change the pear vol. 27 14 Dec 2024

hello, it’s december and i’ve been visited by what feels like a succession of biblical plagues (insects, blood, storms). as i type this i just had to dispose of a highly venomous spider that was inside our back door. crawling to the end of the year on my hands and knees, basically. wishing you all light and ease and warmth as 2024 closes out.

on repeat

forget spotify wrapped. here’s my personal top 20 (okay, 22) songs of 2024, the songs that went triple platinum in my eardrums this year. as zoë says, a machine can never know my truest deepest feelings!!!

categories are: pop girlies / fun kpop / gay kpop / crazy kpop / nostalgia

last seen

november and december are the time of year to hole up and watch crime procedural dramas. i don’t care that it’s 30 degrees outside here, this remainds true. hana and i have been watching slow horses, a show about the flops of MI5. our cringe-fail loser kings and queens have been thrown into the metaphorical dustbin that is Slough House, run by the heinous jackson lamb who enjoys nothing more than reminding everyone just how much he despises them all. gary oldman is having the time of his LIFE in this role and it’s beautiful to see. our main character is river cartwright, my flop king, who keeps fucking everything up due to his inability to knock two thoughts together in his brain. he’s perfect to me. i want to shake him like a pair of maracas. the storylines are pretty predictable, but it has moments of real tension, plus a great deal of humour.

of course, no piece of media about the british secret services is going to be at all subversive. and the politics are not good by any means. but. but! i do think it’s an interesting portrayal in that the plots of this show revolve around internal politicking and attempts by the officers to one up each other—sometimes the home secretary even gets involved. it all seems to be about saving face and protecting individuals’ reputation by any means necessary (including murder), with very little focus on any supposed “national security issues” which are apparently their duty to protect us from. perhaps they were lying to us about that one too! season one shows a false flag operation set up by the deputy director general, which she then colossally fucks up when her inside man gets found out, leaving slough house to clean up the mess. in season two, an ex-KGB spy (who has the best line in the show, “they are my brothers and sisters in the fight against capitalism”….rise, comrade) goes on a revenge crusade against lamb and slough house to avenge his old employee, coincidentally the head of MI5 at the time. in season three, an MI5 whistleblower is murdered, causing the deputy director general to set the whistleblower’s ex-lover on a path for vengeance—getting the file she was attempting to leak, which will helpfully get rid of the director general and allow the deputy to take her spot. along the way, one of slough house gets kidnapped, another one tricked into breaking into MI5, and finally four of them have to fight off the head of the MI5 ‘dogs’ who is attempting to murder them on the director’s orders. see what i mean? everyone in this show is rotten to the core: selfish, ambitious, greedy, dishonest. there’s no honour in MI5. jackson lamb: the day they introduce ethics into what we do, they might as well shut us down. here’s hoping!

currently watching

it’s also new thai BL season! the ones i’ve started over the last year or so have kind of been let downs, so i have high hopes for the heart killers, directed by jojo tichakorn, who recently responded to comments saying the shows he makes are “too mature and explicit and not wholesome enough” with this all-time banger.

i too want gay to be bad as well….anyway, so far the heart killers seems mostly ridiculous rather than heart-wrenching, but there’s another 8 or so episodes in the bag to prove me wrong. the premise: two brothers (fadel and bison) who are assassins by night, burger flippers by day. fadel is stern (“nothing to smile about in my life”), serious and committed; bison is younger, bratty, just wants to blow off some steam. kant is a tattoo artist who has been in trouble with the law for his habit of stealing cars, and has now been given the chance to erase all his charges in exchange for information on the brothers. it turns out kant and bison have met before on a one night stand, so kant decides the logical next step is to seduce him. the only obstacle is fadel, who is (rightfully) suspicious of kant and casts a very forbidding eye on him whenever he spends time with bison. in a move straight out of the taming of the shrew, bison advises kant that if he wants to date him, he’ll have to find someone for fadel. kant says: “i have just the person in mind. nobody is more shameless than him.” enter style, who is totally stealing the show for me at the moment by his attempts to seduce fadel seemingly by irritating him into submission. he turns up at fadel’s work, he follows him to the market, he even joins him on his morning jog. i’m obsessed. fadel is going to obliterate that twink and I CAN’T WAIT!!!

reading

everybody who reads this newsletter must be sick of hearing about how much i love hilary mantel by now, but i’ve just reread wolf hall and i feel insane, so please indulge me.

‘Dame Elizabeth Barton to have money to fee the hangman.’ She has five days to live. The last person she will see as she climbs the ladder is her executioner, holding out his paw. If she cannot pay her way at the last, she may suffer longer than she needs. She had imagined how long it takes to burn, but not how long it takes to choke at the end of a rope. In England there is no mercy for the poor. You pay for everything, even a broken neck.

one thing that always strikes me when i read this novel is how immediate it feels, how alive. we’ve all studied the tudors ad infinitum at school. we all know the story of henry viii’s wives: divorced, beheaded, died… and yet, reading wolf hall (even for the fourth time) it’s like i forget that all this history has happened. i am back there, in 1530, wondering what will happen to cardinal wolsey. in 1532, curious to see if thomas cromwell can pull it off and put anne boleyn on the throne. waiting with bated breath in 1533 to find out if anne is carrying a son. i know how it ends. we all do. and yet, hilary mantel weaves such pure magic that i believe nothing until her pen spins it out. wolsey is second-in-command of england, anne is just a lady, the baby might very well be a boy.

But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

reading wolf hall is to gain an understanding of the hidden mechanics that grind their gears behind the pomp and circumstance. away from the drama and the spectacle of henry and his six wives are the nobles, the lawyers, the politicians—the affidavits, the bills, the contracts—that make all the wheels turn. and, in tudor england in the 1530s, behind all of that, somehow, is one man.

How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.

and the description! london, in all her various guises, is a character in herself: streets alternately full of celebration, riots, mobs at the stake baying for blood; skies of pale april sun, summer storms, leaden grey winter. mantel can describe a setting in one sentence better than some authors manage in a whole page.

On the river, Rafe tells his news. The rocking of the boat beneath them is imperceptible. The flags are limp; it is a still morning, misty and dappled, and where the light touches flesh or linen or fresh leaves, there is a sheen like the sheen on an eggshell: the whole world luminous, its angles softened, its scent watery and green.

and of course, as well as being a deconstruction of the creation of the english church and state, as well as being a vivid depiction of tudor england in all its brutal glory, it’s also a personal tragedy, a revenge story, a ghost tale. thomas cromwell is haunted by his past: that is to say, he was made by it. he’s haunted by human ghosts, too: his father, his wife, the cardinal. all moving around his head, every day. everything he does is, on some level, to appease the ghosts.

He touches his throat, where the medal would have been, the holy medal that Kat gave him; his fingers are surprised not to find it there. For the first time he understands why he took it off and slid it into the sea. It was so that no living hand could take it. The waves took it, and the waves have it still.

Another man would go to Leicester to see where he died and talk to the abbot. Another man would have trouble imagining it, but he has no trouble. The red of a carpet’s ground, the flush of the robin’s breast or the chaffinch, the red of a wax seal or the heart of the rose: implanted in his landscape, cered in his inner eye, and caught in the glint of a ruby, in the colour of blood, the cardinal is alive and speaking. Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.

look at my face. i am not afraid of any man alive. ugh! chills!

miscellaneous

driving the 4wd through the dirt roads in south australia. seeing emus running through the wheat fields. a tiny crested pigeon baby scurrying along beside its mother. my new zip-off hiking trousers from the kids section. hana’s reaction to i hate fruits by nct dream. paintings of trading and processing trepang by dhopiya yunupingu. hana and the giant pears at the gallery. mads cooking us a delicious feast. crispy sesame beef. my new jorts!!! sima’s fresh lemonade and babak’s chicken kebabs. winning at giant jenga. em’s fruit vibes magnet. minature paintings. meera sodha’s caramelised garlic butterbeans. a tatreez t-shirt. korean food for hana’s birthday. re-enacting colin’s catch and toast song. the kangaroos hanging out at the beach! the way the forest came right to the shoreline. the sooty oyster-catcher. mango season! avocado season! silken tofu with doubanjiang on a hot day. holding a baby at the work xmas party. the tiny puppies for sale at the market. fairy wrens at doug and karen’s farm. doug’s nebbiolo wine. karen making us vegan muffins. homemade limoncello. a bowl shaped like a chicken. being back in the document with zoë. marxist book club with audrey. long back-and-forth voicenotes with sakina. bobo the gentle barbershop dog. the creaky evil laugh of the brush tailed possum.

i’ll see you next year. take care out there.