Why This Is Hell

A conversation on witchcraft: history, religion, and persecution - including Ronald Hutton (fangirling).

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And on subversive women: Archiving Bengal’s Revolutionary Women:

[M]any women participated in the revolutionary movement, taking on roles that challenged colonial authority and social norms. The militants who joined underground networks, manufactured explosives, and participated in acts of political violence, however, remain largely absent from both public memory and archival records. When they do appear in colonial documents, they are often framed through their relationships to men: as daughters, wives, or associates, rather than as political actors in their own right.

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More on grassroots activism: Travelling activists, Radical Hospitality, and the Intimate History of Socialist Organising in Britain, c. 1880-1914.

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Women in perhaps unexpected occupations (though I knew a little a bit about this since an old mate of mine did some research on the topic back in the 80s): Women in the Private Asylum Business in Nineteenth-Century England.

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This association is already fairly well-known but a nuanced set of arguments about the complexity of how it plays out: Inequality and health: Lost in the mists of time?:

Rather than behaving like a toxin that produces a sudden spike in mortality after a fixed incubation period, inequality is more like a fog that gradually seeps into bodies, relationships, and institutions over time.

What the information in one scroll recording an C18th Chancery suit opened up concerning George Orwell's ancestors (Jamaica connection).

So dr rdrz will be aware of my recent problems with printer, so I finally bit the bullet and after consulting Which Best Buys and so forth, went for an Epson Eco-Tank from John Lewis.

Which arrived at lunchtime today.

And I had anticipated spending hours if not days whining and stressing and beating my head on the ground and wrestling like until Jacob with the Angel to get the thing talking to my system and actually printing/scanning/copying.

Behold me sat sitting here having achieved getting it connected to the Wifi (the Wizard, though, is crap because it assumes that your password is a word rather than numeric, fortunately there was an alternative route), appearing under printers/scanners in my desktop computer settings, and copying, scanning, and printing.

There was a little hassle with printing which turned out to be due to Advanced Printer Settings turning out to have weird Paper Size as default rather than A4, which given that A4 is supposed to be their standard size, was bizarre.

This is positively uncanny, do admit.

What I read

Finished Never Had It So Good, and while I am less whelmed than I was on first reading it 50 years ago (aaarrgh), and consider that as panoramic social novel of provincial life, does not quite reach the level of South Riding, yet, that is the comparison one thinks of. I also mark up Mr Jones in contrast to The Angry Young Men who were his contemporaries over a whole range of issues.

Finished Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, or, As the Bear Swore, which was fascinating, and very readable, but has not somehow inspired me to rush off and do a re-read.

Then thought I should really read Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017), for forthcoming in-person book group.

In hopes of a change from that - it's grim - read Marion Keyes, The Mystery of Mercy Close (Walsh Family, #5) (2012), a recent Kobo deal, which was itself not entirely the most cheerful read.

On the go

Amazon helpfully alerted me to Kindle-only publication of Alexis Hall, Never After, currently in progress, also not really bringing the delicious froth - opium-addicted Victorian rent-boy rescued from homelessness on the streets by clergyman (unexpected and unwanted 3rd son in aristo family, put him into the church) with his own backstory baggage.

Up next

There's a new Literary Review.

Also I had a mad binge on Kobo the other day, mostly Dick Francises which had come down to promotional prices, but I also finally succumbed to the most recent Edward St Aubyn which has been tempting me. The previous one was so much less gruesome than the Melrose sequence that perhaps this will be the change of pace I'm looking for?

Personally I suspect Blake Morrison has either not read terribly deeply in memoirs of the past, because I could probably without too much struggle come up with instances which were not at all about being 'a geriatric, self-satisfied genre (politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers)', but one sees that this is a position he has to take up in order to make his case about Ye Moderne Confeshunal memoiring.

‘Enough of this me me me’: Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing

(Harriette Wilson would like a word, just saying, for starters.) (We can so imagine dear Harriette on social media, no?)

I'm not sure he's really got an argument there rather than some vague blathering about published memoirs vs social media and blogs, especially given the, er, thinness of his historical grounding (though in some cases past memoirists prudently arranged for the work to published posthumously).

And as for people being somewhat lax with the truthiness of their memoirs, how about this chap: The schoolteacher who spawned a Highland literary hoax:

The book’s author and narrator, Donald Cameron, describes his early life in Blarosnich, a remote hill farm in the Western Highlands in the 1930s and early 1940s. The book presents a Brigadoon-like spectacle of an agrarian community seemingly little touched by modernity, populated by pious women, elderly aristocrats and lusty farm lads.
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Donald Cameron was, in fact, a pseudonym of Robert Harbinson Bryans, an itinerant bisexual schoolteacher turned travel writer who was born in Belfast in 1928 and died in London in 2005. Also known as Robin Bryans, his name is now largely forgotten apart from among students of plots and conspiratorial claims.

Because she is bringing us old bats into disrepute (we are more or less in the same age cohort), this is exactly the sort of thing that gets us dismissed, and it's quite clearly weaponised incompetence to get her son to run around buying stuff on the internet for her while she does not do due diligence over her headphones.
You be the judge: should my mum stop asking me to buy her new headphones?:

My son Henry is exaggerating terribly. I don’t lose headphones all the time. I simply put them away in different places and occasionally forget which place that was.
This happens to everyone, especially when you live in a house where things move about over time. I live on my own, in a large, eccentric home. I’m not a hoarder but I often forget where I put things. Henry will come over and find the headphones after I have lost them, and while I’m grateful to him for helping me find them and buying new ones, I could do without some of his lectures.
I’m 76; I don’t need to be told to “be more careful”. I just live my life how I want and sometimes I’m a bit scatty.

Mind you, also irksome is that thing when somebody prates on of 'in my day' and I think, not merely that I was there in that day and we had electric light and everything, they are, a little calculation suggests, actually somewhat younger and should not be going on like that.

This was something that flitted past me where someone was being driven bananas by her mother-in-law interfering with the baby and upsetting its routine and doing all those things annoying relatives do because they are not going to be kept up all night by agitated babby.... And there was sense that MiL was 'oh, these new-fangled notions' as if in her day it was Ye Wisdomme of Ye Village Cronez rather than paediatricians advising new mothers.

I will, as a historian of medicine, concede that ideas of How To Bring Up Baby have gone through changes, but suspect that 'if babby has got to sleep, let babby sleep in peace' has always been pretty central.

(I realise that there may yet come a time when in a miasmatic wasteland this crone of the tribe maunders on about the time in her day when they had vaccines and codliver oil....)

Yesterday partner and I went on an excursion to Rochester, as partner wanted to visit the cathedral and the castle, and I thought it would make a nice little trip - two trains an hour from St Pancras International. Also, it is not presently in the throes of having either of its twice-yearly Dickens Festivals, although there are quite a lot of manifestations of Charles D associations, from cafes called e.g. Tiny Tim's to plaques on buildings declaring that they are the originals of [some building in one or other of the novels].

The castle is Norman and there is quite a lot of it still standing. Realised that these days I am not so spritely about manouevring around rough-hewn spiral staircases and did not ascend all the way to the top of the tower. Apparently it is where Henry VIII met Anne of Cleves on her arrival in England (dooooomed! doooomed!). There were notices all over about the corpses of pigeons - these are preyed on by crows, the crows are a protected species, tough, pidges.

The cathedral is second oldest in England and has seen a lot of history, not to mention The Reformation, the Civil War and Commonwealth, Victorian church restoration, etc. There are some v kitsch early C19th funerary monuments. The crypt is v modernised and has a caff, a chapel to St Ithamar, first Saxon bishop of Rochester, and an exhibition of medieval manuscripts from the cathedral library (that survived the Henrician Reformation).

The high street is well worth strolling along, quite a number of picturesque ancient edifices, including Eastgate House and the Six Poor Travellers House.

I know I was born into a fortunate generation which had things like university grants and better employment opportunities and the ability to buy one's own house in one's twenties and so on -

I have also occasionally been heard to remark that, on account of the codliver oil and school milk dispensed by a caring Welfare State, Ma Generayshun probably has bones like steel girders persisting into the twilight years and that this very likely no longer pertains -

- I did not realise that life expectancy was actually going down (older article, feel I saw something much more recently but didn't keep the link).

Not to mention decline in actual expectation of healthy quality of life.

I was brought up with coal fires - the Clean Air Act was 1956 but I'm not sure how long the effects took to kick in - possibly various dietary things that might not be considered optimum these days? - various things like the foot-x-ray machines in shoe-shops that have vanished -

While maybe not the plethora of junk food there is now it was absolutely not that organic idyll that gets posited!

So there were adverse factors around, but maybe just enough counter-balancing things going on?

Well, I suppose getting a text from the GPs apropos slots opening up for Covid booster was not entirely unanticipated - I was looking the other day to see whether these were on the horizon - so anyway, my dearios, I am scheduled for mine in just over a fortnight.

But the other thing was getting an email from radio people as to whether I could talk to them about History of Criminalisation/Decriminalisation of Abortion THIS VERY AFTERNOON -

- which it so happened I could, and these days, it is not just talking to them, it is being on Zoom as well with instructions re camera -

So I am always up for saying that the way the police have been carrying on of very recent years, and the health professionals who have been grassing women up to them, is worse than the Victorians as historians have pretty much failed to find anything much in the way of prosecutions of women rather than abortionists -

- possibly because in most cases that even came to light it was because the woman had died, though there are a few cited In The Literature where she lived and testified in the court case, and presumably was granted immunity.

I suppose it is not totally improbable that a very detailed search of the British Newspaper Archives using the various likely search terms under which one would anyway search for cases of abortion (not the word mostly used) would turn up a case or two of women prosecuted for procuring their own, but I really think it's more likely to turn up a lot of fascinating detail about who was doing illicit abortions, and whether local juries thought they were performing a public service and had just had bad luck in this one case (came across at least one in a fairly random swoop myself).

Unfortunately time constraints and what they actually wanted me to talk about (like why the 1861 Act still pertains, cue me ranting about having to defend the 1967 Act, which just introduced Exceptions to the existing Act, for decades because of the RtL mobs rather than press forward with further reform) prevented me from doing the full oursin Boring For Europe on the subject.

Mr 'warm leads for archivists' is still badgering me.

Last week's bread held out pretty well, though got rather dry.

Enough left - though perhaps a bit too much on the dry side - to include in frittata for Friday night supper along with a yellow bell pepper and eggs also getting used up.

Saturday breakfast rolls: adaptable soft rolls recipe, Marriage's Light Spelt flour, maple syrup, ground ginger: turned out a little on the dense side.

Today's lunch: the Mediterranean roasted vegetable thing: garlic cloves, red onion, fennel, baby courgettes, green bell pepper, red, yellow and orange baby peppers, aubergine; served with couscous - this time I tried M&S, and while the packet instructions are a bit misleading, turned out a lot better than Waitrose.