stillsostrange

What is this that this thing is, when, okay, one is aware of all the woozing and grumbling about the various delivery services, but here is the ROYAL MAIL being pretty bad.

Yesterday I had an email saying they had delivered a parcel.

There was no parcel.

I looked at the proof of delivery and behold, that was Not Our Front Door they were sticking it through, it was the wrong colour and one could see the corner of a glass panel (ours is solid wood).

So I went on to their site to try and delve a bit further and, my dears, it is HORRENDOUS, one suspects it is designed to make people Just Give Up.

For example, the 'contact us' link, that actually goes to a 'Help and Support' page that lists a whole range of possible contingencies that one has to sort through to discover one that matches the occasion.

And once I had come across the Advice relating to item (presumably) misdelivered to wrong address, advice was, to contact the sender.

I have no bloody idea who the sender was being as how I was not even expecting a Royal Mail delivery, have been back over my emails and texts and no, I did not receive any previous message involving that particular tracking code.

There is a passing allusion to possible scanning errors.

The only means of contacting them is by phone, and when I tried, and had made my way through the menu options, the wait to speak to a person was 50 minutes.

I am leaving all this pro tem in case a) it was misdelivered and gets put back into the system b) it never actually existed in the first place.

But, really.

And in other, perhaps more minor (?) annoyances of Modern Life, what is this thing that this thing is of 'Cooking Instructions on Back of Label'? that you then have to detach, in the hope that it will actually come off in one piece that one can actually decipher....

ETA Parcel has now turned up, either in today's post or popped through letter box by neighbour to whom it was delivered in error.... Is friend's book I was in anticipation of.

People asking me last night 'what do you/are you working on?'

Duh. I flannelled and gave the general field, rather than saying: I completed my PhD over 30 years ago, I have published 6 books, 3 co-edited volumes, and getting on for 70 articles and chapters, have done assorted meedja appearances, have lost count of the reviews I've done -

Not to mention the website, the blog, the assorted things that fall into the category of other -

'My Deaaar, it's all a long story and rather complicated' and my most recent publication was not even in my field, it was being a sort of Litry Scholar.

Thing is there were some persons of maturer age there who were, I gathered in conversation, getting back into the academic swing, so I might have been doing that, rather than trying to get back up out of something of a trough?

Did mention, apropos of cute cuddly spirochaete, that I had worked on History of Loathsome Diseases of Immorality: but gee, I am large, I contain multitudes, and I have been going a long time.

ETA

Not that I consider the organisers of 'prestigious World Conference on Women’s Health, Reproduction,and Midwifery, scheduled for 08-10 June 2026, in Paris,France' to really Know Who I Am since they are begging and pleading for my attendance on the basis of my 'remarkable work' a recent review of a book on the history of abortion.

Okay, they do offer partial support for accommodation and registration, and brekkers and lunch at the conference (this implies, o horrors, breakfast sessions).

So, the Esteemed Research Institution of which I now have the honour to be a (jolly good!) Fellow sent an invite last week to come along this arvo and decorate the Christmas tree in the common room. Bringing, if one so desired, some bauble, perchance alluding in some way to one's research interests.

My dearios, I realised I had The Very Thing! Some Years Ago I acquired a mini-Giant Microbe syphilis spirochaete, the adorable cutie, and though I say it myself, this went over a treat, with people taking photos and so on.

Had social converse - though a certain sense of Don't You Know Who I Am, though there is no reason why people who don't work in my area/s should know, it is a long while since I have been on ye meedjas.

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Feral wallabies have featured here on previous occasions: apparently there are now 1000 on the Isle of Man: and

[T]here appears to be a continuous population across southern England, with a few hotspots. There have been regular sightings in the Chilterns, plus in Cornwall, where they appear to be breeding.

What I read

Finished O Shepherd, Speak! - as ever, Lanny manages to find himself at major historical events. A particularly fascinating thing considering that news story about Hitler's DNA - he is admitted to the bunker and takes a slice of bloodstained sofa-cover.... In the aftermath of WW2, he has been left money to work for World Peace and he and friends are working for this. One thing I do find a bit curious about Lanny's generally progressive line is that the civil rights question (was it being called that in the 30s/40s?) doesn't seem to feature: maybe because he was brought up in Europe and mostly lived there? His focus on the World Stage???

Val McDermid, The Skeleton Road (Inspector Karen Pirie #3) (2014): not sure this was really doing it for me - there was a point where it just seemed to be going on and on.

Have plunged into a re-read of Barbara Hambly's Silver Screen mysteries (getting myself back up to speed on the series with a new volume forthcoming): so far Scandal in Babylon (2021) and One Extra Corpse (2023). Possibly one reads for the evocation of Hollywood at that era rather than the actual mystery plots, but good, anyway.

On the go

Saving Susy Sweetchild (Silver Screen #3) (2024)

Still dipping into Some Men in London, 1960-1967.

Up next

I am feeling the siren call of The Return of Lanny Budd.

I also realise that I have managed to sign myself up for 3 bookgroups meeting in January, 2 online (Pilgrimage, first meeting, Dance to the Music of Time, concluding volume) and 1 in person (fairly) locally - have managed to fight off suggestion that we read the Mybuggery wot won the Booker, but am now committed to the extremely LOOOOONG new Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

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Further to yesterday's mysterious email from Academic Publisher, have received a further and more official-looking email today:

You may recently have received a message from us with the subject line "Welcome to [redacted] GCOP".
This email was caused by a system error. You can therefore ignore it and do not need to take any action.
Apologies for any confusion the message may have caused.

There was hoohahing going on last week on bluesky anent people pirating books on account authors do not need the money and should be creating for Love of Art.

And I will concede that when it comes to Evil Exploitative Academic Publishing Empires, I cannot get my knickers in a twist over people downloading papers for which they have not paid the extortionate fee, none of which goes to author of the paper or the reviewers who reviewed it for the journal in question (wot, me, bitter?) - in fact I will be over here cheering or offering to use such library access as I have to get access and offer a copy.

But honestly the Average Author of fictional works is not making molto moolah but is probably supporting themselves by doing something else or being supported by someone else (hey, Ursula K Le Guin? e.g. mentions somewhere she was a housewife when she first started out) and writing is not their sole occupation or source of remuneration.

And even writers who we look back on as Important and Successful had their money problems: Hardship grant applications to the Royal Literary Fund... show authors at their most vulnerable:

Nobody goes into writing for the money: today, professional authors in the UK earn a median income of £7,000, according to the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. Looking at the starry names awarded grants through the RLF’s history makes clear that the challenges are not new. However, Kemp thinks the problem has become more acute in some regards. “The kinds of deal you get with a publisher as a mid-list fiction writer has gone down, down, down, down, down.” Twenty or 30 years ago, such writers could survive; it is now much tougher, he says. Big publishers are “paying large amounts of money to a small number of writers”. A “tiny percentage actually survive on what they’re making from writing.”

“On the one hand there are people like Joyce and DH Lawrence, who are early in their careers, and indeed Doris Lessing, who are struggling to get going, who have made a mark but are finding it hard to make ends meet. And at the other end there are people like Coleridge, and more recently Edna O’Brien, who have had stellar careers, and you’d have hoped actually were doing OK, but the vicissitudes of a writer’s life mean that sometimes it goes to pot.”

Many documents show writers at the most vulnerable times of their lives, often in precarious positions early in their careers; everything from feeble book sales to illness to messy marriages to grief is chronicled here.... Nesbit, author of The Railway Children, wrote in an August 1914 letter that the shock of her husband’s death “overcame me completely and now my brain will not do the poetry romance and fairy tales by which I have earned most of my livelihood”.

I suppose it's remotely possible that there's someone with a similar name to mine for whom this would be a relevant conference:

The ITISE 2026 (12th International conference on Time Series and Forecasting) seeks to provide a discussion forum for scientists, engineers, educators and students about the latest ideas and realizations in the foundations, theory, models and applications for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research encompassing disciplines of mathematics, econometric, statistics, forecaster, computer science, etc in the field of time series analysis and forecasting.

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I have discovered a new 'offputting phrase that, found in blurb, causes you to put the book down as if radioactive': 'this gargantuan work of supernatural existentialism' - even without the name of the author - Karl Ove Knausgård - who has apparently moved on from interminable autofiction to interminable this.

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A certain Mr JJ, that purports to be an Art Critick, on long history of artistic rivalries (between Bloke Artists, natch):

Shunning competition makes the Turner Prize feel pointless. It may be why there are no more art heroes any more.
Artistic competition goes to the essence of critical discrimination. TS Eliot said someone who liked all poetry would be very dull to talk to about poetry. Double header exhibitions that rake up old rivalries are not shallow, but help us all be critics and understand that loving means choosing. If you come out of Turner and Constable admiring both artists equally, you probably haven’t truly felt either. And if you prefer Constable, it’s pistols at dawn.

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I rather loved this by Lucy Mangan, and will be adopting the term 'frothers' forthwith:

I like to grab a cup of warm cider and settle down with as many gift guides as I can and enjoy the rage they fuel among people who have misunderstood what many might feel was the fairly simple concept of gift guides entirely. I am particularly fond of people who look at a list headed, say, “Stocking stuffers for under £50” and respond by commenting on how £50 is a ridiculous amount of money to be spending on a stocking stuffer. They are closely followed in my pantheon of greats by those who see something like “25 affordable luxuries for loved ones” and can only type “Affordable BY WHOM?!?!” before falling to the ground in a paroxysm of ill-founded self-righteousness. On and on it goes. I love it. Never change, frothers. You are the gift that keeps on giving.

Further to that expose of freebirthers, A concerned NHS midwife responds to an article about the Free Birth Society