Life is a rollercoaster just gotta ride it (all night long)

• It’s been a funny old couple of weeks with lots of highs and lows. I didn’t write last week as this time last week we were visiting Sheffield. It’s a potential on our “places we might want to live” list and we liked it a lot. I was quite unwell and limited in what I could do and see but the bits that I did see were nice. And we were able to meet up with Luke’s brother and sister law and our niece and nephew which was awesome. I was supposed to be down in London for a couple of days this week just gone but had to cancel because I got even sicker when we got back from Sheffield. I was really sad to cancel - I had loads of meetings lined up for Thursday, I miss my friends, and my little nephew was sad that I couldn’t go and stay with him which makes me feel like a monster. Hopefully I will be able to go down before too long. Thankfully I’ve started to feel a bit better in the last couple of days.
• I got promoted at work! I’m really glad to be recognised at the level I’m at - it feels like a big relief and I had a mini twix to celebrate (don’t say I don’t know how to live).
• My aunty has started making sourdough and on Friday I went and made a loaf with her (sort of - she Blue Petered it so that I did all the stages but on different loaves so I didn’t have to spend a full 24 hours or more at her house). She has an amazing kitchen. I am thinking about trying to make sourdough myself at home - after staunchly resisting the trend during lockdown, I’ve been loving my aunt’s bread so much that I might have to, although I’m nervous about taking on the commitment.
• I’m continuing to do loads of Japanese. Perhaps too much - sometimes I feel like I’m going backwards, and I’ve had some very strange Japanese dreams. I’m mostly enjoying it though. Less than two months until the exam now.
• We watched an awful film last night. So bad I don’t even want to namecheck it. The first half was horrifically traumatic and upsetting and the second half was a totally different film and comically bad. By far the worst thing I’ve seen in a while.
• We had the FT Embrace book club for The Color Purple on Friday. As mentioned previously I loved this book, although at the end Jenn mentioned she had reservations about selecting it for book club because Alice Walker is a known transphobe and antisemite. I was so shocked. And when I googled I discovered that she’s a huge David Icke fan?! So that was very disappointing and dented my enthusiasm for what felt like such a sensitive, intelligent book. My only book-redeeming thought is that it was written long enough ago for her to essentially have been a different person at the time of writing, maybe?
• I’m currently reading I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, which is very enjoyable so far, and listening to Cold Comfort Farm which I’m not that into but will continue with (can you tell I was feeling low and needed some nice stuff in my life?). In the past couple of weeks I also read Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro, which was very good and quite dark/depressing. The protagonist has Parkinson’s disease, and the author is a crime writer, and her description of the protagonist going about her life and her daily struggles is almost written in a thriller/crime style which sounds like it could be offensive or exploitative, but is actually incredibly well done.
• Luke’s off to London for most of the week now so off to console the dog. Catch you next time.