2024 Weeknote 16

What a grind this week has been, going back to work. My leg has been sore and getting sorer (nine weeks, now, since that ill-advised bit of off-piste, ugh), the nasty throat thing I had while I was skiing this month has become the most irritating tiny persistent cough with accompanying gravel voice, I have just wanted to eat everything in sight and I've been so weary that every waddling movement has felt like an effort. I've been down to the cafe near school to get a coffee or a snack on more than one occasion, when I usually reserve this for just Tuesday breaktime when I teach sixth form. I keep forgetting to bring marking home (genuinely forgetting, too), so I cancelled my attendance at a history lecture I really wanted to see on Wednesday only to then realise I could have gone because I hadn't brought the work home to do anyway, and on Thursday after parents' evening, I lay on the bed for nearly an hour looking at my phone before finally giving up and going to bed. 

Once again I thought I must be ill but once again I must remind myself - it's the first week of a new term. 

Thankfully, Thursday's early night did me some good and Friday was better. I watched some interviewees teach. I've dealt with increasing levels of panic from my exam classes who all would prefer me to run extra sessions with them to revise - sorry kids, revision also has to happen at home you know. I've had a good idea to tackle a problem I've been wrestling with for most of the time I've been doing my current role. The sun has been out and I've been able to sit in the garden a bit. The front-garden camelia is looking glorious. 

I am making great progress on Topolino and think I might be done with the body of it, bar the lower edge. I think the pattern is going to suggest finishing it with four rounds of st-st but I am not about the roll so will need to adjust that. I am toying with adding another lace repeat but don't want it to be too long; I suppose it's a question of whether I'd rather rip back or add on. Definitely rip back, I think, so maybe another lace repeat is good. The reflection from the picture frame caught the knitting just perfectly yesterday to illuminate the colour, I love it. 

I made slow reading progress on Still Life but fast progress through Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential on audiobook, which is very entertaining. We finished Game of Thrones and started season 3 of True Detective; Mr Z does not remember watching the first two but I remember that we liked the first one by not the second. We had knitting group yesterday so I got some cheese (there is a great nearby cheese shop) and then went to a makers' market in Staple Hill on the way home, where I bought a stupidly frivolous gold sequinned cap with orange fringing. I have no use for such a garment but it was so lovely. I suppose I have got a festival ticket booked for Victorious, I can wear it for Fatboy Slim. 

And this morning I went cold swimming for the first time this year.

I don't think I've ever seen the water level this high; they were flooded earlier this year, apparently. It was 11.9 degrees. Rachael did not bring her wetsuit and I managed not to be horrified about this because I knew that, if I was, she wouldn't get in. Hats off to her, she got in and also convinced me to do a second (small) lap. She had a place for the marathon today and deferred it, so her mantra was 'it's not a marathon'. Funnily enough I did actually get used to the cold this time, which is a good indication that it is about warm enough to swim in, so I guess this marks the beginning of swim season. 

Lopes

Sometimes, a name hangs around in your brain.

When I started teaching, the school I was at had a unit on slavery that focused on the local town hall, which by then housed a law firm and a takeaway, if I recall correctly. My HoD had done some research into the area and discovered that the town hall had been built by some Devon landowner in order to ingratiate himself to the locals after he had purchased the right to name both MPs in the district. His name was Manasseh Masseh Lopes and the name stuck in my head because I was never sure if the pronunciation was lopes as in 'He lopes across his family plantation, surveying the extent of their sugar holdings' or lopes as in 'Senor Lopes'. The unit students studied considered whether the area should acknowledge the slave trade connection of this building. He'd been born in Jamaica in 1755 so it was pretty clear where their family wealth had come from. 

Some years later I saw, probably during a particularly in-depth wiki rabbit hole on an evening when I should have been marking, that (now Queen) Camilla's daughter's surname was Lopes. How interesting! That name isn't very common. I ran down the next rabbit hole and found her new husband was also from the southwest. How interesting! Not much more digging needed to be done to find he was indeed descended from the Lopes of the town hall fame. I texted my HoD and he was flabbergasted that I'd even remembered the name, let alone made the connection. So the knowledge got filed somewhere in my brain.

But when one of the influencers I follow on Insta did an interview on her business podcast with Katie Lopes, one of the founders of a popular knicker brand, the name rang that bell in my head again.

Interestingly, this was a lot harder to bloodhound my way through. But I was motivated. Katie Lopes has done quite a lot of interviews now where she talks about the difficulties of being a female entrepreneur, that she has to do it as a single mum, that her vile-sounding ex-husband saddled her with £1.5m of debt that she didn't even know about because he was so toxic, how she was able to raise sponsorship for Stripe & Stare against the odds, and so on. This is all admirable. As the daughter of a single parent and one supportive of and interested in female entrepreneurs, I take my hat off to her, really. It is really impressive that she's managed to achieve this. 

But.

That name. Hasn't that name helped?

I'm not really about the aristocracy talking about how success in business is '90% grit'. I think back to my single mother when I was a teenager and how the conversation might have gone if I'd told her, hey Mum, if you were just a bit tougher and had a bit more drive, you too could win millions in investment and start up a very successful knicker company. What an excessively cruel and crushing message that would have been for her to hear. Even with Mother Hand's endless patience, I fear homelessness would have been my next move. 

So, I started to try to find out more about Katie, to see if she was indeed connected to the Lopes family of which I was already aware. I think she's quite careful. There's not much about her online that you'd stumble across unless you were specifically trying to find a connection. The fact she was raised in Devon was a pretty big clue and thankfully The Peerage did not let me down: the Honourable Katie, to use the full title she was born with, is indeed the daughter of the Third Baron Roborough, making her the sister of the current one and the cousin-in-law of the king's stepdaughter. There are no pictures, so I couldn't be certain it was the same Katie Lopes, but then I found a Telegraph announcement of her marriage (this connection also listed on The Peerage and also that man's name, mate, did you not guess he was a wrongun from the start?) and then an interview with her in her married name, which does have pictures of her, looking like a younger version of the Katie Lopes doing the rounds of female-business-owner-friendly media. 

(Why yes, I do have marking to do, why do you ask?)

I'm just quite disappointed that I haven't found this background acknowledged in anything I've read or heard about her, if I'm honest. I'm not naive enough to think that every scion of a peerage is sitting on huge inherited wealth. I'm sure the family didn't just reach down the back of its sofas to pay her ex-husband's debts and fund her new business - sarcastic as that sounds, I mean it. I bet she has worked really hard and she should be really proud. 

But when people who move in circles of very privileged people then spend quite a lot of time chatting about how they've had to 'build everything back from scratch' and anyone can do it if they just 'fuck everything they've ever been told', it properly grates. It's disingenuous and not supportive of other women trying to make it in business that don't have the privilege of knowing people who know people, or knowing people who can vouch for them. If you're not acknowledging the privilege granted by your background in conversations like this, you're not doing it right. It doesn't undermine your success. Privilege does not equate to business success. But when it's unacknowledged, that does undermine it, in my opinion - what are you trying to hide? 

I read a story this week about a woman having to give up her beloved pet dog because she's being made homeless, through no fault of her own. It made me a bit tearful. Try telling her she just needs grit to build back from nothing, when what she really needs is a relative or close friend with a property big enough to have an empty summer house or a second home somewhere, or enough money in their own property to go guarantor for her. I bet Katie had a few of those. 

I wonder when the next Lopes will pop up in my life?

2024 Weeknote 15

I had a hermit's dream of a few days away in London this week. 

I stayed at a fabulous little historic pub in Greenwich, called the Prince of Greenwich, which provided a huge squashy bed with lots of pillows, lots of peace and quiet, a kitchenette for preparing one's own meals (I did not use it but it was a good space), a small black kitten boss and superb Italian food for dinner one night. I was a bit nervous about it being noisy because, yknow, pub, but it seems to no longer be a pub but more of a restaurant, so it was closed by 10pm every night. It was one of those classic British pubs which was stuffed full of every curio you can imagine and the sign for the ladies' toilet said, 'Women are always right' which I loved. 

I went to three exhibitions/museums while I was there, starting with the Entangled Pasts exhibition at the Royal Academy, which looks at how art played a part in shaping our perceptions of empire, enslavement and colonialism. It was full of historic art and contemporary pieces and it was very much up my alley. I am full of examples of how the British Empire has shaped pretty much every institution and aspect of British culture, so hearing from the RA about how their own existence owes much to this period was music to my ears. 

Then on Wednesday, I went to the National Maritime Museum and the Museum of London, Docklands, both places which have been on my list to visit for a very long time and both places which added a huge amount of context to the story of the British Empire that I've been teaching. I think the NMM just pipped the MoL to the favourite spot but I could easily have spent a whole day in either place. Woe that they are so far east, it makes it a tricky place to go to on a day trip. However, I am going to need to go back to NMM because there is a lot I didn't see and at least one other museum that I didn't go into, as part of the complex, so plenty more learning to do.

I think my favourite anecdote from across the museum exhibits was probably this -

The mind boggles at how a man might be so 'ill-used' in a brothel as to occasion his death. I can only assume they meant he caught syphilis. 

On Tuesday night I went to the National Theatre to see Underdog: The Other Other Bronte, which popped up in my Facebook ads while I was in Austria. It was a fantastic piece of theatre. Firstly, the stage/theatre itself was small and I was sat quite near the stage so it felt like I was almost a part of it; secondly, I think the three main actors must have put an incredible amount of time into rehearsing and getting comfortable with each other, because they played sisters really well. Charlotte was played by Gemma Whelan who is fresh in my mind from my rewatch of Game of Thrones and she began the play in the audience, asking people what their favourite of her books was. 'Harry Potter, what?!' she quipped at one point. 

Other notable points of the trip included catching the Uberboat from Greenwich to Embankment, feeling like Elizabeth I; a visit to Liberty for a scarf and some new Jones Road make up (their counter girls were so rude last time, I almost didn't go, but I really wanted to try a face pencil and needed matching. A much better experience this time, thankfully); a haircut; a lunch with Mother Hand and Sib to mark Father Hand's passing; and hanging out with the niblings. I also read two books, finishing Lone Women (creepy and wonderful) and Copper Sun by Sharon M Draper, which offered an interesting perspective on where runaway enslaved people might have journeyed in 18th century America. I've started The Good Immigrant by Nikesh Shukla and Still Life by Sarah Winman. I caught up on lots of recorded TV - how is it already interviews week on The Apprentice and how did I miss a whole series of Sort Your Life Out? - and slept a lot too. 

Family snap.

Now, I suppose, I'm ready to go back to work. 

2024 Weeknote 14

So, as it turned out, writing a personal blog post was not something I had time to do last weekend and it has been a busy week indeed. Ski trip number 14 was not beset with the same extreme delays as number 13 - far from it, we got an earlier crossing in both directions - but it had its own issues. We were one staff member down as one of us fell really sick the day before we were due to leave. On Monday, it rained heavily for the whole day and we had to cut our skiing short and go bowling instead, or risk a mutiny from the students. I came down with a horrible cough/throat thing and had to avoid skiing for a day and cut the next day short so I could go back to the hotel to sleep. Our instructors were quite old and struggled to keep up with the students, and refused to take us to the glacier to ski. I was woken up near midnight two nights in a row, first by one of the drivers (drunk) bringing women into the hotel and giggling with them in the corridor; then by a woman coming to knock on the rep's door at nearly midnight, and then going inside to have some noisy sex with him. Cue me lying awake until well past 2am, panicking about how she got into the hotel and who else might therefore be able to get in. I penned a stiff email to the tour operator and the next day, the woman (it turned out she was on the hotel staff) was fired, the rep was forced to switch rooms with one of the drivers and the hotelier had a permanent scowl. He made a point of coming to chat with me about how angry he was with the rep. 

The rep asked me to ask the hotelier to give the woman her job back. She wasn't a professional, he insisted, as the hotelier had suggested. She was a single mother of two. This was a small valley and she would struggle to find another job. She was young and a bit stupid. As the rep was neither young nor stupid, I had to bite back my instant reply which was, 'I'm very much over men making awful choices and women suffering the lion's share of the consequences, why don't you clean up your own mess by inviting her to live with you in Vienna, if you feel that bad?'

I did plan to have a word but the hotelier was notably absent for the rest of the trip. A shame indeed. Not that I think I could have made a difference. My main issue was strangers in the hotel so the fact that she worked there mitigated that. But once I'd complained there was no going back.

Anyway.

There were some really good bits too. Beating my top time down the mountain and finally breaking 80kph, after years of trying - Rachael said that she was stood near two people on the side of the piste when I did this and they broke their conversation to marvel at my speed. I bought new goggles and then the driver took them back for me to get the magnetic tag removed, what a nice thing to do. Kaiserschmarrn and those Austrian ski wafers. Sipping coffee in a Guess-sponsored mountain hotel whilst watching a hardcore Austrian walk up the mountain in front of us. Fun with the drivers who were Irish and generally lovely although very fond of a beer (not before driving, obvs). They took us to the wrong hotel to start with, two hours away from ours, and then we got stuck in a traffic jam getting back to the main road, but even that was fun. 

The students decided this was how we wore our hair for the slopes. I didn't hate it. 

I finished the book I was reading, The Ottoman Secret. It improved as it went on. I felt like it was a bit of a moral defence of western democracy which, given the current state of western democracy, did not thrill me, but it was a good yarn. I've started a new one, Lone Women by Victor LaValle. It is a horror set in homesteading Montana at the start of the 20th century. It's making me want to reread Annie Proulx's short stories. 

Naturally not much else happened in terms of leisure. I did finish knitting the front panels for my nephew's Presto Chango and managed to adequately reproduce the Notts Forest logo, as that is Sib's team.  

It's a bit pointier than I'd like but tough to do a big rounded tree over such a small number of stitches. 

Off to London tomorrow for some museums and a play. Very exciting. 

2024 Weeknote 12

I began the week with a spectacularly early start so I could get to Birmingham for a meeting. It is really very easy to get the train anywhere from Bristol Parkway, what with the large and reasonable car park, and if you're on the train at 6.45am, the traffic is non-existent too. The meeting was interesting and finished predictably early, which meant I say around at Birmingham New Street for an hour, in spite of walking the half hour back to the station and then having a shop in Selfridges, because school told me that the Trainline had 'run out' of flexible tickets. A shameless lie, but of course they had already booked the advanced ticket by the time they told me this. When I tried to get it changed, the man at the station told me it was £30, which considering the singles there and back totalled £52, was a rip off. 

I've got to go again in June. I will be driving. Parkway is easy enough but as for the rest of it...bleuch. 

That said, on my way home from the station, I stopped for petrol and thought my front tyres looked a bit bald, and upon closer inspection, found a nail driven into one of them. We have a neighbour who has form for this but I don't think I've done anything to upset him recently. Mr Z took my car in the next day so I had to get the bus in to work, meaning I arrived at 6.59am, which is too early for anyone to be to work tbh. When I got home, Mr Z said there was also a nail in one of my rear tyres (he tried to make this sound like it could have been an unhappy accident but my money is definitely on the neighbour). I'm saving those for when I am away skiing next week. I can't do any more pre-6am get ups this close to a holiday. 

We interviewed for staff for my department this week and got two really good ones, so that was nice. One of them is already working with us on a temp contract and I really thought he was a shoo-in but, on the day, someone else did a stronger interview. Luckily I came up with a solution so we could have both. The stronger candidate, as it turned out, had been in to do some pre-teaching observations with me in my first year at the school and liked it enough to want to come back. I used to say yes to absolutely anybody who asked back in those days, when it was a bit easier (no escorting to the toilet), because I was so lonely as the sole subject teacher. It's nice to know that it bears fruit. 

We are reaching the end of Better Call Saul - three episodes left. We speeded up a bit so we could get it in before I go away on Friday. It really is exceptional TV and it makes me want to visit Albuquerque again, even though Albuquerque isn't the sort of place one goes on holiday. I bet there's a Better Call Saul locations tour though. And there's skiing only a few hours away. Maybe one day...in my copious free time. 

I am continuing to make good progress on Topolino and am about four inches into the body now. 

As always, the blue isn't quite right in this picture - it is a little more turquoise. The yarn is 10% linen which gives it a lovely rustic look. I'm supposed to knit to 7 inches and then start the lace section, but I think I'm going to knit to 5 inches instead. I'm finding that a lot of my 4-ply sweaters are just a smidge too long these days and I'm not sure if this is because I've knitted them a bit long or because they've grown. The Ravelry notes on this yarn (Madelinetosh Dandelion) say it grows with blocking so I am going for a scant 12 inches instead of the recommended 14. I can always make the bottom longer. 

I do love a boatneck and an Isabell Kraemer pattern but I am already thinking about how I'm going to finish the collar on this. One round of purl and bind off is not going to be the one. I already have one Isabell Kramer 4-ply jumper that slides off the shoulder and nobody needs to be looking like they're in an 80s dance movie that often. 

It was a very relaxing weekend, tbh. I drove into town and bought pastry treats and some hot cross buns from Farro. I packed for skiing and made some granola, as is my ritual. I finished work on the two exam papers I had left so they are all ready to go. I didn't do any school work, which may turn out to be a mistake - more interviews tomorrow. 

Next weekend I will attempt to weeknote from Austria...we will see. I don't want to take a laptop and the Blogger app really isn't friendly. I'll give it a go. 

2024 Weeknote 11

I am getting later and later with these but I am determined!

I went to Birmingham on Friday night with Rachael and we had a nice brief hotel stay before going to an education conference on Saturday. I've been a few times before but it was interesting to go now that I am preparing for/doing a senior role. The sessions are largely generic, whereas the vast majority of the training I attend is subject-specific, so it had lost its shine for me. But it's very shiny now! Loads of ideas to come away with and it was lovely to go with someone as well, because we got to natter about the sessions with each other afterwards. And then we got to go to Gloucester Services on the way home as well. 

I made good progress on the Topolino sweater and divided for the armholes on Sunday. This indicates that progress will now slow right down but I have been picking away at it this week. I need to go back to my nephew's toddler cardigan but I am sort of saving that for the ski trip.

Books and TV series continued as last week. There was a busy parents evening and an attempt at yoga, which my still-poorly hamstring....I know it's not surprising to anybody that being older makes healing such a long process, least of all me (lest we forget the time when I fell off a paddleboard in summer 2020 and my coccyx hurt until roughly January 2022) but that doesn't make it any less damn frustrating....complained about, so I had to do a lot of weird, made-up poses. Skiing again in under two weeks so I am hoping I don't make it any worse. 

I've had two crack-of-dawn starts in a row but I'll tell you all about that next weekend, or else these weeknotes are going to become a mixture of fortnight notes and day notes. 

All my pictures last week are screenshots of social media because I didn't really do anything. My magnolia did finally flower though. Four years it's been in the ground and it finally got there. I have some pictures of that but I am not sure where they are. Something for next week's post. 

2024 Weeknote 10

It was a busy old week. I drove to Walsall on Thursday night for a trust meeting on Friday, then drove straight on to Wales to join the bunkhouse sprucing volunteer party. I spent all day Saturday cleaning and this was more blissful than it sounds. The meals were all cooked for me, the woodburner kept stoked and there was barely any internet so it was delightfully peaceful. The rest of the work party were mostly decades older, mostly male and mostly retired teachers with a heavy predilection for outward bound - hence their love of the bunkhouse - and it was sort of nice to be back in this quaint time where it's perfectly acceptable to say that, since it's international women's day, perhaps the international women should wash up? Cute. Woman clean. Man fix things with drill. All know their place. I didn't mind it for a weekend and I dutifully donned the marigolds...someone else had cooked, after all. Also I am shockingly bad at DIY. I don't care enough to do it well. 

In solidarity, I invited the other woman from the volunteer party to come along with us to Wonderwool next month. 

I drove home earlyish on Sunday because I had an interview on Monday, for an internal role, the one I am currently doing. I got the job. Both pleased and disappointed, as this means I will definitely be working and doing a Masters at the same time next year. I guess we'll suck it and see. 

I finished Prisoners of Geography on the drive home from Wales. In the end, I didn't like it much. It was very interesting but, having now listened to quite a lot of non-fiction about the continent of Africa, I found what he had to say to be quite narrow-minded. This was not helped by the narrator who had quite the public school accent. I'm sure a lot of well-educated people will take comfort from the narrative that Africa is underdeveloped because of its unlucky geography but I don't buy it. When he referred to Jared Diamond as 'that most lucid of writers', I realised this was not really the book for me. 

I've moved on to one from my favourite genre of audiobook, women escaping from religious cults: Uncultured by Daniella Mestyanek Young. The Children of God sound like a particularly unpleasant bunch of people, or at least they were in the 1990s, but it has given me some fodder to discuss with my students when it comes to the limits that should (or should not) be placed on personal freedoms for adults. 

I've been knitting away at a new jumper, Topolino, that I cast on just before the Great Hexagon Knit, and I'm about 16 rows off dividing the sleeves and body. I have creeping dread about not having finished my nephew's latest Presto Chango, but I am afraid it will be too big and it will go into the black hole of knitwear that my sister-in-law doesn't want to put on her children. Trying not to feel aggrieved about this, they are her kids after all. 

I feel like other things must have happened last week. There were two leaving parties on Monday, one for some school colleagues and one, on Zoom, for an exam board colleague. On Tuesday I had another exam board meeting after school but it didn't go on too long. I watched a lot of Better Call Saul and Game of Thrones...now into the epic sixth season of GoT which I probably think is the best. 

And nobody pulled my hair last week so that is a definite win.