My four-day weekend has reached its final day, and although it hasn't been quite as relaxing as I intended, it has been a lot of fun. Matthias and I just came back from a little Sunday market wander in the rain, and I'm now curled up in the living room in my wing chair, a takeaway coffee in hand, watching people walk by and the raindrops fall. The sky is white, rather than grey, and it feels as if we are under cotton wool.

This weekend has involved two trips into Cambridge. On Friday night, Matthias and I had booked to attend a collaborative event between the upmarket wine sellers and one of the restaurants, with wine from Bordeaux and a French-ish five-course dinner. We've been to several of these types of events, although all the others have been in one of the wine seller's shops and more like a wine-tasting with canapés, rather than a full sit-down restaurant meal. I was amused to discover that the restaurant was actually run by the guy who used to manage the wine cellars and catering at my old Cambridge residential college (on one memorable occasion, I was invited on a tour of the extensive underground cellars, led by him, by virtue of the fact that I lived in a share house with a woman who was the head of the college's postgraduate student committee). He was already an older man when I knew him in college, so I'm amused that he's elected to spend his 'retirement' doing something as stressful as running a restaurant! In any case, the food was good, the wine was excellent, but the people organising things had clearly failed to consider the fact that not everyone attending actually lived in Cambridge — things went on until after 11pm, and we had to dash out to make the last train (which was inevitably delayed by half an hour), and didn't get to bed until close to 1am. I was not super thrilled to be waking up at 7am on Saturday morning to go to two hours of classes at the gym, that's for sure!

Our second trip in to Cambridge was somewhat spontaneous, as misshoijer announced on Thursday that she'd be in the city for a flying visit, and would anyone like to meet up on Saturday afternoon. She's a friend from my postgraduate days in Cambridge — she did her undergrad degree in the same department where I did my MPhil and PhD, and for three years, I sat in on her undergraduate medieval Welsh classes (by the third year, it was just her, one other guy, and me, and we grappled with medieval Cornish and Breton as well). She moved back to Sweden a couple of years ago and I hadn't seen her for ages, so it was good to catch up — and all done in a logistically straightforward way that meant I didn't have to go into central Cambridge on the same Saturday when all the students moved back in for the start of the new academic year: she, Matthias and I met in a pub that was literally on the train station platform, we had one drink, and then she went on to London and we went back to Ely, where we tried a new Indian restaurant for dinner. This restaurant is in somewhat cursed location on the high street — it used to be a nightclub (so the space is big) which closed down at some point during or immediately after the pandemic lockdowns, then it got turned into an extremely mediocre cocktail bar (we went once and were basically the only people there in a cavernous space — very depressing), which then closed down, and it had been sitting empty for several years when suddenly I saw that it was alive and kicking as an Indian restaurant. The food was excellent (and absurdly cheap) — southern Indian food from Kerala, which is probably my favourite. We were home by 9.30, and I was asleep by 10pm.

I've only finished one book this week, but what a book it was: Tori Bovalino's adult fantasy debut, The Second Death of Locke, which was much anticipated on my part, and definitely exceeded my high expectations. I should warn everyone that my enjoyment is entirely due to the fact that it is very much My Kind of Nonsense — self-indulgent in a way that really suits my particular tastes and preferences when it comes to character dynamic. (Amusingly, it also manages to involve two separate ideas that teenage me had for fantasy novels that never saw fruition at my hands — when I say it is my kind of nonsense, I'm not kidding.) This is a world in which magic springs from intense bonds between mages and their human sources (called 'wells'); the former draws on the latter for all manner of supernatural outcomes. It's also a world in which the source of magic is running dry, due to an act of betrayal some years previously in which the titular island and dynasty of Locke (from whence springs all magical power) was annihilated, save a lost heir whom all other powers in the land are fighting to locate and control as their magical power source puppet.

Into this chaos step our two focal characters: Kier, a mage fighting in the army of one of these countries, and Grey, his well and childhood best friend (she's an orphan and was in effect raised by his family; she's also secretly in love with him and has been pining unrequitedly for many years). When they're tasked with escorting a captured hostage teenage girl to a potential ally, this perilous quest risks exposing the pair's many dangerous secrets, with implications for the wider political and supernatural context in which they find themselves. The characters' absolutely intense bond is at the heart of the novel, and if you like stories where characters are loyal to one another to absurdly self-sacrificing degrees (barely a few chapters pass without either Kier or Grey putting themselves in life-threatening danger in order to save the other), you will find lots to enjoy here.

As with many current ostensibly adult fantasy novels, although the characters are in their twenties, it still does feel a bit YA in terms of the relationships, and the whole thing is a bit of a teenage girl power fantasy (at least for the kind of teenage girl I was), but I had an absolutely fantastic time reading it, and won't apologise for that! If I had read it slightly sooner, I would possibly have nominated it for Yuletide.

This morning has been absurdly productive — I've already been to the pool, done a load of laundry (hanging inside, much to my disappointment, due to the rain), done a yoga class, and, as previously mentioned, strolled around the market. I'm looking forward to a few hours spent lying around and doing very, very little. I picked up a copy of Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) from a free book exchange outside a house near the river, and I imagine it will feature heavily in this afternoon's plans. Next week is the start of the busiest few months of the year for me at work, and I'm hoping this weekend was enough of a reset in terms of my energy levels to leave me equal to the task.

I'm a morning person. I have been all my life, to the extent that universalising statements such as 'all teenagers have body clocks that mean they need to sleep in and start school much later in the day,' have been causing me to roll my eyes since back when I was a teenager. In those days, I was getting up at 6 in the morning to do an hour's piano practice, or go to gymnastics classes or piano lessons before school, and that sort of thing! When I was an undergraduate, I used to get up at similarly early hours of the morning, and work a bit on my essays or presentations or Honours thesis before class; on days when I had no lectures or tutorials to attend, I'd stay at home, work on university work and read the books my editor had sent me to review and write the requisite review, and quite frequently finish up everything before lunchtime, after which point I would spend the afternoon lounging on the couch reading novels. Working from home during the pandemic suited me perfectly, because as long as I was around for scheduled meetings and online teaching, my workplace trusted me to manage my own time, so I'd frequently start work around 7am and finish in the early afternoon. I have literally never slept in later than about 8.30am in my entire life — my body doesn't let me.

The drawback to all this is that my energy decreases alarmingly each hour after lunch, and by the time I've got to about 3 or 4pm I'm basically useless. Since I work regular 9-5ish hours, I tend to store up brainless tasks for the last couple of hours of the day, and I've never been able to do much that requires any intellectual effort in the evening. All-nighters — that staple of teenage and university life — are incomprehensible to me, and I'm in awe of people who are able to produce meaningful work in such circumstances.

My prompt today is very much in light of all of the above: are you an early bird or a night owl — or do you switch between both states? Have you always been this way, or did things change at a certain point? How well does this all mesh with your lifestyle?

I had some unclaimed leave that I had to use or lose by the end of September (our annual leave year runs from 1 October-30 September, vaguely in line with the academic calendar), and I elected to use it to give myself two four-day weekends as September drew to a close. I've been doing this job long enough to know that October and November are an absolutely draining slog, and those September four-day weekends are the perfect way in which to gather strength to cope with the new academic year onslaught.

That said, today has mostly been all work, as tends to happen with me when I have a long weekend — I try to front-load all the housework and tedious life admin, so that as the weekend carries on, I have fewer and fewer demands on my time.

However, I did have a small sliver of time, after I got back from swimming at the pool, but before I started making hummus by hand in the food processor for lunch, when I just sat outside on the deck under the yellowing cherry tree, and drank coffee, and ate a slice of spiced pumpkin cake (made by one of my colleagues and transported home yesterday for the occasion), and read my book, and listened to the wind in the silver birch trees next door, and let life stand still for a moment. It was blissful.

It's been a slow, sleepy weekend, and I feel as if the time has somewhat run away from me. I started Saturday at the gym (my legs still ache), and then met Matthias in town for lunch with one of our friends from our PhD years, who was in the UK for a conference and some work with manuscripts. He lives in the US south and has a tenured job at a university there, so our conversation was somewhat grim at times, but it was nice to catch up and show him our town, and eat food truck food under clear skies in the courtyard garden of our favourite cafe/bar. It's always a bit odd to reconnect with people from my postgrad days who are firmly embedded in academia — it's like a reminder of a past life, when that was my whole world, too.

The post yesterday delivered me a postcard from peaked (amazing stationery choices, especially the stickers and washi tape), and she'd included a bunch of puzzles cut out from the newspaper, which was a nice touch! I've totally failed to complete them, but I imagine that will be for next week.

This morning, I went to the pool, and spent most of the morning slow-cooking an Indonesian curry, since Matthias and I will need to eat dinner very early in order to make it to a 7pm film at the community cinema (Sorry, Baby). The entire house smells of lemongrass, garlic and ginger, which I can't really complain about. I went into town for a quick wander and coffee, but have otherwise spent the rest of the day lounging around at home, with the athletics on in the background, dipping in and out of the internet, feeling somewhat unfocused. I did manage to complete Hannah Kaner's epic fantasy trilogy with Faithbreaker, which pretty much stuck the landing (although I felt it relied slightly too much on handwaving difficulties away by making one character ridiculously overpowerful), and I'm eyeing Tori Bovalino's adult fantasy debut, The Second Death of Locke, which Matthias received as the second book in the monthly SFF subscription programme run by our local independent bookshop. Bovalino is one of the few current writers of YA whose books I enjoy, so I'm keen to see what she's like writing for an adult readership.

The heating actually came on in the house for the first time this season. The hedgerows were bright with rosehips, rowan berries, blackberries and sloes on my walks to the gym, and the leaves on our cherry trees are yellowed and falling. I'm ready for summer to move on, and it seems that the landscape agrees with me.