Weeknote 23/2025

8 June 2025 • 5 min read • Weeknotes / weeknote / work

After being slightly unenthusiastic about my wife creating space in our garden for a double egg chair ("you'll only be able to sit in it three days a year!"), I find myself using it more and more. I don't think she reads these anyway, but don't tell her that she is often correct about many things. It turns out that being surrounded by garden noises while very gently swaying and sitting/lying down is quite conducive to typing thoughts into a laptop.

I just wish the weather was a bit less changeable.

My daughter, Grace, who has just come back from a school football trip to Valencia, has unsurprisingly been moaning about the weather in the North East of England. It does feel much cooler than usual: 12°C is not normal for time of the year. I guess climate change doesn't always make everywhere hotter, just the weather more unpredictable

I notice that my son, Ben, hasn't been complaining about the current heat, or lack thereof. This is presumably because he's either been revising for his last 'A' Level exams (Physics) or gaming. Both are very much indoor activities, so he's not missing much.

This morning I went for a solo walk on the beach, up near Coquet Island, while listening to a couple of Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic podcasts. I find that I have to be in the right kind of mood to read or listen to Holiday's work, but it turns out that I was in such a mood this morning, and so the following episodes resonated: 'One Day Can Be a Whole Life' and 'Why Are You Surprised? | 12 Stoic Strategies on How To Stop Caring What People Think'.

It's been a week and a half since had my first therapy session in five years. I've only had one, so let's not call it a comeback just quite yet. Since then, though, I've been turning over in my mind comments my therapist made in response to things I shared with him. One of the comments that prompted the walk this morning was his teasing apart the difference between 'selfish' and 'self-full' activities.

There are "selfish" activities, he said, which you do without thinking about other people. The opposite of that would be "selfless" activities in which you think of others without thinking about yourself. His point was that there are also "self-full" activities that allow you to meet your own needs while not preventing others from meeting their own.

There's a great café just down the coast from where I was walking which serves the greatest Key Lime Pie I've ever tasted. While there was none left by the time I arrived, there was a generous slice of Guinness Cake which seemed to have my name on it, along with a pot of Earl Grey tea. The latter, as tea connoisseurs will be aware, can be classed as a "local" tea given that I live in Northumberland.

Note: this blog post is being written to the sound of a new EP by Faithless which starts with a voice saying "be as completely you as you can be" which, in the age of AI, seems like a radical statement.

Before getting onto work-related updates, of which there are quite a few, to round out the family mentions, I will note that I went out for dinner with my wife, Hannah, to Mowgli, an Indian street food restaurant in Newcastle on Thursday evening. I enjoyed it, but they'd run out of non-alcoholic beers which put a slight dampener on things. I'm tired enough at the moment as it is, and drinking alcohol just makes me knackered.

I suspect she's noticed that I'm not quite myself at the moment, as instead of our usual cinnamon bun Fridays, she bought me a pretty exquisite matcha and raspberry tart from a newly-opened bakery in Morpeth. You've got to know your love languages.

Let's talk about work, then. It's nice to have plenty on, but I do need to remember to schedule things that take preparation, planning, and effort on separate weeks. I ran two roundtable sessions on consecutive days, one for the BBC AI Literacy project featuring expert feedback on the work we've done so far, and the other was one with friends and colleagues on AI and the Future of Education. The recording can be found at that link.

Other than that, Laura and I met with the steering committee for the Digital Credential Consortium Summit in Delft, The Netherlands. We've been brought in to help facilitate the two days, and — as you would expect — we've been trying to make it as participatory as possible. We're currently navigating the tension between this and the standard "academic" conference which attendees may be expecting.

I also did a bit of work on the community platform project for Amnesty International UK. John is running most of the user research interviews and focus groups, while I'm analysing them by both running them through LLMs (anonymously) and going through them manually. I'm also creating diagrams to demonstrate potential user and data flows.

It's nice to have varied work on at the moment, and long may that last. I'm thankful that a large percentage of what I'm good at, professionally-speaking, involves sitting or standing in front of a computer screen. And, while I don't think I'd be able to go back to teaching full-time every day, I can use my facilitation and teaching skills for one-off, in-person activities at conferences and events. We've all got limits and boundaries, I just need to learn to accept my new ones.

I spent an inordinate amount of time this week continuing to research and compare prices for our next car. The business lease for our Polestar 2, which we love, ends in September, so timing is everything as we don't want to be without one at a time when Ben is potentially heading off to university. We had a test drive of the new Polestar 4 yesterday, which is very much at the upper end of our budget, but Hannah really doesn't like the 'screen' instead of a rearview mirror.

I published following five posts over at Thought Shrapnel, which were:

There's only one other thing I wanted to mention this week: an episode entitled 'Metaphor as Myth and Religion' from the Pathways with Joseph Campbell podcast. Campbell worked on comparative mythology and religion, and I've read his work since I was a teenager. This particular talk, topped-and-tailed by Brad Olson from the Joseph Campbell Foundation, is from a 1985 address to the Jung Society. I'm not saying it's for everyone, but I found it full of really interesting insights — especially when he talks about people mistaking the connotative aspect for the denotative. More on this over at my ambiguiti.es blog.

Next week, I've promised Rhia that I'll get the first draft of the BBC AI Literacy report to her by Friday. That shouldn't be too difficult, but will require some focused 'deep work' time. Laura's off on Monday, so I might just blast through a good chunk of it so that she and John can review what I've done on Tuesday.

I've got the other two projects to continue working on, a couple of proposals to start writing, and some trials to take my daughter to, if her ankle is better. Next Sunday is also Father's Day, so I should probably think about that a bit as well.

Image: tiny crab carapace on the beach taken by me, this morning