I spoke with sister #1 on Friday morning, and for various reasons the conversation left me with lingering miserable feelings for most of the weekend, and a real lack of motivation to do much. Nevertheless, I persisted and tried to do happy things in spite of myself.

Yesterday, Matthias and I caught the train and then the bus out to St Ives for another beer festival held in a church. The weather outside was miserable, but the atmosphere indoors was bubbly and cheerful. People brought their small children, and dogs of various sizes, and sat around chatting in the pews. We bumped unexpectedly into R and K, two former students from our niche subject department in Cambridge (the pair started their undergrad degrees the same year I started my MPhil, and I attended all the undergrad medieval Welsh classes at the same time as R) and their toddler son. They live in Windsor now, and I don't think I'd seen them since before the pandemic, so it was somewhat surprising to see them at a random beer festival in St Ives! The world is at once big, and small.

Matthias and I finished up our St Ives excursion with a drink in a tiny cocktail bar (the whole space only has about twelve seats in it), then a very hasty dinner in a restaurant in order to catch our bus back and make it home at a reasonable time. I do enjoy these days out to nearby towns and villages, and should remember to do things like this more often.

Today — because I was trying to be kind to myself and my bad mood — I cancelled my 8am swim and had what passes for me as a lie-in (i.e. I still woke up without an alarm at 7am but lay around in bed until 8am instead of immediately getting up), before going on a walk with Matthias. Without a car, there aren't many options in terms of walking (there are about four routes we can take), so it was the same loop walk we did on New Year's Day, which goes along the river, then through leafy suburban streets, before ending up in the market square, taking just over an hour. We drank hot drinks from the coffee rig, and sat in the crisp wintry sunshine, watching the world go by.

Other than that, it's been a day for pottering about at home with the Winter Olympics on in the background. I haven't really been able to focus on reading (although I did finish a reread of Vanessa Fogg's beautiful little fairytale of a novella, 'The Lilies of Dawn,' while eating lunch, and I enjoyed Rebecca Ferrier's The Salt Bind — nineteenth-century smugglers, miners and Cornish folklore, with the sea an ambivalent and constant presence — earlier in the week), and in general I just feel a bit scattered and unfocused. But I've got hibiscus tea, later I'll light the wood-burning stove, and yesterday was the first evening of the year in which the sun set at 5pm, and that's enough light and softness on which to build.