Randomness Guide to London

I depose that the week in which it was revealed that Charles Dickens tried to get his (sane but inconvenient) wife committed to a lunatic asylum is not the week to hymn 'family life [as] the most successful form of social security the world has ever known'.

The guy is getting his head handed to him fairly comprehensively on Twitter, but really. The ignorance.

Quite apart from the whole noxious gender aspect - I think the response would have been rather different had it been a middle-aged son as carer for an elderly mother, which is not unknown, in fact the situation of one of my cousins, who had his own health problems at the time.

Social welfare systems are not some mimsy-whimsy snowflakey thing that we've only just discovered and put in place, some form of social welfare has been around in this country since the early modern period at least.

And people weren't necessarily cherishing their Olds in the family home: they were going to the parish authorities and asking to have them put in the workhouse. In particular, I may add, if the Olds were fathers/fathers-in-law, because I recall from Book I Reviewed Some Considerable While Ago (I think it was Wally Seccombe, Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline, 1995, but wouldn't entirely swear to it) because aged women could still be useful around the house, doing a little light childminding or domestic tasks, whereas the men were pretty much just a burden.

Plus all the various philanthropic provisions that were put in place, so that people weren't entirely dependent on their families, supposing they had a family. E.g., I remark, the Foundling Hospital, set up by Jonas Hanway after seeing so many infants abandoned by unwed mothers cast out by their families (such successful. so social welfare. much security.).

My dr rdrz will recollect that two weeks ago I went for my free routine NHS checkup, and was praised for the very lovely state of my blood pressure, my BMI was also found in fine order (though I know this is a metric about which doubts have been expressed...)

And last week I went to have my blood samples taken in connection with this.

And this week I had a letter saying that they had found from this that my cholesterol level was somewhat high, not inordinately so, but I might think about dietary changes or more exercise and I am welcome to make an appointment with the practice nurse to discuss lifestyle changes.

Well, my dearios, I have looked up the dietary recommendations and frankly they do not differ greatly from what I am already eating WOT. The oats, the nuts and seeds, the fruit and veg, the pulses, the healthy oils, etc.

Okay, I have cream in my coffee, but on reflection, I am not consuming vast amounts of dairy products or other saturated fats in the course of the week.

I'd really like to do more exercise, but it's quite hard to find something that doesn't have an adverse impact on the arthritis, because a lot of things that one wouldn't think had a direct effect nonetheless do have some. And I am already doing some exercise, possibly statistically a bit more than the norm for my age-group?

So really, maybe I shouldn't be doing anything, more than what I am already doing?

What I read

Finished the Pauline Kael biography: not sure if it's just that somebody whose career was basically sitting in darkened cinemas watching movies and then writing about them is not going to be wildly exciting, and it's by its nature going to be mostly about her critical opinions and spats with other critics, directors she dissed, etc, or whether it's down to Kellow not having got a lot of cooperation from relevant individuals, e.g. Kael's daughter (there does seem to have been a certain amount of drama in her earlier life, resulting in single motherhood). I am not sure I wouldn't have done better to dig out the volumes of her criticism and read those.

Re-read all Martha Wells' Murderbot novellas and the prequel short story: The Future of Work: Compulsory.

Stephanie Burgis, Snowspelled (2017), which I think I saw recommended somewhere and the ebook of which was on offer, and which was very good. It may have the 'not like other girls' going for the protag, but that is just because the other women are differently badass rather than simpering Mean Girls, and the being different is not posited as necessarily at odds with. Have preordered the sequel.

On the go

Stephanie Burgis and Tiffany Trent (eds), The Underwater Ballroom Society (2018), as the prequel to Snowspelled was in this (and it was only slightly dearer than buying it separately, and anyway this had been vaguely on my radar).

Up next

Nothing immediate after that, but next week promises not only the Stephanie Burgis sequel above mentioned, but Amanda Downum's The Poison Court.

Bread made during week: Greenstein's Psomi Loaf, with toasted sesame seeds - mmmmmm.

Saturday breakfast rolls: the adaptable soft rolls recipe, 2:2:1 strong white/wholemeal/buckwheat flour, + dried cranberries.

Today's lunch: a fillet of wild Alaskan sockeye salmon, wrapped over a stuffing of breadcrumbs tossed in melted butter and lemon juice with zest of lemon, salt, pepper and dill, and baked under foil in a moderate oven, served with baby rainbow carrots roasted in goosefat (I am not sure this really adds much to them), garlic roasted kalettes (I fear their season must nearly be over, wah-wah-woh-woh), and padron peppers.

Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction.

Weeelllll...

Puts on her orl moar komplik8d hat.

I have been thinking lately of the idea that is there in that piece that in the past books were revered and people were engaged in deep and reverent and serious reading -

And wondering a bit to what extent some of that is an artefact of survival, because what survives is mostly the more serious literature in the form of bound books -

And I am very like to think that far more people were reading or having read to them broadsheet ballads and so on which were produced in great number and survive very sparsely, because they fell into the category of the ephemeral. Rather than the Bible or Paradise Lost or The Pilgrim's Progress -

I choose those examples on account of much of our knowledge of broadsheet ballads comes, I understand, from the collection of Samuel Pepys (who, however, threw into the fire certain other kinds of literature he consumed, hem-hem).

Plus, almanacks, and Aristotle's Masterpiece, and a whole range of things that are not considered litry textz.

I might also remark that people who read, read all kinds of different things and do not always read in the same mode. One may immerse, or one may skim. One is large and contains multitudes.