rosinarowantree

This week's bread: a rather basic wheatgerm loaf, something like 70/30 wholemeal/strong white flour + wheatgerm, [ETA: small amount of Rayner's Malt Extract], splosh of oil, turned out quite well considering it was the last scrapings of the recent batch of yeast.

Friday night supper: sorta-nasi-goreng with chorizo.

Saturday breakfast rolls: adaptable soft rolls, approx 4:1 strong brown/Marriage's Golden Wholegrain Bread Flour (end of bag), maple syrup, dried cherries. Tasty but a bit stodgy.

Today's lunch: bozbash, with red bell pepper, baby orange and yellow peppers, aubergine, okra, and baby courgettes, dried cherries, 5-pepper blend, dried basil, fresh green coriander (cilantro), and to finish, raspberry vinegar, served with couscous with toasted (slightly burnt) pinenuts.

I think I mentioned (did I?) that my research position at Former Workplace was terminated some while ago due to Internal Upheavals.

Well, thinks I, I still have research connection with Esteemed Academic Institution where I did my PhD and professional qualification, providing me with a) access to a research library and b) an institutional email address.

This connection was renewed some 5 years ago and comes up for renewal in the autumn, and being a forethoughtful hedjog I thought I would start mentioning this to person I know best in the department with which I am associated.

And, dammit, they have gone and changed the rules.

Some years ago (in fact before my last renewal but I guess institutional processes move slowly) there was a massive hoohah when somebody who also had some honorary connection with Esteemed Academic Institution turned out to be using it to bring EAI into disrepute by making it seem as though it had given official imprimatur to rather dodgy intellectual activities they were up to. Plus, there was a certain degree of mystery, or at least, lack of institutional memory, as to how person had even obtained this honorary position in the first place. (Or at least, nobody was copping to knowing.)

So, they are tightening up the rules so that you have to have much more of a formal position - e.g. be doing a collaborative project with somebody in the department - to be assigned honorary research status. So alas, am no longer eligible.

*Mutters obscenities*

Am wondering whether I can find friends in other institutions who might provide some similar position according me library access....

Dept, vain adornment, sort of. Went to get my hair trimmed, as after several months since it was cropped it was getting a bit messy. I went back to the same place (not the one I used to go to in Bloomsbury, for Reasons including my favourite stylist doesn't seem to be there any longer) where the lady half of the operation does a very nice cut and it is not at all expensive.

I do wonder a bit though - it was entirely deserted except for me, and they wanted paying in cash. It may just be it was a quiet day and the cash card reader was broken. But one wonders if it's A FRONT for something, though pretty much every third business around there that's not an estate agent or a grocer's or fast food place of some ethnicity or other, this being a particularly multi-ethnic corner of Our Fair City, is a hairdresser's/barber's/beauty parlour.

***

Dept, this was RUDE: I don't care if he was young - ? primary school age - you do not do this on a London bus, infamy, infamy, etc. I was returning from the above appointment and the downstairs on the bus being rather chokka, went upstairs and scored the prime position, front seat, left-hand. And a stop or so later, little boy gets on and cheekily comes and sits next. Opposite - right hand - seat was empty and the whole top deck was by no means crowded.

Also he gave signs of being an incipient manspreader.

***

Dept of, further on sitting in the wrong place (I meant to add this to the post the other day on Being Inappropriate on Social Media): Tourists damage crystal-covered chair in Italian museum by sitting on it:

An Italian museum has contacted the police after two clumsy tourists almost wrecked a work of art while posing for photos.
Video footage released by Palazzo Maffei in Verona showed the hapless pair photographing each other pretending to sit on a crystal-covered chair made by the artist Nicola Bolla – described by the museum as an “extremely fragile” work.
The woman squats and does not seem to touch the work – called Van Gogh’s Chair and covered in Swarovski crystals – but the man is not so careful, sitting and then stumbling backwards as the seat buckles under his weight.
The pair can then be seen fleeing the room in footage that went viral over the weekend.

What I read

Finished Wide is the Gate, and while things are getting grimmer and grimmer as regards The World Situation, I am still very much there for Our Protag Lanny being a mild-mannered art dealer with a secret identity as anti-fascist activist, who gets on with everybody and is quite the antithesis of the Two-Fisted Hollywood Hero. (I was thinking who would I cast in the role and while there's a touch of the Jimmy Stewarts, the social aplomb and little moustache - William Powell?)

Lates Literary Review.

Mary Gordon, The Chase of the Wild Goose: The Story of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, Known as the Ladies of Llangollen (1936), which is sort-of a classic version of their story recently republished. But o dear, it does one of my pet hates, which is blurring 'imaginative recreation' with 'biographical research' and skipping between the two modes, and then in the final chapter she encounters the ghosts of of the Ladies, I can't even, really. Plus, Gordon, who was b. 1861, obtained medical education, fought for suffrage, etc, nevertheless disses on Victorian women as 'various kinds of imbecile', unlike those robust and politically-engaged ladies of the Georgian era. WOT. TUT. Also honking class issues about how the Ladies were Ladies and always behaved accordingly.

Began Robert Rodi, What They Did to Princess Paragon (1994), which was just not doing it for me, I can be doing with viewpoint characters being Not Nice, but I was beginning to find both of them (the comic-book writer and the fanboy) tedious.

Also not doing it for me, Barbara Vine, The Child's Child (2012): sorry, the inset novel did not read to me like a real novel of the period at which it was supposed to have been writ as opposed to A Historical Novel of Those Oppressive Times of the early C20th. Also, in frame narrative, I know PhD student who is writing thesis on unwed mothers in literature is doing EngLit but I do think someone might have mentioned (given period at which she is supposed to be doing this) the historiography on The Foundling Hospital.

I then turned to Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), which it is a very long time since I read.

Then I was reduced to Agatha Christie, By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968), and Murder in the Mews (1937).

On the go

I happened to spot my copy of Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown (1944), which I know I was looking for a while ago, and am reading that though it looks as though I re-read it more recently than I thought.

Have also begun on Books For Review.

Up Next

Really dunno.

Honestly, people. How is this even A Thing?

NHS staff unsettled by patients filming care and posting videos on social media.

When partner first mentioned this to me I was 'Do they even let them into operating theatre and what about scrubbing up etc?', because I assumed it wasn't actually the patient doing this, and in fact reading further it does seem to be accompanying persons.

Radiographers, who take X-rays and scans, fear the trend could compromise the privacy of other patients being treated nearby and lead to staff having their work discussed online.
The Society of Radiographers (SoR) has gone public with its unease after a spate of incidents in which patients, or someone with them in the hospital, began filming their care.
On one occasion a radiology department assistant from the south coast was inserting a cannula into a patient who had cancer when their 19-year-old daughter began filming.
“She wanted to record the cannulation because she thought it would be entertaining on social media.* But she didn’t ask permission,” the staff member said.
“I spent the weekend afterwards worrying: did I do my job properly? I know I did, but no one’s perfect all the time and this was recorded. I don’t think I slept for the whole weekend.”
They were also concerned that a patient in the next bay was giving consent for a colonoscopy – an invasive diagnostic test – at the same time as the daughter was filming her mother close by. “That could all have been recorded on the film, including names and dates of birth,” they said.
Ashley d’Aquino, a therapeutic radiographer in London, said a colleague had agreed to take photographs for a patient, “but when the patient handed over her phone the member of staff saw that the patient had also been covertly recording her, to publish on her cancer blog.

First we go back to miasmatic theory, then we go back to operations as spectator sport?

How very different, I would argue, are Barbara Hepworth's 'Hospital Drawings':

Capener began purchasing some of Hepworth’s art, which in turn helped with the costs of her daughter’s surgery. He later asked the artist if she might be interested in observing some of the procedures taking place in the operating theatre. Hepworth, initially horrified by this thought, decided to go. The materials that she needed to make her sculptures were scarce during postwar Britain, meaning she also had more time on her hands to explore other projects.
Hepworth soon became fascinated with the surgical process. She was particularly moved by the methodical rhythm of the surgeon’s hands and the concentration in their eyes. The eyes and hands are rendered with a delicacy and softness, with attentively modulated grey-white tones. They emerge from the cruder, more abstract marks in blue, green and other similar hues. Her drawing techniques somehow brings the scene to life; the many flowing lines are suggestive of the creases forming in the doctors’ blue gowns, created by their constant movement around the horizontal, inert patient. After many visits, Hepworth had created a body of work which revealed her wonderful abilities as a draughtsperson, as well as a sculptor.