It's Always More Complicated

That is, I have finally knocked off a review that has been hanging over me for months, probably needs a little more fiddling with but it was very much I had got to the stage of 'just sit down and write the bloody thing' and did it. It's a book I'm fairly lukewarm about, doing fairly useful work with what it does but it feels a bit all over the place and hard to get a proper grip on.

Also, yay, am feeling rather less washed out than the past few days following vaxx.

We have appointment to see solicitor about our Testamentary Dispositions next week - finally found one in the fairly close vicinity through the Law Society Find a Solicitor facility.

Have just been getting Documentation from the local authority who are actually paying me to go and talk about johnnies in their collections in just under two months, so I guess that's sort of the next thing on my agenda.

Though am gradually making my way through ms by deceased colleague, though there is not major urgency on this as my collaborator is still in academic life and overwhelmed with the responsibilities of that at present.

This is so much what I've been thinking about a different period that I'm writing about - that it's there, even though people are saying It's Ded, it's just not doing the flashy newsworthy visible stuff or the results are the things are are not, or no longer, happening: The one thing everyone gets wrong about feminism.

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I am a great admirer of Professor Athene Donald's blog, and I like this recent post: Unintended Consequences - in particular perhaps this apercu:

Business gurus tend to talk about ‘being authentic’ as the right way to lead. But if you are a testy, over-bearing soul being authentic may be very destructive for those around you.

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This is another story about mobility in the world: Looted from a royal palace: The medieval jug now on display in London:

A large bronze medieval jug bearing the English royal coat of arms would be a rare find if dug up in England, but somehow it had ended up in West Africa, in modern-day Ghana, thanks to early trading routes between nations.
Dating from between 1340 and 1405, the jug is the largest surviving bronze ewer from medieval England. Decorated with an English inscription, royal heraldry and coat of arms, it was originally a luxury object — but its meaning changed dramatically as it moved across continents.

I've had to do with either this artefact or another very similar in my working days, I did not know about the biological contamination (we didn't know for quite some time about the radioactive notebooks, either): a parchment scroll designed to guard against the dangers of childbirth:

Until now, this scroll’s worn surface and suggestive staining constituted the main evidence for its use in childbirth. However, new research by Sarah Fiddyment, presented in the exhibition, reveals that human proteins found on the scroll’s surface indicate the presence of cervico-vaginal fluid. This is an important breakthrough in the burgeoning field of biocodicology, which seeks out the invisible traces left behind by users of manuscripts, as they held, rubbed or kissed a parchment.

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You know, I would have sworn that back in my working days I came across something appertaining to this historic event: How smallpox claimed its final victim, but I'm unable to trace it.

What I read

Katherine Addison, The Orb of Cairado (2025), many thanks to ursula for pointing me at source for ebook edition. Very good (need I say?).

Jonathan Kellerman, Open Season (Alex Delaware #40) (2025) - rather phoning it in, I felt.

Several of my collection of Desmond Corys - Cory was a writer of mostly thrillers from the 1950s, these were from not his best-remembered series:

Pilgrim at the Gate (1957) and Pilgrim on the Island (1959) - Set in the GDR in the 50s. Pilgrim, who has a deeply traumatic back story, is a kind of Grey Pimpernel getting people across the Iron Curtain - not all of them want to go....

Three of the Lindy Grey mysteries (which I read out of chronological order): Begin Murderer (1951), This is Jezebel (1952), and Lady Lost (1953). These are tonally a bit weird. There is a certain pulp hardboiled element (Grey is a professional private eye, and in an interview on the Cory website linked above he mentions the influence of Peter Cheyney on his early writings: most of the female characters tend to fall in to the category of 'dames'), but also a certain aura of the Crispin/Innes Silver Age mysteries (though more blood and more bodies), with rather over-elaborate plots, literary allusions, and all the mysteries are something to do with art. Massive amounts of smoking!

On the go

Still Some Men in London

Up next

No idea. There is a new Literary Review.

Well, last week was quite the round of attending to health. I had an appointment with the GP I saw a few weeks ago to follow up the weird skin thing, which is still puzzling medical science - I have now got a referral to the Dermatology Clinic, which is excitingly located in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, which appears to have moved from St Pancras to just off Tottenham Court Road and to be adjacent to what we do not now refer to as a Clap Clinic. (I think I attended there some years back for another Weird Dermatological Thing.)

I have also got A Different Cream to put on it.

I also raised the issue of Increasing Deafness and Noisy Tinnitus, and have a referral for hearing test at Royal Free. However am advised that would be best to get my ears sluiced in advance (by some modern method which is not syringing) privately. I at least have been supplied with appropriate drops.

Then on Thursday I went and got my booster vax, which I had to book privately as I am not quite antique enough to qualify for NHS this time round. This turned out a lot more hassle than I anticipated with getting the Wrong Bus - and thinking I could just walk back to the right spot when I should have absorbed the message that I had got off more or less opposite a Tube station and it would have been all of one stop. However, I eventually managed to pick up a taxi and got to the right place.

There was also more walking than I anticipated once I emerged - ended up getting Another Taxi home.

The info on common side effects of vax included tiredness, but then also has under rarer side effects feeling weak or lack of energy??? - not sure if this was anyway due to unaccustomed amounts of exercise.

And sometimes I see the same piece of misc info flit past me at recurrent intervals.

I am perhaps a little too prone to saying 'As eny fule no', when it is alas, very clear that they do not. Somebody on bsky was venting the other day about people who go off at other people about their ignorance in a condescending and superior fashion - I don't think I actually do that, I think I come on here and grump 'Did Not Do The Research' when I come across this.

But, OMG, Lucy Worsley, how is this a Faskinating New Fact??? Arthur Conan Doyle secretly resented his Sherlock Holmes creation, says historian. Surely it has been known even since he shoved Sherlock off the Reichenbach Falls?

I am not entirely sure that I first came across the edifying tale of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and variolation against smallpox as a picture-story in a girls' comic in my extreme youth, but I'm not entirely sure I did not. Both Girl and Princess were, as I recall, quite into the stories of Real-Life Heroines.

But anyway, well before I got into History of Medicine.

But, anyway, you can apparently be a listing team leader for English Heritage and nevererdover.

Obelisk celebrating pioneering Lady Mary Wortley Montagu given higher listing

(I am boggling a bit at the phallicness of the memorial, but suppose it does have some resemblance to a lancet, so possibly appropriate?)

Okay, is 20 years since I was involved in radio prog on her, but there was massive flurry of meedja interest in 2021, 300th anniversary of her introduction of variolation to England. Somebody who is recurrently being cited as a 'forgotten' figure can surely not be that forgotten.

The weird taskbar thing that was happening on my desktop seems to have remedied itself yay.

Did I ever mention that my GP surgery notified me that they were scheduling the next round of boosters + flu shots? - admittedly it turned out that these were several weeks ahead, but I am now scheduled at least.

A young person solicited my advice on their research and came back to my response with effusive gratitude.

However -

Editor of volume to which I am contributing chapter I have already writ substantial portion of responded to my email saying that I was not going to make it by original deadline (which I was assured was not at all hard), but within a few weeks probably, with what I consider rather belated sending of editorial guidelines. Which include reference system I do not like at all and which means unpicking referencing I have already done, moan, groan.

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In other news: save the hedgehog by giving them additional Protected Wildlife Status.

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The people in Cheshire who will tell you they 'know' the Earth is flat: I had to play that video of Flat Earther singing in a different browser and honestly, it is not much improvement over the hymn of the real (rather than spoof) Flat Earthers in Kipling's 'The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat' - 'Flat, and Flat for ever more'.

London at risk of major measles outbreak, UK Health Security Agency warns.

Lucky lucky me - I am of the generation which had measles as a child, and am immune for my lifetime - it was so prevalent that apparently (looking it up) if you were born before 1957 you don't need to get vaccinated, presumably the assumption is that everybody got it, and those who survived are now protected.

“Measles is one of the most infectious viruses to infect humans,” he said.... Measles is the most infectious of all diseases transmitted through the respiratory route. In a population with no immunity, a single case of measles will infect between 10 and 20 others.

To maintain herd immunity, the World Health Organization set a target of 95% vaccination uptake. But the UK is far below this target, with uptake for the first dose of the MMR vaccine in children aged two years in England at 85.6%, the lowest level in a decade. In some parts of London, coverage of the first MMR dose at two years of age is as low as 69.5%.

“With measles being so infectious once the vaccine uptake rate falls you can’t rely on herd immunity from other parents vaccinating their children to protect you child if you do not get them immunised and in London particularly we are approaching that point,” said Hunter.

Susceptibility is particularly high among 19- to 25-year-olds, affected by unfounded vaccine scare stories in the early 2000s linked to publications by the discredited doctor Andrew Wakefield. Until now, unvaccinated people in this group had benefited from “herd immunity”, the indirect protection given by good overall vaccine coverage in the population.

We are really talking 'within living memory' for measles being one of the devastating epidemics of childhood. And yet these things so soon drop out of people's minds.

A queue, not The Queue.

Partner got NHS notification about Covid booster earlier this week, and they are now offering them in local pharmacies, one of which is, if not just round the corner, round 3 corners, along 4 blocks of a residential street and across a main road, so he booked one for this morning.

And then I got a similar notification, and found that same local pharmacy was still taking bookings for same time of day, so I did likewise.

Having now acquired a strap thinggy to attach to my glasses so that, even if they are still not sitting exactly ideally with a mask, at least I am not terrified they are going to fall off at any moment. (It is one of those things for people doing sports, rather than one of those chains conjuring up images of middle-aged Unsexy Librarians in movies.)

This involved getting up a little earlier than I am wont, but wottahell.

So we went out on bright but rather nippy morning, and there was a queue outside the pharmacy but not a huge one (i.e. not even to the end of the block) and moving fairly expeditiously, though I'm not entirely sure why they had bothered with 'choose your specific five-minute slot', just saying. And all one needed was one's appointment reference no and face mask, and I didn't actually even need to show the number, just give them the slot I'd booked, name, and dob.

In and out just like that, back home in just over an hour.

Arm a bit sore.

At people going about a pandemic disease that they find personally inconvenient 'got to live with it'.

As if 'living with it' is just about shrugging your shoulders and letting the dice fall as they may.

Am surprised at no reports of rumbling in the cemeteries where Victorian sanitarians are buried.

Because when you are dealing with a disease like this, very like the kinds of things they were dealing with, which had no actual cure, a high rate of mortality, and debilitating effects on survivors -

- what you threw your efforts into, was *PREVENTION*.

Even pre-Victorians - the Venetian quarantine of ships in time of plague, etc.

Cholera - okay, your measures against miasma had not worked, but once Snow had pointed out that it was water and not airborne - sewers (though even then, it had to wait until Parliament was inconvenienced by the Great Stink of 1858 to get the money voted.)

Smallpox - vaccination, plus isolation hospitals for active cases.

Encouragement of social practices - you know, like not spitting in public, which was about TB? -

- and Fun-packed public information film, which warns of the dangers of germ-spreading sneezing in wartime.

Thinking also of a whole range of things from food adulteration to avoidable death in childbirth, that people presumably thought were interfering with trade (and their right to colour sweeties with arsenic, bulk out bread with alum, etc) and flying in the face of religion, nature, and the fact that Doctors' Hands Could Not Possibly Be Filthy.

While occasionally efforts of prevention were misguided and just wrong (routine inspection of sex workers for STIs at a time when diagnosis was pretty much guesswork, just saying), and certain interventions now considered excessive (I was part of the generation of what are now deemed unnecessary tonsillectomies), prevention, and it's mostly something that has to be undertaken at a collective level, is usually the horse to bet on

Still feeling somewhat wishy-washy - not sure if this is reaction to the shots (booster site still a bit sore, for the record) - or whether it is merely the product of unwonted physical exercise, i.e. walk to health centre, standing for a considerable while in a queue, walk back (mostly uphill), not to mention the psychological effects of seeing so many people and engaging in interactions?

(I have been exercising: but not letting myself become a totally sedentary lump is possibly not the same as taking regular walks in the world.)

A number of annoying domestically-related things, sigh.

(I thought this might be Mercury-in-retrograde, which somebody mentioned the other day, but that bad puppy should be straightening up his act by now, apparently?)

I was wondering if I was being just a leetle disingenuous dissing on the lady mentioned in this post as setting up to disrupt the publishing industry? But the very fact that she's talking about 'marketing' and 'the industry' I think cuts her off from the whole phenomenon of which I am but a tiny fragment, of people creating fiction online, either fanfic or original, that isn't, at least in its beginnings, about formal publication but about something for the enjoyment of one's friends. I.e she's coming it at from a different end, about building up an audience in the marketplace.

(And tangentially, I noted that Everina Maxwell's Winter's Orbit, the reworking of Avoliot's The Course of Honour, published on AO3 in 2017, is currently 99p on Kobo - also on Kindle.)