cancelled an American Express card that I only got because I wanted some free lounge access. free for year 1, £140 for year 2 and every year after that, and when I got the £140 bill this month I was like “wuuuuut nooooooo”. anyway, the point is: never had a lovely ‘endings’ experience: accrued points transferred to another loyalty account, “obviously the account fee will be waived”, and a little chat about holidays. I guess that’s what the account fee is for. the Amex staff were all working from home, too, so that made me feel better about phoning them up.
Dulwich Park was heaving this weekend but the Dulwich College playing fields were still empty. y'all, what you doing, just cross the street!
someone at work was selling a Surly Cross Check for £350. the part of me that loves a deal and the part of me that loves a Surly suddenly overlapped, so I walked to Streatham to pick it up. thanks Andy for helping do it up nice!
it’s all getting pretty groundhog day isn’t it. finding it hard to think about any kind of planning or whatever for the future. measuring life by our daily morning walks and ice cream sandwiches from Jones of Brockley, where I am surely in the top 5% of customers.
finished Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, which only took me about three months to get through. there were some lovely bits but overall the narrative jumping around was not what I needed. started The Return by Hisham Matar which so far is excellent.
I’m on a day off, thanks to the Queen, so I’m going to go read it in the Alleyns playing field, another of the private school fields opened up. I have come to love that field and hope they never take it back from us.
the week before last, I didn’t want to write a weeknote. last week, I just didn’t make the time for it. sorry to my 25 week streak.
we cleaned out / tided the shed. I’m simultaneously very happy about this and also a bit sad that “sorting out the shed” is no longer a thing to look forward to. questions remain outstanding over what I should do with one working and one broken Shimano 600 STI shifters/brake levers, not to mention the many spare downtube shifters I appear to have acquired in the past decade. I’ve got enough spare parts that I could build a real mongrel of a bike, although it would be a bike without a front wheel, brakes or a seatpost.
yesterday I took an hour for lunch and went out on my bike and down to Fowlds (inspired by Andy). had my first flat white in 7 weeks which was simultaneously lovely and also underwhelming. hope the first pint in the Gowlett is more momentous.
the other success story of the week is that I bought a tiny solar panel and bulb (off Amazon, sorry world). solar panel on roof of shed, bulb off a hook inside. there’s a whole world of solar panel lighting out there when you start looking. surely we can’t be far off my dream of a solar powered freezer (never say I don’t dream big).
we’ve started going for walks first thing, leaving the flat somewhere between 6.30-7am. either up to Dulwich - park or woods - or, this morning, to Brockwell Park. it’s good to get a headstart on the day, and getting back at 7.45 still feels like enough time to have a cup of tea and a sit before starting work. when did I become a willing participant in mornings?
work: continues. there was a point last week that I was like, ah, here I am, at the perfect point which intersects across all of my experience. that quickly folded into “I offer nothing unique on this project”, and now we’re back to an even keel again. what a rollercoaster! I’m getting big meeting fatigue, though, so this week I’m trying to just…get us all writing stuff down more. like the Jeff Bezos 6-page-memo thing. though, lols at having a week to write something at the pace we’re moving. nice idea, Jeff!
the only other thing of note is that I bought a new phone for the first time since February 2015. the iPhone SE is pretty much exactly the same form factor as my previous iPhone 6. I was deeply impressed with Apple’s onboarding / data transfer process - just keep the phones nearby each other, and everything will switch across, just a bit of extra auth required for banking apps - but unlocking a new phone to find it looks visually identical to the old one really exacerbated the feeling of slight underwhelm. no clean slates here! just a metal object, slightly different to your old metal object. I guess that’s the feeling when there’s the flip from smartphones being an object of novelty into being utility items. but at least Strava tracks my runs more accurately now.
fell off my bike on the way back from the shops on Friday morning. clipped a bin and came off sideways on a route I’ve done probably 150-200 times. there are bruises, no skin was broken, I only cried ten hours later after C got home and was nice to me.
arnica is helping.
started doing the Running Clinic’s 5k programme last week. jumped straight into the end of week 6. so until Friday my mind was entirely thinking about intervals and the next run. dead annoying to have to skip a couple of days!
C’s days at work are getting longer. I am not above saying that I find 12-14 hours home alone challenging. big love to the people who live on their own.
the long weekend was excellent, but can I remember what happened? like hell I can.
long chat with Iso this morning, partly around the ‘hero’ narrative for NHS workers. they’re not heroes, they’re skilled workers we should be grateful for and we should pay and reward properly. the moment people become heroes is the moment they can also become martyrs.
I think the only work news is that I’m staying on GOV.UK as lead designer indefinitely now and won’t be going back to international even after coronavirus stops making work a bit crazy. happy to carry on working with Stephen and the rest of the crew.
started thinking about this whole 'what does the world look like after coronavirus’, the narrative around “we can’t go back to the Before”. the trouble is, as far as I can tell anyway, the way things have been (and continue to be, let’s be real) structured is as a result of power, money, and comfort. so when I buy that coffee off someone who earns less than a proper London living wage, I’m doing that for my own comfort, and I’m still part of the exploitation. how do we reimagine power structures when it causes people discomfort to give up some of the comfort they have? I’m not entirely convinced that enough people are willing to do that. (I mean, one argument is that some people have more money than there is comfort to buy and won’t feel it anyway)
anyway, if we could reimagine the world, then thoughts around being less influenced by Europe / US - how do we get a media that properly references the whole world? I want to read about Argentina and Colombia and Nigeria and the Pacific Islands as much as I want to read about Germany and the US, please: equity of coverage hopefully leading to a bit of diversity of thought.
if the economy needs rebuilding and economic stimulus and all those things, could we rebuild it in a green way? build cities for pedestrians and bikes (so tempted to buy two of these and put them in the middle of our road early one morning to create my own car free street), tax breaks for investments in renewables, ummm other things that would help also welcome.
finally and related to the last point: just went for a walk around the grounds of Dulwich College, which have been opened up to the public for the time being. it’s huge! bigger than Dulwich Park! not to mention the attached golf course. how about we share that kind of land more often than just a once-in-a-lifetime (I hope) global pandemic, huh?