Weeknote 39/2025

Last week I wrote how I'm increasingly unsure why I write these weeknotes, reflecting that "much of this would be better left within the tear-stained pages of a diary." Having done my handwriting for today, this is what's left for public consumption. At least my overall mood seems to be the inverse of Sunderland's position in the Premier League (see image above).

I'm typing this into my laptop while the Aston Villa vs Fulham match is on in the background. My daughter, Grace, and her friend are revising on the kitchen table, and my wife, Hannah, is sitting quietly upstairs recovering from a dental procedure yesterday. My son, Ben, is at university and, by all accounts, doing well and even sharing photos of his meal prep. Wonders never cease.

I don't think I ever knowingly read his work while he was alive, but as multiple people have shared the news of Kaleb Horton's recent death, I took a look. Having written for many outlets over the years, he set up a solo publication last year, and in his first post wrote that he was "gonna write about what I care about and what keeps me interested in life." Perhaps the post of his I've seen shared most frequently is one entitled 2025, So Far:

Everybody loves reading advice on the computer, so I’ll share it: the best thing you can do right now is log off as hard as you can. Go outside, talk to people in real life where it’s actually kind of rude to talk about the news, try to actually see the friends you usually just text message. Go for a long drive and turn the phone off while you do it. Get back into your hobbies or pick one and learn it for a while. Watch one of those studio movies that reviews called “wildly miscalculated” and you haven’t seen since high school. Play an album you like but find embarrassing. Go to free community events even if they sound stupid. If you take the freeway, try the surface streets. Go to a bad diner and just order some bad coffee because even bad coffee is good coffee.

It's good advice. Today it has been sunny and, whether or not it's grown-up and mature, I'm just in a better mood when the sun is shining. Today it shone on Morpeth Common where Grace refereed two football matches, one after another. While the games were taking place, I had conversations with parents on the sidelines which probably weren't that memorable to them but meant the world to me. Touching grass is a thing.

It's easy to get all up in your head sometimes when you spend not only the majority of your time at home, but in one room in front of a computer. Although working from home has been a net positive for me, my post-pandemic working life involves a lot less travel, meaning I spend a lot of my time interacting with other people as two-dimensional characters on a screen.

There are a lot of changes going on in my life at the moment, with more likely to happen in the next few months and years. When I went to see my therapist for a one-off session in the summer, after I monologued for a bit, his response was "that sounds like a lot of loss." He wasn't wrong.

My issue isn't that I don't intellectually know what's going on or how I should be able to deal with things. My issue is actually emotionally dealing with it. The three suggested approaches are exercise, therapy, and SSRIs. My ability to exercise is being extremely hampered at the moment by my undiagnosed condition, so I'm having another conversation with my GP next Wednesday and I'm going to start back with some sessions of CBT starting next Thursday.

Every week, the section where I talk about what I've been doing for work seems to get pushed further and further down the post. If you've read previous weeknotes, you'll be aware that WAO is working with Amnesty International UK (AIUK) on a new community platform and with Skills Development Scotland, investigating a potential new national badging system. I'll be up in Glasgow on Tuesday running a workshop for multiple Scottish bodies to come up with a way forward for the latter.

Over on Thought Shrapnel, I resurrected some microcasts which have garnered as much feedback as my other posts over there (i.e. zero):

• Microcast #105 — Being defeated is optional
• Microcast #106 — Conversational configuration
• Microcast #107 — Apocalyptic events
• What we need to do is figure out how we can participate in reality
• The words we use define boundaries for things, but those boundaries are not universal
• Many other countries also use digital ID of one kind or another
• To be honest it sounds like NFTs all over again
• Really real time?

Next week I've got to finish (re-)planning the workshop and travel up to Glasgow on Monday, run the workshop on Tuesday, and work on the AIUK project on Wednesday. Then Thursday is a family birthday, and day with catch-up calls, a flu jab, a CBT appointment, and the usual trip down to Middlesbrough for Grace's training.

After another win at home yesterday, her match next weekend is away against Doncaster—near where we used to live. So most of Saturday will be taken up travelling there and back. I'm tempted to go walking and camping at some point: while September is usually my favourite month for that, perhaps early October could work as well.

Photo: the Premier League table as it stood yesterday evening.