Randomness Guide to London

What I read

Finished The Edge. Well, there was a fair amount of research on Canadian railways went into that....

Shani Akilah, For Such a Time as This (2024), sortes ereader, i.e. opened up as I was scrolling my unread list - not sure how I came across this but enjoyed it, linked short stories about a group of Black British young (ish) people of diverse origins.

Forgot to mention this which I had already started last week and put to one side: Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia (1995, reissue with new afterword 2009) - I think I saw something about this somewhere and was interested in the idea. I was a bit irked at first by the style which was a certain kind of upmarket journalistic, and I was then a bit hmmm about him getting in touch with his own occluded lost in the mists family roots, but it was intriguing stuff, especially the way he got both drawn into the whole thing and then ejected by the community.

Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man (1964), since we watched the movie at the weekend (Colin Firth gives with brood) and I couldn't remember the book well enough to say how it matched (it did some odd things). Not, I think, peak Isherwood.

Madeleine E. Robins, The Sleeping Partner (Sarah Tolerance #3) (2011, recently reissued) - I read the earlier ones ages ago but missed this, which I was really gripped by.

On the go

And straight on to Madeleine E. Robins, The Doxies Penalty (Sarah Tolerance #4) (2025)

Up next

No idea - though a book I requested for review has now turned up. (Also essay review I turned in months ago finally came back with some minimal edits to do.)

Thinking about the 'how can you do/think about normal innocuous quotidien things' while shocking horrors are going on -

(Am not actually going to invoke pet genre of 'look at all these novels being written at a time when World War 2 was just about to begin/beginning'.)

This was just a coincidental thing that occurred to me when I was talking about something tangentially related when being a Nexpert for a journalist yesterday.

Who wanted to know about a certain sex manual v popular in its day and its author -

In the course of which I mentioned that it was not prosecuted for obscenity** unlike Eustace Chesser's Love without Fear (1940). One would have thought that possibly people had other things on their mind in 1940 than maximising matrimonial happiness, particularly considering that families were being broken up by men being conscripted into service, women being evacuated with their children, etc etc, but anyway, it was published, and sold several thousand copies before, in 1942, it was prosecuted for obscenity by the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Again, one would think people had other things on their mind. Anyway, Chesser and his publisher decided to take the case to court and plead not guilty before a jury, bringing three medical witnesses for the defence. The jury was out for less than an hour before returning a 'not guilty' verdict.

***

Yesterday saw snowdrops appearing in the local park.

*WH Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts (1940)

**However, the Pope did put it on the Index.

Should we sell our kidneys?

My feeling, on finding somebody who is apparently a reader in political theory at a well-respected institution of Teh Highah Learninz positing this, is that he may have read a lot of political theory, poor lamb, but maybe he should spend some time with dystopian science fiction if he's going to contemplate these sort of questions.

I suppose, with the Organ Donation register, there is an issue that a) it is Opt-In and b) presumably by the time many people reach that state when their organs come up for donation, those organs are probably past their Best Before date.

(I just now, in connection with an entirely unrelated transaction with a government body, was solicited to sign up with the Organ Donation Register. Already have, thanks, if anyone will want my tired old organs when the time comes.)

And on the intrusion of Commerce into this matter, has this person considered the sorts of things that have been happening - only, one admits, affecting the bodies of wymmynz? - over selling their eggs, or being surrogates, and the stories one hears are Not Pretty.

He might also consider Richard Titmuss' famous 1970 work The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy on blood donation:

[T]he author compares blood donation in the US and UK, contrasting the British system of reliance on voluntary donors to the American one in which the blood supply is in the hands of for-profit enterprises, concluding that a system based on altruism is both safer and more economically efficient.

In the 18th century, for example, some viewed being paid to sing as akin to prostitution, and professional opera singers, particularly women, could be deemed morally suspect. At that time, therefore, it might have seemed appropriate to subject professional singing to legal strictures, just like prostitution.

(I'm also thinking - has this one cropped up on agonyaunt or have I seen it elsewhere - of that scenario in which member of a family - even an estranged member of family - is being heavyed into being a donor for a relative because they are A Match. Was it even child adopted but later traced?)

Last week's bread held out pretty well.

Friday night supper: the hash-type-thing of boiled chopped up sweet potato, fried with chopped red bell pepper and chorizo di navarra.

Saturday breakfast roll: the adaptable soft rolls recipe, Marriage's Golden Wholegrain Bread Flour, maple syrup, sultanas.

Today's lunch: Scottish Loch Trout Fillets, poached like so, with samphire sauce, served with Ruby Gem potatoes roated in goose fat, sugar snap peas roasted in walnut oil with fennel seeds and splashed with tayberry vinegar, and padron peppers.

But so not in the way people who diss on my lovely city of residence usually mean it.

From scorpions to peacocks: the species thriving in London’s hidden microclimates: An extraordinary mosaic of wildlife has made Britain’s urban jungle its home:

London is the only place in the UK where you can find scorpions, snakes, turtles, seals, peacocks, falcons all in one city – and not London zoo. Step outside and you will encounter a patchwork of writhing, buzzing, bubbling urban microclimates.
Sam Davenport, the director of nature recovery at the London Wildlife Trust, emphasises the sheer variation in habitats that you find in UK cities, which creates an amazing “mosaic” of wildlife.
“If you think of going out into the countryside where you have arable fields, it’s really homogeneous. But if you walk a mile in each direction of a city you’re going to get allotments, gardens, railway lines, bits of ancient woodland.”

More than 10,000 yellow-tailed scorpions (Tetratrichobothrius flavicaudis) are thought to live in the crevices of walls at Sheerness dockyard, Kent, and are believed to have spawned a second colony in the east London docklands. They arrived in the UK in the 1800s, nestled in shipments of Italian masonry.
Meanwhile, Regent’s Park provides perfect woodland conditions for the UK’s main population of Aesculapian snakes (Zamenis longissimus). One of Europe’s largest snake species, these olive-coloured constrictors are thought to be escapers from a former research facility, surviving in the wild by preying on rodents and birds.

Art-loving falcons: 'Swooping from the Barbican, the falcons often spend the day at Tate Modern, just across the river'. Doesn't that conjure up an image?

Bats! - 'Wildlife experts believe they navigate much like human commuters, using linear railway embankments as guides through the city.' Bless.

And FERAL PEACOCKS!!! 'Other birds are legacies of Britain’s aristocratic past. Peacocks, for example, are known to strut through the Kyoto Garden in Holland Park, feral descendants of birds once kept by the gentry'.

Mention of the pelicans in St James's Park as descendants of gifts to Charles II, but alas, no crocodiles from that era have survived.

Given this metropolitan seethingness of nature red in tooth and claw, do men really need to go on Rewilding Retreats in Cornwall? (there was a para about this in the travel section which I can't locate online) - particularly given the 'walks in ancient temperate rain forest', I felt this was folk horror movie waiting to happen - just me??

What I read

Finished I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz, though will cop to only skimming the final section 'Fiorucci: the Book' (1980) about which I was a bit WTF? and 'what was she on?'

Over the weekend saw a review somewhere of the latest work by Madeleine Gray speaking well of her first novel Green Dot (2024) so thought I might see what it was like, especially as it was at a very reasonable price on Kobo - gave up about a third or so in. Did not care about the narrator or her situation.

A bit of sortes e-reader (inadvertently opening a book) started a supernatural thriller but I couldn't work out whether it was part of a series and I was supposed to know who these characters and their predicament were, or whether I was supposed to work it out over chapters jumping back and forward over time and didn't feel grabbed. May return because that might be me?

Dick Francis, Risk (1977), where I realised I have recently identified a Francis pattern such that I could finger a certain character very early on as likely to be implicated in bad stuff going down.

On the go

Have been dipping into Timothy d'Arch Smith, The Stammering Librarian (2025), some further collected essays, including one on a person of research interest, and a rather fun Anthony Powell parody.

Dick Francis, The Edge (1988), which is the one involving a lush train journey, with additional Staged Murder Mystery, across Canada (reverse direction to the way I did it).

Up next

Well, the local history society publications in which I was interested have been ordered and have arrived.

I mentioned that I was reading Dream Count for an intended new in-person book group of fairly local people connected through being (mostly) women historians (most of) whom I already know.

The gathering to discuss Dream Count was yestere'en in Highgate, at a destination to which there is a bus service from the nearby main road, though on Sunday evenings the service is a little more sporadic than habitual and I arrived a bit early, even after some difficulty finding the house in question. (Serious FAIL by local residents to actually have house numbers visible, ahem, not helped by several houses actually being nos XX-YY which adds to the confusion and in fact I ended up going to the wrong house first.)

However, once I got there it was agreeable to see auld acquaintance and talk of how things had been going -

- I am not entirely persuaded that having a sit-down at a table supper was actually a great idea, or maybe that was just me who had not all that long ago had a large late lunch.

Discussion of actual book did not get started for some while. Everybody seemed to have a rather mixed response, though it did, at least, provide a basis for discussion along several directions.

Future plans to meet at 6 week intervals - not to have full dinner party (relief!)* - next book will be Anna Funder's Wifedom about Eileen Orwell (already have the ebook yay).

Kind lift not all the way home but to useful point with lots of buses from Our Hostess.

*Snacks instead - should I take foccacia and Famous Aubergine Dip? Y/N