Glamjam

I'm about midway through the stretch of the year which is busiest and most exhausting for me at work, and I am feeling extremely drained already. This does not bode well for the remainder of October, but at least I've been doing this job long enough that I know there is a clear end in sight, and exactly when it's going to fall.

This weekend has been lovely, even if it hasn't exactly contributed to my ability to rest and store up energy for work.

Yesterday, after charging speedily around the market to get next week's groceries, Mattthias and I caught the train into Bury St Edmunds, feeling very smug that ours appeared to be the only route not being substituted for a rail replacement bus service. We zipped through fields lined with hedgerows lit with flashes of red berries, listening to the group of middle-aged men next to us talk about their stacks of coins gathered up for some kind of excursion involving gambling, in Essex, for the half-hour duration of the journey, before wandering along leafy streets with cute little houses and cuter little shops, and marvelling at Bury's admittedly much better Saturday market.

We were in town to attend an event at the Bury literary festival: a joint discussion with Olia Hercules and Felicity Spector about their most recent books. I talked about Spector's book in this post, and Hercules's book in this post, but in essence they can be described by three words: Ukraine, survival, and food. (A fourth word would probably be ingenuity.) It was great to hear them speak — they're both excellent public speakers, and work even better together — and just in general to be somewhere where everyone else cared as much about Ukraine as I do, as I find it quite isolating for the most part. (Sample audience member: young woman from the Ukrainian diaspora, with two vyshyvanka-clad small children in tow, remarking that they had travelled for three hours just to be there, and would be travelling back for another three hours on the return journey home.) Both authors signed my copies of their books, and I inevitably also acquired a new cookbook to add to the collection.

Today was the second day of Ely's weekend-long apple fair, which, like most events of this nature, involves stalls around the cathedral grounds, with a heavily apple-related theme in evidence. (Even local shops get in on the action — the amazing bakery was selling apple pies and Danish pastries with caramelised apple, the guy who makes sourdough bread in his kitchen was selling apple and cinnamon loaves at the market on Saturday, etc.) So in the late morning, Matthias and I set out, beginning with a walk along the river and hot drinks from the coffee rig in the market square, and arrived at the fair just before midday to browse the stalls. These were the usual suspects — we go to all these types of events, and it's the same mixture of craft stalls, food trucks, breweries and distillaries, and so on — but we enjoyed ourselves immensely. The weather is properly autumnal now, and today the town has been blanketed in fog all day, which felt an appropriate atmosphere for a harvest festival. We ate lunch from one of the food trucks, drank hot spiced apple juice with whiskey, and returned home with Turkish delight, baklava, various ciders for Matthias, and bagful of apples of all sorts of unusual varieties: a successful haul indeed.

I'm now looking forward to an afternoon and evening doing nothing more strenuous than cooking dinner (an Olia Hercules recipe, but not from the new cookbook), and reading under a blanket. Even reading has been nothing remarkable this week — I've only had the mental energy for rereads of old childhood favourites, which thankfully has been fairly easy to arrange.

Everything feels very sleepy and slow right now — me included.