218: where have all the weirdos gone?

Yesterday Amanda and I ventured south of the river to tick off West Norwood Cemetery, the sixth of the Magnificent Seven Victorian graveyards – the original plan was Nunhead, but one of my colleagues tipped me off that it was their annual family open day and likely to be infested with Morris Dancers and small children rather than our usual cast of weirdos.

We met at London Bridge, where we both – separately – encountered a man wandering round with some rather grubby cards and a slightly desperate look on his face who was offering to do magic for people for some reason. South London hasn’t really featured on either of our radars, so it was new ground for us – we earmarked the RSPCA shop for a mooch after the cemetery, and we were quite surprised to find that the cemetery was very close to the station rather than a lengthy walk like the others.

West Norwood was the second of the seven to be built but is less higgledy-piggledy than Highgate and Kensal Green, with lots of mowed spaces and a newish rose garden for cremation burials where ashes can be scattered. There are wildlife areas – lots of wild flowers and birdlife, including cheeky robins and wagtails, noisy parakeets and magpies and the odd squirrel.

We are now getting to the age where mortality is making its presence felt and I think we’re quite pleased that there’s only one more to go on the list. We noticed a lot of child and baby burials from the 80s and 90s which made us sad. There are some great tombs, especially in the Greek quarter where there is a monumental chapel being restored with a Heritage Fund grant – a stonemason was at work, in fact, doing something with a chisel in the chapel. We didn’t find a single Martha on the stones – but there is always a Martha! – but did find lots of Elizas. We also found the wonderfully-named Carlton Parchment who, if I ever write a detective novel, will definitely be featured. Oswald Manoah Dennison is buried there, described on his gravestone as ‘The Columbus of Brixton and Empire Windrush pioneer’, which is a wonderful epitaph to be buried under. I love this poem by Dan Thompson I found about him and you can read an interview with him here.

Lunch was at Pintadera, a busy, friendly Italian cafe close to the station and an excellent suggestion by a friend who lives locally. Amanda had the mushroom and nduja pasta special, I had the ravioli with a beef and veal ragu which was delicious. We both had affogatos! Really reasonably priced, and highly recommended if you find yourself in the area.

The RSPCA shop trawl netted me a new pair of linen trousers and a skirt, a book and a pair of sunglasses for Thing 2. I do love a charity shop and this one was a really good one for clothes.

Other things making me happy this week

A girls’ night out to the cinema to see The Fall Guy, which just consolidated my love for Ryan Gosling (especially after watching La La Land earlier in the week)
Mental health awareness week – we went for a work picnic to get out of the office as the theme was movement. It was raining so instead of one of the local gardens we went to the Barbican, which was a great call by one of my colleagues. So good to step away from the desks and have a chat at the end of an exciting week.
And on the way back Esme Young from the Sewing Bee walked past us and I tried really hard not to embarrass myself.
Finishing Ashes to Ashes – the Daniel Mays character was completely bonkers, I still love the Gene Genie, but Alex was getting on my nerves.
Building an extremely long playlist based on blokes with guitars and angst. It’s great.
Coffee with Brian on Tuesday before work.
Finally being able to announce that our development is going ahead!
Running into ex-colleagues at the Museums and Heritage Show.

And that’s it from me for the week – this week it’s my Irish sister’s birthday (happy birthday!), and a session with my favourite teacher training alliance.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Bubbles All The Way/Bubbles Reboots – Sarah Strohmeyer

The Monkey’s Raincoat – Robert Crais

The Lost Continent – Bill Bryson (Audible)

Pay Dirt – Sara Paretsky

Necropolis -Catharine Arnold

217: sequins and a shortage of shorts

Yesterday I found myself watching some of the Eurovision finals for the first time since I don’t know when. I am not sure what to think about it – some of the songs were truly dreadful (Norway), some were naff, and some of the staging caused my eyebrows to raise almost to my hairline (I’m looking at you, UK, and a bit of side-eye for Finland as well). Graham Norton is a worthy successor to Terry Wogan, complete with cheeky comments, and there were enough sequins to keep the entire cast of Priscilla Queen of the Desert in costume for some years. Why was the man from Croatia wearing his Granny’s tablecloth? Why was one of the Ukrainian ones dressed as a pimped Ghengis Khan? Just some of the many, many things that crossed my mind….

This pair would have blended right in at Eurovision

The comperes in Malmo didn’t half drag out the results though, which got quite annoying towards the end but did give cheeky Graham a chance to be entertaining. I do feel a bit sorry for poor Olly Alexander with his nul point from the audience, but it was pretty dreadful all round – sad, as I rather like some of his Years and Years stuff. The ‘political’ voting was interesting this year, and perhaps it was best that neutral Switzerland won in the end….

The entertainment the previous night was far more spectacular, and caused my social media to go quite mad the following day. I am, of course, talking about the Northern Lights making an appearance all over the UK thanks to a huge geomagnetic storm. We were lucky in that we had a very clear night as the persistent rain has finally taken a break, and after trying to spot them from the back garden where the lights kept coming on, Thing 2 and I went for a late night walk on the Common behind the house where we were away from the streetlights.

I’ve always wanted to see the Northern Lights, but had never expected to, so this was a magical moment. Although my phone camera picked up the colours better than the naked eye, the sky itself was glowing and constantly changing with cloudplay; the stars were out in force and we were awestruck by the show. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it. Both of us wished we were in West Wales watching over the sea, but Essex just had to do on this occasion. North Weald has a lot of sky, and we don’t get the glow from London so much, so we were lucky.

(At the risk of sounding entirely soppy, too, both my sisters were watching the same lights in west London and Northern Ireland at the same time, and that felt pretty special as well).

I did check for triffids in the garden the following morning…

Other things making me happy this week:

Many completed crochet cacti and some bags for the Copped Hall stall at the beginning of June
A visit from the local peacocks
Gorgeous sunny swim this morning – and a nice cup of hot chocolate and a bacon roll when we decided not to swim in the pouring rain last Monday
GrandThing 2’s first birthday party yesterday – a Peter Rabbit party in our back garden
Sunshine!
Not migraines, though. No.

And now I’m off to enjoy the sunshine with some crochet and a cup of coffee, and quite possibly a maple raisin muffin. See you all next week!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Bubbles A Broad/Bubbles Betrothed/Bubbles All the Way – Sarah Strohmeyer

Pay Dirt – Sara Paretsky

A Walk in the Woods/The Lost Continent – Bill Bryson (Audible)

Necropolis – Catharine Arnold

216: it’s 1973, almost dinner time…

…I’m ‘avin ‘oops.

This week, having worked our way through all 27 series of Silent Witness, we’ve been watching the brilliant Life on Mars which has just appeared on Netflix. For anyone who missed this gem the first time round, the premise was that Manchester copper Sam Tyler (John Simm) was hit by a car, went into a coma and woke up in 1973. He’s been ‘transferred’ from Hyde where policing is a little more progressive. He’s confronted with sexism, racism, Neanderthal attitudes, ‘old-school’ policing and a camel-coated, gun-toting DCI called Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) who zooms around in a Cortina and shouts a lot (I love him. So. Much.). He spends two series attempting to reform the Gene Genie, hearing voices from various bits of electrical equipment linking him back to his comatose life in the 1990s. There’s a love interest, a truly excellent soundtrack, great clothes and good storylines. I really liked the ending though my Beloved always picks holes in these things, being very bad at suspending his disbelief.

Things 1 and 2 have dropped in and out of the series with us, especially Thing 2 who gets quite engaged with these things – she got very involved with Silent Witness too. About halfway through one episode she said ‘I wish I’d been there for all the feminism stuff, I think it would have been really exciting, really important.’ I’ve been thinking about that quite a lot – I probably should have questioned her a bit more about what she sees as having changed in the last 50 years but I was too busy thinking about how much she’s changed in the last year or so.

Thing 2 was desperately shy as a small person – I had to go to all birthday parties with her and she’d rarely leave my side. I called her my limpet as she’d cling on to me with her arms and legs at all times, which at least left me hands-free. Strange relatives in the house would have her posting notes under the door informing us that she wasn’t coming in the room as she was too shy. It usually took several hours for her to get round to talking to them. Combined with her legendary (inherited – karma strikes hard) stubbornness, this could make things like getting her into school quite difficult. Speech therapy was a trial as she refused to speak to the therapist for the first several weeks. She was seven before I could go to a school assembly without her clambering across every row of people to get to me rather than take part – when she finally managed it I was so proud I cried. She still hates answering questions in class and for her English speaking assessments we have to arrange for her to do her presentation to the teacher and some of her friends rather than the whole class. She hates speaking to waiters which drives her Aunty Tan mad.

What she does have, however, is a fierce sense of what’s right and wrong, and this is when she speaks out – she stands up for her sister when she’s in trouble, she speaks up for friends in school. On one memorable occasion last year our next door neighbours were having a barney outside – my Beloved phoned the police, Thing 1 was monitoring the situation and Thing 2 flung open the front door, puffed herself up to twice her size like an angry cat and stormed out of the house shouting ‘WHAT THE F**K, B…?’ He was so surprised he stopped what he was doing and legged it before the police arrived. His wife brought flowers to Thing 2 the following day which flustered her completely. She was worried that I’d tell her off for swearing – on this occasion I let her off! See? Fierce. Far from telling her off, I’d like to get it printed on a commemorative t-shirt or mug for her. She might not say much but when she does it makes a difference.

Gene Hunt makes his return this evening as we start Ashes to Ashes – similar premise, except our time traveller is a woman heading back to 1981. Fire up the Quattro!

Other things making me happy this week

Coffees with lovely people: a fellow crocheter who’s currently working at the Museum of the Order of St John, with Amanda, and with my team.
Lunch with Panagiota, the friend I made a few weeks ago – we managed to find a date at last!
The prospect of a long weekend with a couple of swims
Two encounters with the Bella-dog, who is unfailingly pleased to see me and lets me know with boisterous enthusiasm
A visit from Timeshare Teenager 1 and No 1 Grandson this afternoon
A gorgeous sunny walk through the lanes today after several days of torrential downpours this week
The return of Disco Jesus to the church just down from our site

Sunshine and flowers!

Enjoy your Bank Holiday Monday!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Mrs England/The Foundling– Stacey Halls

A Walk in the Woods – Bill Bryson (Audible)

Necropolis – Catharine Arnold

Bubbles Unbound/Bubbles in Trouble/Bubbles Ablaze –Sarah Strohmeyer

(Cover image: https://contra.com/p/U6k3LMvr-are-spaghetti-hoops-vegan)

215: next stop, Islington

This week I’ve spent a lot of time on buses on my way to and from visits to interesting people. I like London buses. They are reliable, cheap and almost never involve changing at Bank station. They’re also above ground so hopping on buses around the borough is helping me consolidate my mental map of Islington – this week I connected the dots between Highbury and Islington Green, for example. I now know that the number 4 bus will get me back to Barbican from Finsbury Park, and that it’s no slower than taking various trains.

I like to sit on the top deck when I can, as you’re above the shop fronts and can see the bones of the buildings above them. Islington, bordering the City, has elegant squares (especially in the bit around New River Head where we’re building our new Centre) and brick villas and terraces – home to the Charles and Carrie Pooters of Victorian London. There are modernist council estates like Berthold Lubetkin’s Spa Green Estate and Bevin Court. Interesting buildings include a gorgeous Art Deco cinema (now a community hub) in Upper Street. Exmouth Market has traditional tiled pub fronts, and the old Metropolitan Water Board HQ (also New River Head) oozes Edwardian grandeur at the front and 1930s sweeping glass brick glamour at the old Laboratory building. There’s Islington Green, a tiny square where the statue of Bob the street cat holds court. There are also ridiculously posh corners like Highgate Village, and of course the gothic glories of Highgate Cemetery.

The Pooters, residents of Islington – *Diary of a Nobody,* George and Weedon Grossmith

There are railways and stations and canals, including the very long Islington Tunnel, and for some reason a lot of theatres in pubs, and medieval wells where people would go to take the waters. The more time I spend on buses and visiting new places, the more I like it. I’ve even stopped getting lost on my way back to the office.

Other things making me happy this week

A visit to Artbox in Islington, an arts organisation working with adults with learning needs
Coffee with Amanda
Finishing Silent Witness – all 27 series!
Mike Bubbins’ sitcom Mammoth (BBC) and Deadboy Detectives (Netflix)
A walk in the early morning woods on Monday
Book recommendations from a colleague – finding a fellow fantasy fan is always good. Also, I read the start of a book over someone’s elbow on a busy tube and it looked really good so I had to buy it. Not even sorry.

What I’ve been reading

A Court of Mist and Fury/A Court of Wings and Ruin/A Court of Frost and Starlight/A Court of Silver Flames – Sarah J. Maas

Notes from a Small Island/A Walk in the Woods – Bill Bryson (Audible)

Mrs England – Stacy Halls

214: oooh, people

Every so often I stick my head up above the arts and heritage parapet and remind myself that there’s a world out there of people who probably really enjoy spreadsheets and who can do magical things with apps and technical things and who aren’t at all fazed when month-end and year-end come around. A fabulous friend of mine runs an event planning company and one of their big events is the Digital Accountancy Show, this year held over two days at Evolution Battersea. She brings me and two of our other friends in to support the event – if I tell you that over the three days I logged more than 80,000 steps that should tell you how busy it is.

I love it. My role is officially exhibitor support, plus anything else that looks like it might need doing – covering breaks for other staff, lugging giant water bottles around, answering questions about access, unloading courier deliveries and more. On the first morning of the show I arm myself and my little team with about a million HDMI cables, acquire a notebook and pen from one of the stands and troubleshoot everything in sight.

This year there were many tech queries so I spent a lot of time fetching the people in charge of the USBs. Some things I can fix myself – upside down logos on the stands are pretty simple, for example, by removing the panel and rotating it through the required number of degrees. Some things are harder – my stand isn’t where I thought it would be, something’s damaged or broken, there’s no TV/lights – so I listened to stressed digital types, soothing ruffled spreadsheets. I collect feedback to give to the Show team, check in with people throughout the show, herd people over to the marquee for the evening show, wrangle fire-eaters (yes, really) and generally fly about the place.

Taste test required – I think I’ll stick with the wafers

The show is pretty spectacular and the venue is more like a club than a trade show – laser shows, silent disco style earphones for the talks so all the stages can run simultaneously without the sound bleed, dry ice, light rigs. So much so that when we had a thunder and hail storm on day one a lot of people thought it was sound effects. The companies up their game every year too – when the event was held at the Tottenham Hotspurs ground it was quite straightforward, but now teams bring fancy coffee machines (some bring baristas to work them!), and one brought an ice cream machine. Scottish firms ply everyone with Tunnocks teacakes and caramel wafers, which are always winners. The show swag gets better every year too – a firm called Apron had the best tote bags this year, and put the team in funky work overalls. Some firms give away good coffee, others seed sticks or seed packets. This year there were interactive elements – darts, safecracking, those buzzy puzzles and an electronic thingy. SuperAcornomics dressed their poor lad up in a red squirrel costume and his handler trundled him about giving out mints. There was a red panda mascot, but I couldn’t convince the organisers that we ought to start the night show off with a mascot wrestling match, unfortunately. It would have been great. These shows keep me in notebooks and socks too, which is handy.

Days are long and although we were in a rather nice hotel in Battersea, we didn’t get to see much after Sunday when Miriam and I had a wander round Battersea Power Station and tested out the spa (very small and uncomfortably couply – we were doing widths in the pool to avoid the other end, where one of those ‘no petting’ posters from municipal pools would have been appropriate). A nice lady in the Curated Makers shop told me if I ever wanted to make jackets to sell to come to them first, which was lovely to hear.

At the end of Day 1 we made it back to the hotel and I was in bed by 9, having stayed in a hot bath till everything stopped hurting. By the end of Day 2 I was so ready for my own bed…

Having been working on closed projects since 2020, things like this remind me that I rather like interacting with people – I love my day job but I’m really looking forward to having some visitors again! Four-legged ones will do, like this tiny cub who kept having to be rescued from the venue while build and strike were underway.

Other things making me happy this week:

A visit to Westminster Abbey to meet the team there. I also met a cat.
First of the summer swims at Redricks – 12 degrees!
Sleeping in my own bed again. Hotels are all very well but lack cats.

This week will have a lot less walking, I hope! Watch this space…

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

A Court of Thorns and Roses/House of Flame and Shadow – Sarah J. Maas

Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson (Audible)

211: communications breakdown

Easter is here already, and I am relieved of the responsibility of getting anyone out of bed other than me for the next two weeks. This makes me quite cheerful. While I am known for being generally quite chirpy of a morning, this is only the case if I am allowed to have a cup of coffee and half an hour (at least) of solitary reading before I am expected to engage with anyone else. Having to coax various offspring out of their pits before my happy face is in place is known to test the bounds of my patience, and brings on what London sister refers to as my ‘psycho Mary Poppins’ persona. Gritted teeth, determinedly cheerful voice and walking (and occasionally falling off) the fine line between perky and profane.

It turns out that pulling an all-nighter in A&E with a miserable child (don’t panic, mum, she’s FINE – NHS111 sent us up there but their concept of emergency does not translate to actual emergency care) also tests my patience, especially when communications break down within the hospital and things are missed. The streaming clinician telling child they need to go to Urgent Care where they’ll be seen quickly, for example, but no one having told the clinician that Urgent Care had closed. Then, because we’d been through triage once and then got put back on the system as they’d taken her off because she’d been sent to Urgent Care (that wasn’t open), they failed to take bloods which were finally done at 4.30am – and then the doctor said they couldn’t do anything for various reasons, and to get a GP appointment. I laughed in a what was, according to the child, quite a scary way. These days you can only get a GP appointment if you phone in an arbitrary half hour slot on a Thursday afternoon, a month in advance, and there’s a z in the month. Or if you dial upwards of 50 times (my record is 96) to get into the queue at 8.30am and pray that by the time you get through there’s an appointment left. And now the nurse practitioner (lovely lady, did all the medication reviews, HRT and generally useful things) has left which will reduce options even more. The child also needs a consultant appointment – a telephone clinic – so she attempted to book online, only to find there were no appointments and to leave a number and the clinic would phone back. They did not phone back – the next contact was a letter telling her if she didn’t book an appointment she’d be discharged. I suppose the theory is that you’ll either be better or dead by the time you actually get to see anyone, which at least reduces waiting lists. You can’t fault the actual people on the NHS frontline (which includes some of my favourite friends) but something is going wrong somewhere.

AND the bloody coffee machine was broken.

After six hours I was forced to channel my inner dad, and explain that we’d been there many hours at this point, and that I did have two other children who I needed to make sure got to school and perhaps a doctor might like to talk to us so we could leave? I was extremely polite but my inner psycho Mary P was very definitely in evidence. The only plus was that we’d been there so long that the buses had started running again so at least we could get home.

We got home, I made sure the other two were at least awake and then went to bed, slept for a few hours and was in work for afternoon meetings…. FML, quite frankly. FML.

Things making me happy this week (not the NHS)

Monday morning coffee with an old colleague
Getting a lot of crochet done on my scarf – obviously I’d rather it hadn’t been overnight in the A&E dept, but there we are
Finishing the Rivendell cross stitch – next up, a Michael Powell kit that’s been lurking in the stash
Getting up to date on the temperature cross stitch
Discovering a rather magical new book – Days at the Morisaki Bookshop – and a whole new genre of literature (cats and books in Japan)
A visit from London sister, although I think my cats are trying to kill her
An Easter morning swim

Hopefully you’re all having a lovely Easter weekend filled with chocolate and hot cross buns.

Same time next week then!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Voodoo River – Robert Crais

Sweets – Tim Richardson

At Home/Notes from a Big Country – Bill Bryson (Audible)

Kick Back – Val McDermid

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop – Satoshi Yagisawa

The Easy Life in Kamusari – Shion Miura

210: mad March malaise

Ah, March. People who’ve worked with me for years will recognise this as my annual ‘chuck the toys out of the pram and swear I need another job’ moment, despite the fact that I love my job and really don’t want another one. Usually it’s related to the performance appraisal cycle, when I’m reviewing my year against targets and feeling as if I have achieved absolutely nothing.

In my head I know that the targets set the previous year are SMART (but VAGUE) and often don’t reflect the things I do across the year – which in some years have included writing a unit for the London Curriculum, working on hugely successful exhibitions and applications, developing innovative sessions, pulling off high profile events, to name a few things. If the things aren’t quantified in the targets I feel like a failure.

My current role doesn’t work to the April-March appraisal cycle but it turns out my brain hasn’t worked that out, so I’ve spent all week with a horrible case of impostor syndrome and associated wobbles. Oh yes, and a cold and the tail end of a cold sore.

Tuesday was the worst day. The cats were misbehaving, Thing 2’s work experience paperwork needed sorting out, I had a headache that wouldn’t go away, Thing 2’s eczema was making her miserable and it was clearly my fault, Thing 3 was being stroppy, Thing 1 has mocks and was stressed, my throat hurt, the big piece of work I’d finished the previous week was all wrong, everyone wanted me to do everything all at once, and I was clearly failing on all counts. I was also very, very tired.

I was very, very tired as on Monday I’d been to a conference at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which meant getting up at 4.30am, travelling 3.5 hours each way and when I got back at 8pm they were all waiting to be fed (see? all this responsibility!). It was a really interesting day, despite the cold taking hold and feeling very down – all about values-led community engagement.

One of the breakout sessions, led by the team from the Bluecoat in Liverpool, got us thinking about resilience vs vulnerability and how we define them. Resilience is a word which has been massively overused in the culture sector for the past 15 years or so – ‘resilience training’ for staff, along with ‘change management’ training, is often chased rapidly by other re- words, like restructure, reorganisation, redundancy, and (the most recent one I’ve heard) realignment, Resilience has been pushed on us by years of under-resourcing and uncertain funding, and vulnerability – especially personal – is often masked by a culture of toxic positivity masquerading as resilience. It was a relief to have a conversation with a group of people with shared experiences from across the sector, including one who’d been at one of the same organisations as me during the post-Covid ‘recovery’ process.

Chichester was lovely, too – I took a wander around it after the sessions and before the train – it’s a funny place, with about 12 phone shops interspersed with much higher-end shops (and a New Look with a frontage like the British Museum). There was some lovely street art as well, including a Stik piece, tucked away in side streets.

Pallant House Gallery’s exhibition of work by John Craxton, an artist who’d spent a long time in Greece, is worth a visit if you find yourself over that way. I adored the mischievous cats he’d captured in some of his paintings, and some of them would lend themselves beautifully to textile work.

Other things making me happy this week:

Little lambs seen from the train (and going on a train. I like trains)
Early Saturday morning coffee
Deep Heat on a stiff neck
Spring being on its way – and an office with daylight and a door we can prop open to the fire escape to enjoy it.
Excellent progress on the Rivendell cross stitch and the alpaca scarf

Same time next week then! A couple of four day weeks coming up with the promise of chocolate eggs, what’s not to love?

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches – Sangu Mandanna

The Unfortunate Side Effects of Heartbreak and Magic – Breanne Randall

At Home – Bill Bryson (Audible)

Sweets: A History of Temptation – Tim Richardson

Noise Floor – Andrew Cartmel

A Blend of Magic – Kate Kenzie

208: so, what do you want to be when you grow up?

So here we are at week 208 – four years of me rambling (physically and literarily), reading, making stuff, working, swimming and anything else that’s taken my fancy., Happy birthday to WKDN once again. 11,688 people have visited my little corner of the internet, which is pretty cool – thank you, especially to those people who drop in every week to see what I’ve been up to. Some of them aren’t even related to me!

Does this make me a writer of sorts? There’s certainly been a lot of words. 214,103 to be exact. Some of them have been quite cross and some of them have been airyfairy and about mushrooms and flowers and things, and a lot of them have been about various crafts. Some of them may even have made people think about things differently – I hope so, at least.

At one point in my life I wanted to be a writer, but the trouble was I didn’t know what I wanted to write about, and as it turned out I accidentally fell into a career I rather liked so that worked out quite well.

I’ve been thinking a lot about careers recently thanks to a couple of events I’ve taken part in: one for Year 10s with Inspire, our local Education Business Partnership, and one for undergraduate Education Studies students at the University of East London, but both aimed at helping various levels of students think about their career choices post-education. I’ve just signed up to the latter’s professional mentoring programme, in fact.

When I do these events we’re always asked to talk about our ‘career paths’ and in the last year or so there’s been a focus on non-traditional paths to the workplace – less of the narrow academic routes and more about apprenticeships, traineeships. Definitely less of the ‘I got 3 A*, went to Oxbridge/insert Russell Group uni of choice, got the job of my dreams and now I have a house, 2.4 kids and a dog called Volvo’ career path. I do see some of those people still around – one engineer telling students that they have to do a degree or they won’t get a job, for example, which in the middle of a white working class council estate in depressed post-Ford Dagenham isn’t really the most helpful advice in these days of student debt.

I was on a panel the other day with someone doing youth work and marketing, and he was really open about the fact that he’d dropped out of university having made a mess of his first year, and his dad made him get a job. The job turned out to be in youth work, and he loved it – so he went back to uni with a purpose and now is doing amazing things. He also had an excellent hat.

Another event saw me talking to an environmental scientist who wishes she’d gone down the apprenticeship route as she’d have entered the workplace with practical experience rather than a lot of theory. Her job, on the Tideway Tunnel project, seems mostly to involve telling the construction workers off for throwing mitten crabs back in the river.

The panel event at UEL was essentially for opening up the students’ horizons about the different careers in education: as well as the marketing youth worker, there was a teacher and someone who works in outreach in the Home Office. I always like to describe my career as accidental, as the move out of teaching came as a result of an Inset Day arranged (coincidentally) by the very EBP I did the school event with a few weeks ago. I like these circular moments.

We inevitably get asked at some point what advice we’d give to people starting out, and mine is invariably to take every opportunity you can as you’ll always learn something useful. A range of handy teaching skills, for example, actually came from working behind a bar and clearing people out at closing time. Be curious about all the people around you and what they’re doing – getting the whole picture of an organisation helps you work as a team, and builds relationships. I mean everyone, from the cleaners upwards – make friends, ask them how they are. No one is too low or too high to say hello to. Play nicely, and – this is my current office bugbear – always put your cups and teaspoons in the dishwasher.

Other things making me happy this week

Interesting online meetings about working with young volunteers and Bradford City of Culture
A surprise birthday breakfast for Rachel at the lake after a chilly swim
Good progress on the current cross stitch
Visit from Timeshare Teenager 2 and Grandthing 2
Coffee and world-righting with Amanda
Still watching Silent Witness. We’re up to series 15!
A visit to the Foundling Museum with a colleague

Same time next week then 🙂

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading

The Rules of Magic/Magic Lessons/The Book of Magic – Alice Hoffman

The Wild Rover – Mike Parker

At Home – Bill Bryson (Audible)

Killing the Shadows – Val McDermid

206: a right pain in the neck

This week has been mostly notable for a migraine which has been sulking and stropping around since Tuesday, making its presence felt in a variety of unpleasant ways. Quite apart from the pain, a full-on migraine comes accompanied by visual disturbances, nausea, light and sound sensitivity, shakes and – joy of joys, these days – hot flushes which are a new and entirely unwelcome addition to both the menopause and the migraines.

The migraine landed on Tuesday night and I beat it into submission with painkillers, heat packs and an early night, and then (thinking I was winning) I went to work on Wednesday morning. The Central Line, which at the moment is a portal into the deepest pits of hell (and no, I am not exaggerating) was crowded, hot and delayed. By the time I got to work the side-effects were back with a vengeance and the pain was gearing up for round two, I went home after a couple of hours and took to my bed, which helped, but I’ve had to be careful with my choice of activity for the rest of week.

I’ve had migraines since my late teens, occasionally triggered by food and drink (red wine, white wine and lager – halfway down the first glass, which effectively ruins an evening out; strong cheese; too much dark chocolate – all classic triggers). Sometimes they’re hormonal, sometimes stress-related; sometimes they just turn up for no good reason whatsoever. They’re exhausting, and the really bad ones leave you knocked out for several days and feeling fragile. Painkillers take out the pain, but not the rest of the symptoms – over the years I’ve tried all sorts of thing, like Migraleve and Syndol when they strike; amytriptyline which didn’t work; a nasal spray containing ergotamine which came with a long list of side effects including death, so I didn’t use that much; Tiger Balm, Kool’n’Soothe, heat packs, Deep Freeze gel, and right now I have my neck on an acupuncture pillow which is spiky but effective. It would be nice to find something that worked consistently but so far no luck. Everyone seems to have their own ways of dealing with theirs – currently I take Paramol alternating with Ibuprofen, use Tiger Balm on my temples and a heat pack or cold gel on my neck – I have seen something that recommends a bag of frozen peas on your neck and your feet in a bowl of hot water, but that seems complicated at a time when even thinking in single syllables is a challenge.

Things that were better about the week…

Interesting meetings – the Participatory Arts Network and a friendly rabbi
A great walk in the chilly sunshine with Toby and Loki the Weimaraner on Saturday morning – we anticipated squirrels and rabbits but the geese were a surprise!
Finishing the cross stitch that’s been on my frame for about a year and kitting up the next one
Finishing the scarf I’ve been crocheting on the train
A bit more attempting to draw – this time I liked the bricks but I need to learn about perspective and things. Somewhere I have a book but it’s hiding from me!
The Naked Marshmallow Company’s salted caramel gourmet flavour (thanks Tan)
Thing 2’s lemon and cranberry biscuits

I am off for a swim this morning for the first time in a couple of weeks – let’s hope I haven’t lost my acclimatisation!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Threadneedle – Cari Thomas

Silver on the Tree – Susan Cooper (Audible)

Neighbours from Hell?/The Wild Rover – Mike Parker

200: surprise!

Here we are at post number 200, which is quite a lot and probably I should look back at the last 200 weeks and be all marvelly at what I’ve achieved. 200 posts is what I have achieved, despite Covid, labyrinthitis, new jobs, children, and general life happening all at the same time. Thanks to all of you who have been with me since the beginning (hello Mum, hello Dad, hello Fi), and to everyone else who’s dipped into my ramblings, roamings and adventures with the sewing machine.

Anyway, this week I am coming at you from a cold but sunny Brittany, where London sister and brother-in-law and I rocked up on Friday evening to surprise my mum for her significant birthday. I can’t tell you how old she is as she may make me sleep in the garden. Dad had managed to keep the secret, even sneakily making up the beds, hiding the extra baguettes in his office and putting the fizz on ice without Mum noticing.

Having left Ealing at 6am for a morning Eurotunnel crossing, we made good time across a snowy Normandy and a not-snowy Brittany – spotting the dozens of birds of prey, deer and trees full of mistletoe (at least while I wasn’t snoozing) and only running into a bit of traffic on the Rennes rocade where a combination of roadworks and rush hour conspired against us. At 7.10 Tan dropped me off at the bottom of the drive so Mum wouldn’t hear the car, and clutching the magazine featuring Irish sister Steph* I knocked on the door. Dad had apparently delayed their dinner as long as possible, so when the door went he said he hadn’t finished and made mum get up. She opened the door and stood and looked at me for about 30 seconds in total silence while her brain processed the fact that the daughter who was supposed to be in Essex was on her doorstep. And then I told her I’d hitched a lift with Tan and Darren…there were tears and hugs and much joy, as well as cursing Dad for being a sneaky so-and-so**.

On Friday Tan, Darren and I went for a walk along the Blavet to see if we could spot a coypu in the lagoon. We didn’t spot a coypu but we were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a kingfisher, a heron, a kestrel, any number of ducks, a buzzard and a cormorant in its favourite tree. It’s a canalised river which flows through to Lorient, and the towpath is popular for walking and running. Last winter we did a 10 miler along there with a total ascent of about 3 metres, which tells you how flat it is!

One of the great mysteries of French life is when the polite passing greeting changes from ‘bonjour‘ to ‘bonsoir‘ – if you open with bonsoir, you can guarantee that they’ll come back at you with bonjour, so mostly we’ve given up and just start there. Yesterday’s walk was no different. On the outward stretch we bonjoured away merrily until we’d almost reached our turnaround point. Tan bonjoured a French gentleman who responded with ‘Non! Bonsoir! Nuit est arrive!‘. When we met him again close to his turnround point in Pont-Augan, I bonsoired him….to which is his response was ‘trop bonsoir!’. Er, what…. had we bonsoired him too many times? Was it too evening, in which case was there a third option of ‘bonne nuit‘? Duolingo – or, indeed, Mr Morgan French (to distinguish him from any other Mr Morgans at the school)- never covered this clearly tricky aspect of the language. Is it some secret French thing designed to catch out the tourists? Answers on a carte postale to the usual address, s’il vous plait.

We are here till Monday, when we’ll make the marathon trek back across to Calais. By then I confidently expect to be approximately 75% baguette.

*Women’s Weekly, since you ask, in a feature all about her live interpretation business, Time Steps. Steph had promised to send her a copy….

**censored, for the delicate ears of my readership

Other things making me happy this week

A great meeting with Little Angel Theatre about where we could work together
Kicking off a new project with our illustrator Alaa Alsaraji and Holborn Community Association’s Digital Arts Club
A swim with Sue and Rachel – the temperatures are heading downwards to extreme sports levels again!
Getting organised for this year’s temperature tracker and starting a new Hydrangea blanket as well as mounting last year’s.

Same time next week, mes amis

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Midwinter of the Spirit/A Crown of Lights/The Cure of Souls/The Lamp of the Wicked – Phil Rickman

The Last Devil to Die– Richard Osman (Audible)

Map Addict– Mike Parker