Ooh Heaven is a book I've read

• Luke’s parents visited at the start of the week for a few days (they actually bought Luke with them as he managed to get the last seat on a flight out of Amsterdam to Manchester on Sunday night) and we had some nice walks and lunch at a local pub - although it wasn’t our first choice since that was fully booked… on a Tuesday lunch time! (Our town is full of very active pensioners and sometimes it really shows.) I also took the opportunity to make Nadia’s Orange Polenta cake (I claim that it’s heart healthy because it uses oil rather than butter), and a couple of nice meals: roast cod with roast tomatoes, samphire, shallots, lentils and bucket loads of salsa verde (an Emma original); and this miso sweet potato and broccoli bowl with wild rice.
• We were supposed to be in Sheffield this weekend but we had to cancel because Luke’s sick. Thankfully the hosts at the place we were staying are lovely and we’ve re-booked for April.
• My work week was ok. It was a short week as I had leave booked for our planned trip. I had a couple of difficult conversations which I think went okay. The Japanese presentation went reasonably well once getting over the hurdle that I didn’t understand the first thing that someone said to me. Another meeting that I’d done a little bit of preparation for got changed into a workshop which I think was the right decision and so that’s work in the bank for once we’re a bit further down the road. That workshop was quite interesting - we’re looking at a pretty big piece of work with lots of different elements, and it’s really interesting to see the bits of the project that other people have chosen to focus on and notice assumptions that they’ve made and how they differ from the ones I’ve made.
• I’m hopefully getting a bit closer to getting some referrals with regards to one element of my ill health. I picked up some medication this week which I was thinking of trying, and boy-oh-boy do I wish I hadn’t read the leaflet (terrifying 1 in 1,000 side effects - including possible death?!). Think I might wait for the referrals before I start taking them…
• We watched Banshees of Inisherin. I enjoyed it a lot and really enjoyed Colin Farrell’s performance, which was nice because I saw him in stuff probably 20 years ago and thought of him as a bit of an over-actor and then haven’t seen him in anything for ages (except The Batman in which he is almost unrecognisable!) and here he is, brilliant!
• I read Heaven by Mieko Kawakami which I thought was good. It is pretty harrowing as it’s about two teenagers who are horrifically bullied at school. It was a bit philosophical, and I’ve been struggling to figure out whether the philosophical bits were meant to be actually interesting, or just representative of the sorts of things that 14 year olds think about. Either way it was a good read. I listened to My Year of Rest and Relaxation and can see why it caused such a storm. I thought it was good, and filthy, and far too relatable considering how abhorrent the main character is. I also read Mostly Hero, a long-ish short story by Anna Burns (I adored Milkman) which was really zany and weird and was kind of fun but also maybe a bit lost on me. I’m now reading The Last White Man for the FT Embrace book club.