title
12.22 – 12.28
date
Sun Dec 28 2025 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
updatedAt
2025-12-30T07:49:32Z
tags
  • note

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12.22 – 12.28

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Life

We took the kids to Skate at Somerset House at 9am on Tuesday. Thank god for the plastic zimmer frames they give you to try and keep kids upright. A casual observer would have had a hard time discerning if anyone in our party was having fun at any point, but after the fact both Ηη and Αα have declared that they had fun and are keen to do more of the same. So we may need to remortgage (although it looks like there’s a more sensibly priced option at Ally Pally so maybe we’ll try that if there’s a next time).

We also managed a jaunt along the Southbank and a spin on the carousel which was mostly fun in spite of the fact that Ηη seems to be doing all he can to ruin pretty much everything we try to do to make him happy.

We had a very enjoyable lunch at Pappagone’s on Stroud Green Road with Si and Lou on Christmas Eve.

There are very few levers you have as a parent, but Santa is undeniably an effective one, and we weaponised him to the last, assuring the kids that we were both willing and able to call him at any moment if they didn’t stop behaving like pricks/go to bed/tidy their room/etc.

He did come in the end, and the kids seemed to be reasonably happy with their not inconsiderable spoils. But Ηη was (hilariously) an order of magnitude happier with the box for a pair of running shoes I’d bought for myself than anything else he’d acquired.

Nobody had a proper meltdown, I think we ate and drank only very marginally (I’d argue just the right amount) to excess, the kids were broadly happy, went to bed on time, and stayed asleep for far longer than we could have hoped for. Christmas was a resounding success.

Σσ knocked it out of the park with a butternut squash and mushroom wellington that was somehow even better on day two.

I think the remainder of the week was spent building Lego, playing top trumps and eating chocolates.

This site

I finally figured out how to get the week’s running activities from the Strava API rather than entering them manually. Claude helped me with the OAuth, caching, and tidy-up of the existing entries. I think it should also be working in RSS, but this post will be the acid test.

Reading

  • His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet – heard the author on World Book Club which seems like a rich vein of worthwhile reading material. This was excellent.

Running

There were almost as many timekeepers as runners at the Tuesday Heathside session and I spent most of the time at the front of group two. This almost entirely negated any of the benefit I get from attending track – the main draw is the subconscious urge to try and keep up with the legs in front and if there aren’t any legs to chase it’s just hard and monotonous. If I started to feel faintly optimistic about the fact I was at the front, I’d get overtaken by the runners in group one.