Weeknote 21

Cooking, dConstruct, London Bridge down

An eventful week in more ways than one made this worthy of a return to normal weeknotes timing.

Post-pandemic cooking routine

Ever since the food shortages and lockdowns early on in the pandemic, I've followed more or less the same schedule of meals throughout the week to help me with meal planning and avoid food waste.

Gloomy Mondays are almost always brightened up with a coupling of flavoursome and often spicy home-cooked Indian/Pakistani vegan dishes. For my side dish option this week I experimented with a new recipe for naan bread. I firstly used my bread maker to handle the kneading more vigorously than I can ever achieve. Then I decided to pan grill the flattened dough rather than oven grill it. Texture-wise and taste-wise this had much better results than my previous approach, almost restaurant style.

dConstruct

Early Friday just as the autumn sun rose around 6am I headed to Brighton for dConstruct. Arriving early gave me the time to visit one of my favourite breakfast cafés in Brighton, Bread and Milk.

Back to the main reason for my visit, dConstruct, and in terms of the talks they were all incredibly thought inspiring without fail. It was my first and sadly last chance to see dConstruct which has been running for ten years. I didn't get a chance to say hi to him there, but my Dutch friend, aslo working in web accessibility, Hidde wrote all about the talks, plus some great photos!

It was also great to see so many great friends there I've met over the past ten years at other tech conferences and meetups. I joined long-time good friends Ana, Paul and Nick for lunch at a nearby vegan café, Smorl's Houmous for a veggie burger.

London Bridge down

A day before on Thursday, news filtered through at work of the imminent possibility to implement Operation London Bridge, the funeral plan for Queen Elizabeth II. I helped our team hurriedly put in place website notices announcing her death for the many government-linked websites we help build, and maintain. Shortly after finishing work that day, the Queen's death was announced.

As a mark of respect, much was cancelled over the past few days, including a much anticipated TV audience I was due to attend with a friend for The Last Leg 😢.

The wall-to-wall television coverage devoted to the Queen's death and proclamations of King Charles III wasn't top of my viewing list over the weekend. For those that know me well, it's possibly no surprise that I'm no monarchist. I nevertheless respect the Queen's passing feels a great shared and personal loss for many, and it will take some time to adjust to a new head of state after the so many years she served.

Theatre

Thankfully, my booked visit with my parents to see Walking with Ghosts in London's West End didn't fall victim to the mark of respect cancellations. The show was a hilarious and heartbreaking delight, showing off the full talent of Gabriel Byrne performing alone live on stage.