beach from the beach above. This one has a windsock.)

The island has half the population it used to, and that wasn't much to begin with. (As with much of this part of the world, the population decline was in the 18th and 19th centuries, back when sheep-farming meant big money and ships to North America were a useful way to get rid of all those now-excess people living on your land.) The next island we stayed on was even smaller; the owner of the B&B told us it would only be five minutes walk away from the pier where the ferry dropped us off, but "if the weather's really foul, just go into the ferry terminal and ask him to give Mary a ring, and I'll come and pick you up."



We walked, though - and it was worth getting eaten alive by midges to see this.

via a mobile, on speakerphone, in their car.

"When's your flight?"
"Tuesday lunchtime, and then we're away till -"
"WATCH OUT Jesus Christ."
"Mum!"
"It's fine, he's just going too fast down FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE this hill and I can't see over this plant."
"What plant? I thought you were going to the sheepdog trials?"
"No, that was yesterday. We've just come back from the garden centre."
[My dad's voice:] "With a hoverfly!"
[My mum again:] "Oh, yes, there's been a hoverfly hovering about six inches over this plant since we picked it up, and it's still doing it. We have our own little ecosystem in the car."
"Are you sure it's not a wasp?"
"It's not a wasp. It's hovering."
"Wasps hover! You can't trust wasps."
"It's a hoverfly. So when's your flight?"
"Tuesday, but I'm off work on Monday too, so really I'm on holiday from now. So I'm going to email you the details of the hotel, because I'm not taking my phone -"
"What? You're not taking your phone?"
[My dad:] "What's wrong with her phone?"
[My mum:] "She just said she's not taking it."
[My dad:] "Why wouldn't she take her phone? That's bloody stupid."
[My mum:] "Your dad says that's bloody stupid."
"Yes, I heard that. I'm not taking it because I want to not be around phones and computers and email for a few days. It is not bloody stupid."
[My dad:] "You should always take your MOVE THAT HOVERFLY!"
*scuffling*
[My dad again:] "You should always take your phone. They're so useful."

Yes, indeed.

So. Yesterday, I came back from work, found that my uncle had sent me a birthday card (belated - although, it's always belated - although, I can't ever remember when his is either, so never mind) with a crisp brand new £20 note inside. Ooh, I thought. That's handy, since my wallet contains:

- one £5 note in the note compartment
- one £5 note slumming it with the loose change
- a few more pounds in said loose change
- and various old train tickets, expired credit cards, stamps, etc.
- and it hasn't seen a crisp new note for quite a while.

So I put the £20 note in my jeans pocket - I am very, very sure that I put the £20 note in my jeans pocket - and went about my day.

This morning, heading to work from my boyfriend's flat, I realised halfway there that I'd left my wallet under his coffee table. (Actually nowhere near halfway there, but I am lazy and didn't want to turn back.) He still had some stuff to do at home, and I was meeting him for lunch later anyway, so I texted him to ask him to pick up the wallet, and carried on.

Usually this would be annoying, since it'd mean I had no money until lunchtime. But since I had a crisp brand new £20 in my pocket this morning, I stopped at a shop and bought a can of the world's best Fanta (Fruit Twist, since you ask) to get some change.

I know I reached into that pocket and brought out a £20 note. I know I handed it to the woman behind the counter, apologised for not having anything smaller, was told it wasn't a problem, and was given a lot of change. I remember this.

And yet, at lunch, when the bill arrived, I did not have change for a £20 note in my pocket. Nowhere near. How could I have lost a £5 note, a £10 note, and some loose change? Maybe I'd put it somewhere else? Weird. Anyway, I opened the wallet I'd just got back so I could at least put the two £5 notes that were in there towards the bill, and pulled out... a crisp, brand new, £20 note. And it was the same note. I swear. Okay, it's not like I'd marked it or anything, but... you don't get crisp brand new £20 notes round here very often, and certainly not turning up in wallets after you thought you'd already spent them in shops.

So, either:

1) I'd put the birthday £20 in my wallet after all, and forgotten about it. (Very likely.) By sheer coincidence, there was also a £20 note in the pocket of those jeans the one time I wrongly thought I'd put one there the day before. I somehow managed to lose all the change from that £20 along the way.

2) The note in my pocket was the birthday £20, and the note in my wallet had been there all along. And I lost all the change somehow.

3) Either my wallet or my jeans pocket has started generating £20 notes.

4) The birthday £20 my uncle sent is actually a magic note, which returns to its owner when spent.

5) There was never a £20 note in my pocket, but since I was so sure there was, I actually paid for a can of Fanta with an old train ticket, Jedi mind trick style.

However unlikely options 3, 4 and 5 might seem, I can assure you that the chance of me not noticing a £20 note in my wallet is even slimmer, so that rules out option 2. Which leaves only option 1. But, that also seems unlikely...

I'm surreptitiously watching my wallet from a distance now. Don't tell.

a) Nothing.

b) Or at least there wouldn't be, if product manufacturers worldwide didn't feel the need to spraypaint 80% of everything targeted at women in it. Case in point, my new walking boots:



These were some of the least pink-focused ones available, too. I get the feeling they made it most of the way through the design process being grey, black and silver, until someone noticed. "Dear heavens, George! We can't market those to women - they might get halfway up a mountain and have a sudden crisis of gender identity! Quick, slap some pink trim on there and replace the shoelaces!"

Likewise, I have been wearing pink socks for most of today, because it is apparently impossible to buy a pack of five pairs of socks without pink featuring in there somewhere unless you're really, really trying. Which I'm usually not, because life is too short, but that doesn't mean little bit of me doesn't cringe deep inside every time I put them on.

Because it's not just a colour. It's coded as 'Girls like floaty things and princesses and diamonds and shopping!' just as much as green in supermarkets is coded as 'This is healthy, organic, and good for the planet!' or black in clothing is coded as 'Hello, I am Very, Very Serious'. If pink was just a colour, we would not have ended up with this, in which Memorex learned that women felt ignored by the tech industry, and countered that by producing... a handbag-shaped iPod dock. In pink. Which is really easy to use, because women 'don't have the time' to learn about technology.

See also: HP's laptop disguised as a handbag (which in their own words, 'coordinates perfectly with stunning Vivienne Tam pieces!'). See also Dell's attempt to market netbooks to women by explaining that you can use them to plan your diets and schedule your meditation sessions.

See also: the man who replied to me elsewhere on the Internet, when I described the new computer I was getting and said that while I was pretty tech-savvy and really into computers, I hadn't upgraded for a while and had never owned a laptop before. He helpfully suggested that the Macbook Pro I was thinking of was probably going to be way too expensive and far more computer than I needed, and recommended a netbook which was 'fine for word processing and email'. Because he had lots of women friends who liked it. And he'd heard it was the best 'chick computer' out there.

Okay, he didn't suggest I buy a pink one. All he did was work from the well-supported, long-established premise that because I was a woman, I'd need a special product that could cater for my techphobic womanly nature.

And I'm sure chick computers come in all colours under the sun.

Three conferences in two weeks. For the sake of your sanity, your health, and your ability to sit through a Q&A session beginning with the words 'This is more of a comment than a question, really' without feeling a primal urge to throw a data projector at the speaker in question, just say no.

The conferences themselves were great. I've mostly recovered from my pre-emptive grumpiness before the first one ("Have a fun conference!" "Have a fun conference? Have a fun conference? You do know this conference involves getting up at 4am to fly there, right? On Ryanair?"), and the inevitable exhaustion was helped by having some time at home between conferences #1 and #2. Still, given that for most of my PhD conferences were my only real time off, it's a bit depressing to realise that drunken conference dances going on till 2am are no longer my favourite part of the conference. Going home and sleeping? That's my favourite part of the conference.

Some observations from along the way:

1) There are good conference badges and bad conference badges. Anything that hangs at breast-height with really tiny type is a bad conference badge. (I have heard some disagreement on this, but none of it from women, so whatever.) Clip-on badges are fine, except for when people attach them to their waistbands or to pockets of shirts worn under jackets, which they will. Safety pins are better.

2) A campus map is not a substitute for direction signs. Lots of direction signs. Seriously, just plaster the campus with arrows, everyone will thank you for it.

3) Macs will not bite you! Macs are fine! You do not need special advance warning if people are bringing Macs to your conference! I honestly do not get this, not when all people want is to plug their fairly standard computer into a fairly standard data projector. It's not quite 'Can I get this full-scale model of the Antikythera mechanism running on the campus network', is it?

4) Ryanair really is getting worse. I swear to God, if the plane got into trouble they would sell you parachutes.

5) Packing just about as much stuff as you can humanly carry, and then taking along a laptop as well, is the only deterrent I have ever found to spending three months' wages on the book stall.

Transcribing old documents is fun, so long as they're not too old. Take this, for example:



It looks a bit weird, but but once you account for the lower-case E being written a little oddly and the second letter in being a long s, it snaps into sense as the word 'escape'. (This is a 1715 letter written about the currently underway Jacobite rebellion, and the escaper in question got away from an army.)

There are other letters that don't quite look like we'd usually write them today. Take this word:



Right after the O at the beginning are two lower-case Cs, and again, that's a long S rather than a lower-case F.

Sometimes, you'll come across things you can read, but not make any sense out of, like this:



That looks like '7ber'. It is '7ber'. It makes more sense in context, at the top of a letter:



'7ber' is 'September'.

There's other things around in the same period, too, and sometimes you find unfamiliar abbrevations, characters, and spellings, all jostling together:



The middle word is 'yt', an old abbreviation for 'that'; the last is 'society', spelt with a long S and an -ie ending.

Early 18th century writing is not something I'm familiar with. I have absolutely no training in paleography, the study of reading old handwriting (although I'm pretty sure that mentioning this to medievalists would just get me laughed at since this is practically modern, what's all the fuss about?). But I'm getting quite fond of it, because a) once you understand how the abbreviations work and how letters often get written, it's not that hard to understand, and b) my actual specialisation is in the nineteenth century. You want to see what nineteenth century handwriting looks like?



Hmm. Does that look any better in context?



I rest my case.

1. Set alarm for stupid o'clock.
2. Wake up twenty minutes before taxi arrives, having carefully timed everything to waste not a moment's sleep.
3. Swear as taxi arrives 7 minutes early. Hurry, drop hairbrush, stub toe, swear again, belatedly apologise for being noisy, kiss boyfriend goodbye, race out for taxi.
4. Get to dark and dismal bus station to find bus already nearly full of inordinately cheerful people.
5. Bus leaves 15 minutes early. Ponder enthusiasm of everyone in the country at this goddamn time in the goddamn morning.
6. Get to airport. Go to get money out. Realise debit card is in jeans pocket, back at home. Try credit card instead. Realise credit card is also in jeans pocket. Oooh, this isn't good.
7. Phone bank, to be told that telephone banking is not open this early in the morning.
8. Google bank, to be told that all other enquiries except for 'I want to open an account and give you lots of money!' should be dealt with via telephone banking.
9. Count cash. Wonder if there's enough there to get a coffee now and to get train fare to destination after plane lands. Look up fare, discover coffee is 20p too expensive. Swear quietly to/at self.
10. Google various combinations of 'holy hell I am stranded without a debit card and with hardly any cash and I have to decide right now whether to get on a plane that will take me several hundred miles away, what do I have to do to convince the bank to give me money when I get there?' Answers unsatisfactory. Sigh.
11. Kiss iPhone anyway.
12. Decide upon plan A - get to destination, go to bank, possibly fake tears, produce passport AND staff card AND all other photographic ID on person, beg for money - and plans B-D, which are more complicated but at least bring the total of Possible Outcomes In Which I Am Not In Serious, Serious Trouble to 4.
13. Wistfully watch other people drinking coffee.
14. Get plane. Carpe diem, etc.
15. Land, scramble off plane in time to make it to train station just before train leaves, settle down in seat, wonder if coffee can be materialised through sheer force of will. (No.)
16. Phone bank. Explain situation. Am told that cash will be given at the discretion of the branch in question. Mentally count three branches within walking distance of destination, decide odds must be fairly good.
17. Get to first branch. Explain situation. Look pitiful. Receive cash.
18. Realise, once immediate money situation is solved, that feet have been rubbed to blisters by raggedy insoles and now I cannot walk one more step without yelping.
19. Get insoles. Limp to destination.

My cousin added me as a friend on Facebook. This is a cousin that I think I've met once, when I was twelve and she was eight and we had a lengthy disagreement about what colour rosettes got first prize in horse shows (her: blue, me: red - a US/UK divide, it turns out, argued out in a small English town due entirely to our different choices in horse books). Anyway, nice to speak to her again, in the only conversation I've had with anyone from that side of the family since 1992.

Bit of background here: my mum's side of the family is scattered across the globe, and there are approximately eight thousand of them within first-cousin distance. Obviously, I don't know all of them very well, but I know who they are well enough to take a good guess at names at parties. (Helped, admittedly, by this being a huge Irish Catholic family in which everyone is either named Michael or Kathleen, or has a parent or child named Michael or Kathleen.)

My dad's side of the family mostly lives within a ten-mile radius of where I grew up, and I know none of them. My dad's mother lived a fifteen-minute drive away, and I met her once, at the age of seven, for half an hour. She always sent me huge amounts of toys for Christmas, all things like dolls and girly make-up sets and other things nobody who knew me would ever have bought, things lovingly wrapped in pink paper that might as well have been printed with 'I know nothing about this little girl, but damn it I am going to buy presents for my granddaughter!' I thought this was really sad, that she clearly thought a lot more about me than I ever had about her, until I was older and found out that my dad had left home at the age of five for pretty good reasons. After which I thought it was sad in a whole different way. But, I don't know; she was an unmarried teenager when my dad was born, which can't have been a great situation in a small English town in the fifties. She was a much less crap mother to my dad's much younger half-siblings.

Anyway, what I was going to say is that it's really nice to be in contact with my cousin. And to find out from her profile pictures that my hypothesis re: every relative within three degrees of separation from me having curly hair continues to be compelling.

Behold what I did to my knee last weekend:



The answers to your questions:

1) Yes. Precisely as sore as it looks.
2) There was this hill, and the way down was a really steep path through some woods, all twisty and turny and full of tree-stumps and stones, and the ground was so dry and loose that it would just skid away under your feet, and if you stepped wrong you'd just go flying, see? And then just before that path, there was a big, grassy flat bit containing one (1) rock, rising up through the turf in some ancient geological grudge just in time to catch my knee on the way down. So that's where I fell over.
3) Well, obviously better shoes.
4) Because if I wore jeans I wouldn't be able to milk this for so much sympathy.
5) Yep, still sore.

Raaaaaaaain. Rain rain rain rain rain. And I am not at all complaining, because this comes at the end of a week where the air's been so close and muggy that outside feels like a washing machine after the cycle's just finished. Inside is better, not because of air conditioning - nowhere I work or live has air conditioning - but because I work in an old building with thick walls, and plenty of cool surfaces to drape yourself over when the weather gets too much. Which it does, even in here. So now it's pouring with rain, and that's fine.

This week has been busier than I'd like it; I'm currently The Person In Charge of our student workers. This is mostly not a problem, as they're great and can get on with things by themselves, but some of the software we use has picked this week to throw a grand-scale You're Not The Boss Of Me tantrum, and that we could have all done without. Also, this week has been less fun than it could have been, due to continued worrying over my brother and my dad and the recent revelation that my landlord is moving back to this country and probably wants her flat back. This will be thirteen moves for me in eleven years, including several unexpected and unwelcome events like this one, one set of landlords that were so divorced from reality and threatening with it that the police had to get involved, an assortment of neighbours ranging from the weird to the intolerable, and enough expense in moving and taking time off work to do it and getting movers and paying deposits and overlapping rent periods that I could probably afford a fair-sized payment on a house of my own by now if I hadn't had to pay it. I swear to God, whatever I did to a landlord in a past life must have been epic.

And with thick, humid weather on top of that, the kind you can't even breathe in - yes, I am very, very glad of today's thunderstorm.

My dad and my brother might lose their jobs. They might not have jobs now, by this morning; my brother might have decided to jump overboard and swim for something more stable, my dad might have decided to walk out rather than fire a whole workforce and tell half of them to reapply for their own jobs. But they probably won't. It's only a little company that they work for, and my dad's been there for thirty years; even if they could afford to leave and not look back, there's more there than money.

But the company might not still exist in a couple of weeks, so all that might be irrelevant.

I've never felt further away from home than I do right now.

I ask because I don't.

Once, back when I was twelve or so, I built a little cave behind some cupboards and some junk in the spare room, lined it with some cushions and a motheaten quilt and hid away in there every afternoon after school, reading myself into oblivion for hours at a time. I went through books like air back then. I could read a whole book in one sitting, ignoring any kind of siblings-and-pets chaos that was erupting around me; my parents used to take me shopping, leave me in the library, and find me at the end of the day, usually carrying a pile of books I could just about see over the top of. I read a lot now, but nothing approaches the kind of total, overwhelming, put-that-book-down-and-look-at-the-scenery! immersion I could manage back then.

Other things haven't changed. I still read four or five books at once, and I still have a pathological aversion to stopping at the end of a chapter. Books I like get re-read over and over again (although not quite in the way I used to when I was younger - read the last page, turn straight back to the first page, and carry on without a break). It's not quite the same, though.

This is what I'm reading at the moment:

Ruth Brandon, Other People's Daughters. The lives of governesses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Like Brandon's other books (at least, the ones I've read), it's very good and very detailed at the same time as letting you know exactly who she disapproves of.

Danny Wallace, Yes Man. It's very good. I've liked Danny Wallace since Are You Dave Gorman?. This one, though, I'm reading a couple of pages of before I'm going to sleep, sometimes, which is why I've been reading it since January and am only 2/3 of the way through.

Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out. The lives of single women after the First World War, and fascinating. I can't say enough good things about this book; in fact, I'm deliberately reading it more slowly now so that I don't have to finish it.

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief. Lent by someone who thought I'd like it. I've only read the first two dozen pages or so, of about four hundred, but, yes, it seems good so far.

China Mieville, The Scar. I bought this in October and only started reading it this week, tsch. As with his Perdido Street Station, which is set in the same world, I'm very impressed at the same time as being vaguely annoyed by how the biology works - how is it a human with the head of an insect, or the body of a crayfish? How? I know, I know, it's fantasy, and he doesn't care about that sort of realism, but dammit, I care! Which is why I'm reading this one slowly, too.

Hmmm. Needs more short stories.

Work remains good. But so busy. And yet, I go home before six every day, I sleep properly every night.

I've discovered that under normal circumstances, like when I'm not juggling four jobs and pulling thirteen-hour shifts, I don't sleep that much. Maybe six or seven hours a night, before I wake up, all refreshed and happy. Compared to the PhD years - staring blearily at the TV over my breakfast, watching Everybody Loves Raymond every morning for ten months before working out that there were two of the little blond kid - it's a new life.

I wish my dad would stop posting photos of the landscape back home on Flickr. I am so homesick right now.

By about 2pm today, I'd decided that the afternoon would be better spent under my desk. (Thinking: it's quiet there, no-one can see me, and perhaps two inches of old, nondescript desk would give some protection from the meteor storm of trouble that hit my office today.) But the keyboard would not reach, and so the plan was sadly abandoned.

For a day in which very little got done, a lot seems to have happened, and most of it made me want to gnaw off my hand. I believe that the traditional metaphor for trying to organise large groups of academics is herding cats, but I'd like to contest this on the grounds that cats are smart, independent creatures who are easily capable of looking after themselves if the herding enterprise goes awry. Organising academics is not like herding cats. Organising academics is more like playing Lemmings. That, plus issues with scheduling student workers, plus working with some troublesome documents that by five o'clock I was close to convinced had achieved sentience just to plague me, plus an ongoing battle with my ex-ISP who refuse to accept we broke up, is all why I came home to an evening of pampering myself (viz. a blanket, a mug of coffee, a stack of good books and a Walking With Dinosaurs DVD).