My family brought me and my sisters up as Christians, attending church each Sunday morning and all of us coming to play parts in the various functions of the local parish: kids helping run Sunday School and singing in the choir for weddings; parents organising the music for services and holding leadership roles within the church structure. It was a big part of everyone’s life for a while back there.

None of us attend regularly any more, though I think the rest of my family still maintain their faith in their own way. Once I finished secondary school, I went through all the teenage atheist clichés and haven’t really thought about it since.

Faith has come up again recently in a few ways, though. My son is almost six and is exposed to a wide range of religions and cultural practices, one of the reasons we love living where we do. I found out recently, though, that a group of local Christian leaders have been coming into his school to run “Open The Book” sessions – a national program where kids are taught Bible stories, often dressing up and recreating them.

I’m softly opposed to this in a kind of hand-wringing, middle class secular way: I don’t consider myself religious and don’t particularly want my child to be given any steer down the path of faith/religion by people older and more experienced than he is with life. Whenever he returns from school saying “I believe in God”, or “the world was created in seven days”, I have to carefully demur with “yeah, some people believe that’s true”. Teaching your child that some grown-ups are going to tell him things that may not actually be true is quite a hard thing to express.

I’m overthinking it, of course: he can believe anything he likes at this stage of his life and when he’s old enough to start really interrogating these stories (“but dad, how can everyone in the world be descended from the same two people?” etc) then I think he’ll probably reach the same conclusions that we have. But if he doesn’t, that’s fine too – as a parent you’re always extremely conscious of the impact of anything you do or say on your child and their beliefs and behaviour.

So that brings me to last week: I was attending the christening of my niece, and my sister asked us to be godparents for her. It’s lovely to formally vow to protect and love someone you care about and I was honoured to be asked! And I also—childishly—crossed my fingers while standing before the congregation and repeating after the vicar that I would “promise to teach her to follow Christ” (or words to that effect).

Also attending the service was a family friend who I hadn’t seen for 20 years – I used to babysit her children when I was a teenager, and she helped me apply for university many years ago because she was an academic, one of few that my family knew. As I walked across the church to greet her, she stood up in floods of tears, and suddenly I was fighting back tears of my own, standing in the same church where I’d sang in choirs as a child, laid to rest a step-dad, witnessed marriages and performed plays.

We caught up and she showed me photos of her kids, now with children of their own, and we squeezed each others’ hands as she fought back more tears. I reflected on it later: seeing me must have taken her back decades through her own life (and those of her children): the tears weren’t (just) for seeing me grown up and with a family of my own, they were in unconscious recognition of the time that had passed us both by, the youth that was now in the past, and the things we’d all been through since I last saw her all those years ago, slipping a tenner into my pocket as she dropped me off at my mum’s house for the last time. We’d come full circle.

At the end of the service, another family friend appeared, who I’d also not seen for a while – these are the perils of growing up in a small village where everyone knows each other, then moving away as soon as you get the chance. People’s memory of you remains static: the precocious child (and later the sullen youth), while I stand there feeling like a completely different person with almost no connection surviving to the earlier incarnation of me.

She hugged me and I introduced the kids, and we chatted about life, family, work and society. But just before she left, she turned to me and inquired “I hope you don’t mind me asking… are you still a Christian? Do you still go to church? Tell me somebody from my group still does!” she half-pleaded. It all came crashing back to me: she taught the Sunday School “youth club” that I attended as a teen, and suddenly the memories of the two sisters who performed a “rap” of the books of the Bible came (cringeworthily) pouring back.

I found myself explaining to her that I no longer believed, and even started to explain about a school trip to a Holocaust museum and how it shook my faith. I found myself unable to utter the words “how could God allow such suffering” while standing inside a church – I had to abandon the sentence and trail off apologetically, eyes heavenward. Maybe the religiosity of the day was affecting me more than I realised.

I have no profound conclusions here: there’s probably a point to be made about the value and power of communities of people set up with a shared moral value and deliberate goals of care, compassion and support. Richard Dawkins tried to argue that even this was rooted in “delusion” and was ultimately futile, but it didn’t quite convince me as a teenage atheist. I can take or leave (well, just leave) the deity-worshipping, miracle-believing, water-into-wine magical thinking of it all. But maybe there’s something about people, in all their messy, awkward, well-meaning ways. That’s the part I’ll take.

Mini-feels this week

Sing for England

I went to a former colleague’s leaving work drinks a few nights ago. We ended up at a karaoke bar above a Vietnamese restaurant and someone was busy assembling DIY Jägerbombs from a bottle purchased from the exorbitantly-priced bar just outside the karaoke room. The music was too loud, the microphones too quiet, and everyone was singing their hearts out, myself included.

What I forgot, in my beery haze, was that because of the upcoming four day weekend, all my Friday and Monday meetings had been moved to the following day, and so when I staggered into a taxi at 1am, I began nervously wondering what the next day would be like.

Sure enough, at 9am I crawled into my office and dialled into the first of six one-to-one meetings, my voice croaky and broken. I tried to hide the hangover and appear alert and engaged, but if any of my work colleagues are reading this: I’m sorry. No more karaoke on a school night for me.

Sure, there are moments of intense beauty and wonder as you revel in your child’s awestruck delight at something as trivial as a cardboard box or the reflection from some coloured glass. You can put on a piece of music or favourite film and watch their brain expand almost in real time, as new thoughts and experiences stimulate their cerebral cortex1. Even the hardest of hearts will soften as they watch a 22-month-old stagger around the dining room wearing a princess dress and clutching a toy monkey. But also: it can be soul-crushingly boring, too.

Our daughter was off nursery with a virus for most of this week, which left me with long mornings to fill while we waited for her to recover. Sitting around the house is a recipe for a boredom-induced breakdown, so I resolved to chuck her in the pushchair and go for a walk in the April sunshine.

Messing about on the river pond

There’s a local park about a twenty minute walk away which has a miniature boating pond – it’s a failsafe fallback when the kids need to burn off some energy and us tired parents need a ready-made distraction. I wandered vaguely in its direction as Robin grumbled and fussed from the pushchair.

Thankfully, the boaters were already out and setting sail as we arrived. One old man was slowly pushing a wheelbarrow around the perimeter of the pond, scooping out water sedge from the silty bottom with a long-handled fork and carting it off elsewhere to make glistening green piles of vegetation. I stopped to watch.

Gradually more elderly men arrived with their boats in hand. Some of them acknowledged us (or, at least, the toddler) with a wave, others kept their eyes low and proceeded to the water to carefully launch their model boats. I wondered whether they constructed the boats themselves, or whether they bought them ready-made. I started to speculate about the social conventions of this kind of club: if someone turned up with a huge, expensive-looking model boat that was clearly pre-built, would they be shunned by the other boaters? Who was in charge of this thing?

The men began to coalesce around their boats as some of them cursed the weeds and pulled their models out of the water, now accompanied by a dangling tail of dripping green matter despite the work of the toiling wheelbarrowist earlier. One man left his pristine-looking boat splayed out on the grass as he returned to his car for a forgotten tool, the vessel looking strange and alien lying on its side with its normally-unseen bottom exposed and uncomfortable.

The race begins

As I stood gently rocking the pushchair in the warm spring air, I began to notice the clear social delineations amongst this group: like any random group of men I’ve been part of, there were subtle body language signals and divisions that set apart even this group of hobbyist retirees. The man with the smart shoes and very clean mountaineering jacket, stood alongside the bloke with just one ragged sock pulled up almost to his knee. The handwarmers worn by most of the model sailors, some of which were clearly designed to incorporate the remote control for the model, and some which obviously weren’t. The chap who kept repeating his efforts at banter to his neighbours who steadfastly ignored him. The gent who was sitting on a bench, away from everyone else, but still somehow part of the gathering. And then me, watching from the sidelines with a baby in tow: the only female presence in this gathering of pensioners and pontoons.

Their race began: the boats gradually drifted towards a floating marker buoy and someone’s speaker bleeped out a countdown. An flotilla of models began to drift, leaning on the wind as a gaggle of mostly-elderly men flocked after them, stiff fingers working the controls and sensible shoes stepping around the piles of goose shit2.

Robin was fidgeting, bored. I decided we’d extracted the maximum entertainment value from the model boats and turned and headed for home. We walked past the pond and I looked back once more to see the huddling old men, together and yet silent, walking up and down the edge of the water together with their boats like proxies for feelings and conversation.

All at sea

We need our props, perhaps. I was heartened seeing these men spending time together, socialising in the awkward, jerky way that men sometimes do. I wondered if I was seeing a future version of myself, before realising I was already doing it right at that moment: I too was a lonely man, that day. I too had left the house with my bulky “prop” – the pushchair with the toddler. I knew from years of experience that a baby in a pram is a great conversation starter… or ender. Bored of making small talk with someone by a coffee shop? “Anyway, I better get this one home for her nap”, you can say – no questions asked. And consciously or not, I too had found myself drawn to this location to spend time in the company of other men, one way or another.

Mini-feels this week

Two wheels good

I’ve bought my son a new bike for his sixth birthday, his third since he first learned to sit on a saddle at 18 months old. I don’t think he subscribes to this newsletter so I’m happy to risk spoiling his surprise on the 24th.

This bike, for the first time, has gears. I’m trying to decide how to present this development to him: the obvious thing is to appeal to his sense of danger by telling him they’ll let him go faster, which I suppose is technically true. Harder to sell him on, though, is the explanation that he’ll also have to work harder at pedalling in order to take advantage of the new gearing options.

The brand is called YOMO and I welcome any fun bike acronym suggestions (You Only Mount Once?)

It also brings all the challenges of gears too: don’t change when you’re stationary! Remember to shift down before you go uphill! I foresee lots of dropped chains and oily fingers in my future.

The goal, though, is to gear up3 for longer riders together where we’re both on our bikes. We’ve been out for a few medium-distance rides together but after a couple of miles he’s usually complaining. I’m hoping that a bigger, more capable bike will have a knock-on effect… so watch this space for a future newsletter cherishing the wonder (or chaos) of a bike ride with your kid.

Footnotes

1. This is the second newsletter in a row where I’ve used the word “cortex”.
2. In fairness, it may well have been duck shit. I’m not an avian excrement expert.
3. Sorry.

The popular conception is that John Lennon was the troubled genius whose spiky wit gave the Beatles their edge, and Paul McCartney was the people-pleasing cheeky chappie, writing mainstream-friendly hits and propping up the band during the final years of Lennon’s descent into heroin and avant-garde. This book aims to dispel some of these stereotypes, and uses the songs of the Beatles as hooks to dig into the relationship between John and Paul and how it informed their lives.

Waistcoats are probably due a comeback soon, aren’t they

As both a huge Beatles fan and also an amateur songwriter who’s played music with lots of other beardy men who wish they were Lennon/McCartney, the premise of this book alone is right up my street. Watching the footage from the Get Back documentary, showing a month in the life of the Beatles as they try to coax another album out of their increasingly-unwilling selves, I was struck by the same observation that Ian Leslie makes with his book: John and Paul really do communicate through music.

There’s so much tension in the documentary: when all four Beatles are in the room and not playing music, the palpable sense of discomfort and things-unsaid is almost tangible. The years of drama, the egos and offences, and the sheer scale of what they’ve done up until this point is daunting: how could they not be warped and broken by it?

How could you live something like this and not end up messed up by it?

John and Paul in particular crackle with a kind of nervous energy: we’re watching it knowing how the story ends, and reading the signs of the fracturing relationship as they play out. But suddenly, Paul will sit at a piano and pick out the chords of a John song—Strawberry Fields Forever—and it’s like he’s opened a direct connection to John’s emotional cortex. You can see Lennon across the room, busying himself on his guitar while his musical partner pays tribute to him by playing his song back to him, soothing the row they were previously on the edge of.

I wrote here a couple of weeks ago about my mostly-failed efforts to persuade my male friends to watch Adolescence and share their thoughts on it. But during the same time period, my best male friends (and former bandmates) and I were exchanging snippets of ourselves covering love songs on WhatsApp group chats. Nobody specifically initiated it, we’ve got decades of history of this kind of open sharing of music. But I realised later that this was actually our “love language”, our way of expressing feelings without having to actually say them. We all have complicated lives and pressures of work, family, etc. But someone can just send a quick voice note of them singing to some guitar chords, and the rest of us jump to praise their voice, the delivery, or to share a snippet of something else they’re working on.

In our own small way, it’s the same thing I saw pass between John and Paul on that celluloid footage from 56 years ago: a language all their own in a world where sometimes it’s easier to express the deepest things in a shared tongue that transcends just plain ol’ words. I don’t think you have to be a member of the world’s biggest band in order to experience that – or indeed a man. But the whole reason I started this newsletter was in response to a legitimate criticism that groups of men don’t talk about their feelings when they’re together. Maybe we do, it turns out, we just do it indirectly.

Years ago, when I was home for the summer from university, my parents had separated and were living in different homes for the first time. I came back and stayed with my dad in his otherwise-empty house, so he wouldn’t be alone. It wasn’t a fun time and I couldn’t wait to leave and return to my life of independence and adulthood back in Leeds. While I was there, I busied myself by learning covers of songs I liked – including Twilight by Elliott Smith. I didn’t have a printer so I found the lyrics online and wrote them out on paper so I could sing it. I left the sheet in my room.

RIP Elliott.

My dad came home one evening and said “I found your song, in your room” and it turned out he thought I’d written it myself. I was briefly honoured that he’d mistaken my teenage scribbling for the work of a hero like Elliott, but soon I was horrified to think about him reading those lyrics and attributing them to me. He might even have thought I’d deliberately left them lying around so he’d read them:

Haven’t laughed this hard in a long time
I better stop now before I start crying
Go off to sleep in the sunshine
I don’t want to see the day when it’s dying

Looking back on this now nearly two decades later, maybe some subconscious part of me was hoping that he’d find this stuff and understand how unhappy and lost I was feeling, even though I didn’t really understand it myself at the time. My dad, like most men of his age and generation, isn’t a natural when it comes to volunteering discussion about his emotions and feelings. But he too loves music, and will always get up and sing and perform songs of love, loss and reflection with his guitar and powerful voice – words he’d never otherwise be sharing without a song.

So perhaps there was something at work there that neither of us understood: but music runs powerfully through people, and gives voice to things we ourselves may not be able to say. I’m thankful for books like Ian Leslie’s for bringing it to light in the example of the most famous songwriting duo on the planet, so we can see the echoes of it in ourselves today.

Mini-feels this week

I’m in the money?

My new job comes with company shares, for the first time in my career. Being an absolute beginner in the complex world of stock markets and trading, I’m basically just ignoring them and not thinking about anything to do with investment or planning. Maybe some actual money will turn up in my bank account at some point? Who knows.

But it’s been galling today to watch the theoretical value of these things drop off a cliff thanks to the chaotic idiocy of Donald Trump:

*I don’t know much about this stuff but I’m pretty sure you want the graph to go *up**

Since we’re talking about man feelings: well, it’s enraging and depressing to see the actions of men who have never known true risk (or consequence) in their lives taking gambles that are only possible because of their ignorance of, well, everything – and never having to pay the price. I’m very lucky to have these shares and even if they fell to $0, I’d be fine. But the reverberations of the idiocy and arrogance we’re seeing today will echo around the world and I’m incredibly frustrated about that.

It started many years ago when I was first starting to buy things off Amazon and needed reassurance that the electronic gadget I was planning to purchase would definitely improve my life. I clung to the opinions of random strangers for validation, basking in the glow of their five star rating as my confidence bloomed like a tea bag in hot water. Thank you, generous stranger.

Next, the advent of photo reviews arrived: suddenly you could see for yourself that the awesome-looking Tolkien-themed bookend you were contemplating buying was actually a piece of 3D-printed trash:

This is not the Argonath I remember

I also became enamoured with the Q&A feature that Amazon offers. I think sometimes these things get pushed into the email inboxes of people who purchased the product, prompting them to submit nervous “answers” to questions like “Does this come with a 9v battery?” or “Is this compatible with a 32mm hose?” which are completely unhelpful – often apologetically so. But you also get gems like this:

Yes, this answer was indeed helpful

So I’ve found myself coming to rely on product reviews not only for their honest assessment of the Object of Desire that I’m considering purchasing, but also for the unexpected moments of amusement, confusion or just plain-ol’ serendipity they offer.

The greatest question of existential philosophy, answered succinctly by Yass (No)

There are some people who use the product review area to share personal stories, or just images they feel would be better shared with a wider audience:

I hope this Android app helped restore the eyesight of this man’s mother

And who could forget this review I saw of, er, an electric piano:

A boss indeed.

It’s silly, but I love it. The internet was founded on this kind of stuff: communication, sharing moments, rich media and user engagement. And it also feels like a slightly transgressive bending of the corporate platforms of Big Tech into something vaguely anarchic and chaotic: why is there a photo of someone’s shoe on the Yamaha product portal? Who knows, but I’m glad it’s there.

Several years ago I was on holiday in Iceland and had landed at Keflavík airport, 50km from Reykjavík where we were headed. Everybody boarded a coach from the airport and we settled in for the ride, taking in the icy spectacle of the country in January and marvelling as the scenery unfolded.

Soon, though, we passed an enormous industrial building, seemingly without branding or signage. I took a look at it curiously from the coach window, then returned to my book again.

What could this hall of mystery contain?

Minutes later I looked up again and the building was still there. How long was this thing?! Had I entered a simulation?

Is this the Icelandic Matrix? The Matríx ?!

I goggled as the building continued to unfurl along the featureless road, and as soon as I regained internet access, I desperately googled to find out what it was. It turns out it was the Rio Tinto Straumsvik aluminum smelter. And hundreds of other tourists like me had shared the same thought, and left incredible reviews of it on Google Maps.

I wonder if Rio Tinto are aware of how many fans they have

“her heart smelted” is my favourite part of this

I couldn’t resist leaving my own:

I think we all learned something about aluminium, too.

So I dedicate this week’s newsletter to all the people who leave a review. Whether it’s to slate a service worker for a perceived slight at a mid-market restaurant, to complain about the actions of a delivery man in an otherwise-unrelated review of a bluetooth headset, or to share a random item from their camera roll when allegedly contributing their thoughts on the hockey stick they just bought, these people are giving us gifts and delight. I salute them all.

Mini-feels this week

Money, it’s a gas

My last real paycheque was in December – I got my redundancy money a month after that, but in terms of being paid for an honest month’s labour, you have to go back to 2024.

I’ve been at my new job now for a month, and today is payday. It’s a magical thing to see cash appear in your account when you haven’t had it for a while, and has finally broken the spell of the “new job” for me that still feels like it could all disappear and isn’t really real. Look, someone had given me cold, hard cash for doing work! I must be adding value!

So yeah, it’s nice to embrace being fiscally fluid once more: although I suspect I’ve been under-taxed (thanks, HMRC, if you’re reading this) so next month’s pay will probably be a whole other whirlwind of emotion. You win some…

If you’ve missed the hype, here’s a quick summary: it’s a four part British drama about Jamie, a 13 year old boy who’s accused of murdering a schoolmate called Katie. As the episodes progress, we learn that he’s been sucked into the “manosphere” and his oblivious parents can’t understand how their clever, handsome son has been radicalised into a violent, misogynist criminal. Interestingly, the show is filmed in a single take, with some creative camera work (and incredible performances) to make it all fit together. It’s fantastic and you should watch it.

Okay, summary/promo aside, here’s why I want to write about it this week: this stuff preys on my mind all the time.

I love the internet. I grew up online: as a lonely teenager not much older than Jamie, I discovered “my people” on music messageboards and forums, which directly led to my career today (it turns out learning to code by making music websites is a good foot-in-the-door for a career in tech). I’m still a complete internet culture nerd and can’t tear myself away from memes, platforms and new technology.

The kids aren’t alright

So I’m sympathetic to the current generation of teenagers who equally want to be part of this world in 2025. I can’t imagine what going to school in these conditions is like: as a nerdy teen I was vaguely aware of the existence of a kind of parallel “grown up” life that some of my classmates were experiencing, with parties, sex, drugs and more. But this was only hinted at through MSN Messenger conversations or the occasional photo prints someone brought in (imagine!). Doing all of this in a world of TikTok and WhatsApp feels mildly terrifying.

The platforms themselves have an enormous amount of answering to do here. Facebook—literally complicit in genocide—have badly dropped the ball when it comes to child protection, and YouTube and co haven’t covered themselves in glory either. How can any individual reckon with the state-level might of these unaccountable tech giants?

Adolescence doesn’t try to answer these questions, or even lay the blame for Jamie’s actions at anyone’s feet. Andrew Tate gets a brief mention, and the show touches on Instagram as a means of cyberbullying (or stalking), but it does a fantastic job of representing the issues without trying to pithily answer them. There aren’t neat answers or logical explanations for this genuine issue that’s affecting boys and men.

But the role of parents is clear too: Jamie’s family notice him staying up late on the computer, but don’t involve themselves beyond a nagging reminder to “go to bed”. My son is almost six and I’m already feeling guilty that he has sometimes-unsupervised access to a cheap kid’s tablet. It’s locked down to BBC apps where I trust the content and producers, but he already talks about YouTube because of what he’s heard from schoolfriends who are allowed to use that platform.

The trail of destruction

The best scenes in Adolescence are the ones where Jamie is in the presence of authority figures: police officers, lawyers, and child psychologists. The standout episode features Jamie being interviewed by the latter, and we see the boy-Jamie, nervous and child-like, suddenly replaced by a towering man-Jamie, smashing cups off the table and yelling in the face of the tense woman trying to interview him about his emotions.

It’s the same kind of physical tension that makes gangs of young teenagers feel intimidating when you pass them in the street: the rational part of you reminds yourself they’re barely pubescent, but another, more primal, part of you is scared because you know their young minds don’t have the full, rational complexity of a fully-developed adult one. These kids could do anything, because they don’t fully understand the consequences. It’s probably why teenagers pass their driving tests much more quickly than adults (not that I’m bitter, having learned to drive at 32).

I think the show captures this tension powerfully. Jamie’s parents don’t really understand what he’s up to, and he and his teenage friends are barely able to articulate what’s causing them to hate women, because they lack the emotional vocabulary to express themselves. Jamie’s dad is weighed down by the pressures of masculinity: we see him driving his wife and daughter in his work van, laughing and singing songs, playing with them and smiling, until he arrives at the Hall of Manliness itself: a DIY shop. I watched as his shoulders stiffened, his smile faded and his face hardened – perfectly observed, I thought: the mask of masculinity is back on.

Why aren’t we talking about this?

I shared this show in a bunch of places: I found myself unexpectedly telling my new manager about it during pre-meeting small talk, and I reached out to a friend on LinkedIn to see if he’d caught it.

Most tellingly, I messaged a friendship group on WhatsApp with multiple couples—mostly parents—to get their thoughts on the issues the show raised. I got lots of thoughtful, engaged replies about the content: but only from the women. None of the men replied or shared their takes, though they’ve probably sat next to their partners on the sofa and watched it like I did, too.

Men: why aren’t we talking about this stuff? I don’t mean the TV show – I mean the issues it’s raising. Do we really kid ourselves that we understand the internet experience of the youth? Think of every horrible, shitty thing you saw online when you were a teenager. Remember how it felt? Because I do: the weird kid at school who’d bring in some printout from Rotten dot com and make everyone feel a bit gross and seedy afterwards. The boy who’d go around telling everyone about the sex life of some girl in another class who we barely knew, and yet he somehow felt entitled to share it with us. The rich lad who brought a porn mag to school and deliberately dropped it on the ground in front of the girls doing PE, knowing they’d see it. This stuff has been around forever, but the way it’s happening today? It’s weaponised.

Have the hard conversation with your sons. Bring up the awkward topics: yes, rape culture, consent, all the things you’d rather not be talking about, but that someone else is going to educate them on for you if you abdicate responsibility. The pushback against shows like Adolescence is that it’s another stick to beat men and boys with, and to drive them into the arms of the Andrew Tates of this world who tell them they need to be hard, cruel and violent to get what they want. We have to present a counter-narrative and show them how to live lives of warmth, humour, safety and love – because against these things, the men of the manosphere look faintly ridiculous and irrelevant.

The internet is huge and incredible and a force for good in the world. It’s equalised (some) things, brought freedom and unity to communities, but it’s also unleashed horrors. It’s not good enough to be passive about it and assume that the next generation will figure it out for themselves just because ours did. The rules—and the stakes—are different now, and being ignorant isn’t an excuse. We owe it the real Katies of this world.

Mini-feels this week

The dumping ground

I took some stuff to the recycling centre this week as our binmen have been on strike and we haven’t had more than two recycling waste collections since Christmas. While there, I donated our old pushchair:

RIP – you served us well

We bought this thing back in 2019 as our first kid was on the way, and even today I’m still angry about how expensive it was. Two kids later and it’s done its time: but the wheels are wobbling, the brake doesn’t work safely and there are stains (whose origins I won’t question) which won’t wash out. It’s time.

I left it in the donation area of the recycling centre for anyone who has the patience to restore it, but for us we’re switching to the smaller, more foldable travel buggy at last. But chucking away stuff that the kids have grown out of still fills me with sadness. A year ago I had to throw away the wooden slats of a child’s crib which I’d lost all the metal fittings and fixtures for. Seeing the planks of wood land in the remorseless abyss of the shipping container felt like I was throwing away my own child’s infancy, much like leaving this pushchair and driving away felt like I was abandoning my baby with it.

Kids grow up and grow out of things and it’s totally normal, but maybe I’ll never grow up from this sensation of weeping for their lost youth, despite pushing 40.

At 6.30am my almost-six-year-old son bounded into my bedroom and woke me from slumber. He’s developed a mildly disconcerting habit of prefacing most of his statements with what I can’t stop myself from thinking of as trailers: eg:

• “Dad, can I tell you something?”
• “Do you know what I’m about to say?”
• “I’ve got something to tell you:”

I groggily rolled over to make space for him in the bed, and he earnestly began telling me about the Wizard of Oz-themed dream he’d just had, complete with songs. As I rubbed my eyes blearily, I remembered it was Pi Day.

Down the rabbit hole

Explaining things to curious kids often becomes akin to a Matryoshka doll, where each new word or concept requires an additional explanation or context to explain the previous point. Pair this with a kid whose favourite questions all begin with “why”—or perhaps with “Can I ask you something? Why…”—and you have a recipe for an infinitely recursive conversation.

Forgetting this, though, I asked him if he remembered that today was Pi Day. He did, and like a fool, I blurted out “do you know why they call it Pi Day?”. I’d just opened up the first doll.

Table stakes first: make the obvious joke about Pi/pie. It didn’t land, though, because first I needed to explain about the Greek alphabet and ancient mathematicians. No matter; I can roll this one out again next year. I give a broad-strokes outline of π, its approximate value, and global significance.

“Why is it today, though?”, he innocently asks. I find myself first explaining that today is the 14th of March, and therefore… 3.14. “What’s a decimal point?”, he immediately follows up. As I scratch my head and roll over in the bed, I begin fumbling a summary of what fractions are, settling on “it basically means three-and-a-bit”.

But I realise I still haven’t answered the date question. I’m slightly unwilling to draw him into the complex world of ISO standards and their international variants, so I pretend that I’m okay with dates being expressed as MM/DD in order to make tenuous “jokes” about their similarities with mathematical constants. I feel a little part of me die because, of course, like any right-minded individual I prefer DD/MM (or YYYY-MM-DD, for the truest beauty) but he’s not ready for this degree of conflict yet.

So far it’s 6:40am and I’ve been forced to explain the Greek alphabet, the concept of decimals, date notation systems and a weak joke about pies, and I haven’t even got to the usages of Pi yet. I take a breath.

A no-go area

“Okay, imagine a circle”, I begin, and he sketches one in the air with his hands. “No, actually, a square”, I correct myself, deciding to work my way up to wowing him with the sheer utility of Archimedean geometry. “Look at that wall”, I say, sitting up to point at one of my bedroom surfaces as I ponder whether it actually is a square (of course it isn’t). “Now, er, imagine you wanted to, er… paint it”.

When would a nearly-six-year-old need to know the area of a square? My mind races like a slug through molasses as I try to think of a scenario where this knowledge may excite and inspire him. I give up.

Instead I explain how we can easily measure the area of a square by multiplying its sides, but then drop the bombshell: it’s quite hard to do this with a circle. I think the gravity of this moment is lost on him as he scans the room with interest, perhaps still thinking about what colour paint he’d like to daub my bedroom with.

“So, ancient mathematicians discovered this magic number they could use to work out the area of a circle”, I confide in him, dropping my voice to a hushed tone to ensure he understands that I’m conferring the wisdom of the ancients upon him. He’s clever enough now to know that when grown-ups use the word “magic”, that he’s being patronised. I struggle once more to think of a scenario where a child would benefit from knowing the area of a circle.

But incredibly, he’s found one for me. “Like… a camping circle!” he says, with verve. I bite back my confusion (what is he talking about?) as he adds “so you can see how many tents you can fit inside the circle”.

“Exactly!” I beam, as I smell the first notes of the coffee Maddy is brewing downstairs. “That’s what Pi helps you calculate. And that’s why we’re celebrating Pi Day today, because it’s the 14th of March, and Pi is equal to 3.14, and March is the third month, and if you write today’s date in an obviously-backwards way, ignoring all logic and standardisation, and pretend that it’s acceptable, then you get 3-1-4, which is…”

He’s out of the bed now and running downstairs, shouting something about Rice Krispies. I wearily put on my slippers and follow the scent of caffeine, wondering how I got fooled into opening the first doll again so easily.

Mini-feels this week

On the plus side

It’s a Pi Day special today: for the third week running, I had to dress my son in a costume for school. Two weeks ago it was the Portuguese flag, last week it was as a rock star, and today it’s… the “+” symbol.

This was his suggestion, and because I didn’t want to be one of those parents who sends their kid to school wearing something so meticulously designed that it’s clear the child had nothing to do with it, I decide to follow his lead. We sketch out on paper what he wants it to look like, and it becomes clear that he wants a full-3D costume, made of cardboard boxes. Thankfully, Birmingham’s bin collection service has been on strike for months so we have tons of leftover recycling. I head to the shed to grab some boxes.

The blueprint for the Plus costume

I was up all evening the night before, sellotaping cardboard boxes together and covering them with printer paper so he can decorate them with “number sentences”, whatever they are. When I emerge downstairs after dressing and showering, I find Ted posed in his costume:

The face of a child who knows exactly how much attention this costume is going to get him

I briefly feel guilty about sending him to school in something so obviously disruptive, and worry that he’ll trail a path of destruction through every room he enters, sweeping things to the floor with his albatross-like wingspan of cardboard. Then I remember how much inconvenience and disruption the school has caused me, by introducing these multiple dress-up days, and suddenly I’m wondering if the costume isn’t chaotic enough.

I send him off to school with a smile on my face and a song in my heart – and that’s definitely been a plus.

Imagine you’ve just moved house: suddenly you realise you don’t know where the stopcock is and panic that your kids are going to flood the bathroom while you run around fruitlessly yelling “WHERE IS IT”.

The first time you greet your new next door neighbour, they call you Mark instead of Matt, and you pause a fraction of a second too long while debating correcting them. Too late: you’ll need to answer to a different name for the rest of your time there.

The parking situation is new and mildly challenging: suddenly you have to parallel park on the street again for the first time in years while your new neighbours watch through their living room blinds. One of them sarcastically shouts “good job, Mark!” when you eventually nail it.

These first impressions, settling-in periods and panicky moments of uncertainty don’t come too often in life, but when they do, they can be intense.

Back on the job

This week I started a new job. When I sat down at the keyboard on Monday morning, I reflected that it was the first time since November that I’ve logged on for a day of paid employment. There’s a certain level of “background pressure” there already: can I still remember how to do this? How can I impress the people who hired me so they don’t regret their decision? How can I make sure people like me?

The last time I did this, it was September 2020 and the world had been plunged into lockdown. First impressions were unclear: I didn’t meet a colleague or see inside an office until the following year. People were scared, damaged, uncertain: I don’t think too many people were particularly bothered about the new guy who was sporting a “covid haircut” (eg. none) for the first few months.

Your humble author in September 2020, when haircuts were briefly impossible

This time, though, I’ve joined an organisation who have thought about this stuff an incredible amount. I’ve begun a new role at GitLab, my first proper tech company role. GitLab are famous for being one of the largest all-remote companies in the world, and they’ve literally written the book on remote/asynchronous working. It turns out that they’ve also done an incredible amount of thinking about the challenges of new starts, and done their best to make it easy.

For one thing, I couldn’t start on a Tuesday. The company has a structured, documented Onboarding process for all new joiners, where each day in your first week is planned thematically. If I missed Monday, the carefully-scheduled introduction process would be chaotic and wrong. And as anyone who’s ever started a job knows, your first day (at least) is almost completely spent logging into things, setting passwords, configuring software and installing stuff. I couldn’t afford to spend Tuesday—”Our Values and ways of working”—asking IT to reset my password.

If you didn’t document it, did it really happen?

The company is “Handbook-first”. This means that for every question, process, tool or cultural value the organisation has, there’s a document which answers, explains, contextualises and publicises it. Honestly, go and read it. This is basically what I’ve spent this week doing. It’s mildly overwhelming, a bit like someone giving you a link to Wikipedia and saying “go read this for a week”. Soon you’re falling down rabbit holes and before you know it, you’re midway through the article on the United States Olympic mixed doubles curling trials and asking yourself, well, how did I get here?

So what I’m saying is: it’s been a lot. But in a great way. I’ve spent an entire day reading about the company’s Values. I know that most non-trivial organisations have these things now and like to talk about them during recruitment (and occasionally when a new head of HR joins). But having spent a week not only reading about them, but interacting with some of the thousands of team members who use them, I can already see people take this stuff seriously – and reference it, daily.

Without wanting this post to sound like it’s sponsored by my new employer, it’s making everywhere else I’ve ever worked look a little bit silly and misguided in comparison. Other organisations have a kind of “implied” culture: much like the British constitution, it’s unwritten. This means you have to spend a long time acclimatising to the actual values and mores of the organisation, pick up on the people and politics and “read the room” until you get a true sense of the place. Of course my new gig is going to have those elements too, but by making every new hire spend detailed time reading about this stuff before they so much as write an email or join a meeting, there’s a huge effort being made here to help you get through that difficult “new start” period with grace. I’m super impressed.

So I’m sitting here at the end of my first week and still thinking about first impressions. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing: one British-focused Slack channel had a jokey poll about the best type of pancakes on my second day and I may well have alienated myself from all my fellow Brits by choosing for “thick” pancakes over French/crepe-style. (My rationale: these kind of pancakes allow you to cook 4 or 5 at a time, which is an important delivery metric when you’re serving hungry kids). And I know I’ll look back at this period and reflect on relationships I started and introductions I made with both pride and cringe. But that’s life. And right now, I’m feeling pretty happy about it.

Mini-feels this week

Yet more costumes

Last week was my son’s first week back at school after the holidays and we inexplicably had to dress him up as “a country” for one day. I attempted to make him resemble the Portuguese flag, and went about my day.

Yesterday, though, was World Book Day, so once again, out come the costumes: except this time, school have asked for kids to dress as “their favourite word”. What was Ted’s? “Rockstar”.

After fighting it for a while, I gave up and resigned myself to making a cardboard guitar the morning before school, roping him into helping me colour it in. (my own pride and vanity as a longtime guitarist meant I couldn’t allow him to go to school with one he made solely by himself: if he got the number of strings wrong, I’d have to hand my instruments back to their manufacturers).

Note the “TED” brand on the headstock. I’m a details guy.

I even let him put gel in his hair for the day, like a true rockstar.

You can imagine my frustration and confusion, then, when we received an email from school this week telling us that next week, we need to dress the kids in a third costume: something “maths-related”, for next Friday’s Pi Day. Does anyone know where I can buy an algebra costume?

Let me explain.

If you haven’t seen “Styscraper” before, prepare to be… confused.

I’ve never been a big video game fan. When I was a kid growing up in rural Nottingham, my family was never on top of the cutting-edge: we didn’t get cable TV until years after it became passé, and any games consoles I had were hand-me-downs from family friends who’d already moved on to something several generations newer. I was still playing Sonic on my Mega Drive when everyone else got their Playstation 2s.

Web games, though, have gripped me for decades. There’s something about the magic of playing an arcade-style game in the comfort of your web browser, especially with today’s technical capabilities where fully-rendered 3D environments are served up alongside the same browser tabs that normally give you the weather forecast or that dubious chili recipe that might have given you food poisoning. Games!

Many years ago at sixth form I became obsessed with a simple helicopter game called, er, Helicopter Game. You hold down the mouse button to make the chopper go up, and let go to make it go down. I spent hours in IT A-level lessons playing this game, competing with friends for high-scores. The game, almost trivial in its pointlessness (there was no way to win, you just played until you died… like, well, life), appealed to me because of its basic yet clear imperative: just keep going.

Even today, decades later, I still remember my classic-era high score (it was in the 2000s)

Around the same time I discovered the beautiful games of Orisinal, including The Bottom Of The Sea, whose soothing music still calms me today. I wrote a blogpost on my “proper” blog this week about my lessons learned during redundancy, and I gave this very game, which I discovered in 2004, a shout-out for its calming abilities which I made use of before job interviews earlier this year. Sometimes these things have a knack for staying with you.

Then there’s Wordle. I’m three years in at this point, with a daily habit that feels as much a part of my morning routine as brushing my teeth or having a wee (and it usually accompanies one of these acts, let’s be real).

My daily addiction to it feels almost unpleasant at this point: after a thousand games, I take little joy in guessing the latest five-letter word. I find myself like Sisyphus, compelled daily to roll the boulder of vowels and consonants up the New York Times hill, most with success, but occasionally with real, gripping fear that I’ll get it wrong and see my win rate decline to 97%. I remember when it used to be 99%.

One day, I’ll get Wordle on the first guess, and then I think I can free myself from its tyranny.

That beautiful 120 day streak only ended because I forgot to play.

All this brings me to Styscaper: the silly web browser game currently taking the internet by storm. Your job is to stack farm objects (and pigs) as high as you can until the tower collapses, and obtain the highest score. It’s cute, compelling, and utterly addictive.

Frequent Tetris players begin to see the grid of shapes (tetrominoes, if we’re using the proper nomenclature) in their sleep: neat patterns of rotating blocks and perfectly-fitting gaps. Well, this week I’ve been dreaming of wobbling water barrels, farting pigs and annoyingly-shaped traffic cones, all thanks to this game.

The washing machine is my favourite Styscraper piece, because it’s a perfect shape and incredibly heavy: once you put it down, it’s not going anywhere. Unlike those fucking red barrels. And don’t get me started on the bloody wingback armchair.

I find myself this week coming up with new strategies when I’m not playing, and desperately trying to introduce it to new players (hello) to see if I can discover some new techniques when observing their fresh gameplay. On train journeys I’m glued to my phone like the teenagers poring over TikTok, but instead watching paid-up influencers shilling cheap sweatshop fashion, I’m cautiously stacking a crate on top of an unhappy sow. I… I don’t know what’s happened to me. But you should definitely go and play this game.

Mini-feels this week

Keep your flag flying

Tuesday was the first day back at school for my son after a week of half-term, and we were inexplicably told to dress him up “as a country”. This felt like cruel and unusual punishment, like a final boss we had to defeat before we could rest and relax after 10 solid days without childcare.

I eventually sent him in dressed as “Portugal” after our less-than-awesome holiday there last winter, reasoning that the flag was fairly simple to copy:

I’ve also just spotted that the colour proportions here aren’t, as I wrongly assumed, 50/50. Oh well.

I forgot about the crest thing, though. After kitting Ted out in red trousers and a green top (look, he’s a 90° version of Portugal, okay?), I fumbled a bit for the gold circle thing.

Eventually I gave up and printed off the crest and sellotaped it to his t-shirt, which miraculously survived the school day and was still present on his polo neck when I picked him up again later that day.

Even better? Next week is every parents’ favourite celebration: World Book Day. And we have to dress him as “his favourite word”. Pray for me.

“Dad, this gorilla looks like you”, said every kid in the zoo. Get some better material, you little amateurs.

As previously documented, I’m currently between jobs. School is closed all week, and therefore it falls to me to provide this week’s entertainment for my high-energy son. I began with earnest plans of BBC-esque public service: educate, inform, entertain. But now it’s midway through day two and I’m happy to just shovel flapjacks into my kid’s face until my partner finishes work at 5pm.

I thought the zoo would be sure-fire: we took him here once when he was three and didn’t make it past the soft play area at the entrance. Now he’s nearly six, I reasoned, we’d be able to explore the various flora and fauna of Twycross Zoo together, marvelling at the incredible gifts bestowed upon us by Mother Nature. Instead, I’m trying to persuade a child to come and look at a tired flamingo because I’ve paid £37 each for the privilege of being here.

Eventually, we both come to terms with the arrangement: I let Ted entertain himself on the frozen play park for twenty minutes, in exchange for him pretending to be interested in the rhino and gorilla exhibits so I can convince myself I’ve properly visited a zoo. For a brief, exciting, moment, we’re the only people to witness the Sumatran tiger emerge from its indoor den and strut casually onto the wooden walkway atop an observation bridge, where we pose for selfies with a tiger directly above our heads. This was worth the entrance fee, I find myself thinking, before a dozen other people join us for the photo op.

Spot the tiger (actually, they’re striped)

The next day, I find myself pulling on a harness and wristband at a climbing centre, to accompany my spider-like child for an hour of indoor climbing. Within seconds he’s effortlessly pulling himself up the vertical surfaces like one of Spider-Man’s chattier cousins, while I grimace from the floor mat and try to adjust the straps that are digging into my crotch. Maybe jeans weren’t the best outfit, I reflect.

Eventually I try to climb up alongside him, and find myself unable to physically summon the courage to scale the heights my child is comfortably reaching. I cling to the wall like it’s the only thing allowing my sanity to prevail, and worry that the rope and strap keeping me anchored to reality isn’t properly adjusted. I watch a seven year old confidently leap from the top of a wall and calmly glide like a phoenix down to the ground, swaggering all the way. By contrast, I decide to save my knees the effort of climbing back down from my not-so-lofty perch, and gingerly jump free of the wall. An involuntary shriek accompanies my movement and I half fall back down to the ground, graceless and aching. Ted watches me with a knowing stare.

I had to explain that, in reality, sewing a dog’s head on a man’s body almost certainly wouldn’t work.

Finally we’re in the cinema for his ninety minutes of kid entertainment and I relish the opportunity to enjoy uninterrupted screen time with my phone. I sit back and read a book about the Holocaust while the plot of Dog Man plays out on the Odeon Luxe screen below us. The mum in the reclining seat next to me falls asleep and soon her snores disturb my concentration. Ricky Gervais somehow appears in the film and I lose my ability to concentrate on my book.

Later in the week I bribe Ted into accompanying me to several chores and odd jobs with the promise of a McDonalds at the end of it. By 11.30am he’s clamouring for his Happy Meal so I reluctantly take us for lunch less than two hours after I ate breakfast. I eat the worst burger I’ve had in living memory (oddly cold on one side, but obviously I don’t complain and consume the entire thing) and Ted happily taps away at the stalk-mounted tablet which sits atop the kids’ tables while a bloke with headphones on lies asleep with his head flat on the tabletop beside us. I’m never coming here again, I think, but of course it’s a lie, because McDonalds know you’ll be back, know this is the Great Leveller where everyone, rich or poor, eventually ends up, through circum– or happenstance.

We go for father-and-son haircuts together and I’m initially grateful for the barber who buys Ted some sweets from the vending machine as well as a bouncy ball while my cut is finishing up. My gratitude turns to anger as I see Ted in the mirror passionately throwing the bouncy ball around the barber shop, chasing it under chairs and between electric razors as they charge. He catches my eye in the mirror and turns to wiggle his bum at me with a mocking grin, and I try (unsuccessfully) not to laugh in the face of the taciturn Turkish barber who’s currently trimming my fringe.

Half term: it’s nearly done. So am I.

Mini-feels this week

For want of espresso…

I bought a fancy coffee machine a year or two back. It came with a manual tamper – a little handheld device to “tamp” down (eg. compress) the coffee grounds in order to aid the extraction process.

My long-suffering partner Maddy struggled to make good coffee with this tamper due to the physical strength required, so I bought an expensive automatic tamper with a spring-loaded action to make the process easier. This resulted in even worse (eg. under-extracted) coffee, because the portafilter (eg. the metal basket the coffee grounds are stored in) is too tall and has curved sides that don’t fit the tamper properly.

A good coffee, and an under-extracted one

Next I find myself buying a similarly-expensive basket filter imported directly from Italy, which has a shorter (and straighter) profile. This basket should work better with the auto-tamper, and when it arrives I have to buy another bag of coffee beans because I’ve used the last of the previous ones up “dialling in” the correct settings for the new equipment.

Eventually I manage to make a half-decent brew with the new equipment and try not to reflect on the fact that I’ve spent almost a third of the cost of the machine on buying these after-market accessories, solely to improve the quality of the coffee my partner occasionally makes me. Next time I’ll just make them myself.

Clean, straight lines of green frog tape demarcate the areas to shield from the paint. A bucket of sugar soap solution sits primed and ready to wash the walls clean. Neatly arranged dust sheets are in place to protect the carpet from unexpected blobs of emulsion. Your rollers and brushes lie clean and pristine in their trays, ready to, well, roll.

I’m painting a room, and it’s starting off well.

Your humble narrator in a lineup of Matts

The first brushstroke—much like the first pancake—is the worst. You’re limbering up like a boxer waiting to begin their bout, this time against a semi-gloss opponent. You lather the brush with a hopeful-looking quantity of Polished Pebble (Dulux; £8.80/litre) and splodge it artlessly onto the virgin surface. You wince slightly as it flattens onto the speckled texture of the bathroom wall and seeps thickly with colour, too quickly. You hurry to spread it.

I’ve started the project in earnest, and this is me for the next hour or two.

Soon you’re comfortably cutting in, working your way inwards from the edges and perimeters. The lines of masking tape guide and strengthen you, giving you an air of invincibility as you convince yourself that this is foolproof: no paint can leak through onto the clean white tiles below, or so you hope. There’s a damp cloth nestled jauntily in your belt loop, these jeans already sacrificial cloth to the splashes and daubs of the paint gods. You haven’t had to use it yet, either.

I’m now beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t have skipped the masking tape for the ceiling.

Out comes the roller, its soft brush hiding the traces of the chemical bath it was briefly exposed to after its last outing. Tendrils of Forest Green still cling to its downy surface in spite of the paint thinner soaking it endured. You dip it into far too much paint in one go and nervously roll some of it off again in the tray, worrying vaguely at the thick sound it makes against the plastic. You raise it to the wall and try not to notice the droplets of paint that rain briefly from the edge. You slap it against the wall and try to remember to paint an M shape – or was it a W? Either way, avoid straight lines. You roll.

I’m painting a room, and I’m beginning to get bored.

In hindsight, this was far too detailed a way of measuring the walls and I should’ve just done the room’s width x height instead

Onto the next wall and your arms are aching a little now. You decide to just eyeball the ceiling joint rather than climb onto the stool to see better, and you quickly flick paint onto the pristine white of the ceiling. No matter; out comes the damp rag and you’ve undone the damage. This is how the professionals do it, right? No paint shields or masking tape, just hand-eye coordination and a steady wrist. This is easy. For a brief moment you enter a zen-like state of pure flow, where the paint moves effortlessly from your brush to the edge of the wall, filling each crevice and dip daintily. Then you breathe out and shift position and—oh no—you’ve painted a streak of off-white matte on the wrong surface.

I’m up close to my work now and noticing all the imperfections.

First coat done, now let it cure for… six hours? That seems too long. It’ll be dry to the touch in ten minutes, let alone an hour. You just want to be done with it now, bored of paint, tape, brushes and edges. One of the mini rollers you ambitiously tried turned out to be laced with tiny dirt particles you’ve just had to painstakingly pick out. You dripped paint onto the hoover, and possibly the kids’ toothbrushes. The audiobook you were listening to has just finished and your hands are too dirty with paint to pick your phone up and put another one on. You need a coffee.

A previous painting and decorating project, and I’m still pleased with the beauty of the masking tape today

I’m regretting the choice of colour now it’s dry and wondering if this was all a huge mistake.

Peace; let your arms breathe and conclude that nobody really gives a shit about paint and walls anyway. That corner where the previous decorator left a big lump of dried-on paint? You never noticed it until today, and neither will anybody else. The part above the door frame where no-one will ever look? Doesn’t matter that you didn’t go all the way to the edge. It’s dark up there anyway. The PolyFilla covering the wallplugs that you probably should’ve spent more time sanding before painting? This too shall pass. You sigh.

I have finished painting the bathroom and I’ve done my decorating penance for another year or so.

Mini-feels this week

Turns out I don’t need all those screens

As part of my new job preparation, I’ve rearranged my home office (yes, it’s #ShedNews!) and switched the layout a little – new job, new me, and all that. I also decided to finally admit to myself that I don’t need three screens.

Yes: a laptop and two monitors seems to be the minimum viable setup for anyone working in tech these days. In reality, you probably need an ultra-HD curved monitor and some kind of VR headset if you want to work at a Big Tech org, but I’m just not that guy.

What I did do, though, was… buy a monitor arm. Look at it:

I love it

Monitor on one side, laptop on the other. Now the Macbook is raised off the desk, I’m actually using the hideously-expensive screen it comes with, rather than ignoring it because it’s out of my eyeline. And the third screen? Gone. I don’t have enough eyes to make use of it, or enough headspace to multitask all the things I could display on these screens. Get rid of anything that doesn’t bring you joy – or at least, get rid of things that show you push notifications.

For all the shed fans (you know who you are), here’s the new setup in all its glory:

Okay, the toolboxes don’t really work, but it’s nice to have them around

Thanks for reading this week’s slightly-experimental email! And I hope you enjoyed the photos. See you next week!

— Matt