Wandering Around Talking To Rainbows

It feels like one moment, I was up to my eyes in election programme planning and the next it was the end of the month.

I think (I hope, I hope) that we’re finally making some progress on sorting the rotas at work because there’s frankly perilous levels of burnout so fingers crossed that I’ll start seeing some real improvements to the old work/life balance. I’m also back in the archives again for the second half of my 80/20 placement. I’ve got some boxes ordered so I can start getting the stuff that’s been digitised organised to go to cold store.

Speaking of work/life balance I’m taking myself off on holiday in August. You know how you can do these ‘week in Tuscany painting/learning to make pasta’ kind of holidays? I’m essentially doing one of those for sound recordists, I’m off to deepest Argyll to learn to use a bunch of weird and wonderful specialist microphones and get in some studio time. I’m hoping to reset my creative brain or at least make some art. (Worst case scenario I come home with a bunch of cool field recordings and having read a book and written some fic.) If it goes well, I want to start submitting sound art to projects/call outs again, I’ve missed doing that - I’ve missed that being part of who I am.

Despite work’s attempts to eat me alive, I’ve been having a decent year for consuming new-to-me media. Despite having watched no new films this month, I’m well ahead of where I was last year in terms of film watching, though in fairness, last year I re-watched a whole bunch of films at home but that didn’t start until June or so when I realised I wasn’t watching new films and went on a re-watching films and writing fic for them kick throughout July and August. I’m cautiously going to suggest that I’m more able to read fiction this year than last, but only cautiously because while I inhaled the latest Rivers of London book the other week, I’m conscious that this series is the only fiction I’ve been letting myself buy sight unseen over the last few years as I know I’m going to read them within at most a week or two of buying them. So there may be an element of exception proving the rule there. (The advantage of having gone to cover the same week long event for work this year and last, is that having inhaled a whole book during that week on both occasions I have a clear marker of where I was book wise both years. And the answer is, in exactly the same spot.) What I’ve definitely done is watch more drama series than the last few years. Limited series only but watching a six episode series over the course of a month is such an improvement over the last couple of years. So many watched the first episode, enjoyed it, never went back and watched the rest of it, situations. Okay so it’s only been Chernobyl and Heated Rivalry so far but I have missed being excited about shows.

I’m not sure if it’s correlation or causation, but it sure seems to have helped that I’ve had some good tv knitting on the go. I’ve just finished my election project scarf and having a non challenging craft project literally on hand definitely helped me actually focus and stay put for long enough to get engrossed.

June’s album is Last Summer Effect by Last Summer Effect. This album feels a bit like a cheat, but it is an album that came out last month, and I did have it on heavy rotation for the rest of the month because I liked it. The reason it feels like a cheat is that one of our freelancer’s at work is a sound engineer and worked on it, and the reason I even heard this album is that he dropped the Spotify link in our team group chat the day it came out with a plea to share it about/give it a listen. (By his own admittance they were the band he was in at eighteen, so he might even be playing on it too.) So I stuck it on in the background while making brunch after a night in the pub, to do a colleague a solid on the stats front and ended up really liking the vibe.

It’s kinda…It’s kind of an emo album I think. A bit Hundred Reasons I think, all crunchy guitars and soulful emoting singing. It’s not really my taste in music any more, but twenty years ago it would have been absolutely my jam and I’d have loved this album. (This album came out last month, but the only reason it couldn’t have come out twenty years ago is that the band would have barely been in double digits at that point, but my point stands, it should have come out on Chemical Underground some time between 2005 and 2009 - which is not far off given that the band were officially together between 2010 and 2013!) It feels like stumbling across an album released by a tiny band I saw at a gig when I was twenty, that I saw twice, followed on MySpace and bought a hand-burned EP off the band at the back of the gig. If one of those bands had miraculously got hold of some decent production values, the harmonies and production are pretty lush - Steve does know what he’s about. It sounds like sunny hungover mornings in friends flats after gigs, or big nights out. (The smell of stale sweat, flat beer and other people’s dead cigarettes hanging in the air.) I’m really not sure if there’s actually a market for this that isn’t millennial nostalgia, I probably wouldn’t have listened to it if they weren’t friends of friends, but that could go for a great number of bands I listened to from that actual period of time too. I keep putting it on to listen to while I do other things so nostalgia or not, so clearly present day me rather likes it too.

I am, I must confess, a little bit of a vinyl wanker. I don’t subscribe to the whole ‘oh it’s just a warmer sound, CDs/digital is cold’ stuff, I love my CD collection, I have CDs that I bought when I was 12 that still sound as crisp and clear nearly thirty years later as they did back then. (There is truly very little more disappointing musically than a crap vinyl pressing, especially if they didn’t bother to remaster it for vinyl.) Most of the album’s I own on vinyl fall into one of two categories, classic albums I fell in love with when doing the 50 greatest albums challenge a few years back - there’s just something about listening to an album the way it was designed to be heard, I really loved Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love listening to it on Spotify, but I fell in love with it all over again hearing it on vinyl for the first time, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On is pretty special on vinyl too - or albums from my teens that I loved but either never owned or just a taped or digital rip of a friend’s copy. I have very few contemporary albums, partly because outside of classical and electronic/ambient/dance music very few are actually mixed specifically for vinyl so unless you’ve got a high end turntable - I have a wee portable thing - it sounds a bit rubbish and also there are too many tracks so it’s even harder than usual for me to drop the needle in the correct place if I’m trying to get a specific track. I tend towards albums I already know I love almost every track so I can just listen straight through.
( I wasn't always a vinyl fangirl )

It was -8C when I stopped in Aviemore to give the pool car a safety boost, neither I, nor the car approved of that. Brrrr...

Somehow, it's now the end of November. Due to life continuing to kick me in the arse during the early part of November, writing had a decidedly slow start - I started a lot of things, finishing them was a whole other ball game - however it started to pick up towards the end of the month. 3504 in the final seven days of November which is just shy of half my words for the whole month.



I actually wrote substantially more words than that, but I don't count them towards my totals until they're posted, so the half a dozen started-but-not-finished posts I have sitting in drafts, don't yet count. Given the late roll I got onto with words there, and that I'm not at the 'can't brain no words' stage I usually enter at the start of November - my brain melted earlier in the month and I thought the whole thing was going to be a write off - I'm hoping that I can at least finish off the half-started things. I've got around 2000 words spread across four or five half-done bits, things would look much healthier. It would let me drag my total for the year over the 'a third of my target line', I'd love to get it to 50% but the chances of my writing 11,000 words in December in a good writing year would be extremely slim, and this has not been a good writing year.



I managed to finish two books from my list for this year's November Group Read and I've started another, which is not great, but decidedly better than I feared!

Media I have Consumed Lately
I finished The Starless Sea - in the bath, warming up in a very nice hotel room, after a very chilly and somewhat stressful drive down the A9 - and gosh it was great. It's a very wintery book, so I suspect these last few weeks while winter was coming on properly was actually the ideal time to read it. It's a delight of a book, about books and libraries, computer games and constructed realities, fairytales and lost worlds, the dangers of nostalgia, and how sometimes trying to keep something you love from changing ends up destroying it. Erin Morgenstern seems to write about one book a decade, and on one hand I'm really sad about that but on the other hand, both this and The Night Circus were SO GOOD that I'm quite happy for her to take another ten years to write the next one if it means we get something this excellent in return.

Media I am Currently Consuming
After my chat about the Wayfarers series in my last fandom 50 post, I had the notion to have another run at that series. Though instead of making another attempt at Record of a Spaceborn Few - which was on my November list! - with all it's pandemic failure associations I decided to try the same trick I did with the Rivers of London books where I just skipped over the one I bounced off early in the pandemic and read the rest of the series, and went back and read The Hanging Tree with ease afterwards. So I'm reading The Galaxy and the Ground Within instead, I only started it yesterday afternoon so I'm only about 100 pages in, but it's going well so far. (Obviously if I'd taken a second book with me to Edinburgh I wouldn't have finished Starless Sea on the trip, but because I didn't, I finished it the first evening. I did get a fair amount of writing done while I was away instead so it probably worked out for the best, but I would have preferred a book due to the large amount of hurry up and wait yesterday involved.) I worried I might have a book hangover from Starless Sea but no, it just makes me want to read more books. Also buy more books, though I'm determined to resist that until the end of the year.

Media I Hope to Consume Next
What I want to read next? All the Murderbot books. Half my reading list here and on Tumblr are on a re-read kick ahead of the new book coming out, I've only read the short stories but I really want to read them all now. I am currently using that desire to motivate myself to finish all the fiction in the pile beside my desk...if I get through at least three of them I can treat myself to some Murderbot.

What I'm actually going to read next? Well if the current Wayfarers book goes well, I'll take another run at the previous one. If it doesn't I'll read Gideon the Ninth so pretty much a win/win there... Oh and more non-fiction, going to pick Black and British back up, I hope.

Also I have a bunch of craft projects I want to finish so I'm going on a podcast binge, starting with Being Roman...

You know you've worked with/known your colleagues too long when one of them turns to you and says: you look knackered, have you booked your TOIL days yet? Thanks dude, yes I will in fact take those days back thank you. (I should add that the colleague in question, is a friend, we used to share a flat. He also ordered one of our other colleague/friends to give me a hug to cheer me up, when she sarkily called him charming for that comment. It was a good hug though, I did in fact need it.) Roll on Monday, I say.

Media I Have Consumed Lately
I was totally correct in my last post of this kind, in saying that I was in the mood to read non-fiction but not the non-fiction I had on the go at that moment. I ended up taking Written in Bone by Sue Black away on the train when I headed off to H's wedding at the start of the month and pretty much inhaled that book. Really, really interesting, though definite trigger warnings because Black is a forensic anthropologists, and this is a book about what the bones can tell the skilled examiner about how the person they belonged to died. It feels deliberately unsensational - but it is compelling, and occassionally unavoidably macabre, because humans do awful things to each other.

I listened to an excellent mini podcast series called Bhopal about a horrendous industrial accident that happened in Bhopal in the 1980s and about the journalist - Rajkumar Keswani - who predicted it and was stuck in the Cassandra role, with no one believing him until it was too late.

At the other end of the scale I watched Aoen Flux which is a ridiculous piece of scifi nonsense but highly entertaining nonsense nonetheless. (From the imdb trivia section it looks like there may indeed have been a much better film in there somewhere, but as I'll never get to see that one it makes little odds to me.)

Media I’m Currently Consuming

I thought having inhaled one non-fiction I'd try another, so I started in on Fifty Words For Snow by Nancy Campbell, which unfortunately would be an excellent book to read if I were on the road, dipping in and out of, but doesn't really work as a sit down and read a solid chunk of it book. I think I might put it aside until I'm next on the road for pleasure or work.

I started reading Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik the other day. It's been sitting out on my desk for weeks after I decided I was reading in next in one of these posts and then...didn't. But I picked it up on Tuesday night thinking I might read a chapter or two and read 100 pages all in one sitting, and only stopped because I'd got cold and needed to go to bed. It's great so far, really compelling, the world building is so layered and revealled in such careful and satisfying ways. I'm not normally a big fan of shifting POVs, but each time we shift perspective it actually does change the perspective, like the extra info we get from that character changes how we view the situations and other characters. Really good.

Oh and thanks to all the Proms concert watching I've been doing lately, I discovered there's a new season of Frozen Planet starting so I've been enjoying that, such amazing camera work and visuals.

Media I Hope to Consume Next
There's a series on BBC Sounds I'd like to listen to called The Film We Can't See about the soundtrack - not just the music, all the audio, the dialogue/effects/music everything - of a lost film from the 1930s. Also someone recommended me an upcoming podcast called Taste of Place but I can't remember who or where that recommendation came from, other than I was sold on it so I've subscribed...

I'm thinking I might read The Lost Future of Pepperharrow by Natasha Pulley, purely on the basis that past me clearly had the right idea with the Novik so it may well stand to reason she was on the money about Pulley being a book for this moment too.

You know that XKCD comic from years ago about the delicious cycle of nachos? I'm like that just now with home-made soup and bread - that bread needs used up, I should make soup. Huh, today I have leftover soup I should make bread so I don't waste that soup...

(This may be being exagerrated by the fact that I'm freezing a couple of portions of each pot of soup I make for 'emergency back-up'. A habit I've kept from my temping days, is making a pot of soup the minute I get a sniffle or a tickle in my throat, best case scenario lovely soup helps me repell the cold, worst case scenario I can live on soup for a few days while I'm down with the cold. All my immediate colleagues who were self-isolating are back in action - ordinary winter colds thankfully - or working from home - asthmatics - but as we have literally no idea what might help then soup it is.)

What I've Finished Reading/Listening To
Nope. Nada. Zip.

What I'm Currently Reading/Listening To

My continuing slow progress on Record of a Spaceborn Few (which I'm enjoying! Just...slowly.) and inability to get on with anything else fictional led me to think that maybe I just needed to read some non-fiction for a bit. I'm treated myself to a couple of pop-history books while I was out last week and having been getting along crackingly with Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem. The chapters are a good length (about 45mins to an hour's reading time) and nicely self contained so I can easily pick it up and put it down as necessary. In an attempt to give myself some much needed structure, I've been going to bed a bit earlier with a book and having breakfast in bed with a book in the mornings. A chapter or two a session means that I feel like I'm making decent progress without getting overwhelmed in either direction.

I also started reading His Bloody Project by Graeme MacRae Burnet which is pretty interesting - and which caused me to think I should make to the switch to non-fiction - but given that it's about some real life historical murders I decided was a bit gory for bedtime reading.

Podcast wise I've mostly been catching up with ongoing podcasts, but I have got into You're Dead to Me which I'd avoided before because I'm not big on comedy podcasts but actually they get the balance of funny and interesting right so I've been really enjoying it.

This time last month when I wrote one of these posts, I was contemplating a day trip to Aberdeen and the podcast listing potential therein, as an activity for my week off. Now that the week in question has arrived I'm plotting scenic routes by which to walk to the supermarket. Things are looking very different now.

What I'm Reading/Listening to Next

I'm working my way through this list of food podcasts to see if anything captures my interest. I'm also trying out Answer me This but I think it might be a bit too 'comedy' for this moment.

You'd think that escapist fiction would be absolutely up my street right now, but it's really not. I'm barely reading fanfic right now. Weirdly the only fiction I'm currently consuming is Person of Interest which I'm attempting to catch up on so that I can take part in exchange-of-interest. It appears to be just the ticket for my viewing needs right now - and the music choices are on point UNKLE have such cinematic sensibilities to their music and I've never heard them used in anything else. It probably helps that because my laptop isn't as young as it was I tend to shut everything else down when I have a DVD on so if I put my phone out of reach (say on the other side of the room charging) I'm not tempted by other sources and distractions. I just watch. And knit.

Speaking of knitting, I started the front of my current jumper - a sleeveless pullover - on Saturday and I've almost knitted half of it already. I joked to my parents on Skype at the weekend that I might have it done by the time we next Skype but at this rate I really might...

(I can't do anything. It's taken me days to shake the urge to do something, anything to help but I can't. I'm on call, if they need me; they'll call. The best thing I can do to support my colleagues right now is to rest up, to eat healthy so my immune system is on form, so I can head back to work all refreshed to relieve my colleagues.)