Freckles & Doubt

There are many, many advantages to living in Cape Town, which is my Favourite Place In The World, but high on the list are two of them we invoked on Sunday: good food, and beautiful countryside. We drove out to Luddite wine farm, up past Grabouw, for a local chef's pop-up Sunday lunch. It's about an hour and a half's drive through beautiful scenery, up Sir Lowry's Pass and among mountains and farms and lakes, o my! We are firmly in Spring in the Cape, and it trotted out a blazing summer day just because, and it was a truly lovely excursion all round. Somerset West notwithstanding. (Somerset West is a small-town-vibey suburb of Cape Town, distinguished mainly by its apparently pathological need to assert its own importance by putting eight or so long-phase traffic lights in a row on the main highway going out of Cape Town. It backs up like a complete bastard. Took us an hour to get through, coming back. Citizens of Somerset West have, I fear, a high background level of minor mishap on account of all the ritual cursings of frustrated motorists).

The pop-up lunch thing is fun because apparently it's perambulatory, and takes place in odd kitchens - this one was the winemaker's own home, with concomitant lawns, and dogs, and interesting architecture and art, and a deliriously wonderful accumulation of mismatched crockery to accommodate all the people. (And an interesting selection of people, too! Apparently a good way to randomly expand one's social circle from unlikely angles). It was an excellent lunch - while we were promised Beef Wellington, apparently there was some sort of critical fumble with the beef, and we got two kinds of lamb instead, a sort of shredded slow cooked thing, and beautifully rare chops; also asparagus and artichoke starters and an amazing pan-fried trout with crispy skin, yum. Luddite also does a very small, very concentrated selection of really superlative wines, introduced during a winery tour by the fanatically dedicated and charming wine-maker. (Defiantly anti high tech, hence the farm name). Grenache noir, who knew? Amazing stuff, apparently very commonly grown in France, but rare in the Cape. Kinda light, and fruity, and a bit jewel-toned.

Part of the enjoyment for me was also that I drove, in my little Beastie car, which made for slightly slow and low-gear assaults on the steeper bits of the pass, with the AC turned off, because she has a very small engine and doesn't do hills well with three people in the car. (Or, frankly, with one person in the car). I love driving, and love having a reasonable car into which I can pack friends; it's also an elegant solution given that my current fatigue levels mean I can't actually drink very much without after-effects, so I may as well be Designated Driver and allow jo&stv to imbibe freely, which they did, to great hilarity. (Also, bonus, driver's music choice rule. When you put my MP3 player on random it reveals there is apparently an over-abundance of David Bowie and Annie Lennox in my music collection, but also occasional outbreaks of Franz Ferdinand, during which everyone bops).

The only problem was the wheel-wobble we picked up on the way back, which I attributed at the time to wheel alignment being knocked askew by the really rather terrible dirt roads on the farm. However, when I trundled the Beast into the tyre place on Monday for an alignment, they gently pointed out the balding front tyre on the point of actual collapse, and gave me a Stern Talking-To about tyre tread, the natural life of a tyre, and the need for replacement. Four new tyres, R4000, second visit to have a caster shift alignment done, whatever the hell that is. (Apparently the Beast was pulling the wrong way for our road camber. It's technical). I was clearly overdue for tyres, I've been driving the Beast for five years anyway, and mostly I'm just profoundly grateful she didn't explode on the highway on the way back. Other than in Somerset West, where she could have exploded with impunity on account of how we WEREN'T MOVING.

Owing to wine, heat and general uselessness I took absolutely no photos. You'll have to take my word for it. Also, my subject line is Omar Khayyam, by contractual obligation when I'm talking about a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and the wilderness.

Oh, dear, I appear to have disappeared off the face of the blogging earth again. I blame career change angst and the start of term. I am in the middle of negotiating a severely crisis-ridden change of curriculum week, characterised by advisor flakiness, administrator fail and fascinatingly political double-bookings in my curriculum change venue. (Had to close down the advice process for an afternoon to accommodate an awards ceremony featuring four consuls-general, which was somewhat surreal). I am, shall we say, a little frayed.

By way of a slightly retroactive upside, my mother was in town for the last month; she left on Saturday, alas, but it was a lovey visit, during which she made me clothes, niece-wrangled, did the washing up a lot and was otherwise her usual comfortable and comforting presence. The washing up was necessary because my weird body is at it again, I grew an extra mutant knuckle on the middle finger of my right hand and had to have it surgically removed before it achieved sufficient mass and pressure to fracture the bone. (If you have déjà vu, it's because this happened about a year ago, same finger, different spot. This one was more complicated because the cartilage tumour was partially under the tendon and the surgeon had to detach and reattach the tendon to get at it. Apparently that's a thing you can do. It necessitates two weeks in a splint, and ouch).

While Mother was here we (i.e. me and jo&stv, who are at this point pretty much her surrogate offspring) took her randomly to Riebeek Casteel, which was a lovely weekend in which Airbnb delivered spectacularly on the Some People Have Too Much Money end of the scale, something of an antidote to the weirdness of the Franschoek one. Seriously palatial: a huge, open, beautifully built house with approximately quadruple vertical volume, comfy sofas, a superb kitchen and three ensuite bedrooms. Good food and wine and company. Spectacular views. Generally good for the soul.





(That last one is the view through the front window, which is across from the stairs and above the huge, high living space. The window is amazing, the view even more so. I darkly suspect that church steeple of being Deliberately Picturesque.)

Right, so, another year, another crisis. LJ has just relocated all its servers to Russia. This means that LJ blogs are likely to come under Russian censorship, but more instrumentally, apparently Russian LJ users are jumping ship in droves, and there's a fairly high chance that the site will go under for lack of custom. I have mirrored the entirety of the extemporanea archive at Dreamwidth, where it's freckles_and_doubt. (This was because some evil-minded individual has nicked the extemporanea title on Dreamwidth; on the upside, freckles_and_doubt was what I initially wanted to call the blog but was prevented from doing by LJ title limitations).

So I fear that, suddenly and without warning, this has become a Dreamwidth blog rather than an LJ one; I will post from Dreamwidth, and crosspost to LJ with the comments disabled, at least until the point where it's clear my itsy bitsy audience has made the migration. Please update your RSS feeds accordingly! If you want to comment, do so on Dreamwidth, please, and with my apologies if LJ is easier for you. Dreamwidth does cheerfully support OpenID. It's also a fan-created and fan-driven site which has been the alternative to LJ for a while, with any luck it won't have the wobbles of shifting ownership that LJ has had to endure.

I have been on LJ for almost exactly 12 years, my first post was at the end of January 2005. Blogging generally has declined a lot from its heyday in the oughts, and the LJ community has shrunk a great deal, but it was a safe and happy internet home for a long time. Dreamwidth feels very similar, but it's still the end of an era, and I'm sad.

I have just found three CDs in the side pocket of my Ipad case. They are unmarked, save for a small, cryptic barcode sticker. They do not play when put into a normal drive. I have absolutely no recollection of these - where they came from, who gave them to me, what they're for. I have been reading enough dodgy fanfic that I am half convinced they're a sneaky hacker ploy, and the seven seconds the one spent in my drive making meditative and abortive read noises to itself is in fact the herald of my entire system melting into slag, because unlikely superviruses. This is ridiculous. I know my memory is bad, but this is ridiculous. Who's given me CDs lately? Why? What are they? How long have they been there? What is the meaning of life?

In the Department of Memory, Lack of, Total, there's also Bartholomew's Klip. We had that lovely weekend there over Easter - five-star luxury on a game farm with nothing to do except go on desultory game drives and consume early tea and muffins and biscuits shaped like rabbits, brunch, high tea, sundowners and godlike snacks, dinner, and the shortbread and decanter of sherry in your room when you went to bed. It was bloody marvellous. The group represented that happy confluence of 8 people any one of whom was interesting to talk to in their own right and who were downright hilarious in combination, which is pretty much the definition of a good weekend, although owing to the booze flowly-freeing more or less continually, it was also extremely argumentative. (In a more than somewhat entertaining way, although I do find myself wondering what the hapless staff thought). Jo and I don't agree about feminism, but a bottle of champagne soothes all ideological ills. The food was beyond excellent. Vi pwned me at Scrabble.

I've just remembered that there are a bunch of photos of the place on my camera, and have been since Easter. A full month later, here are some, in a spirit of memorial penitence. (There are a few more on Flickr).



Lovely old farmhouse, lots of garden space, weaver nests in the tree outside the dining room, and if you hang around on the wicker chairs on the patio reading dodgy fanfic on your Ipad for long enough, someone brings you a gin and tonic.

The landscape is also very beautiful, in that sparse, self-contained sort of way I love about the Karoo.



There were inordinate varieties of buck, but my camera skills were not up to capturing them. Also, renosterveld, and heart-warming stories about endangered tortoises and invisible Cape leopards. And my dawn and dusk camera skills have not entirely deserted me.



We slid in on an off-season half-price, and booked out the whole house (five double bedrooms for eight of us), and it was expensive but bloody worth it. A++. Will spend absurd money on again.

I am not, alas, of the cellphone generation. My phone is not a prosthetic limb, it's an occasionally useful communication device on which I probably receive more spam/sales calls than social ones. I am capable of, as I did this weekend, turning it off for a meeting on Friday morning, and suddenly and vaguely recollecting its existence on Sunday afternoon, at which point it had accumulated about eight texts and missed calls, and had caused me to leave hanging several people who were trying to visit. For which, my apologies. Note to readers: I am very firmly of the internet generation, and will infallibly read email way before I'll remember to look at my phone.

It also has a camera. I occasionally remember this, and occasionally take photos with it, and then completely forget that I've done so, until the guilt at not looking at the damned thing for three days prompts me to dig around in its innards in a spirit of enquiry and reveals all sorts of images going back months.

This was taken at the Kingston-on-Thames conference, and is a rather conflicted combination of a truly beautiful river-surmounting evening sky rendered generally exquisite by London's insane and terrifying density of aircraft vapour trails, the contemplation of which invariably gives me a punch to the solar plexus with eco-fear.



This is a stitched composite which has a chunk missing as I apparently didn't take any photo which covered that patch of sky; however, it gives a much better sense of that amazing repeated bow effect than the better but narrower stitch which is also on my Flickr.

This was a very well-run conference, with oodles of information and maps and planning to within an inch of its life (e.g. your sign-up for the conference dinner was confirmed on a separate sheet in the conference folder, personalised to you, with a map and directions and a reminder of the menu choices you'd made in July when you signed up, and had promptly forgotten.) It was a big conference for this particular discipline, two and a half days with three or four simultaneous tracks and four keynote speakers, and I think the overall quality suffered as a result - there were some very basic and/or arbitrary papers. However, the people are uniformly lovely (the organiser commented that in his experience fairy tale theorists are much more pleasant to deal with than postcolonialists. I bet.)

Good stuff: my paper was a lot more successful, still a few minutes over time with some bits cut out, but I did manage to give an overall sense of my argument rather than having to strangle it in mid-flow. (I think the 40-minute-paper luxury from my keynote earlier this year has reset my mental sense of paper length, but I am slowly reasserting my grip). People said nice things about it. I think my book or other papers were referenced five or six times by speakers in the tracks I attended, which means the overall cite-count must have been fairly high (*is smug*). Various people sought me out specifically to burble enthusiastically about shared interests. I met my editor, who is a lovely man and wants me to do more encyclopedia entry stuff for him. And - this has totally made my trip - Marina Warner, who was the biggest name keynote speaker, asked him to point me out (I forgot my nametag this morning and was wandering around in an anonymous daze), and came over to introduce herself and say she found my encyclopedia entries particularly useful. A nice hot cup of validation from a legend in my field really doesn't hurt at all. (Her talk was wonderful - she does a very characteristic synthesis of ideas and images across an incredibly broad front, and was talking about Lotte Reiniger silhouette animation, which has always enchanted me completely). I am, on the whole, stimulated and fired with new ideas, plans, scribbled lists of interesting new texts with which to cripple my credit card, and happenstance sparked connections, together with a realisation that actually as a critic I'm OK, and probably do better than about two-thirds of the speakers I heard. (I score big because I don't read a paper, I deliver it extemporaneously from the written version, which means people engage instead of switching off).

Bad stuff: this B&B doesn't have internet, and the BT temporary account I bought suffered from wireless transmitter crash for all of yesterday, causing the usual internet withdrawal. The Big Cheese critic who I met at the Ghent conference cut me absolutely dead in this one. (Bugger him, anyway. I'm still a good scholar). The convivial conference dinner last night featured Italian food that violently disagreed with me, so today I'm pale and feeble and severely short on sleep. Oh, and I'm booked home tomorrow on Lufthansa, who are having a strike.

However, in mitigation, I get to watch the second Doctor Who episode of the season tonight. On balance, it's definitely been a good trip.

Hooray! I am back in the familiar embrace of Winona, with all my logins automatic, instead of having to type the wretched things in manually on my mother's computer. I miss my own virtual space. I am also much in favour of Virgin trains, which are currently trundling me happily towards Euston with a power point and a table for Winona and easily-accessible internets, with no greater drawbacks than occasional fainting fits in the wireless connection, and a slight tendency to double-type when we go over a bump. Ain't the future wonderful.

I had a truly lovely week in Sedbergh with my lovely mother, and have now sadly left her to her pre-term preparations for the 71 teenage girls who descend on Wednesday. My mental image is of her manning the bunkers wearing an army helmet and an expression of grim determination. She does, however, send love to any of you lot who are acquainted with her.

It is also the start of another month, which is (a) terrifying on account of how the year is doing that acceleration thing, (b) means I missed wolverine_nun's spanky birthday party on Saturday, woe, and (c) obligated me to pay my intellectual debts. Unsuspecting sources from whom my subject lines have ruthlessly nicked euphonious words over the month of August are as follows:

• 1st August: one of the more crescendo-to-silly bits of the Arithmetic Song from the Doctor Seuss Song Book, a copy of which I joyously possess. It's actually surprisingly atonal and tricky music to play, but the inherent insanity of the lyrics makes me very happy.
  
• 6th August: the Obligatory David Bowie quote, here, of course, from "Life on Mars" in rather nicely layered commentary on Curiosity's perfect landing. The ineffable satisfaction with which a quote clicks into place on several levels simultaneously is... well, ineffable.
  
• 10th August: Charles Dickens, the opening Chancery bit from Bleak House, in which he is sustainedly and beautifully rude about lawyers.
  
• 14th August: you should have spotted this one - pretty much my statement of weather-related creed from "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head", which was written for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid by one of the world's great song-writing duos, Burt Baccharach and Hal David. Those guys wrote great music, particularly for piano rendition. Hal David, by an unpleasant co-incidence, died a couple of days ago.
  
• 19th August: a somewhat prescient reference to The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, since, while I have neither seen nor read the work concerned, I have spent the last week rather dementedly catching up on my YA girly literature from the library in the boarding house. This has involved a slightly gruesome amount of paranormal romance in addition to teen fantasy and a bucketload of Meg Cabot. Meg Cabot is fun - funny, acute and surprisingly well written. As a bonus, scientific experimentation suggests I can whack through a Cabot novel in about an hour and a half, which means that the total number of books I've read in the last week is... *counts on fingers* ... somewhere slightly in excess of fifteen. I feel much more frivolous now.
  
• 20th August: a horrible pun mashing up the conference venue with the sort of agony-column state I was in after completely screwing up that first conference paper. My second paper is much shorter and more ruthlessly shaped, and I am poised to watch myself like a hawk for unnecessary elaboration.
  
• 23rd August: dear Bilbo, slightly drunkenly at his birthday party, quoted in mitigation of the slightly drunken ability of a select cohort of academics to correctly remember the quote at the after-party.
  
• 30th August: William Wordsworth, naturally, from "The Prelude". Sticking a pin randomly into "The Prelude" at almost any point will yield a quote useful for heading posts about sight-seeing in the Lake District.

I'm in London for a couple of days, crashing with egadfly, and lunching with various peoples who are being very kind about my feeble flutterings at the idea of navigating London with a giant suitcase in tow. I go through to Kingston for the conference on Wednesday, and then head back to CT on Sunday. I feel very globe-trottery.

Ghent is rather pleasingly prone to outbreaks of dogs and bicycles. I'm not sure what prompts the dogs, invariably cute and well-conducted specimens on leads, but they're entirely consonant with the pleasant, polite, slightly reserved demeanour of the Ghentians I've met. Bicycles are a key mode of transport; little flocks of them toddle past at all times, and pedestrians seem highly trained to avoid both cyclists and trams. The city doesn't seem to be laid out with cars in mind, they're forever piling up behind trams and stopping patiently for pedestrians in a generally subdued and reassuring way. The trams are cute, although it was a miracle I managed not to step on a rail and turn my ankle. I did witness a young lady run her bicycle wheel into a tram rail groove and come a spectacular cropper. Salutary.

I spent yesterday morning sight-seeing, including pottering around the Gravensteen, alias the Castle of the Counts, which is a rather touristy reconstruction of the original 12th-century castle.



It boasts rather a nice collection of medieval armour and weapons, which I spent unconscionable amounts of time with given that I'm no longer in the SCA. Possibly my roots are showing. But sixteenth-century crossbows are simply cool. It also has a rather lovely view of Ghent from the battlements:



I spent a happy hour or so wandering around Saint Bavo's Cathedral, drawn thither by the organist apparently practising. Medieval ecclesiastical architecture sets out to awe and overwhelm, and by gum it does its job. I didn't see the Van Eyck or Reubens, being not so much an art geek, but I love the soaring spaces and the mantle of hushed calm a cathedral wears. Also, several of its bishops park off on their tombs in an attitude of relaxed marble indolence, which always amuses me.



As is obligatory, I accompanied my Earl Grey (in a rather fairy-tale iron teapot) with a Belgian waffle with cream, partaken of at a café on the edge of the square. Belgian waffles have a curiously chewy surface to them, I suspect they're sugared, but they're substantial and very good. Memo to self: try to achieve soggy waffles for Jo by making giant fat ones.



I am now ensconced in a hotel in Brussels preparatory to flying to Manchester tomorrow morning, and then the Lake District. Achievement Unlocked: Ghent. I liked it.

Surprising and unpleasant things about the last 26 hours of solid travelling:

1. Lufthansa won't let you check in online. Apparently they work on a database system which is orthogonal to the entirety of the known universe, and you're screwed if you have connections on another airline.
   
2. Despite the giant leg of the journey being two hours shorter and there being a lot more breaks from all the sitting, the CT-JHB-Europe journey is actually far more exhausting than a 12-hour one without the breaks.
   
3. Frankfurt airport, which is a giant, rambling, incoherent monstrosity blessed with a profound lack of logic in its systems, an incessant stream of simultaneous arrivals and departures in the same traffic streams, and a shy and reticent approach to bathrooms which tucks small iterations into highly obscure corners at infrequent intervals.
   
4. Germany. It wouldn't give me any money (and for sheer unadulterated terror, try facing an ATM screen which says "YOU HAVE EXCEEDED YOUR PERMITTED WITHDRAWAL LIMIT" which you've accessed in pursuit of drawing Euro, which you didn't bring any of with you, and which you will need in order to get from Brussels to Ghent. Fortunately Belgium is apparently happy to let me draw Euro to my heart's content). In a parallel process, Germany didn't recognise my cellphone, whereas Belgium has contentedly connected me to a network of some sort which is allowing the delivery (currently) only of spam SMSes, but hey.
   
5. The Belgian public transport system, which is large and ubiquitous and probably goes absolutely anywhere you may want to, but is almost entirely opaque to outsiders.
   
6. In fact, the ease of the two Scotland trips in terms of negotiating unfamiliar transport systems was horribly unrepresentative. I'd judge that it's probably going to take about two years of not moving much before the mere mention of overseas conferences no longer has me reflexively clinging to Cape Town by the teeth and fingernails.
   
7. A sudden, unheralded and entirely horrible mouthful of coconut in an innocuous-appearing slab of cake and custard on the Jhb/Frankfurt leg. Also, attempting to watch Mirror, Mirror in a spirit of fairy-tale theoretical enquiry, and discovering that it's a bizarre agglomeration of stylisation, slapstick and lack of adequately defined reason for existence.
   
8. The slightly disconcerting experience of trying to sit down in my seat for the Frankfurt/Brussels trip and almost falling over the giant, hairy, sandal-clad feet of the white-robe-wearing gentleman of undisclosed but passionate religious conviction who had stuck his feet through into my footspace from the seat behind. I suspect his knees were double-jointed, I wouldn't have thought that particular invasion was a physical possibility despite the obvious length of his legs.
   
9. Discovering that my hotel doesn't have a tea-tray in my bedroom, which its Australian franchise cousins did, thereby blindsiding me nastily. I am too buggered to leave my room in search of tea, and the withdrawal headache is starting to mount. (Mental and psychic health dictates that I do not drink the corrosive fluid labelled "tea" on aircraft or in airports).
   
10. Ghent's weather. Apparently when they say "heatwave" they mean it. I have brought almost entirely the wrong clothes.

Surprising and pleasant things about the last 26 hours of solid travelling:

1. Despite three connections across three countries, my luggage arrived safely in Brussels in an obviously more calm and collected state than I did.
   
2. Lovely mostly-English-speaking random Belgians who rescued me at most of the most radical onsets of confusion and doubt in my ham-fisted attempts to navigate the public transport system.
   
3. Instant wireless connection to 5 days of free access and unlimited bandwidth in aforementioned hotel. I have almost forgiven them for the tea.

Unsurprising and unpleasant things about the last 26 hours of solid travelling: I am utterly buggered despite having napped for four hours immediately upon hitting my hotel (eventually, after missing the tram stop and having to walk back), and have while negotiating train steps with a heavy suitcase, managed to land the wretched thing solidly on my left baby toe, which is blue and swollen as a result. However, through my rather glazed and exhausted state Ghent seems to be pretty, and the countryside is lovely and green and given to outbreaks of aesthetically pleasing buildings in interesting brick. I have high hopes both of the conference tomorrow, and of acquiring sufficient sleep both to enjoy it, and to give something resembling a coherent paper. But, memo to self, chance to talk shop with colleagues notwithstanding, next year I say it with journal submissions rather than in person.