Academia: A Community for Academics and Interested

Firstly:

So, farewell then, PSC, whose advice to the sexually-bothered (rather than the lovelorn) has so oft provided fodder to oursinial musings. Guardian G2 today includes 23 of the best Sexual Healing columns

Not sure if they are The Greatest Hits rather than molto tipico of the kind of thing she addressed: in particular we note (as she stresses in the interview about the lessons learnt over 10 years of agony-aunting):

The female orgasm is still a mystery to some people
I’m still getting questions that show me people continue to think that the only “correct” type of female orgasm is one that’s purely vaginal and doesn’t involve the clitoris. For people to still think that, or to have that as the ideal, is extraordinary, but there it is. They just haven’t had the education to understand otherwise.

We also note the recurrent MenZ B Terribly Poor Stuff theme, what with the one who appears to regard his wife's bisexuality as a USP meaning *3SOMES* and two or three where one feels she did not interrogate sufficiently whether the male querent was actually gratifying his female partner before offering reassurance/solution e.g. 'My stunning wife makes no effort with our sex life' where we should like to know precisely what effort he is putting in, ahem.

However, there are also some of the wilder shores there.

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Secondly, and could we have a big AWWWW for this: David Attenborough seeks out London’s hidden wildlife:

Filming the wildlife of London requires an intrepid, agile presenter, willing to lie on damp grass after dark to encounter hedgehogs, scale heights to hold a peregrine falcon chick, and stake out a Tottenham allotment to get within touching distance of wary wild foxes.
Step forward Sir David Attenborough, who spent his 100th summer seeking out the hidden nature of his home city for an unusually personal and intimate BBC documentary.

Last week's bread held out adequately.

On Wednesday I made Angel Biscuit dough (this year I had active dried yeast) which was enough to provide for Christmas, Boxing Day and Saturday morning breakfast. Turned out rather well.

For Christmas dinner we had: starter of steamed asparagus with halved hardboiled quails' eggs and salmon caviar; followed by pheasant pot-roasted with bacon, brandy, and madeira and served with Ruby Gem potatoes roasted in goosefat, garlic-roasted tenderstem broccoli (as noted with previous recent tenderstem broccoli, wish to invoke Trades Description Act re actual tenderness of stem), and red cabbage (bought-in, as not only is it an Almighty Faff, making it from scratch would involve ending up with A Hell of A Lot of Red Cabbage). Then bought-in Christmas puds with brandy butter and clotted cream.

Boxing Day lunch: blinis with smoked salmon, smoked Loch trout, and the remaining salmon caviar, and creme fraiche with horseradish cream, and a salad of lamb's lettuce and grilled piccarello pepper strips, in a walnut oil and damson vinegar dressing. Followed by mince pies.

Yesterday lunch was the leftover blinis and smoked fish. For yesterday evening meal I made the remains of the pheasant into a pilaff, served with a green salad.

Today's lunch: chestnut mushrooms quartered in olive oil, white-braised green beans and cut up piccarello peppers, the Phul-Gobi (braised cauliflower) from Dharamjit Singh's Indian Cookery, and blinis made up from the last of the batter, a bit past its best.

Charles Dickens exhibition to shine light on powerful women in author’s life: 'Novels only ‘reinforced Victorian stereotypes’ of meek women to give readers what they wanted, says curator'.

Oh, come on.

Query, did readers (as opposed to various gate-keepers in publishing houses, Mudie's and other circulating libraries. etc) want meek women?

(Do I need to cite Victorian novelists who did quite well out of women who were not meek.)

I would also contend that any input from women in Mr D's life was going to filtered through a lot of his Own Stuff, and the article actually points out some of the things like His Mummy Issues.

There is no-one in the novels at all like Angela Burdett-Coutts, whom one suspects very unlike saintly Agnes Wickfield (and married a much younger man at an advanced age), in fact as I think I have complained heretofore, he was happy to work with this renowned philanthropist while the women philanthropists in his novels are mean and merciless caricatures.

One can make a case that he did worse than 'dilute' the women he knew when portraying them on his pages.

Also I am not sure what the 'debate' is over his relationship with Ellen Ternan!