I was quite anxious about going for my first COVID jab today; less about the jab as about going inside a building other than my house for the first time this year, and driving somewhere new, and whether I needed to get there extra early to allow for walking from the car to the vaccine centre, and what I should do about lunch if I had a meeting until 12, my appointment was at 12:45 and then I was going to go for a swim. In fact, it was all very efficient, with plenty of signage and volunteers directing people. There was a steady stream of people coming in but it didn't feel particularly busy, and I was in and out in not much more than five minutes, with instructions to wait in my car for fifteen minutes before driving.

So, now I've had my first dose of the Oxford/Astra Zeneca vaccine. I was quite glad it was that one; given where I work it would have felt a bit disloyal to have one of the others (although obviously I would have taken whatever was on offer). No side effects so far (unless a greater-than-usual tendency to fail to hit the space bar when typing is a vaccine side-effect, which seems unlikely), but I guess I need to wait and see how I feel tomorrow.

I'd timed my appointment to fit in with my usual Friday-lunchtime swim, which turned out to be a particularly good thing as it was one friend's last swim for a while as she has to isolate over the weekend before an operation next week. It was gloriously sunny, with the water in double figures by all of our thermometers. I picked up a bit of plastic floating in the river, intending just to be tidy, and discovered it was a small sparkly tube of bubble mixture, so I sat on the bank afterwards blowing bubbles and decided that nearly 47 is probably too old to be a manic pixie dream girl, so I must be a manic pixie dream crone instead.

The Guardian's COVID liveblog* yesterday reported that vaccinations were going to be opening up to the over-40s, and this morning I saw that the website has extended booking to over-45s. I haven't actually booked mine yet, because when I looked the closest was Banbury, and when I thought that actually, maybe Banbury was OK and went back it only had Northampton or Milton Keynes, but it seems like a positive sign anyway.

I also bunked off for two hours this afternoon for a lovely swim in the river; the sky was blue, and the air temperature was about 14, which is ridiculous given that it snowed yesterday, but there you are.

Because I felt guilty about bunking off, I decided I'd set up a spreadsheet to track my hours and reassure myself I'm not slacking. It appears that even with bunking off for two hours I worked 8 hours and 22 minutes today (I did start early, to compensate for taking time in the afternoon), so I'm probably not slacking really...

*Is there anything the Guardian won't liveblog?

Apparently it's the warmest March day in 53 years. While the constant beating of temperature records is clearly a bad thing, it is nice to have some sunshine and warmth after what has been a particularly dreary winter, thanks to COVID. Yesterday the rules in England were relaxed so that up to six people or two households can meet outside, so my swimming friends and I celebrated by swimming as a three for the first time since Christmas Day in glorious sunshine, and it was warm enough to stay in for half an hour.

Today I went for a walk and there were new leaves unfurling everywhere I looked.

I wandered down to the river and spent some time sitting on a fallen tree that overhung the water with my shoes and socks off, intermittently dabbling my feet in the water and enjoying the peace and the sunshine.

I thought I didn't enjoy spending holidays at home, but it strikes me that I've only previously spent holidays this much at home over Christmas, and it turns out having more daylight and warmth and no expectation of festivities or following traditions makes a big difference and I am really enjoying having a break and a chance to spend time outdoors or making things. I am not sure how I'm going to convince myself to go back to work next week, though.

I'm sure weekends used to be longer. This one barely seems to have started and it's already finished.

Still, in the last two days I have:

Been for a 10-minute swim in water that was somewhere between 3 and 4 degrees (we had two thermometers, which as always gave different answers, but at any rate both read about a degree lower than they did last weekend). It was bracing but utterly exhilarating. I find that cold water swimming gives me the kind of burst of endorphins I normally only otherwise get at the end of a really long walk, or maybe after climbing a mountain, but it does it after five minutes and not hours of slogging.

Been for a 4.5-mile walk down the canal to the nature reserve and back. Unsurprisingly, there was no sign of the otters (I think very early is the best time to see them, and we were there late morning when there were quite a lot of people around) although we did see a very sweet little fieldmouse on the towpath.

Cut my hair (9mm on the back and sides, 12mm on the top, and didn't touch the quiff). It's nearly a year since my last £50 haircut with my old hairdresser; after she left hairdressing to go and work as a teaching assistant I tried going to a barber and ended up with a cut that I liked just as much for less than half the price, but that was at the start of March and ever since then I've been cutting my own hair, having panic-bought a set of clippers online shortly after the start of lockdown. The first few tries were a bit hit and miss and I ended up with a longish all-over buzzcut a couple of times, and tried to leave the top longer once and ended up with it looking rather odd, but I've now settled on something that I'm pretty happy with, and I'm saving a small fortune compared to what I used to pay.

Cut out another set of underwear (Muna and Broad Banksia Bralette; and Waratah Undies). Underwear was my Christmas break sewing challenge, because my underwired bras were digging into my rib cage in a tedious manner and I thought how nice it would be to have fun, non-wired bras instead, and I thought I might as well do matching knickers while I was about it even though I have no complaint about my plain black M&S multipack midis. So far I've been using leftover jersey from making t-shirts, of which I had quite a lot, and in this case also the t-shirt itself, which was made from a free pattern and came out too cropped and too boxy for me; this will be my fourth bra, although the jersey I used for the second one turned out not to be stretchy enough, which meant that it felt more like a binder than a bra (which wasn't really a problem) and started ripping at the seams very quickly (which was), so I've had to bin it already, and third pair of knickers. I've found that cutting out small pieces in stretchy fabric is much easier with a rotary cutter than scissors, and got to use my new A1 size cutting board this weekend, which is much easier than the A3 one I had before which meant I had to keep repositioning things. I have also discovered, that in the absence of fancy pattern weights, the collection of brooches I used to wear when I wore jackets for work make a pretty good substitute. Though I may buy some actual pattern weights too at some point. Or make some from fabric scraps and rice, if we no longer have to horde rice against Brexit and panic buying. (I always swore by pinning, but weighting actually seems to be better for stretch fabric.)

I suppose that's a reasonable amount of things to have accomplished in two days.

Happy New Year, everyone. Let us hope it's an improvement on 2020.

I am thinking about trying to do the daily posts thing, in an effort to actually get back into writing/talking more about stuff and engage a bit more with the community here. It may well not stick.

My year started with the coldest swim yet (probably 4.something degrees; my thermometer said 4.9, L's said 4.0, various other people had something in between because apparently the number of different estimates is equal to the number of thermometers present). I have a new wetsuit jacket, which is thicker than the old one and has long sleeves instead of short, but I'm not sure I felt any warmer than I do in the old one. It was also really, really busy, hopefully because lots of people wanted a New Year's Day dip rather than because they're all planning to swim regularly, because it just felt like Too Many People. I'm glad we did it, though. (One of my three had persuaded another friend to swim with her, so we had two twos, mostly keeping separate other than brief exchanges of greetings in the water and baked goods out of it.)

Only two more days of holiday left and the prospect of work is starting to loom rather :-(