2026 Week 13

This has been a whirlwind of a week. Monday morning, I was frantically bouncing between Zoom calls, trying to figure out what I could get done in a few days. I had to work this week. By Sunday I was in Beijing with the family preparing for a trip to Nanjing and Yangzhou. Somewhere in the middle of that, we secured tickets to EMF Camp in July, Oscar sat his piano exam, and finished school for the Easter break. Oh, and I finished the Kew 10km race hours before heading to the airport.

I spent a bit of time building out a simple Micropub server to allow me to publish to my blog directly from iA Writer. I’ve been building it in parallel to rethinking the structure of my blog. There are occasionally things that I’d like to share that don’t fit into the structure I have today and this means I tend to jot them down but never get round to posting them. I’m not committing to restructuring just yet, but I’ve started exploring.

Oscar was bitterly disappointed about how he performed in his piano exam. He’s nailed every one of the pieces in public performances in the run up to the exam. For some reason in the week of the exam he couldn’t make it through any of them without finding that his hands wouldn’t do what he wanted. I was lucky enough to sit with him in the warm-up room when for the first time this week, he knocked them out of the park. His face as he left the exam told a different story. The long list of things he felt had gone wrong left him adamant that he’d failed. I knew nothing I said would get him to change his mind. By the time we arrived at school he was still thinking about it. On the way home he was thinking about it, more mistakes coming back to him throughout the day. I asked what he was judging himself against. The answer, “perfect”. So we spent the ride home talking about imperfection, examples where all of us in the family have failed at some point. There are many. By Friday afternoon, when we sat down for lunch in the pub by school, he was still thinking about it. He was just a little less down about it.

The Kew 10km was a great way to wrap up things in the UK before heading to the China. I left my phone behind so was relying on my watch and the pacers to guide me. I hadn’t given too much thought to a target time but my pace on shorter runs has dropped recently and so would be delighted to complete the 10km in under an hour. My watch thought I’d finished the race 500m before I crossed the finish line and the pacer seemed a little fast off the start before slowing down. So, I’ll have to wait for the official times to be published before I know how I did.

Week in Pictures