New Year!

Happy New Year everybody! 

Click this pic!

I have New Year's Resolutions, and I have tried to pick ones that I can actually do, with measurable targets and realistic goals. None of this abstract stuff that's too wishy washy to stick to, and nothing too impossible either. I have 13 New Year's Resolutions as it is the year 2013. 

I am entering this post in Sophistique Noir's monthly theme. It's not an outfit post, but hopefully it's suitable. One of the things I am trying to do on this blog is cut down on outfit posts; I don't want this to become just another fashion blog. There will still be photographs, just fewer of my clothes.

❅ Sporty Resolutions

Sport used to be a much bigger part of my life than it is now, and I now have this gap where it used to be. I'm not quite as fit as I used to be, too. It's not just missing the actual activities themselves, I miss the social aspect, especially with the roller derby girls.

1)Get back into roller derby!

I stopped going to Derby because I simply couldn't afford it. I've decided to make sure I re-adjust my budgeting (including walking more so I spend less on transport, which is part of another resolution...) to have enough for one session of Derby per week, and to put all loose change in my Gear Fund. I've got most of my own protective gear (am picking up a nice neon green helmet soon! whee!) but I can't afford my own skates. I've been using stuff from the team gear pool, and I feel like a cheap-skate (pardon the terrible pun.)

2)Walk more. 

Theoretically I could walk my commute to work and do 15 miles of walking per day. I could also walk from work into town for my lunch, and walk back again. Actually, that part I often do! Anyway, in winter I am awfully tempted by that £9.50 for 7 day's unlimited bus journeys around the city, and try and maximise that ticket's value for money by going places by bus, out of the cold and rain, instead of walking. This is a bit lazy. Obviously, if there is a howling gale and driving rain, I will probably still take the bus, but if it's just grey or drizzly, I am going to walk more.

3)Join an archery club again.

I have posted before about my love of archery, and am wanting to get back into the sport. I really miss it! I've heard that there is another local club, and that they have indoor archery in winter, and outdoor archery in summer, and apparently they have space for new members.

4)Join a Gym.

I know this is a common goal, and most people don't stick it out past january, but looking at my funds, I won't be able to afford this until April, anyway. I am quite an active person anyway, and am not looking to "get fit", I'm looking to address certain specific things in order to improve my performance at the sports I do. 

5)Join a new martial arts class.

When I lived in England, I was learning Chen style Taijiquan and really enjoyed it. In Inverness there is an exercise and relaxation type Taiji class, but no martial Taijiquan class. There is, however a Wing Tsun class; I know how Wing Tsun split away from Wing Chun and how while there are a few similarities, it has quite different principals to Taijiquan, and suchlike, but it still looks interesting. There is also a Kung Fu place that does a variety of Chinese martial arts, but the classes are completely out of my price range. 

❅ Life Resolutions

These are more general resolutions, for everyday life. There's not really a theme to them, there just things I want to do over the year.

1) Budget better

I sometimes impulse buy, and quite frequently get lost as to what is incoming and what is out-going. When my outgoings exceed my income, this becomes a problem. I have set up, with lots of help from my Dad, a spreadsheet that should really help with this.

2)Make Sure Raven & I Have 1 Date-Night Per Month. 

We both work, we both lead busy lives, we often are both really tired in the evening, and it ends up with neither of us really wanting to cook, and both of us engrossed in our computers or a book, or some other form of minimal-effort entertainment. Putting aside some time connect more seems like a good idea, and having a specific 'date night' means that it's a scheduled enjoyable event we can look forwards to, especially when work or other things in life get stressful.

3)Go Out And Socialise More. 

I am REALLY outgoing once you get to know me, but I'm... actually a bit shy and awkward in person with new people. I'm quiet, and tend not to open conversations, but I'm friendly enough with most people, if they talk to me, but even if we do talk, I rarely talk to people again. I'm friendly with everyone, but friends with too few. Most of my good friends, my really good friends, are either in England or Wales, and hundreds of miles from where I am now. I've been here nearly a year and a half, and yet I don't have very many friends up here. 

4)Restart My Daily Gratitudes

I used to write a list of 10 things I was thankful for, everyday. This was something I did to take my attention away from things I wanted, and put it towards appreciating the things I already had. It sadly fell by the way side as a daily thing, and I would like to start doing it again. I would write the list 'blind' to the previous lists, and it was interesting to see what variety of things I came up with. I actually have a lot to be thankful for in life, but I often get quite miserable. Perhaps restarting the daily gratitudes will help me be a less miserable person.

5)Keep A Diary

Somewhere in the middle of last year, I stopped keeping a diary. I think I came to the conclusion that my days just were not interesting enough. Hopefully, if I work on making my days more interesting, I will write them down again! 

❅Blogging Resolutions

My last three resolutions are to do with blogging. There's a few things I can do to improve, and here are the first three I came up with. 

1) Put a new music post up every Monday

I liked my musical Monday idea, and I like doing showcase posts for bands I feel are not well-known or appreciated enough. I'm not one of those Goths who prides herself on the obscurity of my music knowledge; I figure that I should share good things I come across so that others can enjoy them. Goth is a subculture that thrives of creativity, and it should not be one dominated by a handful of big bands, because there's a lot of very good small bands, too!

2) Blog at least twice a week. 

I have been plagued by uncertainties and worries about blogging recently, and haven't had the motivation and inspiration to blog much. I hope to remedy my lack of blogging and post more. I think I will end up writing more opinion pieces. Fashion posts/outfit posts/decor posts seem to all be a bit of a cop-out from writing something more interesting and substantial. 

3) Link more to other blogs. 

There's some very interesting blogging out there, especially in terms of good craft tutorials. I will do a monthly round up of stuff I found that was interesting in terms of other bloggers. 

Hopefully I will do a reasonable job of keeping to my resolutions and I will update people with interesting developments on my blog. 

Arthurian Legend, Medieval History and Gothic Architecture

Or how I came to fall in love with anachronism...

This is in response to Jess, who suggested the topic on the Domesticated Goth Facebook Page.

⚜✥⚜

I have always had a broad appreciation of history. My father is involved in archaeology as a geophysicist and archaeological surveyor, and I was therefore brought up saturated in local history and British history. This, however, can only partially explain why I like history in general, and not really explain why I have a fascination for the medieval in particular, or how this ties in with my other historical interests (we're heading over to Pre-Raphaelite territory...)

My attempts to be a real-life Pre-Rpahaelite depiction of Morgan LaFey

⚜ Childhood Fascination

It all started with an illustrated book of fairy tales from when I was a very, very small child. In it were children's versions of some Arthurian tales. I really, really wish I still had the book, but sadly it is long gone. I can't even remember what the book was called, but I remember that it had lavish, beautiful illustrations in full colour and great detail. There was this fabulous image of a knight in armour on a horse, with the horse adorned in barding and caparison and the knight with a very sharp and shiny looking sword. Then there was a book ordered from the back of a packet of Weetabix (::this:: book - I'm showing my age! ) which I read avidly and repeatedly and with great enthusiasm. It was the first book on history I ever owned, and my favourite section was that from the Norman Conquest on to Henry VIII - just a bit broader than the time-span  referred to as the 'High Middle Ages' and 'Late Middle Ages'.

This interest was picked up, and I was given a French language (I was brought up bilingual, my first language is actually French) history book with a few transparent pages called ::Le Château Fort:: which just fed this interest. I even got taken on some trips to some real-life castles, such as Rochester Castle in Kent, which probably sealed it for me. 

I can't really place what it is that drew me to these things, but  it was partially a confusion between what was myth and reality (probably on account of being a child with a broad imagination). There was something wonderful and exciting about believing that all these knights and maidens and brave chivalrous warriors and fierce monsters and witches and wizards had been real, just centuries and centuries ago. For some time, as a small child, my career ambitions were "knight"... 

As I read more I quickly learnt that no, dragons were not real (dinosaurs, on the other hand...) and neither was the Green Knight, and that chivalry and courtly love were not as later poets would have us believe. I also learnt, over time, that the "shining armour" of knights was often actually depictions things such as 1480s Gothic plate armour from what is now Germany and other parts of the Holy Roman Empire, that there are an awful lot of types of "pointy arches" buildings, and recorders are fabulous musical instruments with a long, long history. Basically, I learnt that a lot of the things I found really interesting came from between the mid 11thC and very beginning of the 16thC. 

⚜ Art History And Gothic Architecture

The more I got to know of art and architecture from that period, the more I realised that it was rich aesthetics that I adored, and still adore. 

I gained an interest in calligraphy and illuminated manuscripts when I was about 12 or 13, after being introduced to them in an English lesson focused on Arthurian myths. I began my first pseudo-'illuminated' Book of Shadows, the precursor to my current book of Shadows, which is all written in uncial calligraphy, richly decorated with a mixture of foliate, spiral and knot-work designs, a lot of silver and gold embellishments (albeit via more modern techniques) and even has a few illustrations. 

I also fell in love with Gothic architecture (no surprise to my regular readers). I like most styles of highly decorative architecture on grand scales, from the temples at Angkor Wat to Christopher Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral, but I have a special fondness for the Gothic and Gothic-Revival. I especially like buildings in the later Gothic styles, especially the Perpendicular Gothic, with their emphasis on verticality and arrays of stained glass windows. I can't explain why I prefer a pointed Gothic arch or fan-vaulted ceiling to a round Romanesque arch or barrel-vaulted ceiling, nor what it is about tracery designs that appeal to me, but that is the way I am, and I could spend all day looking at them. 

It is not enough for me to merely find interest in the appearance of buildings, I am always led to their function, and that then draws me back into the history - old abbeys, cathedrals, grand houses etc. always have rich histories, and it fascinates me how the uses of buildings change over centuries, and boggles me to think of all the thousands of people from so many periods and places that have visited these places and looked at them with their own unique perspectives. 

What also amazes me is the size and complexity of the buildings designed considering the limited understanding of physics and mathematics at the time. People sometimes think that because people in the past were illiterate and superstitious with a limited grasp of science and mathematics that they were stupid but education and intelligence are different things, as can be shown by ::this:: article, where it describes how a string and a weight could show if the vast spire of Salisbury Cathedral was straight or not (it wasn't, it was leaning, and Christopher Wren figured out how to straighten it in 1668) in an age long before optical surveying equipment, let alone laser levels! These cathedrals were built by a largely illiterate work force. People had to be creative and use their initiative to overcome the lack of technology and get things done by other means. 

This does not just apply to great cathedrals across Europe, or even to medieval times alone, of course, but it is one of the things about the medieval period that does intrigue me. 

Also, as an enthusiastic archer, and a person with an interest in historical arms and armour, Medieval European weaponry is very interesting to me, and to understand the weapons, one has to understand the conflicts that were their context, and how they became visual symbols in later periods, which necessitates some understanding of medieval life. 

(Those interested in medieval weaponry may be excited to know that I have asked a friend who is more knowledgeable than me in this area to write a guest post on such things!).

⚜Understanding Where I live
As my readers already know, I live in the UK, currently in Scotland and previously down in the Thames Valley. I am the sort of person that likes to know the history of the places where I live; they make up part of the culture, and inform present day attitudes (like someone I know here, with a tattoo of the Declaration of Arbroath, which was originally made in 1320). The history of the UK stretches back millennia and millennia before the Middle Ages, but much of its best recorded  history is that recorded by the monasteries and onwards, i.e Saxon through to Medieval and onwards. 

Earlier history interest me too, especially the pre-Roman 'Celtic' history of the various Iron Age, Bronze Age and earlier peoples of Britain, but much of these cultures is lost to time, and what we know is pieced together from artefacts and remains, and the writings of later Roman authors writing as outsiders. The very early history is full of mysteries, and these mysteries intrigue me, but they are mysteries, not things we know. 

Medieval history, on the other hand, includes quite a body of knowledge about what life was like then, and is quite accessible - it is not that expensive to go on a tour of Oxford castle and get quite good account of the castle's history, starting with its ecclesiastical history and moving forwards, and I certainly studied the Norman Invasion, the Charter of Liberties, the Magna Carter and the Peasant's Revolt at school, and am sure that various aspects of Medieval history are fairly widespread in history teaching at various levels. I guess it was something I could easily get into, and unlike Roman history, I wasn't faced with my Dad's near-obsession (he spent several years working at a Roman pottery manufacture site with several kilns and a processing works for clay) with the subject. 

⚜The Victorians Have A Lot To Answer for

Another thing my readers may well know is that I have an interest in Victorian things, and as all the Victorian-era Gothic Revival and Scottish Baronial architecture I photograph show, and the subject matter of many Pre-Raphaelite paintings also, there was a definite interest in a fairy-tale and Arthurian Medievalism in that period (as well as an interest in legitimate history). My interests become recursive at this point. To elaborate on the previous examples, I look at a Victorian Gothic Revival buildings, and see in them their stylistic ancestors (and giggle at the Victorian tendency to turn practical medieval things into nonsensical decorative devices.), I look at Pre-Raphaelite depictions of Arthurian legends, and wonder which suits of armour were used as costume references, and how many details are flights of fancy.  

⚜✥⚜

Hopefully I have managed to detail from where my interest stems in a helpful manner to those curious, and have not been too boring and introspective. Personally, I find the history far more interesting than my appreciation of it! I don't think this explanation is exhaustive, and in racking my brains I wonder if I am overlaying too much of who I am now onto my past self, but hopefully it is at least a bit helpful. 

➳ Archery ➳

I don't somehow think these were the bows she was thinking of...

I am a bit of a frilly Romantic /Aristocrat/Goth type person, yes, but bows are not really a decorative device I am in to. That and I wanted an excuse to talk about archery, not that I really need an excuse...

Archery is one of my favourite sports. I started in 2010, when I signed up to the beginner's course at my (then) local archery club, but had been wanting to take the sport up properly for a rather long time, after having had a go at summer camp years and years ago. My partner, Raven, is a keen archer, and talked me into joining. Je ne regrette rien! While there is a local archery club to me now, here in the Highlands, when I last enquired they weren't taking on new members, which is a shame because it means right now I have no club and no space to practice. 
Bah humbug!

I think what I love most about archery is that it is a sport that puts me in a state of absolute focus and concentration. I can shut out my worries and concentrate on getting an arrow as close to the centre of the target as possible. This sort of state exists in many sports, but I think target sports in general are different in so much that it is concentration on a single act (one that can be divided into smaller sections from stance, raising the bow, drawing, aiming, breathing, releasing etc.), not the "thinking on your feet" concentration of sports such as roller-derby, basketball, volleyball, ultimate frisbee etc. This is not to say I don't enjoy that sort of sport - I do, and I either currently do or have done all of the above and enjoyed them - it's just that archery fills a certain niche for me. 

I have been plinking at Raven's parent's farm, and that too is enjoyable to me but I think there is something extra that comes from  drawing a bow with my own strength, that being translated through the mechanical advantage of springy limbs, and that being why an arrow flies. As you might tell from that sentence, I shoot a recurve bow. It's not that I think that such things as compound bows and crossbows are 'cheating', it's just I prefer to have less of a mechanical advantage. I'd love to shoot a long bow, and I'd love to get involved in kyudo. 

Random fact: I do some things left-handed, and other things right-handed. Archery is something I can only do left-handed.

I think for a lot of American readers especially, archery is almost synonymous with bow-hunting. Bow-hunting is illegal in the UK. I am not the sort of person that would kill an animal for pleasure, anyway, and do not see any form of hunting as 'sport' - if I needed food desperately, I'd hunt to eat, but I would not see it as a pleasurable act.  

An odd thing I have noticed is that quite few of my fellow archers are fellow Pagans, not a vast number, but a higher percentage than simply the percentage of the population that are Pagans. Maybe it is because of its ancient heritage and a lot of Pagans are also people into 'historical things', maybe because of its connections to deities such as Artemis. To be honest I have no idea why, only conjecture. Any Pagans into archery who would like to elucidate me on the matter are welcome to do so.