The **summer holidays** flew by in something of a blur. It was a change of routine for all of us. The kids spent several weeks at a (very affordable, open 8-6, thank you!) holiday club near Belsize Park. They love it there and come home every day tired and filthy. A- and I were busy with work most of the summer too, so the days were long and hot. We did take a week off in **Barcelona**. A- has an old friend who lives in La Llagosta around 30mins by train into the centre of the city. We had a few brilliant days exploring the city with the kids (A- and I had been together before) including a trip to the excellent CosmoCaixa science museum. We also spent two days at the Portaventura theme- and water-park where A- and N- took on some of the bigger roller-coasters while F- and I cowered with Elmo in Sesame Street. _A page from my sketchbook with two sketches made in Barcelona. One of sandwich shopCan Paixano the other of a tree-lined street in Sant Adreu._ Back in London we saw **My Neighbour Totoro** at the Gillian Lynne Theatre. In terms of stage craft it was one of the most spectacular performances I’ve ever seen. The music (by Joe Hisaishi) was also fantastic, as it is in the film. I really recommend seeing it, if you can. I’ve been finding it increasingly hard to cope with the **goings-on in the tech industry**. I can’t bring myself to use “AI” coding tools but their presence is absolutely unavoidable in almost every professional and online space now. Coupled with the take-over of open source projects by out-and-out authoritarian racists, it’s all a bit too much. I’ve found myself compulsively checking social media (Mastodon) and news aggregator sites like lobste.rs looking for any kind of hope or reassurance. This is really not doing my mental health any good. I’m planning to scale a lot of this stuff back for the next month and then reassess, as suggested in my re-read of Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. I have been having some **fun with computers** , though. I’ve enjoyed resurrecting my old 11-inch macbook air with Fedora Linux and the Sway window manager. I loved this machine when I got it over 10 years ago and it seems to run well. I might need to replace the battery. I’ve also been messing around with esoteric programming language sequencer thing Orca.

Taking a short break from being spitting mad about AI, to just being sad about how it never needed to be like this

There’s a rather popular flavor of social media content focused on helping unhoused people. The creator will give out sleeping bags, socks, and care kits; sit down and have a meal; or take the unhoused person shopping. Sometimes they help them find work or start a GoFundMe to get them off the streets. It does a lot of good. But it’s also gross AF! Imagine you’re cold, hungry, and desperate, and someone offers to get you all the things you need… if you consent to having a camera shoved in your face and the footage of you at your lowest blasted on the internet.

* Brighton Ruby was really good. I particularly enjoyed Elena, Craig and Tekin’s talks. But the whole programme was great and I had to chance to catch up with old friends too. I even managed to get there and back more-or-less on time despite the heat. My air-conditioned room at Drakes Hotel was very welcome. * I got up early on the morning of the conference for a swim at Sea Lanes. A slow and steady 1,000m as the sun rose over Kemp Town was perfect. I enjoyed a coffee and sandwich at FIKA afterwards. This swim meant a bit more to me. I’d said to myself I’d do the same thing at last years Brighton Ruby, but that plan went out of the window as soon as I had a drink in my hand. It feels good to be able to make plans and stick to them (sometimes). * I saw American Football with some friends at the Kentish Town Forum. They played a good mix of classics and new material - a more varied set than when I saw them in Las Vegas a couple of years ago. Marconi Union were in support. * As a York City and Arsenal fan it’s been a fairly intense 2026 of football. But I’ve still managed to get stuck in to the World Cup - enjoying England and Colombia’s extended run. Football you corrupt, brilliant bastard. * A-‘s parents arrived safely and will stay for a few weeks. The boys have a couple more weeks of school left before the summer holiday. Unfortunately most of their planned trips have been cancelled due to the heat, but the excellent “international evening” went ahead as planned. Great for the school, less good for my waistline.

* I enjoyed a day out in Cambridge with my Go Free Range colleagues on Wednesday. We had a coffee at Bould Brothers, a ploughmans at The Free Press and then a walk along the river to The Plough where we watched some of the May Bumps. I was struck by Orchard Street as we walked past and took a quick photo. I made a sketch from the photo the next day. * I’ve been following the drawabox drawing lessons for a little while in an attempt to learn some more fundamental drawing skills. I did a fair bit of technical drawing at school but not so much “artistic” drawing. I’m taking the courses advice to sketch for fun regularly and go straight to ink (as above) rather than draft with pencil. * I took N- and F- to the New Forest at the weekend. We camped for a couple of nights at Ashurst Campsite with my brother, Neil, Jack and their kids. The campsite is very close to Ashurst station with direct trains to Waterloo. My brother took a bunch of camping gear for us to use, which made things much easier. The weather was great and the kids loved climbing tree and watching the ponies exercising their free-roaming rights all over the place. * A- and the boys bought me a copy of Replay by Jordan Mechner for Father’s Day, which I’d heard about through a Guardian interview. I really like his sketching style and Replay is a real treat. I can’t imagine the amount of work that went into it. * My friend George sent me, in the actual post, an actual mix-tape complete with handwritten track list. It’s full of stuff I haven’t heard and has given me an excuse to get my cassette deck home from the office and set up for some evening listening.

* I went to Piehouse in Deptford on Thursday for an event about music co-operatives organised by academics from Goldsmith, Leeds and Huddersfield Universities. I was representing jam.coop, the online record store we’ve been building as a side project. I also met some lovely creative folks including (those that I have URLs for) Roberta and LLK from Mirlo, Ella from PVA, Finn from grassroots events london (gel) and Toby from leather.head. There were around 20 participants in all, good food from Beirut Canteen and a couple of pints afterwards at the (excellent) Dog & Bell. I’m not sure what comes next, but it felt good to be in a room talking about DIY music projects and things we can do online. It reminded me a little of some of the music hackday events I went to when I first moved to London in the early 2010s. Lots of talk about open data, inter-operating music projects and supporting small indie artists. But with quite a bit more existential dread after 15-odd years of _gesticulates at world_. * We took N- and some of his school friends to Go Ape at Alexandra Palace on Sunday. I was touched by how supportive our group of kids were to each other - encouraging when their friends were nervous and cheering when they achieved something, and it’s something I noticed other groups doing too. My memories of being a kid are not really like that. Maybe we’ll be OK. * I’ve been enjoying playing Ironsworn, a solo RPG. It uses a bunch of random tables and simple mechanics to prompt you to think of situations your character is in. I like how I can use that as a starting point for some sketching or creative writing, or just have the imaginary world to dip into in my mind while I’m doing other things.

* A busy few weeks * We had a good, relaxing holiday over half-term. The grandparents looked after the boys while A- and I had a short break at Nirvana Spa. It’s the best spa I’ve been to - lots of hot water, strong jets and a good sauna. * We then travelled to the Welsh border to meet friends for a few nights. We stayed in the same place we did last year - it has plenty of space for the kids to play and for us all to cook and eat together. By the end of the week I started to miss N-. He was there, he was just so absorbed in games with his friends that we hardly spoke! * We spent a day at the Hay Festival and in Hay-on-wye. N- and I went to see a talk by Olaf Falafel. He was very funny and ended the event with a draw-along. * I’m enjoying the current project with the NHS childhood vaccination service at work. I’m starting to feel like I understand bits of the system and have been able to make a few improvements. Spending time with James and Chris and the other developers at the Good Machine office once a week has been great too. * I’ve been to a few gigs in the last month. Julian Lage at the South Bank Centre was wonderful. Just a great band using Julian’s songs as ever-fresh jumping off-points for improvisation. I also got to hang out with Alex at a gig for the first time in a few years, it meant a lot to see him. * Rilo Kiley at the Empire were excellent, Jenny Lewis is still an amazing singer and stage-presence. They’d sold a few too many tickets though, it was uncomfortably full. * I travelled to Southampton for Rich “The Scene” Levene’s 60th birthday party at The Joiners. My old friends and bandmates were playing (Argelander, billed as “New Band #1”) and the place was filled with familiar faces. A lot of the way I think about the world, work, community and politics stems from my involvement with the DIY/Hardcore scene as a youngster. I wouldn’t have had that without Rich’s tireless organising and welcome. A true legend - I look forward to many more birthday gigs. * My quarter playing Pirate Borg at the Archway Branch of Role Play Haven is coming to an end. I’ve enjoyed it a lot. My favourite session coincided with Arsenal winning the league so at the end of the game I joined the party outside the stadium and again marvelled at the diversity of life and opportunities along the Holloway Road.

* On Saturday at the last minute I decided to go to The Sheephaven Bay in Camden to watch the Rochdale vs York title decider. I remembered that York City South meet there for televised games and was amazed to see around 200-300 York fans packed in for the game. * York needed a draw or better to secure promotion back to the Football League. Rochdale needed to win. After 90 tense minutes the game ended in spectacular, chaotic fashion: * I had a brilliant weekend after the game calling my brother and friends to talk about it, catching up on the amazing, impartial (ha!) BBC Radio York commentary (do give the 60 sec commentary clip on this page a listen, it’s worth the license fee alone). I also enjoyed winning goal-scorer Josh Stone’s interview on the Monday after where he was clearly still drunk. * I know it’s trite to say - there’s a lot of shit out there but for a short while it went away. Days like this are why I still love football. Thanks City!

* We took N- and F- down to Great Ormond Street Hopsital for their regular but infrequent (once every couple of years) screening for the genetic heart condition they may have inherited from me. Everything went very smoothly and there were no concerns. The boys were brave as they were (gently) poked and prodded. * While some friends took N- to Go Ape at Alexandra Palace for a birthday party I got some painting done. The unfinished white primer on the wardrobes in our bedrooms has been staring at me for the best part of a year, so it was good to finally pay down that particular bit of life debt. * Since the news changes minute-by-minute at the whim of a giant orange nonce I’ve more or less given up listening to news podcasts. They’re effectively out-of-date as soon as I listen to them, so have simply become conduits for existential dread, rather than conduits for hypothetically actionable existential dread. I’ve replaced most of my podcast listening with 3d6 Down the Line’s playthrough of RPG campaign The Halls of Arden Vul. The sheer scope of the adventure is pretty amazing, and the players are funny but not overly “professional”. * I enjoyed watching the soppy and pre-watershed The Other Bennet Sister with A-. It was entirely fine. * Predictably York City’s campaign has come down to the final game after Rochdale got a last-second winner on Saturday. Teeth are gritted between now and Saturday lunchtime.

* We had a good long-weekend in Hastings over Easter. The Battle of Hastings English Heritage site was a lot of fun and captivated the kids’ imaginations. They particularly enjoyed the kid-friendly audio guide, picking up armour and weapons in the visitor centre and charging up the hill of the battlefield wielding wooden swords. * We also visited St Leonards-on-Sea and ate excellent bagels at Sleeper. In Littlehampton we enjoyed a long walk along the seafront and then a ride in the land train back. We stopped for lunch at the East Beach Cafe. In Hastings itself we played Pirate-themed mini golf, fed fistfuls of 2p coins into arcade machines and played board games at the excellent Board Game Museum & Cafe. * We started a new project at work with NHS Digital, I’ve written about that over on the GFR blog. * I played another session of Pirate Borg at the Archway branch of Role Play Haven. Our table is getting to know each other a better now and I’m enjoying the game. * I celebrated my birthday on Friday with a mooch around central London’s bookshops and cafes with A-. We stopped for lunch at Kanada-Ya which is a lot more expensive than I remember, but still very good. * On Saturday my friend Dan and I watched Arsenal lose on TV in The Tollington while keeping an eye on York winning on my phone. We then walked the Parkland Walk from Highgate to Finsbury Park with Tom, bowled at Rowans and went to see Toe at the Troxy.

* I missed a couple of these so here’s some edited (by my poor memory) highlights of the last few weeks. * I had a great trip up to York for the weekend. My brother and a group of friends have turned it into an annual ritual now - the focus being a York City home game. This year we saw City beat Brackley Town 4-0 in what is turning out to be a real battle for automatic promotion. While in York I enjoyed a trip to the excellent Making Waves exhibition at the York Art Gallery. The exhibition did a good job of putting wood block prints into their (sometimes problematic) context, explaining the process of making them and included some contemporary work too. I was happy to see David Bull’s work featured, as one of his prints (of a Hiroshi Yoshida design) has pride of place on my desk at home. I also made sure to have at least one curd tart a day (as per doctors instructions (probably)), some pints of Slow Loris a curry at The Viceroy and a mooch in Monk Bar Model Shop and Travelling Man. * We took the kids to see Your Toys at The Unicorn. It was a fun, semi-improvised show that featured the toys that kids (and grownups) took with them. The 5-9 suggested age range seemed worked for our two - it was sweet with just the right amount of scary monsters. * I saw Stornoway’s 20th anniversary gig at the Royal Albert Hall with my brother. While nothing can quite compare to their “last ever” gig at Oxford’s New Theatre they seemed appreciative and somewhat awe-struck by their surroundings, filling the hall with lights, field recordings and a full choir. * We finished work on a project at GDS. Chris wrote about that on the GFR blog. The project was a little directionless at times, but I got to do a bunch of things I haven’t done for a while - “data science” and giving presentations in particular. A new project with a new client kicks off next week which I’m always a bit nervous about, but these seem like good people doing good things so I’m hopeful it’ll work out OK. * Continuing in the Western theme A- and I watched Godless (2017) featuring a brilliantly awful Jeff Daniels. I particularly enjoyed Merritt Wever as the intelligent, gun-toting and sweary Mary Agnes.

* I’ve been waiting for the plum tree in our garden to bloom since we moved in last year. This week it did. * I went to see York City play away at Boreham Wood on Tuesday evening. As is customary when I attend a game, we lost. In this case also ending a 24-game unbeaten streak. On the plus side I got to spend some quality time with my oldest friend. * I spent most of the day at Royal Brompton on Wednesday as part of the clinical trial I’m involved in. I’ve written a lot about what this involves in the past and there’s not much to add (I’m doing OK!). * Chelsea’s weird innit? If misfortune lands you in that part of West London have lunch at unassuming noodle bar Phât Phúc. It’s one of my favourite places to eat. * Chris and James travelled in to London on Friday. It was great to catch up - we sorted out some (r)admin, caught up on life, put the world to rights and ate some lunch. Restorative stuff all round. * In order to ~~bribe~~ reward the kids for being generally great while A- was away earlier this year we promised to take them back to Coral Reef Waterworld in Bracknell. It’s a bit of a shlep just to go swimming. But there’s no pool like it closer to home. We all had a lot of fun on the 5(!) waterslides, pirate ships and water volcano. * The Colonization of Confidence by Robert Kingett is a fantastic short story about writers fighting back against AI slop. > So the Tech Bros, in their infinite mediocrity, decided to bypass the human element entirely. They built a machine that scrapes our work—our pain, our joy, our very souls—without consent, grinds it into a mathematical slurry, and extrudes it as a flavorless, inoffensive paste that can be sold by the bucket

* I spent Thursday lunchtime doing some phone banking to help get the (Green) vote out in the Gorton and Denton by-election. It was inspiring to see so many people involved and fantastic to wake up on Friday to news of a successful result. * While F- was at music centre on Saturday I went along to the start of the Green Party “day of action” - a campaigning event across Islington for the upcoming local elections. It was really well attended, but Zack Polanski’s speech was cut short by some protesters who’d gate-crashed the event. I’m feeling hope again in national politics for the first time in a long time but I’ve seen before how the fractured nature of everything makes it tough for left insurgent movements. * I played a first game of kid-friendly RPG Hero Kids with F- and N-. They got quite involved in the story (rescuing the local tavern-keepers sun from a giant-rat infested cellar), and the rules were simple enough to keep the game moving. I found the scenario a bit procedural (lots of similar fights with giant rats), but I threw in a puzzle for them to solve (how to scale a large wall) to keep things interesting. The final battle with the rat king was nail biting stuff! I think some terrain and miniatures might be more appealing to them than the paper maps and characters I used (and give me an excuse to build and paint more stuff). * I stayed in the office on Friday evening to hang out with Animorph and friends. We’re giving up our shared office soon so it’s the end of an era - I’ve really appreciated sharing the space with them especially during the weird socially-distanced pandemic years. * I’ve been watching a couple of trashy Netflix series with A-. I thought The Night Agent was a good thriller with some strong performances - in particular Stephen Moyer’s unnamed contract killer who is also raising an 8 year old son. I also enjoyed the sets and costumes in Bridgerton. The story and acting, not so much.

* Sprinkles of good news (the arrest of “Prince” Andrew, the sort-of-overturning of the palestine action proscription) this week to compliment the improving weather and early signs of spring. * I went to my first Green Party meeting on Wednesday night after joing up last year. It was a more serious debate than I’d expected (and apparently this is somewhat unusual) but the high spirits and diversity of the members attending made me feel quite hopeful. * I had a pretty productive week at work and enjoyed doing a bit of prototyping/data analysis again. But I’m continuing to struggle with the current state of the industry. I spent a bit of time on lobste.rs again. It’s less slop-ridden than elsewhere but still not that enjoyable. I’m thankful my RSS feeds keep coming up with uplifting things to read, and James does the same in one of our Slack channels. I think I just want Computation Club back. And the time before _all this_ happened. * A- bought me a laser-cut MDF old west saloon kit from AQS Games to sit alongside the two scratch built buildings I’ve made for my slowly-expanding Spaghetti Western town. It was quite good fun to put together, although I think laser-cut plywood would be nicer to work with - the MDF absorbs glue like a fish so you have to work quite quickly when gluing things together. I’m looking forward to getting them painted up and eventually playing a game of Dead Man’s Hand with the kids.

* For the first time in ages I went for lunch and came out feeling well-fed and not ripped off. So many places seem to be cutting quality _and_ putting prices up. Kami in Kentish Town served up a big bowl of rice, lots of crispy tempura, a tasty sesame salad and miso soup for an entirely-reasonable-for-2026 £15. * We then took the kids to the Tate Modern and spent a good couple of hours in the Uniqlo Tate Play. Essentially this was a big table with paper and paints, but we really enjoyed it. N- drew the Sutton Hoo helmet which he’s been learning about at school. We talked about how drawing helps you see things in more detail and sometimes that’s worth more than the end result. I then showed him how to draw things using 1-point perspective and some different shading techniques with a soft pencil. He really enjoyed coming up with scenes (a street at night, a desert road) and drawing them using the same techniques. “When I get home I’m going to do loads more of these instead of playing Stardew Valley!”. * When we got home he played Stardew Valley. * I met up with a few of the “dads” from our school on Thursday night - stayed nattering until last orders. It was good to get out of the house and we might make a thing of it. We went to the uninspiring Garden Gate because the much better Magdala had an unspecified technical fault. * The Brooklyn Brewery Special Effects Hoppy Lager is nothing like a lager, but is one of the best AF beers I’ve had so far. I also really enjoyed a bottle of Adnam’s Ghost Ship. * On Friday I spent longer than planned making some tweaks and improvements to the CoTech website. I’m taking some pride in trying to make the site as light-weight as possible, and have been experimenting again with different CSS approaches. I’m still not comfortable deciding how to split code between utility and component classes - I certainly couldn’t explain my logic to anyone else. I suspect by the time I have this figured out it’ll all be for nought. * I’m getting very tired of dealing with mountains of AI slop and the lazy non-thinkers who produce it.

* I was completely wiped out on Tuesday and Wednesday, having contracted whatever lurgy F- had had the previous Friday. Oddly, on Thursday I felt better than I have for a long time, leaping out of bed full of energy. * I spent some time at the weekend making an Old West-style building out of bits of cardboard. I’m not really sure why, but I found it very relaxing and it took me to a similar place as making furniture used to do (but requires a lot less space and dust removal). It now needs painting. * I’m going to have to move out of my office soon. I’ve been spoilt by having a separate room off the main office space - and I need to decide what to do next. Working at home = too few people, working in an open plan office = too many people.

* A- arrived home safely. We were all very happy to see her and decided to travel to Heathrow to meet her in arrivals. Although the giant orange nonce’s attentions seem to have drifted from South America for a little while, having her home and safe reduced my 😬 a fair amount. * Harry Hill’s new /podscarf/ with Stewart Lee was an unexpected joy. I particularly appreciated the 15 minute serious diversion into the history of castles. I see the next episode features Nish Kumar. The man, if nothing else, knows his audience. * I had to collect F- early from school on Friday. Thankfully we’ve got to know some of parents who live a similar train ride away from school and one of them was able to collect N- for me. Finn spent the afternoon with bad stomach pain, sitting on my and coughing in my face. These weeknotes are late. Are those two things related? Reader, you’ll find out next week.

* A- was away all week, so there’s been even more routine (getting kids to school, home, doing chores) than usual. * We’ve got a leaky gutter that’s causing water to seep through the brickwork. As we live in a fairly high building we first need scaffolders to construct safe platforms for the roofers to do their work. I spent a couple of days letting them in and out and upping my swearing game to fit in. * I sat in on some user research sessions at work on Thursday. I really enjoy this process when I get chance to do it, it’s great to see how things _really_ work and I hugely admire the stamina it takes for my research colleagues to run a whole day of these sessions. * I found this Introduction to screen-readers tutorial that you can follow with along with a screen reader very useful. The default screen-reader on Ubuntu is pretty terrible though, so if anyone has suggestions of how to improve that I’m all ears. There’s no comments on my blog but mailto:blog@chrislowis.co.uk. * I spent a couple of evenings gluing card and various junk together. I’m drawn to the dystopian sci-fi terrain/modelling of Eric’s Hobby Workshop but I think I mostly just need excuses to do something with my hands rather than on a screen. * N- and I continue to play some Stardew Valley together. He _loves_ it and some intricacy of the rules is usually the first thing he asks about when he gets up. We built a shed full of preserving jars to give us some “passive income”. You gotta learn to love the grind. Because life IS the grind, kids.

* A- left for Colombia on Wednesday evening. I’m gritting my teeth because of that-part-of-the-world events but I’m really happy she’ll be able to spend time with her parents for their golden wedding anniversary. * Not unrelated to this change in routine, I managed to lock myself out. Fortunately our kind downstairs neighbours kept the kids warm and entertained while 1st Metro Locksmiths performed open door surgery. * I met Murray for lunch on Thursday - a restorative catch-up over falafel, chips and Hibiscus tea at Palmyra’s Kitchen. * My brother visited at the weekend. He played a lot of Stardew Valley with N- while I took F- to music centre. We sheltered from the cold for most of the rest of the weekend, dipping in and out of various third-round FA Cup matches on a plethora of seemingly unrelated media streaming services. * I’ve been pretty impressed with my new desktop computer - a GEEKOM A6. It’s very fast, running test suites for a couple of projects I’m working on at least as fast as my M2 Macbook. * I was up-and-running with my emacs config, Dropbox and 1Password pretty quickly. I also grabbed a couple of Greg’s amazing desktop images. The painful part has been video conferencing. Google Meet makes the fans spin in both Firefox and Chrome, while Pop doesn’t allow screen sharing (something to do with “Wayland” 🤷‍♀️). To be fair, none of this stuff works particularly well on OS X either. * I watched an episode of Camden on Disney+ - in particular the one featuring The Roots. I remembered reading in an old interview that they’d lived on the Queen’s Crescent while working on Things Fall Apart and this episode confirmed it was above the (pretty good) Blue Sea Fish Bar. As A- will confirm, I bore anyone who’ll listen about my “campaign” to get them a Blue Plaque. The letter writing continues.

## Moving Moving house took up a good chunk of the first half of 2025. We’d decided to keep our kids at the same primary school - they’re happy there, it’s great - and look for a new place within a sensible journey. We found a larger, older place in Archway. It’s a short overground train ride away from the school. We completed at the end of March. We came to a great arrangement with the person who bought our old flat allowing us to stay for a few weeks, and were able to get some decorating done in the new house before moving in. We moved in at the end of April. It’s certainly started to feel like home for me - having family from Colombia come to stay in the summer and being able to make them comfortable made the whole process feel worth-while. We also spent Christmas here with my side of the family which was a special time. ## Kids The kids are happy and settled at school. N- is in year 4 and F- in year 1. Their teachers say positive things and I think they really enjoy being there. I often feel guilty that they have such long days (they go to the after school club most days until 6pm), but we don’t really have an option and they always seem to have fun “just playing” once the formal school day is over. I volunteered for a couple of school trips with them this year, to London Zoo and the panto with F- and swimming lessons with N-. I take F- on Saturday mornings to music centre in Camden. He seems to love it and is learning how to read music and clap our rhythms. He sings and makes up little songs all the time when we’re out-and-about. N- loves games and puzzles. We sometimes play chess together but he’s also keen on Pandemic, Catan and card games. We’re enjoying playing Stardew Valley together, but I need to keep an eye on the amount of time we spend playing it - I find it addictive, and I can tell he does too. We discovered a huge board game cafe near us, and N-‘s eyes lit up looking at some of the larger tabletop games. I picked up a PDF of some simpler tabletop gaming rules and we’ve played a couple of Star Wars skirmish-type games using a bunch of lego figures. N- asked for a box of Space Marines for Christmas which I “volunteered” to paint up. Another slippery slope, I think! ## Health I continue my visits to Royal Brompton as part of a long-term open label trial of a new medicine for my genetic heart condition. I only need to go there for a day every 6 months or so now and I look forward to the visits. I feel a lot better on the medicine and can mostly manage any symptoms I do have (occasional breathlessness and chest pain). I still can’t quite believe my luck that I’m a) alive to see the development of this medicine and b) have a clinical team that encouraged and helped me to sign up for the trial. I stopped drinking in November (40 days today). There’s some backstory to this, but it feels a bit early in the journey to get into it in detail here (although I’m very happy to talk about it). In general I’m sleeping better, feel happier and have successfully tackled a few “firsts” without alcohol that I was worried about (trip to the pub with a friend after work, Christmas party, gig). ## Work We spent a large part of the year working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation buidling a new service called Experience CS. This includes a great curriculum of classroom activities to teach programming and an integrated, “classroom-safe” version of MIT Scratch. I spent quite a lot of time on the front-end (particularly CSS) aspects of the project and really enjoyed that part of it. I feel like I learned a lot about structuring CSS, new (to me) features and working with a designer on a shared design system. As with most post-pandemic work I wish more of the project could have been spent working together rather than remotely. A lot of technical aspects of project reminded me of my early days at FutureLearn and I think that made the remote/in-person working contrast starker for me. After that project came to an end we decided to spend some time working together on jam.coop our co-op music store. I’ve really enjoyed getting half-formed ideas out of my head and seeing Chris and James run with them. We’ve been writing a bit about what we’re working on in a newsletter. ## Hobbies I’ve done some music-making this year but it’s been restricted by house-moving. I’m playing guitar more regularly and learning some fingerstyle jazz standards again. I’ve also enjoyed messing around with scripts on my monome norns in particular a sample-chopping granular thing with an amazing UI. I’m trying to be disciplined with chess study, playing focussed rapid games on lichess and doing puzzles “properly” with a pencil and paper. I also play far too much 3+2 blitz. I really enjoy the chess nights at Coffee Zee and want to make it along more often in 2026. I’m also sketching and painting. Watercolours are a battle, but I enjoy working with ink and markers a lot. I find the compendium of sketches in The Art of Urban Sketching endlessly inspiring. Most of these artists have instagram, YouTube or other accounts to help distract me from the absolute f–king state of things. ## 2026 Seeing people and doing things makes me feel loads better, so I’d like to do as much as that as I can fit in. If you’re reading this, I’m always up for gigs, lunch, walks, food, games, chats in the pub etc! I might need to find a new office in the next few months. My current place has been amazing for keeping me connected so I’d like to stay nearby if I can. And maybe this year will be the year I get fit and lose weight…

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