Cake by Rich, decoration by yours truly, missing slice courtesy of Rich’s brother.
Last weekend Rich and I made our first journey back down south since the full move up north and we were reminded once again how much we hate the M25. 1.5 hours to go 6 junctions. Ugh. Aside from that, we had a fantastic weekend celebrating my father-in-law’s 65th birthday. A delicious family meal at The Bray in Shere was superbly hosted by their restaurant staff and Elwyn seemed to really love the 1960s Roberts radio we had found at Notions Antiques in Grantham, which is one of my favourite places to while away an hour or so. Rich’s beer-can chicken went down well at lunch the next day with family friends and we also had a lovely walk over the Surrey Hills to one of our favourite tea-shops for a delicious breakfast; Tillings in Gomshall is definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area. A good weekend was had by all and a personal highlight was a trip back up to have a go on the best hidden swing ever:
I may have arrived on my Grandma’s birthday, but I was due on my Mum’s birthday and, as I was a week early, her birthday is tomorrow. Mum and Dad are off on holiday in the caravan with Sasha, Adi and Hugo tomorrow, so we set aside today for her to celebrate with me, Rich, Joe and Sophie.
Hurricane Bertha scuppered the original plan of a classic Beacon Hill picnic, so we agreed upon a Sunday roast at the Evanses. Now, of the two Evanses in residence here, it is well known that I am not the cook. I am the sous-chef. So when Rich had one of his worst ever migraines last night and was up sick for many hours, I was left with a dilemma. Cancel? Ask Mum to lead the cooking? Neither of these options scream, “we’re treating you to celebrate your birthday Mum”. So, I made the decision that I should buck up my ideas and just cook the roast dinner on my own.
Bear in mind that I had never cooked any of the elements of the planned roast dinner individually, let alone all at once. This was definitely going to be a challenge.
With instructions from Rich (and I frequently checked those instructions) and a few tips and prompts from Mum along the way, I managed to pull together a full roast dinner. There are various things I will improve the next time around, but I’m not going to be too modest about this achievement because I’m actually pretty darn proud of myself. Just to be clear though, I’m not saying this is likely to be a regular occurrence.
My first roast dinner: chicken, roast potatoes, honey-roast carrots and parsnips, onion and mushroom gravy, sage stuffing balls, green beans, sweet potato mash and Yorkshire puddings.
My marshmallows went down a treat for desert, although I’ve not perfected any flavour other than vanilla. Today it pretty much tasted like vanilla, even though I didn’t add vanilla flavouring and I was aiming for mango. I’ll continue experimenting and report back once I find a method that gives a sufficiently intense fruity flavour.
After dinner, once cards and gifts were sorted, I revealed the entertainment for the evening – pinata time! Mum had contributed the pinata to my birthday BBQ and then not been able to enjoy it with me, so I dug out my Winnie-the-Pooh pinata from the loft. This sizeable pinata was kindly lugged back by Ailsa from Costa Rica years ago and, in honour of the effort she put in transporting it halfway across the world, I have been saving it all these years for a worthy opportunity to use it. Today was the day.
I had quite a lot of fun filling the pinata: fruity chews, mini-Twixes, mini-highlighters, toffees, snack packs of Malteasers and plastic cookie cutters! And, despite her reluctance to give Winnie-the-Pooh a wallop on the nose, I think Mum enjoyed discovering them!
My thirtieth birthday has been fantastic. Completely amazing. Here’s a run-down of why:
We’ve just moved into our house full-time after six months of owning it from afar.
I had an awesome birthday BBQ on Saturday with lots of friends and family (the only negative was Mum being ill so she wasn’t able to party with us).
Rich booked delicious beer-can chicken on the BBQ.
My Notts friends clubbed together to get me a brilliant present – my garden now contains an awesome sundial!
We video-called Ailsa in Brazil during the party.
Entertainment was provided by Rich who had learnt to play Budapest by George Ezra on the guitar even though he doesn’t really like it but he knows I do.
Pinata!
Although my birthday surprise couldn’t go ahead on Sunday morning as planned due to high winds, I am MASSIVELY excited about our balloon flight being rescheduled sometime soon.
Sunday instead involved a lovely stroll around our new village and a drink in the village pub with Claire, Frankie and Caspar.
That was followed by a wander around Rushcliffe Country Park in Ruddington with the family, including my gorgeous nephew.
On Sunday evening, Rich took me out for dinner at Hart’s in Nottingham which was absolutely delicious. We had a lovely date night, despite the dubious jazz entertainment in the restaurant!
Lots of presents awaited me on Monday morning to kick-start the first day of my thirties: DVDs, books, sweets and a digital piano! I’m so excited – get ready for audio blog posts showing my developing piano playing attempts.
These gifts were coupled with a fancy champagne breakfast; I love smoked salmon and scrambled eggs on a toasted muffin. Breakfast fit for a queen.
I also got to help Rich construct the epic cake he was making for me – more on that later.
Then came Mum bearing gifts and beautiful flowers and Sasha bearing Hugo, my first auntie birthday card and 30 gifts!
We drove down to Rutland Water and met up with Rich’s parents. We found a beautiful picnic spot and Mum unveiled a picnic to rival all picnics, beautifully packed into individual Birds boxes, bringing back happy memories of my Now We Are 6 surprise Beacon Hill treasure hunt party.
After filling our boots, we took Hugo on the Rutland Belle for his first boat trip.
When we were back home, I received yet more presents from my Evans family.
For dinner, Sasha had booked a large table at Zizzi’s in Newark and we were joined by lots of my family including all my grandparents. Delicious food. And yet more generous gifts.
Partway through the evening i was taken outside by Mum and on my return all the family had been given masks of my face at various stages of my life from baby right up to the present day. Slightly freaky but very entertaining!
To top off an amazing day, Rich’s epic checkerboard cake with chocolate orange ganache was brought out to ooohs and aaahs from all. It looked awesome, tasted scrummy and even got him a job offer from the chef.
Wow. What a birthday. I am just so lucky.
My sister has written her own blog-post about my birthday weekend here, and this paragraph in particular resonated for me:
“30 seemed a bigger stage for Layla than for most, I feel like it’s the age that she’ll just live, rather than working towards something – her degree, PGCE, NQT year or masters. We never really celebrated the later few of her achievements, so the weekends activities felt even more important. Plus, the party was also a house warming as they officially moved from London into their cottage the week before.”
Just living rather than working towards something is definitely my current plan.
As prompted by my 30 Before 30 review, I’ve started reading for pure pleasure not to tick books off an arbitrary list. So here’s the first of many book reviews, to get my post-read thoughts down in black and white.
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
Warm-hearted and insightful, The Rosie Project follows the (mis)adventures of Don Tillman in his quest to find a suitable wife. Don is an extremely intelligent professor of genetics and is well-aware that social nuances take considerably more deciphering for himself than everyone else. On the face of it, Rosie fails in multiple ways as a candidate for The Wife Project but he finds himself drawn into her world and consequently his own world gets turned upside down. Seeing Don’s social blunders through his eyes was both endearing and amusing and had me rooting for him to succeed.
Recommended to me by Rich’s mum, this was the perfect book to remind me of the joy of reading following my tortured attempts to complete Ulysses. In complete contrast, The Rosie Project was easy to read and I quickly built an affinity with the characters, particularly Don. Reading this book, obvious links to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon sprung to mind, which is an excellent book also written from the perspective of someone with ASD traits. Both these books show ways in which the world around us can present challenges if processed in a different way. As well as being an exploration of what it might be like for a middle-aged high-functioning autistic man looking for love, The Rosie Project has lessons for us all. Aside from prompting me to reconsider my own schedule inefficiency, it was a reminder of the true meaning of compromise, that we could all do with a little more self-awareness and why we should follow our hearts and break some rules once in a while.
A definite page-turner and a charming modern-day love story, The Rosie Project is the perfect light read for a summer’s day; on the basis of this book, I’ll definitely be asking my mother-in-law for more recommendations.
A few years ago, my house-mate Laura wrote a bucket list with her friend Gemma of 30 things to do before they turned 30. I like lists. So I wrote my own list:
However, I hadn’t fully realised how much thought Laura and Gemma had put into crafting their list, based upon ease of completing all the items. So while they completed theirs before their joint 30th party, I’ve had mixed success. Consequently, the ’40 Before 40′ list I began last year will now remain in my notebook for inspiration rather than enforced completion! Here’s a run-through of my ’30 Before 30′ experiences:
1. Become a fully fledged teacher!
DONE
I completed my PGCE in 2011 and slogged my way though the hardest year of my life to complete my NQT year in 2012. Those qualifications aside, I think it wasn’t until part-way through my second year of teaching that I began to feel like a real teacher and now that I’m about to start in a new school, appointed as an established teacher with three years’ experience, I guess I better start believing in myself a bit more. Here’s a clip of my class in action recently, thinking about the movement of water to investigate rivers:
2. Complete a Masters degree
DONE
Somehow, and I’m still not entirely sure how, during the first two years of my teaching career, I managed to complete my Masters degree. This is therefore the first summer holiday without an assignment or dissertation to get finished and I’m loving having time purely to relax. In many ways, I enjoyed my MA in Geography Education: engaging with theory, reminding myself why I wanted to go into teaching in the first place and challenging myself intellectually. But never again. I’ve now experienced wearing a mortarboard at a graduation so I can also tick that off the experiences to do list. I even shared my graduation day with my gorgeous nephew as part of Hugo’s first trip to the capital!
3. Be able to speak Spanish to intermediate level
NOT QUITE
I have been working on this one, but I don’t think I class as an intermediate speaker just yet. I’m going to blame that on not setting a suitable assessment method before starting though; how can I judge if I’ve reached intermediate level with no test identified at the outset to work towards? What I have found though, is an app for practising my Spanish skills: Duolingo. Free and fun, Duolingo is a great way to keep my hand in and, now that I no longer need to teach Spanish or have Spanish-speaking children in my class, I’m thinking a trip to Latin America should be a priority instead!
4. Have been to as many countries as my age
DONE
30 years = 30 countries. Check. Admittedly, some of the countries on the list I didn’t visit for very long, so I think Finland, Argentina and Switzerland in particular deserve another trip one day!
5. Go to at least one country in Africa and Asia
HALF DONE
As you can see from the map above, my travel has still been focused on Europe and the Americas but I did venture into Asia with Ailsa for a fantastic tour of Vietnam. Africa remains as yet unexplored…
6. Have been on at least three more city breaks
DONE
A couple of trips with Ailsa (Venice & Verona, Barcelona), a couple with Rich (Paris and Prague) and one repeated with Mum & Sasha (Paris). Top options for city breaks are now: Budapest, Lisbon and Florence.
7. Go SCUBA diving again – particularly a wreck dive
NOPE
This is still something I really want to do – three months spent in Mexico, diving most days and often twice a day, is now nearly seven years ago. Seven! Epic fail.
8. Grow something edible and eat it
DONE
Here’s what happened: I got come basil seeds, planted them, tended them, grew a lovely little plant and made myself a cherry tomato, basil and balsamic vinegar pasta sauce using my freshly picked basil leaves. Delicious. Unfortunately, not much longer after that, the basil plant died. Oops. I think I still need to hone my gardening ‘skills’.
9. Go up in a hot air balloon
PLANNED
My gorgeous husband booked a dawn balloon flight over our new home for the day before my thirtieth birthday. High winds scuppered the ‘before I’m thirty’ part of the plan, but I am MASSIVELY excited about the prospect. Hopefully it’ll be rescheduled soon.
10. Attend the Olympics – London 2012
DONE
Rich, his parents and I were a few inches away from Bradley Wiggins as he sped through Kingston towards his gold medal in the London 2012 time trials. There was a fantastic atmosphere, just like the whole of London during the games. We also went to see some Paralympics athletics at the Olympic Park with Sasha and Adi which was a brilliant day.
11. Learn Astronomy
NOT YET
After finding a few classes to go to in order to develop my astronomical knowledge, I then didn’t actually get round to going to any. But Mum has provided the solution – I’ll report back to let you know how I get on with my new star-gazing binoculars in the wide open skies of the Lincs/Notts borders.
12. Buy at an auction
NO
We went along to an auction house but didn’t fancy bidding on the giant sequinned horse, so decided to wait to get ourselves a paddle at a more suitable auction opportunity.
13. Go to an opera
DONE
Two operas later and I’m still not a fan.
14. Try glass-blowing
DONE
Mum and I had a great time blowing glass Christmas ornaments and paperweights. Not a craft I’ll be able to do regularly but it was lots of fun.
15. Climb Big Ben
NOT DONE
I got as far as emailing my local MP to request a tour and was offered a few slots, all in term time though. Again, I didn’t really try hard enough.
16. Go to Wimbledon
DONE
This was far easier than I thought it would be and therefore one of the best experiences that happened purely as a result of making this list. As I had already stopped living in central London and in the five plus years of living there hadn’t gone to Wimbledon, you’d think that was it. I’d intended to apply for tickets and even got as far as filling in the application form. Which is not much use if it’s not posted in time. I was sitting watching the tennis with my in-laws, from the comfort of their front room in rural Surrey, during the final week of this year’s Wimbledon, when I decided I should at least go and see the venue in action even if we couldn’t get in.
The next day after work, my husband and I, having researched and found that tickets are made available each day but that people will often camp overnight to get in, packed a picnic and prepared ourselves for an evening in ‘The Queue’ with little hope of seeing any tennis. To our delight, the Queue moved quickly and, in under 40 minutes, for just £12 grounds’ access, we were seated watching some mixed doubles. We made a couple of purchases in the Wimbledon shop, strolled over to Henman Hill and joined another queue to get into one of the largest of the free seating courts. Our luck was in again and we saw the first two sets of an exciting game, featuring Jamie Murray in a mixed doubles match.
Watching Murray at Wimbledon, not bad for a Tuesday evening spur of the moment decision.
17. Visit a psychic and have my fortune read
DONE
Now realistically, I am far too scientifically minded to ever spend much hard-earned cash on something I think is a load of nonsense, so why this even made it onto the list in the first place I’m not sure. I think I thought it would be entertaining. As it was, I found an opportunity for a tarot card reading in a village hall in the Lake District. This resulted in an item on the list being checked off fr only a couple of pounds, but a year or so later I can remember nothing of what was revealed to me.
18. Go to see Just a Minute being recorded
DONE
It’s surprisingly hard to get tickets to be in the audience for the regular radio recordings of Just a Minute, and being married to a BBC employee hasn’t helped at all. We did manage to go and see a special recording of Just a Minute for a series of TV adverts. I’ve not seen any of the adverts that were recorded but I thoroughly enjoyed watching the filming nonetheless.
19. Make and fly a kite
HALFWAY THERE
Since writing this list, I have put together a kite and flown it, but I can’t claim to have made it from scratch. I have however, received a couple of design-your-own-kite kits from Ailsa and Sasha, so one day I’ll get round to making and flying those.
Predictably I loved this. Hopefully, now I’m back within grabbing distance of Nottingham Ice Rink, I’ll get skating more often.
22. Make fire without matches
DONE
Perhaps surprisingly, this was the first item on the list that I completed. On a Geography field trip as part of my PGCE, we built fires in the woods without matches. We did use a flint firelighter to help create the sparks to get our fire going, so some may say we cheated. Given how hard it was, even with that aid, I’m thinking that counts as a win.
23. Spend a night at the bingo
NOT DONE
I think I need to be with a group of people who are ready to embrace bingo to enjoy the full experience and somehow I’ve yet to make the effort to rally the troops.
24. Go to see Rocky Horror (dressed up)
DONE
Brilliant! I went with my sister and a bunch of her friends who all completely got into the dressing-up spirit, so it was exactly as I’d always hoped it would be.
25. Do the Monopoly board pub crawl
NOT LIKELY
Somehow this lost its appeal; I think I’m too lazy and would just prefer to sit in one pub for an afternoon, than to race around London. I’m not even a big Monopoly fan.
26. Go to see Phantom of the Opera
DONE IN STYLE
When writing this list, Phantom seemed to be the biggest West End musical I had yet to see so onto the list it went, but I wasn’t really expecting it to be my favourite. Sasha took me as a birthday present and it was excellent. I loved the musical and to top it off, Sasha knew a stage-hand, so was able to get us back-stage which was fascinating. The theatre still uses the original ropes and pulleys and secret trap-doors rather than using electronics or digital technology. Another fantastic evening.
27. Learn how to milk a cow
SADLY NOT YET
If the opportunity ever arises to give it a go – I’ll be first in line.
28. Have a fish pedicure
DONE
This was also completed pretty early on and was more fun than I’d expected, although it really did feel odd.
Of all the thirty items on my list, this was the one I committed by far the most time to. With this in mind, it’s a bit concerning that I needed to read plot summaries of at least half a dozen to remind myself what they’re about and what I thought about them. In the course of this challenge, I have ploughed my way through a number of books that I wasn’t too sure about, including Crime and Punishment and Catch-22, spent weeks gradually becoming interested in the various families of War and Peace and took two attempts to get anywhere with Midnight’s Children, which is a book I still don’t really rate, unlike A Suitable Boy, which I probably would never have read if it weren’t for this list, due to the weight my wrists had to bear while reading it. I even read five Terry Pratchett books which I had dreaded and found I didn’t hate them as expected.
Working my way through the list wasn’t all bad though, along the way I was surprised to find myself enjoying books such as The Stand by Stephen King and Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer. The biggest revelation was Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, which for some reason I’d had down as a fluffy chick-lit type of book, until I actually sat down to read it and found that it was dark and utterly gripping. I also enjoyed The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel which fueled the anthro-geek in me, although I didn’t enjoy it enough to read the rest of the series, instead opting for the Wikipedia summaries. Another fantastic find was Katherine by Anya Seton, an engrossing historical novel of the life of Katherine Swynford, lover of John of Gaunt. Numerous other books on the list made it a worthwhile project: The Godfather, Cold Comfort Farm, Perfume, The Woman in White, Artemis Fowl, The Counte of Monte Cristo and Middlemarch.
And then there was Ulysses. Never before have I disliked a book so much. I have started reading this book three times now, most of the time it has been a great tool for sending me to sleep but I’m guessing that’s not what James Joyce intended. So I tried reading it aloud to help me process each sentence. Still no joy in understanding what’s going on or the meaning or relevance of most of the sentences I’m reading. In my final attempt to complete this, my 100th book on the list, I found a chapter by chapter summary to help me. I read a chapter summary, then read the chapter itself, the re-read the chapter summary. I often had to double check that I had correctly matched chapter to summary because what I was reading had such little resemblance to what the summary describes. I’ve finally given up on Ulysses. No book or challenge is worth that amount of my time and, more importantly, I need to get back to reading for pleasure. So watch out for blog entries reviewing books I’ve chosen simply because I think that I’ll enjoy reading them. This should also provide a memory aid should, I need to recall my opinions on a particular book I’ve read in the future!
30. In my 30th year, take a picture of myself everyday, then put the pictures in a time lapse video.
NOT EXACTLY
I started this but had lots of bad hair/face days and kept forgetting to do it with enough daylight, so I only collected 16 photos. Really lame. But I did crop a bunch of other photos and put them into a timelapse video showing my thirtieth year in super-speed:
In summary, I didn’t complete the list. But I’m OK with that. When writing the list over three years ago, there were things I wanted to achieve that I couldn’t put in black and white; those are the things that matter the most. I have found the love of my life, got married to that fabulous individual and my husband and I have bought a house together. Those three things were too important to put on the list and so the rest of the list now sits in their shadow. And that’s another reason not to write a ’40 Before 40′ list; the most important experiences can’t be put on a check-list of things to do.
This post is a bit of cheat because much of it has also appeared on my professional blog MrsEvans360 but I’m pro-recycling so here we go:
My sister has started blogging and when I commented to her that I keep forgetting to check her blog for updates so that I wind up reading a couple of weeks worth in one sitting to catch up, she pointed me in the direction of Bloglovin’. I’m completely hooked now.
Bloglovin’ is an app that allows you to follow blogs and then presents those blogs in a feed, just like Instagram does for photos or Twitter does for tweets. You can easily read new posts and create your own store of favourite posts to refer to later. Over the years I’ve found a number of blogs I enjoy perusing for inspiration but up until now they were all bookmarked in my browser but rarely looked at. Bloglovin’ has changed that completely.
Bloglovin’ also helps to discover new blogs both through giving personalised suggestions based on your current choices or by grouping blogs into categories for browsing in specific areas of interest. This blog is all set up on it now so click the title of this blog post or the button in my sidebar to follow this blog using Bloglovin’.
Well, this is not quite my first foray into the world of blogging but is rather my attempt to get some work-life balance. Let me explain. I am a primary school teacher and my blogging timeline began a few years ago when I started a class blog. But my use of it was very much confined to the classroom and its potential was never really optimised.
Fast forward to April of this year when I saw @DeputyMitchell doing a key-note speech at the LGfL Schools’ Conference 2014 and was re-inspired to get my class blogging and to do so I decided to get blogging myself. You can find my professional blog covering all manner of things that occur to me in relation to my life as a primary school teacher here: mrsevans360.wordpress.com and follow me on Twitter: @MrsEvans360. Engaging with blogging myself is helping to boost the impact of blogging in my class which is proving to be an exciting journey.
However, the all-consuming nature of teaching is magnified by the 24/7 nature of social networking and could easily take over my whole life. So here’s my newest solution to a lack of work-life balance – another blog, but this time for me as Layla, not as Mrs Evans.
So, my aim for this blog is to collect ideas for crafty projects, books to read, films to watch, places to go and other miscellaneous things to do and to share my experiences of actually doing those ideas I collect. The challenge of course will be to find the time for the doing as well as the collecting.
This Too Shall Pass 