between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Today I'm twenty-nine years old. Another year older and still not dead!

It has been my habit on my birthday, the last couple of years, to send messages to people telling them how much I appreciate their presence in my life. This year, I think, there are too many people to make that entirely practical - and I don't know all their emails. So I'm just going to write here what I want to say.

Dear friends,

It's been a tricky year, since this time in 2014. Without you, I wouldn't be here. Without you, I wouldn't have a PhD all but in hand. Without you, my life would be so much poorer and smaller, and contain so much less joy. I am honoured by your acquaintance, and your friendship, your hospitalities and your support: your presence in my life is a gift and a blessing, and it humbles me.

Thank you. Never stop being awesome.

And last night the parent took me to The Phantom of the Opera at the new(ish) theatre down by Grand Canal Dock. The dock space is gorgeous, even with all the redevelopment, and the theatre is a lovely space that still has that new car smell, all glass frontage and clean toilets.

It wasn't just me, it was the parent's friend and whitewaveraven as well. We were up the back of the theatre, in the vertiginous Upper Circle, practically as high as you could be and not be on the roof. Staring down into the stalls and the forced-perspective aspect of watching the action on stage was weird and slightly queasy-making: I have never before been in a theatre so large that the actors' faces were indistinct even with my glasses on.

It was, however, an excellent performance, vibrant and energetic, and I had one of the best nights of my life. (It's right up there with visiting Toronto, going gothing with Bear and Amanda - when I was too jetlagged to really appreciate it - wandering around Thessaloniki in the dark with all the craziest lovely Serbian and Russian and English girls on the language course, and at-home dinner parties in Athens with the best mad archaeologists.)

Then, on the way home, the parent slipped in the rain and fell on her wrist. (Today the hospital diagnosed Colles' fracture. Tomorrow, MRIs and bloodtests to check suitability for a general anaesthetic and manipulation of fiddling bones. All taxpayer-funded. Dear American friends: I hate to say this, but I am so glad we don't live in your country, today.) So that put a damper on the evening.

While Mum was getting her man to keep her company in hospital waiting rooms ("No, no," she says to me, when I offer to go with. "It's bad enough I need someone to drive me to the plague house. You go away and have fun."), I went to town and met two of my favourite people for lunch.

...And they gave me presents.

I may have been unnaturally delighted when a copy of Beyond Binary was pressed into my hands. And brownies! And a book voucher!

So the birthday haul, this year (she said, gleefully) (thanks to the best friends and the Aunt Formerly Known As The Wicked Godmother) is:

Beyond Binary, edited by Brit Mandelo (Yay!)
Mechanique, by Genevieve Valentine
The Killing Moon, by N.K. Jemison

(whitewaveraven immediately said, "Echo and the Bunnymen!" when we were browsing the bookshop, all three of us geeks together. The killing moon! It comes too soon!)

And!

Mark Hodder's Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon, which I did not exactly realise was number three in a series. So now I need to acquire copies of the first two. Someday. Eventually. (The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack and The Curious Case of the Clokcwork Man will be mine, along with Many Other Books. Someday.)

---

Receiving books for review is like getting birthday presents without a birthday. Strangely - oddly! - an unsolicited review copy of Jay Kristoff's Stormdancer ("Japanese steampunk") from Tor UK arrived in my door yesterday morning. (I am sure either through some kind of mistake or because every book reviewer Tor UK ever heard of is getting a copy.)

But it is like an extra present, because books are shiny. Very shiny!

(Boooooooooooks. My precious!)

That was a good birthday. Much better than it looked this morning.

Open mike poetry night was interesting, in ways both good and bad. The bad: the guy with the poem about cutting women, and the old bloke with This is a poem I wrote twenty years ago. The good: a couple of excellent poets, and some friends I see far too seldom.

And then there was the conversation about the work of Susan Cooper - her The Dark is Rising sequence - and landscape, liminality and myth. Which is the kind of conversation I stumble into all too seldom. And feels like the most unexpected-yet-welcome gift.

I love smart enthusiastic people. They make the world so much more interesting.

I haven't re-read TDIR sequence since I was ten. But I remember those books, and the immediacy of landscape, and the vital, almost brutal quality of the Greenwitch, the essential cliffness, forestness and hillness that stuck with me, that still sticks with me. In The Grey King and The Dark Is Rising, especially, the landscape that Will moves through is an incredible presence, and the myth that exists in that landscape, also.

They were books that took me from being a sometime reader of the fantastic to someone who actively sought it in books. And maybe I'll reread them, when I come back from Crete, and see if they hold up to the passage of time.

I've been afraid to, you see, because they were such incredible books when I was ten that I didn't want to spoil the memory.

So yeah, all around a good evening. Even if I did get C.S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll mixed up.

Thanks.