Well after my last post, I definitely went downhill quickly! I felt like absolute rubbish that Sunday and ended up missing bookclub and having a sofa weekend – just blocked sinuses though, no Covid symptoms! Disappointing, as I’d been looking forward to bookclub – it’s one of my few regular social outings at the moment. It was a reasonably busy start to the week unfortunately and I had some important meetings so I had to head in to work on Monday.  After dealing with moderation of the students’ writing and a staff meeting about action planning for those of us who lead subjects on Monday, I also had a Zoom meeting with some crazy parents on Tuesday. However, once I’d got those out of the way it was smooth sailing at work for the rest of the week. For the most part we were just finishing work off ahead of the half term break.

We had a Zoom call with Peter’s dad on Wednesday and one with Stu and Rachel on Thursday, both of which mostly turned into complaining about our landlord (who we’ve been having quite a few issues with) and the slowness of the UK house-buying process. Fortunately this was balanced by a virtual pub night for Paul’s (Peter’s cousin) birthday on Friday and we enjoyed having a catch up with that group of friends.

On Saturday I headed in to the Hayward Gallery for an exhibition I’d booked tickets for a little while back. It was called ‘Among the Trees’ and was, unsurprisingly, about trees. There was a wide range of art, from traditional paintings to photography to beautiful sculptures and some video art. I really enjoyed it, particularly some of the pieces by an artist who focuses on ‘old’ trees – truly, some of them were 7,000+ years old! After the exhibition I headed home for a little while and then Peter and I walked up to Kill the Cat, a beer shop on Brick Lane. We had tickets to the ‘smallest beer festival in the world’, Kill the Cat’s annual birthday celebration, which had been reduced even further by having to book people in groups of less than 6 – and only one household inside. We got tickets outside, which was nice because it meant that Justin could meet us and he brought his friend Kat. We had an enjoyable afternoon trying some interesting beers – my favourite was a margarita sour, which was delicious! The salted caramel stout was pretty brilliant too though. Unfortunately it started absolutely pouring at about 7, although we were due to head off around then anyway so we quickly walked home and dried off. Back home we ordered some burgers and had an early night!

On Sunday I had a couch day, just relaxing and reading – and started a puzzle! Very exciting, I’d sort of forgotten I still had this one from my birthday and hadn’t started it ‘because we were moving’ but I’ll definitely have time to do it over the half term.