There was such an interesting Longreads on the myth of Britain, which I would argue is not a myth insomuch as a facet. The author starts with two accounts of the country:

Britain, a small, soggy island whose power on the world stage is declining, where poverty, inequality, and disaster nationalism are rising, where the government has mangled its response to a global pandemic so badly that it’s making some of us nostalgic for the days when all we did was panic about Brexit. The other is “Britain!” — a magical land of round tables and boy wizards and enchanted swords and moral decency, where the sun never sets on an Empire run by gentlemen, where witty people wear frocks and top hats and decide the fate of nations over tea and biscuits.

The second Britain is our Britain; a place we love to visit and feel dreamy about. We talk a lot about taking a trip there every year during retirement, both because we suspect at least one of our children will end up living there and because it’s a storybook happy place.

We, of course, also know about the first Britain, mostly because we—like all of you—live in a place with two stories. We’re America, leading the world in COVID-19 cases and drowning in racism, and we’re also America!—the storybook land of Hollywood and Harvard and Hamilton.

The article is about Britain, but it also points out that “Every nation-state is ninety percent fictional; there’s always a gap between the imaginary countries united by cultural coherence and collective destinies where most of us believe we live, and the actual countries where we’re born and eat breakfast and file taxes and die.”

Other people believing your country’s myth—positive or negative—is uncomfortable because you exist in reality. And that reality is also a fantasy. The author admits:

I’m stuck in the States until the lockdowns end, but want to go back to the soggy, self-deprecating country I grew up in, the country of tolerance and diversity and kind people quietly getting on with things, the land of radio sketch comedy, jacket potatoes, decent bands, and basic decency. I know that that country, too, is imaginary; just as imaginary as any of the “Rule Britannia” flag-waggery.

Is reality the ugly truth or the beautiful lie or something in the middle, which is neither ugly nor beautiful but is a complex story that changes every single second. You can’t sell that, of course, which is what you need to do when you’re project a country’s narrative. You can’t say, “These are the things we’re proud of and these are the things we’re not proud of and the reality is that humans across the world all think they’re unique but are really more alike than we’ll admit.”

I love stories, and it’s easy to reduce things into stories. To tell ourselves and others stories. It is so much harder to not only love something complex but to explain to others why you love it, too, warts and all.

Josh and I are both taking vacation time in August. I need a break, or I’m going to burn out, but it also feels silly to take a lot of time off right now when we’re not going anywhere. Then again, that isn’t going to change any time soon. So I’m taking five days and trying to figure out how to take a vacation without going on vacation.

Because it’s too easy to fall into Saturday habits of going online, which leads into “let me just clean up my email” and finally devolves into “let me just take care of this thing and this thing and this thing.” At the same time, stating that computers are off limits doesn’t feel relaxing. I don’t want more restrictions than I already have.

There are spots along the river that are currently empty if you’re willing to pee in the woods. (I am willing to pee in the woods.) We’re thinking about bringing our beach chairs to the river and reading. It will be hot. And probably buggy. But it will be easy to bail and move somewhere else outside. So that’s in the plans.

I really love the blog A Strong Sense of Place, and they have recommendations for taking a vacation when you can’t go anywhere. They have two rules: you must have anticipation, and you must deliberately savour.

The savouring part will happen in the moment, but I’m trying to plot out my reading list for that week so I can get excited. Making a schedule. Planning fun foods to bring with us. It feels kind of less-than, and, at the same time, I am so looking forward to sleeping in and reading.

I am trying to come up with more on the anticipation front—ways I can get excited about the sort-of vacation. Ideas?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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We’re going to do a channel island trip in the future (my plan is to ultimately hit every weather station named in the Shipping Forecast, but that’s a post for another day), so I read the tourism posts from Guernsey and Sark.

Guernsey wrote recently about the tradition of hedge veg stalls, which are small, unmanned boxes that people set up near the road where they can sell extra vegetables from their garden or crafts or books. It’s done on an honour system; you drop the coins in a box and take what you need.

We have them around our town, too, though we don’t call them hedge veg. And they almost always sell either eggs or vegetables. Every once in a while, you’ll see one selling plants, and, of course, there are Little Free Libraries, but this sounds like a fun way to get creative and make a small amount of money at the same time.

If I lived on Guernsey, I would fill my hedge veg stall with cookies and copies of a serial story.

How about you?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

It’s the 14th anniversary of the Roundup. (Pssst—that’s the first post from 2006.) I’ve been writing it almost every Friday for 14 years—more than a quarter of my life.

It’s the longest running project on my blog, and since my blog started in the early days of blogging, it is in a tiny category of continual, long-running internet projects, such as Wordless Wednesdays and… um… everything else I just Googled is now defunct. So. Our tiny niche on the internet gets to claim one of the longest, ongoing, never-pausing projects. Go us.

But it’s also a tiny peek into what sticks and what doesn’t. IComLeavWe is defunct. The LFCA is defunct. MicroblogMondays is still going strong (but is much younger than the Roundup—only six years old or so).

Thank you to everyone who keeps writing their blog so I have something to read and posts to roundup every Friday.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Immer weniger” (Elaine ohne Kind)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Kveller has a post about how infertility prepared her for parenting during the pandemic. I’d argue that infertility prepares a person for the pandemic—full stop. You don’t need to be parenting to see how going through the stress of infertility helps you process the stress of the current world. She writes, “When I was going through infertility, I did not know what was going to happen. I didn’t know when my next appointment would be, if I could attend my friend’s birthday party, or even plan a vacation —and I certainly didn’t know when or if I would get pregnant! Turns out this experience prepared me for parenting in these uncertain times.” Me, too.

The Barreness got me with Nirvana—we are stupid and contagious right now. She meanders through a backyard visit with parents, protest signs, and life during COVID-19. This line is exactly how I feel as a fellow rule follower: “As a rule follower, I am saddened by nobody else doing the work.” Maybe it’s not actually nobody, but sometimes it feels like nobody.

JewishIVF has a similar sentiment with her post on choices with COVID-19. She writes, “I could do all these things if I chose to. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that it feels unsafe to make those choices … It must be nice to not live in a head-space of constant worry. Maybe that’s what I’m jealous of.” It made me think about how that was also a feeling with infertility. How would it feel to not exist in the head-space of constant worrying and just live normal family building? I was always jealous of that.

Lastly, Hopelessly Infertile and Surrounded by Fertiles writes about grandmother’s last friend dying. Her grandmother died near the end of her friend group, and she writes, “There were 3, maybe 4 of her super-close contemporary friends still alive to mourn her, and now they are all gone.” Even without knowing her grandmother or her friends, it made me sad to think that a “whole generation of beloved matriarchs is gone.” Sending peace of heart.

The roundup to the Roundup: The 14th anniversary of the Roundup. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 17 – July 24) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week? Read the original open thread post here.

I found out about a love-letter-to-restaurants project online, and I nodded over the opening statement: “Restaurants make us feel happy, satiated, soothed, carefree, inspired, restored, embraced, blown away, taken care of, connected, complete.”

Taken care of. That is the feeling I am missing the most in all of this. It isn’t the food itself because I’ve been able to recreate so many dishes at home. It’s someone asking me what I want and bringing it to me. That doesn’t happen in many facets of my life. It’s someone else doing all the work and letting me sit back and relax. It’s someone else cleaning the dishes after we’re done. (Okay, Josh does 90% of the dishes, so I guess I am cared for on that front.)

I’ve felt those other things before—satiated after being hungry, carefree after hanging out at the table during a long meal, inspired to cook new things, blown away by tasting something amazing.

But it’s the taken care of that I miss the most.