A general election is called: the country rejoices. I confess that I’m disappointed by the number of Tories jumping ship – I want to see their smug wee faces crumple as they try – and fail – to hold back the tears in their losers’ speeches. George Bush famously sought a thousand points of light; I’d settle for 650 crying Tory candidates. Gits and spivs the lot of them.
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I was in Glasgow on Friday to see Yes again. I’ve yet to see a bad show by this line up of the band. I suppose their live future is conditional on Steve Howe’s continuing enthusiasm for touring (he’s 77) but their last two albums have been good and they seem to be enjoying themselves. Their set covered most of their 56-year history with the notable exception of the long stretch when Howe wasn’t there but Trevor Rabin was, and that’s fine with me.
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Dr Who is back and I’m enjoying the new series and the performances of Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson. I’ve been with Who for the long haul – Mum says I watched the first episode in 1963 although my first real memory is probably Patrick Troughton and the yetis. I do remember us all making Dalek voices in the playground, though, which would be 1964. That means I’ve seen a lot of good stuff and quite a lot of crap over those 61 years. I’ve had my thoughts about Russell T Davies and Who in the past, but this is good stuff. Last night’s episode, 73 Yards, is a classic.
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It’s taken a while, but I completed a revision of the work-in-progress. I have around 85,000 revised words and no longer have any excuse not to write the concluding stories. This collection continues and probably concludes the sequence I began in Coyote in the Corner and takes me into unexplored territory. My influences, if you want to call them that, have not really been ‘horror’ but Christopher Priest, M John Harrison and Paul Auster, not so much in the content of the stories but in how I’m approaching the writing itself.
This sounds self-indulgent, but one of the things about self-publishing without expectation of financial return (though that would be nice) is that I can write whatever I want in whatever way makes sense for me. It needs to work for the reader too, of course, but that is a concern for later in the editing process; right now it is about creativity, imagination and freeing my subconscious.
A trip to a sports physiotherapist has established what seems to be going on with my left knee. After a systematic assessment and rejection of possible causes of the problem, he reckons it’s down to wear and tear on the meniscus, possibly just because of aging. The upshot is that I can go back into the gym when I want, do as much upper-body resistance as I feel inclined, and also any cardio work except any running on the treadmill. In addition, I have some specific exercises designed to strengthen the knee. The downside is that, particularly at my age, it may be some time before I can consider running again, although he is reasonably confident that the time will come when I can.
Cheese:
Although I haven’t had my annual check yet, the general news is that my HbA1c remains in the normal range and therefore my diabetes remains in remission. This is despite my weight going up by around 2.5 kilograms based on this time last year. A period of weight-loss is called for, something that might be helped by getting back into the gym and/or swimming or possibly also by foregoing my taste for Stilton for a while. A more considered comment is in my latest Substack post linked here:
Progress continues to be made in working through some family lines, though the C19 Nottinghamshire family continues to be awkward. One of the problems is the divergence between social history and apparent genetic history and this is compounded by the way Ancestry suggests genetic matches.
The theory is that Ancestry (a) finds a genetic match (b) compares family trees to find common ancestors and (c) suggests a match. In principal this should work well, and a lot of the time it does. Where it gets less helpful is when either there is an error in one of the family trees it compares or where there is a problem with the underlying records from which people derive family trees – for example if a family are lying to officialdom or otherwise covering over the traces of illegitimacy or other shenanigans – which is what I continually encounter.
On this point, it is worth saying that the myth of ‘Victorian morality’ does not survive first contact with family history research. What is far more interesting to me are the many accepted ways that families would formally or informally absorb issues – for example an older couple might declare an illegitimate grandchild as one of their own children to census enumerators. We cannot know for sure in many (or most) cases the circumstances in which illegitimate (a term I dislike) children might be conceived – it might be teenage passion, it might be false promises from a bloke who then runs away. As the great Lizzie Higgins sang (What AVoice),
When my apron it hung low
My true love followed through frost and snow.
But now my apron is tae ma chin;
He passes me by and he’ll ne’er speir in.
It’s up and doon yon white hoose brae,
He’s called a strange girlie to his knee
An he’s telt her a tale that he’s once told me.
Oh I wish, I wish, oh I wish in vain,
I wish I was a maid again.
But a maid again I will never be
’Til a apple it grows on a orange tree.
However, the child might also come from rape or other coercion or incest. In the latter case, family shame and trauma would also lead to disguising the truth. Two centuries later, after the individuals are long gone, DNA technology throws up discrepancies in the established narrative.
It’s also worth noting that women in urban areas noted for poverty, such as Nottingham, might well (and often did if offical reports are to be believed) turn to sex work to make ends meet. I’m not saying that this was the case for any of my ancestors, simply that it would be wrong to dismiss the possibility.
I note with pleasure that people sharing the same name as my forebears (Faulks/Fawkes) in a small village in Nottinghamshire were noted for their skill in making Stilton, which explains a lot.
An odd thing has happened. I had a listen to Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department (Anthology edition). I thought it was OK and listened to it again. The second time through I enjoyed it. Can you guess where this is going? I’ve since bought Folklore and Evermore and rather like them. I am not a Swifty in the sense that I don’t connect with everything she does, but I do like some of it quite a lot.
Jeez, a Deadhead and Swifty-adjacent: who’da thunk it?
In other news, I haven’t run since February thanks to a knee problem that I’ve been resting. My gym membership starts up again in two weeks and I’ll get a clearer idea of how things, er, stand then. I think it’s a muscle problem rather than a knee problem as such, so aside from not running I’ve also been stretching quads a lot. It mainly impacts if I’m going down hill so my first tentative steps will be on a treadmill followed by a flat surface. I still have time to get back to 10K fitness by autumn, though maybe not as confidently as last year.
My time generally has been spent either revising the work in progress, a more substantial job than I expected, or digging into my family tree. On the latter, from a position of scepticism I’ve become more enthusiastic about the contribution of genealogy DNA as a means of confirming or refuting possible ancestral lines. Finding a DNA match with a sibling of a conjectured 5xgreat grandmother is, if not 100% cast-iron, about as good evidence as you can get that the conjecture is correct.
Meantime, I really like this, because I was a 17-year old boy once too.
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