weekend catching up

It's been a difficult week here and I am very glad that the last eight days are now over and hopefully things are on the up again. There hasn't been much posting on the blog because there hasn't been much to write about, no baking really with the exception of some more rock cakes, no reading at all (this is quite unusual and not really a good thing), and no swimming.

However, the wisdom tooth appears to have healed sufficiently for me to get back in the water yesterday and I had a delightful cycle ride in the sunshine to Woodstock (about 4.5 miles away) to use their heated outdoor pool. It's only a 4 lane, 25m pool, but it always opens in April as is used by the local school for its swimming classes.  It's heated to 29C which is really a little hot for proper swimming but for convalescent swimming or a short swim combined with a bike ride (triathlon training?) it was just perfect. Only 5 other people there and I got 80 lengths swum without too much difficulty. This morning I was back in my usual pool for my usual Sunday morning 5k which was hard as I did it in 4 blocks of 1.25k at a 3.8k race pace. That probably sounds completely incoherent, but I'll translate - it was quite a hard swim. I'm definitely looking forward to some Sunday dinner later! First race of the season next weekend, but it's only 750m so hopefully I can pull out some sprinting to get a good result.

Of course a week that hasn't been too great is one that should probably be cheered up by new books and two have arrived on my doorstep this week. Vicki in Venice is the last book that I needed to complete my Lorna Hill Sadler's Wells collection. I was quite fussy about wanting the GGBP edition to match the other ones that I have in my set, but they were retailing for over £100 on the Amazon marketplace. One came up on ebay, I put in quite a high bid, but the bidding went up to just over half of what I had bid for it, and it was mine for just over £40. Expensive for a book, but actually quite cheap for the market value, and these books are only going to go up and up in price.

I've also got a copy of Ruth Clemens' The busy girl's guide to cake decorating. Ruth was another finalist in the first series of The great British bake off and was my favourite to win. She has an awesome blog called The pink whisk and I am hoping for more of the same in this book.