Hubristic Note

• Last Saturday I joined a free cycle confidence session with Pedal Ready. I spent an hour with one of their excellent instructors on quieter roads, learning tips to help me cycle around vehicles safely. Then we cycled from one park to another as a group. It was pretty fun and I would be comfortable now on not too busy roads. So is my next step to get a bike orrrr..?
• Winter is darker and colder than usual, I swear. I’m still so tired, reader, if you were wondering.
• I went to the gym again and discovered I can't do a single sit-up all the way. I used to be able to! At some point in the last decade... time flies.
• Ironically, back when I could do a sit-up, I’d probably feel embarrassed exercising in a gym. Now I'm happy to writhe around like a pathetic worm next to strangers, in the name of health and self improvement.
• Made my 3rd visit to the office since March 2020 and had a great day. With an inflated sense of my own importance I announced my visit ahead of time to the entire product and tech Slack channel. My mission was to spend no time at my computer and I pretty much succeeded. Loved catching up with friends and meeting new people in the physical world too. 🙌
• Going in with an explicit goal to socialise and chat work felt way more fun and productive than highly lauded water cooler chat. The downside was that I did miss some people who couldn't make it into the office in the end, which was sad, but I'll catch them next time! 🤞
• My commute is now a ~6 hour round trip door-to-door so I treated myself to a taxi on the last leg back. The taxi smelt strongly of cherry sourz, but there was no cherry sourz air freshener.
• It was a late one by the time I got home because I stayed for drinks and boardgames. It was the Christmas special for the FT's boardgame meetup so I took my new Christmas jumper (it has lots of robins, I love it). Obviously November is too early for a Christmas jumper so I took it in my backpack and whipped it on at the pub. No one noticed or cared so I demanded attention and then my jumper got an applause and I realised what I had done.
• On the way back I tried two Greggs at the station, both were out of vegan sausage rolls (I felt quite strongly hard done by, reasonable). But Pret the halls, I had my first xmas sandwich, whilst still wearing my xmas jumper.
• Had a mince pie and broke out the lockdown port chalice, too. It's all kicking off.

P.s. Fully agree with Matt's praise of Stath Lets Flats, we loved series 3 so much, and laughed so hard. It's perfect.