It is too hot to sew, so I spent several hours this afternoon on the sofa reading Victoria Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor and then thought that if I couldn't sew, maybe I'd watch some old episodes of The Great British Sewing Bee on iPlayer.

I went back to the first series, which I watched some of at the time but gave up on because I was a very new and unconfident sewer and watching people struggling to sew under time pressure just made sewing seem even more stressful. Rewatching from the point of view of a much more confident sewer, I thought that the first series, at least, didn't really seem to get the balance right, and spent much more time showing the contestants looking like they were on the verge of breaking down than looking competent and like they actually enjoyed sewing.

Also, I'd forgotten that Tilly from Tilly and the Buttons was on the first series. Her complete inability to deal with fitting her model's not actually very large bust explains quite a lot about her patterns. Also, how does someone who considers themself to be good enough to apply to go on a sewing-themed TV show have no idea how to add a patch pocket to a garment???

I was very disappointed to find out on Tuesday night that Paramount were pulling Star Trek Discovery from Netflix with immediate effect, only about 48 hours before the fourth season premiere. I love Discovery's commitment to diversity and the hopepunk vibe of the last season was so much more what I needed than Picard's dark-side-of-Starfleet shtick, so I had really been looking forward to having the new season to help me make it through the last few weeks until the Christmas/New Year break. Especially as the current Doctor Who isn't quite hitting the spot for me.

I also Very Much Not Here for the people I've seen popping up on other people's posts about it saying "well, I never liked it anyway" or other things of that ilk.

Work is still ghastly. I was particularly unimpressed to be stuck in yet another Teams meeting about the Ongoing Crisis just after 4pm this afternoon, when there was an absolutely incredible sunset going on behind my computer screen. Also, in a particularly clueless email even for her, our VC sent an all-staff email this afternoon which began by saying what a relief it was to be nearing the end of week 6 of term and able to start to look forward to the Christmas break, which I imagine went down like a lead balloon with all the academics about to enter the hell that is undergraduate admissions.

On the upside, C mentioned the other day that she had been known to typo the signoff to emails as "Best weasels" and I immediately demanded that she sign off all future emails to me that way, then forgot about it until this morning when I received an email signed "Best weasels". Which I think is a wonderful thing to be wished.

I've been continuing with my occasional watch-through of classic Doctor Who, and just watched The Dalek Invasion of Earth. I don't thiy I'd seen the original serial before, though I'd read the Target novelisation and also saw the Peter Cushing film, so was familiar with the plot.

What surprised me, watching it, was just how much it resembles a WW2 film. The Doctor and his companions are the British party, landed in enemy-held territory; the resistance could so easily be the French Resistance; the women who betray Barbara and Jenny in return for food are so familiar from war films.

(It's also a bit startling that the serial starts with the Doctor ticking Susan off as if she was quite a young child, and ends with him pushing her out to marry a man she's only just met.)

The current series of The Great British Sewing Bee came to an end last night. I very much enjoyed watching it, though it did seem as though they were making an awful lot of dresses. Or maybe they always made lots of dresses and I just noticed more this time because I was in a watchalong group on Facebook and people kept saying "I'd wear that" and I wouldn't wear any of them? Anyway, I was pleased by the final result; the winner was the person who I'd had as favourite from week 1 (though I would also have been happy to see one of the other finalists win; the third I felt was probably not really quite up to it).

While I was waiting for Sewing Bee to start last night I watched the first two episodes of We Are Lady Parts on All4. This is a comedy series about an all-female Muslim punk band and so far I'm loving it.

T and I are rewatching This Life, which is on Britbox. This involves regularly shouting "Egg, you muppet!" and "Miles, you wanker!" at the TV, with an occasional foray into "Fuck off with your biphobia, Warren!". Although even the women, who seemed reasonably sympathetic nearly quarter of a century ago, are fairly awful viewed from middle age. (The series also turns out to feature a very early appearance by a young Martin Freeman. And apparently the "10 years on" special, which cannot possibly have been almost 15 years ago, features an early experience by a young Jodie Whittaker.)

It's been raining most of the day, which is novel and exciting as it hasn't rained for quite some time. (I think the last precipitation we had was actually snow, two and a bit weeks again.)

Also in "novel and exciting", I had an hour and a half between meetings this morning and managed to get myself into deep focus setting up a spreadsheet, which is something I haven't been able to do for a long time. Mostly the gaps between meetings are so short I don't have the time to work on anything big, so I answer emails instead, and end up doing the important work at the end of the day when I'm knackered. (I ended up doing that today, as well, on a different piece of work.)

I am knackered, as always, but looking forward to Sewing Bee tonight. (I had been wondering about alternating watching Sewing Bee live and going to my Zoom knitting group, but actually I'm increasingly finding that I don't want to do online socialising, when so much of work is online meetings; my attendance at knitting group had dropped off since January anyway, and sitting on the sofa just watching something is a much more appealing prospect.)

T is watching rugby, so I thought I might watch something on my laptop. Unfortunately, the thing I'm currently watching is Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, which is only available on Virgin catch-up via the TiVo box and not online. Logging in to the Virgin online service to confirm this I was offered A Discovery of Witches, which I thought might be terrible but undemanding with bonus Oxford geography failures, but it wants a PIN to watch "adult content" which isn't the same as the one for the box and which neither of us know. Obviously, I have all of iPlayer, Netflix and Prime to choose from, so the chances of me finding anything I want to watch in time to watch it before bedtime seem pretty slim.

(ETA: I have returned after my 15-minute timeout and tried entering 0000, which worked, so A Discovery of Witches it is.)

I turned on the TV just before 9pm yesterday, having just finished work (I had a break for dinner but went back for another hour when T's online pub quiz started) and saw that BBC4 had a programme about Helvellyn about to start. A landscape documentary seemed like just the thing to soothe my frazzled brain, so I thought I'd give it a try, and it was absolutely delightful - a beautifully shot film showing the fells and wildlife throughout four seasons, interspersed with contributions from people who work, live and undertake leisure activities on and around the mountain. It turns out to be part of a series (and to have been first broadcast in 2015, but I certainly wasn't aware of it then), and I'd recommend it to anyone who has access to iPlayer and wants something gorgeous and relaxing to sit in front of. Though it did make me a little sad that I'm not sure there's much chance of my getting to see mountains - or even moderately sized hills, really - for quite some time yet.

I think I liked Sherlock better when the clients and cases were central to the plot, and not just thrown in as asides to make people familiar enough with ACD canon (of whom I am not one, having only read most of the stories once) feel smug when they can recognise the updates.

Also, wtf does John Watson think he's bloody playing at?

Oh well. Next Sunday Endeavour is back and on at the same time. I'll take Douglas Richardson in a trilby over Martin Crieff being a clever-clogs any day.