Sneezing / costumes / clues / a nice train
Heyo,
OUTRAGED to report that I’ve spent the last couple of weeks having Covid for the first time. I guess five years was a pretty good run.
Obviously at this point most people have had Covid, so it’s not like I have much to add about the experience. But I would say that on top of my general sense of outrage — come on, really, now? is there not some sort of statute of limitations? — I’ve also been very affronted by how unintuitive the pattern of recovery is, how much the first week felt like a daily dice-roll allocation of symptoms with no reference to any sort of overall arc or sense of progression.
One thing about being the fourth-last person in London to get Covid is that absolutely everyone has advice, and that advice is mostly “rest as much as you can”, so I’ve been napping and watching television and playing videogames (though Terry has fled the house so as not to also get Covid and that’s really put a wrench in my Silksong boss fight technique, which was “get Terry to do it”). I did try to resolve some pacing problems I’m having with the current book by thinking about them lightly and then fever-dream-ing a solution, but it didn’t work, so it’s really been an exceptionally unproductive fortnight.
Anyway, obviously I don’t have any exciting reports from the last couple of weeks but I DO have a couple of notes from last month’s Austria trip that I didn’t get around to writing up at the time:
VIENNA 1: THE NATIONAL COSTUME
After Vienna and the World Tramdriver Championships, Jude and I went to Graz, where we inadvertently arrived a few hours before the end of an enormous weekend-long folk festival. The entire centre of town was filled with it, a dozen squares with bands playing, food stalls everywhere. And almost everyone was in some version of a dirndl-and-blouse or lederhosen-and-shirt combo — but only a minority had gone full trad knee-socks.
Some of the outfit tweaks were pretty minor; for example, a lot of people were wearing sneakers instead of leather shoes. Others were more significant: some people had a full shirt-and-waistcoat setup on top but they didn’t have the leather shorts, just browny-green normal shorts, or even cut-offs or heans or in one case some baggy camo trousers. Other people did have the proper fancy shorts or skirt+apron but they were wearing them with, say, a tucked-in t-shirt. A few vaguely goth mesh-and-crushed-velvet dirndls. Two fluorescent dirndls. A jumpsuit dirndl. Quite a lot of women wearing a version of the lederhosen-and-shirt. Some of the outfits were just nice bright dresses with an apron on top, some of them were clearly immaculately traditional but were being worn with a baseball cap or a pearl-covered headband. I don’t know, it was really nice seeing such a variety of interpretations of the tradition.
It was also very satisfying seeing people in these stretched-across-time outfits doing a bunch of stuff that was variously in and out of sync with their clothes and the atmosphere and the city:
playing card games
going on their phones
clapping
dancing
refilling water bottles
drinking cocktails from little mini-steins
swapping hats with each other
hovering for tables
vaping
playing a game where you pay two euro fifty to try to hammer a nail into a stump with the wrong end of a hammer (??)
VIENNA 2: A CLUE
Also, I found this in a bargain box outside a charity shop, for if I ever need to commit a golden age murder.
VIENNA 3: A POLITE CANADIAN
When I left Graz, I got a train back to Vienna along the Semmering railway, a lovely railway journey that’s listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Great hills, pretty buildings, good archways and trees and bridges and things, you know the vibe:
A very nice Canadian was sitting a couple of seats behind me, and clearly he was from one of the parts of Canada that give you dramatically different expectations for what a mountainous World-Heritage-site railway journey might look like. He spent several minutes talking to the train attendant, trying to find a polite way to say is this it, culminating in*—*
“Just. I mean. Is there… another railway? Higher up the hill maybe? Up the mountain?”
“No.”
“So the UNESCO listed journey, is that—”
The attendant was not helping him out at all.
“—is that. This one?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Very cool. Thank you. Very beautiful. Cool.”
THINGS I’VE ENJOYED RECENTLY
I haven’t been doing much that requires any sort of sustained attention, but I have enjoyed a few things:
Pocket Boss (£3.99) is a charming little half-hour game by Playables, about making graphs for your terrible boss. Definitely best to play it on your phone
This writeup by v buckenham of a larp based on Piranesi is great
The White Pube is always good but I particularly enjoyed this text by Gabrielle de la Puente on being a judge for a painting prize, and then going to the exhibition for a future iteration of that prize and mostly not liking the art much
Lots of info in this post from a couple of years ago at the Garden History Blog about the history of pumpkins, particularly in Europe, and how they ended up associated with Halloween
Not sure “enjoyed” is the word for this collection of images at the Public Domain Review, featuring hundreds of years worth of illustrations of people who don’t have heads (but do have faces), look it’s hard to explain but here’s one of them, from around the year 1290:
Okay, have fun with the large torso faces, I guess! That’s it for now, speak soon,
Holly