Welcome back to Voice Notes with me Venetia. It's great to have you here. I'm going to

start by catching you up on this past week and honestly I was really struggling just

now when I was thinking about what to tell you because this past week has been a bit

of a blur. I think it's because my work-life balance hasn't been so great. I'm going on

holiday next week which I am so excited about. I've been counting down to this holiday

for what feels like six months and I think this is quite a usual thing. In the run-up

to a holiday I am trying to get as much work-related things done as possible before I go. So this

week I have felt like I've been a little bit in overdrive and everything's a bit blurry.

But if I think back to the weekend, last weekend I had really, really lovely time with

some friends. You might know that I moved out of London a couple of years ago and it's

definitely been a slow process of finding people who I feel like I connect with who live

close to me. And this weekend Friday night I went out for dinner with two local friends

two relatively new-ish friends and we had such a lovely time. We went out for Italian

food, had a cocktail, sat in the sunshine, gorgeous. And then Sunday I had two more local

friends around and I made them lunch and then we went for a walk and we had a lovely time.

So I text my mum like, oh my gosh, it's happened. I have local friends now admittedly.

The friends who I hung out with on Sunday I have known for a long time and they have moved

out of London and they now live fairly close to me. So it's not exactly local friends but I'm

calling it that. I was very, very excited to have some friends around specifically for lunch

on Sunday because I wanted to use it as an excuse to cook some recipes from my husband Max's

book. Now usually if we have friends around because he is, let's face it, head chef,

and a published cookery author, he takes the reins when it comes to cooking. Everyone's just

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