Weeknote 48/2025

My daughter Grace claimed recently, not without some justification, that she is my "biggest flex." Her team, Boro Rangers U15, beat Everton Academy U16 yesterday 3-1 and she won player of the match. So yes, I'm happy to say that I am an immensely proud dad.

Hannah, Grace, and I drove down to Preston on Friday night and stayed over so that we'd only be an hour away from Finch Farm in Liverpool, where the game was played. We drove the 3.5 hours back home on Saturday evening listening to Sunderland coming back from 0-2 down to beat Bournemouth 3-2. So it was a good day all round.

Today, Grace has refereed two matches. Most of the other games were called off, but a couple of those on Morpeth Common went ahead but it was so cold. I'm not sure if it's partly due to the medication I'm on which slightly dilates my blood vessels, but I was freezing. Of course, this being the north east, there were a couple of dads in attendance with shorts on.

On the work front for Laura and I this week has been mainly about getting the Amnesty International UK (AIUK) community platform project configured ready for testing and then the pilot early next year. We've also been doing some planning for the discovery workshop we're running with INASP. It's been interesting seeing some of the pre-workshop survey results come in; if you ask the right questions, it can be a very illuminating way of kicking off a workshop.

I published a few things over at Thought Shrapnel, including a few things from my Finds channel on Are.na such as this:

Tom and I had to reschedule our planned walk as his daughter was ill which worked out well, as it happened, as it was extremely windy on Friday. The cold and the wind isn't exactly an incentive to get into the outside Christmas decorations up, but it's not quite December yet. I have to say that everyone else seems to put them up earlier and earlier — to the extent that I think we'll end up with one long  "Halloweenmas" season in the future. Presumably this will involve giving each other scary gifts.

Next week it is officially December, the time of the year where people are either doing very little work or all of the work. As ever, I'm looking forward to downing tools until the new year after Friday 12th, so only two weeks left to go! As mentioned in this post, WAO is running an *open* Christmas party this year as we look to work in solidarity with other people in 2026.

Final thing: the books I've read, given up on, and added to my 'to read' list are collected here. If you're reading this, what have you read and enjoyed this year? I'm interested in both fiction and non-fiction.

Main image: photo taken by me on a morning walk earlier this week.