The last couple of weeks have been quite hectic at work, so it’s very much been a case of making it to the half term break! The year 6s have their final assessments in the second week after the break, so we’ve been preparing them for that while also writing reports, collating the evidence to submit for the Geography award, and of course just planning everyday lessons! The weather has been awful, with the rain of recent weeks continuing for a wet and miserable end to May. At least it’s slowly been warming up a bit.  

The upside has been I’ve been able to catch up with a few friends. I met up with Alex for a few beers at a brewhouse in Islington last Saturday, which was fantastic compared to our cold and rainy outdoors catch-up in December just before we went into lockdown!

That night we also watched Eurovision with Rachel and Stu on Zoom, which was as hilarious as expected – and a grim loss for the UK, who no one voted for! On Sunday I had my first in-person meet up with the book club that I’ve been meeting with most weeks since January, so it was lovely to actually meet the girls face-to-face and we had a great catch up about our book and life in general.

I promptly got a cold after the weekend, so spent the last week trying to recover from that, with a few days off to rest my very strained voice. The silver lining of the days off was that I had some time to write some of my reports.

After feeling much better by Friday and having a slow start to our day, Peter and I caught the train to Reading on Saturday. We stopped off at Wokingham and got a taxi to Siren brewery, where we had a couple of beers and intended to get some food from the Canadian food truck serving poutine! Unfortunately the food truck was really struggling with the demand and Peter was stuck in a line while I held the table for more than 45 minutes. We eventually gave up and got some crisps from the brewery shop before walking to the bus stop to head back to Reading.

In Reading, we had a quick stop at BrewDog so Peter could stamp his passport before heading to the restaurant where we were meeting Rachel and Stu. The Corn Stores is usually a fancy steak restaurant but to cope with opening again, they had a fixed menu set up. After being a bit nervous that Peter had told them my dietary requirements, I was super impressed to find that they had a dedicated low-FODMAP menu, which turned out to be fantastic. We had little snacks as starters, then three courses of delicious food including cured cod as a starter and lamb for the main. It was a fantastic first ‘nice dining’ experience post-lockdown, and so nice to see Rachel and Stu face to face after so long!

After dinner, we headed straight back to the train station and back to London to crash into bed ahead of a busy day tomorrow!