Valancy's Place

What I read

Finished Cluny Brown.

Defaulted to rereads of Agatha Christie, The Murder in the Mews, The Murder in the Vicarage, Towards Zero and Taken at the Flood.

Somebody on my reading list mentioned Meg Moseman, The Falling Tower (2025) - spooky goings on at Harvard involving the ghostly presence of Charles Williams among other things. May be just me but I found it all a bit rushed: then I realised that my bar for Weird Stuff Going On In Academic Setting was set very high indeed years ago by Pamela Dean's Tam Lin (I considered that there may also be issues around Times Have Changed).

Managed to find my copy of GB Stern's Summer's Play aka The Augs (1933/4) though couldn't lay my hands on The Woman in the Hall alas. Really very good. A problem for republishing may be a few casual allusions to blackface seaside entertainment of the period.

Because I've never actually read it though I've read other of her works, and it was being inaccurately discussed recently as lost, overlooked, neglected etc, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The Homemaker (1924). This is what, like 40 or so years before The Feminine Mystique and 'the problem that has no name'?

On the go

Just recently republished (collation of two previous collections published in limited editions in 1994 and 1997), Simon Raven, The Islands of Sorrow and Other Macabre Tales. So Simon, very Raven.

I started John Wiswell, Someone You Can Build a Nest In (2024) which I know has been widely admired but I'm somehow just not vibeing with it.

Also well on into first of books for essay review, v good.

Up next

Dunno. The new Barbara Hambly arrives pretty much just as (DV) I am off to a conference.

So, today I had a physio appointment at the far from eligible hour of 1 pm, what is this even, do these people not have lunch hours? also it was at the uphill all the way clinic.

Anyway, I got there in very good time, and was able to ascertain the bus stop that would actually take me in the right sort of direction for getting home.

(It was actually quite a nice walk past people's flowering gardens or council floral bits.)

And it was a very good and useful session, with a senior person as well as my usual physio, and I think we may be getting to some habit-changing things that might improve matters.

So after I had come out I went and caught the bus, which is one that goes across rather than up and down (so much of London Transport being designed on the principle of getting people into Central London and back out again) and it is a nice bus that goes past Highgate Cemetery, even if it is the newer bit, and the hospital, and okay, ends up at a slightly non-intuitive place behind Archway, but I was able eventually to locate the relevant stop for an onward bus.

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And in other news, I have whizzed off an application for the Fellowship I mentioned and have had several kind offers from FB friends to provide letters of recommendation.

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(I did not know about Gladys Knight and the Pips version of The Boy from Crosstown!)

On the possible academic library etc access thing, somebody has kindly pointed me at the Institute of Historical Research Non-Stipendiary Fellowships, which look fairly much the thing -

- except that the window for application closes on Friday, and besides getting an application together I need a letter of support testifying to my 'interest in research, good faith and behaviour' (at least, unlike the Bodleian, there is no cavil about naked flames).

So there's that.

In other, is this good or bad, had an email from person on committee of Society with which I have had associations in the past and published in their organ (hurhhurh) saying a) they have come across a piece I published in that organ and might I like to give a paper at their upcoming conference?

Well, I could possibly throw something together -

And b) the archives of this Society and a precursor organisation in which I am particularly interested have been deaccessioned by the Academic Institution where they were held (which has, I remark, form in this matter), and returned them to the Society.

I have, in what I hope was a reasonable tone, exhorted them to put them in another repository pronto, I recommend X, where they will be with archives of related org, also the vast and important collection previously unhomed by the Institution in question.

(*MUTED ARCHIVIST SCREAMING*)

This week's bread: a rather basic wheatgerm loaf, something like 70/30 wholemeal/strong white flour + wheatgerm, [ETA: small amount of Rayner's Malt Extract], splosh of oil, turned out quite well considering it was the last scrapings of the recent batch of yeast.

Friday night supper: sorta-nasi-goreng with chorizo.

Saturday breakfast rolls: adaptable soft rolls, approx 4:1 strong brown/Marriage's Golden Wholegrain Bread Flour (end of bag), maple syrup, dried cherries. Tasty but a bit stodgy.

Today's lunch: bozbash, with red bell pepper, baby orange and yellow peppers, aubergine, okra, and baby courgettes, dried cherries, 5-pepper blend, dried basil, fresh green coriander (cilantro), and to finish, raspberry vinegar, served with couscous with toasted (slightly burnt) pinenuts.

Most women want children – but half are unsure if they will. For some, they won’t be bothered if they remain childless:

The researchers used data from the National Survey of Family Growth, a federally funded survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, from 2002 to 2019. This included surveys of a nationally representative group of 41,492 women aged 15 to 44 about a broad range of fertility-related indicators.
Findings showed that there was little change during that time in the proportion of women who said they intended to have children. On average, 62% of women said they intended to have a child and 35% did not intend to, with only a small percentage saying they didn’t know.
But up to 50% of the women who intended to have children said they were only “somewhat sure” or “not at all sure” that they would actually realize their intention to have a child.
....
And it is not just the certainty that may be affecting the fertility rate. The intensity of the desire mattered, too.
The study found that up to 25% of childless women who intended to have children also said they would not be bothered if they ended up not having a child.
“This not being bothered was especially high among younger women, and it increased over time among those who were younger,” Hayford said.
“They are open to different pathways and different kinds of lives. If they don’t become parents for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem that upsetting to many of them.”
One possibility often discussed for the declining birth rate is that young people today are unsure about the future of the country and the world, and that is keeping them from having children.

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Interesting nuanced article: “It Makes It More Real to You”: Abortion Attitudes Following Experience and Contact With Abortion (research done in UK).

(Okay, stating here that yay for the decriminalisation of women taking abortion pills this week but I have been saying for years - in fact I think the reformers were saying this in 67 but it was a trade-off to get medics on side - the 2 doctors provision in the current legislation is a fossil relic from the period when doctors reckoned that 'unlawful' in the relevant clause of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act predicated 'lawful' and that meant docs with sound clinical reasons, but even so they made very very sure to get a second opinion. And this hardened into the situation after the Bourne judgement of 1938 where the doc who would operate would refer to a psychiatrist to get the 'threat to mental health' box ticked.)

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Yes, I think this is creepy, though I also think there are other (more reliable than cycle-tracking) methods of contraception besides the Pill: TikTok is obsessed with the hormone-free birth control debate: why is everyone telling you to stop the pill?

While on the one hand yes, contraception should be part of general routine healthcare and the sort of thing that GPs provide. But on the other, back in the day, specialist clinics were prepared to work with women to discover what was best for them, and I'm not sure GPs have either the time or the training to do this. At a panel I was on some years ago people were claiming that there was one Pill formulation that was the go-to and it so did not suit every woman.

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This is more in the realm of general demographic information, and I am sure my dearios are already aware of this: There Were Still Old People When Life Expectancy Was 35. (And the menopause is not some new-fangled unnatural thing, siiiiigh.)

I think I mentioned (did I?) that my research position at Former Workplace was terminated some while ago due to Internal Upheavals.

Well, thinks I, I still have research connection with Esteemed Academic Institution where I did my PhD and professional qualification, providing me with a) access to a research library and b) an institutional email address.

This connection was renewed some 5 years ago and comes up for renewal in the autumn, and being a forethoughtful hedjog I thought I would start mentioning this to person I know best in the department with which I am associated.

And, dammit, they have gone and changed the rules.

Some years ago (in fact before my last renewal but I guess institutional processes move slowly) there was a massive hoohah when somebody who also had some honorary connection with Esteemed Academic Institution turned out to be using it to bring EAI into disrepute by making it seem as though it had given official imprimatur to rather dodgy intellectual activities they were up to. Plus, there was a certain degree of mystery, or at least, lack of institutional memory, as to how person had even obtained this honorary position in the first place. (Or at least, nobody was copping to knowing.)

So, they are tightening up the rules so that you have to have much more of a formal position - e.g. be doing a collaborative project with somebody in the department - to be assigned honorary research status. So alas, am no longer eligible.

*Mutters obscenities*

Am wondering whether I can find friends in other institutions who might provide some similar position according me library access....

Dept, vain adornment, sort of. Went to get my hair trimmed, as after several months since it was cropped it was getting a bit messy. I went back to the same place (not the one I used to go to in Bloomsbury, for Reasons including my favourite stylist doesn't seem to be there any longer) where the lady half of the operation does a very nice cut and it is not at all expensive.

I do wonder a bit though - it was entirely deserted except for me, and they wanted paying in cash. It may just be it was a quiet day and the cash card reader was broken. But one wonders if it's A FRONT for something, though pretty much every third business around there that's not an estate agent or a grocer's or fast food place of some ethnicity or other, this being a particularly multi-ethnic corner of Our Fair City, is a hairdresser's/barber's/beauty parlour.

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Dept, this was RUDE: I don't care if he was young - ? primary school age - you do not do this on a London bus, infamy, infamy, etc. I was returning from the above appointment and the downstairs on the bus being rather chokka, went upstairs and scored the prime position, front seat, left-hand. And a stop or so later, little boy gets on and cheekily comes and sits next. Opposite - right hand - seat was empty and the whole top deck was by no means crowded.

Also he gave signs of being an incipient manspreader.

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Dept of, further on sitting in the wrong place (I meant to add this to the post the other day on Being Inappropriate on Social Media): Tourists damage crystal-covered chair in Italian museum by sitting on it:

An Italian museum has contacted the police after two clumsy tourists almost wrecked a work of art while posing for photos.
Video footage released by Palazzo Maffei in Verona showed the hapless pair photographing each other pretending to sit on a crystal-covered chair made by the artist Nicola Bolla – described by the museum as an “extremely fragile” work.
The woman squats and does not seem to touch the work – called Van Gogh’s Chair and covered in Swarovski crystals – but the man is not so careful, sitting and then stumbling backwards as the seat buckles under his weight.
The pair can then be seen fleeing the room in footage that went viral over the weekend.

Honestly, people. How is this even A Thing?

NHS staff unsettled by patients filming care and posting videos on social media.

When partner first mentioned this to me I was 'Do they even let them into operating theatre and what about scrubbing up etc?', because I assumed it wasn't actually the patient doing this, and in fact reading further it does seem to be accompanying persons.

Radiographers, who take X-rays and scans, fear the trend could compromise the privacy of other patients being treated nearby and lead to staff having their work discussed online.
The Society of Radiographers (SoR) has gone public with its unease after a spate of incidents in which patients, or someone with them in the hospital, began filming their care.
On one occasion a radiology department assistant from the south coast was inserting a cannula into a patient who had cancer when their 19-year-old daughter began filming.
“She wanted to record the cannulation because she thought it would be entertaining on social media.* But she didn’t ask permission,” the staff member said.
“I spent the weekend afterwards worrying: did I do my job properly? I know I did, but no one’s perfect all the time and this was recorded. I don’t think I slept for the whole weekend.”
They were also concerned that a patient in the next bay was giving consent for a colonoscopy – an invasive diagnostic test – at the same time as the daughter was filming her mother close by. “That could all have been recorded on the film, including names and dates of birth,” they said.
Ashley d’Aquino, a therapeutic radiographer in London, said a colleague had agreed to take photographs for a patient, “but when the patient handed over her phone the member of staff saw that the patient had also been covertly recording her, to publish on her cancer blog.

First we go back to miasmatic theory, then we go back to operations as spectator sport?

How very different, I would argue, are Barbara Hepworth's 'Hospital Drawings':

Capener began purchasing some of Hepworth’s art, which in turn helped with the costs of her daughter’s surgery. He later asked the artist if she might be interested in observing some of the procedures taking place in the operating theatre. Hepworth, initially horrified by this thought, decided to go. The materials that she needed to make her sculptures were scarce during postwar Britain, meaning she also had more time on her hands to explore other projects.
Hepworth soon became fascinated with the surgical process. She was particularly moved by the methodical rhythm of the surgeon’s hands and the concentration in their eyes. The eyes and hands are rendered with a delicacy and softness, with attentively modulated grey-white tones. They emerge from the cruder, more abstract marks in blue, green and other similar hues. Her drawing techniques somehow brings the scene to life; the many flowing lines are suggestive of the creases forming in the doctors’ blue gowns, created by their constant movement around the horizontal, inert patient. After many visits, Hepworth had created a body of work which revealed her wonderful abilities as a draughtsperson, as well as a sculptor.