br3nda

After a few distinctly less than summery days, today has been quite sunny.

Okay, I think I've had some of these before.... maybe.
Summer Nights

The downside: Summertime Blues:

Not sure if Summer Wine is for drinking then, or made then, with sinister summer herbs:

Obligatory Lovin' Spoonful

Kinks chilling on a Lazy Sunny Afternoon:

Carole King another one wanting it to be over:

I did a quick search over past posts and I see that bibliotherapy has been a thing that I have been posting the odd link about for A Long Time, though I see the School of Life's page thereon is now 404. In the way that things are constantly being suddenly NEW, I see I also had a link much more recently on the topic about which was cynical.

But I find this article really quite amusing if sometimes determined to use all the Propah Academyk Speek: Reading as therapy: medicalising books in an era of mental health austerity:

When reading is positioned as therapy, we argue, evaluative intentions intersect awkwardly with the cultural logics of literature, as practitioners and commissioners grapple with what it means to extract ‘wellbeing effects’ from a diffuse and everyday practice. As a result, what might look initially like another simple case of medicalisation turns out to have more uncertain effects. Indeed, as we will show, incorporating the ‘reading cure’ troubles biomedicine, foregrounding both the deficiencies of current public health responses to the perceived crisis of mental health, and the poverty of causal models of therapeutic effect in public health. There are, then, potentially de-medicalising as well as medicalising effects.

Larfed liek drayne:

In five experiments on how reading fiction impacts on measures of wellbeing, Carney and Robertson found no measurable effects from simply being exposed to fiction: the mechanism, they note, is not akin to a pharmaceutical that can prescribed.

What I read

KJ Charles, Copper Script (2025): somehow not among my top KJCs.

Finished Bitch in a Bonnet Vol 2, perhaps even better than vol 1.

Angela Thirkell, The Old Bank House (1949): not quite sure why this got to be picked as a Virago Modern Classic: WO WO Iron Heel of THEM i.e. the 1945 Labour Government, moan whinge, etc etc; also several rather repetitious passages of older generation maundering to themselves about the dire prospects that await the younger members.

Finished Dragon's Teeth, the last parts of which were quite the wild ride.

Latest Slightly Foxed, a bit underwhelmed, well, they can't always be talking about things that really interest/excite me or rouse fond memories I suppose.

On the go

Have started Upton Sinclair. Wide is the Gate (Lanny Budd, #4) (1943) simply because I had very strong 'what happens next? urges after the end of Dragon's Teeth, but that gets answered in the first few chapters, and I think that in this one we're already getting strong hints that Lanny is about to head southwards to Spain, just in time for things to start getting violent. I might take a break.

I have just started a romance by an author I have vaguely heard well of and was a Kobo deal but don't think it's for me.

Up next

Dunno: perhaps that Gail Godwin memoir.

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*Even barely woken up I was not at all sure that this was not all one of those cunning scams that is in fact a fraudster telling you they are your bank/credit card co, but it turned out it was actually about somebody making fraudulent charges - in really odd small ways - on my card, when I got onto the website and found the number to ring - the number being called from with automated menu bearing no resemblance to the one on my card, ahem - went through all the procedures and card is being cancelled and new one sent. SIGH. This is second credit card hoohah in two days, yesterday got text re upcoming due payment for which bill has so far failed to arrive, for the one for which logging into website involves dangers untold and hardships unnumbered and having the mobile app. (Eventually all resolved.)

In June 1868 the University of London's Senate had voted to admit women to sit the 'General Examination', so becoming the first British university to accept female candidates:

Women's higher education in London dates from the late 1840s, with the foundation of Bedford College by the Unitarian benefactor, Elisabeth Jesser Reid. Bedford was initially a teaching institution independent of the University of London, which was itself an examining institution, established in 1836. Over the next three decades, London University examinations were available only to male students.
Demands for women to sit examinations (and receive degrees) increased in the 1860s. After initial resistance a compromise was reached.
In August 1868 the University announced that female students aged 17 or over would be admitted to the University to sit a new kind of assessment: the 'General Examination for Women'.

Sexism in science: 7 women whose trailblazing work shattered stereotypes. Yeah, we note that this was over 100 years since the ladies sitting the University of London exams, and passing.

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A couple of recent contributions from Campop about employment issues in the past:

Who was self-employed in the past?:

It is often assumed that industrial Britain, with its large factories and mines employing thousands of people, left little space for individuals running their own businesses. But not everyone was employed as a worker for others. Some exercised a level of agency operating on their own as business proprietors, even if they were also often very constrained.
Over most of the second half of the 19th century as industrialisation accelerated, the self-employed remained a significant proportion of the population – about 15 percent of the total economically active. It was only in the mid-20th century that the proportion plummeted to around eight percent.

Home Duties in the 1921 Census:

What women in ‘home duties’ were precisely engaged in still remains a mystery, reflecting the regular obstruction of women’s everyday activity from the record across history. For some, surely ‘home duties’ reflected hard physical labour (particularly in washing), as well as hours of childcare exceeding the length of the factory day. For others, particularly the aspirational bourgeois, the activities of “home duties” involved little actual housework. 5.1 percent of wives in home duties had servants to assist them, a rate which doubled for clerks’ wives to 11.7 percent. For them, household “work” involved little physical action. Though this may have given some of these women the opportunity to spend their hours in cultural activities or socialising, for others it possibly reflected crushing boredom.

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And on informal contributions, Beyond Formal and Informal: Giving Back Political Agency to Female Diplomats in Early Nineteenth Century Europe:

[H]istorians such as Jeroen Duindam show that there were never explicitly separate spheres for men and women when working for the state in the early nineteenth-century. Drawing a line separating ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ diplomats in the early nineteenth-century, simply based on their gender alone, does not do these women justice.

And I am very happy to see this receiving recognition, though how far has something which got reprinted after 30 years be considered languishing in obscurity, huh? as opposed to having created a persistent fanbase: A Matter of Oaths – Helen Wright.

Today I already had the fret of a physio appointment re the neck & shoulder issue coming up in early afternoon.

During the morning I had an email from online pharmacy that ooops, migraine prophylaxis drug I have been taking for some years (and which I apprehend one is not supposed to cease abruptly) they are having supply problems with. Log in to account to contact them.

(This involved a certain amount of faff with their chat client, which froze my browser.)

a)Various options involving see if I can source it from local pharmacy and they will send prescription.

b)Wait and see if they can acquire supply.

c)Contact GP about possible substitute.

I discovered that at least one local pharmacy did have it in stock, so went for first option.

Though on reflection thought I would at least see if other local pharmacy, which was not responding to call to number on NHS site, and which was more or less on the way back from physio appt, also had it.

They did, and also the staff there are a lot more agreeable than the last time I had occasion to visit it.

I hope this was just a temporary supply blip....

Physio resulted in Yet Another Set of Exercises, which we may hope do not set off massive excruciating lower back pain, and also a repeat appointment in a fortnight, with this therapist and their supervisor -

Modified yay, even if it is a) at 1 pm and b) at the uphill all the way health centre.

This week's bread: a loaf of 50:50% strong white and einkorn flour, with a little splash of oil when making up, turned out very nice.

Saturday breakfast rolls: brown grated apple, strong brown flour, and Rayner's Classic Organic Barley Malt Extract, which is much nicer than most other malt extracts.

Today's lunch: pseudo-spanokopita, spinach sauteed in butter and seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg and lemon thyme, pie-dish lined with sheets of filo brushed with olive oil, layer of the spinach, soft cheese, rest of spinach, more sheets of filo, baked for 45 mins in a very moderate oven; served with baked San Marzano tomatoes and white chicory quartered, healthy-grilled in walnut oil and splashed with bramble vinegar.

Naturally, I feared the worst from the headline: ‘Men need liberation too’: do we need more male novelists?, but apart from the guy who is the editor of this new imprint which is to encourage poor wittle male authors (Son of Mybug, well, I guess, Grandson? Great-Grandson? Distant Descendant discovered through sending his DNA to be tested?) they are all actually WTF, FFS, what are you talking about?

He moans on that the vast majority of commissioning editors in publishing are women, which I fancy is a situation that has historically pertained for Quite Some Time and did not happen just yesterday, and there have been Fabled Agents and Editors of Ye Fayre Sexxe who were the champions of Bloke Writers, some of whom were fairly toxic specimens (e.g. look at some of the authors with whom Diana Athill worked closely).

Come on down Anne Enright:

The majority female readership is generous to male writers, while male readers continue to be reluctant about reading and praising women.... More books are being published today than ever before, and this includes more books by men. I have seen publishers eat up novels by younger men (especially Irish men, I am glad to say). I have seen them fall on such books with relief that they exist and that they are good. I don’t see any problem with men getting published, when those men are not misogynistic, because it is actually misogyny that has gone out of fashion, not male writers. I worry about men who miss all that, and who miss the inflated, undeserved feeling of importance of the good old days.

Yay Leo Robson:

Anyone who knows anything about anything, or at least about the English novel, knows that it can never be “too female”.... There have been periods when male novelists consumed most of the attention: notably in the 1980s and early 1990s, when it was deemed necessary to found a women’s prize for fiction. But everyone knew that the leading English novelists were Penelope Fitzgerald and Iris Murdoch, who wrote often and brilliantly about men.... Of course I am exaggerating, slightly. There have been some decent male novelists. If this were not the case, it would have been somewhat presumptuous or arrogant to have attempted writing a novel myself.

Sarah Moss suggests maybe the problem is men as readers:

I suspect that if there is a problem with men’s literary fiction, it’s as much to do with reading as writing. The gender (im)balance of audiences at book events suggests that men much prefer to read nonfiction.... If patriarchy means that some men miss out on the joys of literature, that’s quite low on the list of its harms and also unlikely to be fixed by setting up a men’s publishing house. I wonder also how much this is a British problem, because I can immediately think of dozens of Irish men, established and emerging writers, publishing very well-received novels.... Many men, it seems, experience no curiosity about the female gaze, or women’s experiences. Maybe women, who always used to read men and buy their books, are beginning to return the compliment.

Welsh farmer pleads guilty to stealing more than 70 sheep from neighbour.

The term 'rustled' is invoked: 'At least 73 ewes in lamb were rustled in March'.

Alas, this does not sound at all like the Old West of the movies of my youth:

[He] told the court he had acted because of financial pressure but understood his actions were “unacceptable”, BBC Wales reported. Williams added that he “deeply” regretted stealing the sheep and “feels ashamed”.

Woman who calls herself ‘UK’s poshest thief’ fined for stealing Le Creuset cookware:

A former criminology lecturer who calls herself the “UK’s poshest thief” has been fined for stealing more than £1,000-worth of Le Creuset cookware, steaks, wine and gin.
Pauline Al Said and her husband, Mark Wheatcroft, have been fined £2,500 between them after the thefts from a garden centre and a branch of Marks & Spencer.
....
Representing themselves, the couple, from Southsea in Hampshire, told Portsmouth crown court their actions were on the “lower end”.

I also think it is tacky to call yourself 'UK's poshest thief' and a pretty sure sign that you are a very long way from being the C21st equivalent of Raffles the Amateur Cracksman.