PhD lockdown

Posting has been light lately, and will continue to be so as I enter into the final phase of the PhD. It's due on the 30th of September and there's still an awful lot of work to be done. I'm starting to spend quite a few late nights and weekends at uni, but I'm confident it will all be finished on time! (It has to be...)

Adrian's also in the final month of training for Challenge Roth (3.9km swim, 180km bike ride, 42km run) which looks like it's going to be a lot of fun (for the spectators, maybe not so much for the competitors). He's working hard - although once that finishes and he becomes man about the house to look after me while I finish, it might not be any less work!

There are lots of things to update on the blog, but here are a few photos from what's been going on lately:

Watching NZ vs England at Lords

"Making it Work" at the Sciences Po climate change negotiation simulation in Paris

My team's tomato plants for our 2015 Green Impact summer challenge - we've got to keep these guys healthy and grow as many tomatoes as we can!

Dumpling making to stock up the freezer

Our delicious strawberry plants - we get fresh strawberries on our breakfast every morning. Can't get any more local than that!

So wish me luck as the PhD lockdown continues. I'm planning to emerge victorious on the 1st of October!

Gluttony Friday

While Good Friday was definitely a good day in our house, it was also most definitely a very gluttonous day (irony much? Seven deadly sins and all...). Health warning: do not attempt any of this unless you are actually training for an Ironman.

We started with a delicious panettone for breakfast that we'd been saving from Christmas. It provided vital sustenance for our epic morning of baking that followed. That's right, we had a Great British Hot Cross Bun Off! In the red corner was Adrian who was making the classic Edmonds cookbook recipe, and in the blue corner was me, Amelia, who was making the new-fangled recipe by bake-off judge Paul Hollywood.

Notable recipe differences included Hollywood's one including an egg and not much in the way of spices (which I decided to double, based on other reviewers' suggestions, as well as ignoring the apple and just doubling the regular fruit mix), and the Edmonds one requiring an hour less proving and kneading all the fruit etc. in at once. I also made Hollywood's recipe in our amazing KitchenAid - got to get that price per use down!

Adrian's batch: the classic Edmonds recipe

My batch: new-fangled Paul Hollywood's recipe

Mine on the left, Adrian's on the right

As you can see, they were a lot of fun to make and turned out very differently! Adrian's were much more like scones and mine were puffier, much more like bread rolls. His have a really delicious, dense taste and the kneading with the fruit meant it broke up and was more dispersed around the bun, but he reckons next time they need more kneading and he'll try them in the mixer. I'm really glad I doubled the fruit and spices in mine as without I think they'd be a bit bland. Adrian generously gave me the winner's crown and I like winning too much not to take it, so el champione is me!

But, gorging ourselves on hot cross buns (I think Adrian had at least five or six straight out of the oven) was only the beginning. We then cycled up to Shoreditch to try out Fryhard, a pop-up food stall which was frying (practically) anything and everything. Adrian's long wanted a pie, wrapped in bacon, then deep-fried. Sadly all the pies were sold out so he had to make do with a quiche. Just don't think of the calories!! I decided to have a cream egg which the whipped cream topping really added to surprisingly - very sweet but disappeared in an instant!

Goodies being queued up for the fryer

A batch of deep-fried cream eggs ready to eat!

Mmmmmm... Deep fried cream egg in all its glory.

Deep fried quiche ready to eat!

Finishing there would have been for wimps. (Notice I'm completely disregarding the health warning at the top of this blog myself). The final step on our odyssey was a white chocolate strawberry cronut. Mmmmmmm...

And then, because we were in Shoreditch (the western-most extension of London's hipster paradise) we topped it all off with a tiny bottle of freshly pressed juice goodness for £5. Delicious!

So there you have it. How to put on 5kg and double your cholesterol in a day. Let's also not talk about the Easter egg we ate in its entirety on Easter Sunday shall we... Luckily spring has arrived and it's fresh veges and salads for the rest of the month!

Chaos in the city

We've had a bit of drama in London - an underground electrical fire (which is still burning, more than 24 hours after it started!) meant havoc, evacuation, and power cuts for a fair chunk of the central city yesterday and today.

We were all in the office yesterday when the lights started flickering on and off. Knowing that that couldn't be a good sign I saved everything I was working on and backed it up. Thank goodness I did because a few minutes after that all the power died. Now we're on the 11th floor so have a pretty good view out over the city. We could see people streaming out of the Royal Courts of Justice and someone remarked that they thought it was pretty hazy in the air. We also heard a lot of sirens, so definitely knew it was more than just a small power shortage. Here's a video of the smoke:

Twitter to the rescue meant that we could see it was a fire on Kingsway and there was all sorts of conjecture about what exactly was on fire (initial photos looked like it might be coming from the road underpass under Aldwych but it was actually from a cable fire in an underground tunnel - check out this dramatic photo!).

We, along with apparently 5000 others were then evacuated - we all took our stuff thank goodness, although I had to leave my bicycle as it was chained up downstairs in the basement and we also left all the food in the fridge which was going to be cleared out later in the day due to the Easter break. So, what do you do when you're evacuated in the middle of the day?? Off to the pub of course! The first pub we went to, the Edgar Wallace (great decor with amazing retro cigarette posters and coasters all over the ceiling) eventually lost its power too and so it was off again to one of my favourite nearby pubs, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. Much discussion of divestment, the failure of the economics profession etc. ensued...

Today, I was certain that it would all be fine (naively) and so hopped on a bus to get to uni to spend the day working (even though it's the uni holiday shut-down period already, we're able to go into work on the non-public holiday days). What a mission!! All the buses stopped at Elephant & Castle, it took forever to get to one even near Waterloo, then I had to walk over Waterloo Bridge to LSE as it was shut to vehicles. All of this should have been a sign that power was still out - and is expected to be out until at least midnight tonight. Fortunately I managed to collect my bike, save the perishable food and turn off the main switches to the printers etc. so it wasn't all running while we were all away. But what a palaver! Let's hope it's all systems go by the time I want to go back in on Tuesday...

I love this photo (from this BBC article) taken from the London Eye last night of the area affected. Certainly quite a stark difference to  the rest of the city!

Life round here

I really can't believe it's 2015 and that I'll be handing in my thesis this year - the past three and a bit years have absolutely flown by (cliche I know). It's also somewhat amazing to realise that we've been in London for over five years now. That time really has disappeared! So I'm making an effort to try and capture more of the little things that we've been doing, to remember what daily life was actually about. So here's a few shots of life round here, circa February and March 2015.

I organised a celebration of Waitangi Day at university, mainly so I could have an excuse to try these delicious NZ-themed doughnuts (the kiwifruit jam one was particularly good).

To continue the baking theme, Adrian's been baking up a storm with all sorts of innovative and delicious bread. These are two of the best: a braided white loaf and then a swirled wholemeal cinnamon and raisin loaf. Now you know why I married this man!

At the amazing skip-fit classes I go to at uni, Adrian managed to come to one and get a special one-on-one boxing lesson. He got beat up! (Not literally)

Also at uni, we got our brand new red cedar hive delivered which everyone's very excited about. The wood is extremely soft but smells really lovely. Can't wait for the bees to arrive and make it their new home!

We went up to Cambridge for the weekend to see a friend (I got the train and Adrian cycled - Ironman training has already started!) and visited the Fitzwilliam Museum. While we were there a recital was on - it was lovely hearing the music echoing through the rooms. My eye was also caught by these beautiful tiles from ancient Egypt. Incredible how the colour has lasted so well for so long.

We've also been thinking about some of the differences between the UK and NZ, like the price of food. This is our weekly shop (barring a few other bits bought at another supermarket) from Lidl - £25, or about $50. I definitely won't miss all the unnecessary packaging on the fruit and vegetables, but the cost is hard to beat!

Suffice to say, we definitely eat well around here. Here's dinner from Friday night - a delicious red pesto and goats cheese pizza, with baby corn, mange tout, red capsicum and rocket. Yum! We're using every occasion to use our brand new (to us) KitchenAid mixer. It's pretty amazing what it can do!

And finally, the piece de resistance - my new chair! Because we live in a cul-de-sac, our road is a magnet for fly-tippers, and there are always all sorts of things out by the rubbish bins. One thing that arrived one day was this chair. It's missing a bottom stabilising piece of wood, but I think it looks pretty good in its brand new shade! The paint was left over from a university project and after five coats and a few more coats of varnish, I think it's pretty nice. Definitely brightens up the living room and not bad for a total outlay on varnish of £4.99!

So there you have it, five weeks worth of photos and stuff going on. Pretty homebody stuff, but given I'm now completely unemployed and focusing on the PhD and triathlon training has started, it suits us fine! Stay tuned for more updates - the weather's just starting to warm up so I'm sure there'll be all sorts of things to report on.

Walking in Epping Forest

To help banish the winter blues, I decided to organise a walk in Epping Forest for my birthday. We followed most of this route, although we started a bit further north at Leytonstone and in the end, finished a bit further south at Theydon Bois. I'm guessing it was about 19km all up and although we tried to follow this excellent 1970s guide, GPS was our saviour on the day as even though I'd read that the route wasn't very well-marked, I wasn't expecting there to be no markers at all! I also think, given that we were doing it in the middle of winter, the paths probably weren't as visible as they may be in drier conditions...

We started bright-eyed and bushy tailed, despite some unexpected rain slightly dampening the party (although happily it got sunny later on).

After a bit of a false start (hence the need to bring out the GPS) we got back on track and picked up the pace. Well, that's not true. We tried to pick up the pace but the mud was just a bit too much!

Here we are a bit over half-way making the most of a pretty lake for a photo opportunity, and me contemplating whether I'd just stop where I was and sleep there the night...

 

And finally the end! It was pretty tough going for us city slickers, particularly given that my terrible boots ripped my heels to shreds (I'll refrain from posting that particularly unsavoury photo), and I've definitely got some sore legs now, but definitely landed on the side of fun overall. 

I'd also arranged for everyone, as well as some other friends, to head to a local pub for drinks and dinner - our large group of 20 mostly mud-covered hikers definitely stood out like a sore thumb amongst the extremely well-groomed and glamorous other patrons! I hadn't even thought we'd be heading into Essex territory (epitomised by a TV show called 'TOWIE' for those in NZ) so our muddy trousers being out of place was the understatement of the year so far... Cultural appreciation was had by all though - we'll have to go back when we're slightly cleaner I think...

So, overall I'd recommend walking in Epping Forest, but probably not again in winter! Maybe we'll head back there when all the leaves are fresh and that lovely new Spring green.