we got a dog in December. she came over from a shelter in Bulgaria in a van with 19 of her other dog buddies, two months after her puppies all got adopted. from all the chats I’ve had since with other dog owners, we’ve lucked out: she’s calm, good with kids, doesn’t jump up at strangers, and is super loyal.
every morning when we get her out of her crate she is incredibly excited to see us both and it is the purest expression of unconditional love I’ve ever seen.
the routine is 3 walks / day, which exacerbates my previously stated feelings about lunch breaks. and it’s so difficult to pass a split bin bag! when she’s confused, scared or wants to go a different way to us, she freezes, so we spend a lot of time standing in the cold waiting for her to move. it’s getting better and I’m making my peace with it, but damn, hiding frustration from a dog is an emotional low.
Dishoom now have one of those dark kitchens in Hove, so there’s your last excuse gone for not moving to Brighton.
speaking of those lunchbreak thoughts, let me make it abundantly clear how little I appreciated people telling me how to make an omelette. I’m trying to dismantle capitalism and you’re telling me to crack open some eggs in butter. please.
I feel as flat as everyone else, and like all I do is work, walk the dog, drink and watch telly. grateful that the days are getting longer, and that I can start work at 10am every day to get some daylight in before work.
this week in particular it felt like most of my job is about influencing and steering; the slow pace layers of culture change and strategic direction. it’s great to now have a lead delivery manager in our little gang of three (DM, PM, design) focused on the accounts and data teams on GOV.UK. I’ve missed you Ruth!
bookshelves arrive Tuesday. once we’re not surrounded by boxes of books we’ll realise we don’t have any furniture, but that’s not the worst problem to have. C is planning the garden. I’m thinking about loft insulation. can you really imagine going back to an office 5 days a week?
this week marked five years since James died. someone called it the longest, shortest time; that about sums it up.
that doesn’t feel like a great note to end on, though it’s a good thing for me to think about. time to take the dog out.
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?)