Except I think I did that one last week. For avoidance of doubt: panromantic, asexual, genderqueer; or, interested in people, not interested in sex, thinks any kind of attempt to put people into binary categories is basically bollocks.

Today was also the first day of full term, which meant back to in-person teaching for the first time since last autumn, and even a couple of in-person lectures for the first time since February 2020. Amazingly (mostly thanks to the amazing C), it all went very smoothly, and we did not, as we'd feared, have far more students turning up than could fit in the lectures (our lecture theatre only fits about half the year group, so that was a very real concern). Only another 39 days of term to go...

I have got a new pronoun badge, which is "She/They" rather than the "She/Her" I had before. For me, what "she/they" means is, essentially, that I've spent 47 years being referred to as "she" and am fairly sure that no matter how masculine-of-centre I dress the vast majority of people are going to look at me and see a she, and I can generally live with that, at least in passing conversation, but I'm increasingly feeling that "they" feels more right for me.

I was going to post a picture of it on Instagram and Facebook, as a way of coming out to everyone, but both IG and FB are currently down, so that is going to have to wait. (Not having either one feels quite peaceful, actually, but I miss WhatsApp as that's how I communicate with the swimming coven.)

Today I have mostly been feeling tired and listless. Which is not exactly surprising, even without having been woken up at 7am by a cramping calf muscle.

I resent having to spend my weekends recovering from the working week. I did go for a swim, and have made a bit of sewing progress, but not nearly as much as I would have liked...

I am really not looking forward to going back to work tomorrow, and in particular to finding out (a) how many emails have accumulated in my absence and (b) how many job applications I'm going to need to read before Tuesday afternoon's shortlisting meeting for the first of three vacancies I'll be recruiting to over the next six weeks or so*.

Still, I have had a good break, and done lots of sewing and swimming. And on today's swim we saw a kingfisher, sitting so still I actually managed to photograph it.




* the fact that one of my team has put a meeting in my calendar for 9:30 tomorrow saying that she needs to talk to me as soon as possible suggests that I may have another recruitment process to deal with soon, too.

For some reason my hayfever appears to have gone into overdrive the last couple of days. (That or I just forgot to take an antihistamine yesterday morning, I suppose). It has been a really bad year for it; I'm sure that normally I'm pretty much over it by this time of year.

I'm also at the "feeling even tireder" stage of attempting to rest and catch up on sleep now I'm on holiday.

It's also struck me that when I'm back to working five days a week my Friday swims will be out, and fitting the things I want to do (swimming and sewing, and I'd really like to get back into walking more with T as well) into my weekends as well as just taking the time to recover from the weeks is going to be really difficult. (Last winter, I managed swimming and slow sewing, but no walking. Pre-pandemic, I walked, but didn't swim or sew.)

After my post about the menopause last week, I bought and started reading Dr Jen Gunter's The Menopause Manifesto. I'm slightly wishing I hadn't because I'm not sure knowing about all the possible health problems that occur after menopause is doing me any good at all, and I'm now worrying about whether I should be doing more exercise, and how on earth I could fit it in if I should.

I am on holiday after tomorrow until 13 September.

The university announced today that we would be removing most COVID restrictions from 6 September, including planning for all teaching to be in-person and staff to return to working on-site rather than from home. (I had been aware that this was coming, and got an advance view of the guidance yesterday afternoon.) This meant that most of today was spent in meetings about how we go about implementing this, writing emails explaining how we've agreed to implement this, and updating risk assessments and building guidance.

I had also arranged a team meeting to talk about the proposals for increased flexible working, post-pandemic, which ended up taking place half an hour after the all-staff email about the changes went out. This turned out not to be entirely a bad thing, but it made a slightly nerve-wracking meeting rather more nerve-wracking.

It has definitely been A Day.

(As for how I feel about the changed guidance? Resigned to the fact that it had to happen, attracted by the possibility of not being in pandemic mode any more, but also really quite worried about how it's actually going to pan out.)

I'd been thinking that I'd like to make a waistcoat ever since waistcoats were the pattern challenge on the Sewing Bee, and I managed to find a women's waistcoat pattern which had what looked like a classic enough option (Jalie 3129) that it seemed worth giving it a go. I printed off the pattern last weekend, and cut out the pieces in a tweedy fabric I bought from John Lewis years ago intending to make a skirt out of it. I remember the label saying it was a wool blend, but from the smell and handle I'd say it was mostly polyester. It was also quite thick and textured and altogether a pain in the arse to work with, and I couldn't press it properly without risking melting it.

I decided I'd try to do proper pockets rather than the mock welt pockets from the pattern, which wasn't entirely successful, mostly because the instructions in my reference book were unhelpfully vague on exactly where you should place the pocket lining over the welt and the pockets ended up much shorter than I'd intended (though I also came to the conclusion that waistcoat pockets are probably never going to be particularly functional unless you have a pocketwatch - too small, too high).

Sewing the waistcoat together was quite good fun (you sew everything together inside out and then pull the waistcoat through a hole in the lining, like a magic trick - on the Sewing Bee they referred to it as "bagging out", and it seems to have been the technique of the last series), but once I'd finished assembling it I realised that either I'd found it harder than I thought to sew straight on the nubbly fabric, or it had slipped when I was cutting or stretched after cutting, or possibly a combination of all three, because the front points had ended up all wonky and the tweed pattern made it very clear that it had strayed off-grain. It also turned out to be slightly too small to button up comfortably, and I also realised that the style that had looked like classic menswear on the pattern was actually more femme than I wanted - the v-neck too low, the tailoring lines accentuating curves. Basically, a fail from start to finish, but good learning: next time I try to make a waistcoat, I'll use a smoother fabric which can stand up to pressing, and I think I'd be better off starting with a men's pattern (probably the Belvedere Waistcoat) and adjusting the fit than assuming I can short-cut with a women's pattern. (Also a useful data point for the debate I'm currently having in my mind about whether I want to go for a more tailored look or stick with looser, more fluid garments; tailored clothes tend to be more strongly gendered.)

One of my swimming friends is away this weekend and the other one messaged this morning to say she wasn't feeling very well and didn't think she should come swimming, so I decided that rather than going for a swim by myself I'd go for a walk (while I have been doing quite a bit of walking what with parking my car two miles from the office, I don't count walking to work as Going For A Walk, and therefore hadn't actually Been For A Walk for quite a while). I took advantage of it being a weekend rather than a weekday morning to go over to Begbroke and up Spring Hill (now we're not in lockdown the rush-hour traffic makes crossing the A44 to get there and back pretty much impossible on weekdays), but then I took a different path rather than the one I usually get back which started out well but ended up dropping me just the other side of Yarnton with a fairly dull walk home. Still, it was good to get out.

I then spent most of the rest of the day cooking. I don't actually do a lot of cooking normally, but having successfully nurtured a sourdough starter last spring I do make a loaf of bread every week, or sometimes, as this week, a pizza, so I fed the starter when I got back from my walk. Then I made Nigella Lawson's rosemary loaf cake, because T was busy quizzing and we were out of cake, and stewed the rhubarb that appeared in this week's vegbox so I can make it into rhubarb and custard ice-cream*, and by this point it was nearly time to make the pizza dough and sauce. I haven't actually done any sewing at all today, which feels very strange.

*I bought T an ice-cream maker for his birthday earlier this month. There was absolutely no ulterior motive to this gift, honest guv.

The hardest thing about going back to working in the office after 15 months of working remotely is having to wear shoes all day. I much prefer wearing slippers or just going barefoot or in socks, but the state of my office floor means that even without considerations of professionalism, barefoot really isn't an option at work.

I'm also finding that walking 1.8 miles each way on pavements is very different from going for morning walks in the countryside and my feet are definitely feeling the strain. This is probably partly because I'm not wearing my proper walking shoes, because I've been trying to manage without bringing spare shoes to work to change into or getting back into keeping shoes in the office (I still have a lot of shoes in the office, but none of them I shoes I would actually wear any more, and I've lost the distinction between "work" and "non-work" clothes enough that none of the shoes I do want to wear are ones I want to leave in the office and not have access to if I want them), and my walking shoes are definitely too hefty to wear all day.

I'm seriously wondering whether I should just get some work slippers. As long as they weren't fluffy, would people even notice?

My office window looks out onto the ramp that leads to the accessible entrance of our building (the ground floor is set lower than the street and the grass outside, so there are four or five steps down to the door, or a long zig-zagging ramp). When I got back from lunch today, feeling tired and slightly grumpy because I'd had to go into town, which was Too Peopley (it's always Too Peopley, but clearly COVID makes that worse) and with an afternoon of meetings ahead of me, I discovered three small children using the ramp to rollerskate, and, being tired and grumpy, went out to grump that it wasn't a skate park, and people were trying to work in the building. At which the woman who was with them was so apologetic I felt a bit bad for being grumpy (though I still felt it was a reasonable grump).

Of course, it later turned out that they were the children of the new warden of the college accommodation over the road, who came over later on to introduce himself and apologise again, and followed it up with an email. So now I feel rather embarrassed for making a fuss, when it probably wasn't that big a deal anyway, and if I hadn't been feeling tired and grumpy to start with I might have just let it go with a bit of tutting...