It’s back to reality with a bump for me today. I’m back to work, I need to sort out the new desk (should it ever arrive!) and get to the doctor’s for my flu jab.
Ducks at Alnwick
Project October is a go and I did the first day of the six week exercise challenge today. Food for the week is prepped and I have a ton of emails to work through. Today will be pretty easy, ask me how I feel about being back to work on Thursday! I’ve given up the fight against Autumn and set my wake-up lamp last night so getting up before 7am was easier than expected.
Barney
I’m still getting over my sadness at the lack of ducks in my life, but a visit to visit the new puppy and the nephews cheered me up somewhat. Does it make me a bad aunt if I love the puppy more than the boys?
Right time to get on with the week and the 300 odd emails that are waiting for me!
Today we’ll be mostly in the car, for the 350-ish mile drive home. As ever, I’m sad to leave but happy to be going home.
It’s been a different holiday from usual but I really needed the break and although it was a rest it was also more active. It’s easy to go for a walk every day when the sea is right there!
I thought that everywhere we’ve visited has handled the Covid situation well, I thought that most of the shops were better organised than they are in London. It’s also worth knowing what lockdown and the new local rules have done to the economy.
The Hauxley Wildlife Discovery Centre has lost £12,000 in donations and cafe profits, they aren’t going to be able to make that up and it’s a great place that needs all the help it can get to carry on.
I know that the National Trust and English Heritage are having difficulty everywhere too. But it’s the local businesses, the pubs and restaurants that are really suffering and will continue to while this going on and next year after Brexit. I would encourage you, if you can and feel safe to do so, please take your holidays in the UK in the next couple of years because it’s safer, because the country needs it and you’d be helping the environment by not flying!
Happy Friday! Well the world is pretty much a disaster, has been for a while but the UK govt. are really excelling themselves in levels of incompetency and ignorance. The American experiment seems to be on fire and the rest of the world doesn’t seem to be in much better shape.
I don’t want children but being an aunt is the joy of my life. This is lovely but more complicated than she knows. I love my nephews, but do I love them more than I love Miss T? I don’t know, I spend Christmas with them and they are always around for my birthday because that’s what we do as a family. However, my responsibility to them is the same, it’s to support their parents as their parents can bring them up. (To a lesser extent, it’s what I do for all my friends that are parents.) For all three of them I am part of the back up, should the worse happen (which is why I pray for the continued health and wellbeing of their parents daily!) but it’s a role I have because their parents have asked me to have it. It’s not parenthood, I love them, but as involved as I’ll be when they are little, that’s will change. Loving children you didn’t birth or adopt is an exercise in mostly unrequited love in a way that parents don’t experience. I have have 6 godchildren and 2 nephews, 5 of the godchildren are adults. You have to love them fiercely and hold them lightly. Ryan is 35, I used to see him a couple of times a week, this year, I’ve spoken to him once. That’s entirely his choice. I know he’s ok because his parent is my friend (and he does still speak to his mother!). This is how it should be, I don’t want any of these children to be my children, I wanted my own. Aunthood is special but it’s a much more complicated place than you imagine when your nieces and nephews are 7 and 3.
Despite the horribleness of 2020, the months move on and we are 91 days away from 2021. Although I’m on holiday this week, I’m going to be working from home for the rest of this year and probably into next, the best estimates are March but probably we’ll never have office life like we used to.
I struggle with autumn and winter, and I have written a lot about my coping mechanisms. (here, here and here). Over the last two years being able to work from home once a week has really helped because I don’t have to get up in the dark three days out of seven but working in an office has been good for me because I have to leave the house and be around people. This year is going to be different.
So I’m going to need a slightly different plan. I need good structure and a change of schedule but this year, I’ve also started to have the more obvious menopause symptoms (hot flushes I’m looking at you) but menopause can often be a bad time for depression so I do need to factor that into my autumn/winter survival plan. It’s important to point out that I don’t like doing some of this, but that I feel better for doing it. I need to treat myself like a toddler and force myself to do it because it will help and after a month it’ll feel natural and I’ll hate it less.
So this is the plan for the next four to six weeks.
A new desk
Next week I’m moving my work space from the kitchen to the living room. I’ve ordered a desk and I’ll need to rearrange the flat a bit but I’ll be working in a room with more natural light that looks out to the street. It’ll also mean that I’ll be able to order a screen and won’t have to pack away my work stuff every night so I can eat dinner!
Exercise
I talk about it a lot but doing it is tricky. While I’ve been away, I’ve been doing body balance or yoga every morning and I’ve been walking more because I’m on holiday. It’s not just about the ‘corona kilos’, it’s because when I exercise I feel better. Next week, Christelle and I are going to start the Les Mills app ‘back to exercise’ challenge and Kathy and I are going to try to get a lunchtime walk in a couple of times a week. (That also keeps me in touch with my friends, which is good for mental health too). I’m going to try and get my 10,000 steps a day which means I have to leave the house more!
Food and Drink
I say food and drink but mostly I mean drink. Alcohol and caffeine are two of my favourite things and two of the things that contribute to hot flushes. So back to no drinking Monday to Thursday and limiting my coffee drinking to a four times a week (Monday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday!). Drinking coffee and booze isn’t the only thing, I need to get back to tracking my water intake and making sure that it’s at least two litres a day.
It’s not just about what I eat and drink, in October, I need to menu plan and prep food so I’m not aimlessly looking at the fridge searching for carbs and sweets because I’m tired and miserable. I know it doesn’t help but it’s too easy to do when I don’t have a food plan.
I picked all the tomatoes last Friday, and another eight squash and the last cucumbers.
The weather has changed and it’s getting colder so I didn’t want to go away for the week and lose the last of them. I took all the butternuts in that were mostly grown.
34 winter squash
There are eight other squash that I left out because the butternut had a last flourish, but I’m not sure that they’ll survive so bonus if they do!
I cleared some of the debris but we have a lot of tidying up to do when we get back!
After a cancellation, we are going on holiday today!
We have absolutely thought about the risks of this and decided to go anyway. Ma and I are a support bubble, we are staying in a cottage and our holidays don’t usually include a lot of eating out. The one change is our Newcastle day. Usually we get the bus into Newcastle and spend the day there, but we won’t do that this year, we’ll probably go for a longer walk. We’ve booked visits to Warkworth and Dunstanburgh, both ruined and mostly open air castles. But we probably won’t get to other places we were thinking about. We have masks and hand sanitiser at the ready.
Currently, none of the lockdown rules in London or in Northumberland prevent us doing this and right now, the risk to my mental health if I don’t have this break outweighs the risk of catching COVID for me.
I’m so lucky to be able to go and to enjoy the kind of ‘boring’ holiday that is naturally more COVID secure than most. Other than walking and reading and eating, I also want to pick up my daily body balance exercise, I did really well at the beginning of lockdown but it’s tailed off and with the new advice, I won’t be going back to the office regularly until next year so I need to develop some SAD strategies for working from home and daily body balance needs to be one of them!
Grace Dent reviews Wong Kei’s. When I was 20 something, I told my mum (who is not keen on Chinese food) that I’d been to the rudest Chinese restaurant in London, she immediately said ‘Wong Kei’s?’. Ben had the same experience, Lu took him and he told us about the experience and we both were “So Wong Kei’s then?”. I’ve been there with godchildren 2-5, (Sarah took her own child so I didn’t need to and all we need for Noah is that we find somewhere they can stay because Wales is a long way from London!) and I have plans for Ms T when she’s a bit older (I think Lu and Ben will ensure that Oli and Joe get it!).
I’ve preserved a lot of tomatoes this year but I haven’t preserved a lot of home grown tomatoes. Despite having just over 30 tomato plants this year, we’ve also eaten through a load of them. I’ve eaten so much tomato on toast this month it’s practically a food group.
I have made some tomato sauce and cooked with them but I really wanted to make salsa, the thing is that most salsa recipes require quite a lot of tomatoes, it doesn’t seem to be small batch. This pico de gallo makes about 1.5 litres and and it’s really simple to make with the food processor.
Next on the list is green tomato chutney! And a small batch of canned plum tomatoes.
Nic Dempsey 