Non-fiction 7 (YTD 32) The Notes and Commonplace Book of H.P. Lovecraft, ed. Sean Brandy and Andrew Leaman My Mama, Cass: A Memoir, by Owen Elliot-Kugell The Heart’s Time, ed. Janet Morley The Girl Who Died, by Tom Marshall Hiroshima, by John Hersey Discovering Tudor London: A Journey Back in Time, by Natalie Grueninger A City on Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
SF 12 (YTD 39) Starter Villain, by John Scalzi Moroda, by L.L. McNeil (did not finish) Promises Greater Than Darkness, by Charlie Jane Anders (did not finish) When Voiha Wakes, by Joy Chant Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh Seeds of Mercury, by Wang Jinkang Rose/House, by Arkady Martine Orlanda, by Jacqueline Harpman Witch King, by Martha Wells Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett Abeni’s Song, by P. Djèlí Clark Black Helicopters, by Caitlin R. Kiernan
Doctor Who 6 (YTD 12) Imaginary Friends, by Jacqueline Rayner The Cradle, by Tasha Suri The Self-Made Man, by Mark Griffiths The Angel of Redemption, by Nikita Gill Wannabes, by Dave Rudden The Monster in the Cupboard, by Kalynn Bayron
Comics 3 (YTD 14) The Then and the Now, by Si Spurrier et al The Three Body Problem, Part One, by SFCF Studio Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray
5,900 pages (YTD 27,100) 16/28 (YTD 50/113) by non-male writers (Elliot-Kugell, Morley, Grueninger, Weinersmith, McNeil, Anders, Chant, Tesh, Martine, Harpman, Wells, Kiernan, Rayner, Suri, Gill, Bayron) 6/28 (YTD 16/113) by a non-white writer (Wang, Clark, Suri, Gill, Bayron, Three Body Problem creators) 2/28 rereads (Hiroshima, Small Gods)
309 books currently tagged unread, down 5 from last month, down 61 from May 2023.
Reading now Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak Casting Off, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Unraveller, by Frances Hardinge
Coming soon (perhaps) The One, by Si Spurrier et al Fear of the Dark, by Trevor Baxendale Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood, by Keith Temple Doctor Who: The Myth Makers, by Donal Cotton The Myth Makers, by Ian Potter Dangerous Waters, by Juliet E McKenna The Combined 2001 Election, by NISRA Hallelujah: The Story of a Musical Genius & the City That Brought His Masterpiece, by Jonathan Bardon How to be Invisible: Lyrics, by Kate Bush Comparing Electoral Systems, by David M. Farrell Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse The Virgin In The Garden, by A.S. Byatt “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge”, by Mike Resnick Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz Who Runs the World?, by Virginia Bergin L’Affaire Tournesol, by Hergé Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, by Mariana Mazzucato The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless The Wonderful Visit, by H. G. Wells Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch South, by Ernest Shackleton Monica, by Daniel Clowes Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett All Change, by Elizabeth Jane Howard The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins
As the Administrator, I’m not discussing my votes, but for completeness here is the second paragraph of the third section or chapter of each of the finalists.
He Xi stared expressionlessly at the three people standing in front of the spaceship, or more accurately speaking, his gaze fell on one small figure. His heart was too numb to feel anything. Even the day before yesterday his heart had been full of longing for happiness, but now it was all irretrievable.
The God Shawu completed the work and lost Father Star’s affection. Father Star said angrily: How dare you do this work for me? Father Star punished Blue Star with a white lightsword, destroyed Shawu’s house. Shawu fled Blue Star in a Holy Car to a place Father Star where could not shine.
The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older
“Well,” I said, stretching my legs out till they almost reached her bench where it faced mine, an excusable indulgence since the heating pipes ran under the benches. “We have spent most of the day speaking to people who knew the man.” I stopped, not wanting to say it.
Mammoths at the Gates, by Nghi Vo
“That’s the flag of Northern Bell Pass, isn’t it?” asked Chih, and Cleverness Himself whistled disdainfully.
Thornhedge, by T. Kingfisher [Ursula Vernon]
There were many precautions in those days for keeping changelings at bay. Bits of cold iron tucked into the blankets, a lodestone hung above the cradle, three rowan twigs wrapped in red thread and tucked under the pillow. But Toadling’s mother was bleeding heavily and her ladies swarmed around her, and Toadling was set down in the cradle without any wards at all.
Rose/House, by Arkady Martine
The math was easy. Figure twenty-four hours, to the dot, from time of death to Rose House’s mandated duty-of-care call; another day and night to find Selene Gisil and get her across an ocean and into China Lake; one more day until the beginning of this little expedition into dizzying architecture. Maritza couldn’t quite understand why anyone—Basit Deniau, famous architect, or otherwise—would want to live in this place. But she could count hours, and measure decay against them. This man had been dead for three and a half days, and he was rotting.
— C’est enfin toi, Lucien? lui dit une voix rauque dont l’accent lui sembla tout de suite affreux.
“Is that you at last, Lucien?” croaked a hoarse voice that instantly grated on his nerves.
I’m always on the lookout for actual science fiction set in Belgium, and this is a really interesting example, a reaction to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which is repeatedly referenced in the text (though I don’t think you’d need to have read it to enjoy this).
Aline is a reserved and somewhat repressed Belgian literature lecturer, and one day waiting for her train home in Paris, the more liberated side of her personality splits off and takes over the body of Lucien, a cute young man who is taking the same train. The (short) book has Aline and Orlanda (as her incarnate other halfnames herself) navigating their identities and relationships through the streets of Brussels.
I really enjoyed this. Harpman writes herself into the book as a minor character, a science fiction-loving friend of Aline’s. The story ends a bit abruptly, but it’s tidy enough given the situation. You can get it here.
I wondered about the extent to which the duality of Aline/Orlanda, and the duality of Aline’s apartment which has two street addresses, intentionally reflects the cultural and linguistic dualities of Brussels and Belgium, but perhaps that is reaching a bit far and we only need to look at the fact that Harpman was a psychiatrist who brought her professional work to her fiction, and it’s rather obviously a story about integrating your personality.
Bechdel pass; Aline reminisces about teenage conversations with her mother in the first chapter. (And does Orlanda count as male or female for Bechdel purposes?)
The book won the 1996 Prix Médicis, awarded to an author who “n’a pas encore une notoriété correspondant à son talent”. Harpman’s first novel was published in 1958, but she took a twenty-year break from writing between 1966 and 1987 (she was born in 1929 and died in 2012). Her best known book is not actually Orlanda but a dystopian science fiction novel, I Who Have Never Known Men / Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes, which I think I must now look out for, though most of her work seems to be non-genre. (I see also an alternative history, La Dormition des amants, which has been translated into German but not English.)
After the disappointment of Moroda, this was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Dangerous Waters, by Juliet E. McKenna.
It was the bridge between seasons; the days were hot, but the uncertain weather of autumn was near. Any night might bring storms, or worse, one of the tearing winds from the mountains. Every loaded cart and filled barn was triumph, every uncut field a whip cracking over their heads. This work Rahike did not command, it was too important to be left in the hands of one so new to authority; the Old Mistress did not keep her chair at Harvest, and her successor dwindled to a pupil indeed. Piety demanded that every daughter share the first day of work on her mother’s farm, although in fact Rahike’s mother hardly needed her help, since she grew less grain than green crops which had a longer gathering season; but after that the Young Mistress’s concern was with the public farmlands, and most of her time was spent going about them. The working days were long, under a sun that burned even the city women who were pale most of the year; but the urgency of the task gave it zest, and there was gaiety in the shared labour. A Harvest when all went well, as it did that year, was like a long festival. It was a time Rahike had enjoyed all her life, through all the years she had spent it on her mother’s farm; but that year, riding about her beloved land with a greater harvest to gather and a greater part to play, she felt her life brimming over.
I picked this up from the freebies table at Novacon in 2021, and I’m sure it was one of the books I looked at but never thought of borrowing from Finaghy library in my teens. It’s about unorthodox love in a pastoral society where men and women live separately, with women doing the hard work of parenting and agriculture (and indeed governing) and men floating around as craftsmen, doing occasional impregnation.
I didn’t find the premise terribly believable; of course it’s a utopia, but I wondered how such a society could come to be, and how often situations like the (supposedly unprecedented) forbidden love between the protagonists would occur. So I’m afraid I wasn’t engaged by the plot, though I can see how it would appeal to some readers. You can get it here.
Given that it’s set in a matriarchal society, it’s an easy Bechdel pass, starting with the very first conversation in the book.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2021. Next on that pile is Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, by Mariana Mazzucato.
Current Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak Casting Off, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Black Helicopters, by Caitlín R. Kiernan Unraveller, by Frances Hardinge
Last books finished Hiroshima, by John Hersey Abeni’s Song, by P. Djèlí Clark Discovering Tudor London: A Journey Back in Time, by Natalie Grueninger A City on Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Next books The One, by Si Spurrier et al Electoral Laws and their Political Consequences, eds. Grofman and Lijphart Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse
This post has been updated to include responses from Vooruit, Open VLD and PvdA.
You may remember that last week I asked ten Belgian political parties about their views on the excessively high import charges on small items shipped to Belgium from the UK with the Belgian state-owned postal company bpost, with a view to informing my vote in the coming elections.
As it happens I had another case today, of a friend who sent me some freebie academic books whose value is sadly more than the €45 threshold for a gift. A kind thought, but screwed by Belgian regulations; I will get the parcel returned to the sender, pick up the books via a UK contact, and Bpost will do all the work of handling the parcel and get nothing in return because of their greed.
Well, I have heard back from nine of those parties, three small and six larger. I’m sorry to report that six out of nine replies were pretty unsatisfactory. For your reference and amusement, this is what I got:
From the BLANCO Party, whose sole policy is that spoilt ballots and non-voters should be represented by an unoccupied seat in the new parliament:
Beste Nicholas,
Dear Nicholas,
Hartelijk dank voor je interesse in Partij BLANCO.
Thank you very much for your interest in the BLANCO Party
Zoals je op onze website PartijBLANCO.be kan nalezen is het een essentieel en enige onderdeel van ons programma om geen enkel standpunt in te nemen betreffende andere thema’s dan hetgeen waar we als partij voor staan.
As you can read on our website PartijBLANCO.be, it is an essential and only [?] element of our programme not to take any position on any issues other than the one that we as a party stand for.
Wij met Partij BLANCO willen een keuze en zichtbare vertegenwoordiging geven aan de kiezers die vinden dat geen enkele partij hun stem nog verdient, Dat betekent dat ipv blanco of niet te stemmen, wat uiteindelijk toch maar meer steun en zetels geeft aan de verkozen partijen, er beter gestemd wordt op Partij BLANCO omdat die stem dan door ons geneutraliseerd wordt en geen enkele van de gevestigde, ook niet de extreme partijen, ten goede komt.
We in the BLANCO Party want to give a choice and visible representation to voters who feel that no party deserves their vote anymore. That means that instead of voting blank or not voting, which in the end only gives more support and seats to the elected parties anyway, it is better to vote for the BLANCO Party because that vote is then neutralised by us and does not benefit any of the established parties, including the extreme parties.
Een verkozene van Partij BLANCO zal zich bij elke stemming in het parlement onthouden behalve voor het wetsvoorstel dat we zelf ingediend zullen hebben om in de toekomst te kunnen stemmen voor een niet toegewezen zetel. Wanneer dit gerealiseerd is zal de Partij BLANCO ophouden met te bestaan.
An elected member of the BLANCO Party will abstain in any vote in parliament except for the legislative proposal that we ourselves will have tabled to vote for an unallocated seat in the future. When this is realised, the BLANCO Party will cease to exist.
Dus ok [sic] deze reden kan en zal de Partij BLANCO geen mening geven over wat je hier aanbrengt.
So for this reason, the BLANCO Party cannot and will not give an opinion on what you bring up here.
Ik wens je alvast wel veel succes om dit aan te kaarten bij andere instanties of partijen.
I do wish you every success in raising this with other bodies or parties.
Met vriendelijke groeten en dank je voor je begrip.
Kind regards and thank you for your understanding.
Full marks for courtesy and clarity; they do not care about my issue, and they have no interest at all in helping me with it. Definitely not getting my vote, but they did not lose my respect.
The right-wing New Flemish Alliance, N-VA sent me a brief but substantive answer from a headquarters policy worker.
Geachte meneer Whyte
Dear Mr. Whyte
Beste Nicholas
Dear Nicholas
Hartelijk dank voor uw mail.
Thank you very much for your mail.
Wij willen dat Bpost een volledig privébedrijf wordt en dat er meer concurrentie in de sector komt. Als u niet tevreden bent van de service van Bpost kan u dan eenvoudig omschakelen naar een andere firma.
We want Bpost to become a completely private company and to have more competition in the sector. If you are not satisfied with Bpost’s service you can then easily switch to another company.
This was followed by some boilerplate about where to find out more about the party’s policies and candidates, signing off with an optimistic
Wij hopen u hiermee voldoende te hebben geïnformeerd.
We hope this has given you sufficient information.
Well, yes, in a sense. The thing is that if someone outside Belgium has sent me a parcel, I don’t get to choose whether or not it comes via Bpost, but I do have to pay Bpost’s exorbitant charges if I want to receive my goods. I cannot, as they put it, “easily switch to another company”, and it is difficult to see how diversification in the Belgian market is going to help me. Essentially this gaslighting reply tells me that, as with the BLANCO Party, N-VA’s ideological perspective matters more to them than my own lived experience. I wasn’t likely to vote for them anyway, but now I definitely won’t.
Late addition 1: I posted this blog on Tuesday 28 May, and on Wednesday 29 May I got a reply from the centre-left Vooruit (formerly the Flemish Socialist Party).
Dag Nicholas,
Hi Nicholas,
Bedankt voor je mail. De kosten waar je over spreekt zijn administratieve kosten die Bpost aanrekent, en dus niet de invoerrechten of de btw (waar politici zelf over beslissen).
Thank you for your email. The costs you are talking about are administrative costs that Bpost charges, and thus not import duties or VAT (which politicians decide on themselves).
Het gaat hier dus voornamelijk over een gevolg van Brexit. Dat is een jammerlijke zaak, maar daar hebben wij niet voor gekozen in België. Wij vinden het als Vooruit belangrijk dat de consument goed geïnformeerd wordt over alle kosten. We hebben daar ook de minister over ondervraagd. Dat moet duidelijk en transparant zijn, maar de administratieve kosten worden intern door Bpost bepaald. De politiek kan een publiek bedrijf daar niet zomaar iets opleggen.
So this is mainly a consequence of Brexit. That is a pity, but we did not choose that in Belgium. As Vooruit, we think it is important that consumers are well informed about all costs. We also questioned the minister about that. It has to be clear and transparent, but the administrative costs are determined internally by Bpost. Politics cannot just impose something on a public company there.
Bedankt voor het sturen.
Thank you for sending.
Met vriendelijke groeten
Kind regards
I’m not sure if this is better or worse than N-VA. They too refuse to do anything, but not because of free market ideology, but because the powers of the state are too limited. Anyway, they intend to do nothing for me, and I shall return the favour.
Late addition 2: On 30 May I heard back from the liberal Open VLD. Some of you may need clarification that in Belgium (and France) “liberal” means economically right-wing, rather than socially left-wing as in the USA. Their reply was pretty much the same as I got from N-VA:
Geachte heer Whyte
Dear Mr Whyte
Beste Nicholas
Dear Nicholas
We hebben uw mail correct ontvangen en met de nodige aandacht gelezen. Alvast bedankt om deze problematiek bij ons aan te kaarten.
We have received your email correctly and read it with due consideration. Thank you in advance for raising this issue with us.
Het feit dat Bpost 18,50 euro rekent voor douaneformaliteiten is geen Belgisch wetgeving, maar Bpost policy. Of deze 18,50 euro representatief is voor de effectieve kost van de douaneformaliteiten, dat kunnen we niet zeggen.
The fact that Bpost charges 18.50 euros for customs formalities is not Belgian law, but Bpost policy. Whether this 18.50 euros is representative of the effective cost of customs formalities, we cannot say.
Wel kunnen we u meegeven dat onze partij wil afzien van onze deelname in Bpost en Bpost van de subsidie-infuus willen halen. Op die manier zorgen we ervoor dat koerierdiensten eerlijk met elkaar kunnen concurreren. Als Bpost geen quasi monopolie heeft op de pakjesmarkt in België, kunnen andere koeriers misschien dezelfde dienst aanbieden, maar minder douanekosten aanrekenen aan consument. U kan dit ook terugvinden in ons verkiezingsprogramma, heel concreet onder resolutie 220.
But we can tell you that our party wants to renounce our participation in Bpost and take Bpost off the subsidy drip. That way, we will ensure that courier services can compete fairly with each other. If Bpost does not have a quasi monopoly on the parcel market in Belgium, other couriers may be able to offer the same service but charge less customs fees to consumers. You can also find this in our election programme, very specifically under resolution 220.
Resolutie 220: De overheid trekt zich terug uit een aantal sectoren. Ze treedt terug uit sectoren zoals telecom, post, banken en de uitbating van bedrijfsrestaurants, arbeidsbemiddeling, congrescentra of vakantiecentra. We privatiseren Bpost en Proximus. We liberaliseren het openbaar vervoer. De overheid stelt een duidelijk kwalitatief kader op voor de organisatie van openbaar vervoer en houdt zich niet bezig met het uitvoeren ervan. Dit moet maximaal aan de private sector uitbesteed worden.
Resolution 220: The government is withdrawing from a number of sectors. It is withdrawing from sectors such as telecoms, post, banking and the operation of company restaurants, employment services, convention centres or holiday centres. We are privatising Bpost and Proximus. We will liberalise public transport. The government sets a clear qualitative framework for the organisation of public transport and is not concerned with its implementation. This should be outsourced to the private sector as much as possible.
[paragraph of campaign boilerplate]
Met vriendelijke groeten
Kind regards
Unlike all the others, the message was not signed by a human being. (Was it written by an AI, I wonder?)
Anyway, as with the others, Open VLD has no intention of doing anything to help, and explained their reasoning for not doing anything in slightly more detail, which I respect although it does not incline me to vote for them.
Next is from the Belgische Unie – Union Belge, whose policy is to abolish all of the regional and community structures and transfer their powers to the central government and to the provinces. Their leader sent me this personal reply.
Meneer Whyte,
Mr Whyte,
Mijn excuses voor mijn laat antwoord. U begrijpt dat het erg druk is voor mij.
I apologise for my late reply. You understand that things are very busy for me.
Uw vraag gaat over de kosten van een autonoom “openbaar” bedrijf. Openbaar in die zin dat de staat er een meerderheidsparticipatie van 51% in heeft.
Your question is about the cost of an autonomous “public” company. Public in the sense that the state has a majority 51% stake in it.
Het probleem dat u aanhaalt, kende ik niet in die zin dat ik niet wist dat er zo’n grote prijsverschillen zijn.
I did not know the problem you raise in the sense that I did not know that there are such large price differences.
Normaal houdt de regering zich niet bezig met het beheer van een autonoom bedrijf.
Normally, the government is not involved in the management of an autonomous company.
De regering zou dit eens met BPost moeten bespreken, ook al lijkt het mij dat de baas van BPost dit soort beslissingen moet nemen en niet de regering. De regering kan wel druk uitoefenen om die kost te doen dalen. Het gaat uiteindelijk om de concurrentiepositie van een belangrijk Belgisch bedrijf.
The government should discuss this with BPost at some point, even though it seems to me that the boss of BPost should take such decisions, not the government. The government can, however, exert pressure to bring that cost down. It is ultimately about the competitive position of an important Belgian company.
Als verkozen parlementslid zou ik hierover in de Kamer van Volksvertegenwoordigers een parlementaire vraag kunnen stellen.
As an elected MP, I could ask a parliamentary question about this in the Chamber of Representatives.
Ik hoop dat ik volledig op uw vraag heb geantwoord.
I hope I have fully answered your question.
Beste groeten,
Best regards,
So, this loses marks on several grounds. First, no empathy is expressed for the problem. Second, it is not clear if he actually thinks anything should be done; he seems to say both that the government should not interfere and that it should. Finally, he doesn’t even commit firmly to asking a parliamentary question. So, not getting my vote.
I mentioned in my previous post that I had brought this problem up with one of the sitting MPs for our area a few years ago, and that she more or less told me to go pound rocks. I will reveal now that it was Els van Hoof of the Christian Democrats (CD&V), now running for re-election under the slogan “Who Els?”. I did not write to her last week, but instead contacted the party headquarters and the lead candidate of the provincial list. I got a reply from a policy worker in the central party secretariat as follows:
Geachte heer Whyte,
Dear Mr Whyte,
Onze voorzitter heeft uw bericht goed ontvangen waarvoor dank.
Our leader has received your message well, for which thanks.
We lezen uw klacht:
We read your complaint:
‘De invoerrechten zijn voordeliger in de ons omringende landen dan wat in België door BPOST wordt aangerekend op boeken die u bestelt in het V.K.’
‘Import duties are more advantageous in neighbouring countries than what is charged in Belgium by BPOST on books you order in the U.K.’
Zoals u wel weet zijn we op enkele weken verwijderd van de verkiezingen. Onze voorzitter en vele collega’s zijn nu in campagnemodus. Zij bevinden zich vooral op de baan en niet op kantoor, noch achter hun PC.
As you are well aware, we are just weeks away from the elections. Our leader and many colleagues are now in campaign mode. They are mostly on the road and not in the office, nor at their PCs.
De desbetreffende adviseur is met campagneverlof omdat hijzelf kandidaat is bij de Federale verkiezingen. Ik kan u dus geen afdoend antwoord bezorgen op uw vraag over bpost, helaas.
The relevant adviser is on leave because he himself is a candidate in the Federal elections. So I cannot provide you with a conclusive answer to your question about bpost, unfortunately.
Daar komt nog bij dat het parlement ontbonden is waardoor we ook geen schriftelijke of mondelinge vraag aan de betrokken minister kunnen stellen.
On top of that, parliament has been dissolved so we cannot put a written or oral question to the minister concerned either.
Maar ik lees ook dat u al een oplossing heeft gevonden en dat u dankzij uw vrienden in het V.K. dan toch deze extra douanekosten kan vermijden.
But I also read that you have already found a solution and that, thanks to your friends in the UK, you can avoid these extra customs charges after all.
Ik breng uw vraag alsnog onder de aandacht van onze adviseur. Hij zal zeker niet nalaten, zodra hij uit campagneverlof is, uw vraag te behandelen.
I will still bring your question to the attention of our adviser. He will certainly not fail to address your question as soon as he back from the campaign.
Dank u voor uw begrip en vriendelijke groeten,
Thank you for your understanding and kind regards,
Full marks for respectful tone, but none at all for content. “We’re all very busy” is of course completely true for any political party in campaign mode; I’ve been there myself and I have some sympathy. However, I note that the replies that I got from all three of the micro-parties were personal notes from the party leaders themselves, one of whom is a sitting MP running for re-election. Another sitting MP running for re-election replied on behalf of one of the other large parties who got back to me. All seven of the other parties gave me a policy-led reply, even if it wasn’t a very good one. Since the CD&V did not feel it worth while to give me a serious answer, I won’t waste any more time thinking about them.
Though I did appreciate the fact that the Christian Democrats encouraged me to evade the Belgian charges entirely. That’s the sort of loyalty to country that you want to see from a party that has been in government for 130 of the last 140 years. (Counting governments-in-exile.)
Late addition 3: On 4 June, two weeks after I first wrote and five days before the election, I heard back from the local lijsttrekker for the hard left PvdA. I actually voted PvdA in my first Belgian election, so was interested to see this response in particular. He said:
Beste,
Hello,
Onze standpunt is dat post een publieke dienst zou moeten zijn. In die zin zijn wij tegen de liberalisering van die markt die met zich mee hoge prijzen (bpost) en heel slechte werkomstandigheden (zie postNL) heeft gebracht. Bpost is nog steeds een overheidsbedrijf maar wordt gerund als een privé-bedrijf die winst moet maken om te concurreren met bedrijven als postNL of DPD die met een keten van onderaannemers werken om zo de lonen en werkomstandigheden nog meer te drukken.
Our position is that mail should be a public service. In that sense, we are against the liberalisation of that market which has brought with it high prices (bpost) and very poor working conditions (see postNL). Bpost is still a public company but is run as a private company that has to make a profit in order to compete with companies like postNL or DPD that work with a chain of subcontractors in order to further reduce wages and working conditions.
Wij willen dus de prijzen van bpost verlagen en een kwaliteitsvolle dienstverlening garanderen, ookal gaat ten koste van een beetje winst.
So we want to lower bpost’s prices and guarantee a quality service, even if at the cost of a little profit.
Met vriendelijke groeten,
Kind regards,
I think this is a fine general reply; in summary, “we will throw money at the problem until it is solved”. I find it a little short on specifics with regard to the import of low-value goods, which the two other parties who responded did give me, but I give PvdA good marks for trying.
Late addition 4: A campaign officer from the central PvdA also got back to me on 6 June with this rather insubstantial response, which at least does not contradict what I got from the local candidate.
Beste Nicholas,
Dear Nicholas,
Ik moet u helaas teleurstellen, op dit moment hebben wij daar geen standpunt over.
I regret to disappoint you, at the moment we do not have a position on that.
Wij zijn voorstander van een post in publiek beheer, een bedrijf dat niet gedreven is door winst maar door goede en betaalbare dienstverlening voor de mensen.
We are in favour of a publicly managed post office, a company driven not by profit but by good and affordable services for the people.
Met vriendelijke groeten,
Kind regards,
This was the only party where both of my messages got replies.
The best reply from the microparties was the newly founded Voor U, set up by an MP from the Liberal Open VLD party, who parted company with them late last year. Looking at the party’s programme, I find them well to the right of me, though with some points that I approve of – abolishing the provinces, for instance. I got a personal reply from the founder and leader, who is also the lead candidate in Flemish Brabant.
Beste Nicholas,
Dear Nicholas,
Dank u voor uw bericht.
Thank you for your message.
Het probleem dat u aankaart moet inderdaad dringend opgelost worden.
The problem you raise indeed needs to be solved urgently.
Mijn zoon studeerde in Engeland en ik ben er de afgelopen jaren vaak geweest.
My son studied in England and I have been there many times in recent years.
De Brexit is een historische vergissing. Ik hoop dat de Britten dat rechtzetten.
Brexit is a historic mistake. I hope the British will correct it.
Die douanekosten vind ik een soort EU pesterij waar we vanaf moeten. Er zou een limiet moeten komen op douanekosten bvb douanekosten mogen nooit meer bedragen dan 5% van de kostprijs van het goed (als er gehandeld wordt tussen democratische landen met een vrije markt).
I think these customs fees are a kind of EU bullying that we should get rid of. There should be a limit on customs fees e.g. customs fees should never exceed 5% of the cost price of the goods (when trading between democratic countries with a free market).
Ik heb [X] in cc gezet. Zij is onze EU lijsttrekker.
I have copied [X] on this. She is our EU list leader.
Beste groeten,
Best regards,
Full marks for empathy. Full marks for supplying an alternative policy solution. However it’s a bit ambitious to rewrite the EU VAT code single-handed, and I wouldn’t vote for a party purely on that basis unless I felt that they had a clear sense of how it could be negotiated with the other 26 member states, the Commission and the Parliament. Also, the terminology of “EU bullying” is a bit unfair when it’s specifically the Belgian charges that I was concerned with. Still, the best of the three micro-party replies by some way.
Late addition 5: I also received a reply from the Voor U lijsttrekker in Antwerp; I am not quite sure in what capacity, on 6 June, the day before the election. He wrote:
Beste Nicholas,
Dear Nicholas,
Wat betreft Bpost: het is duidelijk dat deze organisatie inefficiënt is en zoals we gezien hebben ook niet vies van schimmige zaken. Hoog tijd voor echte concurrentie en een volledige depolitisering ervan.
As far as Bpost is concerned, it is clear that this organisation is inefficient and, as we have seen, not averse to shadowy dealings either. High time for real competition and complete depoliticisation.
Wij hopen op uw stem morgen.
We hope for your vote tomorrow.
Vriendelijke groeten,
Kind regards,
Sympathetic but short on detail.
I’m glad to say that one of the mainstream parties came back with a thoroughly satisfactory reply, and unless someone else comes up with anything better, this reply probably gets my vote – the online stemtest indicated anyway that they are among the closest of the parties to my own views on many other issues. The provincial lead candidate, who is also a sitting MP, sent me this:
Dag Nicholas,
Hello Nicholas,
Wij begrijpen uw vraag. De ombudsmannen post hebben deze problematiek ook aangestipt in het jaarverslag. De situatie inzake postzendingen met de UK is complexer geworden sinds Brexit. Bovendien is er een nieuwe Europese richtlijn die strengere regels oplegt voor e-commerce met landen buiten de EU. Bpost moet aan deze regels voldoen, en dat brengt inderdaad kosten met zich mee.
We understand your question. The postal ombudsmen also touched upon this issue in their annual report. The situation regarding postal shipments with the UK has become more complex since Brexit. Moreover, there is a new European directive imposing stricter rules for e-commerce with countries outside the EU. Bpost has to comply with these rules, and this does indeed entail costs.
Wat de tarieven van bpost betreft, deze worden autonoom bepaald door het bedrijf, daar komt de overheid niet in tussen. Bpost heeft ook geen monopolie-positie, dus u kan eventueel de prijzen vergelijken met andere spelers.
As for bpost’s rates, they are determined autonomously by the company, the government does not intervene. Bpost does not have a monopoly position either, so you can possibly compare prices with other players.
Wat betreft uw vraag inzake geschenken: ook dit is een vaak terugkerende klacht. Indien bpost uw zending niet als geschenk heeft geïdentificeerd, dan raden wij u aan klacht in te dienen. Bpost verzekert er ons van dat dan de nodige rechtzetting gebeuren.
As for your question regarding gifts: this is also a frequent complaint. If bpost has not identified your shipment as a gift, we recommend you file a complaint. Bpost assures us that the necessary rectification will then take place.
Overkoepelend heeft de Minister van Post, op basis het jaarverslag van de ombudsman post, een dialoog gestart met bpost en de FOD Economie om te kijken waar zaken verbeterd kunnen worden.
Overall, based on the annual report of the postal ombudsman, the Minister of Post has initiated a dialogue with bpost and the Federal Public Service for the Economy to see where things can be improved.
Met vriendelijke groeten
Kind regards
So, full marks again for empathy with the problem; full marks for explaining the background to the existing practice and for addressing my point about the inefficiency of the service; and full marks for pointing to a policy path forward. (Though as with the N-VA, I fear he is thinking wishfully about the reality of bpost’s monopoly position.)
This was from the representative of Groen, the Flemish Green party, whose deputy prime minister Petra De Sutter is in fact the responsible minister in the outgoing government, so perhaps they had an advantage; but the chap who wrote to me is not directly responsible for that dossier, so either he is very well-informed, or else he actually did some research before replying.
I will vote for him, and Groen therefore gets my support for the Federal House of Representatives – as previously noted, I am voting for Volt EU for the European and Flemish Parliaments.
Unless, that is, one of the other parties gets back to me with an even better reply. Let the record show that I contacted the other micro-party, L’Unie, eight days ago, with a chaser message four days ago, and have not heard back from any of them. There are twelve days left until the election.
He sat on one of the large wooden trunks holding broken weapons, and gazed mournfully at the swords and crossbows adorning the walls of the armoury he had been relegated to keeping an eye on. Head in his hands, Morgen sighed – was this really what it was all about, in the Imperial army? Following order you didn’t agree with and being punished for every mistake? Not to mention constant jokes and jibes from colleagues and superiors both? Morgen had envisioned that a glittering career as a famous knight awaited him in Niversai; it was why he left his hometown, and he had no intention of returning to his small farm and working the land along with his brothers. He had left to prove his worth, and he’d be damned if he returned a failure.
Second paragraph of third chapter of its sequel, Palom (which I didn’t read):
The red and gold armour of the Imperial Guard glinted in the bright winter sun, carving a line of colour through the city’s white and grey buildings. While Palom marched with the soldier, he did not share their livery.
Look, I’m going to admit to a moment of weakness here, OK? I was at a convention, and this author accosted me from her stall, and persuaded me to buy the first two books in her series of fantasy novels. And she autographed them both with heartwarming personalised messages. She was good at selling her product, and she got my money, and I got two nice-looking books.
And I came home and they sat on the shelf for almost six years.
And that’s on me, not on the author. I should have looked inside to see if these books were the sort of thing that I actually like. And they aren’t. It’s a fantasy world which has both dragons and steampunk airships, and the writing is about average, and the typesetting is a bit skew-whiff, and I looked at the combined 800 pages of the two volumes, and I gave up before page 50 of the first one.
You would think that there was only ever one writer from Brazil… And yet I have ruthlessly excluded all of the Paulo Coelho books above because none of them is set in Brazil. The Alchemist is set in Spain and Egypt, Veronika Decides to Die in Slovenia, Eleven Minutes in Switzerland, and both By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept and The Devil and Miss Prym are set in France. (Judging by The Alchemist, the only one I have read, none of them can be very good either.)
With a bit more reluctance, I’m disqualifying John Grisham’s The Testament as well. By the unscientific method of flipping through the chapters in a paper copy, I counted 25 that appear to be set in Brazil and 27 in the USA, so unfortunately that’s less than my 50% criterion.
However, Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder does seem to qualify, with nine of the eleven (long) chapters set in Brazil. It’s a novel about a miracle cure found in the rain forest. The Lost City of Z is also about a quest in the rain forest, this time the non-fictional search for the lost British explorer Henry Fawcett.
The top fiction book by a Brazilian and set in Brazil is in twelfth place on my list: The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, aka Epitaph of a Small Winner, by the great nineteenth century writer Machado de Assis.
Looking for culture on the public holiday last Monday, I found that most of the fine arts museum in Brussels were closed, but the Gallo-Roman Museum in Tongeren was open. It was a very long time since we last visited, so I headed off to explore; it’s an hour’s drive from us and I didn’t persuade anyone else to come with me.
I really enjoyed it. It actually starts from the Neanderthals and works through my old friends the Michelsbergers before getting to the Celts and Romans. Tongeren was the biggest Roman town in what is now Belgium and they have a lot of archaeological finds.
As so often, I was especially struck by the three-dimensional representations of the human body. This is Amor and Psyche cuddling, with Mercury looking on from behind – very small figures all three.
Here’s an even smaller but very cute lamp oil holder.
Here is (headless) Jupiter trampling two men with tentacles for legs. I am impressed by the expression on the face of the first tramplee.
Here is a broken vase from a household shrine which would have originally had seven face representing the seven planets who give their names to the days of the week.
Here is a very characterful Venus, on loan from the Vatican collection. You can see that her right arm would originally have crossed her chest to rest her hand on her left arm, and her left hand would have been modestly on her right thigh.
There is also a temporary exhibition making the argument that most of the classical statues were brightly painted, and extrapolating from the traces of pigment left on them. I don’t know how reliable this is, but the results are certainly striking. Here, for instance, is the proposed original appearance of Augustus:
This is the first of the three-volume second series of Eleventh Doctor comics from Titan, and I must say it’s a good start. We’ve kept Alice, one of the great comics companions, and we add The Squire, who claims to have been a companion of the War Doctor; and also, of all great comics-only characters, none other than Abslom Daak, Dalek Hunter. Meanwhile the Eleventh Doctor is being pursued by a bounty hunter called The Then And The Now for dreadful crimes apparently carried out by the War Doctor that nobody can quite remember. And there is a twist at the end bringing in another favourite character. Looking forward to next month when I read the next in the series. Meanwhile you can get this here.
Bechdel fail at the first hurdle, I think, it is a very Doctor-centric story where the only female-presenting character is Alice.
Then begins a process of learning and adaptation. Each tool will have its own personality and quirks, and will need its own special handling. Each must be sharpened in a unique way, or held just so. Over time, each will wear according to use, until the grip looks like a mold of the woodworker’s hands and the cutting surface aligns perfectly with the angle at which the tool is held. At this point, the tools become conduits from the craftsman’s brain to the finished product—they have become extensions of his or her hands. Over time, the woodworker will add new tools, such as biscuit cutters, laser-guided miter saws, dovetail jigs—all wonderful pieces of technology. But you can bet that he or she will be happiest with one of those original tools in hand, feeling the plane sing as it slides through the wood.
I got this for F a year or so ago, at his request, but it then bubbled its way to the top of my own reading list so I gave it a try. I am not in any way a programmer, so about 60% of it is completely irrelevant to my life and work; but I was surprised at how pertinent the other 40% is – there is lots here about project management, information management, client management, people management and, simply, management. Perhaps the authors should do a shorter version – “The Pragmatic Programmer for non-programmers managers”, maybe? Anyway, you can get it here.
This was both my top unread non-fiction book and my top unread book acquired in 2023. Next on those piles respectively are South, by Ernest Shackleton, and Hard to Be a God, by the Strugatsky brothers.
My godfather was Denis Napier Simonds, known as Toby to the family; he was the husband of my father’s cousin Bunty, and died aged 50 in 1970, when I was 3, so I don’t remember him at all. We lost Bunty in 2000. but their four children are all alive and well. He had one brother, Malachy, who was shot down near Troyes in July 1944 and is buried at Terlincthun near Boulogne.
Denis himself was in the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment as a career soldier, and I recently came across his citation for the Retreat from Burma in 1942, where he was trapped with his men on the wrong side of the Sittang Bridge but managed to get them all back to friendly territory after the bridge was destroyed by their retreating colleagues. General Sir John Smyth was sacked for screwing up the defence, and later sat for 16 years as a Conservative MP.
His brigade was the assigned to the Chindits, and I was very interested to find that one of his comrades, RAF man W.A. Wilcox, wrote and published a record of their campaign together in 1944 which you can read for free here. The second paragraph of the third chapter, with the quote it introduces, is:
The Indians came down in single file. They were a small band of sepoys led by a jemadar. Unshaven and unwashed, some of them wounded, they looked a sorry sight in their dishevelled uniforms, but they gave us a cheery greeting as we passed, to which we readily responded with : “Hello, Johnny ! Tikh hai?” They said : “Bahut tikh!” and the jemadar asked if we could spare any cigarettes. The Commandos needed no asking — every manjack stopped and handed over half his small supply, for which the sepoys were truly grateful. We were unable to supply them with food as we only had one day’s rations in our packs and were even now on half-rations in case of a hitch in the supply-drop plans. Shouldering their heavy mortar-cases they said goodbye and set off again down the road that led towards the plains of India. We continued the climb. Two Hurricanes flew overhead, heading for Kohima. We were already five thousand feet above mean sea level and I nodded to the speeding fighters and said : “I know a quicker and easier way of getting this high than toting a pack and a gun up a mountain.”
In April 1944, Chindit Column 76 was detached from the main body commanded by the legendary Orde Wingate, and sent behind Japanese lines in Nagaland, the easternmost part of India, as part of the 23rd Infantry Brigade. The Japanese succeeded in capturing the local capital, Kohima, but were in the end forced to retreat because the Chindits had successfully cut their supply lines. I must admit that if I ever knew about this part of the war, I had forgotten about it. This is Wilcox’s map which is (with difficulty) matchable to the online cartography of your choice.
Unfortunately Wilcox consistently spells Denis’s surname wrong, but there is no doubt that it’s him. He first appears in Chapter 4:
Major Simmonds, the big, genial, Irish Company-Commander, looked up from his map. He said : “Get me a nice big Dakota — all to myself. I want to go to Calcutta.”
Simonds goes on to establish a crucial fortification, “Ponce Fort”, which the Chindits eventually have to withdraw from, but taking few casualties themselves while inflicting many more on the attacking Japanese. Wilcox at this point has a very bad case of dysentery which takes him out of the war entirely, but he clearly had time while recovering to write this book, which was published in August 1945, only fourteen months after the events it describes.
It’s a vivid first-person account of a crucial but forgotten campaign. There are some beautiful descriptive passages here about the landscape.
The valley was hot and steaming. The river was swollen with the downpour and had oozed over its banks and flooded the paddy-fields, stepped warily on the mud slopes until we reached the paddy-fields where commenced the long wade through the black, smelling water. It wasn’t easy to keep balance. A quelching boot would skid on the clay and down would go some unfortunate soldier into the slime. Almost every one went down at one period or another. To add to the discomfort the rain was doing its worst and the drenched clothes clung to our bodies. A waterfall had to be crossed ; foot and nailed boot clung to the rock as we edged our way, inch by inch, through the stinging spray and blinding floodwater. The man in front of me slipped on the rock-face and disappeared in the swirling waters below. Two of us fished him out and helped him along the smooth- worn rocks. A halt was called and we lay full-length in the filth with our heads pillowed on the wet packs, too breathless and soaked to the skin to smoke a cigarette.
I looked around the valley. On every side, where we lay, there was a wild jumble of black water and green sprawling vegetation. It seemed as though nature had gone mad in that out-of-this-world basin where tree and rock and water were thrown together in crazy confusion. The floor was oozing slime but above that, on the walls of the bowl, was greenness of a beauty that was breath-taking. It seemed to me that in our sea of mud we were the slow squirming creatures that lived and had their being in the mess of mysterious darkness that might have been in the beginning of Time. Primitive protozoa in a glutinous mire of afterbirth.
Unfortunately this descriptive gift is balanced by sheer racism in Wilcox’s descriptions of the Nagaland villagers; it’s clear that they were badly treated by the Japanese during the occupation, but with people like Wilcox around it’s surprising that they showed much affection for the Brits. One interesting character, who I’d like to know more about, is:
Private Wertley, batman to Major Simmonds. His accent was guaranteed to make you look twice at Private Wertley, who was a broad-built young English negro, with a crop of short woolly hair and a wide white smile. Wertley never got ruffled and his slow Yorkshire speech was as unconcerned and genial as a farmer “up for the day” at Stokesley Show.
I suspect that “Wertley” was really “Wortley”, just as “Simmonds” was really “Simonds”, but I haven’t been able to track him down other than in this book.
And that goes for the author too, who I find elusive. He mentions sitting with his fiancee, Joan, on the beach at Saltburn at Easter 1941, and that probably means he must be the Walter A Wilcox who I find in official records, born in Middlesbrough in 1918 and marrying Marjorie J[oan?] Mitchell in 1941, also in Middlesbrough; Saltburn and Stokesley are both within 10 km. But I have no idea what happened to him afterwards – I find a Walter and Margaret Wilcox living in Harrogate after the war, but it’s the wrong end of Yorkshire and the wrong name for the wife. Perhaps they emigrated.
Anyway, for what it is, it’s a very digestible first-person account.
Current Discovering Tudor London: A Journey Back in Time, by Natalie Grueninger Abeni’s Song, by P. Djèlí Clark
Last books finished The Notes and Commonplace Book of H.P. Lovecraft, ed. Sean Brandy and Andrew Leaman Witch King, by Martha Wells My Mama, Cass: A Memoir, by Owen Elliott-Kugell The Heart’s Time, ed. Janet Morley The Girl Who Died, by Tom Marshall The Three Body Problem, Part One, by SFCF Studio Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
Next books Black Helicopters, by Caitlin R. Kiernan Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak Casting Off, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Syria is not unique. Before Syria, humanitarians in 2011 demanded military intervention in Libya, even though the regime of Muammar Qaddafi had given up its nuclear program and had been cooperating for years with Western intelligence agencies. In fact, the United States and France did lead an intervention, and Libya today is barely a state, with Tripoli less a capital than the weak point of imperial-like arbitration for far-flung militias, tribes, and clans, while nearby Saharan entities are in greater disarray because of weapons flooding out of Libya.
Kaplan is one of those hard-realist conservative commentators on US foreign policy of the old school. This is a collection of his essays from the first part of this century, so it’s a bit jumbled and in places repetitive. I found myself nodding in agreement about as often as I shook my head in baffled dissent.
My biggest point of dissent came as early as page 5, where he predicts the disintegration of Europe as a result of floods of migrants from North Africa, because the Arab Spring of 2012 has caused the downfall of the neighbouring “Muslim prison states”, meaning Iraq, Syria and Libya. This is simply bonkers. It’s difficult to decide where to start with dismantling it, but migrants are coming from all over Africa and western Asia, and the driving force for migration is economics rather than security; and anyway the migration question is but one of numerous factors contributing to economic inequality, which is the really big stress on European systems. Kaplan’s analysis privileges hard security over dull economics, and is the poorer for it.
The most attractive aspect of the book is Kaplan’s acceptance that he was wrong about the Iraq War, and that it’s not just that the aftermath of the invasion was mishandled (which is a line you will still hear from some apologists) but that the war itself was a bad idea. But this has unfortunately tilted him into a closer analysis of failures than successes, and it is noticeable that (Iraq apart) he is more drawn to analysing failures by Democratic than Republican administrations.
Fundamentally, Kaplan believes that geography is destiny, and self-interest should be coldly calculated. And yet there is clearly some room for values in his analysis; he doesn’t explain why, and you are left with the sense that he thinks human rights matter for white people and less for the rest of the world. And by emphasising geography, he loses the nuance of political choice in the countries that he is looking at; and even that is blinkered, as he considers risks to come only from states currently hostile to the USA.
Still, it’s very informative about the US foreign policy mind-set. I often like to say that the difference between Brussels and Washington as policy cities is that the depth of knowledge is often much greater in Washington, but you are lucky if there is more than one point of view to choose from, while in Brussels there is often diversity of opinion based on less profound analysis. This book is a good illustration. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is Black Helicopters, by Caitlin R. Kiernan.
We have elections coming up on 9 June, for the European Parliament, the Belgian Federal House of Representatives, and the Flemish Parliament. For two of these my choice is simple: my old friend Sophie in ‘t Veld, who has been a Dutch MEP for twenty years, is running for the European Parliament again, but this time as the lead candidate in the Dutch-speaking Belgian electoral college for the new pan-European political party Volt Europa, and another friend, Bianca Bäumler, is also on that list. The lead Volt Europa candidate in the French-speaking Belgian electoral college, Suzana Carp, is also a friend, as is Rick Zednik, one of the candidates in Slovakia, but I can’t vote for them.
Volt Europa also has candidates for the Flemish Parliament in the Flemish Brabant constituency, where we live, and one of them is a chap who I know very vaguely back in Livejournal days. He is not in a position where he is at all likely to get elected, but I’ll give them my vote at regional level too. They are a small new party, and their chances in either the European or Flemish Parliaments are not brilliant, but I’m backing them anyway. A sceptical colleague said to me, “Yeah, Volt is a party full of people like you, Nicholas”; personally I’m not sure that that is such a bad thing – people like me deserve to be represented too!
However, Volt were not able to get candidates registered in our district for the Belgian Federal House of Representatives (they do have lists in Brussels and Antwerp), so for what is arguably the most important election, I consider myself a free agent. Back in 2009, my first election as a Belgian citizen, I asked all of the parties about their position on the burka ban, and voted accordingly. I also asked the local parties about local issues for the municipal elections in 2012 (with a late response) and 2018.
For the last Belgian elections I used online resources to help me decide. This time I’m going to take a number of factors into account, but one important issue for me is the extortionate charges levied by bpost, the Belgian postal service, on parcels sent here from outside the EU. I have therefore written to all of the political parties who have candidates in Flemish Brabant (except for the extreme right Vlaams Belang, who will never get my vote anyway) as follows – I sent the Dutch version, but am providing the English here for clarity:
Hello,
Hallo,
I have been a Belgian citizen since 2008, and I am deciding how to vote in the coming federal elections.
Ik heb sinds 2008 de Belgische nationaliteit en ik beslis hoe ik ga stemmen bij de komende federale verkiezingen.
One issue is of particular concern to me. I collect old books – not expensive ones, but usually in English and usually for sale from small businesses in the UK. Many of these businesses are not registered for the EU Import One Stop Shop (IOSS), because they have lost their trade with the EU since Brexit.
Eén kwestie baart me bijzonder veel zorgen. Ik verzamel oude boeken – geen dure, maar meestal in het Engels en meestal te koop bij kleine bedrijven in het Verenigd Koninkrijk. Veel van deze bedrijven zijn niet geregistreerd voor de EU Import One Stop Shop (IOSS), omdat ze sinds de Brexit hun handel met de EU zijn kwijtgeraakt.
If the seller is not registered for VAT, then I must pay €18.50 for “douaneformaliteiten” if the value of the book is less than €150, and €39 if the value is more. Usually the value of the book is less than €10, so I am paying almost twice its value just for the douaneformaliteiten.
Als de verkoper niet btw-geregistreerd is, dan moet ik €18,50 betalen voor douaneformaliteiten als de waarde van het boek minder dan €150 is, en €39 als de waarde meer is. Meestal is de waarde van het boek minder dan €10, dus alleen al voor de douaneformaliteiten betaal ik bijna het dubbele van de waarde.
Because of EU rules, all EU countries must make some charge for this service, but bpost charges more than any of the neighbouring countries. Post NL charges €13. Post Luxembourg charges €5 if the value of the parcel is less than €22, and €15 if it is more. La Poste in France charges a maximum of €8. Deutsche Post AG charges €6.50.
Vanwege de EU-regels moeten alle EU-landen een bepaald bedrag vragen voor deze dienst, maar bpost brengt meer kosten in rekening dan alle buurlanden. Post NL rekent €13. Post Luxemburg rekent €5 als de waarde van het pakket minder is dan €22, en €15 als het meer is. La Poste in Frankrijk rekent maximaal €8. Deutsche Post AG rekent €6,50.
In addition, the service that we get from paying these fees is very poor. I have sometimes had to pay douaneformaliteiten for gifts, although they are supposed to be exempt. One of my parcels was lost between customs and bpost for six months.
Bovendien is de service die we krijgen als we deze kosten betalen erg slecht. Ik heb soms douaneformaliteiten moeten betalen voor geschenken, terwijl die vrijgesteld zouden moeten zijn. Eén van mijn pakketten is zes maanden lang verloren gegaan tussen de douane en bpost.
Bpost is now losing my business, because I now find it easier to ship my UK purchases to friends in the UK and pick up from them in person when I cross the Channel.
Bpost verliest nu mijn zaken, omdat ik het nu gemakkelijker vind om mijn Britse aankopen naar vrienden in het Verenigd Koninkrijk te sturen en ze persoonlijk op te halen als ik het Kanaal oversteek.
What is your party’s stance on the exorbitant fees charged by bpost?
Wat is het standpunt van uw partij over de exorbitante kosten die bpost aanrekent?
Bpost is of course a private company, but its majority shareholder is the Belgian federal government, and even if that were not the case, the Belgian federal government can act to regulate permissible charges. I’ll report back in due course on what, if anything, I get from the parties. (I should add that I complained about this in 2021 to one of our current local MPs, who replied two months later telling me to lump it; her party therefore starts at a disadvantage for getting my vote.)
Incidentally, of the ten parties with federal election lists in Flemish Brabant (other than Vlaams Belang, who I didn’t check), six had central email addresses, three had online forms and one had no means of contact at all. Of the ten lead candidates, seven had public email addresses, one had an online form and I contacted the other two via LinkedIn messaging.
This is a much more satisfactory list than the one for Pakistan last week, though it’s notable that four of the top eight books are by the same author. I haven’t gone back and checked, but I’m pretty sure that more than 50% of Americanah is set in Nigeria; I have not read any of the other three by Adichie, but from online summaries it’s clear that all three are entirely set in the country, as are the two lower down the table. I think this is also the most feminine list I’ve had so far.
I’m disqualifying Little Bee (which I read under the UK title The Other Hand) because as far as I remember a majority of the story is set in England rather than Nigeria. Again, I haven’t gone back and checked. Very lazy of me.
Anyway, at the top, far ahead on LibraryThing and by a whisker on Goodreads, is Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I don’t think it’s very good on gender, but it’s definitely a classic for critiquing colonialism, and it’s also nice to see a Nobel Prize winer take the top spot.
Trying to find each other, in the distance they saw what was a shooting star. And desperate to see each other to know themselves,
So, this is very unexpected. It’s a story written in the form of poetry, the internal reflections of the Weeping Angel who is destined to yank Amy and Rory back in time in The Angels Take Manhattan, telling the story of the origin of the Angels, their desperate attempts to feed and deal with a hostile universe, and towards the end their interaction with the Doctor and with the world of the early twenty-first century in England. Doctor Who stories rarely take the perspective of the monster, and even more rarely do it well (though see the Century 21 Dalek comic strips for another example). You can get it here.
A Bechdel fail for an unusual reason. Most stories that fail Bechdel step 1 will also fail steps 2 and 3 (that two female characters must have a conversation, and that it is not about a man). The Angels present as female, and they have many interactions (which can pass for conversations here) about the nature of reality and the fate of their race; but none of them has a name, so while the book would pass the original form of the Bechdel test, it doesn’t get over the first hurdle of the generally understood criterion that there must be two named female characters.
As soon as it’s light outside, I get up and go to my room to change. I thought I’d feel better if I could be in my own room for a while, but I feel like I’m stuck in a nightmare. Noah should be up, running through the halls, complaining about wanting cereal for breakfast instead of something healthy like my mum would suggest. My mum should be coming in to wake me up and telling me to get ready for school.
Fifth in the set of six Doctor Who YA novellas, and I’m afraid not one of the better ones; young protagonist teams up with the Ninth Doctor and Rose to rescue mum and brother from the monster which, er, lives in the cupboard. A number of implausibilities in the story’s own terms, and I wasn’t very satisfied with the characterisation of the Doctor either. A bit more skippable than the rest. But you can get it here.
Edited to add: I forgot to note that this is a fairly easy Bechdel pass; most of the characters (apart from the Doctor) are women. If you want to be specific, there’s an exchange between Rose and the protagonist at the end of Chapter 8 in which no men are present or mentioned.
‘Well, that’s a comfort,’ the Doctor said acidly, as a pulse round exploded a bloom behind his head, splattering his cheek with thick, sweet-smelling sap. ‘I’ll tell that to our lungs, shall I? I’m sure they’ll understand.’
A story of the Tenth Doctor and Donna, visiting Dublin to witness the first ever gig of (fictional) girl band the Blood Honeys, only to find that the event has been infiltrated by a trio of alien sisters out to exploit the emotional energy generated by the event. The aliens have a number of near relatives in both Doctor Who (the Carrionites) and Irish mythology (many cases of three sisters).
Rudden, who is himself Irish, gets the feeling of Dublin in the early Celtic Tiger days very well (even though he would have been roughly eight years old at the time the story is set), and you can very plausibly see Donna and the Doctor interacting with the changing entertainment scene. It doesn’t take a genius to work out who the five-member girl band making their debut in the mid-1990s are based on, but a pinch of satire can help a story run smoothly.
I am preparing a post grumbling about the failures of Big Finish to get Ireland right in a recent audio play, but I have no such grumbles in this case. I enjoyed this and you can get it here.
Bechdel pass in Chapter Four, where the three alien sisters discuss their plans for Earth.
The Doctor strode briskly from the TARDIS, fedora hat balanced on his thick thatch of curls, long scarf streaming behind him. Romana followed a little warily, still uncertain of her friend’s current mood. She glanced up into the flawless blue sky, shading her eyes with her hand. It was a warm morning, no doubt about to turn into a scorchingly hot summer’s day.
This is the longest of the Six Stories for Six Decades in wordcount (the next one has more pages but fewer words), though the story is straightforward enough. The Doctor and Romana, taking a break between seasons 17 and 18, arrive in a London council estate in 1984 where a local lad is achieving great things with technology. But where is he getting the technology from, and what price are he and his neighbours paying? And can police officer Hazel Harper put a stop to it?
About halfway through, it becomes fairly obvious which classic monsters have turned up and from then on the story runs on fairly predictable if entertaining lines. But I did like the way that the bad guy’s downfall has been triggered by Thatcherite economics, tying the merciless and logical free market to the merciless logic of the SPOILERS. I see a number of other reviewers who didn’t get this; perhaps you had to be there. Anyway, not quite as good as the first two in this sequence, but you can get it here.
Bechdel pass when Romana and Tiger Lily talk about cocktails in Chapter Nine.
Current Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett Witch King, by Martha Wells The Heart’s Time, ed. Janet Morley
Last books finished Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh Seeds of Mercury, by Wang Jinkang The Self-Made Man, by Mark Griffiths The Angel of Redemption, by Nikita Gill Rose/House, by Arkady Martine Orlanda, by Jacqueline Hartman Wannabes, by Dave Rudden The Monster in the Cupboard, by Kalynn Bayron
Next books The Girl Who Died, by Tom Marshall Black Helicopters, by Caitlin R. Kiernan Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak
I don’t love everyone knowing my business. And I don’t love the way you have to run, sometimes, from people who want to bash your head in.
Where the previous story in this series took a fictional town and a timespan mainly in the 1960s but stretching to the present day, The Cradle is set very firmly in 1978 in Southall, at a time of maximum tension caused by the National Front, with the protagonist a gay Indian teenager who is at the front line of racism. I know Tash Suri a bit from our joint stint as guests of honour at the 2022 Eastercon:
I remember an Eastercon discussion a few years ago about places that Doctor Who cannot go – the Holocaust, for example, or indeed Ireland (other than symbolically). 1970s racist London might at first sight seem to be potentially one of those places, but Tasha Suri has found a way of doing it, taking her protagonist and friends on a personal journey mentored by the Twelfth Doctor. At the end of the story everything is not all right, everyone is not OK, but the Doctor has helped and the future looks just a little better than it did. I liked this one too. You can get it here.
Bechdel pass in the first chapter when Seema and her grandmother talk about cooking and the strange lights in the sky.
We went to Rome, which is from history and sometimes from Sunday School. There was a lion! I think I mite like lions even more than cheetahs. The Emperer chased Barbrar and the Doctor pretended to play a liar and made it sound silent. I wish Anne would play silent when she does piano practice. There was a lady and her job was to poison people! I thought the police would come and arrest her but they did not.
This is the first in a series of six YA Doctor Who novellas published to commemorate the recent anniversary. It’s a very good start. Young Gerry has dreams of the Doctor, his companions and their adventures together, in a world that is just the same as ours, except that there is no TV show called Doctor Who and strange things happen like the unsolved murder of a pesticide researcher, or the odd goings-on at the Post Office Tower…
Really this is lovely. Jacqueline Rayner on form is one of the best current Doctor Who prose writers, and she’s on form here. She brilliantly evokes the decaying industrial atmosphere of the mid 1960s and the need for escapism, and the changing dynamics of family relationships over the last sixty years, and the universal difficulty of growing up. I loved it. You can get it here.
Bechdel fail, I’m afraid, with tight third around the boy protagonist.
Well, this is a bit grim: the top book set in Pakistan among LibraryThing readers is a real White Saviour narrative about a guy who just goes and does good to the people of Paksitan, whether they want it done to them or not. I haven’t read it, and I have seen nothing about it that encourages me to do so. (And the same goes for the sequel, in eighth place on this table, which I suspect may be anyway more set in Afghanistan than Pakistan.)
Malala Yousafzai, who wins among Goodreads users, is a different matter. Although her autobiography is ghost-written by Christina Lamb, it’s a genuine insider story of life in Swat, and I think I will look out for it. It’s noticeable that the young readers’ edition comes in sixth place.
To my dismay, I need to rule out the next three books because less than 50% of each is set in Pakistan. Midnight’s Children and Exit West are both favourite books of mine, but most of Midnight’s Children is set in India and none (as far as I remember) of Exit West is set in Pakistan. Similarly, Home Fire is mostly set in England.
So the top fiction book set in Pakistan is Salman Rushdie’s Shame. I will look out for it too.
THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR A DETECTIVE STORY PUBLISHED IN 1911
I have been a fan of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories since I was a child, but one point in ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’, a short story first published in 1911, has niggled at me for almost half a century. I was reminded of this last month when I was staying in a hotel on one side of St Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast, and giving two lectures at the new Ulster University campus on the other side of it, so that I walked past it four times in the space of a few hours. The passage in question comes just after the halfway point in the story when Father Brown reveals to Flambeau, his French ex-criminal friend, the current location of the broken-off part of the titular weapon.
“I cannot prove it, even after hunting through the tombs. But I am sure of it. Let me add just one more tiny fact that tops the whole thing over. The colonel, by a strange chance, was one of the first struck by a bullet. He was struck long before the troops came to close quarters. But he saw St. Clare’s sword broken. Why was it broken? How was it broken? My friend, it was broken before the battle.” “Oh!” said his friend with a sort of forlorn jocularity. “And pray where is the other piece?” “I can tell you,” said the priest promptly. “In the cemetery of the Protestant Cathedral at Belfast.” “Indeed?” inquired the other. “Did you look for it?” “I couldn’t,” said the priest with regret. “There’s a great marble monument on top of it; a monument to the heroic Major Murray who fell fighting gloriously at the battle of the Black River.”
The reason this passage has always niggled at me is very simple. There is no cemetery at St Anne’s Cathedral, the Protestant (ie Church of Ireland) Cathedral in Belfast. In fact, only one person is buried on the cathedral’s premises at all: Edward Carson, the Unionist leader and founder of Northern Ireland. In 1911, when the story was published, he was alive and sinnin’ (he lived to 1935). St Anne’s Cathedral was devoid of tombs, inside and out, at the time when Chesterton was writing.
This is very unusual for cathedrals in Britain or Ireland, either Protestant or Catholic. Most Church of Ireland cathedrals are in ancient ecclesiastical centres which have seen better days. I did a quick check and all of the other Protestant cathedrals in Northern Ireland do have graveyards. Many big cathedrals also have many interments inside the building – St Paul’s in London has Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington; St Patrick’s in Dublin has Jonathan Swift. St Anne’s, as noted, has just the one.
But St Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast is very new as cathedrals go. It serves two dioceses, Connor (which is roughly equivalent to County Antrim) and Down (which is not equivalent to County Down), each of which also has a cathedral of its own (in Lisburn and Downpatrick respectively). The foundation stone for St Anne’s was laid in 1899 and the cathedral was consecrated in 1904; this is long after the fictional battle of the Black River, which we are told was at least twenty years before 1911. It is located in a city centre site with commercial and residential buildings pressing around it. The south transept was not completed until 1974 and the north transept was not completed until 1981, when I was already a teenager.
St Anne’s Cathedral in the early 20th century. The block immediately north was cleared for the Art College in the 1960s, and the area to the southwest for Writer’s Square more recently.
Chesterton’s Major Murray, if buried in Belfast, would have been interred at the Clifton Street Cemetery if his family had a concession there, or up the Falls Road in the Belfast City Cemetery if not. Though thinking about it, it would be really unusual for even a very senior officer who had been killed in action abroad at that period to be brought back home. Looking at the 1899-1902 Boer War, the two British generals who lost their lives in the conflict, Penn Symons and Andrew Wauchope, are both still buried in South Africa.
We are told that Murray was a Protestant, which is unusual but not impossible. In the 1901 census, according to Barry Griffin’s data, although 88.65% of people in Ireland with the surname Murray were Catholics (including my own great-grandfather and his family), 5.24% were Anglicans (as the fictional Murray must have been to be buried in the fictional cathedral graveyard), concentrated especially around the shores of Lough Neagh with outposts that seem to be around what is now Newtownbreda and also Carrickfergus.
G.K. Chesterton had never been to any part of Ireland in 1911; he wrote a book called Irish Impressions after his first visit in 1918. (You can read it here.) He was instinctively sympathetic to Home Rule and unsympathetic to colonial wars such as the Boer War, which is clearly the basis for the fictional Brazilian war in the story – the popularity of Chesterton’s Brazilian leader Olivier with the British, years after the war had ended, must be a reference to the shift in the British attitude to the South African leader Jan Smuts at the same time.
I don’t really blame Chesterton for getting Belfast’s ecclesiastical geography wrong. The fictional British invasion of Brazil is a much bigger invention than a graveyard in Belfast. (There was historically a dispute between Brazil and the UK about the border with what was then British Guyana, but there does not seem to have been any armed conflict and the issue was resolved by Italian arbitration in 1904.) Anyway, neither the graveyard nor the war is what the story is really about.
SPOILER FOR A STORY PUBLISHED IN 1911
In Chesterton’s story, the bodies of both General Sir Arthur St. Clare and the Ulsterman Major Murray were retrieved after the battle of Black River – Murray found on the field, and St. Clare hanged from a tree. But the punchline is that St. Clare was a traitor, he killed Murray (who had found out his secret) with his own sword which broke in the process, and attacked the Brazilians, despite it being certain that he would lose with many casualties, so that Murray’s body would be unnoticed in the carnage. He was then strung up by his own men after the battle when they realised what he had done. The secret was kept by the British soldiers, who allowed it to be assumed that St. Clare was lynched by the Brazilians, and the fallen general was honoured as a tragic hero.
The narrative thrust of the story is that Father Brown works out what really happened from scraps of information and his knowledge of human nature. But the point of the story is that we should be wary of spoonfed narratives by the authorities about war heroes, or indeed about anything at all. One wonders if Chesterton had any particular person in mind – Baden-Powell? But he lived. Gordon? But his body was never recovered. In any case, the point is well made.
In the 2015 TV adaptation starring Mark Williams as Father Brown, the main action takes place in the 1950s with flashbacks to Dunkirk. The tableau is shrunk from national delusion to internal (and deadly) barracks politics. It’s nicely done, but it’s longer and less interesting than the original story.
But tonight they were not those children. Tonight, they were Sam and Miel, and he was pulling her on top of him and then under him. The way she moved against him made him feel the sharp presence of everything he had between his legs and, for just that minute, a forgetting, of everything he didn’t.
The BSFA Award for Best Novel that year went to Europe in Winter by Dave Hutchinson, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award to Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. The BSFA and Clarke ballots that year shared two novels, Occupy Me by Tricia Sullivan and A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers, but neither list had any crossover with the Tiptree list.
It was my first year as Hugo Administrator, and the Hugo for Best Novel went to The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin, but I myself voted for All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders, which won the Nebula. All the Birds in the Sky and Too Like the Lightning were also on the Hugo ballot, and Borderline and Everfair were also on the Nebula ballot.
I really liked this book, and once again kudos to the Tiptree Award (as it then was) for spotting something that others had passed by. It’s set in a world very close to ours, where the protagonists are a Latina girl and an Italian-Pakistani boy in love, but there’s a lot of magic going on (she grows flowers out of her arms; he has a well-hidden secret) and the four red-haired neighbour girls may be witches. It’s an intense exploration of body dysmorphia and the experience of being trans, in a well-realised small town, where the grownups have back-stories too. One of the best novels I have read so far this year, and strongly recommended. You can get it here.
With so many female characters, an easy Bechdel pass.
Next in my list of Tiptree winners (only two left!) is Who Runs the World? by Virginia Bergin.
Belfast: Approach to Crisis, by Ian Budge and Cornelius O’Leary Belfast: The Story of a City and its People, by Feargal Cochrane
I got hold of these two books in preparation for the lecture I gave in Belfast last month about the electoral history of the city, which you can watch here:
These are two very different books from very different times. The second paragraph of the third chapter of Belfast: Approach to Crisis is:
The cause of this increasing prosperity, the greatest that any Irish city has known, was twofold. First, the expansion of the linen industry which became fully mechanised between 1852 and 1862 with the rapid acceptance of the power loom.3 With the coming of the American Civil War Lancashire mills were starved of raw cotton and the Belfast mills soon found a new market for their high quality finished goods.4 The linen trade continued to expand until the 1870s,5 but while the labour force trebled between 1850 and 1875 (from 16,000 to 50,000), the proportion represented by adult male workers never exceeded one third. 3‘In 1852 there was only one power loom in Belfast. Ten years later there were 6,000.’ (Jones in Belfast, p. 109) 4The number of new buildings constructed annually between 1861 and 1864 ranged from 730 to 1,400 – thereby increasing the total valuation by about 20 per cent. (B.N.L., 2 January 1865.) 5The number of flax spindles in Ireland increased from 300,000 in 1850 to nearly 600,000 in 1860, and nearly one million by the end of the 1870s. This peak figure was never equalled – too much machinery had been installed for normal output, cf W. E. Coe, The Engineering Industry of the North of Ireland, pp. 60-61. In 1870 80 per cent of spindles and 70 per cent of power looms in the whole of Ireland were to be found in Belfast and its environs. D. L. Armstrong, ‘Social and Economic Conditions in the Belfast Linen Industry, 1850-1900’, Irish Historical Studies VII (September 1951), 238.
I don’t know Ian Budge (who is now 87) but I did know Cornelius O’Leary, an eccentric colleague of my father’s at the Queen’s University of Belfast, and this book represents good political analysis combined with very poor timing. It has two parts. The first half, more or less, is a survey of the political history of Belfast, paying special attention to the city council (known as the Corporation for most of the period), from the earliest days to the 1960s, when the book was written. I got a lot out of this (and plundered it extensively for my lecture last month).
Until 1832, Belfast was a pocket borough of the Chichester family, but the Great Reform Act opened up its politics to the mainly Presbyterian merchant classes. The first successful political organiser was a John Bates, who managed to combine the roles of main organiser for the Conservative Party (which won all the elections) with that of Town Clerk once the municipal council was reformed in the 1840s. He fell spectacularly from power in 1855 when he was exposed for diverting public funds by a public inquiry. I’d love to see some more about his story.
The book goes in detail through the next 110 years of political history, including a couple more times when the Corporation was suspended and the city was run by administrators. And the second half of the book gives the outputs of an exhaustive political survey of Belfast, including most of the councillors, and many of their supporters and voters in general, along with some comparative research on the attitudes of councillors in Glasgow. The data set is very rich.
The problem is that the research was largely carried out in 1966, and the city collapsed into chaos over the next couple of years, so that when the book first came out in 1973, it was a deep analysis of a political system that had already ceased to exist. The Belfast of 1973 was very different from the Belfast of 1966. The authors do look in depth into the questions of naming the new bridge and the Sunday swings issue, but compared with what happened over the next few years it all looks rather silly. (In fairness, a lot of people thought the swings issue looked rather silly in 1966.)
Really a book only for the most dedicated of Norn Iron politics nerds (and I am proud to count myself among that number). You can get it here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Belfast: The Story of a City and its People is:
Some years ago a friend of the family who stayed with us for a few days proceeded to tell me all about the cranes as soon as they arrived and saw the painting. ‘Hey, nice painting!’ they exclaimed, breezing into the living room. ‘That’s David and Goliath in Belfast, you know.’ ‘No, it’s actually Samson and Goliath,’ I responded – politely but firmly. ‘No, I’m sure it’s David and Goliath,’ they ploughed on. ‘You should check it out.’ I walked out of the room, my face burning with indignation, muttering through clenched teeth not entirely sotto voce: ‘Well I lived under them for nearly two decades so I think I should know what they’re called!’ My partner, her laugh stifled by the fear of a meltdown at the beginning of a social visit, rapidly changed the subject to a less divisive one as I harrumphed upstairs. ‘So let’s talk about Brexit then…’ she said.
This on the other hand is a much more accessible book, rooted in Cochrane’s personal story of having grown up as a Catholic in a mixed but traditionally Protestant area of the city (as I did), reflecting on the early history of the city, where he is keen on the radical political tradition of the McCrackens, the Assembly Rooms (now dilapidated) and the Linen Hall Library (of which I was a Governor back in the mid-1990s), and also looking at culture – music, theatre, poetry, and other parts of the arts. I found the first part more engaging, the second feeling a bit too structured, but the information is all good, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about how it feels to be in or from Belfast. You can get it here.
If I can be excused a second video, this is the percussion section of the City of Belfast Youth Orchestra performing Scheherazade in 1985. I am the third percussionist in view, holding the tambourine. The CBYO is still going strong.
The demands of her parents, both ill in their different ways, were endless. She was physically drained and mentally wound up. From morning to night, she worked and worried, her daily life encompassing the worst of both worlds – she was lonely, isolated in her burden of work and care – but never left alone to recoup her spirits. All her resources – time, energy, money, skills – were pressed into a struggle to keep the feeble Lamb family afloat. No part of her life was truly her own, there was no minute of her day that was not already claimed in the service of someone else. Even at night, there was no privacy; she shared the bed of an elderly invalid. Insomnia is now recognised as a warning signal in manic-depressive illness and it was impossible that Mary could sleep properly in these circumstances. With sleep deprivation, that peculiarly disorienting and distressing mental state, problems are magnified tenfold and rational thought flies out the window. That year, September was as hot as June – 78 degrees Fahrenheit – and working with fabric in that heat would have been miserable and oppressive. And September was traditionally a bad month for dressmakers. So added to the normal family worries over money, there was a seasonal dip in income.
A short but really interesting biography of Mary Lamb (1764-1847), who is well known for two things: the 1807 collection Tales from Shakespeare, in which she and her brother retold a number the great Shakespeare plays in terms deemed suitable for children of the day; and the fact that in 1796 during an attack of mental illness, she stabbed her mother to death in the family kitchen. I had previously listened to a rather good radio play by Carlo Gébler about them.
There’s a lot more than just those two things to Mary’s story. The Lambs were of humble stock – their father was a servant in the Inner Temple, and Mary was trained as a seamstress at a time when the market for sewing was saturated. Charles was a clerk in the East India Company. But he had a scholarship to a boarding school where he befriended Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and that friendship gave him and Mary the contacts in the literary world, in particular with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, which made them able to establish a literary salon and to get a good reception from publishers for their own writings – and they wrote a lot more than Shakespeare. Their network included William Godwin, widower of Mary Wollstonecraft, who actually commissioned Tales from Shakespeare.
This was punctuated by periods of serious illness for Mary, and less frequently for Charles. To be honest, two centuries of advance in medical science would not have helped them very much. In today’s world, they would have benefited from some medicated relief, but not enough to eliminate their problems entirely; and in countries with a decent welfare system, there would have been perhaps more care available and more respite for Charles who ended up carrying most of the burden of Mary’s illness. Even so, Mary lived to her eighties.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next up is Discovering Tudor London: A Journey Back in Time, by Natalie Grueninger.
Current Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh Orlanda, by Jacqueline Hartman The Self-Made Man, by Mark Griffiths
Last books finished The Then and the Now, by Si Spurrier et al Starter Villain, by John Scalzi Moroda, by L.L. McNeil (did not finish) Promises Greater Than Darkness, by Charlie Jane Anders (did not finish) Imaginary Friends, by Jacqueline Rayner The Cradle, by Tasha Suri When Voiha Wakes, by Joy Chant
Next books The Angel of Redemption, by Nikita Gill Belfast City Hall: One Hundred Years, by Gillian McIntosh Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
In the absence of coffee, I had a shower, and, by the time I was dressed, Dominic had texted me to say that he was on his way. The air was still fresh but the sun was already sucking up the moisture from the fields and you didn’t need to be chewing on a straw to know it was going to be another hot day.
I’ve read the previous installments of the Rivers of London series before and enjoyed them (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). In this volume, our protagonist, a London detective who has found himself sucked into magical investigations, is called to Herefordshire with his goddess girlfriend to investigate the disappearance of two girls. There’s lots of rural/urban tension, some glorious but not explicit erotic moments, and a look at how the boundary between our world and Faerie might manifest in the twenty-first century. There’s also a really good sense of place within Herefordshire’s geography. I think you could enjoy this book without having read the previous five books, but you’d enjoy it more if you had. You can get it here.
Not quite sure if this is a Bechdel pass. Plenty of women characters, who talk to each other a lot, but because the narrator is a man he is usually in the conversation too, or else being talked about. There’s a sequence at the top of page 117 where three goddesses are discussing mobile phone technology which possibly passes.
