Easter 2025

 I remember that when we lived in York, often the weather at Easter would often be pleasant and bring a hint of warmer days to come (although two or three times we did have snow, and one time when we went skiing at Easter in the Pyrenees it was so cold it was snowing at Biarritz airport on the way back to England).

Here in the south east corner of Australia, it's the converse - the last of the pleasant early autumn weather or the first of the wet damp showery autumn weather.

Our cats were unimpressed by the first autumn storm of the season...

This year we had both, a couple of fine days when we gardened and pruned, and then an autumn storm with thunder, lightning and pelting rain where we basically stayed inside and ate chocolate and war gamed a possible trip to Europe next year - I say war gamed because what we do is start with a set of ideas and then try and organize them into a trip, knocking out any that don't fit, and once we've got a sort of a journey outlined, fit in some more detailed planning.

For example, if on the way between Madrid and Paris by train taking the longer route, we decided to have a day’s stopover in Donostia/San Sebastian, one idea was a side trip to the Basque Railway Museum in Azpieta.

Turns out that’s not as easy as we thought, the railway museum is not accessible by train, and getting there would involve a slightly convoluted hour and a half train and bus trip - fine if we were staying in San Sebastián for a few days, but not sensible if we’re simply having a day off from travelling.

At the moment our outline plan looks like a week or so in  on England, a trip to Paris and the train to Madrid and Cordoba or perhaps in the opposite direction - the direction depends when we actually go - if we go in the northern autumn of 2026, we'd probably go north to south on the assumption that Cordoba would probably be warmer than York in early October.

And of course, for me personally, the big news this week was finishing the documentation of Lake View.

That still leaves me with the task of trying to put together a controlled vocabulary for the Athenaeum, but finishing Lake View does give me a day or so back a week to devote to other tasks.

As well as gardening, and we are coming into a down period for that as well, I've decided to revisit my pandemic era family history stuff, and make it a little more systematic.

In itself, I find family history a little boring but I have the idea of trying to expand it in some way to make a series of microhistories of the way the world worked at the time, something that ties into my developing interest in the social history of the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

To this end I've started going to our local library's family history sessions, which have been a bit of a revelation as quite how technical it has become, not to mention the use of AI, which I am not comfortable with yet.

That said it's certainly a fun way of enhancing and maintaining my research and documentation skills.

I havn't sat down and done anything serious yet, but next weekend looks to be wet, so maybe I'll make a start then...