who only by moving can balance

... to the thing that appeared to be grass growing up through my planted-out cut-price live-baby-salad-leaves, when I stepped onto the patio just now -- full moon or thereabouts shining down serenely -- to retrieve something from the garage (we have a garage) and to pick some tomatoes for tomorrow's lunch. (The fact that my patio tomatoes are still happily ripening up, while sat on the patio, in late October, is... Another Matter.)

So I picked it, and I picked another of it, and I was reaching for the third when I thought "... hold on a second, everything suddenly smells of garlic."

I tasted, cautiously, the "grass blades" I had just broken off.

... the wild garlic I brought back from the Mouldering Ancestral Pile way back at the beginning of the year, as I was passing through Plymouth for my pre-op consultation with my top surgeon? That I planted in a trough, watched shrivel up sulkily, and then exasperatedly planted some cut-price live-baby-salad-leaves on top of, in the vague expectation that I would probably actually see them again?

Like wheat that springeth green, indeed.

Here's the actual consultation on reforming the GRA.

Facebook-based resource #1. Facebook resource #2, which links onward to a key-points summary. The detailed response of someone I know. (To be clear, I haven't actually read any of these in detail yet -- I just want to consolidate links.)

ETA GenderBen provides an overview

I categorically do not have the cope to think about actually responding to this properly, yet, For Some Reason That Inexplicably Escapes Me, but:

Would it be helpful for me to host a response-writing session? My usual attitude to overcatering, solidarity, etc. (I'd pretty much definitely find it useful, but I'll cope better with organising it if there's other expressions of interest.)

We woke up in time to get to the Centre Pompidou! We got there about ten minutes after it opened, in fact, and once again swanned past every single possible queue and did not buy tickets. I am not going to get used to this unless I spend a lot more time in France; I am still, at the moment, apologetically wandering up to security at the front of the queue and saying "um, excuse me, where is it that I should be waiting...?" and getting cut off to be waved in halfway through that. It is disconcerting; I am Disconcert.

But! Centre Pompidou! We did a whistle-stop tour of the Musée, with the Collections Contemporaines and the Collections Modernes. I was especially enamoured of the curatorial decision that Respirare l'ombre was accessed via a stark white room containing trees by the same artist: Nel legno, Albero di 7 metri, and one other -- trees right-way-up and upside-down, excavated to their branches and sometimes their twigs, in the forest of their shadows. Sol-Mur is the kind of thing I'd reblog in a heartbeat on tumblr, labelled "hashtag aesthetic". And, while I didn't particularly care for the explanatory caption accompanying Precious Liquids, I did like the installation.

There was also a room full of wire-frame Friends whose name I did not take down because I was a little distracted, and balconies full of excellent swirly metal sculpture, and various other bits and pieces I would like to make the more detailed acquaintance of at some point in the future.

We cleared out of the Musée at 2pm, and were on a bus to the Gare de l'Est a whisker after half past; half-way up the hill between Gare du Nord and Gare de l'Est a pain spike started. I curled up in a sofa in the business premier lounge (because, again, being a wheelchair user just... gets you that, for the £29 flat-rate Eurostar tickets for you and a companion) and contrived to have A fetch and carry me drinks and snacks; and eventually onto the train we got; and eventually, eventually, home. Where I have been curled up in a small pile on the sofa basically ever since, watching the birds.

I think this is the first time I have Gone On A Holiday that I substantially conceptualised and orchestrated? It feels very grown up, in a very young sort of fashion, and I think I'm going to keep enjoying that.

I have just finished this series, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, and goodness but it does a lot of things with change and motion and theology that speak to me on a very deep level.

I find it very difficult to believe in the writing style -- I... have yet to knowingly meet a teenage girl who writes like that in her diary, okay -- but provided I ignore the conceit of diaries (and my exasperation with implausible world-building -- if food's so hard to come by where in hell are they getting enough cotton to make new jeans from) I am incredibly invested, and I want more, because of course I do, and perhaps I'm going to go and find a bunch of fic (I feel a little ashamed that the fic I want in the first instance is fix-it fic, as though that somehow erodes or elides nuance and complexity; in fact, as we perfectly well know your blue-eyed boys [MCU] is fix-it fic and in no way overlooks struggle and sacrifice and heartbreak).

And it is also sociologically fascinating to have read these books for the first time now, in 2017, when they were written in the 1990s and set in a near-future 2020s-2030s dystopia, in the context of current US politics and racism. ( Mild spoilers? )

Recommended, I think, but with the caveat that it has every single content note, to first approximation. If you'd like more details, please ask.

First and always: Cambridge. Cambridge, which I've seen through enough different eyes -- town and gown, resident and caretaker, political and utterly independent of any given inhabitants -- Cambridge, which had me for two decades and change, and has me still. My parental home is a 1960s newbuild semi in Arbury; my college contains an archway that predates its foundation in 1350, that's had chunks carved out of the limestone by bicycle pedals over the last hundred-odd years. I've laughed, fondly and otherwise, at the new undergraduates with their shiny new college scarves and no idea how to cycle; I've dodged punt touts and helped my baby brother pass his hiring test to be a punt chauffeur; I've rummaged through the stacks in the University Library and put up and repainted street-signs. I know where the permanent graffiti is and I remember some that's been and gone; I've delivered leaflets at 6am on election morning and I've observed the counting of votes and I've walked across town at four in the morning from the Guildhall (where the outcome was known) to a common room (where people were glued to the news); I've walked across town at two in the morning (Homerton to Trinity Hall) very solemn and slightly wobbly with a viola; I've leaned my forehead against stone and felt where it's come from and been reassured by its solid indifferent presence; I've punted to Grantchester and back and eaten strawberries in the meadows in the sunshine. I've lost and found and found and lost religion and confidence and friends and trust and love. Cambridge is mine, or I am Cambridge's, and so it shall be forever, amen.

Zürich was next. I spent a summer soaking up sunshine, glancing up from my commuter paper to see the Alps crowned with glaciers as we crossed the river, looking out the window on my way to tearing down the stairs from the eighth floor to see the turtles and the fish in the pond way below. There are fields opposite the Spital Limattal -- apple orchards up the hill, but immediately opposite - by the bus stop - pick-your-own flowers and an honesty box. I found cafes and restaurants and friends and I learned a whole new language and I lived by myself absent a support network for the first time, and I explored and I fell in love with museums and was baffled by art and I swam in the lake and learned to like blue cheese on a Roman customs point in the rain overlooking a river with P. I miss pear bread most of all.

I didn't learn how to love LA. Mostly I got as far as baffled affection: for the sky that only ever got as dark as a glowing orange-purple, that turned opaque blanket of smog when you drove high enough into the mountains to see the stars, that left my lungs a wreck for six months; the fantastic street art and terrible public transport; the storm drains and dry river; the jacarandas and the humming birds. My experience of LA is less that, more a haze of heat & food & Caltech campus, with a dream-sequence weekend-long road trip up to the Bay Area somewhere in the middle.

And, of course, London. London, and its river-that-is-a-dragon. I would (as I thought) have hated moving here when I was 18; now I find myself delighting in how joyfully small it makes me, in exactly the same way I am small when I look at the stars or (closer to home) the Moon. I don't belong here but the river-dragon will let me stay a while, and so for now I will fling myself into proms and parks and concerts and gigs and museums and the poetry library; I will stand breathless with delight on the bridge at Embankment or at St Paul's; I will be a mirror for this city and the city shall be a mirror for me, and I will learn more about how people work and more about how I work and I will adore its trees and mysterious statuary and, most of all, I will learn.

(Honourable mentions go to Oxford and to Edinburgh, neither of which I understand, in part because of how intensely my experiences of them are bound up with how I relate to the people I love who relate to these cities; to my patchwork understanding of Heidelberg, all castle and computational linguistics and music and cheap beer by the river; to Rome; and to Paris, and in particular the sunrise walk between Gare de l'Est and Gare du Nord, and a toast to fifth-floor balconies and wine, and croissants by the Seine at dawn.)

... on checking the work calendar to determine whether you can manage an overnight run on a Friday, you establish that in fact you can because nobody has the machine booked on the Saturday or Sunday and consequently you start seriously considering blowing off (1) a friend's housewarming and (2) your mum's birthday, because data.

(Relatedly: dear Wednesday!Alex, thank you heaps for making an enormous vat of leek-and-potato soup to be eaten straight from the fridge. Love, today!Alex, who has eaten about three portions of the stuff.)