We're in Ely as our son recently moved here and we've come to visit. Mrs B. has booked us into a lovely B&B above a tea shop, which is full of little book nooks! 😍📚
Coffee and cake upon arrival (I had vegan lemon and lavender, Mrs. B had mocha), and a shufty at the shelves.
We had a stroll up the high street and I popped my head into a perfect Toppings and Co. bookshop - proper visit tomorrow, and a tour for any others I might find 😊

"Timing a trip to look for Scottish wildcats is difficult in a way, but in another way it's not: no matter what time you go, you're almost guaranteed not to see one."

About halfway through, and I'm really enjoying this book ?
???????????????

The lovely Aubrey Beardsley frontispiece and title page of Beatrice Clay's retelling of Arthurian stories.
Although written for older children of the Edwardian era, and therefore removing certain "unsuitable" elements, it's not as moralistic as I'd feared it might be. Her afterword about knightly privilege being predicated on exploitation and enslavement of peasants is rather forward-thinking. 4.75 ?

Skye does *not* pose for photographs! I had to edge as close as she'd tolerate to take this. She's not a wild "Highland Tiger", but she doesn't mess about either. She is often playful, but absolutely on her own terms. We're loving getting to know her idiosyncrasies? #Caturday
The book is about the natural history of and conservation efforts for the Scottish wildcat, of which few now survive that aren't hybridised with domestic cats ?

Last post (I promise!) about my walk today in & around the former Roman fort town of Ribchester.
The White Bull pub has a 1707 construction date, but the pillars in the portico are Roman, recovered from the River Ribble.
Lots of wildlife, including ducks & beautiful damselflies by the river, with a nice shady path through some woods.
The distant view of Pendle Hill, where I walked last week, I sighted just before I lost the route!
#WednesdayWalks

Second Refreshment! A pot of Earl Gray tea and summer berry crumble with custard, before I drive home. At a lovely tea shop / cafe /gift shop, Potter's Barn in Ribchester.
#WednesdayWalks

After walking up Pendle Hill last week, I chose a low lying route this week, along the River Ribble from Ribchester. Although I've enjoyed the walk, it was only half the route in the book due to vague directions (e.g., "head towards the two mature trees" in a landscape full of mature trees) leading me astray (I'm totally blaming the book, not my reading comprehension!).
Stopped off at the White Bull for a non-alcoholic refresher.
#WednesdayWalks

This 1934 edition of Beatrice Clay's Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion is an Edwardian retelling of the main Arthurian stories. I've had it for decades, so it's time is come to be read!
Written for children, the first 1901 edition left out Morgan le Fay, what with their relationship being "complicated", I suppose, but this reprint of the 1905 edition incorporated Morgan in suitably bowdlerised form.
⬇️

"Do It For Mama!" by Jerrold J. Mundis

In an American city riven by factional tensions, fuelled by hard-line conservatives and stoked by media disinformation, with riot police on the streets to enforce authoritarian legislation, the Home Guard is controversially ordered in to quell protests, resulting in hundreds of deaths.
So to take my mind off all that, I've read Mundis's prescient 1971 story set in a New York in which dog ownership becomes ⬇️

One of the more successful walking books I've used, possibly because I paid attention to the directions this time!
I did the "easy" route up Pendle Hill, easy being a relative term! My leg muscles will know tomorrow that they did something today!
It was a fantastic walk, soundtrack by skylarks, aerobatic display by swifts, and incredible views from the summit.
No witches as far as I could tell, though I was nearly pixie-led at one point ??‍♀️

Pendle Hill looks big from far away - it looks bigger close up! This walk does start part way up the hill at the Nick of Pendle, so it should be doable for me🤞🏻
See you at the top!⛰️🚶🏻‍♂️
#WednesdayWalks

A trio of second hand books I found today in a trio of places. 📚
I've been listening to classicist-comedian Natalie Haynes's podcast about Greek and Roman writers and mythology, so added the Oresteian plays of Aeschylus to the tbr, though I'll probably read one of her books first.
The Long Farewell is 15th (or 17th 🤷‍♂️) in Innes's Appleby series, none of which I've read, so hopefully that won't matter. A modern-day (well, 1950s) ⬇️

#SocialistStandard #1450
"Commiserations to you job-seekers out there who fancied themselves as Chief Executive Officer of the international corporation RCC Inc. The position has been filled. There were 135 internal candidates vying to fulfil it with an external individual, Trump, suggesting that he should get the job because he was already running America and as the job involved a one-day week, Sundays, it would be a doddle to do.

⬇️

Simon's poems are nice rather than profound or moving; coupled with Beth Munro's colourful prints, they are evocative, though.
Commissioned to be installed at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, they're inspired by the homes and shelters animals create, hence the title, Dwell. Simon and Beth offer a natural space for the mind to dwell and feel connected 💚

As someone who has Harding's "A Year Unfolding: A Printmaker's View", I was initially excited to see this newly published book of her wonderful prints, and so brought it home to the disappointment of finding much (though not all) of the contents are lifted from the book I already own.

Had I not already got her earlier book, I would love this. As it is I feel ripped off and taken for a mug ?

Colquhoun covers a lot of territory, geographically and thematically, in her survey of the Western Cornish peninsula, as indicated by the tags I used on my Library Thing record:
• travel
• biography-memoir
• history
• nature
• birds
• mythology and folklore
• ghosts
• food
• arthurian
• occult-esoteric
• witches and witchcraft
• non-fiction

Her writing folds together personal memoir of her post-war removal to Lamorna Cove to focus on her ⬇️⅓

Anybody else having a problem with StoryGraph?

"I like knowing stuff. I like learning. I like being more than I was yesterday. If I am giving future me a gift, it is reading a book for an hour instead of sleeping."

This #BookMail arrived unexpectedly yesterday: I won it in a Library Thing #EarlyReviewers giveaway. Gonna see if I can squeeze it in as my final book for May ?
It says it deals with "the darker side of being #neurodivergent " but also that it is "hopelessly optimistic," so perhaps the darkness isn't entirely unrelieved.
#NonbinaryAuthor ????

Limburg's grief at her brother's death by suicide makes up the poignant first sequence of poems, The Oxygen Man, reflecting on life as a surviving sibling ❤️‍🩹
The Autistic Alice is the second sequence, on Limburg's life as an autistic woman in a society that others both of those threads of identity, using Carrol's Alice books as a reference.
The final sequence is a collection of Other Poems, which are funny, touching & observant. Loved this: 5♾️

Well, I'm giving this four (red) stars based on the concluding section in which Sève summarises his preceding thesis and where I got a glimmer of light, though I suspect Sève would give me one star for comprehension due to my sketchy knowledge of the concepts he takes for granted his reader will understand, which is forgivable as he originally delivered this as a presentation at a Marxism conference. I think bits may adhere in my mental miasma 😏

You're Not My Dad, John Inman

"Got lots of Dads beside my Dad -
television's full of Dads.
Mr Corbett, he's my Dad,
Michael Bentine, also Dad.
Roy Castle is the Singing Dad
and Brian Cant the Voice of Dad,
Play School, Play Away teem with Dad.
John Inman, though, he's not my Dad -
not everyone I love is Dad."
#Poetry ❤️

"She will harrow this town, she will turn him up, whole or in pieces."
- Sister, from The Oxygen Man

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
#Poetry

'Excuse me,' says Alice.
'May I say something?'

'Of course,' says the Caterpillar -
'You may say something-'

'Yes,' says Humpty Dumpty,
'and we'll tell you why it's wrong.'

- The Alice Case

The #neurodivergent person's experience of assessment by neurotypical "experts". ♾️
#Poetry

"The Yiddish proverb that made them laugh so much was: 'Your health comes first: you can always hang yourself later.'"

- Notes on an Unwritten Eulogy, The Oxygen Man

#Poetry

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude
Peter Sellers imitating Lawrence Olivier's characterisation of William Shakespeare's King Richard III, reciting The Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night" with a salacious twinkle in his eye.
Everything has been downhill since this ?

https://youtu.be/PLjA331K4YI?si=NEr9HFrgDLwB1fGd

This is one of those short books (59 pages) that takes me ages to read as I have to keep looking up concepts, theories and references to parse the meaning, and then reflect upon and integrate the information before I can move on to the next paragraph 😮‍💨
Once I've done that, I'll hold onto the information until I have to sleep, and tomorrow it will be🎈💢😳 gone! 😄

26th May is #DraculaDay ! Commemorating the first publication of Stoker's novel.
Imagine my delight at (rather belatedly) finding out that before he was Sherlock Holmes, Jeremy Brett was The Count! 🦇🧛🏻‍♂️🦇 And even better, in the 1978/79 USA touring production with Edward Gorey designed sets! 🖤❤️🖤
I would definitely have gone to see this had I not been at school and 4000 miles away!

I check the charity book table at my local shop more in hope than expectation of finding anything I'd be interested in amongst the old cook books, mountains of Jeremy Clarkson drivel and biographies of disgraced celebrities, but today I was rewarded for my perseverance with these two schlocky '70s tomes! 🖤🧌💚💀❤️🧛🏻‍♀️💚🧟‍♀️🖤 😱😁

"Now, in 1971, it isn't possible to look the other way. It is the daytime, suburban side of our existence that has become our nightmare...These are not catastrophes of the imagination - they are what's happening...I get the feeling I'm playing Russian roulette: each passing month that the Worst hasn't happened is an empty chamber of the revolver. But one of them, sure as hell, *is* loaded."

- Introduction, Thomas M. Disch

I fancied some scifi, and this 1973 collection of stories came to mind as I've just finished reading about the ruins of ancient Athens. Some of the Greats contribute to the anthology.
I started reading this in 1981 and paused it, but it's fair to say at this point that I'm starting it anew!
The cover blurb is sad from the current historical perspective, as we continue to head in the direction predicted in these tales of ecological apocalypse.

On 28th May, 2022, Andrea Marcolongo spent a night at the Acropolis Museum, looking onto the Parthenon, ruined by Lord Elgin, whose biography she brought with her. Inspired by her impressions of that night, Shifting the Moon is a blend of histories: art history, colonial history, personal history, classical history.
While never condoning Elgin's theft, Marcolongo, presents him as a tragic figure, ruined by the act of ruination he committed.

"On the last week of May, in an outdoor gear shop in Paris, I bought a camping bed, a sleeping bag, and a flashlight."

#FirstLineFridays @shybookowl

“The Cornish language did not die a natural death; it was executed like a criminal by the oppressing Saxon power.”

I hadn't intentionally paired my reading of these two books, but they're both paeans to ancient cultures, adopted by self-exiled women, which have been colonised and exploited by invaders who have appropriated the rich heritage of a native people, while simultaneously seeking to destroy them.

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude

There are so many songs about the moon I could have chosen to accompany this book, but it's a marvelous morning for a Moondance, so the romantic, mystic, Celtic soul of Van Morrison it is💚🩵💚
#BooksAndMusic #BooksAndCoffee

Next up: Italian classicist Andrea Marcolongo got permission to spend a night at the Acropolis, and this shortish book (142 pages) is an account of her meditations on ancient Greece, Lord Elgin, personal reveries and "the ever-changing relationship between present and past". ?️?

#SundayFunday @BookmarkTavern
As a two-volume set, the annotated Holmes short stories has the highest page count in my Library Thing account, coming in at 1,878 pages, with an extra lxvii pages of prefatory material, totalling 1,945 pages
The longest single volume book I've read, at 1,892 pages, is the Bible, so long ago that my edition is signed by Adam, Eve and the Serpent! 🌿🐍

Having savagely mauled this clump of grass, Skye decided to make peace with and sit under it. I think it is a tense ceasefire, though! 😾 #CatsOfLitsy
I'm still reading #NewInternationalist #554 on Aboriginal rights, sitting in the sun, eating pizza, drinking highballs and listening to a playlist of artists covering Bob Dylan songs 📖🌞🍕🥃🎶😎 #HappyWeekend 😌

"It was the place of deluge."

#FirstLineFridays @shybookowl

"Several of the autistic women I spoke to said they had to make sure that certain types of food didn't touch their plate - tackling a full English breakfast involved a sausage barrier to keep runny baked beans away from dry foods."

Seen! ? The old "sausage barrier" is a classic move to keep those beans away from things they shouldn't touch ? Despite which, I will load my fork with different food categories, but I guess I have the control there.

Time is still
A moment of pleasantry
In this zombie birdhouse

#TuesdayTunes @tiedyedude

?️ Iggy Pop
? Run Like A Villain
? Zombie Birdhouse ?
?️ https://youtu.be/jY7GtqO3dTk?si=xQV-tZDTAfHwbBRb

The official video is a neat animated effort. Look at the suggested videos for an awesome live version from The Tube, in which Iggy correctly declares, "I am the fucking greatest of all time!"
I love this edgy '80s album. It has an End Times vibe.

I came across Ithell Colquhoun in an article Stewart Lee wrote about her in issue 4 of the Weird Walk zine. She was a surrealist painter, poet and occultist, who lived in and was inspired by the Cornish landscape.
The Living Stones: Cornwall is an artistic travelogue of the county in the '50s post-war period. I'm hoping to love it 🤞🏼📖❤️

“He that is able to express no sense at all in several languages,
Will pass for learneder than he that's known
To speak the strongest reason in his own.“
- Samuel Butler

William Hazlitt quotes Butler in the epigraph to his essay, “On the Ignorance of the Learned“. I've added a completely random picture of a man talking Latin gibberish in a confident manner. No idea who he is. Looks like a 🔔🔚 though.

"I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own - that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people's Time, not his.”

- The Superannuated Man, by Charles Lamb

We went to Liverpool today to attend a protest in support of Trans Rights, so an after-protest visit to News From Nowhere was mandatory. I bought a book on the politics of mental health and a mug with a quote from living legend Kathy Burke:
"I love being Woke. It's much nicer than being an ignorant fucking twat." No argument from me!
I bought a couple of t-shirts from a shop up the road, too ??‍???‍♀️

"Why tariffs are not an issue:
'Tariff Reform, Free Trade or No Trade? The Fiscal Fraud Exposed' was the front-page headline of the Socialist Standard in April 1910."
#FirstLineFridays @shybookowl

Articles include a critique (and rejection) of the UK Supreme Court's ruling on a legal definition of sex and gender ✊?️‍⚧️
DT and tariffs
A critique (and rejection) of the tactics of Just Stop Oil
DT Vs Greenland
The monetisation of universities

Nice wraparound cover (which I downloaded: I wouldn't flatten my own book like this 😱) illustrating one of the scenes from the novel.
Williams wrote this 1977 novelisation of a film that was never made, and I wonder just how bad the SFX would have been 🐜😳🦂
The story is a good B(ee)-Movie creature feature that's entertaining enough that I'm glad I got the sequels, which I'll read later in the summer, probably. 3½🐝

The basic premise of the book is clear: miniaturised people have to survive the micro-savagery of an ordinary garden. The specific milieu is a post-abundance world, ecologically poisoned by misuse of pesticides resulting in the deaths of billions by starvation. However, there is plenty of food for an insect-sized elite, providing the dystopian political power struggles of opposing factions can be resolved: or one side destroys the other!
👇

I ended up reading two editions of Coleridge's poem, the one illustrated by Doré, with "Assorted Poems" including Kublai Khan, and the smaller edition illustrated by Mervyn Peake ❤️, with an interesting introduction by Marina Warner, drawing out some of Coleridge's anti-slave trade themes, and the culpability by association of a society that profits from suffering.
Coleridge's gothic atmosphere is paramount, though ?

Inspired by The World of the Romantics jigsaw I did last week, I'm rereading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, illustrated by Dore ❤️
Inspired by some leftover "cocktail beetroot", I wondered if there was an actual cocktail using beetroot, and the one recipe I found for a "Borschtini" was too complicated, so this is a simplified version, which has an "interesting" flavour profile! ?