Tuesday Ten

Ten things making me feel successful at adulting

1. Paid my taxes. Is there anything more adult than that?

2. Paid them out of my savings. Extra smug points.

3. I got invited to speak at a conference in Australia! A virtual presentation, of course, but still. 

4. I've managed to stick to the same skincare routine for over a week.

5. I bought a new piece of furniture in a sale - a chairbed for the spare room.

6. I marked two sets of Y13 essays at the weekend and, with any luck, my marking pile might be completely gone by next week. 

7. My fitbit is pleased with me. Always a good sign.

8. Today at work, somebody annoyed me (it wasn't her fault, I had a lot going on) and I had an honest conversation with her about it, rather than just silently seething. 

9. I bought some worthy hot chocolate with lion's mane and other mushrooms in it from Holland and Barrett, and I'm actually drinking it. The texture is amazing. We won't discuss the taste. 

10. This is my first Tuesday Ten post in more than FIVE YEARS! We're bringing it back, baby. Well. I mean it's coming back this week but I'm not making any guarantees. 

Wonderwool 2024

So long ago now! But Wonderwool 2024 was a sunny affair, full of laughter and cake and yarn and sharing and general joy. And it seems that I didn't buy a huge amount of yarn - shockingly.

This is pretty much all of it, with the exception of a Joe's Toes set I bought and have made but not quite finished. For some reason I didn't take a picture of the kit, I suppose because it doesn't look like much in its gauze bag. 

Top - some linen from Namolio. I have already cast this on, it is going to be a stripey summer Tolsta tank top. In fact I should not forget about it, because I would like to wear it this summer. 

The rest is two jumpers' worth of black yarn with some accent pale green. This is for a zecret project. In true Wonderwool style, I trawled the whole show looking for the perfect yarn, then bought something from a sale bin that would do, then found the perfect yarn. Typical. Come to think of it, I think the middle is DK and the lower 4-ply - the DK is what I needed. It's not like I won't have a use for the 4-ply, though. 

Then, some non-knitting things -

A blocking board from Wombat's Woodshop, which I bought to block my hexagons. I have blocked precisely no hexagons so far. In fact, the hexagon I used to check the board was big enough is still pinned out as it is in the picture above. I'm glad I checked before I left the showground, because I bought a smaller one, so I was able to return it for a larger one before I left. The pins are old knitting needles, trimmed down. Very eco. 

A kit to make a felted robin wreath. I found this again on approximately December 23rd. Oh well. This year. 

Basically one of everything from the sinister cat stall. I bought the unicorn pattern to make a jumper for my niece but haven't found yarn I like yet, so perhaps this will be a Wonderwool mission for 2025. 

It's good looking back over this. If I can get the zecret project on the needles before April, I can rightfully claim to have knitted up everything from 2024 before 2025. Even if I haven't finished it. Compelling!

2025 Week 3

This week has very definitely been better than last, in that I haven't had to drag myself around all week. More sleep was had and health was more closely attended to. The new aran weight cardigan is ticking along nicely, I'm already 6 inches down which is one third of the (quite short, might need extending) body. In fact it's a bit cropped and has elbow sleeves and I might adjust one or both of these, so that I use up all of the yarn. 

I also bought two mini hot water bottles to knit covers for after knitting group yesterday, plus trawled through my stash on Ravelry to plan new projects and consider what I might be able to get rid of. I ordered a new chair bed for the spare room, now I've cleared it all out, so I'm hoping to get some shelves up soon and get the hatboxes of yarn onto said shelves, to open up the space a bit; but there is limited wall space and quite a lot of yarn. Hence I'm looking at chunky projects. Clearly my crafty nerve wants quick and space saving. Said nerve is ignoring that fact that knitting a new garment just transfers the storage problem from the spare room to the wardrobe. 

I browsed my stash at such length yesterday that I had to go back through my blog to look at Wonderwool posts and then realised there was never a Wonderwool 2024 post. A terrible oversight on my part, that I will rectify soon - maybe even immediately after posting this, since I have a little stack of essays that still need marking for first thing tomorrow morning and I like to live on the edge. 

On that, I think I am going to have to reinstate the 20 minutes of marking per day in my life for a bit. It's built up quite a lot and I think my upper school classes could do with more feedback in their lives. Honestly, it would help if I could make myself more productive at work. Productivity has remained embarrassingly low this past week. 

I clearly need some sort of list. 

I haven't read very much this week, I'm in denial about the next uni assignment so have generally spent far too long on socials. I watched the whole series of 'Black Doves' which I liked but it was a bit too holey to be entirely comfortable: made me think of that 'two screen TV' somebody was talking about recently, where Netflix like to commission series that people can watch whilst also looking at their phones. Mr Z would be quick to point out that I do look at my phone a lot, but when I have a knitting project on the go, I like something more engaging. It was a bit too obvious in places and other scenes were just not believable. Plus Keira Knightley (love) toed this interesting line which I think was meant to be faintly humourous but didn't quite hit the mark. Still. It was good, glad there will be series 2. I also started watching 'Joanie' and 'Lockerbie'. It's a dark month and cosy knitting under a blanket with some telly sounds extremely inviting. 

2025 Week 2

Happy New Year everyone! I missed updating last Sunday as I was in the throes of The Essay, which I happily managed to submit online and think it probably enough to pass. I of course wanted to write something that was ground-breaking and distinction level, but have had to give myself a good talking to, that a pass is absolutely fine, given that I am holding down a couple of jobs at the same time. 

Coming off the back of an exhausting overnight trip back from Kazakhstan, which marked the end of a week of fun and poor sleep, the extra workload of the essay was the nail in the coffin of the past week, which seemed to go no FOR. EVER. I had many early nights, tried to exist quietly and get lots done at work, which was a fail - this week will be interesting, when all those deadlines I ignored come home to roost. Meh. Fire me. I could do with the time off. I was naturally also ravenous and feeling very gym-resistant, so by Friday I was a mess. 

This weekend has consequently been extremely restorative. I have played lots of Super Mario with Mr Z (we were unable to squeeze in our usual completion of the game over the Christmas break), eaten up the Christmas cheese, the mince pies and the negroni ingredients, been to the gym and enjoyed it, batch cooked a million veggies to see me through the coming week, read in the bath for an hour, marked an easy set of Y7 assessments and generally lounged. I have been reading What You Are Looking For Is In The Library, a translation from a Japanese bestseller, which was a secret Santa gift (along with some stickers of medieval cat illustrations, perfect). I have cast on a new knitting project - a cardigan that has been in my queue for about a decade, in aran weight, because I have forgotten how I was able to knit that weight within a month and right now that sounds very tempting. I finished watching 'Until I Kill You' - Anna Maxwell Martin was just superb. 

So, yeah. Let's say the new year begins here, shall we? This week should hopefully be better. 

2024 Round Up: Health

I mentioned in the summer that my over-40s health check identified that I was diabetic. I had a sugar number of 61 (it was explained to me what this meant but I didn't really understand, only that the healthy range is under 42). 

Father Hand had diabetes, diagnosed at a similar time IIRC, as do both his brothers and his dad, so there was no surprise element to this diagnosis. However, given that he died at the start of this year and since, prior to that, Sib and I regularly lamented the fact that he never tried to manage it, so that it progressed to insulin injections, I did think that perhaps I should do something about it. 

Hence, the health kick. The gym was already a habit and not particularly for size reasons but more because it's good for my mental state and helps keeps me fitter for skiing. To this, I added a calorie-tracking app from the start of September. I have been using Nutracheck which is a handy one because it has a barcode scanning section that pops up a picture of the food you've scanned. It's a British one so it knows all the supermarket own labels. It's still not ideal for someone like me, who tends to eat mainly foods made from ingredients rather than pre-prepared food, but I can build recipes in there and sometimes I just track the main calorie sources in a meal, rather than all the veggies etc. 

I also put a massive fruit bowl on my desk at work and stocked it weekly. I pretty much gave up my wanders down the road for a coffee and an olive stick (always two olive sticks, truth be told) - this has happened maybe five times since the start of the year and the olive stick is always a single and the coffee is often black now. 

So, by the time my next blood test rolled around, I'd lost 13kg, which rose to 15kg by the time Christmas came along. I was in the museum last week when the nurse rang me with my results. She told me I was an inspiration, which was a lovely thing to hear. My sugar number was down to 45, she said, in the pre-diabetic range. She told me to take Christmas off (I have enthusiastically followed this advice), crack on in January and come back in three months, and if the number is under 42 they will take it off my diagnosis. 

Isn't this great news?! I realise my health isn't why most of you turn up to read this, it's quite dull, but since I am my most enthusiastic reader, I thought I would share the news, as a reminder of how pleased I was that I was successful. I'd had two dreams about the sugar number by the time she rang; one had it at 38 and the other at 72, so it is a relief that it was closer to the lower number. 

Other side benefits include going down about a dress size and a half; feeling the cold; having a resting heart rate now in the 60s for the first time since I started tracking it, eight years ago; better sleep; inexplicably, food tasting better. The last time I remember being this weight was in 2010. 

Naturally, I'm only part-way there. Having proved that being a woman in her 40s is not the barrier to weight loss everybody says it is (at least, it's not when you weigh as much as me), I'd like to continue. Ideally, I will lose another 20kg. Even writing that down makes me come over all cynical, tbf. But that is the goal. That would get me down to my wedding weight. 

Also, gym, because I noted in an early weeknote a reference to a weight I could lift and it pleased me that the number has gone up over the year. 

So at the moment, for reps, I can do 45kg as a bench press, deadlift 80kg, leg press 200kg and assisted pull up at 70kg. I can force myself through a 20 minute jog-walk on the treadmill although I find this very dull, looking forward to some more light in the world so I can start running outside. 

Here endeth the very self-indulgent post about my weight and health. I very much hope I can revisit this topic with positive news at some point next year. 

Gym selfie to remind us all - there are no bad angles. Also yes I am the person who takes selfies in the gym now. This was after my first attempt at running in many years and I was both horrified and impressed that I survived. 

2024 Round Up: Reads

A year in which I just surpassed the number of books I read last year. I was well ahead of myself after the summer holidays, but then that all stopped when I had to start reading for the Masters. I could have added a large number of academic articles and books about assessment to this list, but I don't think anybody is going to be superkeen to read about the finer points of validity. 

Fiction

The Vanishing Witch - Karen Maitland - I fear I might have run out of Maitland books to read now. They are deliciously creepy. 

The Ottoman Secret - Raymond Khoury - love a bit of Ottomans but when I got it home from the library and realised it had a commendation from Lee Childs, I nearly took it back - not my sort of thing. But it was pretty good. I do like a counter-factual. 

An Inspector Calls - J.B.Priestley - we dressed as characters from this for World Book Day so I thought I'd better read it. Meh. 

Lone Women - Victor LaValle - not at all what I was expecting but very enjoyable. Horror set on the American plains. 

Copper Sun - Sharon M Draper - teen fiction about American slavery. Jarring because the ending is not miserable and therefore feels ahistorical. But it is for teens, I guess. 

Still Life - Sarah Winman - this took me a while (followers of my weeknotes might recall) but once I got going I loved it. I still think about these characters and it gives me a strong yearning to see 1950s Florence. 

Stormbird - Conn Igulden - I enjoyed this more than I expected to. It was given to me by a tutee way back in 2015 and was packed into a crate of books I brought from my last job, that still languish in the garage, 8 years later. I picked it out and thought I'd better read it or get rid. It was a good story of the early reign of Henry VI but it wasn't exactly gripping - I started reading it in May and put it down numerous times to read other things. Still, Igulden has written a lot of historical fiction so it is good to find a new author to work through. 

Wild - Cheryl Strayed - a reread of this one, I really like it. I know it's not fiction but it didn't quite fit on the other list. I've visited a fair few of the places on the PCT and the reread just makes me want to pack a bunch of stuff and give it a go. I'm not kidding myself that I'd make it even more than two days, but it is a nice dream. 

The Family from One End Street - Eve Garnett - a childhood book I wanted to reread. I remembered a section of it where the oldest daughter irons a green silk petticoat and shrinks it but for the longest time, that was all I could recall. Eventually the internet caught up and I was able to find the name of it through searching the story I remembered. 

An Instance of the Fingerpost - Iain Pears - this took me a while but I really liked how the story is expanded in each subsequent retelling. In the final section, there's some consideration of how history is told with a strong nod towards Thucydides, that made me think - if I was cleverer, would I recognise that each section is told in a different historical methodology? 

Ballet Shoes - Noel Streatfield - another childhood book I powered through in a few hours. Then Facebook started serving me ads for Ballet Shoes on stage this autumn. I really do find this level of knowledge about my life pretty creepy. 

The Wolf Den - Elodie Harper

The House with the Golden Door - Elodie Harper

The Temple of Fortuna - Elodie Harper - these three make up the Wolf Den trilogy which is set in Pompeii in the years leading up to and immediately following the 79 eruption. It was pretty atmospheric to read them with a view of Vesuvius. 

Weyward - Emilia Hart - I read this in a day, on my way home from Amalfi, and I really enjoyed it. Three lives and how they intertwine. I went back to bits of it to reread in the subsequent days. 

Act of Oblivion - Robert Harris - Harris never misses for me but it was particularly interesting reading this shortly after the Fingerpost book, because both are set after the Restoration. There was some character overlap. I've struggled a bit with a paucity of 17th century contextual knowledge in my A-level teaching, so these books are really helpful - this one particularly provided some good insight into why the relationship between England and its colonies was already a bit stale even in the 1660s. 

House of Odysseus - Claire North - Ithaca was one of my favourite books of 2023 so I was delighted to find it was the first in a trilogy. I haven't got more than two chapters into it yet, though. 

Salt to the Sea - Ruta Sepetys - the story of a group involved in a real-life naval disaster in the Baltic, towards the end of WW2, told from four different points of view. I found the jump in narrator a little frustrating at times, as the chapters were sometimes incredibly brief, but it was a good story. 

A Little Princess - France Hodgson Burnett - a comfort read when I had toothache. I got through it in one evening. I think it's interesting to return to these books now that I know more about the history of the time in which they're set. A dashing young soldier, a diamond mine, brain fever, exoticism from India, etc. 

A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles - there is so much to love about this book. It is taking me a long time to read it but I really dote on the writing, sometimes rereading pages just because I think it's so beautifully phrased. I had it from the library and then had to buy it on my Kindle because I couldn't read it quick enough. 

Non-fiction

The Witness Wore Read - Rebecca Musser - started off the year with a religious cult memoir. Mormon ones always make me think of the series Big Love and this makes me want to watch it again. 

Fearing the Black Body - Sabrina Strings - quite high brow but an interesting glimpse into the way that what is desirable about someone else's body changed as a result of empire and slavery. 

How the Word is Passed - Clint Smith - I think this was the best audiobook I listened to all year. I bought it in hard copy afterwards. If you pick one from my list, make it this one. 

Prisoners of Geography - Tim Marshall - I wasn't really a fan. Some good bits, some bits I didn't really agree with. I guess it is quite old now. 

Uncultured - Daniella Mestyanek Young - I'm running out of books about women escaping from cults (my favourite genre of audiobook) so was pleased to come across this one. She narrates, too. I love those in particular. 

Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain - a bit like listening in to some drunk guy's conversations in a pub. But an interesting drunk man with a lot of good stories to tell. 

Ultra-Processed People - Chris van Tulleken - not preachy at all, in my opinion (though a colleague saw this in my email sig and told me she did not agree). Just common sense and a good advice. 

Leaders Eat Last - Simon Sinek - I should have known better, really - I can't really be doing with these silicon valley self-congratulatory sermons, but since this stuff has leaked quite heavily into educational leadership, it is probably better to read what your leaders are reading, so you know what to expect. It was OK. It sort of fitted what I thought about leadership anyway. 

I will say that I blame Sinek entirely for the current craze, at conferences, for starting keynotes or workshops with an extended explanation of the rationale. Yes, fine, start with why, yes, Sinek is a genius, yes yes yes. But in education, we all know the why already. We are already convinced. That's why we work long hours for meagre pay. Just hurry up and get to the what and how, it's what I came for. 

Exam Nation - Sammy Wright - I thought this would be more about exams so I listened to it in the run up to my first uni week. It was a bit broader than that. He was an engaging reader of his own work and there are many good anecdotes in this book.

Our Island Stories - Corinne Fowler - I've been familiar with Corinne's work for a long time as her interests bump up against mine in the teaching world. This is a real treat. She narrates stories about different areas of the country and their connection to empire - she walked around each one with someone of note, so the audiobook contains clips of her voice recordings of those walks, which is a nice touch. Not finished yet, I am savouring it. 

Fave Friday

Five favourite things I saw in London

We broke up on Wednesday, so I made myself some nice plans in London for Thursday and Friday. When it came to it, I was somewhat overwhelmed by how many nice plans I made, but in the end I found the trip invigorating rather than exhausting - so much so that I wrote this post on my phone on the coach home, after almost a month of not being able to muster the energy to update. 

The lights were, of course, beautiful. London seems to have a thing about doing big decorated doorways that I haven't noticed before and I appreciated that a lot too. I stayed near Kensington Palace and I'm pretty sure I saw the king driving past me - at least, if it wasn't him, it was somebody important enough to warrant 8 police motorcyclists blowing whistles and an accompanying 4x4. And yet these didn't even make it into my top 5, so crammed was my 30 hour stay!

1. The Medieval Women exhibition at the British Library

This one is called 'Medieval women in their own words' and focuses specifically on works that were created by or about women, on the basis that much of this is lost or ignored. It was a very interesting walk around and, even though it is not very large, I still spent the best part of two hours reading through everything. It never ceases to amaze me how long the middle ages went on for - this exhibition covered all the way up to Margaret of Anjou. I was also pleased that there seemed to have been an effort made to include women from Wales and Scotland, as well as England.

Illustrated women's herbal. There was a lot about medicine. 

2. The Mughals exhibition at the V&A

This exhibition covered the golden age of the Mughals, from around the mid-16th century until the early 18th century, which coincides nicely with what I teach at A-level, coincidentally. There were some beautiful examples of calligraphy, jewels and jewellery, glassware and textiles, such as this huge cotton drugget that would have been laid on the floors of the palaces in the summer. 

A lot of this was simply marvellous to behold and I particularly liked the many examples of flower motifs and tiny birds included in a lot of the calligraphy. However, it did make me feel liberal unease. Many of the exhibits, such as highly illustrated texts from the early 17th century, had notes on them such as, 'Donated by Miss Constance Smith, 1921' (I made that name up) or similar. How did a Miss Smith end up with such a priceless artefact, I wondered. Granted, I did not read every word of the exhibit, but there didn't seem to be any effort from the V&A to explain how any of these objects had come to be in their collection. Maybe that would be too much to expect, but it did nibble at my conscience, a bit. 

3. Burhan and Stewart Lee

I met Burhan in 1999 when we were both working the same miserable summer job for the exam board. I see him too rarely (the last time being in 2019) for somebody that I get on with so well. We went for Korean food (excellent restaurant, plus, when I told the waitress in somewhat panicked tones that my phone was about to die, she took it from me without any further questions and charged it, thus saving me from an hour's sad walk back to my hotel later in the evening) and then to see Stewart Lee at Leicester Square. Lee was extremely funny, as I had expected. I booked those tickets when the clips of him ragging on Russell Brand resurfaced over the summer, something he referenced in the show. 

4. My hairdresser

I think I must be approaching 15 years with the same hairdresser, who now occupies a chair at a salon on Park Lane. This makes me feel extra fancy, though tbf I don't really rate the salon. His cuts are second to none, though, and somehow he manages to blow dry my hair so that the grey falls evenly, as opposed to in two semi-transparent stripes. A true artiste and worth every penny. 

5. Two dog owners with their golden retriever in Hyde Park. Said golden retriever was the proudest doggo ever, having caught (or hopefully picked up already dead) a bird. He was studiously ignoring his owners' every exhortation to drop the bird. They had all the treats out, but he was staring into the middle distance with an inscrutable expression that anybody who has interacted with teenagers would recognise instantly as a clear sign that a change of tack is required to move the situation forward. I commiserated with them. 'He had a parakeet last month,' said the man, ruefully. 

I also observed a tourist (I assume) trying to get a couple of well-fed squirrels, spread eagled upside down on a tree trunk, to eat out of his palm while his girlfriend filmed him. I wanted to stick around until he got bitten, but I had to get to my hair appointment.