Livre d'Or

I am drifting away from long-form social media again. There are a couple of big things going on that I don't want to talk about in public, family health stuff and a potential big life change which is unfolding slowly. Also I'm a lot on Discord and Twitter which feel less of a commitment than posting here, but are also much less good for the kind of deep interaction I actually need from my online life. Otherwise work is going mostly well, I am enjoying spending time with my partners, and I'm doing a few lowkey things with a lowish pandemic risk profile.

We hosted a garden party for jack's 40.5th birthday (as his real round number birthday was in January when outdoor socializing was unpromising. It was really nice to see people, and outdoors wasn't too much of a hardship; it was a bit rainy but some lovely guests brought a set of ten umbrellas from their outdoor wedding. And I met up with an old friend who is back on the academic conference circuit; by this time last year I was expecting never to see my north American friends again, so although I'm not myself willing to go to big international events, that was a real treat.

Religious life continues to be good for me. Two of my students celebrated bar mitzvahs in the past few weeks. A girl from my community, who was in my class aged 8-11, and then I didn't see her for two years because of the pandemic so I never bumped into the bnei mitzvah class. She ended up being assigned back to me because her mother quarrelled with the main bnei mitzvah teacher. I really enjoyed getting my student back, though, returning to me as a mature, thoughtful young woman definitely ready to be a religious adult. We gave honours to older women from her family and it turned out they'd been more or less alienated from Judaism for decades after bad experiences with ultra-Orthodox misogyny, and having had such a positive experience at the bat mitzvah they want to return to Progressive Jewish life, so I'm proud of that.

The second was a kid from Stoke who has been learning with me for three years, very serious and dedicated. With his father, he's been more or less keeping the Stoke community running through the pandemic, but chose to celebrate his bar mitzvah at a somewhat more distant Progressive shul. Travelling for the service was definitely weird and scary but I am glad I showed up. Learning on Zoom had caused me not to notice that this boy is suddenly 6' tall, so I was a bit shocked to find him towering over me. Nothing is quite fixed yet but that little class are hoping to carry on with Hebrew, possibly aiming towards Biblical Hebrew GCSE.

I'm doing some in person services not just making exceptions for special occasions, and in person council meetings which are a pain, I really think committee meetings ought to stay on Zoom for convenience even if it's not necessary for Covid safety. And in person teaching at my regular Sunday school as of this term. I was worried about going back in person, but it seems to be mostly working well and the children appreciate it, even those who acclimatized fairly well to Zoom. But I missed the last day of term with a cold, because I'm trying to live up to my principles that we don't go to indoor gatherings when we have symptoms, even though in this case I'm pretty certain that it was an actual cold and not Covid.

UK politics is Very at the moment, and we're in the third omicron surge in 2022, and lots of my very careful friends and people whose health I'm worried about are getting infected and I generally feel a bit despairing. But on a day-to-day basis my life is mostly good, and would be improved by checking in here more often, so I'm going to try to restart that habit.