Christmas 2024

Christmas 2024 was the now standard pattern: to Ma for a few days; home; to Mfd+J to New Years Eve.

It was the usual pleasant time; I won't analyse it in any detail, just pull out some pix. The full set is here.

The children around the tree. Mother's tree in the front garden.

Christmas day meal was as ever. The bringing of the pudding. Mother in state. The Rulez. My morning half in just under 2 hours, alone this time.

Boxing Day to RNLT for lunch then a walk around the mystical Five Standing Stones of MuW. Photo by M (proof she came). It was all too much for some.

On the Saturday we went home we were going to Parkrun but it was closed-for-mud. So we did our own. Finish order: D, Toby <gap>, me, Lara <gap>, Rob, Miranda. Nina went over the fields with the dogs.

Our faithful cat was waiting at home to greet us.

DE and I walked to Ely and the cathedral on a cold frosty but lovely day that was so cold people were skating. E and I didn't find time for the Backs because she is a busy little thing, but I did scull.

For New Year's Eve to Mfd+J. And in the end, Mfd+J finished the puzzle. Indeed, the Ely walk was after NYD, but I think the puzzle makes a nicer last pic.

New rope

Our ropes are rather old. We were climbing on them in '93, so more than three decades. They still look fine, and I'm still trusting my life to them¹, but perhaps it is time to start thinking of renewing our infrastructure. So, I bought an Edelrid Skimmer Eco Dry 7.1mm x 50m in Icemint for £127.50 from Rock+Run.

I bought it online unseen and unfelt, because AFAIK no Cambridge shop stocks ropes or indeed any other climbing gear any more.

I chose it mostly on weight: it is a 7.1 mm half rope and weighs 36 g/m; according to Edelrid it is The thinnest and lightest half rope on the market. I would have preferred a colour more distinct from the deeper patterned blue I already have, but the only other option was black, which I thought would be hard to see.

As you can just about see from this, it is marked as a half rope.

Disappointingly, they aren't nearly as slinky as the existing blue, which I think was a Calanques (see this review which considers them outstanding for handling, so maybe they are exceptional).

Notes

1. They have had very few falls, because I'm fairly cowardly. And of course they've had a rather long gap in use while the infants were infants. I think there is little genuine info on how long ropes really last - see e.g. this thread - but the answers appear to be "inspect for damage" and they're fine from that viewpoint.

Refs

* Climbing: lightweight rope / rap cord pondering.

Book review: Horse Under Water

Horse Under Water (1963) is the second of several Len Deighton spy novels featuring an unnamed British intelligence officer. It was preceded by The IPCRESS File and followed by Funeral in Berlin, says wiki.

For some reason most likely related to the order in which I read things when young, it isn't on my "classic" list up with IPCRESS, Spy Story and Funeral in Berlin. But actually it is just as good. It has much the same mix of plot twists, real-seeming spywork, interesting locations, snappy dialogue, and somewhat irritating "the sky was like a lemon in a martini" sort of descriptions, though sometimes it works - "Cats sat around with their hands in their pockets and stared insolently back into the headlight beams".

The interesting location here is a fishing village in Portugal during the Salazar dictatorship; probably even more exotic in those days before common travel and limited information.

As to the plot, I think it works. The buoy is implausibly clever, though; they just didn't have that tech in those days, let alone the ability for it to continue to work for a decade; indeed radio underwater essentially doesn't work.

And the constant revision of what the thing was in the boat that was of interest works well.

The canister that they recovered though: that was empty, as-in not-full-of-water: would it really have stayed that way for a decade? Indeed buoyancy would have jammed it against the ceiling, making it easy to find, but perhaps quite hard to move; indeed, would it have collapsed under pressure? I think that's ignored.

Book review: the Unforsaken Hiero

Per Hiero Desteen was alone, weaponless and without food or water, facing the unknown perils of the desert in this grim world, five thousand years after the holocaust known as The Death says Goodreads, and yes The Unforsaken Hiero is one of those sort of books. The area is the US / Canadian border, the Great Lakes, whatever. Millenia have passed, animals and people have evolved in convenient ways, people live in the conventional mediaeval state and so on. I don't know what is in volume one, but in volume two Our Hero and his associates triumph over the terrible evil of the Unclean.

Trivia: Our Hero's miraculous mind powers become inconvenient fairly early on, because with them he is too powerful and plots just wouldn't work, so it is arranged for them to be conveniently removed, whilst quite implausibly leaving him alive.

Trivia: this was apparently to be the middle volume of a trilogy, which probably explains the rather thin end of the my-wife's-kingdom plotline, which all rather happens offscreen. But I do object to the trope of nearly-everyone-except-the-heroine-gets-slaughtered; too many authors think like maniacal despots and think nothing of killing off spear carriers.

There's nothing too engaging about the writing quality, so by the end I was skipping bits because it was convenient to finish it.

Book review: Shogun

We watched Shōgun (2024 TV series) and I bought M the book for Christmas; this post is about the book. She didn't get very far - it is 1k+ pages. Wiki says Shōgun is a 1975 historical novel by author James Clavell that chronicles the end of Japan’s Azuchi-Momoyama period (1568-1600) and the dawn of the Edo period (1603-1868). Loosely based on actual events and figures, Shōgun narrates how European interests and internal conflicts within Japan brought about the Shogunate restoration and that seems true enough. That page also has a historical accuracy section which though brief is incisive; my feeling is that an awful lot more is wrong; mostly I think that the whole thing represents a naive gosh-this-is-Japanese-culture kind of attitude; the emphasis on honour and so I think is overdone.

Although Blackstone is the key figure in the book - pretty well everything is shown from his viewpoint - his actual role in events is quite small. He saves Toranaga a couple of times, but so might any close retainer; he represents a fleet-in-not-quite-being threat to the Portugese "Black Ship" but not any actual threat; and so on. His main function is to mindlessly object to every tiny cultural difference he is presented with.

In the 2024 TV series Toronaga is generally presented as cunningly working out his plan (although mostly by being blank faced and staring off into the distance) which eventually does work out. In the book it is much clearer that he is winging it: repeatedly delaying on the off chance that something will turn up. This is in some ways less inspiring, but then again it makes his desire to avoid wasting vast number of lives clearer.

Overall, the book is too long. It really doesn't have 1k+ pages of things to say. But it is mostly well enough written though with occasional tells; for example, putting a mute as the lookout is kinda wacky.

Wiki thinks that the book is telling us that the samurai way is superior to the West. But the samurai acceptance of death is propped up by the Shinto belief in rebirth after 40 days. Without that, you can't have the culture. He mostly handles the rigidly caste-based culture by hiding the lower classes from us; they seldom do anything other than bow head-to-the-ground when their superiors go by. And in the end their system fell part in the face of superior Yankee tech.

New thin RonHill coat

Following the wild excitement of a new coat, I also bought - on a whim, I was in John Lewis, and Rob had Strava'ed about his running coat - this thing (link to labels).

It is an "Rh-005218 Mens Core Bk".

And also some thin black silky running gloves.

It is black, with no reflective patches, so I'm not sure I ever plan to run in it. But it was nice and slinky.