memory of the future

I survived the busiest time of the year at work! All of my timetabled start-of-the-academic-year classes are done, I've reassured the first round of stressed out postgraduate students that they are capable of the research skills expected of them, and after this week, the remainder of the busyness is no longer my responsibility. It's felt easier than it has done in years, due to the fact that I actually have a full complement of colleagues to share the load.

Although I don't tend to do much in the way of Halloween, this weekend ended up being one of dust and echoes, haunting and memory, and light and warmth against the turn towards winter almost unintentionally. We didn't get any trick-or-treaters, but I've had candles lit almost constantly since Friday night, and I spent a pleasant half-hour last night watching the fireworks (in advance of 5 November) from the guest bedroom window. This annual event has a whole capitalistic carnival apparatus around it — the hill (usually a public park) from which the fireworks can be viewed is cordoned off, accessible only with a fee, there are fairground-type stalls, and so on. The fact that you have to pay to get in, and that it's cold, always puts me off, and this year I felt more smug than usual at this decision, as it also rained heavily for about an hour before the fireworks began. Far better to watch for free from my warm house!

I've been doing all the normal maintenance activities of the weekend — two hours at classes in the gym yesterday, followed by market lunch, 1km in the pool this morning, coffee and bookshop browsing and a drink in the courtyard garden of the best bar in town today — plus trying to get the garden ready to hibernate over winter. The fact that half the plants are still flowering in November is impeding this somewhat, but I can hardly be annoyed at raised beds still filled with a riot of cornflowers, hollyhocks, nasturtiums, marigolds and dahlias.

In addition to all that, I worked on this year's Yuletide assignment, and made good progress.

Other cool things: goodbyebird has set up a new comm, rec_cember. As per the description of the comm, it involves:

[a] month long reccing event for December. Let's recommend some fanworks! Let's appreciate and comment on those fanworks!

This weekend's (re)reading was deliberately seasonal: the annual The Grey King (Susan Cooper) reread on Friday, and A Lane to the Land of the Dead (Adèle Geras) yesterday. The former remains as exquisite and devastating as ever, the latter was a reminder to me of Geras's versatility as an author: an accomplished collection of ghost stories, set in various parts of Manchester in the mid-1990s (contemporary to the time at which she was writing), with an incredible sense of place. I first visited the city in the 2020s, so never encountered it in the decaying, collapsing, impoverished state that Geras depicts, but she makes it come alive. This after I first encountered Geras as a writer of historical children's fiction, and of YA fairytale retellings set in a British girls' boarding school in the 1960s. Both books, in very different ways, understand haunting not only as the supernatural (although of course this is a strong presence) but also in land, and the built environment, and the memories they retain and transmit, and the bitterness people carry and refuse to let go. I'm glad I chose to read both at the time I did.