Stag do this weekend. Thing I am most looking forward to is getting a new parkrun location tomorrow morning 🫣

Selling house and already suffering idiots in the first week. Feedback: we really want an open plan kitchen and dining room. Maybe look at the photos and floor plan of the Edwardian cottage before you book a viewing?

I’m fine with the triple lock. As long as tax thresholds, child benefit thresholds, 30hrs childcare thresholds and every other fiscal drag mechanism that’s kicked my arse for my working life also rise with inflation. (prob means I am not ok with the triple lock 😅)

7:45am water balloon fight.

Six year old just sleepwalked into her big brothers room and went for a pee sitting on his drum kit stool 😂. He didn’t wake up and we cannot ever tell him.

I wrote this a year ago. It's suddenly getting views again. helenbarrett.substack.com/p/cool-place...

This is my lasting memory of a very short stint as SCS. Absolute insanity of horse trading people and not being able to reward the right people because of a forced distribution bell curve meant only so many people could be in each box per team.

A very lovely evening at Interesting 2026. The hidden trance track in Radiohead’s Videotape was my highlight. Closely followed by the surprising connection between Sea Monkeys and the Nazis.

We’re arguing about food today then? The most spectacular food I’ve eaten have been in Tokyo, London and Berlin. The US does a fine job with seasoning and portion size… but didn’t come close on world’s best food.

Fuck. That.

Authors, critics and academics have a very odd view of what makes something ‘good’ www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int... Lists like this that don’t include The Shining, Jurassic Park, Hunt for Red October, Silence of the Lambs, Enders Game etc… can jog on.

London on marathon day is a pretty special place. Managed to catch my buddy Steve in Rotherhithe and on Birdcage Walk. Lime bikes on quiet streets was a particularly delightful experience.

Aylesbury Rugby Festival for the boy today. Huge volunteering effort to get events like this to work. I’ve been put in charge of the tombola 😅

Brilliant bit of reporting on potholes in Oxfordshire (the analysis is spot on for most shire counties)

Pensions chat is 25% of my close friends WhatsApp group. All geriatric millennials with predicted retirement ages ranging from 55 through to death bed.

Local Decathlon branch has taken away the half dozen plastic shoe sizing devices and replaced them with an over engineered foot scanning machine. After multiple steps, including email capture 🤯, you get a data screen that doesn’t tell you the fucking shoe size of the person being measured.

Handing back a lease car and rolled the dice on a £1000 20 year old mini as our second car for the school run and partners local commute. What could possible go wrong?

Excellent note left on my windscreen while visiting the parents for lunch. Bonus points for: printing, double question marks, imagined scenarios, invoking higher beings and the confidence to attribute to No. 6 ✍️.

Excellent AI summary of 90% of my inbox… and my approach to ‘five touch’ sales engagement.

My heating oil is running low. 6 months worth usually costs me around £400. Now it’s going to be £800

9 year old just described my Fortnite play as ‘sweaty’. No higher form of praise.

Massive shortage of sonographers in the news. My partner has been looking at qualifying… there are exactly 0 trainee or apprenticeship positions on NHS Jobs 🤷‍♂️.

My boy has strong KoЯn tribute act vibes today. We shall be listening to Blind on the way to cricket practice 🏏 🤘

Open data innovation still a thing. Gov releases EPC data in machine readable format and Zoopla has a shiny new ‘search by floor area’. get-energy-performance-data.communities.gov.uk

The accompanying blog post shows that Dan and colleagues followed responsible disclosure process before publishing.

www.theguardian.com/money/2026/m... very much feeling this right now. I didn’t pay any attention to having an oil boiler when we moved. This is the second massive price shock we’ve had since moving to a rural area in 2018.

It's the morning of IWD, and I've had 92 nominations so far, from 9 countries. I've replied to each of the 24 that have posted about IWD. eg: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/... Keeping an eye on the others. Keep the nominations coming. Keep an eye on the comments.

I am sure this will deliver excellent services for users.

Excellent update on the official #parkrun app. Brings in all the excellent statistics and features from the unofficial 5km app they recently aquired.

Guess who gave himself minty fresh hands this morning. Should probably be a long LinkedIn post with a laboured analogy about experience design… but for now, who the fuck has ever put mouthwash in a pump dispenser next to a sink?

I do like a council magazine. Lively debate with the in laws on the merits of this form of communication with residents 🙃.

Good luck! Here’s how I’ve approached this at the NHS: digital.nhs.uk/blog/design-... (Along with training and community-building) It’s a hard slog though!

The initiative will provide €325 (£283) a week to 2,000 eligible artists based in the Republic of Ireland. This follows a pilot (for which 2,000 artists were randomly selected from 8,000 applicants). ‘The scheme recouped more than its net cost of €72m’ www.theguardian.com/world/2026/f...

Love the Swedish and Japanese ice hockey uniforms 🏒 🇸🇪 🇯🇵

Something quite amiss in digital government if this shocker can be launched to the world aiskillshub.org.uk/aiskillsboost/ Horrible user experience, multiple registration steps, full of commercial advertising disguised as learning, on a .org.uk domain and quite hard to actual see any content.

AWS's inevitable destiny: becoming the next Lumen

Everytime I think I understand the internet people do something like invest in a memecoin bags.fm/79VXvEt7xSPh... in support of a GitHub repo with NoCode in it github.com/kelseyhighto...

Bought my partner a modern sewing machine a few years ago for £500 and it completely shit the bed after 5 years use. Meanwhile, her backup machine has been operating happily since the 1950’s

This is a Gladiators x WWE crossover waiting to happen.

Back in DIY mode this weekend. Turning the old converted garage into a more useful utility room. Finally at the point where I can order some cabinets and worktops 🙌

The commentary on this clip is worth the entire licence fee www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricke...

9 year old got a #chess board for Christmas. I’ve forgotten nearly everything… except this opening that only works on beginners: colonelkilgorekurtz vs progamer1453 - www.chess.com/game/1474588...

parkrun challenge 🏆completed on Xmas day, have now run one on every day of the week.

Very experienced senior person working as freelance consultant on an important issue charging £850 a day really doesn’t feel like a big story www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

slow day in the office so figured we'd start some beef with museums

The end of year wrap has gone too far when your Wickes Trade account does it 🤦🏼‍♂️ 🪚🔨

Thanks AI Summary!

If online recipes actually made it easy to see the ingredients list and method, rather than scrolling through pages of ad-filled nonsense first, I would be more sympathetic with this take www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

My new favourite instagram account is Official Unofficial Time - ve rt much here for the pettiness of holding people accountable to chip times over strava times www.instagram.com/officialunof...