On Friday night I was lying on my couch, idly browsing messages on various WhatsApp and Signal groups, when I spotted a photo posted by a neighbour. She’d taken it a few steps away from our house. It was amazingly beautiful. All of us went outside to see for ourselves and were joined by neighbours from up and down the street who had the same idea. To the naked eye we could see streaks and patches of purple sky, but the beautiful shapes and colours were revealed as soon as we raised our cameras to take photos. It was a night to look up in wonder, and to talk to neighbours that we rarely see as we shared the experience. Years ago I remember walking to the pub with my dad and both of us stopping to watch comet Hale–Bopp as it hurtled through the night sky, something we knew we might not see again. Friday night felt the same way.
Last week’s Bank Holiday bike ride took it out of me; I was feeling the effects throughout the first couple of days at work. I’ve ridden much longer distances before but nothing of this size for a while, so maybe I’m just out of practice.
Most of my week was spent at home, with only one venture into the office. I needed to be around to let various tradies into the house and we also had a midweek train strike. Our kitchen renovations are now almost finished; the flooring and skirting boards are down, the plumbing is complete and the worktops are on. We’re just waiting to get our hob installed, the decorating to complete and a couple of small adjustments to various things before we can return to normal. We’re so pleased with the work that everyone has done and can’t wait to start having people over to visit again.
This was a week in which I:
- Had the weekly programme and project meetings.
- Pulled together the latest Steering Committee pack for our programme and chaired the meeting. I used the first part of the meeting to have our audio-visual designer present the ideas for what we will do in a couple of rooms that we share with another organisation.
- Attended the first construction meeting for a new office, hosted by the general contractor. It was based on-site with an audio-only Teams conference for everyone else to dial into, which instantly took me back 15 years to how we used to get together remotely. We have to get a proper conference speaker on-site for the meetings in future.
- Reviewed and agreed the list of items and their costs that we will spend on beyond the standard fit-out for the office.
- Met to review the responses to our RFP for fitting out our new office from a technology, security and audio-visual perspective, and appointed a vendor.
- Reviewed our real estate and facilities costs for one of our offices as preparation for our planned work over the next couple of years. We ‘filled in the blanks’ with super rough estimates for everything we don’t have a proper estimate or quote for yet. Some number is always better than no number at all.
- Met with our internal insurance specialist to discuss our cover for a space that we share with a sister company.
- Discussed the risk of a popular tool that comes with its own cloud storage and whether we should be removing it as an option. It’s not a trivial decision as the storage offers better functionality than our other cloud applications for certain tasks and we know that people are using it in their workflow.
- Had a discussion on how our twice-weekly change approval process could be improved and offered some suggestions to help us make changes faster, with less risk and with more of an audit trail.
- Assisted a colleague as they got to grips with Office Timeline Pro+. The software is such a time-saver and works beautifully. Sometimes you just need someone to spend 10 minutes with you to show you how to get the best out of a tool.
- Met with a sister company to discuss the process we went through to move from hard phones on desks to soft phones. We spent a painful time with Cisco Jabber before moving across to Teams when it was ready for prime time.
- Was fascinated by a colleague’s presentation at our weekly Learning Hour as they talked about their recent visit to Beijing.
- Had a delightful Random Coffee with a colleague in China that I’d never properly met with before. It turns out that she was born on the exact same day as my two brothers.
- Replaced the doors on our fridge freezer, ridding ourselves of random dents that have accumulated over the past few years. Swapping them over wasn’t trivial but we managed to do it in a couple of hours.
- Enjoyed the latest WB-40 podcast Album Club where our host chose Hard-Fi’s Stars of CCTV for us to listen to. I’d never heard it before; the first few songs didn’t grab me, but somewhere halfway through side A I started getting into it.
- Had the spoke repaired on my bike’s back wheel ahead of the weekly club ride. £1.25 in parts and £20 in labour.
- With both children out of the house, my wife and I decided to wander down into town for a casual dinner. I guess we’ll be doing more of this again now that the boys are older.
- Got myself ready for a business trip, the first one in over a year.
Media
Podcasts
Articles
- The Guardian’s article off the back of their survey of “every contactable lead author or review editor of IPCC reports since 2018” left me aghast. Most of the respondents think that the current climate targets are already unachievable. I don’t see how we can avoid catastrophe. When the world stopped for the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 it caused a minuscule temporary drop in carbon dioxide emissions. Imagine what would be required to bring these emissions down significantly.
Video
- Started watching The Dry on recommendation from Andrew Harrison on the Oh God, What Now? podcast
- Caught The Art of Tommy Cooper before it left iPlayer. A fascinating character. It’s weird to watch a TV programme from 2007 — which feels like it should be recent — and realising that all of the talking heads have themselves now passed away.
- Victoria Derbyshire’s interview with Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus was captivating.
- Started season two of How To with John Wilson. I can’t imagine the effort it takes to put this show together, matching a narrative with just the right visuals from his archive.
Audio
- I’m still exploring Tears for Fears and somewhat obsessing over Songs from the Big Chair. This live version of The Working Hour from 2014 is so good.
Next week: Travel.
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