Three-chocolate millefeuille

and this:

Apple turnovers

and a pie, and some cheesy puffs, and some cream slices (not shown). Not all at once – it freezes!

Apparently it’s really easy to make. I wouldn’t know. I do know that it’s delicious.

Up till now I’ve always written the addresses out by hand (I have much neater handwriting than Robin does, possibly because I was actually taught handwriting at school). A few years ago we spent a couple of quid on a stamp kit and assembled a return address stamp, which cut down on the workload considerably (though I’m not sure how readable it actually is). But the main addresses carried on being hand-written.

This year, prompted by some experiments I’d been doing at work, and having found some address labels to print on, I started looking into ways of getting the addresses printed directly from the Address Book. I keep my contacts in there and have a list of people who should be sent Christmas cards by post. (There’s a separate list of people who get Christmas cards but whose addresses I’m not sure of; they get a pretty email sometime round about Christmas Eve or Day. People whom we see over Christmas don’t get a Christmas card at all – it’s an inferior substitute for personal contact, not a requirement in itself.)

If you select an address, or several, or a whole group, and press Print, you get a print dialog offering quite a lot of options. You can print on envelopes (not something I wanted to do as all the envelopes were different sizes) or sheets of labels, and you can choose such things as whether or not to include the country on the address and which addresses to include if a contact has multiple addresses listed. All very nice. But there was a problem.

Apple’s Address Book allows you to add the names of related people (such as spouse or child) to an entry. You’d think that the main reason to do this (apart perhaps from enabling you to swot up on your boss’s children’s names so you can ask after them) would be so that they could appear on address labels (‘Jane, Joe and Jill Bloggs’). But they weren’t showing up.

Trawling around the net I found some instructions for how to set Address Book up for printing multiple names on one label. Address Book follows quite a complicated set of rules for working out which and whether names should be shown on printing – so complicated, in fact, that Apple themselves gave up and removed the feature altogether in Snow Leopard. Which, of course, is the version I have.

Not to worry, though. The functionality is still there; all they did was remove the preferences file that told Address Book when to enable this feature. I managed to download an appropriate file and install it.

Still nothing.

More poking around led me to discover that this was because I’m in the UK. Apparently the preferences file turns on the ability to print spouse names by country, God knows why. The preferences file I’d downloaded had an entry for ‘UK’, but apparently what Address Book actually wanted to see was ‘GB‘. I edited the file with a text editor and replaced ‘UK’ with ‘GB’.

OK, fixed.

But only some of them were coming through, and in the wrong order. Now I needed to go and look at those complicated rules.

First of all, I needed to add everyone’s surname. So instead of Jane Bloggs having a spouse called ‘Joe’ and a child called ‘Jill’, her spouse has to be ‘Joe Bloggs’ and her child ‘Jill Bloggs’. That’s what gets you ‘Jane, Joe and Jill Bloggs’; otherwise you get ‘Jane Bloggs, Joe and Jill’.

But the spouse or child name doesn’t show up at all if the first name matches any other entry in your address book. So if you have another contact called Joe Smith, Joe won’t show up on the address printed from Jane’s entry. Apparently Address Book only looks at the first name when deciding whether someone is duplicated elsewhere, and only prints the name if there’s a separate entry for Joe with the same address as Jane.

There are two ways round this problem. The official answer is to make a separate entry in the address book for every spouse and child, and populate them with the correct address. This seemed like far too much hassle: some of my friends have multiple children, and Address Book doesn’t cope well with attempts to copy and paste whole addresses. So I cheated. I went through every spouse and every child, and made sure they were unique by adding a non-printing character to the beginning of the name.

Then there were occasionally people I didn’t want to appear on the address – usually adult children whose names I wanted to remain associated with their parents but whom I knew no longer lived with them. But this was fairly easy: apparently Address Book only looks at certain categories of associated people when deciding whether to include them. I created a custom category of ‘Offspring’ to apply to adult children, and these disappeared from the labels.

So then I printed the labels, which worked fine, and stuck them to the envelopes. I think that even with all the research I had to do, and the footering around with Address Book, it was still quicker than writing them all out by hand. And it’ll all be there for next year.

Next task: designing the email Christmas card.

Eventually we gave up on the idea of being able to see the fabric in person before we bought it. It still took some hunting, but we found something on ebay. It wasn’t quite what we had had in mind, but it looked utterly gorgeous: goldy peacock feathers on a blue-green background. And it was the first fabric we’d found that we could remotely contemplate hanging round our window.

So then we started looking for someone to make the curtains up for us. We found a nice-looking website for someone just up the road from us, but they never answered their emails. Eventually we gave up and found someone else, Olivia McNichol, listed on Google and Yell – no website of her own, but a good review, and not far away. I phoned her and she was happy to take the job.

Now this is the good bit. We ordered the fabric, which was being sold from Hong Kong and would take 5–14 days to arrive. It came in three. We took it round to Olivia that evening. Next day we got a call from her to say that they were ready!

I’m really impressed with the fast turnaround. And they’re lovely curtains and she’s done a really good job on them.

I think with the curtains hung, although we still haven’t received our Certificate of Completion, we can officially call this extension done.

Now for the big Christmas celebratory feast!

We took some flowers to her grave. Someone else had been before us and left a tiny Christmas tree and some little pottery animals. It’s good to know that other people are remembering her too.

I didn’t win. But that’s because, though I wrote a response (which forms the basis of this post), I didn’t really answer the question, at least not in the spirit in which it was intended. Short answer: I give nostalgia very short shrift.

Part of the trouble is that they are two rather different questions. I can think of plenty of places and times I’d like to visit, whether to experience a piece of historic culture first-hand (the premiere of Beethoven’s fifth and sixth symphonies, in the same concert) or to satisfy curiosity (were great whales really in the waters as abundantly as recent theories suggest, before humans got involved?). But I wouldn’t necessarily want to live there or then. I could also agree that a certain time period was a good time to be alive, without any great longing to be then myself.

And there’s another, larger issue.

Patrick Dillon’s answer very much assumes that the time-traveller must be purely an observer. This is understandable: if time-travel is true time-travel (and not, say, a means of casting you into an alternative universe that just happens to be running a few centuries behind our own) then anything that has happened has happened. You already know that you failed to prevent the First World War or the Fall of Rome. And unless you can persuade yourself that you can seamlessly assume the identity of an established person in history (that they were you all along), you know that you didn’t bring the heliocentric model of the solar system to the sixteenth century or women’s suffrage to the twentieth. You might be able to work behind the scenes: be a passer-by who comments to Newton in the orchard ‘I wonder why apples always fall down?’ (Or, if you have a mischievous streak, you could be the Person from Porlock who interrupts Coleridge’s Kubla Khan.)

I’d much prefer to be in a position to make a difference in the world. But in travelling to the past, you’d never know if you were really necessary or not. It’s true that perhaps, but for your interference, the Black Death would have been infinitely worse. But perhaps, but for your interference, it wouldn’t have happened at all. You just can’t know. And that would mean that whatever your actual role, it wouldn’t really feel like you had achieved anything.

There’s also the question of how you would live in the past you’d chosen. Most people in this culture have skillsets which would leave them superbly ill-equipped for any sort of earning in past time periods. My work-related skills revolve around the operation of a machine which has only existed in a form I’d be capable of working with for about 20 years – and nothing at all like it existed before the mid twentieth century. One of my main hobbies involves a musical instrument which only reached its current form in the eighteenth century. I suppose I might be able to earn a living of sorts as a singer, back to the period when cultural understandings of music differ so greatly from my own that I wouldn’t have any listeners. By then literacy would be rare enough that, if I can learn the language of the time, I could become a scribe. But in reality, there aren’t an awful lot of options. In much of civilised history, without my husband I’d have two choices: nun or prostitute.

I was recently unexpectedly reminded of the importance of gender in identity, so I am rather disturbed by Dillon’s blithe assumption that we can easily ‘switch genders if we feel like it’. That would be to fundamentally change who I am, which is surely not the point of the exercise. Dillon can only offer this so easily because he knows he wouldn’t have to take himself up on it. I doubt he’d leap at the chance to become a woman to experience life amongst the mythical Amazon warriors.

It’s also fundamentally selfish. Don’t like the way women were treated in ancient Rome? That’s ok, you don’t have to actually be one. Don’t like the atrocities in the Congo Free State? You can be one of the soldiers who chopped off hands instead. That makes everything all right, doesn’t it? Anywhen can be the best time to be alive if you’re allowed to ignore all the bits you don’t like.

I’d rather steer clear of times past entirely. If time-travel into the past is possible, then surely time-travel into the future is equally possible. I can’t believe there’s a mechanism by which I could travel to the sixteenth century which would not also allow the people from then to travel to my present. And if they can travel to their future, I should be able to travel to mine.

Dillon is speaking nonsense when he suggests that our time has little potential left: speaking from breathtaking ignorance of his own privilege and an astounding lack of imagination. His excitement may have leaked away, but mine certainly hasn’t. I’d love to visit an era where we have a benevolent Government of World Peace; where everyone enjoys the level of comfort that people like Dillon (and me) take for granted now; where malaria and dengue fever have gone the way of smallpox; where people really do treat other people without prejudice; where clean energy is limitless and speedy travel to distant planets routine. I want to see teleporters, matter replicators, anti-gravity devices, brain–computer interfaces, non-Terran sentient life; cures for dementia, tooth decay, and selfishness. I want my holosuites, dammit!

Dillon claims that the question is not about technology but about ‘lifestyle and ideas, people and manners, things that ebb and flow’. I don’t think the two can be so easily separated. How could we have developed mass literacy and the exchange of ideas without the printing press? How could we have a lawful society with an effective police force without rapid communication? Or how about modern philosophy without the advances in housebuilding and furniture-making (not to mention electricity and central heating) that enabled people to sit down and read and mull things over in comfort? What would music look like without the techniques to build modern instruments, or trade without global transport? I’d love to see what cultural advances can be achieved by the development of technologies that are currently the preserve of science fiction.

But even if I travel forward and find the Utopia I hope for, I’m still robbing myself of agency and relegating myself to the role of observer. What could I say to a people so much more advanced than my own? Wouldn’t it be better to stay here and now, and play my small part in bringing this future into being? (Or, if I discover a post-apocalyptic wasteland, how could I begin to go about putting it right?) And, again, what would I do with my life? My computer skills would be irrelevant in an age when computers have evolved beyond recognition. I’d probably end up as a curiosity at some university, pedantically correcting historians on twenty-first century trivia.

Ultimately, the best time travel is the only one available, and it’s one we can all use: moving into the future at the rate of sixty seconds a minute. This is potential for both more experience than can be contained in an entire lifetime, and more power than we know how to use. We all of us have the potential, and the duty, to change the world, here and now, in ways small and large, seen and unseen – to make the future we deserve. We have the present to work with, and it’s a powerful tool. We should learn to wield it wisely.

I feel rather better about him now, having finished the book and realised he was the only actual character (rather than plot device) in the story. But it made me think about how our identities are tied up with our names and our genders. I was much more bothered by a male Rhiannon than an evil god Rhiannon.

A recent news article talked about how black boys refuse to work at school for fear of being branded as gay, academic achievement being such a feminine trait. Robin tells me that about the only thing that threatens his sense of masculinity is the existence of women named Robin, such as that television chef. I wonder whether my reaction to encountering a male Rhiannon is just the same thing from the female side.

If so, it’s a much milder version. Robin may be secure in his masculinity, but so many boys and men seem to feel it is a very fragile thing – especially when it comes to being seen as gay, even though being gay doesn’t necessarily make a man feminine any more than it makes a woman masculine. I have no idea why masculine identity seems so much more easily threatened than feminine identity, except for presuming that it has something to do with the historical power of men over women. It’s certainly much more acceptable to give a girl a ‘boy’s’ name than a boy a ‘girl’s’ name, and that must be because a girl can aspire to masculinity, but it would demean a boy to be feminine.

I wondered why Brackett should choose to use a female name for a male character. She was obviously keen on Celtic mythology, as evidenced by some of the other names she uses, and presumably just liked the name. But there’s no particular reason to me that Rhiannon in this story has to be male. Rather, in the time at which she was writing, every character is male who does not have a particular reason to be female. There are three women in total in the book. One is the love interest and the other two are both Seers – wisdom and insight being obviously feminine traits to balance the active, physical (but also intellectual) prowess of the men.

But there’s more to it than that. In this story, Rhiannon takes up residence in the hero’s mind and actually possesses him for a while. A woman possessing a man? That would have been seen as very disturbing in an age when not only were women assumed, unspeakingly, to be inferior to men, but a relationship between a woman and a man was almost always necessarily sexual (and a relationship between a man and a man never so). This wasn’t the sort of relationship Brackett wanted to convey. So perhaps Rhiannon’s sex in this story was necessitated by the culture of the time.

The inherent sexism in this book seems very alien to me. We’ve come a long way in the past sixty years. But we still have a long way to go.

A picture of me is among the top hits for my name. There’s a different one further down, along with a bunch of other people who share at least part of my name.

Scroll down far enough, however, and you come across this:

I had to find out more about a book called The Sword of Rhiannon. The blurb looked as if it might even be a decent story, Amazon was selling it for a few quid, and my birthday was coming up…

We were expecting a fun little retro-future adventure: a book written in 1949, time-travel from modern colonial desert Mars back to the days when it was lush and verdant and peopled with humanoid races. And indeed this it was. What we weren’t expecting was to find the source of some of the greatest influences on our own culture and upbringing.

Leigh Brackett, the author of this short novel, apparently wrote the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back. It may not have looked much like the final version (she died and it was substantially revised by others), but regardless, George Lucas was definitely a fan of her work. Han Solo clearly owes a debt to Matthew Carse, the protagonist of this novel. And there’s more than a trace of Ywaine in Princess Leia (though Leia, being a creation of the 70s rather than the 40s, is actually capable and intelligent as well as proud and fearless).

The writing style reminded me of nothing so much as Ursula Le Guin. Brackett isn’t interested in character development in the way that Le Guin is, at least not here: the book is pure plot, in the manner of a fairy tale. But she has a very lyrical turn of phrase and an eye for sudden beauty in her descriptions.

Raymond Feist had obviously read it as well, before writing the Riftwar saga. The Riftwar has a city – a port – called Krondor; Brackett’s Mars has one called Khondor. Time travel to the distant past – check. Evil snake people – check. Evil snake people following an evil god from the even more distant past – check. Long sea voyages – check. Possession by an entity that may or may not be bent on destroying the world – check. Dearth of female characters – check, though that’s probably not Brackett’s fault.

It’s amazing that we should have come across, quite by chance, in this early sci-fi novel, so much of the basis for our own cultural development. Feist and Le Guin have both had a huge influence on fantasy literature and roleplaying, and anyone reading this knows all about the cultural impact of Star Wars already.

And to think, if the publishers hadn’t changed the title, we’d never have found it. After all, what motivation would we have to read a story called The Sea-Kings of Mars?

The instructions said to mix the ingredients (apart from the cinnamon), which I quickly found had to be done by rubbing as for a crumble. The mixture was very fine and powdery: from the bit where it said to form it into balls and flatten slightly by pressing on top, I was expecting it to get sticky and doughy, but it never did, even after leaving to stand for the required 20 minutes, and even after adding extra olive oil. This doesn’t appear to have been a mistake in our interpretation of the recipe; we found that someone else had had the same problem.

So we formed it into balls by grabbing fistfuls and squeezing, and then putting the results very gingerly down on the baking tray before they fell apart. (Nor did the recipe specify what size the balls ought to be, or how many we should expect to get from the mixture, so we ended up with a highly varied mix of sizes.)

After 20 minutes in the oven, they had solidified in their shapes and were going brown at the edges, particularly where they were thin and pointy. So we took them out and tried them hot.

Absolutely delicious: lemony and cinnamony with a little extra tang from the olive oil. Firm enough to hold and take a bite out of, but crumbly and melting in the mouth.

They don’t keep well: the next day in the tin they’d turned into rock cakes requiring canines and pre-molars to get a bite out of them (but still very tasty rock cakes). We’re going to try again sometime, and we’ll try and make them a bit lighter (and reduce the problem of the biscuits crumbling apart) by using cupcake trays as moulds, pressing the mixture down very lightly.

Strange mushroom: stem and gills

Can anyone help me identify this mushroom?

Strange mushroom: cap and stem

It appeared under my lawnmower yesterday as I was mowing the edge of the lawn. It might have been growing in the lawn or under the heather beside the lawn – I don’t know which as it appeared already uprooted. It has a very blue cap and pale pink gills.

Cap of mushroom, with hand for scale

(Don’t worry, I’m not eating it, whatever anyone says!)

Meanwhile I’m still going to Chansons (in fact they’ve made me treasurer) and we also have a concert in November, singing Copeland’s In The Beginning and a new piece by Jonathan Dove. Rehearsals are on Mondays.

I’ve also rejoined the church choir. The poor things were desperate as they had no sopranos at all (though no shortage of men). Rehearsals are on Thursdays.

By Friday evening I’m usually quite shattered. So that leaves Tuesday evenings for any other activities, like committee meetings or church meetings. And since there are quite a few of those, my Tuesdays are pretty much booked up too.

Weekends are for housework and garden work, and general recuperation. Sometimes this can involve visiting friends or having friends round. So if you do want to meet up with us, don’t feel offended if we have to set a date quite a long way into the future!