who only by moving can balance

<3

French horn! I've dabbled a very little in clarinet (during my I Should Know Roughly How To Play All The Instruments phase, enabled by my mother being Musical and us therefore just... having a Lot of instruments lying around) , but I was mostly violin + piano until my hands gave out & now play, yes, the horn. I would be fascinated to know why you think the clarinet is a good match for me!

It was SUCH a good bat, and we saw a bat swooping around over the lawn at bat o'clock (i.e. dusk) almost every night all summer :)

Mouldering ancestral pile: makes it sound far grander than it actually is while also being a strictly accurate description, which I think is hilarious. It's my grandparents' (grandfather's) house; it was built in, oooh, maaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe the 50s, maybe a bit earlier? It's in a fairly large garden on a cliff overlooking the sea, and my grandfather -- Papa -- was both an engineer and, um, a hoarder.

He would do shit like go "aha, two pineapples reduced to 10p each in the bargain bin at Tesco, I'll get BOTH of them, I have no idea what to do with them nor indeed any such desire but my grandchildren will Like Them and they're A Bargain"... such that when we came to visit six weeks later there was a carrier bag containing two mouldy pineapples on the sideboard. And so on, and so forth, including an enormous washing drum full of empty six-pint milk flagons (seriously, several dozen) that Might Come In useful One Day, and tax returns going back to the fifties crammed higgledy-piggledy into a cupboard all out of order with bank statements from last year.

So: it's ancestral, it's mouldering, and it is very much one giant glorified pile.

It's fairly common terminology in fannish circles; see e.g. this Fanlore write-up of the Dark Agenda challenge. In general, "non-X" terminology is preferred because setting things up as "X and non-X" often winds up interpreted by humans as "normal and abnormal" -- c.f. referring to people as LGB+ or queer rather than "non-straight", "abled" rather than "non disabled", and so on. (Compare also with the part where some of what's fucking up gender politics atm is In My View that we don't have a good catch-all term for the group "people who aren't men or don't benefit from male privilege", such that "women-only spaces" feels more positive & affirming than "spaces for people who aren't men" and thus gets used, even though it's imposing a false binary and hurting a lot of people at the margins.) (Note also that it doesn't always work this way around, e.g. "allistic" versus "not autistic" and "cis" versus "not trans", but tl;dr the "not X" construction contains an implicit norm in a way that tends to reinforce power structures.)

So, first, using "non-white" centres whiteness (as a norm and default) even when the topic isn't about white people; it positions chromatic creators and characters and existence relative to whiteness, as though whiteness is a central and necessary reference point, always. Which isn't great.

By my understanding, using "chromatic" has some of the same advantages of using Queer as an umbrella term, or LGBT+, or neurodiverse (or neurotypical!): it's a welcoming term that allows for fuzziness and doesn't run into issues with "have we listed everyone?" (e.g. Reni Eddo-Lodge discusses, in Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race, the way that Black has sometimes historically been used as a catch-all for folk who are targeted by racism, and goes on to talk about ways in which more nuance and specificity when discussing Black experience is helpful) -- while emphasising the diversity of experience that "non-white" encompasses, rather than just sort of... collapsing it.

So: term in primarily fannish usage, that I am using in a fannish context, but that I (as obv a White Person) think has obvious usefulness & applicability outside that context.