jambiscuits

Reading the first question addressed in Ask a Manager today:

I have been at my job for a two years, and the job requires international travel, often with members of a team. We often go to very safe countries (Europe, Singapore), but for a new client we had to travel to South Africa. I’m South African and therefore am quite aware of the risks and safety measures necessary, particularly in the areas in which we were traveling, as was HR, which repeatedly sent emails about safety precautions.
Unfortunately, my fellow team members continuously engaged in risky behavior over the course of the trip (jogging at night alone by the freeway, wearing expensive jewelry in public, getting rides from random taxis on the street…). I repeated my concerns to them repeatedly, as did the hotel manager (who was so concerned that he ended up asking me to tell them to stop, saying he didn’t want the hotel to be held responsible for their choices). They didn’t take my concerns seriously, saying they were “experienced” travelers because they’d gone to Europe before, and I was being “overly cautious.” The entire experience was incredibly stressful, it was like babysitting toddlers.

Besides the story of the boy who cried Wolf! (except this is more like, if the villagers kept crying Wolf! every time they saw a wee doggie coming up the village street) I have a vague recollection of a ?fairy tale/children's story of somebody who is brought up to think Out There is terribly dangerous. And something happens and they go out there and are not immediately eaten, so they think Nothing Is Dangerous. And if as the tale progresses they don't actually end up eaten it is only through luck rather than good risk management.

Last week's bread held out pretty well.

Friday night supper: sorta-nasi goreng, with milano salami.

Saturday breakfast rolls: basic buttermilk, 3:1 light spelt/buckwheat flour, turned out well.

Today's lunch: savoury clafoutis with Woodland Mushrooms, garlic and thyme, served with steamed asparagus with melted butter and lime juice, padron peppers, and baby pak choi stirfried with star anise.

With which we had our traditional unwedding anniversary Bollinger (41 years).

I was very taken with this article (from 2008) about a genre of nature writing, and how, really, it's very dubious to invoke wild and untamed NAYCHUR in our green and pleasant land.

Wild and not-wild is a false distinction, in this ancient, contested country. The contests are far from over. When the wild is protected by management, or re-created by the removal of traces of human history, you have to ask, who are these managers? Why do conservationists favour this species over that? Whose traces are considered worth saving, whose fit only to be bulldozed? If the landscape is apparently empty, was it ever thus?

It's also wonderfully codslappy about a certain type of (male) writer going alone into the Wild Places (and not meeting the existential horror that attacked poor Moley in the Wild Wood before he found Badger's house).

It seems to me to resonate with this other thing I came across lately about Rights of Way. Which is of particular interest to me since I am pretty sure that the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949 owed rather a lot to my dear fubsy interwar progressives rambling and occasionally organising mass trespasses because the countryside was for The People and they had a Right to Roam. And was much more about collective enjoyment.

Or maybe not.

Only over the past day or two there have been various things on listservs and social media relating to research I have done and published (and not just my research, much lamented Canadian historian in the same area's work) and I realise that this was Back in the Day and maybe it has fallen off the radar.

But how is this thing that this thing is that - I suppose this comes with working in a particularly niche area - that people are not aware of the Horrible Hystorie of the Heinous Synne of Onan?

I am almost tempted to go forth and offer a conference paper WOT.

I'm not sure I have anything in the way of startling new research to offer but a lot of the same anxieties have been popping up again around Precious Bodily Fluids etc.

On another paw somebody was advance-mentioning a book they have coming out and that made me think, though it's not directly related, that there's a piece of research I keep meaning to get back to that's a similar sort of story.

Meanwhile there is something a bit weird going on, I fear, with conference I have been invited to speak at next month, having had rather cryptic message from person who was liaising with me. Shall get on with book reviewing before investing any more energy in paper-prep.

A few days ago Ask A Manager posted stories of co-workers overstepping their expertise.

And I guess this is not quite the same thing but I had a massive flashback to That Morning of Hours I Will Never Get Back when the whole library staff had a session with an outside consultant.

I am honestly not sure what the rationale was for having us give up an entire morning of our precious closed period - during which we did all - well, seldom actually all, but as many as we could manage - of those essential backroom housekeeping tasks which cannot be undertaken when the place has actual readers coming in and USING THE COLLECTIONS dammit.

Possibly we had either just undergone, or were just about to undergo, one of the restructurings of which I saw many during my years there, distinct from the physical relocation upheavals.

But anyway, consultant.

Had consultant been briefed? Had consultant done any due diligence about what sort of institution this was?

Okay, did know it was a LIBRARY.

Had not the slightest apprehension that this was a world-renowned RESEARCH collection and that, you know, we were not lending out books and stamping them with return dates (I am not sure that this practice, by the date in question, even pertained in public libraries).

We were sitting there cringeing and wincing, wondering when it would all be over.

Were we not very restrained by not going, in huge chorus, in the manner he would doubtless have anticipated we learnt as part of our professional training, SSSSSHHHHHHHHHUUUUUUSSSSHHHHHH!!!!?

What I read

Finished Dragon Harvest.

Read the latest Literary Review.

Read Angela Thirkell, What Did It Mean? (The Barsetshire Novels Book 23) (1954), which, I depose, is the one where Ange, sighing and groaning, realised that she was going to have to write The One About The Coronation, like what everybody else was doing. (The title alludes to a cryptic prophecy by one of the local peasantry.) So there is a fair amount of phoning it in, but on the other hand, some Better Stuff than one might expect for that period of her output.

On the go

And it's back to Lanny: Upton Sinclair, A World to Win (Lanny Budd #7) (1946), in which WW2 is raging but so far, USA is not in it and Our Hero can still pootle about Europe under the guise of being an art expert while mingling in very elevated company indeed.

Up next

Once that is done, I should probably turn my attention to the very different WW2 experience of Nick Jenkins in the next one up for the Dance to the Music of Time book group, The Soldier's Art.

This has me thinking (for that is the way I roll) 'who is the novelist that this has escaped from?': Alan Turing Institute accused of ‘toxic’ culture -

“The problems are deep-seated going back to the foundation,” said Lawrence. “If you create an institute that has a lot of money and spends that money on itself and a club of universities, you create a lot of politics.”

***

A more cheerful thing: Barbara Hepworth’s Sculpture with Colour saved for nation

***

More on heritage and reconstructing the past: The museum where history keeps repeating itself:

The easiest mistake to make in historical re-enactment is to create an era that never quite existed, by playing too closely to period. At Beamish, there is a real thoughtfulness given to how every age is a sort of palimpsest.

***

And Dept, Here Comes the Silly Season:

This strikes me as in the fine old spirit of Stephen Potter and GamesManShip/LifeManShip etc: The Best Time I Pretended I Hadn’t Heard of Slavoj Žižek: One weird trick to frustrate the hell out of a Marxist bro:

My advice is intended only for special occasions. It is for when you have an itch to scratch, and that itch is called, “a puerile desire to get on other people’s nerves.” All you do is stonily deny any knowledge of a person or cultural touchstone that you should, by virtue of your other cultural reference points, be aware of.... The game works best when you choose something that is normally the prompt for a great deal of intellectual posturing, of talking in a loud, bored voice.... Don’t do this to anyone who will be hurt by it, as opposed to merely irritated.

Whereas this has escaped from the era of Ealing Comedy, surely? Daniel Jackson was just 14 when he and his friends saw a strip of forest between Serbia and Croatia, and decided to claim it. Now 20, he is the president of Verdis, but has been forced to live in exile:

[I]t seems that men are more inclined to start a new country: 70% of Verdis’s citizens, and all seven of its government ministers, are men. This is not because of any kind of meninist agenda, Jackson assures me, and it is something he would like to address, but “it’s a lot harder to find women who are interested in getting involved”.

The Benson Diary by AC Benson review – musings of an Edwardian elitist:

His outlook is that of an Edwardian clubman; and indeed, the only England Benson knew well, apart from Eton, Cambridge and the court at Windsor Castle, was the smoke-filled rooms of Pall Mall, a world largely without women. Benson did not much like women and was not at ease with them, preferring the company of handsome young men. The editors go to great pains to argue that Benson, while certainly homoerotic, was not actively homosexual. But, really, who cares?
....
In truth, these diaries are a monument of misplaced scholarship.

(The Literary Review was kinder)

But also, while I guess Bensons are a minor fandom of mine, the diaries I would be interested in reading are those of Minnie (Sapphic romps at Lambeth Palace!) and of naughty Fred, EF Benson, author of the camp classics about Mapp and Lucia and the Edwardian bromance David Blaize. Though once attended conference paper claiming that the M&L novels were essentially romans a clef about his circle, so maybe he didn't need to write a bitchy diary as well.

I think we already had as much of AC as anyone would wish to know in that Goldhill volume on the family, which had a bit too much AC for my taste to begin with.

This week's bread(as last week's developed mould): Len Deighton's Mixed Wholemeal from the Sunday Times Book of Real Bread, 4:1:1 wholemeal flour/strong white flour/mix of wheatgerm, bran, and pinhead oatmeal, splosh of sunflower oil rather than melted butter, rather nice.

Saturday breakfast rolls: brown grated apple, started out as 70/30% wholemeal spelt/einkorn flour but ended up more like 50/50%, maple syrup, ground ginger, quite good.

Today's lunch: diced casserole beef slow-cooked in soy sauce, rice wine, and water with star anise, served with sticky rice with lime leaves, cauliflower florets roasted in pumpkin seed oil with cumin seeds, and sugar snap peas stirfried with garlic

Passed by my skimming eye yesterday somebody commenting on how people are still unclear on the concepts of the Dark Ages/Medieval Times/Renaissance and what/when they were -

- and I was muttering to myself, huh, those were after all a longish time ago, people are unclear on THE VICTORIANS AND THEIR ERA which is really not that long ago -

- and then I thought, hang on, we do not even need to go that far back, have I not expatiated upon people going on about that lovely healthy food grandma used to cook -

That would be grandma living in the heyday of tinned food/convenience food etc etc, what is this pastoral myth you are propagating?

And then we get people trying to make excuses for living persons having Certain Opinions or Phrasing Things in Certain Ways and saying 'oh well, they were brung up in a different era'.

So was I, bozo, so was I, that era was the 60s/70s/80s and unless they were being brought up in entire seclusion as part of a mad scientist's experiment, I doubt they could have completely missed what was going on.

I'm boggling a little at this article about nostalgia for parenting and childhood in the 90s, because I bet in the 90s they were looking back to Some Earlier Era, and there were panics about Modern Childhood, and Meedja, and so on.

In my post about manners yesterday, conuly brought up in the comments a couple of posts to Ask A Manager from An Awful Young Man, who, on the evidence given, probably knows all the intricacies of cutlery and which way to pass the port, but is unfit for release into general society:

First post:

I was travelling home on a packed train with my bike. Suddently, I was approached by a lady who asked me, rather rudely, to give my seat to a man, her father, who was travelling with her. Since I was sitting on a regular seat (not a seat designated for disabled passangers) and had to read some materials to prepare for my interview, I ignored her. Unfortunately, when I was getting off the train, I accidentally moved my bike in a way that it caught and left dirty stains on her coat. I did not think much of this till the next day when I ran into the same woman and one of directors in the lift in my office building. It transpired that she is the CEO’s wife. She said nothing and did not acknowledge me, but it was very clear to me that she recognised me.

Second post:

I wish I had been told the receptionist/janitor/security guard story by career services at my university, which is one of those prestigious English ones. (Note from Alison: This is a reference to advice that you should be polite to receptionists/janitors/security guards when interviewing.) We get a lot of tips about how to write our resume and cover letter and how we should conduct ourselves during interviews, but not this type of real life recommendation.

But, my dearios, is this not a positively archetypal morality tale? At least one of the commenters pointed out its resemblance to Folktale Motif of Young Man on Quest who Fails to Help Old Woman, Bad Luck Eventuates/His Despised Younger Brother Does Help Her, Go Him, Wealth and Princess Are His Lot.

So there's that one.

It could also make a 'Sliding Doors' tale where the different outcomes of doing the wrong and right thing change destiny.

Or maybe he's condemned to repeat that journey and interview over and over again, Groundhog Day style, until he Learns His Lesson.

Or, maybe this is one of those novels that takes An Incident and does it from different viewpoints and that while to Mr I Am The Main Character here, this is all terribly important, there are other people who are going about their lives and barely noticing him unless they have to, and even then they have their own concerns.