I finished up work at midday on 24th December, caught the train home, and walked straight up the hill to meet Matthias for food truck lunch and drinks in our favourite cafe/bar. He had spent the morning trundling around town collecting all the various bits and pieces of food that we'd preordered, and after we returned to the house, I set about enacting my plans for the twelve ensuing days of holiday: cooking, eating, reading, TV, and nothing more strenuous than swimming, yoga, and long walks. So far, everything's gone wonderfully: cold seafood dinner on Christmas Eve, a fantastic roast dinner for Christmas Day (we'll be eating the leftovers for at least the next four days), watching our way through the last season of Stranger Things in the living room lit only by the wood-burning stove, candlelight, and our various sets of string lights, reading nothing more demanding than Rumer Godden children's Christmas books, romance novels, Christmas romance novels, etc. Today we blew the cobwebs away with a 2.5-hour walk through the fens. The air was cold, the sky was clear blue, and the river water was still, and abundant with water birds, and everyone we met seemed relaxed and happy. We finished up with coffee in the market square.

Yuletide has been wonderful so far (initial terrifying moments when the mods somehow manage to open the collection with all author names revealed notwithstanding). I've been working my way backwards up through the alphabet — I do this as I feel most people read in descending alphabetical order and have run out of steam by the end, and I want to ensure authors who wrote for fandoms in the last quarter of the alphabet get love for their work too — at a leisurely pace, being more selective than in previous years in terms of what I choose to read, and I'm having a great time so far. My two fics have been well received by both their intended recipients, and other readers, which is always my main aspiration.

And then there's my own wonderful gift! I have been asking persistently for this fandom, and these two characters for the past eleven years — every single year in which I've participated in Yuletide, plus in several other exchanges as well — and no one ever wrote them, so when I saw what my gift involved, I almost danced around the room with happiness. And the fic itself is the fic of my dreams for these characters, and this fandom. What I always want from fanworks is more of the stuff that drew me to the specific characters in canon, and my author most certainly delivered in this regard: pitch perfect character voices, with a well-crafted little fic that reminded me all over again of all the specific things I love about these two characters individually, and together. I'm so happy!

Thrive (1030 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Pagan Chronicles - Catherine Jinks
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Isidore Orbus & Babylonne Kidrouk
Characters: Isidore Orbus, Babylonne Kidrouk
Additional Tags: Found Family, Bologna, Healing, House Hunting
Summary:

Isidore and Bayblonne settle in Bologna.

I will share it again once authors are revealed, along with other recs from the collection. I hope everyone else who's participating in Yuletide has had an equally good time with this year's exchange.


( Another December talking meme response )

I'll finish up this post with a reminder that fandomtrees is going to open for fills soon. It's easy to browse the tags to see what people have requested. If anyone is interested, my tree is here.

I did my last teaching of the year last week, I had meetings with four separate students today — and no more 1:1 meetings remaining — and I just have one half-day of work remaining for 2025. Between work and illness, I feel almost flattened with exhaustion, so it's a real relief to have my upcoming holiday almost in touching distance.

Today's December talking meme prompt is from lokifan, favourite places to visit around Cambridge.

I could talk about so many, but I will limit myself to three(ish), in three different categories. You'll get lots of guides to Cambridge highlighting the beautiful old colleges and grounds, the standard walk out to the village of Grantchester along the river, punting tours and so on, so I'll stay off this beaten track.

My favourite museum/gallery in Cambridge is Kettle's Yard, which is a contemporary art gallery with a difference. It started out as the home of Jim and Helen Ede, art collectors, who hosted frequent open house events for students to view and tour their collection, and was later gifted by the Edes to the university. Now, the former living space is preserved essentially as it was — filled with objects from the Edes' collection, plus lots of lovely indoor plants — and students can come in and use it as a quiet study space. Other visitors to the gallery get a guided tour of the space, and then can move on to the extension, which is an exhibition space displaying temporary exhibitions. It's an absolutely beautiful, jewel-like little oasis of calm, and rewards return visits. This is a photoset of photos I took there many years ago.

My favourite outdoor space in Cambridge was somewhere I discovered serendipitously during the first days of the pandemic lockdown in early 2020. I had leapt into working from home with enthusiasm, and had deliberately built a whole bunch of routines into the day out of a mistaken fear that Matthias and I would be stressed or irritated or find things monotonous, and one such deliberate routine was my obsession with having short walks outside after lunch, to ensure we moved and saw the sunlight. One day, I made a spontaneous decision to go down a little street I'd never ventured before, and I ended up, quite literally, in Paradise (Nature Reserve). This is Paradise. We had lived with this beautiful, green, jungly place just around the corner from us for eight years and had never known. For the last year we lived in that little house under the ivy, it became a favourite spot. Walking into it was like inhaling deeply.

Foodwise, my favourite high-end places are this one (entirely vegetarian tasting menus; they also have a wonderful newsletter that gathers together curated links on all things foodie, crafty, cultural and local), this one (seafood), and this one, and in general I love the Mill Road area, which is home to two of the previously linked restaurants, but also a great cocktail bar, some excellent cheaper restaurants and takeaway places, and all the Asian, Eastern European, South Asian, Middle Eastern etc grocery stores in the city.

It was a good place to live — and it became more interesting, especially in a culinary sense, during the thirteen years that I lived there.

Happy Gravy Day to those who celebrate! It's been a bit of a disjointed few days. I'm working right up to (and including) 24th December, so there's the usual mad scramble to deal with the inevitable mad scramble of students and researchers wanting to 'wrap things up before Christmas,' I'm trying to get all the food shopping and Christmas preparation done around that, and to top it all off, both Matthias and I have been sick. He's mostly better now, and I'm on the way to recovery, but the timing was less than ideal.

author_by_night suggested that I talk about the discrepancy between conventional understanding of history (based to a large extent on the experiences of the upper echelons of society), and the realities of ordinary people's lives for the December talking meme, and although I don't really feel qualified to provide a definitive answer to this, I'll do my best.

( See more behind the cut )

I've picked up The Dark Is Rising for my annual winter solstice reread, but haven't finished it yet, and have otherwise only finished one other book this week: The Art of a Lie (Laura Shepherd-Robinson), another great novel by one of my favourite writers of historical fiction. This was a page-turning, enjoyable read with all the features I've come to enjoy about Shepherd-Robinson's books: a scammer in eighteenth-century London embarks on a new con job on a wealthy widow, and finds he's picked a more savvy and complicated mark than his usual targets. The book switches perspectives, each time revealing more unreliabilities in its pair of narrators, pulling the rug out from each other and from the reader with every shift in point of view. As always, the author's extensive research and rich evocation of this period in history is on full display — I was delighted to learn more about eighteenth-century confectionery- and ice-cream-making, law-enforcement in London before it had a dedicated police force, and all the various opportunities for scamming and corruption (most of which are essentially unchanged to this day — there was a common 'Spanish prisoner' scam which is identical to today's 'Nigerian prince' scam).

And that's about it for this week. I hope everyone else is having a restful time.