The Night Ship by Alex Woodroe
Thursday, 28 May 2026 08:00
A young woman's bid to escape Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania is complicated by apocalypse.
The Night Ship by Alex Woodroe



What I read
Dorothy Richardson, Interim (Pilgrimage, #5) (1919) for online reading group. Less dentistry in this one, but Canadian doctors.
Vonda McIntyre, The Curve of the World - which, well, my bar for her is set high, and one does wonder if maybe she would have worked more on this had she had the time, but it was still pretty good, even if there was a bit of an air of thought-experiment about the possibilities of cultural exchanges at the period. Points for having ageing (textually indicated to be menopausing) protag, and the seafaring party includes a pregnant woman.
Mick Herron, Nobody Walks (2015), thriller set in the Slough House universe and with various known characters mentioned but a stand-alone about unrelated characters. Not bad.
On the go
Still Persuasion, but very nearly there.
Still dipping in to Violet Hunt's Tales of the Uneasy - possibly her strength lay in the creepiness lurking within human relations, because I'm not sure she's really up there with her horror contemporaries?
Up next
There's a new Slightly Foxed.




It is torrid today in London, my dearios.
And I have booked myself to go to an in-person seminar at the Institution With Which I Have The Honour to Be Associated later this afternoon, o joy.
Somebody is presenting on a couple of fairly obscure early C20th progressives/sexologists whom I have also done a spot of work on, so feel a bit obliged to turn up.
Also, it is the time for applying for renewal of fellowship, so showing one's face about the place may be A Good Idea.
In other news I have actually managed to acquire an in-person GP appointment apropos of the knee issue for next week at a reasonable sort of time of day, after only a day and a bit of keeping going back to the practice site....






I may just possibly have fulminated heretofore about the assumption that a woman over 35 is But A Barren Stock and her fertility has fallen off a cliff and She Should Have Frozen Her Eggs while there was still time -
- and this may be a factor of age and reading certain novels at an impressionable age not to mention being a historian with interest in that area -
- but honestly, is the existence of The Menopausal Baby - You're Not Having The Change, Duckie, You're Preggers! - unknown to the present generation?
I will state, for information, that my sources in organisations such as BPAS indicate that a significant % of their custom comes from women who believed that their ovaries had shrivelled up and they no longer needed to employ contraception, and WHOOPS.
(Okay, maybe there's some kind of pendulum thing going on here, from No-One is Talking About The Menopause to Everything is Attributed to the Peri/Menopause once a woman is over a certain age?)
Briggs said misinformation around perimenopause is concerning.
“I look at things like Instagram to see what they are exposed to and I am horrified,” she said, citing examples of women in their 30s being told to demand HRT if they are unable to sleep or are struggling with migraines – and to switch GPs if denied. Or women being told they should seek testosterone treatment.
“I’m not anti any of these things in the right person, but females produce their own testosterone lifelong, even women without ovaries, so the idea that everybody has to demand testosterone is bonkers,” Briggs said.
Dr Channa Jayasena, an expert in reproductive endocrinology at Imperial College London, also raised concerns.
“It’s great that there’s better [public] awareness [about perimenopause]. And I think many doctors are completely unaware about how debilitating the symptoms of perimenopause can be,” he said. “But the flipside of that, I think there’s a risk that some women are being mislabelled as having perimenopause when they have other things that are wrong.”
I am very much inclined to think that the President of the British Menopause Society knows whereof she peaks:
[T]here is a perception that any symptom affecting women between the ages of 40 and 60 is due to perimenopause or menopause and that HRT is required.
“I think HRT is completely wonderful,” Rymer said. But, she added, “it’s not for women who don’t need it,” noting that in such situations it can cause heavy bleeding.