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.

About the best I can say about today is that I got a bit more done than I would have done if I'd stayed in bed, which, given the combined effects of crashing depression and an awful night's sleep, I was quite tempted to do. I did at least remember about Spotify halfway through the morning and stuck the Brandenburg Concertos on in the background as a way of distracting my brain from going round and round in depressive circles.

Despite not really feeling up to socialising I did manage to have a very pleasant lunch with my old tutor from Warwick in the early 90s, who has fetched up as a Senior Research Fellow of Campion Hall and member of my current Faculty, and his wife who is also a Senior Research Fellow of Campion Hall (the first woman to have been granted that honour), and took advantage of it being the vacation to take a long enough break to have a full tour of Campion and its art collections. Just down the road, I also spotted the blue plaque on the house where Dorothy L Sayers was born, which I hadn't seen before (Brewer Street is not a road I walk down very often).



(What do people use to post images to DW these days? I can't use my Flickr account unless I pay them £50 a year, which I'm not planning to do, and I can't see how to make Instagram divulge the image location while the embed code doesn't actually embed anything.)