The Male Glance

At a glance, what do you think this is? (Answer in tags.)

A strange sort of day, where everything I did wasn't quite right, including a series of online meetings, all of which felt less than best. The whole police/car saga has taken up a lot of brain space, I guess.

Interesting article on The Male Glance, a long read from The Guardian, also a podcast: Male art is epic, universal, and profoundly meaningful. Women’s creations are domestic, emotional and trivial. How did we learn to misread stories so badly?

I have just finished reading a moving book about Greece before and after the Second World War, Those Who are Loved, by Victoria Hislop. Learnt so much I didn't know about the history of Greece, and about people and the tension between standing up for what we believe in and loving people. But it's described by The Observer as a "beach read". Another site describes beach reads as "light and fluffy" - not at all how I'd describe this book. For one thing, the author lists 66 books at the end for you to read if you want to know more, and that she presumably read as part of her research.

Anyway, the thing that particularly struck me in this book is how easily we could find ourselves in the same sorts of situations that Greece was in not that long ago. And how would I react?


Gratefuls:
- getting a wash done and on the line, even if I did forget to get it in before it got damp again
- seeing all our family on Zoom, even though we arrived late, and I hadn't thought through what we needed to talk about
- doing some scything, even if I'm still pretty useless at it (and planting out some tulip bulbs at last, even if rather late)