I sometimes abuse ampersands

This week's bread: a rather basic wheatgerm loaf, something like 70/30 wholemeal/strong white flour + wheatgerm, splosh of oil, turned out quite well considering it was the last scrapings of the recent batch of yeast.

Friday night supper: sorta-nasi-goreng with chorizo.

Saturday breakfast rolls: adaptable soft rolls, approx 4:1 strong brown/Marriage's Golden Wholegrain Bread Flour (end of bag), maple syrup, dried cherries. Tasty but a bit stodgy.

Today's lunch: bozbash, with red bell pepper, baby orange and yellow peppers, aubergine, okra, and baby courgettes, dried cherries, 5-pepper blend, dried basil, fresh green coriander (cilantro), and to finish, raspberry vinegar, served with couscous with toasted (slightly burnt) pinenuts.

Most women want children – but half are unsure if they will. For some, they won’t be bothered if they remain childless:

The researchers used data from the National Survey of Family Growth, a federally funded survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, from 2002 to 2019. This included surveys of a nationally representative group of 41,492 women aged 15 to 44 about a broad range of fertility-related indicators.
Findings showed that there was little change during that time in the proportion of women who said they intended to have children. On average, 62% of women said they intended to have a child and 35% did not intend to, with only a small percentage saying they didn’t know.
But up to 50% of the women who intended to have children said they were only “somewhat sure” or “not at all sure” that they would actually realize their intention to have a child.
....
And it is not just the certainty that may be affecting the fertility rate. The intensity of the desire mattered, too.
The study found that up to 25% of childless women who intended to have children also said they would not be bothered if they ended up not having a child.
“This not being bothered was especially high among younger women, and it increased over time among those who were younger,” Hayford said.
“They are open to different pathways and different kinds of lives. If they don’t become parents for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem that upsetting to many of them.”
One possibility often discussed for the declining birth rate is that young people today are unsure about the future of the country and the world, and that is keeping them from having children.

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Interesting nuanced article: “It Makes It More Real to You”: Abortion Attitudes Following Experience and Contact With Abortion (research done in UK).

(Okay, stating here that yay for the decriminalisation of women taking abortion pills this week but I have been saying for years - in fact I think the reformers were saying this in 67 but it was a trade-off to get medics on side - the 2 doctors provision in the current legislation is a fossil relic from the period when doctors reckoned that 'unlawful' in the relevant clause of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act predicated 'lawful' and that meant docs with sound clinical reasons, but even so they made very very sure to get a second opinion. And this hardened into the situation after the Bourne judgement of 1938 where the doc who would operate would refer to a psychiatrist to get the 'threat to mental health' box ticked.)

***

Yes, I think this is creepy, though I also think there are other (more reliable than cycle-tracking) methods of contraception besides the Pill: TikTok is obsessed with the hormone-free birth control debate: why is everyone telling you to stop the pill?

While on the one hand yes, contraception should be part of general routine healthcare and the sort of thing that GPs provide. But on the other, back in the day, specialist clinics were prepared to work with women to discover what was best for them, and I'm not sure GPs have either the time or the training to do this. At a panel I was on some years ago people were claiming that there was one Pill formulation that was the go-to and it so did not suit every woman.

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This is more in the realm of general demographic information, and I am sure my dearios are already aware of this: There Were Still Old People When Life Expectancy Was 35. (And the menopause is not some new-fangled unnatural thing, siiiiigh.)

I think I mentioned (did I?) that my research position at Former Workplace was terminated some while ago due to Internal Upheavals.

Well, thinks I, I still have research connection with Esteemed Academic Institution where I did my PhD and professional qualification, providing me with a) access to a research library and b) an institutional email address.

This connection was renewed some 5 years ago and comes up for renewal in the autumn, and being a forethoughtful hedjog I thought I would start mentioning this to person I know best in the department with which I am associated.

And, dammit, they have gone and changed the rules.

Some years ago (in fact before my last renewal but I guess institutional processes move slowly) there was a massive hoohah when somebody who also had some honorary connection with Esteemed Academic Institution turned out to be using it to bring EAI into disrepute by making it seem as though it had given official imprimatur to rather dodgy intellectual activities they were up to. Plus, there was a certain degree of mystery, or at least, lack of institutional memory, as to how person had even obtained this honorary position in the first place. (Or at least, nobody was copping to knowing.)

So, they are tightening up the rules so that you have to have much more of a formal position - e.g. be doing a collaborative project with somebody in the department - to be assigned honorary research status. So alas, am no longer eligible.

*Mutters obscenities*

Am wondering whether I can find friends in other institutions who might provide some similar position according me library access....

Dept, vain adornment, sort of. Went to get my hair trimmed, as after several months since it was cropped it was getting a bit messy. I went back to the same place (not the one I used to go to in Bloomsbury, for Reasons including my favourite stylist doesn't seem to be there any longer) where the lady half of the operation does a very nice cut and it is not at all expensive.

I do wonder a bit though - it was entirely deserted except for me, and they wanted paying in cash. It may just be it was a quiet day and the cash card reader was broken. But one wonders if it's A FRONT for something, though pretty much every third business around there that's not an estate agent or a grocer's or fast food place of some ethnicity or other, this being a particularly multi-ethnic corner of Our Fair City, is a hairdresser's/barber's/beauty parlour.

***

Dept, this was RUDE: I don't care if he was young - ? primary school age - you do not do this on a London bus, infamy, infamy, etc. I was returning from the above appointment and the downstairs on the bus being rather chokka, went upstairs and scored the prime position, front seat, left-hand. And a stop or so later, little boy gets on and cheekily comes and sits next. Opposite - right hand - seat was empty and the whole top deck was by no means crowded.

Also he gave signs of being an incipient manspreader.

***

Dept of, further on sitting in the wrong place (I meant to add this to the post the other day on Being Inappropriate on Social Media): Tourists damage crystal-covered chair in Italian museum by sitting on it:

An Italian museum has contacted the police after two clumsy tourists almost wrecked a work of art while posing for photos.
Video footage released by Palazzo Maffei in Verona showed the hapless pair photographing each other pretending to sit on a crystal-covered chair made by the artist Nicola Bolla – described by the museum as an “extremely fragile” work.
The woman squats and does not seem to touch the work – called Van Gogh’s Chair and covered in Swarovski crystals – but the man is not so careful, sitting and then stumbling backwards as the seat buckles under his weight.
The pair can then be seen fleeing the room in footage that went viral over the weekend.

What I read

Finished Wide is the Gate, and while things are getting grimmer and grimmer as regards The World Situation, I am still very much there for Our Protag Lanny being a mild-mannered art dealer with a secret identity as anti-fascist activist, who gets on with everybody and is quite the antithesis of the Two-Fisted Hollywood Hero. (I was thinking who would I cast in the role and while there's a touch of the Jimmy Stewarts, the social aplomb and little moustache - William Powell?)

Lates Literary Review.

Mary Gordon, The Chase of the Wild Goose: The Story of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, Known as the Ladies of Llangollen (1936), which is sort-of a classic version of their story recently republished. But o dear, it does one of my pet hates, which is blurring 'imaginative recreation' with 'biographical research' and skipping between the two modes, and then in the final chapter she encounters the ghosts of of the Ladies, I can't even, really. Plus, Gordon, who was b. 1861, obtained medical education, fought for suffrage, etc, nevertheless disses on Victorian women as 'various kinds of imbecile', unlike those robust and politically-engaged ladies of the Georgian era. WOT. TUT. Also honking class issues about how the Ladies were Ladies and always behaved accordingly.

Began Robert Rodi, What They Did to Princess Paragon (1994), which was just not doing it for me, I can be doing with viewpoint characters being Not Nice, but I was beginning to find both of them (the comic-book writer and the fanboy) tedious.

Also not doing it for me, Barbara Vine, The Child's Child (2012): sorry, the inset novel did not read to me like a real novel of the period at which it was supposed to have been writ as opposed to A Historical Novel of Those Oppressive Times of the early C20th. Also, in frame narrative, I know PhD student who is writing thesis on unwed mothers in literature is doing EngLit but I do think someone might have mentioned (given period at which she is supposed to be doing this) the historiography on The Foundling Hospital.

I then turned to Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), which it is a very long time since I read.

Then I was reduced to Agatha Christie, By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968), and Murder in the Mews (1937).

On the go

I happened to spot my copy of Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown (1944), which I know I was looking for a while ago, and am reading that though it looks as though I re-read it more recently than I thought.

Have also begun on Books For Review.

Up Next

Really dunno.