Peter had Monday and Tuesday off so we had planned a few little bits. Peter had a doctor’s appointment on Monday so I just had a chill morning before meeting him at Mile End and going on a big walk up through Mile End and along the canals to Victoria Park. We cut through the park, which was lovely and autumnal in the brisk sunshine, and walked down to Hackney. At Howling Hops we picked up a snack and a special barrel-aged bottle of beer from and then walked across the Merchant’s Tap for a half pint of a lambic ale and a special stout. The plan hadn’t been to stay out so long, just go for a walk but it was such a nice day we just needed to be out and about!

Unfortunately the clocks changed on Sunday so it started getting dark at about 4:30, so we hopped on a bus and headed home. We got home just in time to pick up a bottle of champagne on the way before our special dinner was delivered – we were celebrating my recent pay rise basically as an excuse to celebrate something after a very stressful couple of weeks. We had ordered a delicious ‘Nordic’ dinner from Ekte, a fancy restaurant in the city. We had little Smorrebrods for entrée, then shared steak and Swedish meatballs as our main.  It was delicious, and we watched Enola Holmes while we ate, which made for a lovely relaxing evening.

On Tuesday morning we skyped Padley and Amelia and it was lovely to touch base with some friends. After an hour we had to rush off though, as we’d left it a bit late and had to hot foot it to the station to catch the tube in to Westminster. We made our way around towards St James Park to the Cabinet War Rooms, also known as the Churchill War Rooms, where we had to line up in a socially distanced line and wait for our timed entry to the exhibitions.  The Cabinet War Rooms are the bunkers where the cabinet, alongside Winston Churchill, worked during World War 2. They’d set up a one-way system through the exhibition that toured the rooms that the Cabinet worked and lived in, including clear plastic screens down to the bunking area on the subbasement level. It was very cool, and seemed very authentic – all the furniture seemed to be original, and the maps on the walls were the same ones used during the war. We weren’t such fans of the Churchill Museum later in the exhibit, which wasn’t particularly well curated and was quite hard to navigate, with no official ‘one way’ system and people (and children) all over the place. It was also wildly biased, basically going on about Churchill the war hero, which wasn’t particularly surprising but was still a little irritating. We did have a big read though – I didn’t realise he was from such an aristocratic family and learned a few other similar things about his background and early life.

From the Churchill War Rooms we caught the train over to London Bridge and walked home from there. Peter followed up on a few house things and had a nap and I had a quiet afternoon doing my puzzle and listening to my audiobook. Peter was on nights on Tuesday night so we watched a couple of episodes of Dark – fantastic German show, would definitely recommend – over dinner before he started work and I headed to bed!

I set aside Wednesday and Thursday this week as ‘work days’ so I’ve had a very productive last two days knocking down all the things on my to-do list that I was putting aside at the end of term. I’ve re-planned most of the school’s geography curriculum (‘my’ subject) and did some professional learning for supporting dyslexic children (I’ve got three in my class – officially, anyway) and for the mental health course I’m doing. Aside from that, we’ve also booked a weekend away down at Battle so I’ll actually have something fun to write about on the weekend!