England! The land of (huge amounts of) tea, food that is baked, boiled, and imported, and incredibly cold, cold weather. And for some reason, I love it.

I flew in yesterday morning at 6am. I was lucky in that I got about 6 hours of sleep at the end of my last of 3 flights. It was enough to push me into being awake for the day, although I did end up going to bed quite early indeed.

My sister picked me up and at about 3pm, in an attempt to stave off the need to sleep, we decided to make pasta. My sister is an absolute inspiration; a whiz in the kitchen who just kind of wings it and manages to make it good. A very large amount of what she makes is homemade, simply because she likes the taste and because it’s cheaper. So we made Ravioli from scratch. It’s very easy, although time consuming to use the pasta-stretcher. But it does taste fantastic.

So we had ravioli filled with spinach and (full-fat) ricotta, since that’s what was in the cupboard. As a sauce, we took a can of tomatoes and mixed in some capsicum, mushrooms and zucchini and let it simmer for a while. Maybe one day I’ll take a picture and do some recipes, because it was delicious and felt so light.

Then today she and I went for a run. I started the C25k week 3, Day 2, but it just didn’t work. My body isn’t used to the cold, and my lungs just couldn’t deal with the knife-edge of the frost. So I think i’m going to drop back to week 2 and hopefully build up again. It’s frustrating and it felt almost like I was being betrayed by my body — but I’m still determined. And it feels so good when it works.

I’m really quite excited about being here. It’s such a change and the people I know here live so well. My sister is incredibly inspiring, so naturally healthy and it will be wonderful to embrace that. I only hope that I can continue it once I get to Scotland (tomorrow), and I’m pretty sure that I can — which is a funny but reassuring feeling.

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