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I keep sleeping. I get totally strange dreams, too. Must be the effects of the last few weeks. If I sleep, I don't need as many pain relievers*. That's the bad news. I'm still in a very high pain zone and my body is responding in its normal way.

The good news is that I've reconfigured my study and should be now caught up with it by my birthday. I'll still have two chapters to write, but Chapters 2-5 are now in clean drafts and the novel isn't as messy as I thought it would be. This is not because I've been working triple the pace** but because it seems that my initial work was of much higher quality than I thought. A little bit of rethinking and hardly any rewriting. This is amazingly wonderful. I often tell people it's better to put a bit more work in initially and take longer to get to the writing and do a good job on the writing and lo, my words are coming back to haunt me, happily.

I'm still behind on three other papers, two of which are quite substantive. I'll see where I am on them in two weeks. I may yet be fine for everything, if I put in consistent effort. There are some sticky points in these papers, though, and some library research not yet done, so I will declare them fine only when they actually *are* fine. The good news with them is that my deadlines for them were a few weeks ahead of where they should have been, because I thought I would run into trouble with my novel around now. Which I haven't.

The bottom line is that I am not out of the woods yet, but I have every hope of still meeting all my deadlines. Just. With much work and some hair-tearing. Still, this time last week I was wondering what would have to give when, really, I can't afford anything to have to give. Every single thing I take on this year has about twenty reasons for existing, and cannot be given up without consequences.

Not a bad start to Monday morning. I have high pain and I am working too hard, though. I shall take off the afternoon and help R to move house.






*The dental work left me with some very interesting bruises and aches.
**I've only been working double the pace, due to all these odd aches.

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This morning is entirely devoted to Oscar Wilde. This is for one of those essays-on-which-I-must work. Naturally I choose the most fun one to start. I shall do work on another on the bus. If I worked on Wilde on the bus his style would flow from my fingers for the rest of the day. Possibly for the rest of the week.

This bears thinking of.

Family food and family history

This afternoon I'm thinking of flavour profiles. I just made my last batch of matzah latkes, finishing up the ingredients for the season. I sampled one, just to be certain I wasn't going to poison my friends accidentally* and then it struck me that this way of cooking the latkes came from my father's mother's family**. It's the exact balance of flavours and the mouthfeel. It matches up with the flavours and mouthfeel in so many sweet dishes from that side of the family, including my grandmother's Jewish Christmas pudding***. There is a 'Polack' way of doing things that's quite distinctive.

A few years ago I traced it back via my grandmother's notes and found that her grandmother brought it out from London. This was one of the flavour profiles that Sephardi Jews in the Aldgate area cooked with, right up to the big cultural change from the mid-nineteenth century.

The ingredients are nothing special: cinnamon and sugar and egg and raisins and matzah meal and milk and butter. Together, however, they carried my family through two hundred years.









*If I'm going to poison them, I'd rather it was with intent.
**Most years I cook them Mum's way, which is far more Eastern European in style. This year I needed emotional sustenance, and emotional sustenance always takes me to Dad's mother's food, even though she died when I was a toddler. Solace comes from eating Mum's cooking or from cooking Grandma Polack's way. It's a mystery.
***currants and cinnamon instead of raisins and cinnamon, but very familiar

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My new BiblioBuffet piece was put up, while I was busy doing other things. The magic of other people doing work while I do nothing. Well, not nothing. I wrote 800 words and researched for another 1200 and then I unpacked boxes for a few hours. Still, it was nice to go out to dinner with friends and then come home to find that my BiblioBuffet piece is here looking somewhat Medieval.

I meant to do more work when I came home, but, like the last three nights, I am bushed. I shall do forty five minutes of something and then sleep early...again.

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I didn't tell you about my new rocks. Two lovely clear pieces of calcite (what I've always called Icelandic feldspar - apparently only the 'Icelandic' was right), the strangest twinned gypsum I've ever seen (dark grey, with sand and shells embedded), a gorgeous quartz crystal and and even more gorgeous amethyst one, plus a piece of rose quartz. I must go gloat over them. Excuse me, please.