crookedeye

So dr rdrz will be aware of my recent problems with printer, so I finally bit the bullet and after consulting Which Best Buys and so forth, went for an Epson Eco-Tank from John Lewis.

Which arrived at lunchtime today.

And I had anticipated spending hours if not days whining and stressing and beating my head on the ground and wrestling like until Jacob with the Angel to get the thing talking to my system and actually printing/scanning/copying.

Behold me sat sitting here having achieved getting it connected to the Wifi (the Wizard, though, is crap because it assumes that your password is a word rather than numeric, fortunately there was an alternative route), appearing under printers/scanners in my desktop computer settings, and copying, scanning, and printing.

There was a little hassle with printing which turned out to be due to Advanced Printer Settings turning out to have weird Paper Size as default rather than A4, which given that A4 is supposed to be their standard size, was bizarre.

This is positively uncanny, do admit.

Personally I suspect Blake Morrison has either not read terribly deeply in memoirs of the past, because I could probably without too much struggle come up with instances which were not at all about being 'a geriatric, self-satisfied genre (politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers)', but one sees that this is a position he has to take up in order to make his case about Ye Moderne Confeshunal memoiring.

‘Enough of this me me me’: Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing

(Harriette Wilson would like a word, just saying, for starters.) (We can so imagine dear Harriette on social media, no?)

I'm not sure he's really got an argument there rather than some vague blathering about published memoirs vs social media and blogs, especially given the, er, thinness of his historical grounding (though in some cases past memoirists prudently arranged for the work to published posthumously).

And as for people being somewhat lax with the truthiness of their memoirs, how about this chap: The schoolteacher who spawned a Highland literary hoax:

The book’s author and narrator, Donald Cameron, describes his early life in Blarosnich, a remote hill farm in the Western Highlands in the 1930s and early 1940s. The book presents a Brigadoon-like spectacle of an agrarian community seemingly little touched by modernity, populated by pious women, elderly aristocrats and lusty farm lads.
....
Donald Cameron was, in fact, a pseudonym of Robert Harbinson Bryans, an itinerant bisexual schoolteacher turned travel writer who was born in Belfast in 1928 and died in London in 2005. Also known as Robin Bryans, his name is now largely forgotten apart from among students of plots and conspiratorial claims.

Because she is bringing us old bats into disrepute (we are more or less in the same age cohort), this is exactly the sort of thing that gets us dismissed, and it's quite clearly weaponised incompetence to get her son to run around buying stuff on the internet for her while she does not do due diligence over her headphones.
You be the judge: should my mum stop asking me to buy her new headphones?:

My son Henry is exaggerating terribly. I don’t lose headphones all the time. I simply put them away in different places and occasionally forget which place that was.
This happens to everyone, especially when you live in a house where things move about over time. I live on my own, in a large, eccentric home. I’m not a hoarder but I often forget where I put things. Henry will come over and find the headphones after I have lost them, and while I’m grateful to him for helping me find them and buying new ones, I could do without some of his lectures.
I’m 76; I don’t need to be told to “be more careful”. I just live my life how I want and sometimes I’m a bit scatty.

Mind you, also irksome is that thing when somebody prates on of 'in my day' and I think, not merely that I was there in that day and we had electric light and everything, they are, a little calculation suggests, actually somewhat younger and should not be going on like that.

This was something that flitted past me where someone was being driven bananas by her mother-in-law interfering with the baby and upsetting its routine and doing all those things annoying relatives do because they are not going to be kept up all night by agitated babby.... And there was sense that MiL was 'oh, these new-fangled notions' as if in her day it was Ye Wisdomme of Ye Village Cronez rather than paediatricians advising new mothers.

I will, as a historian of medicine, concede that ideas of How To Bring Up Baby have gone through changes, but suspect that 'if babby has got to sleep, let babby sleep in peace' has always been pretty central.

(I realise that there may yet come a time when in a miasmatic wasteland this crone of the tribe maunders on about the time in her day when they had vaccines and codliver oil....)

Yesterday partner and I went on an excursion to Rochester, as partner wanted to visit the cathedral and the castle, and I thought it would make a nice little trip - two trains an hour from St Pancras International. Also, it is not presently in the throes of having either of its twice-yearly Dickens Festivals, although there are quite a lot of manifestations of Charles D associations, from cafes called e.g. Tiny Tim's to plaques on buildings declaring that they are the originals of [some building in one or other of the novels].

The castle is Norman and there is quite a lot of it still standing. Realised that these days I am not so spritely about manouevring around rough-hewn spiral staircases and did not ascend all the way to the top of the tower. Apparently it is where Henry VIII met Anne of Cleves on her arrival in England (dooooomed! doooomed!). There were notices all over about the corpses of pigeons - these are preyed on by crows, the crows are a protected species, tough, pidges.

The cathedral is second oldest in England and has seen a lot of history, not to mention The Reformation, the Civil War and Commonwealth, Victorian church restoration, etc. There are some v kitsch early C19th funerary monuments. The crypt is v modernised and has a caff, a chapel to St Ithamar, first Saxon bishop of Rochester, and an exhibition of medieval manuscripts from the cathedral library (that survived the Henrician Reformation).

The high street is well worth strolling along, quite a number of picturesque ancient edifices, including Eastgate House and the Six Poor Travellers House.

What I read

Finished Honeycomb.

Read Jonathan Kellerman, Jigsaw (2026), for a change of pace. While the perp is, for a change, not a serial killer with intricate pattern of murders, still a psycho, though revenge in the mix. I yearn for Dr Delaware to get a locked room mystery at a country house party with a load of ye trad motives.

Then back to Barbara Hambly, Murder in the Trembling Lands (2025), which I still found fairly confusing - admittedly the plot is rooted in confused/confusing stories - on a re-read.

Something or other brought to mind a really obscure author whose 2 novels I'd managed to find (after reading the second from the library and then wanting to read it again and searching for it for years), so actually managed to retrieve these from the approximate places where they were supposed to be on actual shelves.

D. A. Nicholas Jones, Parade in Pairs (1958), first novel, some good things, thought the racial violence at the end was a bit gratuitous - chronology suggests it could not have been response to Notting Hill Race Riots. Period racial attitudes are situated in characters and there is quite a bit of ambiguity going on. Also some, fairly peripheral, characters are gay.

On the go

D. A. Nicholas Jones, Never Had It So Good (1963), which is the one I first encountered. I see I wrote about it years ago back in LJ days.

Also on the go, as I was out and about today and did not want to tote about a substantial hardback, Farah Mendlesohn, Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, or, As the Bear Swore, published yesterday.

Up next

No idea.

I know I was born into a fortunate generation which had things like university grants and better employment opportunities and the ability to buy one's own house in one's twenties and so on -

I have also occasionally been heard to remark that, on account of the codliver oil and school milk dispensed by a caring Welfare State, Ma Generayshun probably has bones like steel girders persisting into the twilight years and that this very likely no longer pertains -

- I did not realise that life expectancy was actually going down (older article, feel I saw something much more recently but didn't keep the link).

Not to mention decline in actual expectation of healthy quality of life.

I was brought up with coal fires - the Clean Air Act was 1956 but I'm not sure how long the effects took to kick in - possibly various dietary things that might not be considered optimum these days? - various things like the foot-x-ray machines in shoe-shops that have vanished -

While maybe not the plethora of junk food there is now it was absolutely not that organic idyll that gets posited!

So there were adverse factors around, but maybe just enough counter-balancing things going on?

Gosh those people with the archivists' sales team are persistent! I've heard again - okay, different name and email, exact same wordage - TWICE, second time with added 'Worth a chat?'

No, sir, not in the least.

***

This week I got the Authors Licensing and Copyright Society payout, which was an agreeable sum, maybe it would not actually support me in My Old Age, but it is Better Than A Bat In The Eye With A Burnt Stick. Furthermore, as it is itemised - all the tiddly sums that get totted up - it is a Revelation of what works of mine are still being looked at, wow.

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Church attendance report pulled after YouGov finds 'fraudulent' responses:

A report claiming the number of young people attending church in England and Wales had skyrocketed has been retracted, after the underlying data was found to be flawed.
The Bible Society's "Quiet Revival" report had been widely reported on since its publication last year and became an accepted part of discourse among many Christians.
Now YouGov, which carried out the research, has told the Bible Society that an internal review of the data found that some of the respondents who completed its survey were "fraudulent".
It has said that quality control measures, which usually remove such responses, were not applied due to human error.
....
But academics questioned the findings, pointing out that the results seemed out of step with other data. Results from the long-running British Social Attitudes Survey, and even the Church of England's own figures, show a long term decline in church attendance.
Experts said that YouGov's methodology - gathering data from volunteers who received cash rewards for their time - left it vulnerable to "bogus respondents" skewing the data.

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Pepys ‘curated’ letters to conceal being offered enslaved boy as bribe – research:

Howe wrote to Pepys to “crave your acceptance” of a “small” enslaved boy, which “I brought home on board for your honour … Hoping he is so well seasoned to endure the cold weather as to live in England.”
Pepys wrote back indignantly rejecting the offer. But Edwards argues this was not because of ethical concerns about slavery, but the optics of looking like a man who could be bribed.

This is quite resonant with discussion I was having this week apropos of my 1930s feminists and the less visible ways in which the work was happening, so much so that it's been supposed (it was being claimed at the time) that Feminism Woz Ded: The Way of Water: On the Quiet Power of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Activism.