The quick brown fox... in winter
4 January 2026 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeIt eventually dawned on me that the mysterious phrase on the bottom of my handwriting worksheets was the Russian equivalent of the infamous quick brown fox that jumps over the lazy dog -- a short sentence that includes all the letters of the [Cyrillic] alphabet :-D
съешь ещё этих мягких французских булок, да выпей чаю
(Eat more of these soft French rolls, and drink tea!)
I *think* I have finished the BBC Musketeers one-shot that I started halfway through December... after struggling with my final line over the dread of how other people's fetishes might choose to sexualise something that very much wasn't intended to be 'shipping' :-(
(Apparently AO3 actually has a No Romantic Relationship(s) tag: I thought 'Gen' automatically covered that, but evidently not...)
I rewatched the first few episodes to try to get this version of the characters fixed into my head in clear contrast to the Dumas "Twenty Years After" cast: Grumpy Commander Athos, Jokester Aramis (who is a lot more of a daredevil than Dumas' version), Black Street Kid Porthos (who tends to get written in painful dialect in fanfics, presumably because Americans struggle with English 'regional' accents; BBC Porthos is very much lowerclass London) and Very Young D'Artagnan.
I didn't endow d'Artagnan with the assorted stages of chilblains currently on my fingers and toes, but it is definitely a coldfic :-p But since our introduction to BBC Athos is a shot of him having to smash the ice on the surface of the water in his bedroom in order to submerge his hangover into it, and the setting for this fic is clearly somewhere very near to the start of the series, that makes sense: I'm basically writing a story set outdoors in December or January in a climate that doesn't feature romantic winter snow :-p
съешь ещё этих мягких французских булок, да выпей чаю
(Eat more of these soft French rolls, and drink tea!)
I *think* I have finished the BBC Musketeers one-shot that I started halfway through December... after struggling with my final line over the dread of how other people's fetishes might choose to sexualise something that very much wasn't intended to be 'shipping' :-(
(Apparently AO3 actually has a No Romantic Relationship(s) tag: I thought 'Gen' automatically covered that, but evidently not...)
I rewatched the first few episodes to try to get this version of the characters fixed into my head in clear contrast to the Dumas "Twenty Years After" cast: Grumpy Commander Athos, Jokester Aramis (who is a lot more of a daredevil than Dumas' version), Black Street Kid Porthos (who tends to get written in painful dialect in fanfics, presumably because Americans struggle with English 'regional' accents; BBC Porthos is very much lowerclass London) and Very Young D'Artagnan.
I didn't endow d'Artagnan with the assorted stages of chilblains currently on my fingers and toes, but it is definitely a coldfic :-p But since our introduction to BBC Athos is a shot of him having to smash the ice on the surface of the water in his bedroom in order to submerge his hangover into it, and the setting for this fic is clearly somewhere very near to the start of the series, that makes sense: I'm basically writing a story set outdoors in December or January in a climate that doesn't feature romantic winter snow :-p
no subject
Date: 2026-01-05 07:59 am (UTC)The houses at Little Woodham (1642 village built by volunteers) are very clearly going to be horribly cold in winter. They do the occasional sleepover there - my daughter said she woke twice in the night on the last one, using night sight alone to help her re-kindle the fire...
no subject
Date: 2026-01-05 12:55 pm (UTC)Presumably bed-curtains (for those who could afford them) and box-beds helped retain warmth, but it isn't too much of a problem provided you've got enough bedding for insulation and it starts off warm; relying on your own body heat to warm things up is chilly. My bedroom is about 48-49F at the moment when I wake up, and that's absolutely fine provided I stay beneath the covers, but any bits that stick out definitely feel it; one can understand why bed-jackets used to be so popular for invalids, because if you want to sit up and read then your top half gets cold very quickly!
Ice on the windows: https://igenlode.dreamwidth.org/88698.html
I imagine that in the 1640s people would probably have been sharing beds in many cases rather than having the privilege of sleeping on their own; I don't know if they would have had the additional heat from livestock below/in a neighbouring section of the building at this period?