Weeknote 38/2025

I’m up early on a Sunday and I’m full of cold. These two things should be incompatible, but they’re not. I’m tired — physically, emotionally, and perhaps even spiritually.

This week, we took my son, Ben, to his student accommodation as he begins his degree in Sport and Exercise Science next week. I’m not ashamed to say that I was a bit emotional afterwards. While he’s only 15 miles away in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, I remember reading something saying that, by the time they turn 18, you’ve spent 90% of the time you’ll ever spend with your children. I know that they’ve got to grow up, spread their wings, and become independent. But that doesn’t mean I don’t miss him already.

You don’t stop worrying about your kids just because they’ve crossed some arbitrary line to become an ‘adult.’ Is his new flat too hot? Does he know about this thing? Has he got that thing? You just have to trust that in the preceding years that you’ve done a good enough job of helping them deal with new situations that arise.

I took a photo of him walking away after we took him to dinner near his accommodation and hugged him goodbye. In it, he looks calm and assured. Everyone always compliments us as parents at how much of a nice person he is. He has, and continues to, both inspire and infuriate me — I’m sure it’s the case for most parents. You want them to grow up quickly, but also slowly.

Ben’s sister Grace is four years younger meaning there’s a few years before Hannah and I become ’empty nesters’. I’ll have to have to find a few more hobbies to occupy my time, but for now, my weekends are mostly taken up by her footballing activities. Yesterday, we drove 2.5 hours each way to Bradford to take her to a game that her team won 7-0. I’ve updated her football dashboard as a result.

Grace is now a qualified referee, taking charge of her fifth game on Wednesday night. It’s been great to see how she’s grown in confidence in the role, even having a word with a parent who was so embarrassed about being “told off” by a 14 year-old girl that they pulled up their hood and stood well back from the pitch afterwards! Today, she’s supposed to be refereeing a couple of local under-10 matches, but it’s been raining so hard that I should imagine they’ll be called off due to a waterlogged pitch.

Work? Oh yes, I don’t quite have enough of that on at the moment. This week I’ve been collaborating with Laura on the Amnesty International UK community platform project and planning an in-person workshop for Skills Development Scotland taking place in Glasgow at the end of the month. I’m hoping the latter leads to more work, but I also I need to get better at describing what I do.

I updated the Work with me page on my website, but perhaps I need a more solid value proposition than the following:

So in response to the dreaded question “what do you do?” I guess I could respond that I’m a combination of consultant, coach, service designer, project lead, facilitator and researcher. It’s an odd mix, but I like it.

I don’t know. You stack up all of these qualifications and this expertise and then expect doors to open, while what actually happens is that you sit on the bench while people who are better at promoting themselves seem to do much better. In an algorithmic world, the algorithms are not working for us.

Over at Thought Shrapnel this week I published:

• A 10y old phone can barely load google, and this is about 100x slower
• These images are made from open access sources, and they are themselves open access
• Most people could read extra lines on eye test charts after using the drops
• We tell ourselves the story of human uniqueness like a bedtime prayer
• Asking, Doing, or Expressing?
• You must not talk about the future. The future is a con.
• People living today are almost never the descendants of the people in the same place thousands of years before
• Now is the time to be even more aggressive, not to cower in the face of pressure and criticism
• A brick is always a brick, whatever the reasons of the clown chucking it
• The project of building alternatives to Big Tech is colliding with American authoritarianism

Next week, I should imagine it will be more of the same. I hope I can shift this cold quickly. I had a blood test on Thursday to double-check my thyroid function and cholesterol levels, so those results should come back soon. I’ve also been referred to ‘Elderly Medicine’ for a tilt-table test at the end of October. It’s been over nine months since my symptoms began and still no diagnosis.

I’m increasingly unsure why I write these weeknotes. Much of this would be better left within the tear-stained pages of a diary, to be honest. The world needs more optimism, and sadly I’m not able to be a provider of that at the moment.

Photo of the panoramic glass roof of our Polestar 2, taken by me.