I was given madly to ponder and think by this post of
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Life finds a way: in search of England’s lost, forgotten rainforests: Few people realise that England has fragments of a globally rare habitat: temperate rainforest. I didn’t really believe it until I moved to Devon last year and started visiting some of these incredible habitats. Temperate rainforests are exuberant with life. One of their defining ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Defender Hellhound - quite fun.
And then I had a spate of starting things in a 'what-do-Tiggers-like-to-eat?' fashion and putting them down after a very short while, and then defaulted to Agatha Christie, Hickory Dickory Dock (1955), which is coming up for that late period and milieux in which one feels Dame Agatha was not ( Read more... )

Dept of Signs and Portents: Snake mystery after lone, elderly python lays clutch of eggs: The oldest snake in captivity - known only as 361003 - hasn’t been near a male python for two decades: [U]nusual though not rare for ball pythons to reproduce asexually. The snakes also sometimes store sperm for delayed fertilisation.

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Dept of, uh, History ( Read more... )

I found this, ‘Treble Hearted’: Queer Intimacies in Early Modern Britain, a very provocative piece for thinking about the ways women might negotiate romantic friendships (or more) within a society/social milieu in which family ties and marriage were pre-eminent concerns and constraints in women's lives.
Constance Aston Fowler met Katherine Thimelby ( Read more... )

Dept of, Miff once more at the British Library: okay, I finally got to see the manuscript I ordered the other week (after being 'processing' it was 'returned to store', I ordered it again and lo and behold, it was in due course 'ready for collection' in the Manuscripts Reading Room.). Alas, it contained nothing of relevance to my research. However ( Read more... )

When a good friend cuts you out of their life, it can be as devastating as the end of a romance. How should you cope? You know, I think sometimes we should accept that some friendships are dependent upon contingent conditions and when those go away, it's difficult to maintain the friendship (or maybe I'm still bitter about someone who I used to ( Read more... )

What I read
The Friend Who Got Away, which got its own response post.
Finally got to the end of The Ariadne Connection, but still felt that the trajectory of the redemptive arc was a bit abrupt, also, another and different trope I find problematic.
Zoe Chant, Bought by the Billionbear - by a pseudonymous friend. Short. Don't know the generic ( Read more... )

I finished that book The Friend Who Got Away: Twenty Women's True Life Tales of Friendships that Blew Up, Burned Out or Faded Away yesterday, and still thinking about it. The contributors appear to be writers by profession, which has I suppose pluses and minuses, and even people who aren't writers would probably strive to impose some kind of ( Read more... )

Sekkrit Projekt #ifitoldyouidhavetokillyou isn't actually over, but it is now at the stage where I am no longer contemplating huge piles still to be got through somehow.
What I read
I seem to have picked some winners as freebies from US scholarly press (and although I would have preferred ebooks on principle, will admit that these are rather nice ( Read more... )