we’ve moved, to Brighton right next to the South Downs, so now I strip wallpaper for fun. having enough space for us each to have an office is amazing, walks on the South Downs every morning are amazing, the sea poking its head up from all angles is amazing. I haven’t really ventured into Brighton which I half wonder is a fear of going back to the past, when I was a student here. or maybe it’s just that Sainsbury’s online and being neighbours with the local butcher means there’s no need to go anywhere.
I still miss south London too.
a difficult-ish week at work that reminded me of the importance of some kind of mix of 'strong opinions, lightly held’ and the importance of following your nose rather than the plan you had before. and how difficult leadership is when working remotely. and maybe just in general. but I think we ended the week in a better place to where we started it, so that’s something.
had a 1:1 with Jen who is my line manager for a couple of months while Stephen is doing some parenting and I am being head of design for GOV.UK (imagine that!). despite the “oh god line management with a friend” fear, it was good to be kicked into thinking a bit about my career and what I want to be doing for the first time in a while. cheers boss.
passing obsessions since we’ve moved have included compost, garage storage systems, garage doors, cork walls, wood burning stoves, office chairs, mountain bikes, elevation from sea front, the weirdness of induction hobs. it’ll probably be good when that expands to curtains, blinds and doorbells.
our neighbours think we will get a car within 6 months. I am determined not to. we’ve joined the car club though it’s 30 mins walk to the nearest one. but perhaps a smaller chainring for the bike, cos I reckon our hill rivals Swains Lane.
feel like having an office might reinvigorate my energy for work again. when I think about our flat in London it makes me feel a bit claustrophobic, in hindsight.
it was a lovely little flat though. not slagging u, Hillcrest!
thing about everyone caring about GOV.UK on the internet again this week: there’s no way to make everyone happy. it’s a public service, so everyone feels a bit of ownership. fair enough. I’m looking forward to seeing how accounts play out based on what we learn, and having some proper chats about it as we go along.
moving somewhere bigger (…almost four times bigger) is making me mildly concerned about our electricity bills - it’s looking like we’ll move next month. so of course I’m now in a rabbit hole of privacy centric smart homes. I’m interested in thermostats and radiator valves, but not really in smart speakers. at the moment we’ve got a Hive hub but it’s a bit flaky, and it properly locks you into the Hive system, too. open source privacy centric smart homes? do I have to buy a Raspberry Pi and start building thermostats on local networks or something? (would probably quite enjoy that tbf.) I’m reminded that Nat wrote about Ikea smart lighting a few years ago, and might now go and look that up again. should probably write a proper post about it when I figure it out as a way to capture the research, because that’s what the internet is for.
even though we’re moving, I’m super happy that we got a grant of a few grand from the local authority to make the garden outside our current block nicer. I put in a bid suggesting picnic benches and some raised beds, and it might actually happen. chalk that one up to “the world only gets better if you do something about it”. this year’s Cleaner Greener Safer grant fund ends on October 4, if you live in Southwark you can apply here for ‘permanent, physical changes to your local area’ - things like bike parking, playgrounds and benches. as far as I remember I did mine a few hours before the deadline when I was a bit drunk.
I’m interested in the 'will there be a remote future’ / 'what will hybrid working be like’ debates, because I am a white collared tech worker (ha ha imagine wearing a collar in 2020), but I’m also wondering about business models for these things. what about redistributing estates budgets to individuals or teams? what does it look like to give financial autonomy about ways of working to individuals or units? I could see a world where individuals get, I dunno, £200 / month to sort out their office space - and maybe if you chose to take team funding, a team of 5 gets £1200, a premium to encourage face to face collaborative work. essentially how could we redistribute and decentralise the 'future of work’? because 'office open / office closed’ is hardly a new way of doing things, is it.
been feeling a kind of slow burn into stir craziness / cabin fever now I’ve been working from home for six months, which this week I told the internet about. astonishing response to be honest and I’ve no idea if I’ll have enough time left as a south Londoner to meet all these humans. I think it’s variety that’s been missing; the only days I feel like I remember from the past six months are the ones where either we’ve gone looking for houses or I’ve been out all day on my bike (big ups to my riding buddies Will, Kuba and Papa). hopefully an injection of different people and perspectives will help make life feel like a thing that’s being lived rather than survived. Though I suppose survival isn’t such a bad goal either.
thank goodness for Folklore. imagine this year if it hadn’t had a new Taylor Swift album in it? (the best bit, officially, is the bit in August at 1:43 - “back when we were still changing for the better, wanting was enough” - until “cause you weren’t mine to lose” at 2:08, because somehow she musically codifies the feeling of longing, how’d you do it Tay?)
shed mouse has got some nerve. first eating our Brexit spaghetti. and now it’s taken to eating the caps off bike chain lube (that’s two bottles lost to it now) and the straps of every single piece of bike luggage I own. humane or kill trap? both make me feel sick, but then, so does the rage I have for shed mouse, so.
I was pretty dismayed by the comments on Gary Younge’s excellent piece in the FT (paywall, but the key sentence is probably: “The racism we are dealing with isn’t a question of a few bad apples but a contaminated barrel. It’s a systemic problem and will require a systemic solution.”). a lot of ‘all lives matter’, so there’s an example of people who are presumably reasonably well educated having not learned…anything at all, in the past six weeks. good to see how far uphill we have to go! black trans lives matter, btw. I’m doing my best to be braver at work and saying things that maybe previously I would’ve kept to myself. I don’t expect any medals for it; should’ve done it a long time ago.
for some reason, despite never having worked in the cycling industry, my activism lies mostly in cycling infrastructure policy. maybe because it’s, well, intersectional: safer infrastructure for getting around cities on a bike can benefit pretty much everyone. often it’s people on lower incomes who don’t have cars, and the roads are already safe for people in Range Rovers. and it’s not right that the image of cycling in London is a middle-aged man in lycra (known as a MAMIL). from TfL’s 2016 report on cycling potential: “more than half of all trips made by residents using motorised modes could be cycled.” “The most significant barrier to realising this potential is that most cyclable trips are made by people that do not cycle at all.” “According to 2016 figures from TfL, Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) groups account for 15 per cent of current cycle trips, but 38 per cent of potentially cyclable trips.”
a qualitative insight into Black women cycling in London is Jools’ book ’Back in the Frame’ - Jools gave up cycling as a teenager, and refound it as an adult, and the book is really about that. part of this is being a teenage girl (I stopped cycling between about 11 and 21, too), but heck it’s way harder to go back into doing something when you don’t see others who look like you doing it as well.
not going to go on and on, mostly because it’s bedtime, but access to safe cycling is an intersectional political issue and yes I have been writing to my elected representatives about this.
C got offered a fully funded PhD position by UCL. I’m very proud. our main response was to stick the flat on the market and start looking at larger places near the sea, because 5 days a week in an office (or hospital, in C’s case) ain’t happening for either of us now for the foreseeable and if we’re both going to work from home, we’re going to need a bigger boat I mean place to live. made an offer on somewhere yesterday, so fingers crossed.. owned by (based on the photos up on the walls) a lesbian couple, so maybe there’ll be some pride solidarity in our favour?!
hi, sellers, if you googled me. sorry for creeping on your pictures, we like your house and would like to live there!