who only by moving can balance

Celebrating. My PhD! Totally spurious graduation ceremony in the Royal Albert Hall on Wednesday. I bimbled around in silly clothes, and cuddled my thesis and told it it was a good thesis, and A handed me my degree certificate when I got back to my seat. I am still surprised by how glad I am I did it, especially because I'm also fairly sure that if I hadn't I would be experiencing at worst a mild wistful regret, of much lower intensity than my unexpected joy.

Reading. One More Croissant for the Road, Felicity Cloake. Cloake cycles (... and sometimes takes the train) around France, eating twenty-one specific regional foods and commenting on an awful lot of other ones, on her own personal Tour de France. (I surprised myself a bit by generally being more uncomfortable with the descriptions of alcohol consumption than those of animal death product, but also if you like me are squeamish about eating animals be aware that there are some Extremely Graphic Descriptions of same -- like, more than I expected even knowing I was opting in to reading loving descriptions of French cuisine.) There are pause-cafés in which she explains aspects of French food culture; there are recipes. I enjoyed myself immensely, am going to very gently prod my library to see if they'll also grab the one she subsequently wrote about doing a similar thing in the UK, and have vague plans about cooking at least one of the recipes.

mauve, Simon Garfield, which I am mildly annoyed with myself for Not Having Finished Yet and which I also took to the Royal Albert Hall. I very much enjoyed it matching The Gown.

Cooking. One new food: a vegan Hoppin' John-inspired concoction, by Meera Sodha. This used spring greens from the veg box! And wanted a significant amount more salt than I'd put in it, and also benefited from the addition of smoked paprika, and also also either her recommended quantity of liquid is Just Not Adequate or the scale on our kettle is wildly inaccurate, and I haven't yet tried weighing it (the kettle) to work out the details.

Also salted caramel brownie, for A, which I have been nibbling bits of. (The caramel was less solid than I wanted, going in, which resulted in a less solid brownie than I'd expected when I attempted to remove it from its baking vessel even after I'd burned the edges because It Still Wasn't Solid Yet, but minor issues of structural integrity and crispy bits aside I am given to understand that A is enjoying it a very great deal.)

Eating. A wild garlic leaf, as a discreet way to dispose of the evidence having surreptitiously picked one somewhere I probably oughtn't have in order to demonstrate to A that the thing that smelled like garlic (1) was in fact garlic and (2) was the same form factor as the wild garlic leaves we got in last week's veg box.

Exploring. Poking around some more bits of the Enfield Greenways (see e.g. The Enfield Society -- Walking in Enfield) on Evening Constitutionals. There are so many excellent bulbs out at the moment.

Also Enys Gardens (bluebells spectacular, absolutely fantastic wisteria, lovely wee walled garden bit, lots of excellent spring flowers in general, second tallest gingko in the country after Kew), Devichoys Wood, and a quick stonk along a bit of coast path (squills still out! primroses! SO MANY BLUEBELLS here also! waves of sea pinks cascading down off the hedges! gorse! so many campions!).

Growing. SQUASH STARTED: not cucumbers, but two summer squash and two winter squash. Did some minor engineering to prop up a branch of jostaberry that had decided it wanted to be much more closely acquainted with the gooseberry. Also put up some gooseberry infrastructure while I was at it, and pulled up the two josta canes that were Definitely Sprouting for relocation. (Have I completed the relocation? lol no. SOON, though, by which I probably mean tomorrow.)

Lots of weeding. Very excited by everything in the fruit cage looking increasingly fruit-shaped, and also by the strawberries responding to being weeded with exuberance. Broad beans extremely cheerful; peas suffering rather from Depredations various; French beans finally showing their faces; and! at home! the celery hatched, which I am unreasonably excited about...

Observing. SO many excellent plants. Probably some swallows. Sea; sky. :)