Weeknote 18/2026
Well here we are. Laura's on sabbatical, John's looking for a job, and We Are (no longer) Open. It's been quite the week.
To be honest, it's been less outwardly emotional than I was expecting, but a couple of migraines as I headed into the weekend suggested that I've probably still got some inner work to do.
A workshop I attended on Friday run by Annalise Lewis entitled Myths We Live By: Metaphor as a Tool for Empowering Change came at just the right time. I knew I was in the a good space when one of the early slides featured a section of a John Martin engraving alongside the words “metaphors are the language of the subconscious.”
Annalise had us do an activity in which we closed our eyes (I know, I know) and she used Clean Language questions to help guide us through some metaphors. I have to work hard at these moments to suspend disbelief, and managed to do so successfully enough to come up with a really weird hybrid metaphor.
Understanding that this will be about as interesting to other people as telling someone about a dream from which you've just awoken, I will remind you that this is my blog and you are here voluntarily. So here we go...
First off, for some reason I pictured a Griffin, and then I thought “no, Doug, that's just lazy" – after which, for some reason, a scene from a David Attenborough documentary entered my mind really vividly. It was the one featuring marine iguanas:
And then I realised that they weren't iguanas that I was contemplating, but chameleons. At this point, I'm not even going to bother connecting the dots for you: if you can't see the relevance to my post-WAO professional life, then I give up.
Writing & Creating
Here, I published:
Doug Belshaw
Doug Belshaw
Doug Belshaw
I didn't publish anything over at Thought Shrapnel.
Reading, Listening, and Watching
I finished There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm, enjoying it slightly less the second time around. I'm currently weighing up what to read next.
As with last week, I didn't listen to any podcasts or watch anything other than football and a single episode of Taskmaster.
Working
It's a weird feeling to be working in the last week of an organisation you've decided to close. I've left organisations where I've been employed and I've shut down projects, but this was different. On the one hand there things to get done, on the other hand, it was all stuff we were choosing to do; we could have just not done it.
One of the potentially most difficult things to discuss when closing down a business is what happens to the money. I'm pleased to report that the consent-based process we used led to a satisfactory outcome. Along with logistics we'd already itemised, that's what Laura, John, and I focused on getting done on Monday during our last co-op day.
The rest of the week involved meeting with INASP about the technical report we'd sprinted towards for their Rising Scholars website project. They were delighted with our work, and it looks like I'll be doing a bit more with them via Dynamic Skillset.
It was a bit cheeky of me to ask Laura during the final week before her sabbatical to start work on the DCC project around Wallet Attached Storage. But, gracious as ever, she indulged me and created a couple of diagrams which will be extremely helpful.
Nate made more progress on Digital Badges Proof of Concept platform for Skills Development Scotland. However, we weren't quite where we needed to be to run the workshop this week, so I postponed it until next Friday. In the event, that turned out to be a good decision for a couple of reasons: (i) I wouldn't have been in the right frame of mind to run it on the last day of WAO, and (ii) it's meant that more people can come along next Friday than could have done this week.
Other than that, helping get the WAO archive page in order, and continuing iterating the 10 new systems thinking tools I'm building, I worked on a proposal related to Digital Public Goods sustainability with Alina Mierlus after Dees posted it to the MozAlums mailing list.
Personal
I've been feeling a lot better physically recently, despite not running as much or intensely meaning that I've put on a bit of weight. So, in addition to doing weights at the gym this week, I attempted a 5k at a normal-ish pace. Ruh-roh. Error. My smartwatch told me I needed 53 hours of recovery time afterwards and I was absolutely exhausted yesterday, and pretty tired today. It turns out that recovering from Stage 3 OTS takes quite a while...
We travelled the 1h 15m each way to Middlesbrough twice this week to watch games that my daughter, Grace, wasn't actually involved in. She's recovering from shin splints, and the physio advised her not to play. Her grassroots team, playing a year up against Academy opposition, had others out through injury – including their (excellent) goalkeeper – so ended up losing 5-0 and then 6-0.
My son, Ben, is considering changing courses from Sport to Geography at Northumbria University, and so went on a field trip with the Geography department this week. He's got exams the week after next, and then he's done for the year. It's been a weird one, due to getting on a course through clearing he hasn't particularly enjoyed and being ill a couple of times. Still, it's better to figure these things out and make decisions earlier in life.
Next week
It's Bank Holiday weekend, so I'm off on Monday. I don't particularly want to think about next week yet, to be perfectly honest, but it will involve working on the projects I mentioned earlier. I'm also still exploring options for running more powerful LLMs locally, after my order for a Mac Studio M2 Ultra at a bargain price ended up being cancelled due to “overwhelming interest.”