AMK's Journal

Last week's bread held out pretty well.

Friday night supper: sorta-nasi goreng, with milano salami.

Saturday breakfast rolls: basic buttermilk, 3:1 light spelt/buckwheat flour, turned out well.

Today's lunch: savoury clafoutis with Woodland Mushrooms, garlic and thyme, served with steamed asparagus with melted butter and lime juice, padron peppers, and baby pak choi stirfried with star anise.

With which we had our traditional unwedding anniversary Bollinger (41 years).

I was very taken with this article (from 2008) about a genre of nature writing, and how, really, it's very dubious to invoke wild and untamed NAYCHUR in our green and pleasant land.

Wild and not-wild is a false distinction, in this ancient, contested country. The contests are far from over. When the wild is protected by management, or re-created by the removal of traces of human history, you have to ask, who are these managers? Why do conservationists favour this species over that? Whose traces are considered worth saving, whose fit only to be bulldozed? If the landscape is apparently empty, was it ever thus?

It's also wonderfully codslappy about a certain type of (male) writer going alone into the Wild Places (and not meeting the existential horror that attacked poor Moley in the Wild Wood before he found Badger's house).

It seems to me to resonate with this other thing I came across lately about Rights of Way. Which is of particular interest to me since I am pretty sure that the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949 owed rather a lot to my dear fubsy interwar progressives rambling and occasionally organising mass trespasses because the countryside was for The People and they had a Right to Roam. And was much more about collective enjoyment.

A few days ago Ask A Manager posted stories of co-workers overstepping their expertise.

And I guess this is not quite the same thing but I had a massive flashback to That Morning of Hours I Will Never Get Back when the whole library staff had a session with an outside consultant.

I am honestly not sure what the rationale was for having us give up an entire morning of our precious closed period - during which we did all - well, seldom actually all, but as many as we could manage - of those essential backroom housekeeping tasks which cannot be undertaken when the place has actual readers coming in and USING THE COLLECTIONS dammit.

Possibly we had either just undergone, or were just about to undergo, one of the restructurings of which I saw many during my years there, distinct from the physical relocation upheavals.

But anyway, consultant.

Had consultant been briefed? Had consultant done any due diligence about what sort of institution this was?

Okay, did know it was a LIBRARY.

Had not the slightest apprehension that this was a world-renowned RESEARCH collection and that, you know, we were not lending out books and stamping them with return dates (I am not sure that this practice, by the date in question, even pertained in public libraries).

We were sitting there cringeing and wincing, wondering when it would all be over.

Were we not very restrained by not going, in huge chorus, in the manner he would doubtless have anticipated we learnt as part of our professional training, SSSSSHHHHHHHHHUUUUUUSSSSHHHHHH!!!!?