22 Dec 2025
I'll skip the obligatory apology for leaving such a long time since the last post and instead skip straight to the interesting stuff. We spent around a week in Berlin at the end of September and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Everything from the food to the culture to the shops were great, it really felt like there was something interesting for us to find wherever we went. Some of those discoveries have stayed with us, we've had a few pretzels since!
The next month I did a combined work and holiday trip to Paris, my partner scoped out all the good tourist spots while I was at a conference so we could then go see all the best sights. It was around the time of the Louvre heist, but we definitely both have alibis. We went on a day trip to Monet's house in Normandy, ate French onion soup and explored the Musee d'Orsay - along lots of other sights.
The month after we then had a trip to the Peak District. The weather was quite variable so we did a day of walks and then a day of visiting a local town. We got 2 long walks and two town trips in, and two trips to the Denby Museum, very recommended for their pies!
December has been the usual whirlwind of buying presents, lots of work and my birthday. The pick of the birthday presents was (of course) from my partner, she got me a Kobo Clara BW. It's a great device and way less locked-down than the hand-me-down Kindle I had been using. I used the device to finish my reading of Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
On that note my partner has more premium model of Kobo, and that allows you to synchronise your books from Google Drive or Dropbox. My model doesn't have that built-in but luckily it is easy enough to enable with Nickel Menu. If you are looking for an ereader that respects your privacy more than Kindle and gives you proper ownership over your device, I'd highly recommend Kobo.
Now with you all caught up on my life I'd like to wish everyone who reads this happy holidays, and I hope the next year treats you tremendously.