I enjoy making cakes, biscuits, traybakes, fruit crumbles, etc. and improving on recipes that I find. My best cakes are sponges, and I've made a lot of Victoria sponges and chocolate sponges, but have recently branched out into coffee and walnut sponges as well.

I am currently not baking as much as I did, because I either have to eat it all myself, or transport it to work, which is difficult to do without baked goods getting ruined.

I also bake bread and savoury pies and pasties.

I have recently rediscovered watercolour, when I get time I enjoy sitting down and painting.

I mostly like to paint landscapes, like the one to the left, which I painted based on a sunrise that I saw from Therfield Heath, when my insomnia was particularly bad. When my dog, Pixel, died in June, I decided to do my best to paint her. Even though the details are not perfect, I think that it captures her energy.

I enjoy playing a wide variety of games, including video and tabletop games:

Tabletop Games

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I play chess irregularly with my dad and brother, and have since I was a child.

I collected Warhammer 40K for a long time while I was at school, painting very poorly, and playing infrequently. I have recently started painting some of the models that I didn't get around to at that time (shown to the right).

During my undergrad, I would play boardgames, like Pandemic and Carcassone, with my brother, whenever we met up in person. I now attend the campus board game evenings in Cambridge every other month, where we go to a board game cafe, and play a wide variety of games.

I have listened to actual play podcasts, among other types, for a number of years, but have only started actively participating in TTRPGs recently. During my MSc, I gathered a group (mostly different members than the climbing group) to play a game called Blades in the Dark, which we played until December, when most of the group left the city. We also played (remotely) a campaign of Beamsaber, and oneshots of A Quiet Year, Fiasco and Delta Green.

I am currently trying to organise a game of The Wildsea.

I learned to play the piano from a very young age (I currently have an electronic one), and have also made forays into other instruments, with less long lasting consequences. I am looking into picking the violin up again.

I tend to play classical music, or music from the soundtracks of games that I particularly like, but I also experiment with other music when I come across the sheet music for it.

I listen to a wide variety of music.

I read anything that looks interesting or fun, which normally means sci-fi/fantasy, or popular science books, but also includes some mysteries, comedies, and other genres.

I also listen to audiobooks and podcasts. These can be broadly grouped into scientific, dramatic (including Actual Play), and comedic, with some overlap.

I have been rock climbing since 6th form, where it was offered as an optional activity for "games" each Wednesday afternoon. A small group of us would be taken, by bus, either to a bouldering centre in Abergavenny, which is now sadly closed, or to Boulders in Cardiff, for roped climbing.

During my undergrad, I went bouldering with the climbing society for the first couple of years, before changing to a separate group to which my brother also belonged, to do some outdoor climbing, near Chepstow, together with more roped climbing and bouldering indoors around Bristol.

Once I completed my undergrad, and through my time working at the pub, I continued to climb with this group.

When I moved to Leicester, I formed a small group of my classmates, mostly new to climbing, and we continued to climb together regularly throughout our time in Leicester.

I currently go bouldering with a friend regularly at the weekend.

During 6th form, I spent many of my Saturdays at a nearby craft shop, which had an attached space for woodworking. I used a wood lathe to produce a number of different products, including bowls and bowling pins. I also did some restoration of a clock, and some pyrography. An example of my work is shown on the right.

More recently, I have been learning to carve, although I have yet to produce anything that looks remotely like I intended it to look!