Now

This is a /now page. In a nutshell, “a /now page shares what you’d tell a friend you hadn’t seen in a year.” For more about who I am, see my About page. For week-by-week information, you can check out my weeknotes.

Last updated: 12 February 2026, on a train between Berkhamsted and London

Family

Our eldest son is in the middle of his second semester at college in Texas, USA. He’s there on a running scholarship. It was great to have him back with us for Christmas, and he made the most out of the three weeks he had here. Spring Break is much shorter than the Easter holiday in the UK, so he’s probably not going to be back until the summer. Our youngest is in the middle of the second term of his A-Levels. It’s been strange to have just three of us in the house; things are much quieter. But we are getting used to it.

My wife recently had a vitrectomy to fix a detached retina in her eye, a couple of years after the same thing happened in the other one. There is a checkup or two to go, but she’s doing great.

We’re still living in Berkhamsted, UK, and have been in our house for over 20 years now.

Work

Currently I’m the Head of Technology Enablement for one of Africa’s largest financial services groups, a position I’ve held since April 2020. It’s effectively a Deputy CIO role. Our team are responsible for all technology and real estate/facilities for our investment banking offices outside the continent — London, Beijing, New York and Dubai — as well as a new office we are currently setting up in Cairo. It’s extremely varied, which comes from the relatively small sizes of our offices and our team. In the same day I can go from reporting to the board on artificial intelligence to dealing with the impact of a faulty tap, and everything in between.

Work-adjacent

I’m an active member of the Signal group that Matt Ballantine and Chris Weston set up to accompany their WB-40 podcast. At first I enjoyed the tech-related conversations there, but as the years have gone on we’ve been through so many things together — personal life events and the collective experience of the pandemic — and now I’ve made some very real, trusted friends.

I’ve recently signed up to the Society of Hopeful Technologists and have been involved in the Signal group as well as playing a very minor role in facilitating the online meetups. The group is the brainchild of Rachel Coldicutt and I first heard about it when she spoke at this year’s Interesting Conference. I’m hopeful that being part of the group will make me hopeful, plotting a path forward to make me optimistic about where technology is taking us.

Fitness

I try and do something every day that I am at home and don’t have an early morning meeting. Usually that means getting on the indoor bike trainer for an hour. On Saturday mornings I go out with Berkhamsted Cycling Club, riding with the 16-17mph speed group, unless there’s a risk of ice or it’s chucking it down with rain. I’m trying to keep my running going by doing a run on a Sunday, so that I don’t suffer with DOMS whenever I’m away from home and running is all that’s on offer. That’s also weather dependent. Strava tells me I have a 330 week activity streak.

I’ve signed up to ride London-Wales-London again in May 2026 and am considering what other long rides I might sign up to between now and then. In January I managed a 200km Audax ride through Berkshire, which felt more epic than I thought it would.

Media

I spend most of my listening hours with podcasts, and am struggling with wanting to spend more time with music — which is a passion — versus keeping up with politics and technology. I’m in two album clubs, the original in-person one that we started in 2011 and another with friends from the WB-40 Signal group that has been going for a couple of years. I love these monthly meetups as they force me to put everything else aside and listen to music.

I’m currently reading Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. My wife bought it for me for Christmas, probably as an antidote to the daily torrent of awful news that looms so large in our lives at the moment.

We’re watching season three of Shrinking on AppleTV. The characters are great, but it’s missing a little magic from the earlier seasons.