Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I just came back from an incredibly frustrating and stressful swim at the pool — so much so that I had to bow out after 750 metres rather than my usual 1km. However, my walk home featured not one, but two cats that wandered up to me and wanted to be stroked and snuggled, which did a lot to restore my mood!

It's a long weekend, and it's been absolutely baking. The temperature gauge in our bedroom said it was 27C last night when I was trying to get to sleep, and it's meant to be 32C today — pretty extreme given it's still May! I've coped with this in the usual way: chilled infused water in the fridge, lots of ice cubes and frozen grapes in the freezer, salads for lunch (using chives and bitter salad greens grown in the garden!), avoiding leaving the house for much other than swimming and buying iced coffee at the bakery down the road. While confined indoors, we did at least manage to book our accommodation for our holiday in September, which always feels very satisfying and efficient.

Yesterday's swim was flawless: sun shining on the water, not a single other person in the lane for the entire 40 laps, and I just glided up and down the lane in pure, uncomplicated happiness, boundless in an unbounded world. It took me only 22 minutes to swim the entire kilometre. Today was pretty much the polar opposite. I'd seen when booking that only half the pool was going to be available to lap swimmers at the time I'd booked, but in that past when that's happened it's meant there is one fast lane, one medium lane, and one slow lane, and then the other half of the pool given over to lessons or free swimming. This time, two lanes were for lessons, two lanes were for free swimming, and then they'd widened the remainder into a double lane for medium speed lap swimmers, and another double lane for slow swimmers. Both were full with a scrum of people swimming up and down with almost no space in between each pair of swimmers. No fast lane at all. I attempted to swim up and down in the middle of the medium lane in between the other swimmers, but I was so much faster than everyone else that I basically overtook every single other swimmer every two lengths. Almost all of them were doing breaststroke, and I was kicked and hit repeatedly, including in the head and face, and including by someone wearing hand flipper things, which drew blood on my arm. I was so stressed that in the end I gave up. I could have been seriously injured.

I didn't expect them to rearrange the whole layout of the pool for one faster swimmer, but I do think it needed to be made clearer on the bookings website when 'half pool' specifically meant 'no fast lane,' and I'll be writing to the company that manages the sports centre and saying so!

Other than exercise (I also went to my two fitness classes, and I've been doing very slow, stretchy yoga classes in the shadiest part of the house), I've basically just been lounging around the house, reading, cooking, and eating.

I finished up Sister Wake (Dave Rudden), a standalone secondary world fantasy novel which essentially compresses 900 years of English colonisation of Ireland into 300. In the book, the Croí (the analogue for the Irish people) rise against their colonial rulers, against a chaotic backdrop in which the gods and supernatural beings of Irish mythology have burst forth to walk the island once more: gigantic, angry, animal-formed embodiments of sovereignty impossible to control and impossible to reason with. The book was packed with allusions to Lebor Gabála Érenn and other medieval pseudohistorical texts that I studied as part of my PhD, which I enjoyed immensely (I also enjoyed the fact that Rudden's use of Irish made semantic and grammatical sense, which is not always a given when authors decide to sprinkle it into their fantasy settings), but overall I struggled to get on with this book, for reasons on which I'm not entirely clear.

Yesterday, I gulped down Sunburn (Chloe Michell Howarth), an Irish novel of a very different kind. This is a coming-of-age story, set in a claustrophobically tiny rural Irish town (population around 300) in the early 1990s, with a teenage girl narrator who embarks on an all-consuming secret relationship with another girl from her friendship group. In the conservative environment of the village, any deviation from the expected path of graduation from secondary school, serious heterosexual relationship with another young person from the village, marriage, and stay-at-home motherhood is so outside the realms of possibility that it's not even contemplated, Lucy, and Howarth's novel captures perfectly how horrific it is to be closeted in such a setting. It's the kind of story that brings the experience of adolescence crashing painfully back: the repetitive limits of the world (school, home, chip shop, corner shop), the intense internal focus and sense that all your peers are observing and documenting your life, appearance, choice of clothes, and faults with journalistic rigour (as indeed you are doing of them), the anguish of every tiny thing taking on a significance of epic, life-altering proportions. Those more universal sensations take place in an exquisitely specific temporal and physical space, and Howarth's portrayal of this slice of her characters' lives is the richer for it. I thought this was fantastically done: earnest, painful, and rich.

(My one issue with the book was its choice to render dialogue like this:
'Blah blah blah.'
He says.

'More dialogue.'
Says Susannah.

And so on, always with that full stop and line break. It was wildly distracting.)

I'm now about one hundred pages in to A Treachery of Swans (A.B. Poranek), with low expectations, and much trepidation. It's a Swan Lake retelling, and I've already been primed by chestnut_pod and others that it's not great!

Other than books, Matthias and I watched Sirat last night: a meandering, melancholy road trip by a Spanish father and his young son through the deserts of Morocco, accompanied by a quintet of quirky ravers en route to their next rave, where the Spanish pair hope they'll find their lost daughter/sister. This is not a feel-good roadtrip movie — there are a couple of truly horrific, shocking moments — and it reminded me very strongly of medieval voyage tales, in which saints, or figures otherwise rendered outside of society (criminals, outlaws, etc) embark on journeys that are part free roaming, part panicked flight from their problems, and very soon find themselves in strange, supernatural environs outside the ordinary human world, and the whole thing becomes a sort of psychological metaphor for the spiritual journey of the soul. There's nothing so redemptive in Sirat, but it's that same kind of wasteland wandering, through bleak, empty deserts fringed by spectacular mountains (with an incredible techno soundtrack), all the characters in search of something that none are fully able to put to words.