who only by moving can balance

A few weekends ago I visited the NHM with A. We visited the butterflies, which are always good; I particularly enjoyed that they've moved the banana plants that are always covered in caterpillars to the beginning rather than the end of the route, so you get to move through the life cycle rather more -- the readily-identifiable caterpillars are now before the pupation hut, where we saw an actually only halfway hatched butterfly for the first time, and we also got to see several sizes of Pale Owl caterpillar, all of which have delightfully the same face. We met a couple of new butterflies that we totally failed to identify (black! with red stripy lower wings!) in addition to all the excellent iridescent teal nonsense, and as ever the route is juuuuuuuuust short enough that the "hallucinating that there are somehow impossibly butterflies inside my clothes" doesn't start until I'm right at the very end.

We also took a quick spin around the Life in the Dark exhibition, not expecting great things, but were pleasantly surprised! Particularly compared to the exhibition on colours and the one on venom, this was surprisingly well curated -- though it did still suffer from "items in cases and their descriptions are inexplicably numbered in the opposite direction to that of travel". (Also of note is that there is a central section, otherwise very dark, that features flashing but apparently not strobing lighting; this allows the Ceiling Art Installation to give the effect of bats swirling around above your head and does have warning notices posted, but I didn't spot an alternative route through, though I admittedly wasn't looking terribly hard.)

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Not last weekend but the weekend before we went on a Group Outing to Woburn, where I think I had probably not been since I were wee. It turns out that they have no wifi and basically no phone signal of any kind, which made coordinating two groups Somewhat Trickier Than We'd Expected for a Major Public Attraction. There were lots of things I enjoyed (the buckets halfway up a tree for the giraffes! the people feeding the giraffes from a jeep! the tiny elephant! the giraffe research student, with attendant ranger crossly telling everyone that yes THIS person was parked counter the flow of traffic with their windows open but that didn't mean YOU got to! the giraffe storage sheds with Very Tall Doors! the capybara! the parents very discreetly telling their children to stop watching the enthusiastically-shagging parrots because They Were Busy and Wanted Some Private Time! the agouti, which are Round and Shaped Like A Friend and have Rubbish Little Tails!), but obviously my favourite was the tortoises.

I Learned Some Facts about the Tortoises! At Woburn they've got five or so Aldabra tortoises (I met four but another couple were? hiding?), nine years old and ranging in size from about 15kg (Flo is tiny and runty and nobody's quite sure why but they're fairly certain she wouldn't have survived in the wild) to about 30kg (... everyone else). This means that they are still just about small enough to deadlift (they are an awkward shape, okay) when it's time to go to bed: they sort of wave their legs in the air with a ponderous indignance, but when deposited at the entrance to their (heated) hut (with browsing material inside) they do all go "ah, yes, maybe this is after all a good idea, you are forgiven," and plod solemnly inside to continue munching.

Apparently they're being target-trained against the day they're too heavy to lift, but they're not quiiiiiiiiiite there yet. Target training consists of giving them a treat (accompanied by a clicker) every time they boop their snoot on a proferred stick, and ignoring them if they ignore it, which Flo (the tiniest) in particular is having difficulty with: it was explained to us that after about fifteen minutes in the enclosure, keepers who are new to it always emerge looking slightly spooked and promptly seek advice from a seasoned veteran.

It is always the same advice.

"Why," they ask plaintively, "is she ineffectually FOLLOWING ME EVERYWHERE, it's kind of creepy." "Ah," say the veteran keepers, "did you give her a pat? Well then."

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[December Days masterpost, with two days still kinda-sorta available - I've got fillers/secondary requests planned for them, but if you'd like something and haven't given me a prompt yet, please feel encouraged to!]

... actually probably has to be my dinner suit, which also has the distinctions of being (1) the most expensive clothing I own and (2) the only pair of trousers I have ever owned that actually fits.

At the beginning of my second year, because of Reasons, I ended up going to a Properly Formal dinner. Like, actually and seriously black tie. The most appropriate thing I had to wear was a green silk floor-length ballgown. (I wore cargo shorts underneath it for the sake of pockets.) It was pretty much then that I swore I was never going to present normatively femme for anything ever again, and I got hairyears to introduce me to his tailor, and I got a suit made.

I have since worn it to perform in more concerts than I can count; at the kind of formal dinner that's routine at Cambridge; to my graduation; and to a couple of funerals and similar functions. It's my favourite not just because it is clothing that actually fits me (and was deliberately tailored to look good while I'm playing music) and is much more multi-purpose and probably fundamentally cheaper than buying dresses for all those occasions would have been, but because in its way it's a symbol of becoming an adult, of saying "this is who I am and who I am going to be", of being sure enough of myself to make investments.

( A few photos. )

(Of course, there's lots of other things I love - the teal knee-high DMs; my shirts, various; my first cufflinks, silver and Lizard serpentine; the hoodies I curl up in and have as my armour; but this -- this is special.)

... or several, because I can't actually choose; sorry-not-sorry.

First up, of course, is the permanent phonolitic lava lake on Mount Erebus, Antarctica.

Because it's in Antarctica, where summer temperatures can get as high as a balmy -20degC; and because it's at 3800m above sea level; there's no atmospheric water vapour. This means that you can stick infrared sensors on the roof of the huts at base camp and get beautiful, beautiful spectra of the gas plumes coming off the lake - most places, there's so much atmospheric interference that you can't really do this. And the absolutely beautiful thing is that, most of the time, the lake blups along quietly to itself, on an approximately twenty-minute cycle (as lava drains back down to the subterranean reservoir, and undegassed hotter stuff rises), and you can watch the composition of the gas plume changing over the course of that cycle. ... and then sometimes it operates on an eight-hour cycle instead, where every eight hours the entire contents of the lake get kicked out, only for it to slowly refill, and if that happens during field season it makes checking all the monitoring instruments a bit more exciting...

The second is the Ossiachersee, one of about seven big lakes in Austria, and the one in the vicinity of where my family's from.

Because More Austria: the Seenplatten in the Oetztal. There's a gorgeous shoulder 600m up from the valley floor - putting you at 2500 Hohenmeter - and it's beautiful Alpine meadows, with spongy grass and strings of small lakes, and I adore it up there. Along the less-walked patches, there's marmots you can get within three feet of; and on the way up you get to pick and eat bilberries and cranberries.

... and finally, the Emerald Lakes by the Red Crater on the Tongariro Crossing, in NZ, which are absolutely stunning, and are a very nice thing to look down on while you're boot-skiing down the interminable scree. I can't immediately find any photos I think do them justice, so you're going to have to look for yourself to get an impression!

I sort of thought that lakes weren't really a thing I did, particularly - I'm from the Fens, which is swamp; and from Cornwall, which is heath and cliffs - but apparently I do. Huh. :-)

-- that they are like blankets or warm jumpers or soup: full of potential. Because they can be beautiful and intricate and handed down through generations, or they can be new and designed particle by particle, or they can be both. (Everything old is new again.)

That they are fuzzy: there is a thing I want to work into a poem at some point, which is that gift means present and Gift means poison and there's obviously something in there about poisoned chalices, about how the act of giving (and giving and giving) can destroy us, about how the things we choose to give as gifts can be toxic to the recipients, about generosity and care and gentleness.

That they taste, that they have different mouth-feels, mouth-shapes. That I know how to be polite in German and imperious in English; that my poetry is English but my lullabies and prayers are German.

That they are the tools by which I communicate: hello, I'm a person. Would you like to make something?

That I have the choice, every day, whether to use them to heal or to hurt; and in choosing to help I remind myself that I am human, that I am real, that I am here.

[Daily December masterpost; still open slots, if there's anything you'd like me to write about!]

I've written before about my relationship with perfume, which is probably helpful but unnecessary background to this post; nonetheless! It is there if you want it.

And then, of course, one of the things that I want to note first off is that the perfumes I most like to wear don't always have any relation at all to the scents I'm fondest of. Yesterday, I talked some about foods that smell reassuringly of home: parsley and nutmeg and walnuts and caraway and rye. There's more, of course: fresh yeast; stewing apples; the sea; catabatic winds.

Whereas the perfume I wear - I wear it for myself, not for other people, so that I have something familiar and comforting that I can bury myself in if I need to escape. It's very much about having something familiar and sensory to retreat to, if necessary; more on this later in the month.

-- I was saying. The perfume I wear is intended to be things that are comforting to me; I care relatively little about what other people think of it, beyond the obvious points of "not setting off people's allergies" and "treat for the boything". I tend to gravitate towards things that are heavy on woods or vanillas or stones or leathers as base notes - things I can interpret as weighty and grounding and strongly located - though on days when I am feeling sharper, spikier, I've got a range of scents based on white musk, with varying amounts of citrus and lavender. I mostly don't wear florals, largely because I'm allergic to lots of them; and beyond that because I tend to prefer things that aren't just or overwhelmingly floral - Penhaligon's Vaara is pretty much the only floral nonsense I wear, and that mostly in summer.

Fruits is a different matter: I routinely wear things that smell of mandarin or apricot or raspberry over the top of the base notes I talked about above. Herbs and spices are also, in general, a yes - though BPAL's cinnamon note amps to the point of drowning out everything else in the perfume on me (and their snow note turns into "motorway service station toilet cleaner"). Chocolate and hazelnut are things I adore.

If you want to know about particular things I wear a lot, or am wearing this week, by all means ask in comments; or if you'd like to list things you like and ask me for a rec by all means do :-)