#midwinterblood

Book #57 of 2023:

Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick

A journalist in the late 21st century visits a secluded island where he instantly feels a sense of mutual romantic attraction and familiarity with a local woman. In the next section of the text, set decades earlier, there are two other people there who share their names, and so on back through seven different time periods in all. The implication is that these are the same souls, reincarnating and remaining forever connected across history, but the execution of this idea doesn’t really land for me. I don’t buy the bond between these characters in the first place, when they’re skinny-dipping and imagining a future together, let alone when their prior selves instead manifest as siblings, or parent and child, or adult stranger and tween whose photograph he recognizes in her father’s wallet, and so on.

If this book were strictly a collection of unrelated short stories, I would probably give it three-out-of-five stars. No individual chapter impresses me too much, but most are interesting enough for their length and I especially enjoy the few that more overtly verge on the supernatural elements that are otherwise generally backgrounded throughout the work. But the framework joining these disparate plots is a mess, and there’s no particular thematic echoing or boldness of format changes that strengthen the superficially similar structure of a novel like Cloud Atlas. Ultimately I just don’t care about most of these protagonists, particularly when considered as repeated iterations of some bland eternal love affair.

★★☆☆☆

It’s day three week fifty-seven of the Bamboo Apocalypse. My father commented that, just like running bamboo, it has Taken Over My Lawn Life, and I feel like I’ve been doing it forever.

Yesterday I took all the bamboo sheaths off of the bamboo that we collected, discarded the very smallest, and put then in giant emulsion tubs (emptied and full of water, and not just ones we only just emptied of paint, either). There were a lot of them.

(Quite dirty. At one point, a small slug squiggled out of the end of a bamboo sheath. I nudged it onto some moss on the floor.)

We left them overnight and came back - they were still pretty tightly coiled. Father commented that since the bamboo we took them off wasn’t ridiculously chunky, they wouldn’t flatten out as easily. 

However, I had a quick peel of the striped bamboo in our garden - the sheaths come off quite easily. It’s possible I’ve picked a tougher bamboo than I would have wanted, to be honest, but I don’t have much choice.

I took the sheaths out of the water and left them to dry on some old carpet from the skip on the front driveway. It was a ridiculously hot day, so it didn’t take long to do.

(I sandwiched it. Didn’t want them rolling off, in the unheardof chance a breeze happened to blow through the garden.)

Once dry, they scrubbed up lovely, but the problem was that they’re still quite brittle and stiff. 

They’re strong, yes, not fragile, but they’ve got a brittle quality to them. The same way that obsidian is brittle and obscenely hard, this bamboo has the same qualities. 

We did have a bit of fortune with some sandpaper, though - it turns out the type of bamboo I’m using has little spines, hairs, on the outside of its culm sheaths, which irritate the skin. However, going over it with some 240 grit sandpaper very gently gets rid of them completely, leaving you with a smooth bamboo sheath that won’t irritate the skin.

Father did suggest steaming, but I thought hey, what if it pre-shrinks it, and what if we need to shrink it when we steam and compress it at the end. The ensuing thoughts followed:

After which I went downstairs for a snack and was told, “I’ve sent you a link over messenger, it’s a document on steaming bamboo sheaths”. Where did you get this? “Random search. Says you soak it for two days and steam it for two hours, which flattens and softens it.”

So I’ve now got exactly what I need for the next few steps.

I’ve got sandpaper to get the little hairs off, which works well and doesn’t damage the bamboo.

I’ve got a guide on how to flatten, steam and soften the bamboo, which is exactly what I’m looking for. I don’t think I can avoid pre-shrinking the bamboo, so the weave will have to be quite tight, but this brings me onto my next point:

- that the next part, after this is to figure out exactly, nail down exactly, how to weave them.

My tests so far haven’t been wide enough. I don’t think the stand I’ve been using, makeshift as it is, has been wide enough, but at the same time, looking at the video, I don’t think my hands are wide enough. I seem to be weaving nuno-zouri wide enough for...my hands. Quite tiny.

This may be down to my fabric choices - I am using a cut-up jersey t-shirt, but I did cut the strips along the non-stretch grain. Nevertheless, I’ll try something stronger.

I also don’t think I’m using a strong-enough warp; I will have to test a little bit of the warp in the vintage pair I bought to see what fibre type that might be. The hanao are coming out, anyway, so they’ll leave a little gap at the side, making it easy to extract fibres. Might be hemp, to be honest.

I’m going to make something with some sturdiness that I can use to beat down the fabric in between weaves. 

My hands are literally so small, I cannot get them around my phone comfortably. They are only just longer than the width of my keyboard, which is a compact one, and every pair of gloves I buy turns out to be too long for me to wear and not look silly.

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