Weeknote 07/2026

15 February 2026 • 10 min read • weeknote

Photo of snowdrops amongst brown leaves — Photo of snowdrops taken by me while on a walk with my wife, Hannah, this week.

You do it to yourself, you do
And that's what really hurts
Is that you do it to yourself, just you
You and no one else

— Radiohead, 'Just'

I am starting to write this on my laptop before we leave the house, headed for Edinburgh Airport, with our destination being Barcelona. We're splitting our time during this half-term week between there and Madrid.

It's our first holiday without our son, Ben, who is still at uni this week. Next week, he's got a reading week, so he's heading to Iceland by himself, using some of the money my parents gave him on his 18th birthday. They added on a monthly basis to the Child Trust Fund introduced by the Labour government – but then scrapped by the Tories before my daughter, Grace, was born.

I'm really pleased Ben's heading back to Iceland, which was our last family holiday before the pandemic. We went for a few days over my birthday just before Christmas 2019 and had a great time. Well, other than when jumping around in snowdrifts near a crater lake volcano with the kids led to me losing the keys to the hire car. That was an expensive mistake you only make once... 🤦‍♂️

Writing

Here, I published the following:

Meanwhile, over at Thought Shrapnel...

Reading & Listening

Last night, I finished Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth, which started off weirdly but ended quite profoundly. I'll choose another book to read on holiday, but first I might just ensure I finish re-reading Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

I really enjoyed re-listening to the episode of Hardcore History where Dan Carlin explains what happened when John of Leiden and other Anabaptists took over the German city of Münster. An amazing story.

It's also a pretty stark warning about what can happen when fanatics take over and have unchecked power.

Working

We had a WAO co-op day on Monday where important decisions were made and actions undertaken. Laura and I had meetings with INASP and with Amnesty, and did some worth on the latter's community platform project.

Nate and I found out midweek that we were successful with our bid for the next part of the digital badges project for Skills Development Scotland. I'll be getting started on that soon after returning from holiday.

After meeting earlier in the week than initially planned, Tom and I decided not to go for an Ada Lovelace Institute tender, even though we would have been about 80% a good fit for it. The turnaround would have been too tight.

Instead, we got far enough with our noodling around digital sovereignty to soft-launch TechFreedom. This will be both a diagnostic tool and a cohort-based course for organisations looking to move away from US Big Tech companies.

The bottom of that site links to our respective consultancy online presences. Tom's been working on his for The Good Ship and it looks great. While I was proud of mine being super-fast loading, Tom's is no slouch either. So I've taken a leaf from his book, snd (hopefully) made it easier to understand what I do and can offer.

Other than that, putting together the How to Be Less Wrong in a Polycrisis ebook took some time. I'm really pleased with how it turned out and his it's been received.

Personal

The quotation at the top of this post was chosen to hint at this section and what I'm about to explain. As mentioned in my last weeknote, after just over a year I've received a diagnosis: Overtraining Syndrome.

As a couple of people have commented, it sounds like a massive flex to point to something which says:

The incidence of overtraining syndrome in elite runners approaches 60% and even in non-elite competitive runners, nearly one third will experience OTS at some point during their running lifetime. Outside of running, the incidence across all sports for high-level athletes is approximately 30-40%.

Reader, let me assure you I am, nor have I ever been close to being, an 'elite runner' 😂

Instead, as my consultant advised me, a combination of overtraining, stress, and viral infection has affected my parasympathetic nervous system. The following is a direct quotation from the consultant's letter:

I explained that I think it is likely that you have a degree of over training syndrome which is a complex beast but probably triggered the events. It is often a combination of stress, too much exercise, too little recovery, possibly with a degree of illness thrown in on top. We use the analogy of the fact that you can end up falling into a pit where you are struggling to do what you could do before. However actually getting back out of that pit and getting back to normal requires quite a gradual process of recovery. People who are quite goal orientated struggle to do this slowly. We talked a bit about how one might try and gradually increase what you are doing whilst not risking over doing it again and going down the same path. We talked about aligning your goals for exercise and what is it that is actually driving you to do it. I explained that the actual cardiovascular benefits are from a relatively modest amount of exercise - 150 minutes of light or 120 minutes of moderate exercise a week. Doing anymore than that does not reduce your risk of having heart attacks or dying. Any other exercise should be for your pleasure, mental wellbeing, allowing you to eat more etc. It is worth thinking about whether setting yourself goals and targets can be a bit destructive in terms of making you work harder than you should be when your body is not up to it.

Although it took me a few days after the consultation to do so, I have now taken off my Garmin smartwatch and put it in a drawer:

In terms of getting back to normal (whatever you decide that should be), I would suggest you start by doing really small amounts of exercise once or twice a week. Short periods of time with low intensity. Over time each week I am happy for you to slightly increase either the duration, frequency or intensity of exercise but never more than one parameter each week. You should aim to operate within your comfort zone of exercise. I also think (I am sorry, but I agree with your wife on this one) that sometimes the heart rate monitors can be unhelpful in terms of actually alerting you to changes in heart rate and making him more introspective on this which can sometimes actually drive the complex interaction between the brain and the body. Give it a try not wearing this.

Finally, I'm going to have to be kind to kind to myself and just do nothing apary from walking for a while:

I am confident we can get you back to doing whatever it is you want to do in life exercise wise. However you absolutely need to be patient and put the brakes on with this, otherwise there is a risk that over doing it will set you back significantly.

Other than that, not much to report other than I am now typing this on my phone as we travel on the bus from the airport car park to the terminal building.

Oh, one more thing: my daughter's Boro Rangers team played FC Fylde yesterday, over near Preston. Fylde are top of the Junior Premier League and, given that Boro lost to the bottom of the league team last week, I think Fylde were expecting an easy game.

With two new dual-signed players, the Boro girls – all of whom are playing a year up – did extremely well. It was 0-0 at half-time. In the second half, Boro went 2-0 up before conceding two late goals to draw the game 2-2. Some of the Fylde girls were crying afterwards.

Next week

I'm delighted to say that we're leaving behind the pissing rain and heading to much warmer and sunnier weather in Spain. We're in Barcelona for a couple of nights, before getting the train to Madrid. We then return to Barcelona before our flight home.

I'm now through fast track security. No drama. You should not expect any published writing from me this week; I'm under strict instructions to be fully present 😅