kaberett | vital functions

Reading. Heston's Fantastical Feasts, Heston Blumenthal. I'm glad to have read it but also mildly impressed at how much it's put me off the man. There was the comically poorly thought out swipe at vegetarians, sure, and the book definitely suffered significantly for being quite such a TV tie-in, but it just... mmm. I think, in short, I'm now actively less interested in his approach to exploring food. There are a small handful -- fewer than five, I think -- recipes that I'm theoretically possibly interested in, but that's about it. This is at least I think going to encourage me to get my act together to actually sit down and read (as opposed to flicking through) The Fat Duck Cookbook and decide whether it warrants shelf space or can also go back to the charity shop...

The House of Shattered Wings, Aliette de Bodard. I bounced off the first page once, hard, but then made myself keep going past it, and am now a hundred and fifty pages in and cautiously optimistic. (I think at least two of characters are nowhere near as good at politics and manipulation as they think they are and, crucially, as their author thinks they are, but this is a widespread problem and thus far it is resulting only in mild eye-rolling.) (The bits on the first page that I bounced off, if you are interested, were twofold: "Some part of you knows you should be experiencing pain; ... that the lancing pain in your back ... [is] irreversible and deadly" and "But you feel nothing: no exhilaration, no relief, not the searing agony of your wounds. Nothing but that sense of unnamed relief..." I Struggle, you see, with being told explicitly that something is not being experienced and then, immediately, that actually it is, when I am not confident that this is a deliberate and conscious dialectic.)

Boris Anrep - The National Gallery Mosaics, Lois Oliver. I apparently bought this in 2012 (according to the receipt stuck in it as a bookmark), after a visit to the National Gallery where I was very taken with the mosaics. I am just now getting around to reading it, as part of my Decide If I Want To Actually Keep These Books project. It is very short; I am nearly halfway through it; and so far mostly I intensely dislike the way Anrep treated the women in his life, good grief. Not entirely delighted with the way Oliver writes about said treatment (or at least seems to) as though it is just another of his Charming Foibles, to be glossed over and swiftly moved on from, but perhaps I am being unfair to her. But! SOON DONE.

Digger, Ursula Vernon. NOOOO WE HAVE FINISHED IT and also most of the bonus material, though we're going to sit down and go through the web notes properly flipping back and forth and such. I love it a lot. I had forgotten most of the contents. I am delighted to have reread, and also to have successfully introduced A to Ursula's stuff -- such that I can now give him a whole bunch of context for other things I have introduced him to over the years (MORALLY AMBIGUOUS HONEYBADGERS) that are slotting into place. Also, this worked well enough as an experience that for my next trick I am possibly going to sit him down with Strong Female Protagonist, though that might be considered a bit mean given that the creators both got famous and extremely busy doing other things so we have been left on an indefinite cliffhanger leading into the last chapter... maybe Dicebox. Hmm.

Oh! And some academic writing by a sibling, for feedback.

Eating. Winterval fruit cake courtesy of my mother! Who also made us an extremely tasty butternut squash wellington, which I found far more convincing than the cauliflower variant I made lo these several years ago and will at least contemplate recreating. Many other good food also in that context.

Exploring. Had a lovely time poking around St Peter's Church in Coton -- excellent mediaeval architecture, smells properly of church, etc. ALAS we did not get to go up the TINY spiral staircase. Elsewise poking around in Coton and environs: found a medlar tree! And was very good and did not grab a carrier bag and help myself (largely because we wanted to get home sooner than would have been compatible with same...)

And! Glow Wild at Wakehurst Place! With GASTROPODS. It's an annual lantern trail, which has just concluded its tenth year; in contrast to previous visits we got a much stronger sense of narrative and theme this time. ~~(Watch this space; I'm about to edit in a bunch of photos...)~~

We started out with a series of birds, none of which I got good pictures of: a pigeon, a group of robins, and some bullfinches that I don't remember from previous years, and a green woodpecker that I'm pretty sure I do:

a green woodpecker lantern, against a dark background

This was the point at which we discovered that they'd made the very sensible decision to scatter refreshment Gelegenheiten along the trail this time around, so we got warm drinks and moved on to the pollinators. I only took one close-up photo, but there was a whole stretch of these:

two lanterns: a flower with red petals and a purple centre, with an insect -- probably a wasp -- hovering above it

Via some excellently atmospheric leaves, we then got to the ARCHITECTURE. Behold minka houses, presumably at least in part a reference to Kew's Japanese gardens:

tiny lanterns shaped like minka houses, decorated with maple leaves

This turned out -- to our utter delight -- to be a theme scattered throughout the rest of the trail, with more in different architectural styles just around the corner:

tiny lanterns shaped like thatched cottages, decorated with oak leaves

tiny lanterns shaped like circular adobe huts with thatched rooves, with animals silhouetted in the doorways

A few more twists and turns (past more leaves and a beetle and...) got us to the next refreshments plaza, where we met THE SLUGS. So we spent vastly more time admiring and cooing over those than most people (and were starting to notice that we were getting overtaken a lot...), but eventually moved on to More Houses and Smol Snail (and a palace I didn't photograph):

small house lanterns spiral up tree trunks; between trees, a curious snail

I failed to get a good photo of, on the opposite side of the path, the set of illuminated windows up another tree trunk: one showing fish swimming by, one with notes, one with dinosaurs... and then, as a special treat for Adam, FERNS:

$curled fern-head lanterns in green with yellow tips, decorated with more fractal curls$

And as a little foreshadowing -- though I didn't get a photo of this one either -- there was a koi bearing some stilt houses upon its back.

This was followed in fairly short order by lots of teardrops blinking on and off in shades of blue and purple, which I clocked as raindrops at about the point that there appeared, above the path beyond them, a series of clouds. These started out white and turned gradually darker, while the soundscape (which I mostly disliked but which was deployed to particularly good effect here) shifted from gentle rain to thunder and eventually to waves, as we passed through a pair of breaking waves and on down into, apparently, the sea:

blue and purple jellyfish lanterns floating, above us, from trees; in the background, a blue whale's tail rises from the grass and leaf mulch

The jellyfish phosphoresced, on and off, in blue and in purple, floating above our heads and signalling to each other through the dark. The texture of the whale was, somehow, a perfect match for the grass-and-leaf-mulch sea-foam surrounding it.

three mottled blue seahorse lanterns (plus a nose)

There were also purple-pink bivalves that were very evocative of gingko, hanging from a tree just past the seahorses; and a little further on there were things we think were limpets and also starfish, but the starfish in particular were flashing brightly and rapidly and painfully so we didn't linger. The nautilus shells that gently shifted colour were lovely but beyond my skill to capture. And from there we somehow moved back out of the sea and into woodlands:

mushroom lanterns: five-foot-tall shaggy ink caps (possibly), with coloured stripes around their hems

mushroom lanterns: shaggy inkcaps, with a background of trumpet flowers that mostly look like more mushrooms

Just past these mushrooms were the snails, and just past those (via chrysalises and a dormouse curled up sleeping in its nest) were more, different mushrooms:

a fairy ring of mushroom lanterns, with the trunk they're surrounding silhouetted against them

(There were foxes around the fairy ring, too, but I like this photo best.)

There was a grove of illuminated trees that I wanted to love but that didn't quite work for me, leading on to My Favourite Setpiece:

a moon lantern, surrounded by stars, hanging above and reflected in a pond

I failed to capture it but the moon has a lovely intricate decorative structure. I was a little dubious about the children fishing for stars when viewed from the approach, but thought they worked rather better looking back:

a crescent moon and stars hang above a pond; two lantern-children fish for stars, one from the bank and one from an illuminated boat

... and then we had seedpods, and more stars, and the light show on the side of the mansion with its rows of fire, and a turret, with the sky-moon:

a tower lantern, red at the base through to yellow at the top, with ornate decoration; in the background, the moon

... and then we were done. (We do not talk about the Bad Moon, or the Bad Peacock, both of which contained People and Danced. We talk relatively little about the lake setpiece this year, which was fish jumping above glowing ripples; the ripples were much more to my taste viewed through the heat-haze from the torches at the other end of the trail, but while the fish were beautifully detailed they did not quite do it for me.)

I mourned the absence of the badgers and the nice person who hands you bags of chestnuts hot off the coals, but I was overall delighted.

Growing. Faffed about with repotting various things I'm overwintering.

Observing and celebrating: happy Gregorian new year. <3

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From:

jjhunter

Happy New Year! These photos are delightful.

Somehow I have not yet encountered Ursula Vernon's Digger, and this sounds absolutely up my alley. Something to look forward to tomorrow.

Always glad to hear from you; thank you for sharing your joys. <3

swaldman

Huh. Strong Female Protagonist. I remember reading that for a long time, then I stopped a while back, and I don't remember why. Did it have a long pause or something such that I thought it was dead?

The lantern trail looks *delightful*.