sollers

What I read

Finished The Tunnel (Pilgrimage #4).

Finished Tehanu.

Both of these were put aside to gulp down two of the honestly least memorable of Robert B Parker's Spenser thrillers, Double Deuce (#19) (1992) and Thin Air (#22) (1995) (I even skipped the inset passages from kidnapping victim's viewpoint) which was basically the equivalent of needing a stiff drink after wrestling with the 'prove you are a real person with verified identity' app last week.

Also read classic noir by William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1946), as having been wanting to do so since we watched a movie version some while ago. Very bleak - and the central character is profoundly unsympathetic even by noir standards.

Also another Parker, Back Story (#30) (2003), a bit less dire - part of that subgenre that was going around at the time in mysteries/thrillers, whereby something that happened in the heated days of the 60s/70s has repercussions or case is reopened or whatever.

On the go

Back to Ursula and Tales from Earthsea.

Up next

Maybe continue with Earthsea, maybe not.

Though I went and looked up that Love Among the Butterflies Victorian lady who had a very close relationship with her dragoman and that was based on diaries discovered in the 1970s, so very much an outlier.

And possibly Jane Digby does not qualify as a lady explorer? though she covered a lot of ground as well having a really spectacular love-life.

Female explorers of the 19th century demolished Victorian notions of stay-at-home women. But why were they so vehemently anti-feminist?

(And do we in fact have to invoke Wollstoncraft even if she did publish a travel journal???)

Article tends to argue that it was partly in the cause of maintaining an aura of the feminine in spite of their masculine pursuit and partly in order to dissociate from the shadow of Wollstonecraft (which also loomed among suffragists, do admit).

Maybe.

And maybe they were invested in being Not Like Other Gurlzz and therefore not identifying with the Struggles of Their Sex.

Or maybe they were doing that thing whereby if a lady-person does something notable in one sphere, she had to balance that out in some way by not being an all-rounder, or doing careful respectability-maintenance, or whatever. (Translating Greek and being able to cook....)

Also, surely C19th British women explorers (wot no Isabelle Eberhardt?) were a very small group - not enough for a subset to be designated 'many'? Do they include e.g. missionaries or those women like Isabel Burton who followed their husbands?

Today partner and I went to see solicitors about our testamentary dispositions, their offices are behind the Screen on the Green cinema opposite Islington Green (an in-joke that seems apropos for a certain lady's official birthday*).

Solicitors, like GPs, these days are very young, bless their little faces, awwwww.

But we had useful discussion and they seemed moderately impressed that we were fairly organised and knowledgeable and had stuff sorted out.

Though I have a whole swathe of Information to collate which I should perhaps have been doing in a more regular fashion heretofore. (General helpful hint, along with any requirements re funeral.)

And apparently - this is news to us that get our information from Victorian novels and murder mysteries - you do not actually have to sign the will/s after the ceremony if you are getting wed/civil partnered, just incorporate into the text that it is in expectation of that occurence - so we will not, as I had rather envisaged, have to dash down from the Town Hall to the solicitors to append our signatures.

***

*No, I am not doing 3 Weeks For Dreamwidth after what happened last time I did that thing.

Janet Fordham died in crash after travelling to see man who claimed he would help to recover money from earlier scams.

Woman in question was clearly the despair of her family and the local police who failed to discourage her from sending £££ to a series of romance scammers.

The family even spoke to her doctor, who said she was of sound mind, merely 'brainwashed'.

Eventually she

was contacted by a man in Ghana known as Kofi. He claimed he was a doctor and had found out she was being scammed when he came across her details while working part-time in a phone shop. Kofi told her he would help her get her money back and she flew to Accra in October 2022.... The relationship with the man appeared to develop into a romance and Fordham agreed to marry him, the inquest heard.

This also makes me think of a possible historical sort of parallel, whereby in the days of belief in witchcraft if you got cursed, there was also - well, perhaps not quite a profession - a class of individuals whose job it was to lift curses, cunningfolk. (Am not going to rush off and delve into the fairly numerous works on the subject around here.)

And more generally on the topic of spam, that conference in Kyoto is still anxiously asking for my response on whether I will be joining them.