skipped last week. wrote something. didn’t publish it. Friday was busy. have you done your tax return?
more travelling this week. have a feeling I’m not meant to write about where I was. how shady is that?
good trip though. met lots of nice people. ate a lot of nice food. had some great feedback at the end of the week. as someone who thrives off appreciation, that’ll keep me going for a week or two.
in every country I’ve been to, engineering and technical skills have been highly valued by people in government. and talking about transforming government and user needs has also been, mostly, bang on. but I’ve not seen much by way of ‘we need design’. there’s huge potential for design in government around the world.
a bunch of people stuff we’ve been working on at GDS in the design team has finally come together this week. the bureaucracy of organising progression in the civil service been wearing me down for months to be honest, but it’s fully gratifying in the end to see good people getting promotions.
I know why process exists, but it doesn’t half feel like it detracts from doing valuable work a lot of the time. slowing down good outcomes just a bit.too.much.
will be trying out my Sleepy Ride footrest on the flight home tonight. one day you’ll all have one! if it’s good. feedback to follow.
haven’t looked at Twitter for two weeks.
happy to confirm that Alice was not doing anything embarrassing in Beckenham Park Place when I saw her. maybe when the water in the lake there warms up a bit I’ll be back in that park for a swim and our paths will cross again!
three hours till we go to the airport. hotel swim here I come.
taking a couple of days off next week. excited to gallivant around London like I used to back in GoodBooks days.
I had no idea whether to write a weeknote last Friday or not because I’d already posted two that week.
had a great dream on Saturday night that, one way or another, Max and I ended up hiring a Zipcar and driving Taylor Swift to her gig in Glasgow. the best part was probably the bit where I dreamt about how we’d taken the Zipcar for longer than we’d expected, but the limit for Flex rentals is £72 / day and we could probably get Universal to pay for it.
Alice wrote about my weeknote in her weeknote so now I’m going to write about her weeknote in mine. which is to say, I’m glad that the reflexive pronoun misuse resonated with someone else, and this is the internet I love: loosely connected humans making new connections over shared interests (…or frustrations, either is fine). Alice and I have not met to the best of my knowledge, but [creep alert] I think I might’ve seen you in Beckenham Park one day in the autumn!
first week back at work. I was not ready.
maybe also not ready were the multiple cafes that have been, in my humble opinion, fucking with me this week. not open until Wednesday, says the sign on the door. opening at 9.30am instead of the Google Maps prescribed 8am. closed today for maintenance. I have empathy - guess who used to update the Gail’s Artisan Bakery Christmas hours on the internet? - but also, I really wanted a coffee yesterday morning and I was sad.
went to Turncoats last night thanks to a heads up from one of our team. a discussion about the nuclear family home. they said not to tweet about it and I guess that extends to blogging, but how about I refrain from a summary of the discussion and instead list some takeaways: architects look a lot like designers. the live art at the beginning was like something Sam Trotman might’ve taken me to in 2009. the people whose points of view resonated with me the most were, I think, also the people who hated public speaking the most.
just had lunch with Rod who is a delight and I don’t see him enough. we talked mostly about the minefield that is ethical investing. I had a jacket potato.
once Christmas credit cards and small stacks of books by the bedside are done, I’m going to get myself a Daunt Books subscription as a treat. look at that website. it’s so calm. don’t you wish you were in the gallery or sat in one of those wicker chairs?
on which: to get through that bedside stack, and reward myself with the treat of someone else choosing things for me, I have some reading to do. this is good also because reading makes me calmer. so consider this me signing out of Twitter for the foreseeable. you’ll find me reading novels and my RSS feeds. weeknotes will continue but I won’t be tweeting them. you can subscribe to tumblr via RSS which is great cos I haven’t got round to the ‘replatform my blog’ part of my 2020 OKRs yet. ok bye!
Philip Pullman was always better than JK Rowling anyway
more on transactions, aka the two things I’d forgotten when I wrote about library fees last week: at With Associates, we ate lunch with each other quite often. Mathew had built the table to accommodate that. one person would say “Turkish?” and usually one or two people would go out to get lunch for the others. which meant we all owed each other money quite often. 54Bank (the studio we were in was called 54B) was Mathew’s solution for that. just a simple tally system on a web app, “Anna owes Mathew £6 for Turkish”. and over time, ideally it evens out, or you can call in your debts. I think when we closed I owed about £20 to various people, which was nothing on my unnamed but no less lovely colleague who owed Mathew over 100 quid.
upstairs at 54B Tim rented a desk. him and Henry used to have a token system - physical tokens - they had a limited number of physical tokens which were originally shared out evenly. hand over a token to the person buying lunch. when you run out of tokens you know it’s your turn to start buying lunch.
Taylor Swift is headlining Glastonbury. I haven’t been for years but it used to be my favourite festival. going to ask the three people I still know working in music if there are any tickets floating around cos MATE wouldn’t that be brilliant! a mere 15 years since my first Glastonbury, which involved an off-site party with the Magic Numbers where I bumped into a girl I fancied from school who’d just won Make Me A Supermodel on telly. being 17 was kind of brilliant sometimes.
last night C suggested I do a PhD in comparative pop music focusing on TSwift between 2014-2017 and while I’ve never thought of myself as a PhD person, it does sound tempting.
went to Paris for a meeting on Wednesday. you may have seen the news that most of Paris is on strike. I love the French fondness for industrial action - it’s so French! and their revolution was definitely more effective than ours - but spending 3.5h either waiting for or in taxis was not really my idea of a fun day out. at least the meeting went well.
started wondering about whether I should get a new New Yorker subscription next year. probably requires reducing my work hours so I actually have time to read it.
this week has been full on. I’m very ready to not go to work for a couple of weeks.