Our first day back at school on the 1^st was an INSET (Curriculum) day, and a great chance to get everything organised for the children returning. We were surprised to find on Thursday and Friday how calm and ready the students were, particularly compared to the chaos that was last year’s start! What a difference it makes not having had 6 months off school!

One of the highlights of the time Peter was away was my choir starting back up again. Ready Singer One is a nerdy choir that sings songs primarily from movies and games, and we’d just started in 2020 before lockdown happened. This started back up in the second week of school and it felt fantastic to be back singing in a group again.

Peter got back on Thursday the 9^th and we had a pretty manic week after that. On the Friday we had a beer festival in Greenwich, where we coincidentally met up with both a group of people from Peter’s bottle share friends and some friends from our run club. We tried some fantastic beers and chatted to lots of brewers, and it was a really nice experience. The next morning we had to get up and ready pretty quickly as we were due to hop on a train to Cambridge for Adam’s memorial. Once we’d arrived in Cambridge and dropped our stuff at our hotel, we headed over to Cambridge Wine Merchants to have a glass of wine, before making our way to Sydney Sussex College to attend a catch up before the formal memorial event began. The grounds of the College were gorgeous, and it was fascinating to see ‘behind the walls’, as Ros put it. Bryan, Mickey and most of Adam’s friends who were at this first part of the evening were former students at the College, and many of them hadn’t seen each other since lockdown. At about 6 we headed into one of the quads, where Adam’s parents greeted everybody and ushered us into the dining hall. We had a sit down dinner where they alternated between courses of the meal and Bryan and Mickey MC-ing the speeches. It was bittersweet, as it was supposed to be a celebration of Adam’s life and a positive event, but most of the people there hadn’t been together since he died, so there were a lot of people feeling very fragile. After the dining finished, we moved into another hall (these Colleges are enormous!) where we had drinks and some music until the College kicked us out and we headed back to our Airbnb.

It was quite an emotionally exhausting day and we felt quite drained heading back to London the next morning. Luckily we were able to have a quiet afternoon, as the week wasn’t going to get any less hectic! Peter went on to night shifts that night, and each evening over the next four days I came home and we painted the parts of the house that hadn’t been done initially – the upstairs hallways, downstairs entryway and living room. It made for quite busy evenings, but was worth it for the lovely white walls!

On Tuesday we had a phone call with our lawyer, going through a game plan for how to deal with the dispute for our deposit. We’d received an email from the landlady on the previous Friday saying she was going to keep the entire deposit, but provided no check out report or breakdown of costs. The lawyer’s advice was to email her back requesting a breakdown, to ensure that we were as able to dispute her particular issues as possible. We did that on Tuesday evening and are now just waiting to hear from her.