much_of_a

The status of the yontif this year is that my mother and I made honeycakes, but it is autumn and the head of the year and we are still here, the important thing. A sweet year, a safe. L'shanah tovah, all.

Update time: I posted here on Day 2 of the new Long Covid, today is Day 16, I posted the below on Facebook on Day 9. I'll make this public for a week so I have something to share on short form social media, then make it friends only.

Since the FB post last week not a lot has changed, no trajectory of improvement, largely managing to not make it horribly worse but I am having to spend a lot of time on bed rest. I've bought a wheelchair (£200 from Argos, lovely smooth thing) and been out for a short trip with Toby, me walking 2-3 minutes then pushed for a while. It's useful to be able to get out and walk a bit. Friend C is dealing with prescriptions. Mum is visiting tomorrow to chop loads of veg for batch cook (but at 80 she's retired from wheelchair pushing). I've booked in the gardener for early-mid Oct to put the garden to bed. I've cut 8" off my hair so now it's "just" shoulder length.

I have days where the heart rate feels precarious, where anything could set it leaping; and days when it feels more solid, and I can plod a bit at washing up and things, and some of those days it stays solid and others it only realises what I did a couple of hours later and soars then while I'm resting.

Stop adding things Bridget and go and lie down.


The FB post as posted:
Hello Facebook, I don't post here often (bugshaw on Bluesky or Dreamwidth usually) but it's a good way to reach a lot of people at once to say...
I'm having a big big Long Covid relapse.
Like the old days five years ago, sometimes can't prepare food or fetch drinks, barely use stairs (where the bath and study and books and papers are), felt a bit better on Friday and sat for 30 minutes at big computer for admin, crashed badly on Saturday Sunday so I'm still getting the delayed effect after apparently overdoing things but not feeling like it at the time. I can't see myself getting out of the house in September, hopefully eventually being able to do occasional things within 10 minutes walk e.g. Co-op, Light cinema, and visiting Toby in his house of many stairs (it's like a zig zag front and back).
Had three great months in the summer, garden parties, painting the garden fence, day trips to London, 3 mile walks with Toby. Was looking forward to doing more, hatching out of the last five years to a more functional life, doing more visits.
But got Covid in late August. Just my second time, the illness was noticeable but mild (that brief sore throat like I'd swallowed sandpaper), this time I'd had all the vaccines and boosters and been on Metformin for a couple of years which has a protective effect against LC. I knew to be careful, return to activity very gently. 10 min gentle gentle walk one day was fine. 20 min the next day was fine. 25 min the next morning was fine. After lunch, BOF! puppet with strings cut energy, heart pounding, oh dear I recognise this. Got myself settled downstairs with a quick bag of essentials from the upstairs where it happened. Couple of very bad days, few slightly better days so I did tiny things and got bad again.
I have rather lost track of where I am, doing long text on a small phone.
... Argh, FB cuts it off here so I'll put the rest in comments. NOT HELPFUL FB.

Part 2
But yes, probably housebound for a month except essential appointments, no London trips till at least February. Any thoughts of returning to work are right off the radar. My plan for a September full of craft and sewing projects for Christmas is off. I don't know when I'll be up to it again. This is only Day 8 of the relapse but it feels precarious and there's nothing that looks like an improvement trajectory. Ask me again in 3 months.
Good things: I know what's happening and how to manage it. Still no treatment I'm aware of but I'll let the GP know. Almost everything important is on the ground floor - bedroom, loo, basin, washer and dryer, kitchen. I've got plenty of healthy food in store. I'm ok for cash flow with the two lodgers, who also help with small things. Supportive friends and family. It's the time of year where the garden stops being desperately needy. Lots of music, podcasts, streaming video, ebooks, physical books according to energy levels. I just need to wait it out again. Sometimes I'm patient, sometimes I'm frustrated and miserable.
But that's where I am at the moment.

Part 3.
Oh you poor thing! Is there anything I can do to help?
Well actually I have given that some thought! Friends could help me:
Accompany in taxi to appointments eg GP, blood test.
Drive to appointments.
Help me buy an entry level manual folding wheelchair for occasional use (Cambridge Mobility in Sawston?) and tiny displacement rearrange furniture to store it.
Collect prescriptions from Mill Road.
Batch cook for freezer.
Veg prep for salad grab nibbles.
Visit for brief socialising.
Take masses of fresh growing basil before the season turns, there's loads and loads in the garden trough.
Check if garden needs watering.
Tiny grocery shop if delivery services let me down.
Take a ukulele - bought it last year thinking I'd learn. Not going to happen.
Bring your clippers and give me a 1-2" haircut - I've got two months of root growth and not going to get to a hairdresser for a more sensitive and gradual dyed black to natural grey transition. Bit nervous about this one but it will take away the difficult task of hair washing for months and months, gives me back a day per week it's so strenuous. I think I'd prefer a friend to a professional mobile hairdresser I don't already know, as I have very little energy for the getting to know you, discussing prettiness objectives, no I don't also want it washed etc etc. It seems like it might exhaust me before it's begun. I might be wrong. That got long. Like my hair.

Part 4 the last part.
Lodgers are fully on top of the bins and regularly refilling my 2 litre water bottles.
I know a cleaning company if I need it, and a gardener who made it a lot lower maintenance and nicer who I hope will put the garden to bed for the winter.
Best contact is email, WhatsApp, signal, text, phone. FB is very difficult on my phone and messaging is unreliable, don't know why, I have the app, it prefers the big upstairs computer.

TL;DR Bridget can't come out to play till spring, she's got to bed.
Bridget Ken from the Barbie movie: My job is bed!

I did not post it last night because I was so tired, but spatch took a proof of life when I was finally home which does indeed look much more like a person than my fluorescently washed out self-portrait of a couple of nights ago and amazingly more so than the traditional tubes-and-wires effigy of earlier in the week. It's peculiar to look back on. Concentrating to talk to doctors during that period worked well enough that I was asked more than once if I had a medical background and had to answer only in the sense of having had a lot of medical to deal with, but otherwise much of what I remember of the first few days involved drifting in and out of weird half-overheard half-sleep acutely punctuated by conversations or procedures. It was amazing to go back to sleep this morning after my medications without having to discuss them extensively with anyone.



fleurdelis41 seasonally sent me some cases of piracy tried at the Old Bailey, of which my favorites are the prosecutor no-show, the punch line of the stolen hats, and the dudes whose defense was having been very drunk at the time.

Home from six days in hospital with a plan designed not to land me back there any time soon, I have been passed into the care of Dr. Hestia, who is already carrying out her duties with enthusiastic ministrations of purr. I have washed my hair for the first time in a week. I have eaten food prepared by my family. I napped like a stone in the late afternoon, which I will have needed since my regimen for the foreseeable involves a schedule of medications I cannot let slide even when some of them require me to be awake at hours I have preferred my entire life to spend unconscious. My calendar is inevitably full of further maintenance, but I am truly looking forward to an increase in conversations that have nothing to do with the monitoring of my vitals. Mostly I am marrow-tired and vague with new chemistry and glad to be home in my own clothes and drinking water I don't have to ring anyone to bring me in bed. I was not expecting and delight in the gift of a plush harpy eagle that arrived while I was away.

In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, I respectfully wish to submit that if I had just had scurvy, this whole week would have been much easier. Have a suspicious ghost crab, the Changelings' "Port Royale" (1998), and Tim Eriksen rocking out Bellamy's setting of Kipling's "Poor Honest Men" (2011). In keeping with the recent influx of Kevin McNally in the eighteenth century, when I get back to my stack of DVDs I could just rewatch Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006). For all the varied and undeniable flaws of those second two films, their sea-iconography has clung to me like dream-wrack for nearly twenty years and I wouldn't have a cycle of stories without them.

This afternoon I voted Miss Jessel from Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) one of my favorite ghosts on film, a tall order but a true one. A masterstroke of sound design and suggestion, she's not spectral, she's uncanny: as real as the reflection she casts on the sunlit shiver of the lake, as motionless in the heat as the bulrushes she stands so far out among, she could be walking on water, though we will learn she drowned herself in it instead. Her slight, dark-dressed figure in long shot gives no impression of a threat, nor even any particular emotion such as hunger or melancholy that would make her apparition easier to read. Her incongruity becomes its own eeriness, the noonday drabness of her presence more frightening than its disappearance between one look and the next, which is after all only characteristic of her kind, though part of the film's chill is that really it has no such rules by which a haunting may be mapped and governed, only the inexplicable facts of things that should not be. Once we have heard that she grieved sleeplessly for her rough, flaunting lover until she died of him, the governess played like a doorway of possession by Deborah Kerr can hear her sobbing, a desolate, gulping, wretchedly echoing sound that when finally traced to the schoolroom has nothing to do with the still-faced, dry-eyed imprint of Miss Jessel at her desk and yet when the governess rushes to the empty chair and touches the slate left by her own earlier lesson, it is wet with tears. Without a parapsychological conversation in sight, it gives the effect of a ghost that has stained through time in all its layers, desynched to perpetuity. The parallel sightings of Peter Wyngarde's Peter Quint with his cock-strut and his bestial snarl of a smile, always smeared through sun-mist, night-glass, steam-sweat until he can cast his unfiltered shadow from a crumbling ring of statues at last have their own rude potency, as malignantly charged as one of the more explicitly libidinous legends of Hell House, but it is his ruined lover who looks as though you could never scrape her off the air, so soaked into this patch of reality that trying to part her from the grounds of Bly would be about as efficacious as trying to exorcise an ice age. Their voices whisper like tape loops on the candlelit stairs. The children are watching. The children are watching. The children are watching. Like the uncredited radiophonics of Daphne Oram that accompany her first, summer-humming manifestation, Miss Jessel or whatever has been left of her belongs to the weirdness of time just really starting to flower in British film and TV, more Nigel Kneale than Henry James or even Truman Capote and yet she fits as exactly into the sensibilities of the Victorian Gothic as she would into the bright horror of that lakeside to this day. She was one of three images left on film by the artist and director Clytie Jessop and I doubt you could get her off the print, either. This excellence brought to you by my watching backers at Patreon.

I just had my first opportunity to shower in four nights, even without washing my hair, so I just had the same opportunity to free-associate in the shower.

I have no explanation for why I was singing the blessedly abridged setting of Kipling's "The Ladies" (1896) that I learned from the singing of John Clements in Ships with Wings (1941) except that it's been in my head ever since it displaced Cordelia's Dad's "Delia" (1992).

As a person who does think all the time about the Roman Empire, I am incapable of not associating Rosemary Sutcliff's "The Girl I Kissed at Clusium" (1954) with Sydney Carter's "Take Me Back to Byker" (1963)—as performed by Donald Swann, the only way I have ever heard it—even though Sutcliff was obviously drawing on Kipling's "On the Great Wall" (1906) with her long march and songs that run in and out of fashion with the Legions and the common ancestor of all of them anyway is almost certainly "The Girl I Left Behind Me" (17th-whatever).

Somehow I remain less over the fact that Donald Swann was the first person to record Carter's "Lord of the Dance" (1964) than the fact that he did a song cycle of Middle-Earth (1967) and an opera of Perelandra (1964).

Oh, shoot, Swann would have made a great Campion. You register the horn-rims and immediately tune out the face behind them.

Ignoring the appealingly transitive properties of Wimsey, Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walter, I am not going to rewatch the episode of Granada Holmes starring Clive Francis, I am going to lie down before someone wakes me.

When I heard tonight about Robert Redford, I did not think first of the immortal freeze-frame of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) or the righteous paranoia of All the President's Men (1976) or even the perfectly anachronistic jazz of The Sting (1973) where I almost certainly first saw him, effortlessly beautiful even before he shines up from street-level short cons to the spectacular wire of the title grift. I thought of The Hot Rock (1972), a freewheelingly dumb-assed caper film of which I am deeply fond in no small part because of Redford. Specifically, his casting makes it look at first like the inevitable Hollywood misrepresentation of its 1970 Donald E. Westlake source novel, a cool jazz glow-up of the canonically, lankily nondescript Dortmunder whose heists always look completely reasonable on paper and in practice like a Rube Goldberg machine whose springs just sprang off. Only as the setbacks of the plot mount past aggravation into absurdity approaching Dada, of which the attempt to sneak into a precinct house via helicopter must rate highly even before the crew land on the wrong roof and the siege-minded lieutenant mistakes their break-in for the revolution, does the audience realize that this Dortmunder has the face of a screen idol and the flop sweat of a shlimazl, a man whose charisma is not an asset when it makes people think he knows what he's doing. "I've got no choice," he says doggedly of the eponymous diamond which he did at least once successfully steal, whence all their troubles began. "I'm not superstitious and I don't believe in jinxes, but that stone's jinxed me and it won't let go. I've been damn near bitten, shot at, peed on, and robbed, and worse is going to happen before it's done. So I'm taking my stand. I'm going all the way. Either I get it, or it gets me." When he acquires an incipient ulcer at the top of the second act, who's surprised? He glumly chews antacids as one of his meticulously premeditated schemes trips over its own shoelaces yet again. It may be the only time Redford played so far against his stardom, but he makes such a gorgeous loser with that tousle of coin-gold hair and an ever more disbelieving look in the matinée blue of his eyes, the Zeppo of his quartet of thieves who only looks like the normal one and no slouch in a stack of character actors from Moses Gunn and Zero Mostel through Lee Wallace and even a bit-part Christopher Guest, not to mention George Segal by whom he is characteristically almost run into a chain-link fence, trying to collect him from his latest stint upstate in a hot car with too many accessories. "Not that you're not the best, but a layman might wonder why you're all the time in jail." Harry Bellaver figured in so many noirs of the '40's and '50's, why should he not have retired to run a dive bar on Amsterdam Avenue patronized by exactly the kind of never-the-luck lowlifes he might once have played? The photography by Ed Brown goes on the list of great snapshots of New York, the screenplay by William Goldman is motor-mouthed quotable, the score by Quincy Jones never sounds cooler than when the characters it accompanies are failing their wisdom checks at land speed. Watching it as part of a Peter Yates crime trilogy between Bullitt (1968) and The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) may induce whiplash. It may not be major Redford, but it is beloved Redford of mine, and worthwhile weirdness to watch in his memory. This stand brought to you by my jinxed backers at Patreon.

I had not thought there were any meteor showers of consequence this month, but it seems that the swift pale streak between the telephone wires southwest of Cassiopeia belonged to the September Epsilon Perseids, so named despite their radiant in β Persei, the demon-star of Algol. I can hope it was not wildfire drift that accounted for the candle-tint of the half-moon, which was doing its autumnal trick of hanging like a lantern in the not yet leafless trees. The last of this summer's monarchs flew just before sunset, the twenty-second of her name.

I am glad to read that a classicist on Tumblr whom I do not know feels validated by a poem I wrote a dozen years ago, because she's right in turn about the linkage of ideas that led to its writing: the evocatio of Juno from Veii in 396 BCE, the evocatio of Tanit from Carthage in 146 BCE, the assimilation of Tanit to Juno Caelestis rather than Ištar-starred Venus, the self-fulfilling loop of enmity that a double-thefted goddess makes of the Aeneid and under it all the irony that Vergil even in his Renaissance aspect as magician could not foresee, that Carthage-haunted Rome was itself built on the needfire of the most famously sacked city of the ancient world, Troy whose gods Aeneas salvaged from the night of its destruction and now we remember Rome as the epitome of decadence, the eternally, contagiously falling city.

Also I had just been turned down by a housing situation that I had painfully wanted, but the classical stuff was all still bang on.

Not having read any of the source novels, approximately twenty minutes into the first series of Poldark (1975–77) as I lay on the couch self-medicating with the late eighteenth century, I remarked to spatch, "Is there any aspect of this homecoming that is not going to be a clusterfuck?" on which the answer turned out to be no, whence it seems the engine of the plot. Since I came to this show by having to wait for the third season of Turn: Washington's Spies (2014–17) to arrive at my local branch library, I was more than ordinarily entertained by the line pertaining to the hero's soldiering past, "Shocking business, eh? Losing the Colonies." The bomber leather frock coat is as impressive as advertised.

This afternoon my godchild's school was locked down because one of the students had a gun and the nineteenth and twentieth monarchs of the summer hatched. What am I supposed to say about the day itself? That I am reminded even without the martial canonization of a never-laid grief that nothing is easier to shovel under six feet of lime than memory? The last cousin of my grandparents' generation died earlier this week at nearly a century. The lines to the past snap fast enough, no one needs to hurry them along.

On that note, Andrew Kozma's "The Black Death" (2025). I like that Ulysses S. Grant is top of the list of historical characters Jared Harris wants to play, in part because of his civil rights commitments as president and as a counterweight to his negative figuration in the mythos of the Lost Cause. I need a door in the hall closet to BFI Southbank if they are going to keep doing inaccessibly tantalizing series like last year's complete Powell and Pressburger or, currently, Anna May Wong.

It is my fifteenth anniversary with rushthatspeaks and I am spending it with various doctors instead of my husband and our traditional restaurant. We had a better wedding the first plague year.

I wish merely to register my pleasure that when I went looking for the uncredited actor playing the dean of the law school in the early scenes of Winterset (1936), I found that Murray Kinnell had the kind of Wikipedia biographer who includes short reviews with their subject's stage and screen resume. "An unusual role for Kinnell as a derelict one-time gentleman; the film opened in July 1931." "'No man is a hero to his valet', as Kinnell's character in this murder mystery could testify." "Kinnell as yet another butler, though this time with an unexpected flourish." I am much more used to finding this kind of partisanship on social media: with no prior attachment to an actor whom I did not notice previously in a handful of pre-Codes, just its enthusiasm makes me want to see these lovingly noted small parts even when a non-zero quantity of Charlie Chan seems to be involved. I hope Kinnell would have appreciated his future, however microscopic fandom.