Last weekend’s start of a cold turned into a full-blown one on Monday. I went into the office as usual but felt as though I was wandering around with a hangover. Everyone was telling me to go home, but it never felt quite bad enough. That night and the next day were the worst, getting through tissues like a chain smoker gets through cigarettes as my eyes watered and drooped. I even got woken up in the middle of the night by a runny nose, something that I can’t recall ever happening before. On Wednesday I felt that I had turned the corner and was well enough to go in again, although my first hot drink of the day was a concoction of hot lemon and paracetamol. The cold never got too bad and I’m now largely over it, but it is still lingering.
This was a week in which I:
- Created the technology and real estate/facilities ‘bill of materials’ for our new office in North Africa. We are still deciding on the exact location, but we’re ready to go when we do. I reviewed the list with our CTO and Head of Infrastructure and Operations, adding more detail and getting aligned on the technology that we plan to implement.
- Finished the small project of replacing two separate taps with a mixer and making good on the paintwork in our multifaith room.
- Had the weekly meeting with our audio-visual design vendor, discussing our project to install technology in our shared meeting room spaces. There are a few minor issues, but things are on track and the space is starting to look great.
- Attended the monthly steering committee meeting for our sister company’s office refurbishment, which includes the shared spaces in our office.
- Met with our catering vendor to discuss options for providing staff with free snacks from next year once our shared café re-opens.
- Had a couple of meetings with the project team for our document management initiative for a walkthrough of the plan.
- Wrote up the majority of the appraisals for my team. It’ll be good to close out the annual reviews before the year ends.
- Met up with the Disability subgroup from our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team to discuss what should go into our strategic plan for the next few years. I joined the broader group the next day for a workshop, which was good but made slightly more difficult by me being the only remote participant. 9am in Johannesburg is 7am in London, and on a day that I need to be physically in the office it is difficult to take part right at the start of a session at that time. The discussions were great and I’m looking forward to working with the team again next year.
- Held my final staff meeting with my team for this year. We took some time to reflect on what we’d done and what we hope 2026 can be.
- Caught up with our colleague in our technology team who is based in our Beijing office.
- Spent some time at the weekend writing up the ‘wins’ from the past few weeks. I had lots of notes sitting in Outlook but hadn’t managed to find the time to tidy them up and post them to our long Teams thread.
- Took Friday off to get my wife to the hospital — more on that later — and to pick our eldest son up from the airport to welcome him home. I hadn’t seen him in person since mid-August when he left to go to college in Texas. We got to the airport early and spent ages looking out for him at the two entrance doors to the arrivals hall. He was hungry after his flight from Houston so we went for a late lunch at Nando’s on the way home. Within hours, it felt as though he had never been away.
- Added him as a temporary driver to our car insurance. £190 for three weeks feels simultaneously like very little, but also a lot. It’ll be handy for him to be able to drive himself places over the next few weeks.
- Went to our work Christmas party at Eight members club near Moorgate. Bizarrely, we had a Wild West theme, so colleagues were all dressed up in cowboy boots and hats, with the occasional inflatable horse. I went with the intention of cleaning up this town.
- Met up with a bunch of old school friends that I hadn’t seen in years. We went to the intriguingly named Roux at Skindles as a couple of our friends knew the singer who was performing that night. It was a strange place, located in a cul-de-sac at the end of a residential street, with lots of old people dressed up for a posh Friday night out. We had a great laugh; at one point we got onto the small dance floor. It was lovely to catch up.
- Caught up with old colleagues and friends at the pub, including some faces that I hadn’t seen in a very long time. Meeting up with them always feels like a glimpse into my future. Many of them were in the first team I worked in when I started back in 1999. Back then, I was a spritely, single graduate in my early 20s whereas many of them were married and had young children. Now a few of them have retired, and in a couple of cases they are grandparents. It all goes so quickly.
- Spent a lovely Saturday afternoon with friends, having a long lunch and playing party games involving balls of wool and various hats.
- Found a massive damp and mould patch in our makeshift cupboard in the eaves of our loft conversion. My wife has been saying for a couple of weeks that the cupboard smelt a bit damp, but we couldn’t see any signs. I was taken aback by how bad it looks, as it seems to have appeared very quickly. We’ve also noticed another patch close by in the hallway. I can’t see any obvious missing tiles, but I’ve got in contact with some roofers to investigate.
- Took my wife for what we thought was a final check-up of her second detached retina. Unfortunately — or fortunately? — they spotted that there was a small part of her retina that still needed some work. The thought that she would have to go in for another operation on her eye was absolutely gutting. We find out next week what they plan to do.
- Had a disappointing coffee and sad croissant at The Grocer at 15 in Amersham. We went there to kill some time between the hospital and the airport, but it didn’t feel like a treat.
- Enjoyed this year’s Berkhamsted Cycling Club Mince Pie Ride. Last year’s Christmas pudding outfit made it a bit difficult to manoeuvre on the bike and also acted as a parachute, so I figured it was time for a new outfit. A Christmas tree dress made sense as it meant I would be able to sit down on the bike unencumbered. It worked well. The start of the ride felt brutally cold, with my fingers screaming at me as we went up our first hill. But it was a beautiful, clear day. The sun was a menace as it reflected off the road. We passed through a village that had a timidly-placed ‘Road Closed’ sign, ignoring it as we continued on our planned route. As we turned the next corner, the riders in front of me braked sharply. It was hard to see due to the sun glare, and I could just make out the fact that the road was super muddy. The reason for their deceleration, and the reason that the road was closed, was that someone had fly tipped AN ENTIRE HOUSE in the road, stuffed with lagging, plaster and other rubbish. It was absolutely shocking.
Media
Podcasts
- Great episode of The Guardian’s Politics Weekly UK podcast where John Harris speaks to Yinka Bankole about how Nigel Farage treated him while at Dulwich College. Bankole was nine and Farage was much older. I’m not sure whether the allegations will stick or will make any dent in his popularity, but they should. Keir Starmer and the current government are deeply unpopular, but I do think that broadly they are good people. The Reform Party is filled with the worst of us.
- Pocket Casts has shown me that my podcast addiction has only got worse this year:
Articles
- Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image. You can’t trust any photo you see anymore.
- Java applets will no longer be a thing from March 2026. The applet I built for my undergraduate final year project hasn’t worked in a modern web browser for a very long time.
- I’ve been exploring what it means to ‘have a theory of change’ and came across Aaron Swartz’s very useful blog post which explains it well.
- John Gruber shows that the report about Marco Rubio getting the US State Department to revert to using the Times New Roman font over Calibri, effectively suggesting that he thought the latter typeface was too ‘woke’, wasn’t quite right.
Video
- Finished season one of Platonic. It was a lovely show, with a lot of laughs.
- Watched A House of Dynamite (2025) with the rest of my family. It started well, but soon became taxing. Idris Elba was completely unconvincing as the President, dealing with the biggest crisis he may ever face in his lifetime, and yet talking about something he heard on a podcast.
- Started to watch Wake Up Dead Man (2025), the latest Knives Out movie, but gave up after 10 minutes. The boys were looking at my wife and me and asking “What the heck are we watching?”
Audio
- I have a new album obsession. And that album is Entertainment! by Gang of Four.
Books
- Nearly, but not quite, done with Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy.
Next week: Another reunion, more hospital visits, and my last week of work for the year.
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