Arkessian

Maybe reading is having a moment with people going on about it in various places??

Anyway I was beswozzled, bothered and quite boggled to read somewhere - and seem to have failed to have retained a link anywhere - somebody saying they were getting back into reading, and what they found actually helped was taking the time to look up New Words They Had Not Come Across Before.

Which is the sort of thing that I remember we were given as homework once, and you know, I was hard put to it to find words in the chapters of the relevant set text that I did not know already or could work out from context what they meant or fair approximation.

I can't imagine anything more dreary, but hey, diff'rent strokes for diffr'ent folks, I am no better and neither are you, etc etc etc.

On the other hand I think I can quite get behind this, which popped up on bluesky today:

What you read is less important than whether you ever spend time thinking about what you've read.

And on reading and also writing and not always doing big showing: Say it, don't show it: A contrarian take on exposition:

almost as if the reader is being enlisted as a collaborator, using their own imagination to fill in details that are merely implied in the words of the book.

Bread made this week (because last week's developed mould, sigh): a very nice loaf of Marriage's Golden Wholegrain Bread Flour.

Saturday breakfast rolls: the ones loosely based on James Beard's mother's raisin bread, Marriage's Light Spelt Flour, perhaps overdid the raisins a bit, mace a bit too subtle? even though is new supply.

Today's lunch: seabass fillets which I cooked thusly (think this is a bit better with plaice, though): served with miniature potatoes boiled and tossed in butter and dried dill, steamed asparagus with a sauce of melted butter, lemon juice and lemon zest (I now have a zester that actually zests), and cauliflower florets roasted in pumpkin seed oil with cumin seeds.

Doesn't appear to be online yet, but apparently, according to piece in Guardian Saturday, there is this horrid new trend for people to outsource chatting up to chatbots - I immediately thought CyberCyrano, because there were not a few instances when after meeting up with the silver-tongued smoothie who had been romancing them, what was discovered was a tongue-tied ditherer.

Like, I'm pretty sure there used to be guides to useful lines of chat, but this is taking it to a new level, where at points it seemed like you had chatbots pitching their woo to one another....

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Also o tempora, though I wonder whether this is in fact a new pattern at all: report on crime in London - apparently crime central is actually Knightsbridge, at least for luxury watch, handbag and jewellery theft. Because that's where they are.

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But good news about tortoises: Baby giant tortoises thrive in Seychelles after first successful artificial incubation.

Are we entirely surprised: A woman’s place was not in the home: New book challenges assumptions about women’s work in early modern history:

Far from being the unpaid homemakers and housewives of traditional historical record, women contributed to all the most important areas of the economy, such as agriculture, commerce, and care.
More than half of the work done by women in the period between the 16th and 18th centuries took place outside of the home, and around half of all housework and three-quarters of care work was conducted professionally for other households.

I posted this in a comment over at agonyaunt apropos of the woman who thinks her husband is too laid back (she sounds too tightly wound): ‘Rawdogging’ marathons: has gen Z discovered the secret to reclaiming our focus?:

Specifically, it means sitting still and staring into space for an extended period. Most importantly, without your phone.... It sounds as if the TikTok generation has somehow invented meditation. That’s one criticism levelled at rawdogging, but young people are battling monumental levels of distraction these days: while older generations had to learn to tolerate boredom, they must learn to cultivate it.

Back in the day late 70s/beginning of the 80s I encountered a person or two for whom meditation was just that, a dive into an escape from all the pressing troubles of their existing life (rather than dealing with those).

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Rather different from the early modern images of witchcraft and witches that the popular mind tries to impose on The Middle Ages: Medieval witch stories, and a literary grandmother for the Wife of Bath.

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Country diary: The unlikely success of wildlife in lead country: 'Bonsall, Derbyshire: It was, in fact, the poison in the ground that prevented this patch from becoming cattle country – then nature took care of itself'

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This is fascinating: Remembering Quintard Taylor: Historian of the Black West and beyond

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Poisoning Crimes and the ‘Mushroom Murderer’: Patterns and Precedents (Cassie Watson is one of the authors)

The fact that poisoning may not initially be suspected is yet another unique feature of this method of killing, and so proof of a criminal offence has often rested upon circumstantial evidence. The nineteenth-century development of forensic toxicology brought more cases to light and led to more convictions, but reliable toxicological and pathological evidence concerning the cause of illness and death is not the first but the second stage in a successful prosecution. There must be some formal suspicion raised first, to lead to a medico-legal investigation. Criminals might try to evade prosecution through claims of accidental poisoning, or may not be detected at all if symptoms are misattributed to other conditions.