Matthias has been away in Germany since Friday to celebrate his 25-year high school reunion, and the combination of being on my own with no plans other than some scheduled classes and swims in the gym, and the storm on Saturday gave me all the encouragement I needed to have a very cosy weekend. To be fair, I don't need much encouragement on that score — it worries me a bit how good I am at being on my own! Putting that aside, everything worked out perfectly. I felt particularly smug that on Saturday I was able to finish up at the gym at 11.45, dash home, dash out to the market and do all my grocery shopping, plus stand in an endless queue for Tibetan food from the food truck, pick up said food, and make it back through the door of my house at 1pm, at exactly the point that it started raining and howling with wind.

I didn't leave the house for the rest of the day, but simply lay around in the living room, with the string lights on, candles burning, drinking tea and rereading A Little Princess (Frances Hodgson Burnett), a massive childhood favourite of mine that I don't think I've revisited for at least fifteen years. The blunt racism and classism was as I remembered, but the story itself: of book-devouring, wise, and compassionate young Sara Crewe's riches-to-rags-to-riches-again fall and rise, against the backdrop of a cloistered Edwardian girls' boarding school run by the grasping, vulgar Dickensian villain Miss Minchin remained as compelling as ever. Sara's ability to escape her circumstances through the powerful world of her imagination was what spoke to me the most as a bookish child who lived very much in my own mind, and I enjoyed it immensely on this reread. Although it feels more like a winter book to me, I'd deliberately picked it up for this storm-tossed weekend, because in my memory, it's a book that plays heavily on the senses: warm fires and richly-described meals set against inadequately insulated attic bedrooms, and the dismal fog and biting cold of the streets of Edwardian London — and this indeed proved to be the case. I'm not sure if it's a book to pick up for the first time in adulthood, but if it was a childhood favourite, it's worth revisiting.

Other than reading sentimental childhood favourite books, I've spent a lot of time this weekend on a marathon catching up to all the episodes of the Rebecca Fraimow/Emily Tesh Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones podcast. (I'm only just at the start of season 2 — I was very much behind — and had hoped to make it to the 3-hour-long Fire and Hemlock episode, but that's not likely at this point since it's 3.30pm on Sunday afternoon.) I'm enjoying it immensely — the discussion hits the sweet spot of enthusiastic affection and depth of analysis in a way that I feel is rare in popular literary criticism at the moment, and it manages to make every episode engaging, even if you haven't read the source material (as I hadn't for most of the 1970s books — although now I want to). The two hosts are clearly having a great time, and the Hugo award for the podcast is very well deserved.

The podcast was the perfect accompaniment to the truly ridiculous amount of cooking I've been doing this weekend. This morning I went out into the garden and agressively pruned the tomato plants, including removing large numbers of green tomatoes (since I don't think there's much chance anything will ripen at this point). These I have put into preserving jars as three batches of fermented tomatoes — one type uses ripe red tomatoes, and the other ferments them while they're still green (for this I had so many tomatoes that I had to spread them across two massive 1L jars). I'm also slow-cooking a stew (my whole house smells of garlic and red wine), I made pickled cucumbers with chilli, and am going to infuse a bottle of bourbon with fresh peach (thanks for the tip, lyr). I'll update the post with a photoset once all the ferments are sorted out in their jars; the whole process has been incredibly satisfying. I may have had zero luck with growing anything other than tomatoes this year — but oh, what tomatoes they have been!

Update: gardening/preserving photoset here!

Happy Friday! I'm tucked up in the living room with all the string lights on, while the rain pours against the windows, and I'm looking forward to a very cosy weekend, snuggled up inside against the elements.

This week's prompt is inspired by a short podcast which was being shared approvingly among all my academic research support librarian colleagues, on the 'broken' nature of academic publishing. In it, the participants talk about all the immense problems research dissemination faces: the fact that journal prestige is treated as a proxy for quality of research in job applications and promotions, 'double dipping' by publishing companies (i.e. making university libraries pay twice for the same journal subscription: once for reading access to the articles, and a second time to make articles Open Access when a researcher from the university publishes in that journal: did you know the typical cost to make an article Open Access is £1000-£2000 per article?), the predatory publishers and citation mills that have swooped in to exploit the immense pressure on academics to publish, inadequate peer review, etc etc. At the root of all this is organisations signing the DORA declaration and then ignoring it at every stage of the academic reward process.

I don't agree with the solutions proposed by the podcast participants, and I suspect most librarians won't either, but it is nice to hear these things being talked about outside my own little professional bubble. These issues are known by all in my professional context, but in my experience are not common knowledge outside it; if you've ever wondered why not all research articles are Open Access (or why the paywalls to read closed access articles ask the most absurd prices), this is why. (The other similar issue — common knowledge in libraries, not widely understood by the general public — is the predatory pricing models that publishers use for ebooks purchased by libraries.)

So, my prompt in light of all this is: what is something that's common knowledge in your professional (or perhaps hobby/volunteer) context, but not widely known or understood by the general public?