Weeknote 29/2025
A couple of weeks ago, I printed out the first part of The Enchiridion by Epictetus and stuck it on the wall of my home office. Ideally, I’d have it lovingly hand-painted in a style reminiscent of Michel de Montaigne‘s famous library but, until then, a simple piece of A4 paper will have to do. It reminds me that:
Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.
You could boil a lot of Epictetus’ teachings down to just the nine words of that first sentence, to be honest. Blaise Pascal was onto something similar when he said:
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
The trouble is that my working life is sitting relatively-quietly in a room alone, so outside of that time I’d like to be doing something else, thank you very much.
It remains true, however, that we cannot control the actions of others. Parents might fool themselves that they can force their kids to do this or that, but how does that work out in the long-term? We might think that we have an outsize influence on friends or colleagues, but do we really? Or is it the case that most people are doing pretty much whatever they like, and it is merely our post-hoc rationalisation of their behaviour that gives us a starring role?
Spending too long thinking thinking of your own actions and behaviour does tend one a little towards a kind of epistemological solipsism. While this might be a philosophically-curious position to take, it’s not particularly useful if you want to get anything done that involves other people. I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a tension between looking after your own mental health and expectations of oneself, and trying to impact the world.
For the past couple of years, I’ve taken three lots of three week holidays in April, August, and December for a total of nine weeks. It’s been glorious, and felt like a privilege.
This year has been different, for a couple of reasons. First, I had nowhere near enough work on from January to March, which made it impossible to take a chunk of time off when work did start coming in. Furstratingly, I was still sitting in front of my computer as usual during the time I wasn’t working very much, so I still had a need for a break.
Second, of course, my (still undiagnosed!) health issues mean that I’m not sure exactly what to do with my time off. I like being active, whether that’s walking a long way by myself, cycling with my family, or doing things in the garden. All of these are a bit of a challenge at the moment.
I’ve now got work to do, but July is always a bit quieter. So instead of taking that third week off, I worked reduced hours last week and plan to do the same next week.Then I’ll take two weeks off, one of which we’ll be spending in Devon instead of Madeira — as I explained last week. I wish it were different, but there we are.
So what have I actually been doing this week? Well, work-wise I’ve been…
- Co-working with Laura on the DCC Summit report which I worked on while she was away. We’ve sent off a draft and waiting for feedback.
- Continuing to work on the Amnesty UK community platform project with Laura and John. Although there’s a lot more to the project than simply choosing a platform, we’ll be advising them on that soon, and moving into phase two of the project soon.
- Meeting with Skills Development Scotland and the Awards Network about a couple of workshops with relevant bodies in Scotland. The idea is to convene them to work through how digital badges / Verifiable Credentials could work at scale in a Scottish context.
- Convening a meeting of the unnamed group of awesome peers who came together for the AI and the Future of Education session we ran in early June. We had a useful discussion and will be meeting again in late summer.
- Launching WAO’s new Ghost-powered blog which we’ve migrated to after nine years on Medium. I’m really pleased with the three-column, responsive layout provided by the Thesis theme.
- Collaborating on various things as part of our July co-op day.
- Working with Aaron on a proposal for something in a completely different sector that I’m used to. It’s a strategy thing, so would be good to apply some theory of change and systems thinking stuff to it.
Aaron and I had arranged to meet up to go for a walk on Saturday, but I can’t walk up hills and mountains at the moment, and it was predicted to rain heavily. So I drove over to his house, which is just over an hour’s (very enjoyable) drive from mine, and I hung out with his family for a bit before we walked along a river. We topped it off with lunch together in a place that combined a bookshop, deli, and café. Very civilised. I enjoyed it a lot.
In previous weeks I’ve hinted at the issues that my daughter’s extremely successful football team have had. This week, the team folded due to not having enough players and not seemingly being able to recruit enough for next season. Bearing in mind that they won the treble (i.e. the league and both cups) playing a year up, and got to the quarter-final of a national invite-only tournament for champions of each area of England, this blows my mind. It’s a tragedy, it really is.
I thought about creating some kind of system diagram, but from my perspective — trying to remove all emotion and explaining things as simply as possible — it went something like this:
- Newcastle United announce trials and the intention to set up a ‘Tier 1’ Academy for girls.
- Some girls from the best “grassroots” teams in the North East get into the Newcastle Academy, as well as some girls they ‘recruit’ from Sunderland Academy (currently ‘Tier 2’)
- During discussions about which league my daughter’s team should enter next year, the idea of applying to the Junior Premier League (JPL) is floated as an idea.
- The main coach expresses concern that “some girls” are not ready for this elite league as it involves playing against Academy teams and a lot of travel.
- Another coach, who is a parent of a player who did not get into an Academy, moves to set up a JPL team anyway. This involves an “illegal trial” which some of the team go along to. The main coach steps down.
- Parents of other players in the team decide that they want their daughters to play elsewhere — either because of the insinuation that they “holding back” the “better” players, or because they don’t like the drama.
- The club puts out a public statement saying that they will not be running a JPL team next season and that those who have been saying otherwise have not been working with the backing of the organising committee. This confirms rumours of a split and, although a couple of new players join, it makes it very difficult to recruit enough to form a team.
- Those advocating for a JPL team find another club willing to meet the conditions required and hold trials. Some of the girls from my daughter’s team go along and successfully get into the squad.
- The original team is left with an almost-viable number of girls, but the need for clarity causes some parents to take their daughters to trials for other teams. Sunderland Academy are forced into holding trials as they have lost players to Newcastle, and take more girls from the best “grassroots” teams in the North East.
- The number of girls in the team becomes non-viable as girls take up places in other squads or in Sunderland Academy, and the team folds.
It’s been a crisis that has unfolded largely on WhatsApp. I don’t think the chat app caused things to happen this way, but I’d note two things. First, interacting via text is a very low-bandwidth medium when it comes to expressing human emotions and intentions. Second, the ability to interact with any number and combination of people at a distance means a proliferation of rumours and assumptions.
Everyone thinks their own daughter is amazing, and I’m no different. I’m of the opinion that Grace could/should be in an Academy, and can’t understand why Sunderland recruited externally rather than from their Emerging Talent Centre (ETC). She’s certainly good enough to be in the JPL team, but as a family we wanted to try and “hold the line,” supporting the third coach who did a heroic job at trying to recruit players and keep the team together.
So now that the team is not continuing, we’re taking Grace to trial with other teams on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday next week. One of them has already offered her a place based on reputation alone, which was nice. There’s another JPL team which we’ve approached which is an hour’s drive each way. That’s quite a distance when they train twice per week, but then Grace already goes to Sunderland ETC sessions a couple of times per week which is around 40 minutes each way. Also, JPL games could be anywhere in the north of England, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At the end of the day, as a parent you have to do what you think is right for your family. As ever, this experience has shown me that you should judge people by their actions rather than their words. But also, in general, maybe it’s best not to judge people at all. Things happen, and people do things as as a result. What they do depends on a whole host of factors, including how they themselves were parented, how ambitious they are their children, and how much they value the relationships within an existing group.
Next week, I’ll again be working a bit less than usual and trying to be around for my family. Grace has now broken up for the summer holidays, and obviously my son Ben has been off ever since finishing his A-Level exams. I’ve got a bit to do in the garden and some stuff to put on eBay after realising that I should have already sold or given away the stuff in the two “Tech – to go” boxes cluttering my home office.
I’m looking forward to reading Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparouhova. She’s previously written on Open Source communities, which I enjoyed and wrote about. I’m also interested in the way that she’s publishing this through Metalabel, “a release platform for creative work, built to help people release work and create value together.”
Other than that, I’ve hopefully got another test to see what my medical condition might be. I’ve had to chase my GP surgery three times as apparently it’s not something they’ve done before. However, I think they’ve now got some guidance from the hospital’s endocrinology unit and we’re good to go. No doubt, I’ll get a diagnosis of something the day before we were due to head to Madeira. C’est la vie.
Photo taken by me earlier this week on a walk in Morpeth, England.