Battle Abbey and some week notes

I’ve got the week off work (I had some annual leave I needed to use or lose before April 30^th) so I have time to log some week notes:

Out & about

On Sunday I visited Battle Abbey, which was built in 1070 by William the Conqueror on the site of the Battle of Hastings (which is actually some six miles north-west of Hastings) four years earlier. It was partially destroyed as part of the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII.

I was playing with a green graduated lens filter on my camera. Usually these are used to enhance the saturation of vegetation in the lower half of the photograph. However I remembered the 1980s TV series Robin of Sherwood where it was frequently used on the top half of the camera lens to add a green cast to the sky to enhance the feeling of the supernatural nature of the deep woods. So I had a play, as you can see in the image at the top of this post.

Reading

I’ve just finished The Great When by Alan Moore, a novel set in London of the late 1940s (and simultaneously in the parallel fever-dream of “Long London”) which I very much enjoyed.

I’ve just started reading Landscapes by Christine Lai, published by Influx Press, and this is also proving to be a very enjoyable read. Here’s the blurb:

Set in a near-future fraught with ecological collapse, Christine Lai’s mesmerising and prismatic debut novel Landscapes is a brilliant exploration of memory, empathy, preservation, and art as an instrument for recollection and renewal.

In the English countryside—decimated by heat and drought—Penelope archives what remains of an estate’s once notable collection. As she catalogues the library’s contents, she keeps a diary of her final months in the dilapidated country house that has been her home for two decades and a refuge for those who have been displaced by disasters. Out of necessity, Penelope and her partner, Aidan, have sold the house and its scheduled demo­lition marks the pressing deadline for completing the archive. But with it also comes the impending return of Aidan’s brother, Julian, at whose hands Penelope suffered during a brief but violent relationship twenty-two years before. As Julian’s visit looms, Penelope finds herself unable to suppress the past, clinging to art as a means of understanding, of survival, and of reckoning.

Recalling the works of Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro, Landscapes is an elegiac and spellbinding blend of narrative, essay, and diary that reinvents the country-house novel for our age of catastrophe, announcing the arrival of an extraordi­narily gifted new writer.

On my ever-growing to-read pile are:

• Engines Beneath Us by Malcolm Devlin,
• Vehicle by Jen Calleja, and
• Local Haunts by Adam Scovell.

Watching

I watched Common People, the first episode of season seven of Black Mirror, which was a suitably bleak satire of the “enshitification” of the US health service under late-stage capitalism.

I also watched The Robot Revolution, the first episode of the new season of Doctor Who. I used to love Doctor Who as a child. I still rather like it, but I’m aware that it is—and always was—essentially a children’s show, so I’m not the target audience any more. Still, it was very good fun to watch and will doubtless continue to be the focus of the fury of the Daily Mail and other similar far-right news sources.

Finally I am very looking forward to the second series of Andor, which is due later this month.