Ossamenta

What I read

Finished Eleven Hours to Murder and went on to Death by the Dozen, which combine the cozy antics of Cat Caliban and her posse with mysteries tending to be rooted in past historical events in and around Cincinnatti. And Cat is after all pursuing a career as a PI, rather than taking up some quirky midlife career and just stumbling over bodies. And her partner is a retired cop who used to work in Juvie, not homicide. So counter to a lot of the recurrent tropes....

Then I realised, oops, that next meeting of in-person book group appears to be next Sunday - though I have not received any further notification since exchange of emails after the last meeting - so I have been reading Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (2023), which is blurbed as 'genre-bending', meaning it does things I am not that on board with, i.e. the writer's personal stuff/odyssey and b) fictionalising bits as narrative. Though I am marking it up somewhat for her realisation that her Great Hero G Orwell was A Horror. I daresay a lot of his trouble with being basically incapable in managing matters and practicalities was down to class and educational background but you'd have thought he might have cottoned on to some of that? rather than blithely eating up the whole of their butter ration? (fairly minor in the overall marital picture).

On the go

Read a bit more in I Am a Woman but still feeling a bit bogged down, even if Laura has finally had a night of sapphic passion.

Elizabeth George, A Slowly Dying Cause (Inspector Lynley Book 22) (2025). Fortunately this was a Kobo deal. Phoning it in. Also getting rather bogged down. 20% in and only just getting a sight of Lynley, let alone Havers. Includes great chunks of autobiographical reminiscence from the corpse.

Have also made some progress on volume for review.

Up next

Have apparently manifested, in place where I would never have thought to look for it, GB Stern, The Woman in the Hall (1939), which I had been fruitlessly looking for elsewhere, with a notion of maybe recommending for book group, as has recently been reissued for the first time since 1939 by British Library Women Writers.

'I'm so glad I didn't die with the measles when I was little!'

Thinking a bit further about that education meme and the line You were in relatively good physical and mental health.

Well, on the one hand, I had my vaccinations for smallpox, diphtheria and whooping cough all in order at a young age.

I did, however, get measles, chickenpox and mumps once I started school and they were going around. And in those days if you had an infectious disease you were obliged to stay off school for a designated quarantine period (and return your library books to the Public Health Department for fumigation).

I think scarlet fever was still around though rare, and I have a vague recollection of some child at the school actually dying from it?

Polio vaccination only came in when I was 7 or 8.

I suffered from severe tonsillitis until they removed them when I was 6, I am not at all sure, in the light of present thinking on the subject, that this was necessary, but it was very common.

In less dramatic health interventions, I mention the free codliver oil, orange juice and milk bestowed by a munificent government.

I am a little surprised, in retrospect, that my short sight wasn't picked up through testing at school, but in fact my mother noticed me squinting at things and took me for an eye-test.

I feel that I had fair amounts of time off from school being ill one way and another (besides the aforementioned epidemic diseases and operation) - not to mention the appendectomy and its after-effects when I was at uni - but that this didn't have any major adverse impact.

At the grammar school I was tagged for remedial exercises to do with the way I walked (on the outsides of my feet?): am not sure this had any effect whatsoever.

My migraines were not identified as such.

Period pains were after the way of womanhood, pretty much.

On the whole, relatively good health. A certain amount of mental stress, especially at uni.

And I'm not at all sure it's culture-neutral, hmmmm?

Okay, I had parents who had books in the house and read to me and once I could read took me to the local library to get tickets for the children's department.

No children's museums that I recall but visiting the rather dull local one attached to the public library, and visits to local sites of historical interest.

My primary school was not, I think, particularly distinguished - suspect that the year there were a whole four of us passed the 11+ was Memorable - but there were some good teachers.

I don't know how one calibrates into all this my mother knowing the teacher of Infants 1 and asking her about whether I could go to school once I had turned 5 (having an autumn birthday) and her saying, oh, send her along, on account of my mother thinking I was entirely ready.

And then the Head saying I should do the 11+ technically a year early - (which was not a given, people did get kept back)

Going to a fairly academically-intense girls' grammar school, where I did get the odd spot of class-hassle, I realise in retrospect (including from horrid Mrs B of the really weird ideas about sex), where I was marked out as university material and my parents exhorted to keep me on the sixth form -

Which they were entirely happy to do.

So yes, I was I suppose supported on my academic journey. But some of that was external factors, like the existence of that extinct phoenix, full student grants.

Books and screens: Everyone is panicking about the death of reading usefully points out that panic and woezery over reading/not-reading/what they're reading etc etc is far from a new phenomenon:

We have been here before. Not just once, but repeatedly, in a pattern so consistent it reveals something essential about how cultural elites respond to changes in how knowledge moves through society.
In the late 19th century, more than a million boys’ periodicals were sold per week in Britain. These ‘penny dreadfuls’ offered sensational stories of crime, horror and adventure that critics condemned as morally corrupting and intellectually shallow. By the 1850s, there were up to 100 publishers of this penny fiction. Victorian commentators wrung their hands over the degradation of youth, the death of serious thought, the impossibility of competing with such lurid entertainment.
But walk backwards through history, and the pattern repeats with eerie precision. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, novel-reading itself was the existential threat. The terms used were identical to today’s moral panic: ‘reading epidemic’, ‘reading mania’, ‘reading rage’, ‘reading fever’, ‘reading lust’, ‘insidious contagion’. The journal Sylph worried in 1796 that women ‘of every age, of every condition, contract and retain a taste for novels … the depravity is universal.’
....
In 1941, the American paediatrician Mary Preston claimed that more than half of the children she studied were ‘severely addicted’ to radio and movie crime dramas, consumed ‘much as a chronic alcoholic does drink’. The psychiatrist Fredric Wertham testified before US Congress that, as he put it in his book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), comics cause ‘chronic stimulation, temptation and seduction’, calling them more dangerous than Hitler. Thirteen American states passed restrictive laws. The comics historian Carol Tilley later exposed the flaws in Wertham’s research, but by then the damage was done.

Moving on: on another prickly paw, I am not sure I am entirely on board with this model of reading as equivalent to going to the gym or other self-improving activity, and committing to reading X number of books per year (even if I look at the numbers given and sneer slightly): ‘Last year I read 137 books’: could setting targets help you put down your phone and pick up a book?:

As reading is increasingly tracked and performed online, there is a growing sense that a solitary pleasure is being reshaped by the logic of metrics and visibility. In a culture that counts steps, optimises sleep and gamifies meditation, the pressure to quantify reading may say less about books than about a wider urge to turn even our leisure into something measurable and, ultimately, competitive.

Also at the sense that the books are being picked for Reasons - maybe I'm being unfair.

Also, perhaps, this is a where you are in the life-cycle thing: because in my 20s or so I was reading things I thought I ought to read/have read even if I was also reading things for enjoyment, and I am now in my sere and withered about, is this going to be pleasurable? (I suspect chomping through 1000 romances as research is not all that much fun?)

(Okay, I have an essay-review coming out on several works which deal with moral panics around coffeebars and jazz clubs and so forth in the 1960s - 'the monkey walk was good enough for us'....)

But on the one hand wo wo the yoof of today are not even getting into leg-over situations, though the evidence for this as far as the UK goes dates to the NATSAL 2019 report based on survey undertaken 2012.

And if they do, The death of the post-shag sleepover: Why is no one staying over after sex anymore?

Okay, very likely - I dunno, is the '6 people I spoke to in a winebar last week' cliche still valid or has this migrated to some corner of social media, but amounting to pretty much the same thing as far as statistical sociological validity goes?

But while it may be all about anxieties around sleep hygiene rituals, or looks-maxxing practices, which will not sit happily alongside unrestrained PASSION and bonkery -

- there is also mention that, individuals in question are living with room-mates and one does wonder whether they actually have RULES about overnight guests who might hog the bathroom wherein they perform their wellness things (apart from any other objections such as noise....)

Yes, my dearios, I am already doing the hedjog all-more-complicated flamenco about this, and thinking about a narrative theme of the 1960s of young women rising from beds of enseamed lust in order to go home to the parental roof and sleep in their own chaste bed so that they can be plausibly awakened therein. (And is there not a current wo wo narrative about young people still living with PARENTS???)

Charity secures 1000 acres for Wales’ largest rewilding project:

The charity’s approach will include introducing hardy cattle and Welsh mountain ponies to the land, with ancient breeds of pigs to follow. Their grazing and roaming will support habitat restoration.
Peatland rewetting and natural water retention across the site over the next five to ten years means the project will contribute to increased biodiversity, cleaner water, healthier soils, improved carbon storage and reduced flood risk for downstream farmland.
It is hoped these actions will create conditions to boost various species, with the potential for red squirrels, pine martens, polecats, curlews and hen harriers to return.
The charity also aims for much of the work to be carried out by local tradespeople. Community participation will also help uncover and share stories of those who lived and worked across the site’s 55 historic stone landmarks, from Bronze Age cairns to traditional upland buildings.

Not sure if this can at all be mapped onto Cranford (based on Knutsford): Knutsford's Booths Hall granted special building status:

The house was built in 1745 for Peter Legh after he married heiress, Anne Wade.
The building was extended in 1845 by his grandson, Peter and remodelled in 1858 into an Italianate style by Edward Habershon for John Legh, a nephew of Mr Legh.
In 1917, the Legh family auctioned the hall and estate.
....
Historic England says it was listed for ‘demonstrating fine craftsmanship in the brickwork and stone detailing’ of each phase.
Special features include the unusual and well-preserved first floor conservatory with a curved glass roof.
The good survival of interior features and decoration from all three building phases using high quality materials and a high degree of craftsmanship.

Another kind of heritage: Green’s Dictionary of Slang: Five hundred years of the vulgar tongue, including the invaluable Timelines of Slang.

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Smutwalk: Mapping Nineteenth-Century Obscenity - though actually, not all of the physical places are still there. Still. I think one might manage a tribute to Pornographers of Ye Olde Tymes stroll.

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Queer love and friendship: 1920s Fitzroy Square:

In 1927, Bobby and his queer working-class friends gathered in his Fitzroy Square flat. Though surveillance documents, we can learn about these vibrant gatherings, the people involved and the passionate, intimate letters that survive. These records offer a rare insight into queer lives of the time.

How Not To Do Heritage, we feel (guy has quite rightly been getting crapped on on social media): History professor finds huge Iron Age hoard: 'The collection will be auctioned at Noonans in Mayfair on 4 March as part of a coins and historical medals, external sale.'. Observe the guy's creepy smirk in the photo.