ansley15

My four-day weekend has reached its final day, and although it hasn't been quite as relaxing as I intended, it has been a lot of fun. Matthias and I just came back from a little Sunday market wander in the rain, and I'm now curled up in the living room in my wing chair, a takeaway coffee in hand, watching people walk by and the raindrops fall. The sky is white, rather than grey, and it feels as if we are under cotton wool.

This weekend has involved two trips into Cambridge. On Friday night, Matthias and I had booked to attend a collaborative event between the upmarket wine sellers and one of the restaurants, with wine from Bordeaux and a French-ish five-course dinner. We've been to several of these types of events, although all the others have been in one of the wine seller's shops and more like a wine-tasting with canapés, rather than a full sit-down restaurant meal. I was amused to discover that the restaurant was actually run by the guy who used to manage the wine cellars and catering at my old Cambridge residential college (on one memorable occasion, I was invited on a tour of the extensive underground cellars, led by him, by virtue of the fact that I lived in a share house with a woman who was the head of the college's postgraduate student committee). He was already an older man when I knew him in college, so I'm amused that he's elected to spend his 'retirement' doing something as stressful as running a restaurant! In any case, the food was good, the wine was excellent, but the people organising things had clearly failed to consider the fact that not everyone attending actually lived in Cambridge — things went on until after 11pm, and we had to dash out to make the last train (which was inevitably delayed by half an hour), and didn't get to bed until close to 1am. I was not super thrilled to be waking up at 7am on Saturday morning to go to two hours of classes at the gym, that's for sure!

Our second trip in to Cambridge was somewhat spontaneous, as misshoijer announced on Thursday that she'd be in the city for a flying visit, and would anyone like to meet up on Saturday afternoon. She's a friend from my postgraduate days in Cambridge — she did her undergrad degree in the same department where I did my MPhil and PhD, and for three years, I sat in on her undergraduate medieval Welsh classes (by the third year, it was just her, one other guy, and me, and we grappled with medieval Cornish and Breton as well). She moved back to Sweden a couple of years ago and I hadn't seen her for ages, so it was good to catch up — and all done in a logistically straightforward way that meant I didn't have to go into central Cambridge on the same Saturday when all the students moved back in for the start of the new academic year: she, Matthias and I met in a pub that was literally on the train station platform, we had one drink, and then she went on to London and we went back to Ely, where we tried a new Indian restaurant for dinner. This restaurant is in somewhat cursed location on the high street — it used to be a nightclub (so the space is big) which closed down at some point during or immediately after the pandemic lockdowns, then it got turned into an extremely mediocre cocktail bar (we went once and were basically the only people there in a cavernous space — very depressing), which then closed down, and it had been sitting empty for several years when suddenly I saw that it was alive and kicking as an Indian restaurant. The food was excellent (and absurdly cheap) — southern Indian food from Kerala, which is probably my favourite. We were home by 9.30, and I was asleep by 10pm.

I've only finished one book this week, but what a book it was: Tori Bovalino's adult fantasy debut, The Second Death of Locke, which was much anticipated on my part, and definitely exceeded my high expectations. I should warn everyone that my enjoyment is entirely due to the fact that it is very much My Kind of Nonsense — self-indulgent in a way that really suits my particular tastes and preferences when it comes to character dynamic. (Amusingly, it also manages to involve two separate ideas that teenage me had for fantasy novels that never saw fruition at my hands — when I say it is my kind of nonsense, I'm not kidding.) This is a world in which magic springs from intense bonds between mages and their human sources (called 'wells'); the former draws on the latter for all manner of supernatural outcomes. It's also a world in which the source of magic is running dry, due to an act of betrayal some years previously in which the titular island and dynasty of Locke (from whence springs all magical power) was annihilated, save a lost heir whom all other powers in the land are fighting to locate and control as their magical power source puppet.

Into this chaos step our two focal characters: Kier, a mage fighting in the army of one of these countries, and Grey, his well and childhood best friend (she's an orphan and was in effect raised by his family; she's also secretly in love with him and has been pining unrequitedly for many years). When they're tasked with escorting a captured hostage teenage girl to a potential ally, this perilous quest risks exposing the pair's many dangerous secrets, with implications for the wider political and supernatural context in which they find themselves. The characters' absolutely intense bond is at the heart of the novel, and if you like stories where characters are loyal to one another to absurdly self-sacrificing degrees (barely a few chapters pass without either Kier or Grey putting themselves in life-threatening danger in order to save the other), you will find lots to enjoy here.

As with many current ostensibly adult fantasy novels, although the characters are in their twenties, it still does feel a bit YA in terms of the relationships, and the whole thing is a bit of a teenage girl power fantasy (at least for the kind of teenage girl I was), but I had an absolutely fantastic time reading it, and won't apologise for that! If I had read it slightly sooner, I would possibly have nominated it for Yuletide.

This morning has been absurdly productive — I've already been to the pool, done a load of laundry (hanging inside, much to my disappointment, due to the rain), done a yoga class, and, as previously mentioned, strolled around the market. I'm looking forward to a few hours spent lying around and doing very, very little. I picked up a copy of Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) from a free book exchange outside a house near the river, and I imagine it will feature heavily in this afternoon's plans. Next week is the start of the busiest few months of the year for me at work, and I'm hoping this weekend was enough of a reset in terms of my energy levels to leave me equal to the task.