As anticipated, this week was fairly manic. Instead of staff meetings this half term, the teachers are all providing tutoring for year 6 students who require it ahead of SATS so my Monday afternoon was spent with two lovely girls working through some challenging maths. On Tuesday we had ‘deputation day’, when the ‘Haberdashers’ from the Haberdashers Company come around to inspect the schools in their federation. Of course, being non-teachers they hadn’t consulted with David at all and just announced that they were coming to observe lessons at 12:15 – which is when half the school is at lunch and the other half is finishing lessons and about to go on lunch. As a result, we had to rearrange our entire day and had a strange break at 11:20-11:55, go into another lesson at 11:55 and then pushed lunch out to 12:45. Luckily the observation went well and the year 6s were on their best behaviour, working quietly and then sensibly answering the questions asked by the large group of rich white men who visited. Super weird. Apparently the ‘master’ and the ‘clerk’ emailed very positive feedback later in the week though so at least we made a good impression.

After school on Tuesday I left reasonably early to meet up with Meghan, a friend I’d made on my Iceland trip last year. We met at London Bridge and walked around to Flat Iron Square, where a pancake store was holding a special ‘pancake day’ (Shrove Tuesday) event. Both of us got gluten-free, dairy-free pancakes, mine with bacon, maple syrup and banana, and found a spot to sit down and chat. Once we’d eaten, we grabbed a beer from a cute little bar under the arches of the rail bridge and caught up about her recent trip to Egypt and what has been going on in our lives in the last year. It was great fun, but she was exhausted by 8 after a very dramatic trip back from Egypt that day, so we headed home at around 8 – nice early night for a school night!

On Wednesday I rushed home from school at 5:30 after a fairly manic day to have a quick dinner with Peter (fantastic home-made pizzas!) before running off to Ready Singer One. This is a choir I’d read about a few weeks ago that is inspired by ‘nerd culture’ – we’ll be singing songs from video games, movies, TV shows and other quirky sources. I really enjoyed the night, with wonderful rounds for warm ups and two fun main songs – the Pokemon theme song and ‘Toss a Coin To Your Witcher’ from the Witcher TV series. It was only a 10 minute walk up the road as well, so I still managed to get home at a reasonable hour.

After back-and-forth-ing with my insurance company, Apple Chadstone and Apple Covent Garden, I had eventually on Tuesday night received my Apple receipt that I needed to claim my insurance costs for my laptop. I’d uploaded that to the insurance ‘portal’ and contacted them to approve it on Wednesday, at which point I was able to contact Apple and finally tell them that they could fix my laptop. As a result, on Thursday afternoon I was able to go and pick it up. By the time I got into the city and met Peter at the Apple store, we were both starving, so we popped over to Seven Dials Market and got some food at the stores there. I had a delicious gluten free fried chicken arepa and Peter got a truffle burger and we shared some wine. From there we spontaneously headed over to a cute wine bar in Holburn and ended up stopping for a glass of wine there before heading home to bed.

On Friday night we headed to the Old Truman Brewery off Brick Lane to BrewLDN. We’d been looking forward to this big brewing event for a while, having bought our tickets months ago, and it was exciting to finally get there and see the range of breweries exhibiting. Lee and Alar met us there and we all picked up our special glasses and spent an evening trying fascinating and interesting beers.

We didn’t have a heap of plans on Saturday, lounging around in the morning and having a slow start. I completed a bunch of my puzzle, which is still proving challenging! At 2:30 we headed up to Shoreditch for a special edition of the MRC run club, with the owner of the Mikkeller brewery and their master brewer joining us for a run from Shoreditch to Exmouth Market! It was quite a big group who showed up for this run as when we arrived at Exmouth Market, we were shown into the building site that is the soon-to-be Mikkeller Brewpub. It was still fairly sparse, but they had the big brewing vats installed up the back and downstairs in the basement, and the bar was still in place as before. They put a pilsner and a Vienna lager on tap and we had a couple of beers and a good chat to the MRC crew. At around 7 we headed home, intending to head down to Deptford for a friend’s music gig, but by the time we got home it was a bit late to make it to the gig anyway, so we ended up staying in and watching RuPaul’s instead.

On Sunday Peter had work at 7am so I had a slow start and skyped Mum and Dad in the morning. At 11 I headed to Old Street and had coffee with Tess, one of the anzuk girls who initially headed home in December and then missed London so much that she came back! Bonus for me, as we had a lovely brunch and coffee at an Australian-style café. At around 1 I caught the train down to London Bridge and met Peter at the Cloudwater brewery on the Bermondsey Beer Mile. We had a taste of a couple of beers that were leftover from Friends & Family and then I headed home to do the shopping and food prep. At 4:30 I headed to Kings Cross for book club, where we had a great chat about Such A Fun Age and a lovely catch up. It was a later book club than usual so by the time I got home it was 7:30 so we just had a chicken salad for dinner and then headed to bed ahead of another week!