Welcome to 2026! I hope you are having a good new year.
As in previous years, we didn’t stay up until midnight to see in the new year. However, our reason for an early night this time is that Christine is working today. So, we had what would have been our New Year’s Day meal yesterday. Christine pressure-cooked a gammon joint with pineapple juice (here’s a recipe that’s a close match) and we had the namesake trifle from Robert Owen Brown’s Crispy Squirrel and Vimto Trifle book (also available on Amazon via this affiliate link, but for about 10 times the price so buy it from the publisher).
2026 holidays
We have a couple of trips away already planned for 2026. As usual, we’re going to Sci-Fi Weekender in Great Yarmouth in March, and having enjoyed last year’s holiday in North Wales, we’re going back there this year. There were lots of places that we wanted to go to, but couldn’t fit into the week, so we already have several ideas of places to visit.
I’m not expecting any other trips away, although we may be in London at some point. Christine is starting her studies for another qualification at one of the London universities, and whilst it’s primarily a distance learning course, there are some in-person teaching events. Depending on when they are, it may be that we can go down as a family. As it was, I didn’t get to visit London last year; Christine did, but only for work-related reasons.
New tech
As Christine will be starting a new course, we’re using it as an excuse to replace the laptop that we share at home. We currently have a Lenovo Ideapad 320S, which was bought in 2018 when Christine started a previous course, so it’s eight years old now and positively ancient in laptop terms. I upgraded the RAM to 16 GB in 2022 (previously it had just 4 GB), which goes some way to explain its longevity, but it can’t be (easily) upgraded to Windows 11. And as Windows 10 is literally on borrowed time, it’s about time for an update. I’ll write more once we’ve got it.
Home renovation
We’ve owned our house for 10 years (11 this summer). We bought it with the intention of renovating it, and before we moved in we renovated most of the downstairs. At the end of 2020, we had our (then) four-year-old’s bedroom renovated, followed by our kitchen in 2022.
The next big project is the bathroom. We’d planned to start looking at this in 2026-27, but for various reasons we’re probably going to bring this forward to the first half of 2026.
So that’s some of the things that I expect we’ll get up to this year. There will always be things that happen that I never expect – like last year’s work trip to Athens – but it looks to be a busy, and hopefully productive year.