two-penny spells

... aka, happy birthday to Roger Delgado, who would have been 107 (!!) today. This old fanvid drifted across my tumblr dash yesterday and made me laugh, so it's getting a share on the big day:


In other brief news:

Crocheting is going better: while watching Cadfael in the evenings, I've finished one (1) square consisting entirely of single crochet stitches! :D Now it just needs a border in a different colour and I will have reached my first goal of making a basic potholder!

I've also started reading the first of Ellis Peters' Cadfael novels! I've had a couple of them sitting around for years, and I've thoroughly fallen in love with the characters now from watching the TV series. The prose is so lovely -- a little lyrical, period in a way that feels effortless, and genuinely funny. Reading it feels like a warm cup of tea and a blanket.

I wrote a short anonymous fic for The Terror, for a prompt-meme event that was run on tumblr and in the server I moderate. It was very out of my comfort zone (dubcon/sex exchanged for career advancement, in a rather coercive way), so I wasn't sure at all if it was a success. But it took me no time at all to write, compared to my usual, and with posting being anon, it didn't feel like it would be too embarrassing if nobody liked it or it wasn't what the prompter had wanted. So I posted it, and even though the same prompt received another fill which was much longer (and better, imo!), I still got three very lovely comments on my own fic within 24 hours! Baffling, but very encouraging!

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.

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A couple of other recs from the love of my life the Internet Archive:

• 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.