We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

Today partner and I became civil-partnered in the eyes of the state.

While I tried to organise this in as low-key a way as possible - gosh, people do seem to want to fancify it even if they are doing it in one of the Town Hall venues, let alone in one of the other designated places - it still required a certain amount of faff and angst.

No readings, no personally composed vows, no music, etc.

(Also no pets. Apparently you can have pets at your ceremony, at least in some of the venues.)

(I am honestly not sure whether interpretative dance is ever involved.)

We did have to have two witnesses, so my sister and brother-in-law came up to Town (these days it is a very trouble-free and direct train journey) and we booked a table for lunch at Ottolenghi Upper Street.

Also booked a minicab to get us there - I was a little twitchy about this after my misadventure with the ill-omened Taxiapp, which now appears to be defunct, but found what seems a very eligible online minicab booking service, which turned up most expeditious, almost too much so as I had not yet put on my shoes.

Ottolenghi was less busy than I thought it might be (maybe people get takeaway from the deli counter and lunch al desko?). The food is still lovely.

Had time for a little perambulation around Islington, and then back to Town Hall, where we had a short pre-ceremony interview to check our details before the ceremony. Apparently one does not need to provide mother's maiden name these days? Genealogical shock-horror.

We decided not to go for the Really Basic Option whereby the couple just sign the form, and did do the minimalist ceremony taking one another as Civil Partners.

Do not really feel very different.

On what I wore: a shirt with a neckline that would suitably accommodate the necklace in the icon: the elephant motif pendant and beads were from a necklace that my father brought back from India after the war to my mother, which had fallen apart, made up into a new one by elisem with garnets when I was at Wiscon, 2010.

23 years since I signed up to LJ! which is now crickets and tumbleweeds, pretty much, but has led to Dreamwidth and friends past and present and also dispersed in various other places these days.

*Serves virtual drinks and snacks*

I took a punt on a crime novel that the mysteries reviewer of the Literary Review seemed very keen about.

And not only did it fall into that category we were recently discussing, of mysteries/crime novels/thrillers, where one suspects the writers would really like to just be writing a novel about these people/this community/this setting but these days you can't do that, you have to have a body in there somewhere and some detection going on -

It was way clunky.

I was shocked! shocked! to see that it is traditionally published by a firm which has, or used to have, a significant reputation (Faber & Faber), because clearly they are not doing much on the editorial side these days -

Even the very pro-the-book reviewer mentioned pointed out that there is a massive and absolutely basic blooper about property law which has significance to the plot, such as the plot is, which one would have thought would have got picked up by a competent editor on first reading the ms, let alone with a decent copy-edit. This was not the only blooper, some of which may be charitably attributed to that thing which one has observed too much since word-processors became a thing, spell-check says it's spelt correctly. It does not pick up that it's the wrong bloody word in context.

Okay, it is apparently no 4 in a series and maybe this has built up enough cred that readers will take for granted that Our Detective is a cop, because I found the procedural details a little vague and misty, but that may be due to having misspent significant parts of my young years reading procedurals?

I don't read a lot of modern cosy-ish crime - because this struck me as really fairly cosy - but is viewpoint-hoping within scenes now A Thing? - i.e. we start in what appears to be standard tight third person, and then suddenly we have viewpoint of Other Person in the scene and then flip back. Maybe I am a fuddy traditionalist who thinks you sticks with the viewpoint you came in with.

Possibly there is a hope that the sequence will get took up and made into a TV series as actors might well flesh out the rather flat characters....

I am the more annoyed as the reviewer put me onto Sally Smith, so this was a particular disappointment.