Finding it much more of a struggle to do ten-day updates this time around, compared to the spring. The fact that the weather is bad and the nights are still getting long doesn't help. Very much missing the usual circuit of holiday receptions that I'd be attending in normal times. As mentioned last time, I did have the thrill yesterday of another in-person diplomatic meeting, and was struck by how busy Brussels actually is - everyone wearing masks though.

I've been working more on my DNA connections, finding that my American relatives have been much more systematic than those of my three Irish grandparents. Last weekend I had a call with a lady whose mother was found abandoned in a Philadelphia park as a three-week-old baby, in 1917. DNA suggests that she and her siblings are my fourth cousins or thereabouts. My American grandmother was born in Philadelphia in 1899, but the link is too distant for her or her immediate family to have been involved; I checked through her first cousins to find a couple of likely suspects, but it may well be one of her second cousins (or more distant) and that is complex.

I also had a chat with a fourth cousin once removed whose name is almost the same as mine. He's the guy in green here. He lives in Scotland, and his niece works in Brussels. A small world.

On the rare clear evenings, you can see the approaching conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn an hour after sunset:I am thinking of going to the Netherlands for a haircut - hairdressers are open there, and neither Belgium not the Netherlands insists on quarantine before or after fleeting visits. The border is about an hour's drive, and I already checked that the hairdressers take reservations from us Belgians. It will be a change of scene at least.