It's Always More Complicated

(Mix and shake that metaphor and pour it over ice and serve it up with a wee paper umbrella!)

Somebody today on Another Site was mourning the Old Days on LJ which made me think of:

All the various Old Days in my life on and offline which were by their nature transient -

- but that transient didn't mean that they didn't have lasting effects/influence.

(I will spare dr rdrz accounts of various short-lived initiatives I encountered among the archives and in the course of Mi Researchez which nonetheless echoed down the years.)

Also that even had things not fallen out the way things did with LJ (hiss, boo, etc) by now it would almost certainly not be the same experience as it was in the 00s - people would have come, people would have gone, our interests and energies would have changed....

So we would probably be nostalgically regetting the glory days before [whenever].

I was looking out of the window at lunchtime and saw a parakeet flying by. We have a colony of parakeets somewhere in the vicinity so there are these occasional sightings.

Parakeets have been in and around London for 50 years now. There are a few concerns about how far they constitute a problem invasive species, but pretty much not:

They have been here for around 50-plus years now and there are no obvious and significant impacts to UK wildlife reported so far. Many feel they have found their own niche here. And they are a second favourite [prey] for our London peregrines.

Which made me think generally about cities as places which, if they are alive and functioning, are in a fairly constant state of change, and those cities or towns which are lovely preserved examples of How They Were at some historical epoch are usually thus because the tide of history swept past them, their trade fell off, their harbour silted up, the river changed its course, etc etc.

Whereas a city like London is a palimpsest because things go on happening there.

There's a review in the latest Literary Review of a book on London's Lost Interiors which begins by making this sort of point:

A lot of London has been lost. German bombs didn’t do anything like as much damage as the energy produced by the huge, ever-expanding metropolis itself. In the late 19th century, London was the richest city in the world, boiling with plutocrats flinging up new mansions in the Kensington ‘suburbs’ or drastically refurbishing old ones in Mayfair and Belgravia. Clifford’s Inn, a remarkable medieval survival, was pulled down in Edwardian times. Nash’s Regent Street would have been one of the architectural wonders of the world had it survived in its original form, an astonishing urban scheme stretching all the way from Carlton House Terrace to Regent’s Park. But it was carelessly chucked on the rubbish heap: more retail space was required and undesirable persons were congregating in the arcades. Priceless aristocratic mansions, such as Devonshire House, designed by William Kent, were breezily bulldozed in the 1920s, when their owners could no longer afford the upkeep, and replaced by hideous blocks of flats.

I also saw somewhere a plaint about the end of the traditional pie and mash shops of the capital woe woe and some Conservative MP is trying to obtain protected status for pie and mash, like the Cornish pasty. This article suggests that if people still eat this it is very occasionally as a nostalgic tradition in search of lost time, plus that, like so many trad London foodways, it came from immigrants (Italian, in this case).

(I'm wondering if there are now poncey eateries 're-imagining' or 'deconstructing' pie and mash, but I'm so not going there.)

When I retired from my former workplace, I retained a connection as an Honorary Research Fellow.

At that time that included not only continuing email access, staff pass including to subsidised staff restaurant, a desk, place to keep various books for my research etc etc, but (at first) an actual small research budget (this decreased quite rapidly and then disappeared).

Pre-pandemic, I used to pop in more or less weekly, to take advantage of the yoga classes (though was already finding that not all yoga poses go with arthritis), do a spot of library research, catch up with old colleagues, etc etc etc.

This all came to a rather crashing halt, and since then there have been Massive Changes (not that massive changes, huge restructuring exercises, were not a more or less recurrent cyclical theme during my decades at the place, the Heraclitus school of management), and the mission seems to have altered, and lots of people have left -

And I have mentioned the uppy-downy issue with the email, no? not to mention the unannounced purge of older messages.

So anyway, my dearios, it finally comes around that they no longer Have Fellows, and while appreciative of my contributions over the years, it's toodle-oo, auf Wiedersehen, so long, goodbyeeeee.

Fortunately I still have an academic institution connection elsewhere (and I think that library is probably rather more generally useful).

I suppose I'd quite like to have hung on for just a few more years so that I could make it to a half-century connection.

(I do wonder if The Oldest Inhabitant, the Curator No-one Expected Would Ever Retire and Would Be Borne Out Feet First Having Expired In the Stacks, is still there.)

I was reading this earlier this week, which alludes to that poor woman who is leading a so-called 'traditional lifestyle': and you know, traditional life onnafarm with a mass of offspring -

If you could afford it, you had HELP - either members of your family, or servants -

Or the children themselves were toiling in the fields or helping in the house -

And actually, if Tradwife Mom is taking to her bed for prolonged periods, and we do not wonder, we rather suppose that elder children are being Little Mother, no?

Cite here to Phil May's late C19th cartoon 'Little Mothers' which I spotted in the Museum of Childhood, a bit less foregrounded than I think it might have been, depicting Big Sisters (looking very pissed-off about in) in charge of their young siblings about the urban streets.

Presumably a bit after the date when they could all legally have been sent up chimneys and otherwise grafting for a living.

While in the higher social orders the sons were despatched to school asap, and the girls consigned to the care of the governess.

Have also just now been reading about,after the Education Act of 1870, prosecutions of parents who kept children home (and we bet the majority would have been eldest daughters) for domestic reasons.

(There's also a grim few passages about cases of baby-farming....)

One of the reasons I have Queen V as the icon on this post is that she, of course, had a vast support staff, and among other things, wet-nurses for the Royal Offspring, in fact was dead snarky with her daughters who chose (as had become The Thing) to feed their own.

While we perhaps would not really wish to return to the Victorian days I am reading about (chapter on juvenile crime in the context of Metropolitan Police Courts), even my own childhood seems to have been very different from These Here Present Days.

(I am perhaps still reeling a bit about the family that got aerated about the perils facing a woman of 28 going to a European capital city with a friend, when I think of my contemporaries setting off on the overland trail to The East.)

I have mentioned the recent hassle about getting access to Former Workplace Email restored (given that I have an honorary post connection still allegedly in place).

This issue already arose in the New Year. As I said in previous post, this whole thing is 'not aided by the massive disruptive changes that have taken place and people in charge of things who I suspect Do Not Know Who I Am'.

The person who is apparently i/c the bit that technically oversees that I am in is someone who, if they were even there when I was, was not in any role with which I had contact at that time. Anyway, I get a distinct sense that they do not know Who I Am, and, okay, there have been a lot of changes, and people leaving, and restructuring, and changes of direction, and so on, and while are still a few of the Old Gang around though I wonder a bit about the state of their morale.

Anyway, I thought it might be prudent, since person in charge doesn't seem like a person who hangs out in the places where I am Known, to put together a resume of What I've Been Up To since I retired and changed to this different relationship.

I think they're getting good value out of the association - particularly as the small amount of research funding got smaller and smaller and has been - well, I haven't actually required research funding for the last few years, right? not doing any travel to archives or bopping off to conferences, so I haven't actually tested the waters on that.

I'm moderately productive, I'm engaged with the scholarly community, I'm research-active, people consider my opinions of some weight....

It was actually quite an interesting exercise in itself.

(Goodness, but the subjects are a bit all over the place. That is what comes of following one's interests, and occasionally what people ask one to do.)

So, two months later than my last dental-related excursion, I finally got to see Periodontal Specialist - and believe it or not, this was rescheduled pretty much at the last minute, i.e. around 5 pm on the day before, to the following, i.e., this, week.

This took place at my usual dental practice, and really was a fairly low intensity experience - prodded a bit at my gums and looked at the x-rays and asked me a few questions but considered the gums were in fairly good nick (apart from some issues largely to do with, hai, have not been to a hygienist in some while...). Talked through the various possibilities for Problem Tooth, was a bit dubious as to whether it would be possible to put another implant in an existing gap, but anyway, if I go ahead, it would be a staged series of things over a period of time.

But first I had to go and get 3D images of the relevant gnashers and underlying structures, which is not done onsite, but at a dedicated dental scan operation in Harley Street - yes, this sounds POSH but what it means is - and I seem to recollect this from when I went to a physio practice there - the buildings are chopped up into lots of different suites offering various kinds of medically-related services (for lo, that is the condition of leasing premises on the Howard de Walden Estate, just north of Oxford Street) and you go up to a top floor and wind along corridors. It is totally not at all like when slimy Norman Haire had a whole house there with a waiting room full of chinoiserie furniture where patients for his sometimes rather out-there offerings in the field of interwar sexual medicine could contemplate how much this was all going to cost.

Anyway, I took the Tube to Oxford Circus and walked (technically Regents Park is nearer but actually involves several changes), and it all went off very expeditious and they will send the scans to my dental practice.

I then walked back to Oxford Circus the more interesting and rather nostalgic way via Cavendish Square, and took the Tube, possibly a mistake, it was rather busier than I had anticipated pre-rush hour.

Have been thinking that my mouth is probably an archaeological record of changing dental practice over the years - the days of mercury-based amalgam, metallic rather than ceramic caps (both of these of course removed but are there traces?), possible over-treatment? do they do that that way these days, etc.

As is oft my wont, I thought further about my post about success vs victory -

And what I thought was, thinking about the areas in which I have been interested as a historian, how very often the victories/successes after a great deal of turmoil and struggle were still only partial and still needed further fighting for - hardly the time to sit down and celebrate.

E.g. I will cite the very limited grant of female suffrage in the UK in 1918, requiring a further 10 years of campaigning to get it on equal terms in 1928 - described in demeaning language as 'the flapper vote', i.e. women aged 21-30 and those above who had not been previously eligible were being dissed as irresponsible light-minded Bright Young Things.

And even those very limited and partial gains have people wailing Deth Of Civ, as I'm sure they did when in 1923 the terms for divorce were finally equalised and women did not have to prove that their husbands were fiends in human form but only adulterous. (Unfortunately they could not divorce them if they were fiends in human form who had not, however, been unfaithful to their marriage vows.)

And as for Abortion Law Reform (I have lately written on this), scarcely was the ink dry on the 1967 Act that there were attempts to roll it back, limit it at least, hedge it about, and the next decades had activists forced to fight to keep the Act where it was, rather than being able to amend it in more liberal directions.

Progress is slow and sometimes retrograde.

Hand me my malacca cane and my antimacassar - maybe I should also get an attack parrot, didn't Aunt March have a Mean Parrot? -

- for I am feeling grumpy about Changes.

All these new social meedja, one of which is waitlist + concerns that it is being used to train AI, and the other which does not have (yet) desktop version and also security issues, not to mention, doesn't, reportedly, provide a timeline of posts from the people one actually signed up in hopes of reading....

And I don't feel that Mastodon is precisely a community, or it's a kind of community that does not facilitate passing and random exchanges that may expand into more of a conversation, or not.

Furthermore, vis-a-vis the No Desktop version issue, apart from the fact that I don't habitually access my socials on my phone -

- my phone is doing that thing whereby the battery, when fully charged, is only charged for what is well less than an acceptable time. And okay, it has long been in the habit of occasionally doing the thing of full charge going down and then creeping up again for reasons I wot not of. But seems to have been stuck at this low level for several days.

I am daunted by the faff of getting a new phone and setting it all up, sigh.

And in further tales of WO, in the pond in the other park, there are allegedly frogs, newts and dragonflies: however there are also INVASIVE PREDATORY GOLDFISH that people dump there, that nosh on frogspawn, etc, to ecologically deleterious effect.

(Now envisaging heavy metal band Invasive Predatory Goldfish doing heavy metal cover of 'Sally Go Round the Roses'.)

I see that it is 50 years since the foundation of Virago Press -

(Take, o take that peach away.)

And certainly, back in the day, it was a Good Thing bringing back into print and recognition a vast number of women writers, even if quite a number of the writers & works were ones I knew before they were cool before they appeared arrayed in green with the apple logo. And not all of them were that forgotten.

I could also go on a rant about the works and writers they did not revive, perhaps more about when they did the relatively well-known work/s of some moderately forgotten writer and did not delve further into their oeuvre.

I also have a few Massive Personal Irks: even before the recent massive debacle over Outrages, they published A Certain Work promulgating simplistic misleading narrative on Victorian psychiatry by someone who was clearly on excellent terms with Carmen C. Okay, I will forgive them a fair amount for also publishing e.g. Judy Walkowitz's stuff (which is great), but fear their academic peer review process was not perhaps All That and somewhat haphazard.

Also, over the course of decades, things have changed, as organisations and institutions do - reading those histories and memoirs, even though one felt that a fair amount had been omitted on legal advice, there was obviously a lot of upheaval and change with the moves from being an independent publisher to being an imprint of a conglomerate, as well as all the other stuff that was going down.

I have a belief that a) just because a thing doesn't last, doesn't mean it wasn't important and influential and b) a thing may last but is it carrying on the mission and the vision for which it was founded? (there are of course entirely legitimate reasons for course-change.)

I'm not sure that these two links to book reviews that I recently found of interest are quite what this day is about, as they are about a rather wider engagement between women and science than merely 'careers in STEM', but actually, that might have been what Ada - and her mother - and her maths tutor Mary Somerville - and so many other women who engaged with SCIENCE - were all about?

In a New Light: Histories of Women and Energy, a collection of essays focused on how women shaped the fossil fuel energy transition from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century in Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany:

[A]n important contribution to the growing literature on energy transitions around the world. Of course, women were part of the story, but they have not been as much a part of the documented history.
....
The essays illustrate the anxiety and ambiguity felt by many when asked to change their habits, their duties, and their societal roles in order to use newfangled energy technologies. This, the authors suggest, should serve as a caution for twenty-first-century citizens. The stories of how women navigated the new world of industrialized and networked energy systems indicate agency and responsibility across societies—just because the domestic domain was designated female did not exempt it from a role in the fossil fuel transition.

Anne Skomorowsky’s The Carriers: What the Fragile X Gene Reveals about Family, Heredity, and Scientific Discovery illuminates the often-overlooked stories of women who carry the fragile X premutation gene:

Skomorowsky shows how fragile X spectrum conditions came to be understood and diagnosed as a result of communities of women willing to empathize and take one another seriously—essential emotional labor that has led to critical medical breakthroughs. Several chapters are dedicated to carriers’ challenges with FXPOI, toxic gain of RNA function, and resulting physical and mental health challenges, including brain and ovary damage. Distinct accounts show women being misunderstood or dismissed by medical providers who resort to overmedicating against symptoms without identifying root causes. On the socio-emotional side, we see the overwhelming demands on mothers who are premutation carriers and face complex intellectual and behavioral symptoms, while also parenting their children with fragile X or the premutation. Imperative, however, are women’s accounts of self-recognition and identity-building as they learn about their premutation, make sense of their personal history, and free themselves from burdensome self-criticism in their adult lives.