Blog 4.0

Yesterday was apparently the hottest June day in the UK on record, and tomorrow is predicted to exceed it. Before I moved to the UK, I was always making fun of my English friends for being such wusses about the weather, complaining about the heat even at 25°C. Even twenty to thirty years ago, weather over 30°C wasn't unheard of in Austria in the summer, and while it wasn't exactly pleasant, I don't remember ever perceiving it as that bad either. But now that I've lived in the UK for over a decade, I get it. The humidity in the air here is just much higher than in central Europe, and it makes even lower temperatures feel really uncomfortable. Yesterday was a real struggle trying to work from home, as I just couldn't think at all with the temperature exceeding 29°C in our flat. Mostly I just stripped down when I wasn't expected to be on a video call, drank pint after pint of water and wandered the house in search of slightly cooler spots. I'm not looking forwa...

My husband has had chronic back problems pretty much as long as we've been together, so I'm quite used to being the one assigned to do any heavy lifting around the house. (Taxi and delivery drivers often look a little startled to see the woman in the relationship make a dash to pick up all the heavy items while the man shuffles his feet awkwardly.) Except... my time to also have back problems seems to have arrived at last. While I was visiting my mother last week, my back started to ache after a few days, and for the last couple of days of my stay I became pretty useless as merely shambling around the house was already enough of an effort. The husband blames my old bed, which makes his own back ache every time we visit together, but I figured, it's my old bed, surely it can't hurt me ?! But no, it seems my body has reached a point where spending several nights sleeping on a pretty hard mattress that felt perfectly fine to me in my twenties is no longer something I can ...