This week's bread: a loaf of Dove's Farm Organic Seedhouse Bread Flour, v nice.

Friday night supper: penne with a sauce of sauce of Peppadew roasted red peppers in brine drained, whizzed in blender and gently heated while pasta cooking.

Saturday breakfast rolls: basic buttermilk (as buttermilk reaching its bb date), 3:1 strong white/rye flour, turned out nicely.

Today's lunch: panfried seabass fillets in samphire sauce, served with cauliflower florets roasted in pumpkin seed oil with cumin seeds, padron peppers (as we have noted on previous occasions, these had not been picked as young and tender as they might be), and sticky rice with lime leaves.

Actually, I can't find that the article by Molly-Jong Fast in today's Guardian Saturday is currently online, alas - clearly she had a sad and distressing childhood, even if I was tempted, and probably not the only one to be so tempted, to murmur, apologies to P Larkin, 'they zipless fuck you up...', the abrupt dismissal of her nanny, her only secure attachment figure, when Erica J suddenly remarried (again) was particularly harsh, I thought. No wonder she had problems.

And really, even if she does make a point of how relatively privileged she was, that doesn't actually ameliorate how badly she was treated.

Only the other day there was an obituary of the psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien, who wrote Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the “Privileged” Child.

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Another rather traumatic parenting story, though this is down to the hospitals: BBC News is now aware of five cases of babies swapped by mistake in maternity wards from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Lawyers say they expect more people to come forward driven by the increase in cheap genetic testing.:

[V]ery gradually, more babies were delivered in hospital, where newborns were typically removed for periods to be cared for in nurseries.
"The baby would be taken away between feeds so that the mother could rest, and the baby could be watched by either a nursery nurse or midwife," says Terri Coates, a retired lecturer in midwifery, and former clinical adviser on BBC series Call The Midwife.
"It may sound paternalistic, but midwives believed they were looking after mums and babies incredibly well."
It was common for new mothers to be kept in hospital for between five and seven days, far longer than today.
To identify newborns in the nursery, a card would be tied to the end of the cot with the baby's name, mother's name, the date and time of birth, and the baby's weight.
"Where cots rather than babies were labelled, accidents could easily happen"

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A different sort of misattribution: The furniture fraud who hoodwinked the Palace of Versailles:

[T]his assortment of royal chairs would become embroiled in a national scandal that would rock the French antiques world, bringing the trade into disrepute.
The reason? The chairs were in fact all fakes.
The scandal saw one of France's leading antiques experts, Georges "Bill" Pallot, and award-winning cabinetmaker, Bruno Desnoues, put on trial on charges of fraud and money laundering following a nine-year investigation.
....
Speaking in court in March, Mr Pallot said the scheme started as a "joke" with Mr Desnoues in 2007 to see if they could replicate an armchair they were already working on restoring, that once belonged to Madame du Barry.
Masters of their crafts, they managed the feat, convincing other experts that it was a chair from the period.

I am really given a little hope for an anti-Mybug tendency among the masculine persuasion: A Man writes in 'the issue is not whether men are being published, but whether they are reading – and being supported to develop emotional lives that fiction can help foster'

While Geoff Dyer in The Books of [His] Life goes in hard with Beatrix Potter as early memory, Elizabeth Taylor as late-life discovery, and Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets as

One of those perennially bubbling-under modern classics – too good for the Championship, unable to sustain a place in the Premier league – which turns out to be way better than some of the canonical stalwarts permanently installed in the top flight.

I did a quick search over past posts and I see that bibliotherapy has been a thing that I have been posting the odd link about for A Long Time, though I see the School of Life's page thereon is now 404. In the way that things are constantly being suddenly NEW, I see I also had a link much more recently on the topic about which was cynical.

But I find this article really quite amusing if sometimes determined to use all the Propah Academyk Speek: Reading as therapy: medicalising books in an era of mental health austerity:

When reading is positioned as therapy, we argue, evaluative intentions intersect awkwardly with the cultural logics of literature, as practitioners and commissioners grapple with what it means to extract ‘wellbeing effects’ from a diffuse and everyday practice. As a result, what might look initially like another simple case of medicalisation turns out to have more uncertain effects. Indeed, as we will show, incorporating the ‘reading cure’ troubles biomedicine, foregrounding both the deficiencies of current public health responses to the perceived crisis of mental health, and the poverty of causal models of therapeutic effect in public health. There are, then, potentially de-medicalising as well as medicalising effects.

Larfed liek drayne:

In five experiments on how reading fiction impacts on measures of wellbeing, Carney and Robertson found no measurable effects from simply being exposed to fiction: the mechanism, they note, is not akin to a pharmaceutical that can prescribed.

In June 1868 the University of London's Senate had voted to admit women to sit the 'General Examination', so becoming the first British university to accept female candidates:

Women's higher education in London dates from the late 1840s, with the foundation of Bedford College by the Unitarian benefactor, Elisabeth Jesser Reid. Bedford was initially a teaching institution independent of the University of London, which was itself an examining institution, established in 1836. Over the next three decades, London University examinations were available only to male students.
Demands for women to sit examinations (and receive degrees) increased in the 1860s. After initial resistance a compromise was reached.
In August 1868 the University announced that female students aged 17 or over would be admitted to the University to sit a new kind of assessment: the 'General Examination for Women'.

Sexism in science: 7 women whose trailblazing work shattered stereotypes. Yeah, we note that this was over 100 years since the ladies sitting the University of London exams, and passing.

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A couple of recent contributions from Campop about employment issues in the past:

Who was self-employed in the past?:

It is often assumed that industrial Britain, with its large factories and mines employing thousands of people, left little space for individuals running their own businesses. But not everyone was employed as a worker for others. Some exercised a level of agency operating on their own as business proprietors, even if they were also often very constrained.
Over most of the second half of the 19th century as industrialisation accelerated, the self-employed remained a significant proportion of the population – about 15 percent of the total economically active. It was only in the mid-20th century that the proportion plummeted to around eight percent.

Home Duties in the 1921 Census:

What women in ‘home duties’ were precisely engaged in still remains a mystery, reflecting the regular obstruction of women’s everyday activity from the record across history. For some, surely ‘home duties’ reflected hard physical labour (particularly in washing), as well as hours of childcare exceeding the length of the factory day. For others, particularly the aspirational bourgeois, the activities of “home duties” involved little actual housework. 5.1 percent of wives in home duties had servants to assist them, a rate which doubled for clerks’ wives to 11.7 percent. For them, household “work” involved little physical action. Though this may have given some of these women the opportunity to spend their hours in cultural activities or socialising, for others it possibly reflected crushing boredom.

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And on informal contributions, Beyond Formal and Informal: Giving Back Political Agency to Female Diplomats in Early Nineteenth Century Europe:

[H]istorians such as Jeroen Duindam show that there were never explicitly separate spheres for men and women when working for the state in the early nineteenth-century. Drawing a line separating ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ diplomats in the early nineteenth-century, simply based on their gender alone, does not do these women justice.

And I am very happy to see this receiving recognition, though how far has something which got reprinted after 30 years be considered languishing in obscurity, huh? as opposed to having created a persistent fanbase: A Matter of Oaths – Helen Wright.