Some days dark tremors sweep across our lives. Troubling events accost us. We have grown accustomed to such things, and often we have fenced off our natural sympathies with the thought: this belongs to somebody else.

But now a crisis of life brushes close to us, touches us, befalls us and those we love. We want, now, to know: how, and what, and why? We want an explanation, though we know that all our explanations put together do not finally explain. They but fend off worry, anger, and grief. The mysteries of evil and innocence remain. The darkness of being at a loss remains, and in this abyss of the heart we can but pray for light.

This is when I pray, and this is my prayer.

Let me be patient of all these feelings that drive me hither and yon. May I be at peace, more patient with myself. Let me live within the questions that promise no answers but only signal the mystery that gave them birth. Let me turn from every pettiness of the heart, willing to see and accept that the world does not revolve around me. Let the grief, the pain, and the nameless trouble that overcomes me also open me to feel what others have felt.

Giver of being and freedom, unbind my compassion for all beings about me, and again set free the child of grace within me. Amen.

(by George Kimmich Beach, source.)

If you are unfamiliar with a viva (hi Mom!), it’s the oral defense of my dissertation. Basically, I sit in a room with two examiners, and they ask me about my thesis. Everyone in the U.K. does it, and while all of my friends who have done it insist that it’s actually not that bad, it’s stressful but you get through it, and no one has ever really had the nightmare viva where they have to send out for takeaway because you’ve been in there for seven hours, I remember what they were like the week before their own vivas, and they were all nervous crazy wrecks to a man (and woman).

I’m not a total wreck yet—that’ll probably happen when I go to catch the train to Norwich and discover the entire National Rail system is down—but I’ll admit, it’s a bit nerve-wracking. Suddenly all of my carefully-crafted arguments look a bit amateurish, and my typos seem to be multiplying as I turn the pages…but what can you do. I’m trying to remember that I had supervisors who read my thesis and wouldn’t have let me submit if it wasn’t ready, and that when it comes down to it, I know my work better than anyone else on the planet. (And let’s face it, with a dissertation on the links between original writing and translation using Beowulf as a translation case study, that is a very small planet indeed.)

Anyway, this leaves me with a few more blog posts between now and the fateful day. Will I be looking for study breaks and suddenly come out with my most incisive book review yet? Will I write three more posts whining about my dissertation? Will I slowly devolve into misspelled gibberish? Only time, and the copious amounts of wine and beer I suspect will fuel my studying, will tell…

Puffins gonna puff…

The internet ruins everything.

Okay, maybe not everything. The internet has vastly improved my ability to caption cat pictures, for example. But lately I’ve noticed a new way people react to disagreement that makes me want to kill it with fire (sorry, it’s a post about the internet: memes ahoy, kids): constant references to “haters.”

I do get it. If you have a popular blog, or a blog whose readership extends beyond your immediate family and friends, or a blog that a random fourteen-year-old stumbles upon while attempting to read All The Internets, you probably get the odd trolling comment that is purely about saying shitty things to you. But it seems like more and more often, any disagreement on the internet—no matter how nuanced or carefully expressed, no matter how much it’s intended as a discussion-starter rather than an insult—gets classified by the person being disagreed with as about HATERS, don’t haters just suck?, haters REALLY GET ME DOWN  *snap*. And it’s so annoying. It’s the internet equivalent of responding to any criticism with “whatever, you don’t know me, you’re just jealous.” Except on the internet you’re writing it on your blog, not while standing on the Maury Povich stage, so you don’t have those external cues to point out that you just might be the one in the wrong here.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a veiled reference to any blog in particular; it’s just something I’ve noticed becoming more and more common. Maybe it’s just the next stage in adjusting to the internet—when I was a teenager it was about Perverts In Chatrooms, a few years ago it was about “maybe if you plan on doing things like applying for a job or attempting to appear professional anytime in the future, you should stop putting pictures of yourself doing drugs as your profile pic on Facebook,” now it’s THE MEDIA IS RUINING INTELLIGENT DISCOURSE, go-round #5,772. But at the moment, it’s becoming a real drag on my blogroll, and hey, this is my blog, so I get to say what I want, I do what I want, YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!! *neckroll*

Oh, and yes: extra credit to anyone who comments on this post with “no fatties” or an ascii drawing of a penis.

A. Age: 29. I still can’t quite tell if turning 30 is going to freak me out or not.

B. Bed size: Double. When we were buying our new bed, Luke argued we should get a king-sized bed and I laughed at him. “But it’s only us and a french bulldog! A king would be ENORMOUS, you moron!” Now I wake up in the middle of the night with paws in my back, and oh karma, the moron is me.

C. Chore you hate: Mopping, probably. Usually I do the kitchen and bathroom, and Luke sleeps off his hangover hoovers and mops.

D. Dogs: Yes please! Our next dog may be an English bulldog named Albert. Or another frenchie. Or a puuuuug. Basically, if it will blow snot on me in the mornings, I probably want it as a pet.

E. Essential start to your day: Coffee coffee coffee.

F. Favorite color: Hmmm, this is surprisingly tough. A dark but intense red!

G. Gold or silver: Silver, definitely.

H. Height: 5’6”. I think. I thought I was 5’5” for years, but then at a few doctor’s visits in a row I was told I was 5’6”. Hey, I’m not going to argue!

I. Instruments you play: Piano actually well, clarinet and guitar passably, ukelele and banjo TERRIBLY. Now that I have more spare time, though, that last one is going to get more practice. (Sorry neighbors…)

J. Job title: Either “research administrator” or “graduate student.” 

K. Kids: Someday, but not for a while.

L. Live: Yes please? Um, in England at the moment!

M. Mom’s name: Susan. If I have a daughter I’d quite like to name her Susan, but whenever I mention this to my mother she laughs in my face. Apparently she isn’t a fan of her own name?

N. Nicknames: When my twin sister and I were babies in our cribs, my parents would hear us wake up in the mornings and check to see if the other one was awake by saying “Mooooo?”….“Dooooooo?” That turned into Moodle and Doodle, but Doodle never really caught on. I, on the other hand, still answer happily to Moodle, Moodle-keed, etc.

O. Overnight hospital stays: Twice. Most recently, when I had my gall bladder out, and spent a chunk of the night texting and emailing people in a haze of relief and painkillers saying things like “I CAN EAT CHEESE AGAAAIIIIIIN!”

P. Pet peeve: Luke chews non-food things like straws and the little plastic cover that you yank off cartons of orange juice. It makes a horrible squeaky chewy sound and I hate it.

Q. Quote from a movie: “Where do these stairs go?”

R. Right or left handed: Right. I do certain random things with my left hand, though, like brush my teeth.

S. Siblings: One twin sister, one younger sister.

T. Time you wake up: Around 6:45 on weekdays, later on the weekends.

U. Underwear: Uh, usually?

V. Vegetables you dislike: Hm. I like most vegetables, actually. I can’t eat mushrooms (I’m mildly allergic), so I’ll say those for not liking me back, the fungical little bastards.

W. What makes you run late: Remy. If he’s left home alone he goes in the kitchen, so he has his food and water and bed and can’t eat the rest of the house, but he knows it, so if he sees us putting on our shoes he’ll run away like a little pig-dog and refuse to go into the kitchen. Until we throw a tea biscuit into his crate. Remy will do anything for a tea biscuit.

X. X-Rays you’ve had: Various fingers and toes when I was a kid. I also had an ultrasound when I had gallstones, and apparently my stomach and liver overlap slightly and create a dark spot on the screen, which is why I was left sitting there for about ten minutes while the doctor doing the ultrasound went to find a specialist and I was thinking “OH MY FUCKING GOD IT’S NOT GALLSTONES IT’S CANCER.” It was probably more like twenty seconds, actually, but in those twenty seconds I managed to plan half my funeral. Then the specialist showed up and after a two-second glance went “oh, that’s just an overlap. Did you sneak any coffee before you came here?” See question “E".”

Y. Yummy food you make: Yummy to me, or yummy to the rest of the world. I make a massaged kale salad that will blow your hair back with garlic deliciousness. But if you want to keep your friends, I do a mean gingerbread.

Z. Zoo – favorite animal: Hm, I’m not really sure—I am kind of ambivalent on zoos (if they’re good, they can be great for education and helping to preserve species, but if they’re bad they can be really cruel), so I haven’t been to one in a bit. I do like penguins. Or monkeys. Or wombats! Yeeeah, wombats!

So. Yesterday evening I’m home, and I hear Luke’s knock at the door. He bikes home, and is also a lazy git, so usually when he gets home rather than wrangle bike/backpack/keys all at once, he’ll just knock and let me get the door. This is also so I can pick up Remy, who runs to the door all excited, and make sure he doesn’t make a crazed break for frenchie freedom. So Remy goes to the door, and I follow behind him, announcing in a Remy monologue “OH WHO IS THERE? WHO COULD THAT BE? IF ONLY I COULD REACH! THE! DOORKNOB!!!”, pick him up, swing the door open, and–

It’s not Luke. It’s a lady canvassing for the Liberal Democrats, and she has a look on her face that I can only imagine is typically the look on my face when I realise it’s political canvassers at the door.

On the one hand, it could have been a little more embarrassing than it turned out: my piece de resistance is to open the door only wide enough to allow Remy’s enormous noggin to poke out, and then to say something hilarious like “SORRY WE DON’T WANT ANY THANKS” and then slam the door in Luke’s face. I could have done that. Except…that is the quickest I have ever gotten rid of someone trying to get me to sign things. It was totally painless, barring the whole “other person witnessing me talking for my dog” thing. So, maybe I’ve stumbled onto a winner here? If the Tories come round, I may have to conduct our entire exchange in Dog French.

My commute to work is about 3.3 miles each way, and I walk it. It’s a bit of a haul—an hour each way door to door—but I enjoy the thinking time, and it’s giving me an excuse to listen to one of my guilty pleasure: old radio shows from the 1930s-1950s.

I don’t know why I enjoy them so much, but give me any type of mystery/detective/police show, and I am ALL OVER IT. This week, I plowed through the 18 episodes of “The New Adventures of Michael Shayne” available for download at the Internet Archive, and I am sad to see Mike go!

Michael Shayne is about what you’d expect from a show about a private investigator: the “reckless, red-headed Irishman” is a detective in New Orleans who, in the course of each episode’s case, almost invariably encounters a femme fatale with ambiguous morals, butts heads with the police, and then solves the case after a certain amount of muscle- and mind-work. It’s done well, though, and each episode opens with a hilarious cliff-hanger: we hear Shayne saying a particularly suspenseful snippet of dialogue or description, usually leaving him in peril, and then the episode begins and eventually circles back to that same moment. Picture something like “As I rifled through the desk drawers in the office, a bolt of lightning illuminated a figure standing in the doorway. And the next crack of thunder wouldn’t be from outside; it would be from the muzzle of the shotgun he pointed directly at me!” or “You’re gonna spill it, doll-face, and you’re gonna spill it now! One man is dead, and I’ve got a murder rap coming my way, so you’re gonna talk if I have to beat it out of you!”

I’ve made both of those up, but you get the general idea. It gives the shows a pulp-fiction-y touch I adore, which is why I should have suspected Michael Shayne actually started life as a character in novels and films, detailed pretty exhaustively at the Thrilling Detective website here. I may have to look up some of his other media work, but in the meantime, I’ll have to content myself with narrating chunks of my day Michael Shayne-style.

The post written, I leaned back into the sofa’s cushions and exhaled. It’d been a long day, and I’d been lucky. Those tea biscuits lurking in the kitchen, though…their day was about to get real bad—and fast!

1. My occasionally cheap tastes. I was reminded of this yesterday, when I decided nachos for dinner sounded like a perfect idea. I popped into Tesco and realised to my delight that this branch carries their own-brand tortilla chips—you know, the ones that come starkly packaged and with an ugly rendering of the Tesco logo I am CONVINCED is designed to remind us of Soviet Russia. I am convinced that the packaging is so bad because Tesco doesn’t want us to pay 28p for a bag of chips when we could be spending 1.19 on a bag of Doritos. Fortunately, I have already discovered that I like the own-brand chips better (they’re sturdier), so Tesco’s marketing division can suck it. IN MOTHER RUSSIA, CHIP DIPS YOU.

2. That I haven’t been killed by a cow. This is a longer story that I suspect will get its own post this week, but my walk to and from work involves walking through commons that are occasionally pasture for a few small cow herds, and I had a moment this Friday crossing a wee bridge where I thought I was about to meet my maker in the form of a shaggy, stinky cow. Fortunately, the cow didn’t kill me. Perhaps she smelled all the broccoli stink on me and thought “oh wait, vegetarian…she’s cool.”

3. My incredibly nerdy family. There was a recent email discussion between my whole family that turned into an argument about the correct possessive form to be used with proper nouns. Specific examples and scholarly journals were invoked. And people wonder why I’m such a dork?

The story begins simply and satisfyingly: it is 1780. A dead body is found on the grounds of a manor house; in one pocket of the corpse is a ring bearing the coat of arms of a neighbouring estate. The rather modern lady of the house who discovered the body enlists the help of a reclusive anatomist in unravelling the mystery, and detective hijinks ensue.

If this sounds like the rough outline of any number of openings, you’re not wrong: Instruments of Darkness is a historical murder mystery, and Robertson hasn’t set out to break down many genre barriers here. There will be red herrings, historical characters with rather ahistorical viewpoints on things like science and gender roles, and a denouement that brings all the major players into one room for the big reveal. If mystery novels are not your thing, you’ll probably hate it. But if you enjoy murder mysteries, this is a thoroughly enjoyable example.

The eighteenth century isn’t a period I’m particularly interested in. While I am an inveterate devourer of historical mysteries, they tend to fall into time periods I’m interested in from a nonfiction standpoint as well (cue endless hardboiled fiction and medieval intrigue). My own proclivities aside, Robertson does a great job of writing her setting believably and intriguingly without hitting you completely over the head with it; even her use of the Gordon Riots—an event that potentially requires enough explanation to easily devolve into a history lecture—is handled with a deft, light touch. On a similar note, Robertson knows when to leave well enough alone within the plot as well. The book leaves us with certain relationships largely unexplained, and portions of back stories left in the mist. It sounds like it should be frustrating, but instead it reads as believable: we don’t always get to know everything; sometimes knowing who the murderer is is enough.

There were a few moments in the book I found frustrating: the big reveal puts an entire new spin on one secondary character’s evil ways that, I thought, rather overwhelmed the moment; during the last third of the book certain obstacles are overcome almost immediately, in ways that made me wonder if Robertson was worried about her pacing and decided to just streamline certain events.

That said, though, this is a book that is just fun to read: Robertson has a lovely hand at descriptions and throwaway moments of dialogue, and I found myself admiring her work as a writer as much as I enjoyed the story. Part of my distraction may be the book’s history: it began as the winner of The Daily Telegraph’s Novel in a Year competition, and her previous draft’s first chapter is still online here. Reading an earlier version makes me appreciate the craft that has gone into her final copy; and, of course, given that I’m in the middle of working on a novel myself, it’s likely I’m paying more attention to how a writer performs certain actions, because I’m desperately trying to figure out the best approach myself! I could certainly find worse tutors than Robertson—Instruments of Darkness is one of those books that is fun for the entire ride, and I really recommend it.

Random fact about today: there is a bee in my kitchen.

I am worried these two facts are going to become mutually exclusive.

It’s sunny again today, and so as soon as he got up, Remy has been staring at the back door, wanting to go out and lay in the sun. He likes laying out there, but I don’t like leaving him in the back garden unsupervised, so I decided to join him with a book. We were having a nice mid-morning basking session, him on the concrete part of our back garden, me sitting on the back stoop. Birds were singing, flowers were blooming…and a particular bee was flying, straight through the open back door and into the kitchen.

Our kitchen is ridiculously nice for a British kitchen. Kitchens in general here, and especially ones in pre-war terraced houses, tend to be very very small and narrow by American standards. Our landlord redid this house just before we rented it, though, and one GENIUS move of his was to knock out the side of one exterior wall, so instead of a poky little kitchen with a back door that leads to a short, damp, dark ten feet of sidewalk and then to the back garden (I have no idea why having a little side passageway was so popular, but several houses I’ve lived in have had it), we have a kitchen as wide as the house, and a backdoor that opens directly onto the garden. (This also means we have a random indoor window that looks from our living room into the kitchen that’s a remnant from when that wall looked onto the outside of the house. I find it hilarious, and plan on telling Luke it’s some sort of butler’s hutch and making him deliver me lattes through it.) The roof of that new section also contains several skylights—I know! natural light! in a British kitchen!–so basically, we live in a fairy palace and are never moving again.

HOWEVER. There are two bad things about the skylights. One is that birds poop on them and it’s ridiculously hard to clean off. The second is that, if a bug does get into the kitchen, instead of seeing the light coming through the back door and flying back out, it sees all the lovely natural light at the top of the room, and promptly flies up there and spends the next several hours bonking its head against the glass. This is where I found Mr. Bee.

I’m not one of those people who screams and runs at the merest hint of buzzing. I don’t necessarily want one on me, but if a bee is exploring flowers in my general vicinity, I’m not that perturbed: I know I am not that interesting to it, and we’re each fine in our own little sphere. But a bee in my kitchen is a whole other story: now it’s in my territory, and I am slightly freaked out.

And oh, it gets worse. After hoping it would fly out on its own, I had to give up and shut the back door for a bit and retreat to the rest of the house. I just crept back in to make my lunch and let Remy out again…and now I can’t find the bee. The only thing worse than a bee in your kitchen is a bee in your kitchen…somewhere.

If anyone needs me for the rest of the afternoon, I shall be parked in my living room with a large glass of wine. Possibly googling how to waggle-dance “the door is to your left, you great buzzing clod.” Wish me luck.

Luckily, Civilian Wartime is around to wash that particular bad taste out of our mouths! LeRae Umfleet, in association with the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, is tweeting short excerpts from North Carolina civilians’ accounts of the war, and linking it back to fuller passages on the Civilian Wartime blog. It’s thoughtful, interesting stuff. This is one example from last week, from the diary of Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston:

She knows too no more about the proper management of negroes than a child, tho’ she has had them under her since she came to woman’s estate. She thinks all discipline severity, yetcomplains if they are not perfect & makes them ten times more unhappy by her want of government than severe masters do by their excess of it. Vinyard was married whilst she was here & tho she had what to her was a splendid supper & was as happy & contented with it as tho it was a feast & desired nothing more, she took her for the object of her especial sympathy.

Planted Beets, Carrots, Spinach, Parsnips and Salsafy.

There are countless history books about the Civil War out there, but for me, reading a woman move casually from a discussion of the best managing practice towards your human property to updates on her garden says about as much about the fundamental moral gap between abolitionists and secessionists as any of them.