A NOAA-15 satellite pass at only 21 degrees to the west was not the strongest option for an image of the Adriatic, but I wanted to capture one last satellite image while nearby to this sea. Standing at the corner of a balcony reachable from T's childhood room, I fished for signals in the quiet Sunday morning. I could hear the squeak of laundry lines being pulled in, and the occasional shutter being lifted, but otherwise it was calm, near-silent. The sky lifted into a clear blue and I felt a little cold in the wool jumper that T's mom had given me when she last visited in London.

Thankfully it is morning now, and the sun is shining on the Maljicka River in Sarajevo. I woke around 1am last night in tears, thinking of all of the places I have seen so far on this trip in the Balkans, and the way my family history is so inscribed in this landscape, a landscape that has felt so much pain. I thought about the memories the landscape holds, that monuments to anti-fascist resistance or tombs of fallen fighters, or memorials to the more recent Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, only manage to represent partially. Upon properly waking, the news of the US election was shocking, but somehow dulled by the intensity of the last few days. I almost found it darkly humorous, that in the week I am spending engaging with my family’s history, and the very concrete, serious struggle of anti-fascism, a movement for which my great grandfather risked everything, a fascist has been elected to power in my birth country. As the news sunk in later in the day, the dark humour faded and despair set in. I kept the despair at bay by throwing myself head first into the story of Sarajevo womens’ resistance to authoritarian power, and their role in the communist movement. T and I drove to see a monument to Sarajevo victims of the national liberation war at Vraća Park, on the west of the city. The park itself is not well maintained, with trash and graffiti everywhere, and much of the original stone architecture crumbling. However, at the far end of the park, stands a monument to ‘Women Fighters’ by Sarajevo sculptor Alija Kučukalić. The sculpture is a 2-3 metre tall figure of a woman, from the torso up, wearing a sharp jacket, and gazing to the sky, arms open in a cactus shape and fists clenched. She has a long braid that flows down her back, and her face turns upward. An early sketch for the sculpture that I found online shows a female figure with an agonising face - indeed the original title of the work was “Stratišta” (Executions). While the sculpture is meant to be representative of all fallen women victims and fighters, many believe the sculpture depicts Radojka Lakić, a female leader of the Sarajevo underground communist resistance who was executed at Vraća in September 1941. The sculpture is in poor condition, emblematised by the fact that the right arm has been sawed off. Yet, even with only one arm raised, the figure is striking - a reminder of the immense strength of resistance, and the cost of truly fighting fascism.

It’s dark, and I am standing in the botanical garden of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo. It has been a sunny, cold day. Across the street from where I am standing is the US Embassy, a place whose politics will change in the next 24, or maybe 48 hours, depending on how close the election is. The embassy is measuring the air quality as part of the IQ Air network. The level of pollution is currently 122 on the AQI scale, meaning ‘unhealthy for sensitive groups’. The main pollutant contributing to this unhealthy air is PM2.5, the most deadly of the microscopic particles. In comparison, London’s air today is around 70-80. It feels somewhat prescient that, on the day my home country is voting to elect (or not) a fascist leader, I have been conducting historical research on the Antifašistička Fronta Žena (AFŽ) at the nonprofit organisation and art space called Crvena. I learned about women’s efforts to organise between 1942-1953, largely around issues related to women’s working lives, their capacity to aid in the fight against fascism by taking up all manner of jobs, their need for labour recognition, their literacy, and childcare practices. As Andreja Dugandžić, co-director of Crvena explained to me, the term ‘feminism’ was not so popular at the time as it was seen as a bourgeois idea, but a ‘women’s antifascist front’ was a concrete and inspiring movement for many women in former Yugoslavia. I read magazines like ‘Nova Žena’, poems by women writers, and looked at prints and engravings. Some of it felt very contemporary - expressions of power and voice - while other parts would turn to the domestic, for example ‘how to treat diarrhoea in your baby’ or even an article on 'butchering chickens'. One article was called ‘čudno kuhinje’ (strange cooking) and I look forward to translating it to understand what kind of cooking the AFŽ thought to be strange! I wasn’t able to understand or read everything given my basic Croatian/Serbian /Bosnian, but I absorbed so many themes and images, it will take months to entirely unpack. I am left with the feeling of the Yugoslav women’s antifascist movement as a prideful one. I also felt something resonant between the thematics of the AFŽ and what I have come to understand as ‘cuerpo-territorio’ (body-land) in South American feminisms. Like cuerpo-territorio, the movement of AFŽ was about relations to land, as much as it was about anti-fascist struggle. Sharing some of the poems of 'Nova Žena' with my Mom, she immediately replied with the exclamation that she felt so much pride, like those women did, and that she also wrote poems as a teenager in Belgrade about the pride and struggle ('borba') of Yugoslavia. As I ride the tram back to the hotel, I think of my Mom, who now lives in the 'red state' of Florida, and I reflect, not without a lot of worry, about the political systems she has weathered in her life.

Turning off a narrow street, we climb a dirt road into hills of farmland. The smell of manure permeates the car as we pass farm equipment and local men that wave kindly at us. I think I hear one of them call out but he doesn’t follow us. The road winds steeply onward and turns against the edge of recently turned fields. Next to two stacks of hay, sandwiched between two different fields, both steaming with manure and dust, we can see curved shapes of stone. At the base of the hill, a plaque in an odd mix of Latin and Cyrillic letters, lines running at odd angles, seems like a warning, but we climb the hill anyway. We are completely alone except for two men driving tractors. There, on the hilltop, is a kind of assembly, a collection of surreal stone figures around two metres tall, arranged at odd angles to each other, resting on stone plinths. Like serpents with eyes or faces in contorted shapes the figures peer wildly and hauntingly into the distance. I notice there are rotting cobs of corn scattered on the grass in places, and I wonder if there are any offerings to these creatures. The site is Nekropola žrtvama fašizma (Necropolis for the Victims of Fascism) or Spomenik na Smrika (Monument on Smrike) designed by Bogdan Bogdanović and it is both monument and underground crypt. This is the site of a great massacre of around 700 Serbian civilians and communists by Ustaše forces during WWII. Of the monument, Bogdanović apparently said: “It is a story of mythical creatures: the ambisbaena is a two-headed serpent that goes by day in one direction and by night in another. It symbolizes the end of time." To me, though, the figures are less serpent-like and more like currents or energies. Leaving Smrike by car, it is not long before we enter a valley shrouded in haze, and it only increases in density as we approach Sarajevo. We notice white smoke plumes pouring out of peoples’ chimneys and large currents of either steam or particulate flooding from thermo electric plants. I remember reading how a combination of local fuel burning in winter and heavy industry is creating an air pollution crisis in this part of Bosnia. The five o’ clock prayer echoes from minarets as the air thickens, spectral timing as voices mingle and seem to repeat across the landscape, and materialise the feeling that the air is a carrier of many things in these valleys, of faith and ghosts and microscopic toxicity. I think about the double headed serpent invoked by Bogdanović and I wonder about the ‘end of time’. T and I both peer hard at the sky, wondering if we are seeing the sickle moon or a strange small arc in the sky. When the air is so thick and unbreathable, do we see and feel time passing more slowly, finding our circadian rhythms numbed, or do we see and feel what lies underground?

“Gdje je mala sreća, bljesak stakla, lastavičje gnjezdo, iz vrtića dah; gdje je kucaj zipke, što se makla, i na traku sunca zlatni kućni prah?” wrote Ivan Goran Kovačić in the poem Jama or ‘the pit’. It describes village life near the town of Jasenovac in modern day Croatia. In these lines, happiness flows through a ‘window’s glint’ and ‘windborne garden sweet’. It manifests ‘by the threshold, sunshine at my feet’. These lines evoke a bucolic, gentle, rural life. And yet the poem - immediately recognisable from these four lines by anyone borne in the Balkans - is far from a picture of happiness. It narrates what occurred at the town of Jasenovac after Axis forces invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia during WWII, and installed an Independent State of Croatia (NDH) ruled by the nationalist Ustaše militia. Jasenovac became the site of one of the deadliest forced labour and extermination camps of the war. What happened at the camp is disputed, but most evidence suggests that the majority of people imprisoned and executed at Jasenovac were ethnic-Serbs, largely civilians brought there for their collaboration with Partisan rebels. My grandfather, Deda Milan, was one of those anti-fascist Serbs brought to Jasenovac, but luckily he was released after my great grandmother, of Croatian / Hungarian heritage, managed to use her influence to save him. Roma, Jews, and political communists were also targeted. Kovačić’s poem goes on to narrate the horrors of Jasenovac in gruesome detail, and its power in communicating these scenes made it one of the most celebrated anti-war poems of its time. Most children educated in former Yugoslavia (and even, I learn at dinner in Banja Luka, in present day Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina) learn this poem in school. This context might help explain why the lines quoted at the beginning of this note - about happiness, gardens and sunny thresholds - are engraved in a plaque inside a large scale monument designed by Bogdan Bogdanović in the 1960s that now stands at the former centre of the Jasenovac camp. Its shape resembles a giant flower with six petals from some angles, but from others, it looks like a pair of wings. The edges of the petals are sharp, and diamond shaped holes allow the sky to shine through, against the heaviness of concrete. As I walked around it at sunset, its form seemed to transform, always asymmetrical. In the landscape around the monument, Bogdanović created mounds to denote the places where buildings of the camp used to stand. The monument was Bogdanović’s attempt to memorialise the history of civilian suffering without reproducing it, toward “termination of the inheritance of hatred that passes from generation to generation". To place lines of poetry depicting ‘sunny thresholds’ or ‘windblowne gardens’ at the heart of this monument is perhaps to use peaceful images - peaceful weathers - to break the ‘inheritance of hatred’ while recognising the importance of careful, watchful memory.

The Ginko trees make pools of yellow everywhere on campus, from the parking lots behind student dorms, to the small copses between departments. As the day is grey lit and damp, and Heathrow borne planes roar past overhead, invisible through the cloud, the pools of colour are welcome. Later in the afternoon, Soph and I compare 'lighting gell' colours on a role of about 200 samples, ranging from fluorescent magenta to eggshell yellow. The colours come with short descriptions of their intensities and transparencies. Soph asks me to hold up the small rectangular transparent samples against a black and white photograph in a book on my desk, the better to compare how the colour enhances or mutes the detail in the image. It is difficult to make a choice of colour when only one of us can actually see the physical 'gell'. We end up choosing a green called 'half plus green', which is a more transparent version of a green called 'plus green'. Hovering between a bright green and a lemony mint, and around 80% transparent, the green film adds a beautiful intensity to grayscale text and imagery. As I leave campus at 5:30 it is almost pitch black. Students in hooded sweaters walk past in small groups, dorm kitchens are brightly illuminated, and rows of liquor bottles balance precariously on window ledges. As I pass the parking lot into the deep dark of the woods at the bottom of campus, a Ginko leaf catches my attention- it is fanned out against the asphalt, an opaque yellow through which dark textures permeate.

I awoke to a creeping feeling that the plants in my and T's flat were feeling very happy today. Leaves of monstera deliciosa, begonia maculata and weeping willow seemed unusually vibrant and springy from their stems. The lower angle of the sun at this point in the autumn means that the flat is flooded with rays. Throughout the morning, the sun climbed slowly over the three-story houses and the 'Open Doors' Baptist Church directly opposite our second floor windows. Later in the park, a local young family and a couple of mid-20s french women asked about my antenna, and I got to explain the 'magic' of radio twice. It was so bright I had to squint to see their faces. Above, an intersecting set of contrails looked like another, much larger Yagi-Uda, pointing south.

A black cloaked, elderly woman steps slowly across the dense, wet grass of Millfields Park in East London. I worry about her feet getting wet, as mine have soaked through already. Though it is nearing 12 noon, the sun casts long shadows against the plane trees, shapes forming and rearranging on the ground.

The department is hosting an 'authors meets critics' session with Henry Wai-Chun Yeung, an eminent economic and human geographer from Singapore, and I am on a panel of respondents. Henry's book is called Theory and Explanation in Geography, and it synthesises vast literatures in the discipline informed by theories such as non-representational theory, actor network theory, assemblage and feminist and postcolonial theories. As I need to formulate something to say, I spend the morning and most of the afternoon buried in this book, thinking about Henry's proposals for theorising. In one chapter, Henry proposes that 'relational' theories in geography need more concreteness, focus on causation, and specificity, so that they can better explain the world. He advocates for what he calls relational ‘geometries’ or ‘relational specificity’ or ‘relational complementarity’. An example of relational geometries is regional union networks and their ways of complementing each other, to gain power and resources. The response I decide to give reflects on what a specific focus on the geometry of relation might do - how does it operate? What does it explain? I have recently been puzzling over the geometry of relations in a paper on the ‘aerial turn’ in geography - I have been observing how, for quite a while now, geographers participating in the ‘aerial turn’ are writing about air in three key modes: i) as something that flows or can be traced, most often on a line ii) as a collection of particles iii) and as a volume. Although these three ‘orientations’ to air are persuasive, and in many ways helpfully explanatory for all kinds of aerial processes, from atmospheric warfare to the relations between breathing bodies and spaces, they produce versions of air and atmosphere that are linear, particular, and volumetric, and they distance other ‘versions’ of air that are more difficult to draw into geometric forms or shapes. I have been wondering how the ‘aerial turn’ is thus reproducing spatial geometries that say more about disciplinary formalism and perhaps modernist aesthetics than anything about air itself. Geographies of air are indeed a very small part of the discipline, but in my hesitation around the ‘relational geometries’ in Henry's book, I wonder if there is something else going on here. I wondered if the proposal to adopt ‘geometries’ felt at odds with the ‘relational irresolutions’ ‘topologies’ and disorientations being developed and theorised for studies of infrastructure by people like Jerry Zee and Aya Nassar. I think also about the outpouring of work on quantum field theory and quantum mechanics in black studies and geographies, for example in new work by Pat Noxolo, and I think it is important to take seriously what a turn to the quantum does in this work, that geometry simply can’t. As important as it is to be specific and practical about spatial relations and how our theories of relation can explain causal effects, I feel that these and other movements in the discipline suggest plural, capacious, perhaps less immediately geometric forms of relation, and yet they are doing so without the vagueness or flattening that might have characterised relational theories of ten-twenty years ago. For the seminar, the room is packed- geographers from across the department are present, as well as people from other departments. Henry gives a presentation on the book and I am impressed with the way he manages to make theory sound exciting and approachable. After me and three of my colleagues have offered responses, we discuss what it means for goegraphers to 'do theory', what kind of theory that might be, and whether the issue is rather than geography is both a social science and a humanities discipline- theory works differently and does not necessarily need to 'explain' in the humanities, as it might do in the social sciences. After the event, the atmosphere of the department is animated. A PhD student comes to my office and speaks for thirty minutes about how excited she was by the seminar. From time to time, I catch a glimpse of the ginko trees outside the window of my office. The golden leaves are glowing in the afternoon sunlight, so that they seem to be projecting light in all directions.

The sunlight stretches through the shutters as I prepare a roast vegetable and fish lunch for T and her mom who are on their way back from the airport. I mix purple carrots, magenta-striped beets and lightly gold potatoes with extra virgin olive oil and a mix of spices and herbs - a medley of oregano, peppers, sage and other 'bilke' from my grandmother's village on the island Hvar in Croatia. When the vegetables have roasted, I place three marinated 'John Dory' fish on top of everthing and keep the oven hot for another twenty minutes. As I cut, season and roast, my turnstile antenna leans out the kitchen window. My hands are too oily to hold or point it, so the resulting image is just what the antenna receives from its resting position. At one point, though, I graze the handle with the dishwasher door, and the whole antenna slips out the window and dangles on its cable over the edge- luckily there is a small ledge immediately underneath, otherwise it might have fallen to the steps below!

The day started with low, misty clouds and rose to a golden, clear-skied afternoon. The last few days have been much warmer, even balmy. I noticed the transparency of fallen leaves, shining like small lanterns in the grass.

"You might find me with some tims on, rockin fascinators and clutches / marchin' through these streets my face on double decker buses / London's been all love, from the dancehall to the pub / when we play the O2, or back when subterranea was the club / real Fugees lovers / big up you know them, all my sisters and my brothers!!" spoke Lauryn Hill, reading a poem she had written in the twenty four hours before her performance at the O2 Arena last night. T and I were in seats so far away, on the opposite side of the stadium, that the sound seemed to bounce and refract in odd echoes. But that didn't matter- squeezed into tiny steep seats, all 20,000 people were dancing the whole night. I looked over my shoulder to see several grey-haired ladies singing all the words, while below our row, a group of teenagers managed to dance and livestream at the same time. This morning the energy stayed with me as I got ready for the day, another grey and cold one in London. The park was full of dogs, including an incredibly fast whippet named Ziggy. In several places, the gilled cap of a small mushroom pushed through the blades of damp, freshly mowed grass.

As I ride the 35 south from Liverpool Street the sun begins to pierce through the matted, slightly hazy sky. A current of ‘Arctic Air’ has flowed across the U.K. this weekend and lowered temperatures at least six degrees. At a performance yesterday afternoon in a roofless Anglican Church in Nunhead Cemetary, the cold entered deep into my lungs and bones. After an evening at the pub, T and I ran to the overground station and realised we had fifteen minutes to wait for the train - it felt like an interminable time in that level of cold. As we entered Tesco to warm up before the train, an older man sitting on the pavement near the streetcorner lost his paper cup in the wind and it spun into the traffic. After I retrieved it for him, he asked if I could buy him a chocolate milkshake. He drank the cold drink in big gulps as me and T ran back to the station for our train.

Of a day like today, Derek Jarman might write, "Crystalline sunlight, all the dark humours blown away by the wind" (1991, 235). As my partner opens the curtains in the morning, the blue of the sky pierces through the growing gaps in tree branches, blue against yellow and light brown. Before lunch I set the automatic ground station up in my flat, leaving the turnstile antenna resting against the open windowsill in the kitchen, and I head out to the park wtih my tape measure Yagi-Uda antenna. Later I enjoy comparing the images: not surprisingly, the automatic station has captured a swathe of the satellite pass to the south (as our kitchen window is south-facing) and lines of interference from the building pulse through it. Out in the park, I receive a good signal for most of the 86 degree pass, enjoying the 'crystalline' sun and the momentary break from the 'dark humours' of recent grey and rainy days.

On London Bridge, loosely knit groups of people wander by. I notice two families in which the Dad is pointing across the Thames to skyscrapers and offering some words of information or wisdom to his children. They don’t look interested. It’s the kids instead who are interested in me, asking ‘but what is she doing ??’ in voices that implore an answer. A tall man passes very close to my left shoulder and says in passing ‘watch out with that thing’ even though I am standing well to the edge of the bridge and there is tons of empty space to walk. The pass is a bit staticy at times but I have come to expect this from most of London’s bridges - too much happening by land, river and air.

Today we put on the heating in our flat for the first time this autumn. The air temperature has dropped significantly over the last week, and there is an 'edge' or 'bite' to the weather outside. At dinner on Friday night with a very good friend, we all agreed to change our duvets to the heavier 'winter' version. This collective decision made me think of squirrels and other forest creatures adding leaves and twigs to their nests for warmth. I tested a new antenna in the frosty park this morning - a copper, weatherised V-dipole made by a radio amateur supplier in Florida. I used a PVC pipe given to me by Martin Collett (for another tape measure Yagi) to elevate the antenna above ground level, as if on a small mast. A woman walking two chihuahuas smiled at me. A small cyclone of clouds emerged, swirling over the UK, but hopefully leaving some space for bursts of sun over the rest of the day.

A rolling family of storms passed over Hackney today - one body after the next. Alternating floods of sunlight and dark shadows passed through the flat, a changing scenography to breakfast, PhD student supervisions and emails. As it was pouring when I planned to head to the park with my Yagi, I instead tried fitting the antenna out of the bedroom window - more difficult than the compact V-dipole or tunstile antennas I've used inside before. It worked somewhat- both detecting the 'flood' of Meteor MN 2-3 before picking up NOAA-18 - though I think it also proved sensitive to lots of interference coming from flats and the building itself. By the end of the pass the sun was shining and an orb-like cloud receded into the distance.