• UK politics continues to be an embarrassment. Thankfully Boris isn’t back, but unthankfully Suella Braverman is, less than a week after doing something so heinous she had to quit. Is this stuff for real?

  • It’s autumn and therefore Soup Season. In the last fortnight we have made creamy roasted pumpkin soup twice, minestrone, tomato soup and several rounds of “pasta soup” (recipe: boil diced potatoes, carrots, onion, garlic in veg stock; add broccoli and supermarket filled pasta; eat with tabasco).

  • “It’s autumn” apparently hasn’t been noticed by the weather, though. A combination of 20°C days and a breeze has delivered great drying on many occasions. I’m fun at parties.

  • There’s a long hedge in our street that was just prickly branches when we moved here in January. In the spring little buds grew and then, as the sun reached more and more of the hedge, a wave of green leaves popped out. It was quite strange to see bare branches at one end and full leaves at the other. Now the process reverses: one end is brown leaves and the other is once again prickly branches. 🍂

  • The baby now disturbs her own sleep by getting stuck on her belly. It’s a pain to go and rescue her every so often but on the other hand it’s nice to give her a cuddle, feeling her heavy little head rest on my shoulder as she calms down.

  • We were going to go to Zürich and Italy to see friends and family this week but it’s such a drag to travel with the kids that we’re just going to sack it off and stay home. I am bummed to lose a lot of money on flights but I know that if I went I’d be thinking “man I’d pay a lot of money to be home now” almost immediately. We resolved to never buy nonrefundable flights again.

  • Picking up running again is going okay. I’m not running as often as I’d like (2 or 3 times a week) but it’s probably better to take it slow despite my desire not to. The running route options around here aren’t great — mostly neighbour roads — so I’m looking forward to running along the river or up the Uetliberg.

  • The toddler likes to “beep” things with the handheld scanner in Waitrose. Twice this week she managed to reboot the scanner halfway around. Toddler fuzz testing! I was disappointed to find that it takes like 3 minutes for the thing to reboot but relieved to learn it didn’t forget about all the shopping we’d already beeped.

    I’m not a supermarket snob, honest. Waitrose is closest to me by far!