Glamjam

I'm really tired, and don't feel in any way prepared for the upcoming working week, but I've been trying to mitigate that with a very lazy Sunday. I had grand plans to plant the first of the spring seeds and start germinating seedlings in the growhouse, I had plans to go out for a walk with Matthias (the weather today is gorgeous), but instead I've spent the whole day vegetating in my wing chair in the living room, watching the tail-end of the Winter Olympics from the corner of my eye, watching Olia Hercules cook borshch on a BBC cooking show, scrolling around on Dreamwidth, and so on.

Matthias and I saw Marty Supreme at the community cinema earlier this week, and we'll be heading out to see Hamnet tonight, so it's definitely been a film-heavy time by our standards. I'm anticipating a lot of cathartic crying tonight.

I've continued to make my way through mythology/fairytale/folktale retellings recommended by you on a previous post. This week it was Girl Meets Boy (Ali Smith), a slim little novella in conversation with Ovid's Metamorphoses, concerned with fluidity in gender, gender presentation, sexuality, and so on. It felt very, very, very of its time and place (the UK in the 2000s), but that's not to say that its specificity was a bad thing.

I also read The Swan's Daughter (Roshani Chokshi), a lush, surreal fairytale of a book in which the titular daughter (one of seven sisters born to a power-hungry wizard and his swanmaiden wife) finds herself caught up in a competition to win the hand of the kingdom's prince in marriage. Chokshi's previous books have been very melodramatic and earnest, and she's relished the opportunity here to shift the tone to something much more humorous and knowing, while still digging into her favourite big themes: the tension between love and vulnerability, genuine love requiring an embrace of uncertainty, and the interplay of love and monstrosity made literal.

It reminded me so much of one of my very favourite books — The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (Patricia McKillip) — although the latter is portentous and serious where Chokshi is whimsical and humorous that I picked up the McKillip for yet another reread. I've written about it here before, so suffice it to say now that it remains an incredible book — sharp and perceptive, devastating and beautiful.

I'll leave you with this fantastic link to a Shrove Tuesday tradition in which contestants dressed in costumes race through central London while flipping pancakes in pans. It's as delightful as you might imagine.

I've been seeing this doing the rounds for a couple of weeks now, and have found everyone's different responses really interesting. I particularly appreciated people who are parents answering each question twice — once about their own experiences, once about those of their children, and teasing out the commonalities, continuities, and changes.

[This took me three hours to write so I'm not going back in and editing all the typos.]

Before I launch into my answers, I think providing some context is helpful.

( A lot of context )

Now, on to the questions!

( Meme questions )

Wow, that took a really long time to fill in! I had a lot to say! On balance, my entire experience of education as a child was a very positive one, due to various privileges that are presumably obvious from my answers to all those questions. The fact that I had an excellent education at pretty well resourced public (state) schools in a country where the divide between public and private schooling has continued to grow in the intervening years shows that good state education can be done, if it's adequately resourced. It's also left me with a bit of a chippy lifelong belief that (outside of disabilities that public schools are not resourced to support, and a small handful of other cases) private education shouldn't exist, and if it has to exist, it should be very rare.