two-penny spells

Sumer is icumen in, but you wouldn't know it to look at my view atm: we're spending a couple of weeks up north where my mum grew up, which means a tiny island in the North Sea, wind-blasted and with nary a tree except for what people have planted in their gardens, and currently it's been raining and blowing gale force winds non stop for days. It honestly doesn't bother me too much -- getting away from my flatmates and my job and having virtually unlimited time to read and write fanfic is so nice that the lack of sunshine doesn't even register, and honestly the novelty of some proper northern weather is actually kind of fun. We're early enough in the summer to catch the midnight sun this year, and it's beautiful when the rain lets up.

That phase where you're kind of drifting out of a fandom you've been in for a long time is so weird. I was neck deep in The Terror for over two years, and while I still care a lot about the show and characters as well as the historical research side (and I'm still hoping to make some more headway on my research projects), on the fannish side I kinda feel like I've read, and written, most of what I urgently wanted to, which means lately I'm just sort of drifting with a lot of interest and energy that has nowhere to go.

But equally, fandoms come back to you in the oddest ways: rekindling my interest in the Kingsman fandom tided me over for a couple of months -- and then I started chatting on tumblr with an old friend from a past fandom, who's deep into classic Doctor Who lately, which means I have now spent about a month rewatching Third Doctor serials and reading Doctor/Master fanfic, of all the things. I was never properly in that fandom; it was always sort of a blorbos-in-law situation for me (a friend introduced me to the show and we binged a bunch of serials, but I didn't have an easy way to keep watching at the time), but this time around I'm armed with several google drives as well as the Internet Archive, so I can basically read and watch almost whatever I want. It's been super nostalgic and a lot of fun.

• While browsing relevant tags, I found the BBC Repertory Theatre audio drama production of 'Poison for the King' from 1959, starring Howard Marion-Crawford and Roger Delgado. It was a lot of fun! I made a post about it on tumblr here.
• We've been whiling away some long evenings up here with (what looks to be) the entire series of Sherlock Holmes short stories read by Stephen Fry. Can recommend! He reads great.