Wonderwool 2025

It was a very sunny Wonderwool this year. I was still full of overwhelm (the mood for 2025; I read something the other day about perimenopause causing anxiety and idly wondered if that might be why but no, undoubtedly it's the colossal workload I stupidly took on so I only have myself to blame) so I was largely in retreat for much of the weekend and left at lunchtime on Sunday, but I had a good time and it's always so nice to be in Brecon Forest, even if the dawn chorus/weird intrusive dreams/unease about deadlines woke me at 5 something on Saturday morning and 4 something on Sunday morning. I managed to finish knitting the peppermint mocha cardigan and get all the ends sewn in, it just needs a blocking and a zip now. 

Onto the goodies. I tried to be as thoughtful as possible about what I was buying, but may have come home with a bit more than last year. 

Taking it from the top -

• Some neons with a UV nep from Sealy MacWheely. I couldn't resist the brights. I loved her set from a few years ago and made a favourite jumper using it, so I am looking forward to seeing what this becomes. 
• Some grey with UV nep from Mothy and Squid, along with a gradient set from the Yarn Artist. This is to make the unicorn jumper for my niece, that I bought the pattern for last year. 
• A Starry Nights set from the Yarn Artist - this is just so very definitely me. It's the new watermelon. 
• Bird yarn from Mothy and Squid in the robin colourway. This was a last minute, on my way home purchase. I want to knit a vest top out of it, I have the pattern already in mind, and also convinced myself it would go well with my recently-finished cardigan. 
• The splurge - this is a kit of 45 colours (plus the undyed for swatching) that will knit into a three-dimensional shawl. It is absolutely gorgeous and also made of cashmere. I really dithered about this one because a kit this beautiful doesn't deserve to sit in stash for many years and I'm afraid it might. But in the end, I couldn't let it escape me. The colours are too pretty and the finished scarf is glorious. 

There was also a vintage jewellery booth this year, with any number of old-lady brooches which I could have sifted through for hours, were it not for a forthright woman coming along and moving me on as I was chatting to the owner. A good indication of my overwhelm, because on a normal day I would have stood my ground, but instead I fled. I went back later for this pin on the right, though, which is a cheapy little thing but holds a flower; and then spotted this string of real, hand knotted pearls. There were actually two and I'm a bit sorry I didn't get both, but they are very long so they loop up for layering. 

I'm off to Oxford today for the final fortnight of my course. The two mini assignments are done. I've given the conference presentation I also had to be working on and launched the new policy I needed to write for work. This feels very much as though there will be a lull in workload. I am looking forward to lots of sleep and nerdy reading and wholesome activities. Interestingly, the brain is just whirring from all the effort of the past couple of months, like it is revved up and ready to go  but without a clear direction. I want to knit all the things and I've got lofty plans for some work projects. Torn between wanting to capitalise on this and wanting to just let it spin down for a bit. 

Scenes from the Classroom #44

A couple of years ago, I brought back a teaching model for Y7 that we used when I started teaching. It means that I see my Y7 class almost every day and this has made for some great relationships. Lots of kids said at parents evening this week that mine was their favourite subject and, although I appreciate the time I've got back since I loaned them to a student teacher, this week she's been off doing some lectures and I have really enjoyed having them back, especially since I started a Tudors module with them. 

Predictably, in the first lesson, we didn't get much done. I have masses of knowledge of this topic and it is a favourite of many of the class already. At lesson end, I realised we had made it through two slides and precisely none of the lesson activities. 

Me: Oh, it's time to pack up, sorry, I have talked too much.

L: We have literally just talked about the Tudors for the whole lesson.

Me: I know (grimace) sorry about that, we will get more done next lesson.

L: I loved it. Best lesson ever. Ten out of ten, would recommend. 

I now know what it feels like to be reviewed on Trip Adviser.

Lordy, it's a busy time. So busy. I am #sadface a lot and having to remind myself that this situation was my choice. I'd like to say it's going to quieten down soon but...I can't actually see when that's going to happen. That said, a quick tally suggests I only have 15 more lessons to teach in the remaining nine weeks of this school year. I did a great job with picking my timetable last year, well done me. So at least there is some ebb in my main job. 

2025 Week 11

I'm not doing such a good job of keeping up with this in 2025, but 2025 is also going to be the year of "letting myself off because, as usual, I have taken too much on". We haven't had one of those in a while. 

I have been managing to keep abreast of all the various things I have to do, which include the usual school work things (lots of marking following the second round of mocks, a big review next week and it's the ski trip in 3 weeks), planning a presentation for a conference in May, attending exam board meetings and writing the module 2 assignment for uni. It is a lot to juggle. To say I am enjoying myself would be strong. But. The nice thing is that, after many years of taking on too much, I now know enough about myself to have some strategies in place. Firstly, I've gone to ground, socially. There is work and there is home and that is pretty much it. Gym and sleeping are a priority because they both help. 

Secondly, I'm having a nightly non-negotiable hour of work between 9 and 10. I mentioned this to my upper sixth, who've got coursework due soon, and offered to hold an open Teams meeting where all just work in silence and solidarity - no cameras, no microphones, but they can ask questions in the chat. This has proved so popular I have extended it from Mon-Thu to Sun-Fri. Not Saturday because just no. I was looking forward to it coming to an end next week, when coursework is in, but it turns out - they want to carry on. Sometimes I have had to do schoolwork in the hour instead of Masters work and tonight I worked on my presentation, because I've done about 5 hours on the Masters today already; sometimes I have to pick a really low-bar work activity, like searching for article to read. But it has kept me honest. Mr Z came and confiscated my phone last week because I was watching a TikTok - this helped. 

So, life is not very interesting but it is very productive. I need to stop thinking about when my next day off will be because it is so, so far off. 

I have been picking away at the sleeve of the yoked cardigan I started knitting in January, in the lovely, squishy Lorna's Laces in Peppermint Mocha that has been in my stash for decades. Now I am a bit thinner, I can wear thicker woolies again, so exciting. I think I might have enough yarn for full sleeves but I won't know until I've done them, which is annoying. Trying to convince myself that it's better to knit the full sleeve on one side and then rip it back if needed, rather than casting off at the pattern-recommended six inches and having to come back to it, but I really hate ripping back. Still, it is the sensible thing to do. I will then icord-edge the fronts and get started on sleeve two; I think I'm going to put a zip in, instead of the two buttons, as I am not a big fan of two-button open cardigans. It's a nice pattern though.

I finished reading KJ Maitland's Rivers of Treason in record time: actually before it was due back at the library, which is astonishing. It was a very easy read and I did whip through it in Oxford, finishing it on the train home, as it provided some light relief from the academic reading. I've now got my hands on the final book of the series, A Plague of Serpents, which I'm excited to start tonight. I've been trying to get though Claire North's House of Odysseus for months but it's proving tricky to get into, so I keep picking up a gardening book I bought (because I have so much time for a new hobby), The Book of Trespass (a favourite audiobook) and Underland (a top 5 book of all time). I usually manage 1-2 pages a night before falling asleep, so everything's going to take a while. Last night I went to bed at 9pm and managed precisely no pages of any book. But it did mean I was up by 7am this morning and I got loads done. 

I have been rewatching The Good Wife, a series I adored, over the past week and a half, as well as episodes of The Apprentice (still reeling from that woman who said she didn't know how to lay a table) and Sort Your Life Out. Now I am older, I am more jealous of Diane Lockhart's fabulous wardrobe - how does she manage to have so many stunning red jackets when I can't even find one that I am satisfied with? Also a bit sad to discover that Julianna Margulies wore a wig for her character but also amazed I never spotted it the first time. Interesting that she is almost exclusively pictured in skirts but gets pulled up for wearing trousers in an episode I watched today. I think that is the first pair of trousers I have seen the character wear so far. 

Not much time has been left in all of this for the business of weight loss and getting healthy. I have been stuck for some weeks now at the weight I made it to just before Christmas. I just want to eat all the things and it is hard to spare enough energy to fuel my willpower. The gym attendance has also dropped off, though I think I have realised that's because I've been trying to transition to treadmill running from the elliptical. I hate treadmill running, it is dull and without variation. So yesterday I went and bashed out 20 minutes on the elliptical instead, and did 10 minutes + sled pushes on the treadmill today. Much easier. I keep in mind the old maxim, 'You can't out-train a bad diet' and therefore seem to have sub-consciously decided that the gym was not contributing to my weight loss; but that is just silly. I don't have a bad diet. I'm not trying to out-train it. I'm trying to complement it. Plus it's also lighter in the evenings, which is a big psychological help. So, this week I will try to hit the gym for cardio on Monday and Friday. 

2025 Week 9

I've spent the past week in my garret in Oxford, trying to do all the studying and unscramble my brain after days of lectures. It was a good and interesting week. Nice to see everyone on the course again. A bit more practical than the first week, so a bit less intense and I left with the general feeling that I could do it, rather than the feeling that I was so out-of-my-depth I was making a fool of myself, which is how I went into it. I had the result for the first module back during half term and it was OK. It was a high low pass, by which I mean it was a high score in the low pass bracket. Naturally I wanted it to be a high distinction but I really just need to set that aside. I'm working two jobs at the same time, after all, and still seem to be attempting to have some sort of life, so a pass is all that is required.

Naturally hoping I will smash the next one though, which is a much more structured piece. 

We went for a Guest Night dinner at college during the week, which included a lecture and a lot of wine included in the price. It was very grand and dripping with Oxford tradition, so it was good to get a taste of that. Here is the exact moment when I was unable to continue holding the squat in front of my coursemates.

I managed to read a whole novel during the week. It's amazing how much one can get done when there's no interesting TV to watch, no knitting and no pressing schoolwork (or rather, you are refusing to do pressing schoolwork because it's an unpaid week). It was Rivers of Treason by KJ Maitland, which is the third in the Daniel Pursglove series. I was quite surprised to find the fourth (and seemingly final) book is already out, so that's on order from the library too. I found it a bit beach read-y, hence being able to whip through it so quickly, and I was unreasonably annoyed that she kept using the word slither when she clearly meant sliver. A quick google suggested this might be falling into accepted usage now but, unlike using 'staycation' to describe any UK-based holiday, this is not an accepted usage I am agreeable to. 

Obvs I will still be reading book 4 though. The set up has been long and I can't wait to find out what happens. 

Other things of note from the past couple of weeks -

I got plenty of sleep. Early nights and no alarms in half term, early nights and consistently waking before my alarm in Oxford. I feel very rested. 

Pilates. I have been a few times now. I still think it's over-priced, but the last one I did (in half term) was with the studio owner and I thought she was better than the other instructor. Unsurprising. Perhaps I will go back, as my glutes hurt for three days. But I can probably do all that stuff at the gym, if I think about it a bit. 

Baths. I love a morning bath and my Oxford garret has a bathtub, so with a 9.30am start, I made it a habit. 

Walks. University Parks continues to be my favourite place in Oxford. the whole place is full of snowdrops at the moment, with a decent smattering of crocuses and celandine. Can't wait to go back in April and see what else has come out. There is also a small swan family back on the pond. They look so pretty that people keep stopping to take pictures, convincing the swans that they are going into their pockets for food and causing a lot of hopeful neck stretching. Hours of entertainment. 

I also managed a good muddy walk around Port Meadow, scoping out places I hope I can go swimming in May. Fingers crossed for good weather. 

Tuesday Ten

Picking up from my y13s being endeared by my old-lady-internet-enthusiasm last week - Ten Granny Internet Stories

1. Going to Avalon hostplay with R and being really bemused by these people that would travel to the house of a man who slept on a shelf, just to play a game they had to pay to play. I did have an Avalon account for about five minutes at one point. I didn't get it. 

2. Circa 1995, having a phone conversation with a man who had a dream about internet shopping malls - places that you would go to buy things from shops like Boots, and you'd have them all in one place. I thought I might be able to use my nascent HTML skills to work with him (I had essentially learned most of it from a programme called Hotdog, if memory serves). Oh this sounds hilarious now, given what internet shopping has become. Absolutely wild. Making websites used to be so simple. I think I sent him my work on a floppy disk. 

3. Reading endless stories of someone called Victor, online, in the computer lab at Hatfield where my boyfriend was at uni. They were questionable and sometimes obscene. I have looked for them again but the internet is too big now. 

4. The 100 point purity test for non-virgins. This was the nerdy version of More magazine for 90s girls. 

5. Said Hatfield boyfriend and I shared a domain at Demon. It was tinyred. So our email address (I feel there was just one, I can't remember if we had our own...I have a folder of printed emails I could look in but I just can't read those emails right now, not enough time has passed for it not to be awkward yet) ... our email address was xxxx@tinyred.demon.co.uk 

I have just bitten the bullet and looked, we did have our own email addresses. This makes me feel better. I was hoping that, even back in those days, I wasn't a person who shared an email address with their boyfriend. 

I was a person who printed out their emails, though. 

6. The notion of modem speed. The first modem I used was 2400 which was slow even by the standards of the day, when everyone was on at least 14.4k and the richest nerds had 28.8k. Then the 56.6k came out and that was the fastest of the fastest. I didn't really need speed as all I used it for was chatting to people, but I was still a bit jealous. The first I heard of wired internet was when R was going to get it in 1999 and the thought of having a connection that did not tie up the phone line, that was always on and that didn't cost half my monthly salary in phone bills was just dreamy. 

7. Related to that - computers that were simple enough that even I could take them apart and fix them. Somewhere on my old blog is the story of when I had a problem getting online that I thought was being caused by the modem. All my nerd friends said it was not. R wanted to reinstall Windows for me. This sounded drastic and horrible so I just unscrewed my machine, pulled out the modem and put in the old one I (for some reason) just had lying around the house. It solved the problem. 

Now I don't even know if I have a modem. There's a huge thing that looks like an upside down tarantula with a purple belly and a wire goes to my machine. If Mr Z ever dies suddenly, I am going to be in trouble. 

8. Ah yes - the old blog. The OG. Written in Notepad and later some similar programme called something like Notepad Plus; all the html tags included to make the background and writing different shades of purple and keep the paragraphing in place and make the font big when I was shouting. Painstakingly uploaded via....I can't even remember what it was I used to upload it. FTP? Then noticing mistakes and having to edit and reupload. Endless words and the very occasional scanned picture that you had to click through to view, I am unsure why I wasn't putting pictures in in-line to start with. Perhaps I didn't know how. 

Now I've had the blog on Blogger since 2007 and I don't know what I would do if Blogger went away. My blog has been around for more than half my life. I'd probably manage, but would I keep putting it up online? I think doing all the writing on it for decades has taught me a lot about my writing style and how I like to communicate. I don't much care for the way I wrote in the early days now but that was a product of the fact I spent hours chatting on BBSs and then ICQ, there were no emojis and the idea of communicating by gif....well. What was a gif?

Blogs are now old media. But when I started, they weren't even really a thing. How have I been alive for this long? 

9. My first experience with Amazon, in the summer of 2000. I wanted to buy a couple of CDs - Coldplay's Parachutes and the Magnolia soundtrack - to take with me when I moved to Vegas. It seemed very futuristic that I would place an order online and then the CDs just arrived in the post. It turns out I has a bit late to the Amazon party as it had already been around for a year or two by then. This might be the same for internet banking - I always thought I must have been one of the first people to get online banking from Natwest, because I pushed really hard for it so I could check my bank balance when I moved to the US, and my user name was [mybirthday]0016 - I always wondered whether I was the 16th user, or the 16th user with my birthday. Probably the latter. 

(This just made me go and look at these statistics which are really interesting! So probably 1500-2000 people in Britain with the same birthday as me.)

10. This is the oldest I have ever been now - I just really miss that the internet used to be about connecting with people. Tapping away on a bulletin board, playing trivia and tetrinet against people, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Trillian, blogs - writing, reading and commenting, long chatty emails, email exchanges across half a dozen people like a groupchat, forums, even early Facebook. All about talking to real people, for the purpose of talking to other people. I think social media has killed that - or rather, the monetisation of it has; the algorithms that push the negative comments higher, the financial gain that comes from going viral and all that creates. It was quite golden before all that came along. I was a pretty shy person with a tight circle of friends and little confidence to go out and make new ones, and the internet was a game-changer for me - for no other reason than I used it. I didn't even have to try. 

Normally I don't go in much for sad-eyes nostalgia, the past is just that; but now I have reached my great age, I find that I can feel a sense of loss for something that evolved in my lifetime and has evolved right out of existence again, before my very eyes. Boo. 

Not that I've got time for it anymore though, I suppose. 

That seemed to get to 10 quite quickly, and I haven't even mentioned Napster, early experiments with email (involved something called nodes but I can't remember much more than that), how we searched before Google and browsed before Internet Explorer and posted videos before YouTube, the first MP3 player...I wonder if I can think of enough for another 10. Maybe looking through those printed out emails would give me some inspiration, but I'm not sure I can do it. 

2025 Week 7

It is hard, when it's the depths of winter and also a busy term, isn't it? Thank goodness half term is finally here. 

I've had a busy couple of weeks with non-work work and writing my short assignment ahead of the next week at uni, which was due last Sunday. It was only a thousand words but by the time I had finished it, I largely disagreed with over half of what I'd said and had lost most of my confidence in it as a decent response to the question. Feedback came very swiftly and I feel like all my concerns were well-placed. There was one point where I just stopped in the middle of a sentence - poor show. Some positive comments here and there, but I have finally made a start on the reading list and can already see that, if I'd done some of the reading before I wrote the essay, it would have been miles better. A helpful learning point for next time.

The scale of the reading list is currently overwhelming but I have all of this week to do it and I can only do what I can do. I managed to mark half of the Y11 mocks before I even finished term and have almost finished the other half, which is good going. I think Tuesday will be a schoolwork day and the rest of the time, I can just hit the books. I'm going up to Oxford next Saturday so I also have the option of Sunday in the library, though I do really fancy going to the natural history museum there for a look round. More incentive to read this week!

I have been done a few culture things since my last wittering. This past week I went to see Merlin Sheldrake talk about fungi and learned some very interesting facts, especially this about a species of fungi that infects cicadas, rots part of their body off and then makes them fly in a jerky way to spread the spores. The lecture came with a film of beautiful time lapses of various fungi growing. A lot more interesting than I had hoped, even. 

Then today, Mr Z and I went to see the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at Bristol Museum and then out for lunch. Between this and the semi-regular Saturday brunches, we are in danger of becoming almost a normal couple. 

Not much has happened at home in terms of culture though. I finally finished reading What You Are Looking For Is In The Library this week, during my ritual end-of-term early morning coffee and pastry in Friday. We've been finishing up our annual play-through of Super Luigi, so there hasn't been much TV watching, but we did watch Conclave at some point. I love Robert Harris but it was somewhat missing the tension I was expecting. It just won the Bafta though, so maybe it's just me missing something. 

I set aside the cardigan knitting and made a mini hot water bottle cover for my colleague at work, who is just about to start chemo. My gauge was a bit off because the yellow is DK and not 4-ply (leftovers from Volt), but the grey is a gorgeous Rowan angora that has been in my stash for ages and it makes the whole thing so soft and fluffy. 

I continue to frequent the gym though no more weight has been lost, which I've found a bit depressing, to be honest. I keep reminding myself that I went back to a weight I was 15 years ago in the space of four months and that is fine for now, if it takes another six months for my body to recalibrate so I can lose a bit more. But all this sensible rationalising means nothing when I spend the week carefully counting my calories and the number on the scale remains resolutely at its post-Christmas inflation. I went to the extreme length of weighing myself after I'd been to the gym this morning, though, and the scale reckoned I'd lost nine pounds in a week. I know I have not but it did make me feel like there might be more weight loss to come. 

Better head back to the marking and assignments. I indulged in a very good nap today so I have got my second wind now. Naps are a holiday pleasure. I have been a bit sad at all the ski pictures in my Timehop over the past few days, wishing we were still going, but it's not long now until the school trip. 

Scenes from the Classroom #43

Today, one of my favourite pieces of stationery broke. It's a plastic concertina folder that has tabbed compartments, but it opens fully rather than being a wallet. Hard to explain. Anyway, I bought it a Carrefour in France on holiday with Tutt about a decade ago and I haven't seen anything like it since. It split all down one seam and is not salvageable. I was glum when I handed Y13 back their essays - it is the folder of all marking. 

Me: I bought it on holiday in France, I'll never be able to replace it.

Them: It's bound to be on Amazon.

Me: I have looked but I don't even know what to search for.

S: You can take a picture of it to search.

Me: What! I didn't even know that was a thing!

S: Yes, search by picture.

Me: *dons reading glasses* so you mean, I should search for it in Google Lens or...

S: No, you can do it right on Amazon.

Me: *tappity tap tap* *squinty squint* *be old*

Behold, purchase options for my folder appear almost instantly. My face lights up like Christmas morning. Then, the piece de resistance...

L: Awwww!

That's it. The line is properly crossed. I am now just an old person who doesn't understand the internet. And I was basically there at the start. But still - now I'm Mother Hand. As if those years of learning HTML tags meant nothing. 

It's the beginning of the end.