2026 Week 17

I was really on the struggle bus with work this past week. I did not want to be there, an issue exacerbated by the fact that BOTH events that would have seen me elsewhere for one day were cancelled. I suppose this made things easier, at least the second, Birmingham-based one but...hrmph. I have decided the grump was due to being tired from a week in Iceland and it being my much less preferred timetable week...but it might be the last time I have to teach it through, since the next one will have a bank holiday in it and the next one will be well into exam season. 

I realised, when I put my out-of-office on for the course I'm at tomorrow (allegedly), that I must not have missed a day of school since before Feb half term. A record! Although maybe this is also why I'm somewhat over it. 

Hobbies continued. I half-heartedly picked away at the Latvian mitten I am reknitting since it was working up too tight. Now I am slightly concerned it will be too loose but, meh. We'll see. I wound a gorgeous blue skein over the weekend to start another jumper but then lost confidence in my planned modification almost immediately after cast on, I think it would end up being much too wide in the neck, so I have stopped again. Mr Z and I continued watching The Pitt; I've nearly finished The Song of Penelope; I'm two-thirds of the way through Anxious Generation. I went to the sauna, yoga, a PT session and the gym twice. 

This weekend has been glorious Wonderwool - and it really was glorious, possibly the best weather we've ever had. The halls were actually a little bit too warm on Saturday afternoon, when I arrived. I committed heresy on Saturday morning by driving to Powis Castle for a visit first. Clive features heavily in the A-level course I teach and I have been very keen to go, but it is three hours' drive from here and I just don't think Ginge would put up with it. 

Powis was indeed beautiful but I was gutted to discover that the Clive museum was closed for essential works. No mention of this on the website. I made do with touring the rest of the house, but the vibe is very much, 'We've had to give you our house but we are very unhappy about it so will seriously limit your access' (see also: St Michael's Mount) and so everything was dark and difficult to access. Not really a problem, I enjoyed it a lot anyway. I will have to repeat visit, thanks to not being able to get into the Clive section yesterday. There's not much mention of the man himself around the rest of the place, even the portraits of his parents aren't labelled (I had to ask), but there was this statue, connected to him:

This is a 1st century Roman statue of a cat, apparently very rare because cats aren't often featured in Roman art. Clive bought this as a gift for his wife in the year that he died. I've been having fun imagining the subtext to this as a gift. Was he just trying to find the rarest and most expensive present he could? Heaven knows he could afford it. But I feel like there's a slight air of 'you're emasculating me'. 

Separate Wonderwool post to follow, with the goodies. I was very restrained this year. I gave far more to the Air Ambulance stall than I bought and I didn't buy anything at all on Saturday, very unusual for me. In the end, though, there were a few bits I just couldn't pass by. 

Spring 2 Goals

 

It's been a bit trickier to come up with good things to go on my termly goals list since Christmas. I find I am filling it with things I am going to do, rather than things I want to achieve: it is therefore easy enough to complete most of the things on it. Trying to think about what might make good goals for the next term, a brief affair of only five weeks. 

Anyway. 

What didn't I do? I didn't get to the gym much. I did make it every Sunday I was at home, but no Mondays (except that one week when I got all the way into the changing room and realised I hadn't packed a top). It is definitely harder to motivate myself now that skiing is done. Perhaps I need a new fitness goal. 

I didn't finish an audiobook, either. My brain is just a bit full at the moment, I can't cope with much more than the same 20ish songs cycling round. I am listening to two that I'm really enjoying, but enjoyment is not enough to keep me concentrating. 

I did manage to finish a novel though (House of Odysseus). I made the sauna a regular treat, it is so lovely in the spring sunshine and there are a whole load of narcissus around the little pond they've made. I went to hot yoga twice, on Fridays: a super way to end the week. I bought myself a 10-class card so I really need to make this a more regular part of my routine...somehow. 

I went to blood donors after I'd had to cancel my previous appointment due to a cold. I was greeted at the front desk by an ex-student, so thank goodness I hadn't ticked 'yes' to any of the questionnaire questions, that could have been super awkward. I flew to Edinburgh for Steps, I took sequins even if I did not wear them - I did manage glitter eyeliner, and there were plenty of sequins in the production so I count that as a yes. I had a manicure for Mallorca and did my own pedicure; the owner of my local beauty shop has just lost her husband so the remaining staff are flat out and I felt guilty enough commandeering a long evening slot for the nails. 

Most proud achievement was doing the Friday night reset each week. I do all the washing up, clean up the kitchen and put all the week's clothes away. Mr Z seems to have cottoned on to this and there seems to be less to do in the kitchen in more recent weeks, so I have taken to trying to tidy/clean/dust something else in that time instead. I am still pining desperately for a cleaner (one of Mr Z's few red lines) but this is helping a little to make me feel happier about the state of Chez Z. 

2026 Week 16

And what a week it has been! I went to Iceland on a school trip, that most glorious type of trip: one that I was not in charge of. I spent my time 'bringing up the rear' which was my official job role every day. We went to waterfalls, beaches, extinct volcanoes, lakes, hot springs and a glacier. I made a snow angel, walked behind a waterfall, chased rainbows, inspected (and bought) yarn, admired jumpers, marvelled at geological features and took dozens of selfies. 

I even managed some hobbies. I finished the purple jumper I'd been knitting for this trip, so I did get a day's worth of wear out of it. It needs blocking as it is a little short on me: I added 5 extra rows but didn't want to run out of yarn, which seems to have been the correct choice. 

I started reading The Last Song of Penelope, the third in the trilogy from Claire North. I wouldn't normally read a follow up novel so quickly after the first, I tend to absorb too much of the writer's voice and it makes it come out in my own writing or speech, like a mimic, but I couldn't resist. The House of Odysseus has stayed with me, there was some cracking writing in that, but this one has got me right in the feels several times so far. I'm about halfway through. I carried on a little with the two audiobooks but this really needs to be a school commute thing, I think, and at the moment I am obsessively listening to Tame Impala's Dracula and a few other recent musics so I don't want to put an audiobook on.

Mr Z and I have been watching the first season of The Pitt. Nice to see Noah Wyle back as a doctor and it's different enough that I don't get Carter vibes. I see Euphoria is back for its third season; I am in two minds whether to watch it. I keep seeing people arguing online that it is shocking because 'that's what addiction looks like' but I'm not sure addiction looks as glamorous as it's made out to be. I think addiction looks more like groping in a toilet bowl, a la Trainspotting. But then, I guess I wouldn't know.

I forgot to say last weekend that I binged the whole of The Other Bennet Sister in the days in between trips. Very, very enjoyable. I loved the nods to the BBC's P&P - trying to blow out the candle in front of the mirror, having Hill played by Lucy Briers, who was Mary in the 1995 adaptation. Also the quite modern additions, like the terrible bird drawings, the stretching. I was so impressed that Mary's marital fate kept me guessing right up until the final reveal. Really artfully done. 

A couple of Iceland pictures to finish up:

I wore only dresses for the entire trip (with ski bibs over the top for the waterfall) because that is the sort of energy I bring these days. If Wordsworth's sister could climb Scafell Peak in a dress, I can definitely stroll down a path to a waterfall and climb up a volcano. 

Throwaway Thursday - wedding moisturiser

An occasional series that I might also title, 'Things in my house that are basically rubbish but I am a borderline hoarder and cannot bring myself to throw them out'. The idea is to memorialise such things here and then bin them for good. 

Look how foul this is. 

Witness: the thick layer of dust over the whole top of the bottle; the lid that seems to have split in a place other than where it should open; the apparently solid layer of moisturiser on top of the remaining cm on product. This slipped out from behind some other bottles on my bathroom storage last week and is now headed to the recycling. 

Where did this come from and why has it lasted so long?

When I got married, back in 2006, I was deep into the Lush forum life and doing mystery swaps for cosmetics in this country and the US. I believe this Bath and Body Works Peach Melba moisturiser arrived in one such swap; there is a chance that I bought it myself but it wouldn't necessarily be my first choice of scent, though I do love it. My first experience with B&BW was in 1998 when I went for Camp America, coming home with a thick body moisturiser in the scent Country Apple. I don't think I would have bought myself a lotion like this. 

This scent is quite heavily associated with my honeymoon. I've got a fair few things knocking around from that era that should be gone, really, but remain because of the scent association. On my wedding day, I had a long bath with a Lush Bottle of Bubbly, and washed and moisturised with B&BW Mango Sorbetto. I wore Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs Stardust perfume, both for the name (inextricably linked to the beginning of my relationship with Mr Z) and the fact it has white musk in it, of which Mr Z is a fan (tell me you grew up in the 80s without telling me). On honeymoon, I brought a Lush buttercream that smelled of roses and geranium (I think it was originally called Amandopondo) and this moisturiser. 

It all sounds quite overwhelming; hopefully it wasn't too much so for the people around me. I chose things very carefully, that I hadn't used much before, because I knew the scent memories would bring me back to that day. And they do. One sniff of this and I'm back in Lake Garda.

That's why it's not yet in the recycling. Honestly, it is so gross, but it does still smell of my honeymoon. How does one hold on to a scent? 

Also kind of miss the mystery swaps. I'd add them to my 'golden age of the internet' list. 

2026 Week 15

Welp, it's been the last week of term and the first week of the Easter break since I last managed to get a post up, so a fair amount of stuff has gone on. 

I limped through the end of term, much marking, some scheming, general end of term vibe where you are proverbially shaking the printer cartridge to eke out the very last sprinkling of toner. On Thursday night, I flew to Mallorca, where I repaired to a little hotel near the airport for the night, before collecting my rental car and heading on to the family villa on Friday morning. Our first family holiday since the IoW caravan in 1992. 

Mallorca was nice. Beaches, lunches, rock-pooling, a chef we hired to come one night and then invited back another night to do Argentinian barbecue, a heated pool with the kids, crafting, lots of cats. The odd squabble, obviously. I don't envy Sib his marriage. It was a lot of fun to spend the time with the niblings, though. I very much appreciate that feeling of being owned by a child, in the way that they climb on you and sit on your lap and press their face against yours and it's all just so normal. Very fun.

I returned from Mallorca on Monday evening, had one day at home and then headed to Sheffield for a geography conference, where I was speaking alongside the Head of Geog from school. We've done a little cross-curricular project together so that I could convince her to go to the conference and speak, she is very good but doesn't really appreciate how good she is. One of the exam board guys was there that I usually see every year at my own subject equivalent conference, so we had a good catch up and went to a very interesting session together; I was interested to note that (1) this conference seemed a lot more activist than my subject equivalent and (b) a lot of the issues are ones that might easily be solved if subject teams talked to each other a little more. I chose to stay in a lovely spa hotel I've stayed in before, so I got a couple of sessions in in the steam room and a swim or two. I ate exceptionally delicious Korean fried chicken two nights in a row. It was quite restorative. 

Though, I do feel the press of the dissertation at my back. I don't think I'm going to be able to get the first draft done for July in the way I want to. I am setting a challenge for myself to work on it for an hour every day over the next term, but, given that it's currently 'dissertation accountability hour' and I'm writing this instead, I am not sure if the self-discipline necessary to achieve that is going to present itself. We'll see. 

Some hobbies happened, as a result of the leisure. I finished Claire North's House of Odysseus, listened to a bit more of The Anxious Generation and started a new audiobook, The Human Planet, which is very engaging. I'm also ploughing through a bit more of Is A River Alive? so my brain is crammed full of lots of other people's words at the moment. 

I went to see Underland at the Watershed on Tuesday night: Underland might be my favourite book ever (definitely top 5) but I'd heard the film was more of a spin-off, so wasn't quite sure what to expect. It was indeed very different, focusing on three people who work underground, in Mexico, America and Canada. I was totally unprepared for the first scenes to be in Vegas. I still find scenes from Vegas make me a little sad, since Father Hand passed away. But it was a very good documentary, very moving in unexpected ways. It seemed that each person was dealing with a different temporality - Mexico past, searching for Mayan remains; Vegas present, looking at the way people live in the storm drains and what they leave behind; Canada future, working in a deep mine, looking for dark matter. It was very well put together. 

Anything else? Hmm. I am onto the sleeves of my latest knit; I hoped to finish it for Iceland but, since Iceland is now under 24 hours away, that seems ambitious. I'm off there at 6.30 tomorrow morning for a school trip. It is a holiday of trips and extremes of temperature: I managed to get a reasonable tan in Mallorca, where the temperature hovered around 20 degrees, but I fear that might all be sloughed away by the windy and wet conditions predicted at my next destination. It will be worth it, though. So excited to get eyes on Iceland again.