A really big week. We spent the first three days on a management team offsite. It was bittersweet, as it was the last one we will have with someone in our team who is retiring later this year. We hadn’t been all together in the same place for about two and a half years, and it was excellent to reconnect with each other as a group. We spent the first day at The Old Vic theatre, with excellent professional coaches and corporate trainers, who helped us to reflect on what has made us great in the past, what may be holding us back and where we go from here. That evening we went to see the production of Glengarry Glen Ross, reimagined with an all-female cast and staged in the round. It made me want to watch the film again.
The next two days were spent at Wallacespace in Holborn, where our hosts at the venue made sure that we didn’t need to worry about anything — they even popped out to buy rooibos tea and throat lozenges for two members of our team. We were joined at points by our regional CEO and other executives from our firm, which helped us to align our thinking with the strategic priorities of the organisation. By the end of the three days, it felt as though we had come together as a team and were all pointing in the same direction, or thereabouts. I couldn’t be happier with the outcome and where we got to.
On Tuesday evening we went out to socialise with a couple of people from the broader Technology team who were in town from South Africa. Going to something like Flight Club is so much better than just heading to the pub for drinks.
On Thursday and Friday I was back in the office, cramming a week’s worth of work into two days, just before I go on leave. It was great to purposefully go into London five days in a row to be with the team. The whole week left me worn out by Friday evening, falling asleep a few minutes after putting the TV on.
Aside from our management team offsite, this was a week in which I:
- Attended a half-year review meeting with our regional executives.
- Enjoyed a team lunch in one of our large client meeting rooms on the occasion of having two members of our management team over from South Africa for the week. It was great to be able to do something with the wider team.
- Had mid-year performance review meetings with my direct reports.
- Felt glad that the World Cup is finally over. I’ve loved watching the matches, but I’m happy to get my evenings back again. It was sad to see England go out, but I don’t think I’ve been particularly emotionally invested in their success for a long time.
- Noticed, three-quarters of the way home on the train, that the guy sitting next to me was wearing the creepy Ray-Ban Meta spy glasses. I’d been tapping away on my iPad for the whole journey, and now wondered if the cameras had been recording what I’d been writing. I angled myself in such a way as to make it more difficult for the cameras to record my screen, and sat there wondering how to say something like “those are really not cool”, but couldn’t find the words and ended up saying nothing. I know that in 2026 you need to assume that you — or at least any sounds you are making — are always being recorded by something, but these are particularly offensive to me.
- Enjoyed our weekly cycling club ride on Saturday morning, the last one that my eldest son will do with us before he heads back to university.
Media
Articles
- It was interesting to read the different perspectives on the fact that nine out of ten bestselling novels in the UK include a woman being murdered as part of the plot:
But why does commercial fiction keep returning to the same story? Critics argue that repeatedly turning women into victims risks normalising violence against them. Yet the genre’s paradox is that women are also its biggest consumers, with some arguing its appeal may be a way of processing real-world fears.
- It was sad to read about the passing of David Potter, founder of Psion. Somehow, as a teenager, I came into possession of a Psion Organiser II. It had no manual and I didn’t have access to the Internet, so I am not sure how I learnt to program in Organiser Programming Language. I must have borrowed a book from the library, as I remember typing in the code for some simple games to play on the two-line LCD. I loved it and carried it everywhere. Later, around the time I finished university, I invested in a Psion Series 5mx, which included an email program and a web browser, both of which I used by pointing the infra-red port on the device at the one on my Nokia phone. I was still using it to email my girlfriend (now wife) when I moved to New York in 2001. So much thought had gone into the little computer, and it felt so well-made. In my mind, it represents a high point among the digital devices that I’ve owned, before the iPhone came along and we started to take for granted that one device could replace everything else. I massively regretted my ‘upgrade’ to a Pocket PC a few years later, which was a worse device in every meaningful way. I’ve lined up some articles and videos to learn more about Potter and his journey with the company.
Video
- Finished series two of The Four Seasons, which — inevitably — wasn’t as good as the first. We enjoyed it, but it didn’t feel as sharp.
- Watched Mackenzie Crook and Martin Freeman Remember… The Office. I have such fond memories of wandering into our own office at the time the series was first broadcast, laughing with my colleagues about what we’d seen in the latest episode that was broadcast the night before. Twenty-five years go by so fast. This programme is a gentle and seemingly honest look back at Crook and Freeman’s time on set.
Books
- Managed to read a little more of The First 90 Days by Michael D. Watkins, and Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier’s biography of Steve Marriott. The quote below makes it clear that the early 1960s were different times. But having read one of John Osborne’s plays, I think the newspapers could have sent someone round to publicly remonstrate with him about how bad it was.
Next week: A short cycle tour with my boys.
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