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I have mostly spent the weekend sitting on my bed drinking tea and reading a book about rivers. Which seems like the perfect way to spend a soggy January weekend when you have a cold. I did print out a sewing pattern but decided I couldn't summon up the energy to stick the pieces together, let alone to actually consider doing anything with it. Plus, I was enjoying reading about rivers.

I did venture out yesterday to meet my swimming friends for coffee, as none of us is feeling up to swimming right now. We went to the cafe in Florence Park, which I'm told is very good, although at 3:45 on a Saturday they had a very limited range of cake and only enough chai left for one person when two of us would have liked it. On the other hand, the barista greeted us by saying that she didn't usually get three people at once with such excellent hair and telling us we looked like we should be in a punk band, which clearly we were all delighted by.

One of the surprising delights of the last year and a bit has been the friendship that's developed between me and my two swimming friends, L (a longstanding friend who I rarely saw, even though we live in the same city) and B (a much newer friend, who I'd met a few times as part of a group and had a couple of lunchtime coffees and walks in the months between C's cancer diagnosis and the start of lockdown, as we worked near each other). What started as principally a swimming arrangement has morphed, over the course of 13 months, two lockdowns and various physical and mental health wobbles, into a close friendship and essential source of support for all of us.

I've also developed closer friendships with some of my fellow departmental administrators, as we've made use of both Teams calls and chat to share our frustrations and help each other through an incredibly tough time, workwise.

My core existing friendships, many of which date back to LJ days, are, I think, still what they always were, and if I'm sorry to have gone so long without seeing people, the online interaction is always there.

The thing I do regret, rather, is the friendships that were very much based around seeing each other, even if infrequently, at yarn shows or conventions, and which have waned without that connection. And the newish friendships, the people I'd met and liked and looked forward to seeing again and building a deeper connection with, which probably won't now happen because we've all been changed by the last eighteen months and we can't just pick up from where we left off because that place, and those people, don't exist any more, and where we are now is much further apart than we were back then. (Though who knows but that we might not come back into step again, in another few years, when the ability to meet in person remains? Perhaps this is only a temporary halt, and not the loss of an opportunity which will never return.)

It's a year ago today that I met up with longterm friend L and newer friend B to swim in the river. I'd swum in the river with L once before, several years ago, but while I'd enjoyed it, I didn't feel that the pleasure of being outdoors really outweighed the inconvenience of getting to the river when I live on the other side of Oxford, and I didn't go again. After three and a half months of not being able to swim at all last spring, I felt rather differently, and happily agreed to the suggestion that we should swim together every Friday over the summer. And then somehow when autumn came round none of us wanted to stop; swimming together had become much too important to all of our mental health, as the pandemic continued. So we kept going, and actually started swimming several times a week; we bought neoprene gloves and socks, and then jackets and shorts; we swam in woolly hats and brought hot water bottles and flasks of tea to warm us up as we got changed, and we kept swimming as the temperatures dropped to nearly freezing. One weekend, we broke ice to swim; we never managed to swim with snow on the ground because when it did snow none of us was comfortable driving to the lake. Swimming has been a joy and a solace to us all, and so has the friendship it's brought us.

We will be going for an anniversary swim this evening, with fancy doughnuts to celebrate. And, entirely coincidentally, I've also just finished making a swimming-themed shirt.

A white person with short grey hair and glasses stands in a garden wearing a pale blue short-sleeved collared shirt with a print of people swimming.

I have been increasingly finding that I need to take my glasses off to read, thread needles, pick up dropped stitches and so on, so given that it's been over two years since my last eye test I thought I should probably brave the opticians. I have now spent a somewhat staggering amount of money on not one but two new pairs of glasses: new varifocals for everyday and a special pair for looking at a computer screen (I should be able to claim back the cost of those from work, at least).

I'd booked the appointment for today because my friend A, her partner and child are staying near Windsor this week and she'd proposed that they come to Oxford for the day, so I spent a lovely few hours wandering around the more picturesque bits of the city with them (Christ Church Meadows, Merton Street and Oriel Square, the Covered Market, Radcliffe Square), pointing out colleges and ranking them by their relative degree of being up themselves and noting various other sites (five-year-old B was fascinated by the idea of the Bodleian's tunnels). We ate takeaway sushi in the "urban meadow" that the council have created in Broad Street, went to look at the dinosaurs in the Natural History Museum, and had ice-creams from G&D's (apparently if you're five mint choc chip with maple syrup and gummi bears seems like a good idea).

This would have been a fairly normal day in the Before Times, but is probably more than I've done in the whole of the last 15 months. (I also ended up lugging far too much stuff around with me, because after so long only ever taking my phone and keys with me I'm apparently incapable of judging what I might need, and had a massive backpack with a raincoat and a cardigan (not needed in the slightest), my camera (not used), my knitting (not touched), a bottle of water *and* a mug of tea (useful, but I probably didn't actually need both) as well as my kindle. My phone, obviously, was in my pocket instead.) On the other hand, it was lovely to see A and family, and it will be good to be able to see properly again.

A colleague was saying to me last week how exhausting it was dealing with all the social things she suddenly had happening since lockdown started easing. I've seen lots of people on social media posting about the things they're doing now, too. Meanwhile, the only change that the easing of lockdown has made to me over the last few weeks is that, as of 29 March, I've been able to swim with both of my swimming friends at once*. I haven't been to shops, pubs or restaurants; none of my team are going back into the office on a regular basis just yet; and I haven't seen anyone apart from my swimming friends in person**.

I almost miss lockdown, when being a weird antisocial gremlin who never has weekend plans and uses pretty much all their social spoons for work was so much less detectably different from everyone else, and I didn't feel that I had to camouflage my lack of friends-I-see-in-person-on-a-regular-basis*** behind vague mutterings about people not living nearby (though that is also true for most of the people I'd really like to see in person, but I'm not sure the people who see lots of people find it that convincing. Or not just as weird as not wanting to rush out and see people after four months of lockdown).

*Although as one friend has just had surgery which had been put off several times due to COVID, for the next few weeks I'll only be swimming with the other friend anyway.

**Saying which, on Friday I will be going into the office and having an outdoor six-person leaving tea for a colleague who is retiring.

***And, indeed, interest in spending my weekends peopling when I could be sewing and recovering from another hard week on Teams and not having to navigate masks and social distancing arrangements and worrying about people getting too close.

This morning started off grumpily, not so much about the continuing impossibility of booking a vaccine appointment nearer than Milton Keynes as about the fact that when I posted on Facebook asking if anyone else was getting the same error message I was getting saying that I had missed my first appointment lots of people commented to say I really should take the time to go to Milton Keynes rather than waiting for a nearer appointment.

I stayed grumpy all morning (despite ordering a new pen to distract myself), but a swim at lunchtime calmed me down (and thanks to the time tracking spreadsheet I've made myself, I knew I didn't have to feel guilty about taking the time, because I was still on track to clock in at about 44 hours this week. For my next trick, I should try working on not feeling that I need to be working 44 hours per week anyway).

I settled back to work after knitting, picked up my phone for a brief brain break after a meeting and discovered that a knitting friend of mine died very suddenly on Monday night. While we mostly knew each other online, through Ravelry and then Twitter, we'd met in person several times, at knitting shows and group meet-ups and when one of us happened to find herself in the same place as the other one. She was an incredibly generous person, and there are lots of cards on my pinboards that she sent me with various things - some fibre she'd carded when I first got my spinning wheel, a set of buttons that she thought might work when I mentioned that I'd bought a jacket which had horrible buttons and I wanted to change them - and I will really miss her presence on Twitter.

An hour later, an email of the kind that you would really rather never get, but definitely don't want to get at ten to five on a Friday afternoon, popped into my inbox, and I spent the next hour making calls to get more information and alert various people who needed to know what was going on.

And then, after I'd given up on attempting to get the business case I'd hoped to finish writing done and logged off for the day, I spotted a friend mentioning on Twitter that she'd just booked her vaccine in Oxford, tried the site for the nth time since Tuesday and discovered that I could get appointments any time next week, so I've booked my first jab for next Friday and my second for July, and am very glad I didn't just book Milton Keynes instead.