Beware crows, for crows hold grudges.

Frosty ground. Mental boxes. Shrimp report.

The western sky is clear, an ice blue fading to white near the horizon. To the east, it is a blush pink, stuck in some perpetual half lit dawn, and with the clarity of a hard frost. It is nearly midday, but the ground is still frozen solid. If you are in a country where the temperature can deviate by more than 5° from 18°C without a severe weather warning (only a slight exaggeration), you might not realise this is unusual, but it is. Frosts are not common, frosts that last days are not normal. I am making to most of the solid ground by stomping through some otherwise inaccessible fields. They are largely inaccessible due to the actions of farmers and their tractors; here the public foot path has been churned into a thick mire while putting up a new fence of gargantuan proportions. Last time this happened I wondered what kind of monstrous livestock they would fill the field with, but no elephants or wildebeest or anything else came. The fences were to stop people using an innocent shortcut through to the woods, and the field remained unused.

I’m forced to walk along the road, narrowly missing a motorcycle which has inexplicably decided to drive on the wrong side. The next village along, another farmer has churned up the footpath cutting hedges. It is my route to the postbox. Hedges should be cut about this time of year, after the berries have been eaten and before the nesting- but I still need access to the postbox in case anyone buys something, and besides I particularly hate that farmer because he shot crows and strung them on posts around the field, their dead wings uselessly flapping in the wind.

It did no good. The crows know the farmer cannot guard the field most of the time, can’t stop them eating seed anymore than he can stop the walkers sneaking around the field edge instead of using the footpath which zigzags drunkenly across it. The crows eat seed and hold grudges. I contemplate cutting the dead crows down and stringing up small poppets of the farmer while walking along the edges of the field thinking about something I heard on TikTok.

In the video a woman asks me to imagine a fantasy world, before saying that all fantasy worlds are Eurocentric medieval landscapes full of castles and white people. ‘That’s patently not true’ says my son, probably thinking of Terry Pratchett. ‘Of course it’s not’ I reply, ‘there’s a whole genre of fantasy called ‘science fiction’ that takes place in space, for starters’

I had imagined a fantasy world as asked, and it had not involved any castles or white people, or any people at all, and definitely, definitely no farmers (yes, my house is still surrounded by cow dung). My world was completely unpopulated by humans, though I concede I am not writing a book. If I was writing a book I might have to allow one human as a protagonist, and perhaps a wise hermit in one of the mountains, but even then, talking animals would be preferable.

If you take things to the logical conclusion, pretty much all fiction is fantasy, and hardly any of what I’ve read involved castles, but the TikTok woman is only interested in what she calls fantasy, an arbitrary way of cutting up fiction in separate genres. I’d be all for it if it helped me find the sort of books I like to read, which it doesn’t. Romance exists, but life becoming a bit better because you made a friend does not. Our culture values sexual partnership, not platonic friendship, so there’s no platonic love section in the library. Science fiction is separated from action or romance even when action and romance occur in space (I have argued before that some genres, like historical fiction, are, in fact, settings). Most books I love the most I have stumbled on despite, not because, of these categories. Who knows what books I’m missing out on because ‘nothing much happens but it’s still interesting because you really like the characters’ isn’t a thing.

The fieldfare clickclack in the fields. The escaped guinea fowl wheezes in the hedge like a badly oiled hinge. They don’t care for fencing or any of these other made up boxes that humans create. I’m worry about what other categories have been taught to me that I take as given? Which other things do I mistake as part of the natural order of things, but are instead a human construct?

Over the Christmas holidays my son and husband watched all the Indiana Jones movies including ‘the bad one’ (Indiana Jones and the temple of oh my god that’s more than a little racist how did they think that was ok?).

When I was growing up Indiana Jones was presented as a hero you should aspire to/carnally desire and I never questioned it. Having rewatched the films I’m 100% sure Indiana Jones is a colossal arsehole who only ever looked even partly decent because he was standing close to the epitome of evil (usually a nazi). If I had a small daughter I would not be watching this and saying he was a great guy. I mean, yes, he dislikes nazis but he treats women terribly and he’s not even a great model archeologically. And I say that as a person whose handwriting is based on Indiana Jones’ in the 1990 Indiana Jones diary (it was a great diary though. I loved that diary a lot more than Dr Jones).

Workings

January is the worse month. People of the blogosphere are busy reassuring us that the darkest weeks of the year are over, but I need more than light. The cycle path is an ice rink that’s full of joggers, and even if I make it to the leisure centre alive, the whole place is crammed.

I mean, I respect their commitment to personal health for 3 weeks but maybe they could each choose a different three weeks? Spread it out a bit. Because it makes the first 3 weeks of January very busy. Also, there are rules in lane swimming and one of them is swim in the direction the sign says, but if you do mistake lane swimming for jousting and swim directly at me repeatedly and I simply avoid your antics do not try and wave me down. I don’t want a chat with you and you aren’t going to like the things I have to say to you.

Anyway, I’ve got nothing much to show ans I’m sorry to write this poor excuse of a newsletter

Anyway, I hate January and I haven’t done any work, not least because school only started back on Wednesday and I need at least a week of silence to even contemplate doing something. I did make these shrimp stamps so I can document my favourite shrimps though. Sticking to the most important tasks.

Shops open but quite maybe buy something while the path to the post box is passable I don’t know. Thanks for all the orders over Christmas, I was busy and I’m sorry I didn’t get round to thanking you individually in emails. Basically it me so long to get round to things because I have no real grasp of time and eventually it was so long past when you bought it it was just embarrassing. Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas/festivus though.

Findings

I have other things to worry about; learnt this week that black caps from Germany follow one of two different migration routes and if you breed the two populations together the offspring fly down the middle of the two routes and I cannot get my head round that at all. I can barely navigate with a map and birds have them genetically encoded? Genetic maps?

I’ve learnt about this in Bird Brain: An Exploration of Avian Intelligence by Nathan emery which was on special on the kindle. I read an immense world recently by Ed Wong recently and how other animal perceive the world is amazing. Humans transform into animal or the might see an animals perspective in literature but it’s always presented as a sort of.. small furry human, but their brains work completely differently, we can’t even conceive how animals perceive the world. This is why I can’t have talking animal protagonists in my fantasy novel I’m not writing. Who know what they’d say? It would probably be mad and incomprehensible to our bases human senses. They’d get frustrated with our lack of smell or inability to perceive UV light and run off, I’m sure.