Including being gaslit by the Royal Mail, like, I know they sent me a text yesterday and a text this am saying they were delivering A Parcel, but when I went to look as the window was drawing to a close, could not find, while online tracking said something entirely different (parcel still in transit to local sorting office).

In fact, Parcel has just turned up, several hours after indicated.

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Phone doing Weird Stuff - well, part of this is not phone per se, it was O2, as in, when I was out and about in the world the other day my web data allowance ran out and they send this message about texting 'WEBDAILY' to get a top-up, so I did, and did it? not until yesterday, which was totally pointless.

Plus, in relation to niggle this morning about Downstairs Flat having an electricity thing doing which involved turning off the Main Meter deep in the cellar which affects both flats, was trying to use phone as a hotspot with my laptop and it wanted some network authorisation code? With old phone this used to come up on the actual phone? Though I was also having issues with bluetooth and this may be down to ageing laptop....

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So there was also that thing of morning routine being disrupted by electricity being turned off. (Though now this thing has been done maybe we too can get a Smart Meter set up, because as I recall having to get at that was the issue.)

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Have actually, this week, started on outstanding overdue essay review, as well as putting it some more effort on keynote presentation for end of month (this is still a goer and is actually up on their site that I am speaking).

Moderate yay me?

Have just been contacted by A Young Scholar who I feel has imprinted on me like a gosling about an article of theirs currently going through the submission process....

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GP has requested to make appointment re routine medication review, which I have done, but am a bit anxious about (but perhaps I can get them put sumatriptan back on the routine medications list????).

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However, in better news, the grocery delivery came early enough that I have been able to get a sardegnera on the go for supper!

What I read

Finished A Darker Domain, which I thought was a bit so-so but maybe the series kicks it up a bit as it goes on?

Elizabeth Bear, Angel Maker (Karen Memory #3) (2025), which apparently is not supposed to be out until this week but Kobo UK let me purchase last week - a lot going on there (steampunk Western, for those who aren't acquainted with previous volumes) including making of silent movie with possibly sinister other motives and a lot of other stuff going on.

Latest Slightly Foxed.

Val McDermid, The Distant Echo (Karen Pirie, #1). Okay, I was pretty much spoiled for this because A Darker Domain mentions whodunnit, but still, not at all bad, even though it's a bit of a push to tag it with Karen Pirie, who is a very minor character who appears very late along in the narrative though does provide a key bit of evidence. (I am also a bit sad that McDermid has become this really quite mainstream crime writer after those early Women's Press years.)

On the go

Angela Thirkell, Love at All Ages (The Barsetshire Novels Book 28) (1959) - good grief, Ange, you really were phoning in this one, weren't you? (I bought it on promotion.) Padding, repetition, breaking the 4th wall, inconsistency - there is one character - the American-born Duchess of Towers - who at one point is Southern womanhood/invocation of Confederacy and at another has strong New England character, and we wonder about Thirkell's geography of the USA.... plus there is a couple who seem to be having Schrodinger's honeymoon, they are offered somebody's Riviera villa, but later mention that they will be doing a tour of cathedrals, and then they go off to Brighton hotel. Also she is really working her grudge against Ann Bridge as the novelist Mrs Rivers. It has its moments but one does feel her publishers just threw up their hands and said fuckit, if we do a full copy edit it won't be out in time for next Christmas let alone this year's.

Up next

Not sure, though there is a new Literary Review.

Casn't seem to locate link to the article but apparently taking your dog to the movies is a thing these days? YOY? - and apparently one reason is so as not to have to get in a dogsitter for pooch while out at the pictures. What happened, we asked, to leaving one's faithful canine to guard the house during one's absence? O tempora, o mores, etc.

Presumably contra-indicated viewing would be Old Yeller....

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Also in modern-day weirdness, another thing that is apparently A Thing is doing Extreme Days Out, which involves jetting off at the crack of dawn to some touristic spot, doing The Sights (at presumably a brisk pace) and then jetting home again, no doubt to soak in a recuperative hot bath.

Aside from the horrid environmental impact going on with this, how far can anyone be enjoying Tourist Spot if they're going at high-speed clip to fit everything in? It sounds like hell. No time to stop and stare and appreciate. Point thahr, misst.

I was therefore delighted to come across this in Lucy Mangan's column:

[O]ver breakfast I read about the great sunflower fields at Westgate Farm near Walsingham, Norfolk, which for the two weeks that the mighty blooms are in mighty bloom across its 16 acres invites people to come and pick their own for a small fee. Have you ever heard of anything better? Desire – no, need – filled me.
I demanded my husband – the driver of the family, for Walsingham is a short car trip away – abandon his desk, crowbarred my son out of bed and by 10am we were looking out over acres of sunflowers under an azure sky, and do you know what? It was even better than I had imagined. It’s just sunflowers, you see. Sunflowers almost literally as far as the eye can see. All facing the same way, because they are – get this – flowers that follow the sun.
We followed the little dusty tracks that led through the fields and wind about so that eventually you are facing the flowers and they are facing you, and the effect is so joyful and uplifting that even your family hostages begin to break into smiles.
We picked our allowance of five each and were home by lunchtime. They are now in a massive vase I was once mocked for buying but which I must have known somewhere deep in my soul was meant for this, and life is good.

Had the news today that I have been awarded a Non-Stipendiary Fellowship at [Esteemed Research Institution in My Discipline]! For next academic year at least. Yay me!!!

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Dept of, gosh, some people have a very weird notion of Effix, wot: I can't link to this because it was all in screenshots on FB, but anyway -

Person posts in a romantasy forum that they reviewed book by A Well-Known Author asserting that it had been written by AI, on the grounds that it used a number of bog-standard cliche phrases that (we suspect) hurried and harried writers in a popular field in which you are expected to keep on churning out the product are wont to resort. (In fact I suspect that they crop up to a significant extent in your average romance novel and that many authors' fingers type them quite automatically.)

Well-Known Author intends to sue for libel.

Person who posted review, and claims to be an impoverished grad student (we ask ourselves in what possible field, seriously hoping not law, philosophy, or literature), is all wo wo wringing hands about this, and wonders if it is a plea in mitigation that they did not actually purchase work in question but obtained it 'by other means'.

I depose that if you are going to pirate a work and not pay the author, you are in no position to whinge that They Did Not Write It or indeed, complain at all. If you take a free book from a box that somebody has left on the wall outside their house for passersby to help themselves, you do not then go and knock on the door because somebody has scribbled on the pages and it is by no means a pristine copy.

(Actually this also sounds as though it's timetravelled from An Earlier Day and the improving literature thereof.)

‘They’re beautiful’: 13-year-olds lead audacious project to save harvest mice in Devon:

Best friends Eva Wishart and Emily Smith had become devoted to harvest mice, and were upset, a couple of years ago, to find out the species is threatened in England due to farming practices and habitat loss.
The two girls took matters into their own hands and decided to replenish local harvest mice stocks themselves. In the two years since, they have bred dozens of the tiny rodents in their garages and on Wednesday they released 250 of them into a nature reserve near Wishart’s home.

It totally has elements of heart-warming Britflick though -

Wishart and Smith, the two young naturalists, raised the mice in 27 tanks in their homes, with some sourced from a tip by Smith’s mother. Honeysuckle and hazel, plants the mice love to climb, were harvested from Wishart’s garden to place in the tanks.... The pair managed to finance the project, including buying the mice and commissioning the enclosure, with £4,000 crowdfunded from the public. They reached their goal after a boost from the well-known nature presenter Chris Packham, who shared it with his millions of nature-loving social media followers.

Wishart’s first foray into mice husbandry almost ended in disaster: “I was given four mice by ecologist Derek Gow, but we kept them in enclosures outside and the neighbour’s cat ate three of them. We saved the fourth, which was pregnant and had some pups.