Week 32
No work this week as I’m on annual leave. If you’re not interested in personal life updates, just click away.
My hearing has been off recently and a while back the ENT consultant asked for an MRI, to give him a better view of what was causing it. The results were inconclusive before - there was a lump in my mastoid cavity, but it wasn’t distinct enough in the MRI for him to know if it is a cholesteatoma or a tumour. The follow up was this week, a long enough wait for whatever has been growing in my head to be identifiable. My MRI was on Monday and I got the results on Friday - he’s confident it’s a very slow growing cholesteatoma, not a tumour, so I won’t need surgery to remove it unless it hinders my hearing significantly further. Reflection: I’ve had this hanging over me for a while now. I’m amazed at how little I’ve thought about it over the intervening period - I’ve become very adept at not dwelling on problems I have no control over and I love that for me. Nonetheless, the sense of relief I felt on Friday was massive.
After patting myself on the back for being the only person in the house who hadn’t come down with a virus last week….yeah, that wasn’t to last. The first three days of this week I felt like death warmed up - lucky for me I was able to spend the days relaxing, reading, and napping. I haven’t fully shifted the dregs of the secondary infection, but I’m most of the way there. Reflection: being ill the first few days of a holiday after an intense period of work is not new for me, it’s a distinct pattern and one that tells me that I should have taken time off sooner. It’s really tough because the kids’ school holidays don’t make it easy to space out breaks. Covering the summer break also means that I’ve no time off remaining to take between the start of September and Christmas - so from mid-November I’m going to need to take particular care to pace myself, lest I fall ill again.
I went to a Burlesque show on Thursday night. It was very sexy and has renewed my desire to learn to dance Burlesque myself. The new office location (Holborn) should make that easier as the London School of Burlesque is really close by. My biggest blocker is definitely going to be finding dancing heels for it - think ankle boots with stiletto heels - because (1) I hate shoe shopping, and (2) the delicate easy-blister skin on the balls of my feet hates it when I wear heels. Reflection: I like that going alone isn’t a blocker here. I’ve become really comfortable doing things on my own in London in the evenings. [Disclaimer: with a no-drinking rule, taxis to stations, and a rape alarm in my pocket.] I might see if they let me start with an existing pair of kitten heels.
The kids and I went to see Coraline at the cinema. It’s a 15th anniversary showing - remastered, and with a follow-on short documentary walking you through the process of creating the new puppets, costumes and sets. Seeing the love they poured into it, I was really touched. It was a 3D stop-motion film and so plenty of people were worried that using the latest CGI capabilities might take away from the art of the original film; or that being able to do something in tenth of the time that it took before would make for a quicker and cheaper production. Reflection: one story the artists told feels very familiar to me in the public services space. As worried as some were that the new capabilities meant they would be expected to do the same with less, they found that increasing efficiency in one part of the process just freed them up to focus on being more effective (in realising the creative vision) elsewhere. Making the film wasn’t quicker or cheaper - instead it elevated the outcome, as you’d expect from those working on this as a labour of love.