nineveh_uk

All week I have been thinking it is a day later than it is, and tomorrow morning is going to be very disappointing. It's in no way been a bad week: although I was too tired for a planned cinema trip on Tuesday evening, which was disappointing, work has gone well and I feel like I'm getting over a virus. But it is very discombobulating.

Well it was for a few days. But it is the nature of spring to be fickle, so I shall endure the appearance of equinoctial gales and hope that the cherries don't blossom until later in the week or it will disappear in the closest thing to a blizzard of this winter. I have been failing to write a post because I should be writing about seeing Peter Grimes (brilliant, very dramatic), or more Olympics, or visiting my parents, or reading A Month in the Country (rich and lovely) and it has not happened. Admittedly having a cold has not helped. And I certainly don't want to try to think of something to say about geopolitics.

So when I was reminded of the existence of this song/vid, I thought, I should post that. It is very relatable, literally and metaphorically. Who has never been the penguin who doesn't want to get out of his futon?

Such as when it is February and seems to have been raining forever.

Merry Christmas to all celebrating! I hope you have a lovely day.

Beige is a practical summer work cardi colour. It doesn't suit you and you never wear it.

These trousers are lovely. Their shape is perfect for you and suits you really well, the wool fabric is in perfect condition. But you got them 18 years ago, they were a Hobbs sample in a smaller size, and it is hardly surprising they are too small. They should go. But you need to mend the lining first. Or cut it out? Because you will never have time to mend it.

These trousers are likewise a great style and shape for you. But you bought them on Ebay knowing they were a size too large and planning to take them in. You could send them back. But you won't.

You made this great vintage style dress. It was snug then, when you had just had norovirus, because fitting it was a nightmare. Also, you can't sing in choirs at the moment anyway. You can let it serve someone else in winter party and concert season. Please. You can.

Why on earth did you buy all three volumes of Captive Prince on fandom osmosis before reading the first and discovering that fandom osmosis lied to you and these are not books of Nirvana in Fire court scheming? You do not have to read the second and third, you will not learn valuable things about writing from them. You also can drop them somewhere you don't do Gift Aid so you don't have to be embarrassed by the pro published slavefic.

You've never liked this blouse, much as you want to. It needs ironing. Do that!

Thank goodness, this jumper has no complicated feelings attached.

I subscribed to Disney+ in the summer for a £1.99 per month (with adverts) offer for a simple reason. I wanted to watch Rivals, and I wanted to watch Shogun. At the end of the offer I succumbed to continuing a few months more for £3.49 per month to finish series 1 of Only Murders in the Building, and watch a few films I hadn't managed. It's been entertaining, but Disney definitely doesn't make enough of interest to keep me going beyond this calender year.

The adverts, surprisingly, aren't too bad, but then nothing is worse than Eurosport advertising, and Discovery+ has now made that £30.99 per month (it was that a year not so long ago) and removed the no-adverts for subscribers. But that is another rant.

Rivals You had to be there, I think, whenever it was that the latest Jilly Cooper bonkbuster from the library was the big thing. I was there, so I enjoyed this utterly ridiculous television, which due to timing, I watched with my parents. It had the sense not to make something serious out of this utter froth, but to let it be over the top 80s fun. The casting is terrific. I don't know whether they decided to make Cameron Cook African-American before or after the casting call, but it was an excellent choice, and not only for a strong performance from Nafessa Williams. Forty years on, it highlights Cameron's status as an outsider among this incestuous, privileged bunch to make her more than a ball-breaking bitch. There is an inevitable problem of casting David Tennant as Tony Baddingham, namely that his charisma is way ahead of everybody else. This helps make it plausible that he's got where he has, but really doesn't help Rupert's actor, who is perfectly adequate but not in the same league as Tennant on the acting or charisma front. It also doesn't help that Tony is 100% right about Rupert being a nasty piece of work whose politics are, shall we say, rather flattered by production. Cooper's transformation of the character was masterful, but she is good at characterisation and I found the politics easier to put aside on the page than on the television where they are somehow just not there except that for their uncommented-on pervasiveness. Rupert really cares about and sympathises with the underlying causes of football hooliganism. As a Thatcher minister in the 1980s, yes. It also pulls its punches on Declan and Maud a bit, whose parental failures are more explicit in the novel. Anyway, it's utter tosh, but sparkling tosh, recommended if you enjoyed the books back in the day and don't expect anything else. I will probably resubscribe for a month to watch series 2, especially given the different-from-the-book cliffhanger.

Shogun. Back to the 80s too with Shogun, a new adaptation of the 1975 doorstopper. The harsh way to put this would be that I would probably prefer Richard Chamberlain's character interpretation of seventeenth century ships' pilot John Blackthorn who finds himself washed up in Japan and caught in aristocratic power struggles (loosely based on real figure William Adams). That's not entirely fair. There's a lot to like here, from the outstanding performance of Sanada Hiroyuki as Lord Toronaga, to the visuals, and it tells its story pretty well. The weakest performances, unfortunately, seem to come from the two leads of Cosmo Jarvis and Anna Sawai, but the real problems are not so much the actors, as the presentation. Jarvis/Adams is written and played as far too much of a bolshy European/American audience everyman who has no patience with these backwards Japanese or realism about his position as a de facto captive, as opposed to a seventeenth century man with the prejudices of his time - but also his own experience of an extremely hierarchical society. The concept of bowing to a social superior is hardly going to be new to him, even if these particular bows are. As for Sawai/Mariko, it feels like the 1970s really show through the character's origins, with the background TV sexism of 2025 failing to dig into the character's potential. There's a lot to like about her, but it didn't feel adequately explored, not helped by the tendency to use the character to infodump. I'm sounding very grudging here, and I was disappointed in comparison to the glowing reviews, which I felt in retrospect were bowled over by the obvious successes (including the handling of the languages, which is done extremely well) and didn't look closely enough at other elements. It's decent TV that I can completely see why many people enjoyed, and there were some very strong performances, but one of those things where one just feels that there was the potential to be better with a more nuanced script. I may look out for some of the actors in other things, though.

Currently watching Only Murders in the Building, which is fun, but tenser than I had osmosed. Possibly I ought to have paid more attention to the title...

It's forever since I posted, which is due to a variety of things, quite high among them being tired and returning to work, and also that I prefer to do DW posts on my laptop and this one is reaching the end of its life. Though I have done some more enjoyable things this summer, and am just back from visiting my parents. So with the train delay compensation payment requests submitted, it's time for a post. Books.

To Each His Own, Sciascia. What can I say, other than that I should have read it years ago? This is simply a superb book. The form may be a detective novel, the subject is political, the condemnation sharp, the writing exquisite (I read it in English). A pharmacist in a small Sicilian town receives an anonymous death threat, and is duly murdered. Life continues much as before, except for mild-mannered academic Professor Laurana, a little vain and certainly naive, who finds himself following a lead and slowly drawn into a dangerous situation. I can't recommend it highly enough to people who enjoy a book that is really, really well-written. Especially as it isn't even a challenging ride - part of the beauty of the prose is its straightforwardness. The narrative isn't complicated, but perfectly chosen; it is the situation that is twisted.

Legend of the Condor Heroes, Jin Yong. A wuxia (martial arts society historical fantasy, think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) novel set in the 1200s, this is the first of a trilogy published in the late 1950s and with many, many film and television adaptations since then. Like a lot of genre ur-texts that are basically pulp, it tells a rollicking story in sufficiently competent prose and makes for a fun read, although the translator's choice to translate some names* and not others felt a bit odd. If I tell you that chapter 2 involves a lengthy fight in an inn, it will give those who have watched cdramas a sense of the kind of book this is. Long-lost relatives, treachery, and beautiful chaste women abound. At some point, I'll read the next one.

*Her argument for keeping the title, despite the birds not being condors, is much stronger.

The Incandescent, Emily Tesh. I ordered this from the library and was very much looking forward to it after enjoying Some Desperate Glory, but alas, I wasn't impressed. The concept of a magical boarding school story from the perspective of the teachers is great, but unfortunately I found this deeply unconvincing: thinly plotted, didactic, a trifle smug, and the worldbuilding doesn't hold up at all. Paired with Some Desperate Glory, I can see that Tesh feels passionately about education, but you need more than that to make a good novel, especially given the aforementioned worldbuilding, which fails specifically in terms of secondary/tertiary ed. You can have learning magic at school being basically socially irrelevant like Classics, so it doesn't matter that it is only taught in very expensive private schools and the entire rest of the population is shut out except for a few who have to learn it for public safety, or you can have magic be something that military R&D are passionately interested in and every shop needs to pay for magical wards for safety, but you can't have both. In the world she sets up, in every respect except "this school is unjustifiable and of course the protagonist is appropriately aware but it is also old and special and lovely", there is no way that several Scottish universities and the redbricks wouldn't have been teaching sorcery ab initio since the 1920s at the latest and the government funding it. Also, if you are telling me that the teacher cares, she really cares, and is a sensible, competent professional woman, then why the hell is she repeatedly behaving like Harry Potter and his progenitors going off to investigate things without telling anyone? I could go on (the caretaker!), but I'll spare you.

Idlewild, James Frankie Thomas. A fandom osmosis read, except it turned out to be a misosmosis. I was under the impression that it was about intense Theater Kids (US spelling for what seems to be a US phenomenon) at New England private university level possibly murdering one another, i.e. a bit of a The Secret History rip off. It is not. It does feature sort of Theater Kids, but at an expensive New York private high school. Unfortunately, fairly contemporary US private high schools are about the last setting that I am interested in reading a novel so this book started out as not really my kind of thing and remained so. But, I did read it, and I did think it was a good book. There is no murder, but there are a couple of very intense queer teenagers in a very intense friendship at a Quaker-ethos school that I thought was rather well depicted as supposed to be offering something different because it was a Quaker-ethos school, but that actually was failing its pupils in a highly conventional manner*, and US 2003 setting that seems well-drawn but that, obviously, I didn't personally relate to. Mostly what I admired was the novelist actually having something to say and saying it in a book about queer and trans experience, in a particular time and place, and accepting that something with any depth is inherently not going to speak to everybody's experience, and Thomas doesn't waste his or the reader's time hesitating to commit to his story and characters. It didn't speak to me personally - much though I enjoyed the recognisable early 2000s LJ milieu - but what does that matter? It spoke to other people, and it made an effort to be something.

*I found myself wondering whether Fay would have been better off at a standard school that would haved force all pupils through the hoops to higher education and its potential for self-discovery, or whether that would have been even more destructive.

I had an excellent weekend last week in Ilkley, watching the Saturday of the Lexus Ilkley Open Tennis Tournament (an early grass season event) with my sisters. They are more into tennis than I am, but live sport is always fun to watch, and we had a lovely day of sunshine that wasn't too blistering, and relaxing entertainment, punctuated with occasional bleating of the nearby sheep.

On the train, I read James Lee Burke's Two for Texas a novella that which has been sitting on my shelves for the better part of two decades. TBR piles never do get shorter. It's an early work by Burke, and lacks the depth of his later books, while showing that promise in his fantastic sense of place and descriptions, and ability to draw the reader straight into scene and character. However its compactness as a narrative was a problem for me because it was drawing on a lot of US cultural history/national mythology that I am simply unfamiliar with. I felt like someone reading a short novel about the trial of Anne Boleyn from the POV of a clerk, written for a British audience, while knowing nothing more about Henry VIII than his name. Sam Houston? Never heard of him, but the city must be named after him so presumably he wins something. Santa Anna? A name with no resonance whatsoever. David Bowie? I know he had a knife... But it was engaging nonetheless, and a reminder that I haven't read Burke for a while. It's time to pick some more recent Dave Robicheaux novels off the TBR pile.

The Giro d'Italia has by far the most evocative competition jerseys of the three grand tours of cycling. Forget France's yellow or Spain's red, what could beat the rosa, ciclamino, or azzura?

I am completely failing to write up a short fic that is a lot of fun in concept, but like pulling teeth to write. Character voices are not cooperating. Possibly if I ignore it for a bit, I can wrench a mini version out of it. In the meantime, I've been meaning for absolutely ages to mention some TV series, so I'll do that instead.

Mr Queen
In which a modern chef and a bit of a playboy finds himself bodyswapped with a depressed nineteenth-century Joseon era queen. At its heart is a terrific performance by lead actress Shin Hye-sun as our deeply confused protagonist, but the whole thing is just great fun. Can Jang Bong-hwan/Queen Cheorin navigate the pit-of-vipers court, avoid having sex with the king, and get back to his own time, hopefully having sex with his hot maid first? He may not know too much history, but he does have one useful skill: he can cook.

On a cultural ignorance note, this would have been a lot less confusing as my first Korean drama had I been aware that nineteenth-century Joseon attitudes to cousin marriage were not not those of nineteenth-century British literature. It turns out my "Ah, so the king can divorce his wife and she can marry her hot cousin and they can all end up happily" has a degree of wrongness as an interpretation up there with "Aslan is really Satan."



Crash Landing on You
Wealthy South Korean businesswoman Yoon Se-ri gets blown off-course while paragliding and lands in North Korea in a Netflix success. Technically, the North Korean section of the MMZ, but she doesn't realise this until too late, and now she is stuck. Rescued by handsome, highly educated, sensitive pianist North Korean* army captain Ri Jeong-hyeok, can he and his battalion hide her until they can return her to South Korea, or will they be betrayed? Whether they will fall in love is, obviously, not in question. It's not all romance or North Korean army scandals, there's an extensive plot around her family's business, which she was going to take over before she went missing, and a family drama with various terrible relations.

There's so much to like about this drama. It has engaging characters, good acting, and a great plot concept. The visual design of the North Korean settings is fantastic, and it does not, in any way, make one think that it would be good to live in North Korea, despite the warmth with which some of the characters are portrayed. Unfortunately, it has sixteen episodes each about 70 minutes long, and once we got into the second half they felt longer. It felt as if approximately 50 minutes of plot has to be wrapped in an additional 40 minutes of romantic glurge, sometimes with graphics of pastel hearts and rainbows literally decorating the screen. Obviously a lot of people felt differently, but I don't think South Korean romantic TV drama pacing and I don't quite gel.

Also, I feel very aggrieved on behalf of the secondary romance couple. They deserved better, damn it!

*No, I wasn't entirely convinced by this, either.