Clotilde

This image is an illustration from a traditional Ottoman manuscript featuring floral depictions. Works of this kind are frequently found in flower books known as şükûfenâme. The image depicts flowers painted in a traditional style, accompanied by the following verses written in Ottoman Turkish below: "As one gazes upon it, the eye of the soul is illuminated, Because it is 'Nurbahş' (bestows light), they gave it that name."

🎨 A Narcissus Drawing in an Ottoman Manuscript, 18th Century

"O Hakkı! If I were to open up and speak in the spiritual realm,
The blessing of the Messiah's (resurrecting) breath would accompany my thoughts."

✏️ Hüseyin Hakkı Efendi (1832-1891)

I've been meaning to read this for ages, so thanks for the reminder!

And by "infusion", I meant "infodump".

I love a crazy infusion novel. It took me 6 months to trudge through the first 100 pages of Moby Duck and then it sudden became the best book ever and I stayed up nearly all night to read the rest of it in two days.

😢RIP Michael. Thank you for all the beauty. #illustrator #art

A pin badge and matching sticker in the shape of a stained glass window featuring a heart-shaped trans symbol, a sword, a flower and the text " Trans Bodies Are Holy".

A lovely colleague had one of these pin badges on his lanyard the other week, so I ordered one (and I think my teammates have also got some on the way). It feels very fitting to wear it at work.

Eldest child and her dad are off to a university offer-holder day on the other side of the country so they will be away for 2 days, so youngest child and I plan on eating lots of spinach during the absence of the household spinach-haters.

The obvious solution is to copy the beautiful Royal Bank of Scotland "The People's Money" notes which have historical figures AND animals AND poetry AND plants and traditional fabric designs AND other good stuff and which are designed to look even better under UV light.

Yeah. It seems a perfectly normal thing to say, like "it should be illegal to have flu on my birthday", and she's just expressing that it seems a shame that her kid has to deal with cramps and PMS and creepy guys thinking I popf her as "breedable" when she's still just a little kid.

If you are doing that and haven't already seen it, Severance is also on Apple and was wonderful.

And then the pool and sauna, which I used to bribe myself with on days when I really didn't want to lift weights, broke and is still being repaired, so it's all stick and no carrot. But annoyingly, I do feel much healthier and happier for regular exercise.

I signed up for sessions with a personal trainer last autumn and had been really good about consistency, but the dark mornings meant that from mid January onwards I just couldn't face getting up early enough to fit in a workout before work, and I run out of will power at around 11am each day.

Sympathies. I have been v lax with workouts recently, and now I don't want to start again because I will spend the rest of the week hobbling around, plus I my office is in an attic up a very steep flight of stairs.

She went to Dignitas when she had around 6 weeks left to live. Having seen other people dying of the same cancer, I can absolutely understand her choice to miss those final weeks and go out in comfort surrounded by her loved ones.

I'm in favor of euthanasia as an option, alongside access to good palliative care and general resources to support people at the end of their lives. My grandmother chose euthanasia, and it was really tough on her children having to help her organize it, but ultimately she had a good death.

A thread for this snowy Saturday

An insane warlord facing death contemplates invading Persia as his last hurrah and has enormous issues with supply lines, treacherous foreign allies, and rising debts. Is it Phillip II or Donald Trump? Take the quiz!

Yeah. I went to a NI grammar and now live in an area of England with no grammars but great comprehensive schools and the comprehensives are SO MUCH BETTER.

They aren't all single-sex. There were plenty of mixed grammars near me. But (and this was in the 1980s so things have changed) passes were given to the top 20% of boys and the top 20% of girls, so girls had to get a higher score to pass. Also, you could go as a fee-paying boarder without passing.

Oh, that is gorgeous!

I was so much cooler as a teenager than I am now. Although that's hardly unusual.

Teenage me would light beeswax candles and read medieval poetry while listening to a cassette of Gregorian chants I copied from the library.

Of those, 3. I also like the Zebra retractable gel ink pens. At work I use a cheap biro because the ink doesn't smudge under a highlighter. And for pure pleasure, I like a blackwing pencil or a smooth fountain pen, but I don't have a fountain pen I love at the moment.

What’s your costume for World Book Day this year? I’m going as a Generative AI Subsidiary Content Aggregation Addendum to an already one-sided academic publishing contract

Nope. Smooth all the way for me.

A good friend is working her way through the Inspector Skelgill novels by Bruce Beckham and enjoying them.

Slightly less happy now as a filling had fallen out so I had a new one put in and it hurt a bit.

It was the first place I encountered the previous Dean. I was a bit worried because I'd seen his photo and he looked very generic white man, but he was very helpfully wearing his purple bishop's shirt.

The sword dance books are SO GOOD!

On my way to the dentist, but for once I'm really happy about it as it's my first NHS appointment since my old practice closed 3 years ago.