A huge banner now hangs from St Pancras New Church near Euston Station in London, raising awareness of the climate emergency

I’m enjoying my work, but this week was super hectic. To add to the fun, on Thursday afternoon I started getting a cold and by Friday evening it was in full swing, forcing me to load up all of my pockets with tissues. As of Sunday night I’ve started to turn the corner, just in time to get back to work again.

This was a big week for the main programme that we are running this year. I’d set up our first Steering Committee meeting for Friday afternoon and I had to prepare a slide deck for the team to review. Getting ready for a governance meeting isn’t something that you can start too early, otherwise the information changes and you end up tweaking and reworking the slides multiple times. Once I’d aligned with our CIO on the information we wanted to present it was then just a case of getting my head down and creating the document, which I did through Thursday evening and Friday morning. The meeting went well and I feel as though we have a good collective understanding of where we are and what we need to do.

This was a week in which I:

• Had several meetings with our audio/visual technical design vendor who are working on multiple projects for us.
• Met with our Finance team to discuss the approach to modelling our property programme costs. We’ve now got a clear view of what we need to pull together.
• Continued with the process to bring additional project management support on board for our team.
• Had the weekly project meeting with our sister company for renovating our main office.
• Spent half a day in vendor presentations that were in response to an RFP issued by our sister company. We may have some involvement with the organisations so it was good to see what they have to offer.
• Had the weekly meeting for the move of one of our offices.
• Reviewed the latest draft of an RFP for furniture in our new office.
• Wrote my sections of our quarterly report to our Board of Directors.
• Attended a vendor demo of a web-based software tool that may help us with originating new business.
• Met with a colleague who is getting an internal Engineering Community of Practice off the ground. Offered my thoughts that we need to encourage our staff to be members of communities of practice beyond the boundaries of our organisation, and that we should use the internal forum for the things that are unique to us.
• Drafted text for an article in our in-house monthly magazine about speaking to the Technology team ahead of planning an important meeting or event. Although the technology in our office is relatively straightforward and intuitive, this doesn’t always hold when people start to do something exotic such as using shared meeting spaces and expecting a particular conferencing platform to work.
• Reviewed text for another article that encourages people to take part in our Random Coffees initiative. After nearly four years we’ve had over 5,000 pairings and still have about 60 people that regularly take part. Staff joining our organisation have consistently said how useful it has been to be able to meet other people through this process.
• Took part in a half-day mandatory training session on the topic of Meaningful Conversations.
• Had our monthly catch-up with the Operational Risk team.
• Had my weekly meeting with my product leadership team.
• Decided to replace an old Raspberry Pi with a model 4B. I use two Pis for running redundant pi-holes at home, but this old one regularly gives me trouble when I try to upgrade the software. The rpilocator website is an incredible tool for finding where Raspberry Pis are in stock.
• Heard an unexpected clatter and thunk as I drove my car off of our driveway. It turned out that one of our front coil springs had failed, leaving a piece of it in the road. Getting the pair replaced and getting four new tyres at the same time left us unexpectedly £900 lighter.
• Had a very informative meeting with a company that specialises in sports-based scholarships at US universities. It now feels like a real possibility for our eldest son.

Media

Video

• One of my Album Club friends was gushing about how good Netflix’s The Greatest Night in Pop (2024) is. He wasn’t wrong — it’s superb. I remember watching the music video for We Are the World, tucked up on the sofa with my parents when I was about nine years old, with them delighting in telling me who was singing each part. Watching it all come together in this movie is an absolute delight. There are so many amazing moments which I won’t spoil here. But, the next time I start thinking that I’ve had quite a long day, I will channel my inner Lionel Richie and push on through.
• My family are more of a TV series kind of people than movies. I took advantage of being home alone one evening by watching Toni Erdmann (2016), a three-hour German film. It’s a slow-burning delight which made me laugh out loud, a weird thing to find yourself doing when you’re watching a movie alone. Loved it.

Audio

• Loved hearing Soundgarden’s Superunknown at Album Club. I listened to the album a little bit around the time that it was released but probably haven’t heard it in 25 years or so. Spoonman has been rattling around my head ever since.

Books

• Needing to feed my soul with some fiction, I picked up a copy of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning from my bookshelf. I was delighted to remember that it is a BookCrossing book that was sent to me by someone I met on Twitter some 15 years ago. Once I’ve read it I’ll drop it off somewhere for the next person to enjoy.

Next week: Quote-gathering, and finally seeing Helena Deland live.

The four days at work were busy ones. An overtime ban at the rail company meant that my usual morning train wasn’t running, something I found out on Monday morning after I jogged all the way to the station to avoid missing it.

I also said goodbye to my colleague who has been over with us from Johannesburg for a couple of weeks as she headed off home. Time goes so fast.

This was a week in which I:

• Got agreement from our internal governance committees to go ahead with the programme structure and steering committee that I have proposed. The next step is the near-impossible job of getting the meeting series in the diary at a time that the everyone can make.
• Responded to questions from potential suppliers as part of an RFP and had a quick glance at the responses once the deadline passed.
• Brought our Head of Marketing and Communications up to speed with where we are with our office move project, looped her into the fit-out discussions and arranged for her to have an on-site meeting with the team next week. It’s fascinating what someone with a particular eye for detail will think about that I would completely miss on my own.
• Had a step-by-step walkthrough of the office move plan with the landlord’s project manager.
• Joined the weekly meeting with our sister company who are also moving to new premises in the same city. We said goodbye to a colleague in their team that we have worked with for many years and welcomed a new team member to the meetings.
• Had our weekly meeting with our office technology design vendor to agree next steps for the two office projects they are assisting with.
• Reviewed the core financial data for an office upgrade/refit project.
• Gave a tour of our office to a leader from our sister company who occupy the same building as us. They are looking to undertake their own refit next year and wanted to see what we had done.
• Reviewed the plans to fit out our office with carbon dioxide meters and started to discuss how we might take an alternative approach to meet the requirement, giving us more data and potentially more control in the long term.
• Had conversations about the Microsoft suite of Generative AI tools and started to look at budgeting for licencing.
• Had the weekly Digital Product team meeting, discussing how we will approach the work on the backlog and how we will communicate the process to the rest of the team.
• Met with colleagues in South Africa to discuss approaches to document sharing between our offices.
• Agreed an approach to some information-gathering work on tools that can potentially help our Investment Banking business.
• Had an interesting discussion on avatars and authenticity at our monthly Lean Coffee meeting.
• Attended a town hall meeting where we heard from colleagues in Compliance and a reorganised revenue team.
• Had two lovely random coffee meetings, one with a friend that I’ve made through the WB-40 podcast community and another from India who works in our Credit Risk team.
• Enjoyed the first free office lunch of 2024, a delicious poke bowl handmade by our in-house chefs.
• Enjoyed a Saturday afternoon dog walk and cup of tea with a friend. Discovered how bad a dog can smell after it has rolled itself in fox poo.
• Popped to the doctor’s to check out what I’m hoping is a small medical issue. Popped back a couple of days later for a blood test and made an appointment with a consultant in March.
• Had a visit from UK Power Networks who will be removing us from a looped electricity supply with our next door neighbours.
• Got outside on my bike for the first time in three weeks. Club rides have recently been cancelled due to the cold weather; we don’t go out if the temperature is 2°C or below at 8am. This week it was actually warm enough for bibshorts, but I was the only one in the group to turn up suitably kitted-out.

• Attended an Academic Speakers Bureau taster session at the LSE, hearing from Nick Robins, Liz Stokoe and Alexander Evans on the topics of a Transforming Finance for a Just Transition, The Conversational Racetrack: The Power of Words in Motion and Cyber, Geopolitics and AI: Navigating a Volatile World.

Media

Podcasts

• A fascinating conversation on the new-look (new sound?) WB-40 podcast with Mark Bjornsgaard on using the heat generated from data centres to warm swimming pools. Deep Green looks super interesting. I had no idea you could run servers submerged in oil and then harvest the heat they generate.

Articles

• Heather Burns’ post on the annual NASA Day of Remembrance is beautiful. I couldn’t help but think of Boeing as I read it, wondering if there are elements of NASA’s culture that would help with their current situation.
• Found the Guardian’s report of a rise in young men thinking that feminism has done more harm than good very depressing.

Video

• Discovered Mitch Boyer’s YouTube channel and enjoyed his attempt of the Pittsburgh Dirty Dozen crazy hill climb bike race.

Web

• I’d love to start a Little Free Library, but the front of our house doesn’t get enough foot traffic.
• This exploration of visual patterns in vinyl records and what could be done with a fantasy record player is extraordinary. I can’t believe how much effort must have gone into this.

Next week: Fitting all of the work around a two-day offsite meeting that I’ll be joining remotely.

An extremely busy week. Three of my colleagues on our management team came over from Johannesburg, so I went into London every day in order to maximise our time together. (Being with them on a Teams call with me at home and them in our London office would have felt so wrong.) Every time I head into the office for five days in a row I wonder how I used to do it week in, week out. I’m knackered.

Tuesday and Wednesday were spent offsite at Etc. Venues Monument, right next to where the Great Fire of London started in Pudding Lane. I’d been beavering away on the agenda for the past few weeks and it came together well. Everyone seemed to get a lot out of the two days. It was wonderful to have all of us together in the same room, away from the distractions of the office. The venue was perfect; not too expensive, well-equipped and with lovely food throughout the day.

At the end of the week we fed back to the whole department, giving everyone an overview of the ‘hard landscape’ of the year ahead, with the work we have to get done across our property/facilities portfolio taking priority over everything else.

I still feel that I’m working on a ‘just in time’ basis, looking ahead to what the next immediate deadline is and getting the work done for that. It’s hectic.

This was a week in which I:

• Had a revelation as we prepared for our offsite meeting, realising that there are two types of work that we do. The first is ‘don’t ask me what I want, tell me what I need’ which covers the core IT infrastructure, meeting room technology etc. The second is ‘ask me what I need’ which sits more in the digital product development space. The approach to each type of work is different.
• Met with our meeting room technology vendor, to review the setup of two of our key internal rooms and see if there are any simple improvements we can make. They introduced us to Grid View, which we’ve now enabled in both of the rooms. It has completely transformed the experience for remote participants, with zoomed-in tiles for each of the groups of people in the room.
• Had a workshop with our meeting room design vendor, reviewing the new office space that we are moving into in one of our cities and talking about what kind of technology might work there.
• Had a briefing on Sustainable IT at our offsite meeting, with an expert researcher in the field. I learned so much in 90 minutes, but realise how much more there is to know.
• Enjoyed a recap of the strategy of our part of the organisation from our business manager at our offsite event.
• Took some colleagues up to see another part of our building which we may want to use while some major works are undertaken in our main office later in the year.
• Had the monthly project meeting with our sister company on the planned office renovations.
• Joined the weekly project meeting for opening a new office in a new country.
• Met with our main technology partner to discuss the big projects that we need to complete this year, so that they are able to come back with a proposal for how they might tackle the work.
• Had an in-person meeting with our Microsoft licence vendor and discussed other services they offer beyond what we use them for today.
• Gave my presentation on Large Language Models and Generative AI to our team of Corporate Finance analysts in Johannesburg.
• Provided some content for an in-house version of the Thoughtworks Technology Radar that we’re trying as an experiment.
• Met my product development leadership team for a weekly check-in.
• Bumped into an old friend from university at the offsite venue, someone that I haven’t seen in over a decade.
• Wondered how I suddenly became the parent of a son old enough to go to a work Christmas party. I feel like I was his age a moment ago.
• Had a wonderful dinner at Manicomio City, celebrating a colleague’s birthday and another colleague’s imminent retirement. The table was set up perfectly for the ten of us to all be able to hear each other and the food was exceptional.
• Enjoyed a team drink at the rooftop bar at Coq D’Argent. The heaters and sheepskins kept us cosy despite the cold.
• Heard Portishead’s Dummy for the first time in decades at the WB-40 album club. I admire the album more than I love it, which is maybe why I’ve never gone back to it since the time it was released. It’s quite a downbeat record and it’s not often that I want to feel quite like that.
• Enjoyed a lovely dinner with my wife, her fellow running club coaches and their spouses at someone’s house. It was a good way to unwind after a very busy week.
• Ran the line at my eldest son’s football match.
• Was pleased to see my Bookcrossing stickers and labels drop through the post. I’ve got a lot of books lined up to release. It rarely happens, but there’s nothing quite like the fun of hearing from a book I released years ago.

Media

Podcasts

• I don’t think it’s too much to say that a rally for Donald Trump has massive echoes of those that took place in Germany in the early 1930s.

Video

• Loved Annie Nightingale’s visit to McLaren Racing ahead of the 1971 British Grand Prix.
• Continued watching For All Mankind on Apple TV+.
• Finally — FINALLY — got to the end of Grange Hill season 14 on BritBox. It’s taken me over a year to get this far. I’d promised myself to stop watching once its most famous headteacher, Mrs McClusky, ended her time on the show. I have notes on everything I’ve seen and will be writing them up.

Audio

• Ben Thompson’s Stratechery interview with Netflix Co-CEO Greg Peters was excellent. I loved the point that Peters made that building institutional capability is only something that you build over time once you’ve hired great people. He also gave some great insight keeping things disciplined and strategic:

Ben Thompson: To our point about the operational stuff, what is fun for me about Netflix is it feels like a deeply strategic company.

Greg Peters: I think of it as that for sure, and Reed [Hastings, Netflix Executive Chairman, Co-Founder and ex-CEO] really instilled that value in that sense that you want to be very considerate about what you go do, you want to only go do the things that really will lead to a gigantic revenue and profit pool. We have this thing we call the lemonade stand in front of the gold mine, which is don’t get distracted building lemonade stands in front of the gold mine — you want to find the gold mines and that’s what you really want to work on. So that discipline, that focus, I think is important.

The other one that really I take away with me is probably the under-recognized benefits of being extremely disciplined about having top talent in all your positions and this goes a little bit back to that strategic mindset versus what it looks like in practical operations, and having great people everywhere just means you can get tons of stuff done.

Web

• Interesting nonprofit organisation dedicated to sustainable IT.
• I’ve signed up to attend the launch of the Academic Speakers Bureau Taster Talks series talks at the LSE on Wednesday. On the agenda:
  • Transforming Finance for a Just Transition with Professor Nick Robins, Professor of Practice in Sustainable Finance
  • The Conversational Racetrack: The Power of Words in Motion with Professor Elizabeth Stokoe, Professor of Psychological and Behavioural Science
  • Cyber, Geopolitics and AI: Navigating a Volatile World with Professor Alexander Evans OBE, Professor of Practice in Public Policy
• Need to find time to explore the explore.org webcams.
• Enjoyed seeing how places used to look in Britain From Above.

Next week: Saying goodbye to my nan.

Mentally this was an extremely busy week. From a work perspective, there’s a mountain to climb this year. But, I have a map, a compass, provisions, fair weather and an excellent team; it’s going to be tough but I think we can do it. This week felt as though I spent a lot of time wrestling with the problems we need to solve, but I didn’t feel like I was tackling them on my own. I love working in our team.

The weekend was so busy with unplanned events that I wasn’t able to get my weeknotes written up in good time. It happens.

This was a week in which I:

• Was sad to hear that my nan had passed away. But so grateful that she had lived a long and independent life.
• Had a visit from the ‘couldn’t make it up’ department where my first commute of the year was delayed as the doors stopped working on our brand new train. After the crew wrestled with them for 20 minutes at Bushey station, they eventually made the decision to take the train out of service. It wasn’t an auspicious start to the year.
• Continued work on the ‘kickoff deck’ for the year, including what will be the hard-edged immovable deadlines that we need to hit this year. Our plan is to review this at an offsite meeting the week after next and then take it back to the whole team.
• Made progress with booking a venue for the offsite meeting. We’ve agreed where we plan to go and now need to get the contract signed.
• Got my head around a building infrastructure project, primarily through re-reading materials that had been sent to me over the past few months and asking questions of the team that have been leading the work. Things are starting to make sense. It made me realise that there is no substitute to burying yourself in the work; attending meetings is not enough on its own. Finished the week by sending out an advisory note to our senior leaders about the broad shape of the work for this year, trying to prompt issues being raised as early as possible.
• Joined the weekly project meeting for opening a new office.
• Had the weekly project meeting for moving offices in one of our cities. We are very close to a significant milestone, after which our team needs to spring into action.
• Had a couple of meetings for the project to address the way in which our teams store documents. Information management is a difficult problem to solve in a way that meets the needs of all interested parties.
• Had a call with a senior internal stakeholder to close out on an initiative that we had decided against taking forward.
• Had an impromptu conversation with one of our business heads about a gap that they have in their business process. Next steps are to set up a call with a vendor and start to map out where a tool could fit into a broader set of steps to plug the gap.
• Agreed with a vendor to postpone some team-wide training on clear writing that we had planned for Q1. We don’t have enough time available to make sure that we do justice to the preparation and delivery of the material. Hopefully we’ll be able to complete this once all of our main projects are up and running.
• Held the first Learning Hour session of the year. The talk continued the theme of 2023, with a focus on Generative AI. Our presenter gave a high-level overview of LM studio which allows you to download and run large language models on your PC. The conversation made me realise that most people — including me — have an imperfect knowledge of how the tools work. It got me searching for an analogy that I had encountered before Christmas which you can find in the podcasts section below.
• Met with colleagues across our Group to discuss Generative AI patterns and guidelines and our approach to utilising the technology.
• Had our monthly meeting with the Head of Operational Risk.
• Met with a senior colleague who is struggling with their personal productivity workflow. Our conversation was a reminder that what works for me doesn’t necessarily work for anyone else. I’m very much a text-based note-taker, whereas a big part of my colleague’s job is marking up PDF files across a number of different devices. Our team needs to get good at using the same tools so that we are able to help with requests like this.
• Said ‘Happy New Year’ to the final set of colleagues who returned from leave. It’s great to have the whole team back in action again.
• Had a lovely lunch with our divisional CIO and my colleagues in our management team. Found out that one of my colleagues is allergic to shellfish, not great when you’re sitting down to eat at a restaurant called Burger & Lobster. They (both the restaurant and my colleague) were very good about it; the restaurant let him nip over to Nando’s and bring back something to eat at our table.
• Had a random coffee with a fellow member of the WB-40 podcast Signal group. He is an IT Director at an events company. It was fascinating to hear about the challenges he has had with deploying IT infrastructure in unusual places, as well as occasional problems with event attendees.
• Started to look at what it would take to remove a support pillar in our kitchen. Exchanged emails with an architect friend who previously worked on our house to see what the possibilities are. Our kitchen is old and tired. When we last had it fitted we couldn’t afford to do anything with the pillar, but it’s meant that we’ve had to compromise on everything else.
• Decided to stop using the Kagi search engine, two months after I started a subscription. This forum thread was the catalyst, and another sealed the deal for me. I’ve switched back to DuckDuckGo.
• Took down our external Christmas lights at home.
• Didn’t make it out for a bike ride as the temperature has dropped too low. TrainerRoad  had me on a recovery week so I had a few easy rides lined up. I think that perhaps they are too easy and I’m not convinced that a whole week of gentle rides is really necessary. The next time they turn up in the calendar I may opt for something heavier.
• Joined seemingly everyone else in the country in watching Mr Bates vs The Post Office. I approached it gingerly as I am not usually someone who likes an ITV drama, but it is actually superb. Brilliant storytelling that brings a complex, technical narrative to life.
• Had a great time at Album Club, listening to an excellent album, enjoying our host’s fabulous hospitality and talking a lot of nonsense.

Media

Podcasts

• This analogy for Generative AI from Aza Raskin on the Your Undivided Attention podcast is useful. The reference to MP3 files is prescient given the New York Times vs Microsoft and OpenAI lawsuit and the commentary that it could echo what happened with Napster:

Aza Raskin: Just quickly for listeners, I want to give an analogy because a lot of this can feel confusing, like model weights and source code. How does all this stuff work? I think a useful analogy is sort of like an MP3 player, model weights, when you say a model weight, what is that? That’s like an MP3 file on your computer. And if you’re open up in a text editor, it would just look like gobbledygook. But if you have the right kind of player, you take your MP3 and you put it into a music player, an MP3 player, you can hear the song. And it’s very similar with AI. Weights are just like this MP3 file. If you open it up just looks like gobbledygook. You put it into an AI player, and then you get the blinking cursor that can start to think and do cognition. And then there’s the code that generates the MP3, that’s the training code. It takes all the data and it makes MP3 file, an AI file. Inference is what we normally call the player. So those are some of those terms. And when we say that the weights are open, it means that the MP3 has sort of been put out onto the web and anyone that has a player can now play that thing, and there’s no way to take the MP3 off of the web. Once it’s out, it’s out forever.

• It was fascinating to hear the hosts of The Race talk about Guenther Steiner in such glowing terms whilst being extremely critical of Gene Haas. Apparently Steiner doesn’t deserve his clownish reputation that has been cultivated through his appearances on Drive to Survive.
• Enjoyed this Dot Social interview with Tim Chambers. I didn’t know him until I signed up for a Mastodon account on indieweb.social, which he happens to run. He’s been very visible to me since. The interview makes me so glad that I landed on that particular server. It was interesting to hear about Independent Federated Trust and Safety who provide resources and help for people who work as social media moderators.
• AVTalk gave an amazing explainer of what happened on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 including details of the air pressurisation systems of modern aircraft and what it would be like to experience a sudden depressurisation event. Steve Giordano knows what he’s talking about.
• The Slow Newscast episode on the prevalence of women who fall to their deaths in suspicious circumstances was a sad listen. As of the time of release, only one police force was tracking numbers of women who fell where men were charged with a crime.
• The Microsoft Teams Insider episode with Damian Lewis was superb. I love his idea of having a weekly ‘Microsoft Message Center Review Board’ with one outcome being a weekly ‘Did you know?’ post on internal social media. He has processes to set up to populate a Microsoft Planner Kanban board with new entries on Microsoft Message Center which he can then quickly process.

Articles

• Graham Chastney notes how Mr Bates vs The Post Office gives us an insight into the power of storytelling.
• Despite vinyl getting all the headlines, CDs are not dead yet and still outsell records. Over recent years I have started buying and enjoying CDs again, particularly recent box sets where the CD versions can be much cheaper than their vinyl equivalents, if the equivalents even exists.
• Microsoft Teams now lets users forward chat messages.
• I love a deep-dive analysis like the one covered in Tiago Forte’s annual review. It’s amazing to get such a detailed insight into a small business as well as understanding the challenges that a successful person goes through. The transparency is incredible.
• “Can you add AI to the hydraulics system?“
• Baldur Bjarnason’s link post was a source of rich pickings. He makes an interesting point that “Tech co stocks will get annihilated once the AI Bubble pops, so they’ll do everything humanly possible to keep it going. Be supremely sceptical about AI-boosting press, research or case studies.”
• An interesting experiment in creating a custom GPT based on the corpus of someone’s blog.
• BBC: eBay pays $3m fine in blogger harassment case. A small amount of money in the grand scheme of things, but the story is horrible.
• The ‘AI-powered’ news app Artifact is dead. I tried it out soon after it launched, but the habit of looking at it never stuck. Probably because there wasn’t enough utility in it.

Video

• I have had a major earworm of this song for the whole week after it turned up on a random playlist. I first heard it on a VOX magazine cover CD. Press play and you too can have an earworm of your own.

Websites

• An incredible resource of software that has free tiers for developers.

Next week: Trying to move forward on all fronts at work, an online Album Club, and heading to the cinema to see Queen rocking Montreal.

COVID-19 grabbed hold of me and took me down on Christmas Day. I spent most of the first half of the week lying on the sofa, as getting up led immediately to watery eyes and sneezing fits. It’s such a strange illness; highly contagious — every time I’ve had it, I’ve been one of many that tested positive after a social event — and yet I don’t think we’ve ever passed it onto each other at home. It wasn’t fun, but it could have been worse. I didn’t develop a fever, and by Wednesday evening I felt that I had turned a corner, with my tests being negative by the weekend.

In my infected haze I somehow managed to get the dishwasher and laundry tablets mixed up. I can report that washing clothes with dishwasher tablets does no discernible harm, apart from to your ego as you have your geriatric moment pointed out to you.

We managed to make the most of Christmas Day, getting around the table for a rare family game of Ticket to Ride before the lovely dinner that had been hastily bought the day before.

I don’t think I’ve watched so much television in years. I’ve recently rediscovered the joy of putting on an old classic film that doesn’t require a lot of thought. Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) — my favourite film of all time — is in that category, as is Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and White Men Can’t Jump (1992). You can put the film on, half-watch it, stop it at any time and come back to it whenever you feel like your brain needs to veg out. My mission of trying to get through the first 14 seasons of _Grange Hill_¹ is entering its third year and has slowed up; I’ve lost interest a bit as the key characters and storylines are now in the past.

We also watched some excellent TV series and films. AppleTV+ seemed to be on a roll with both Slow Horses and Severance. The last episode of Severance literally had me on the edge of my seat, exclaiming out loud at how good it was. We continue to love The Orville on Disney+ with season two taking things to much greater heights than I had expected. Disney+’s documentary of the Brawn F1 team’s incredible lone season in Formula One was also excellent. We caught How To Have Sex (2023) on MUBI, a superbly-acted portrayal of a hedonistic holiday in Greece which tackles issues of peer pressure and consent. On Saturday we even made it to the cinema to see Everything Is Illuminated (2005); it’s amazing how something so recent already feels so distant, with its story of an American visiting Ukraine for a road trip to trace his ancestors being something that is sadly impossible to conceive of as we enter 2024.

I turned 47 on Sunday. We spent the day with my wife’s parents, as my illness had meant that we couldn’t visit them at the start of the week. It was lovely to see them and to get a couple of things done to help them out. While we were there, the boys were fishing around on the television for something to watch and discovered the World Darts Championship. Like most sports, I don’t follow it but love to watch it when it’s on. The remaining matches have now been etched into the family calendar.

My family and friends bought me so many lovely gifts for Christmas and my birthday. I’ve got a backlog of vinyl records to listen to and new books to read. Some of the books have been put on the shelf next to others that were bought for me this time last year that are still unread. The speed at which the years now whizz by make me more aware of how the only real limiting factor is the time available to me to sit and listen to music or burrow into a book.

New Year’s Eve was a quiet night in, save for picking up my eldest son from a party. I’m looking forward to 2024. It’s going to be a very busy year at work with some critical deadline-driven projects to deliver as well as taking on some additional responsibilities. We are also likely to have an election here in the UK for the first time since 2019. I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to finally see the back of the dreadful government that we’ve had for the past 14 years and start to have a positive vision of the future again.

Next week: A few more days off before getting back to work.