Forgive me, Father for I have sinned. It’s been one year since my last newsletter.
I kind of know how this happened.
Last March I started a new job. I was in at the deep end: my first time working for an actual tech company, after fifteen years of being a software engineering professional. I suddenly had a lot on my plate, and a lot to prove.
I also decided that a good use of the leftover redundacy money from my 2024 layoff was to finally get hitched Civil Partnered with my beloved Madeleine. This was an amazing day and I’m so glad we did it, but it was also intense, stressful and tiring (just like being married to me is, I imagine).
By the time I wrote my last Man Feelings newsletter, on April 18th 2025, I think things were shifting underneath me.
Watching all the ground beneath you drop
I’ve always used writing—and the internet—as my way of understanding myself. I think things through as I type them out, often stumbling upon my own understandings and feelings about a topic by forcing myself to sit down and attempt to express them. Blogging and writing about things I’ve been doing has been something that’s animated my life since I first discovered that I could put things I wrote on the internet, and I’ve been addicted ever since.
Over the initial run of this newsletter, I found myself essentially writing a public journal: with all of the caveats and risks attached to it. I was comfortable with living my life visibly in this manner: when I was at university in the mid-2000s, I wrote a “uni blog” for my family and friends back home about the stuff I was doing (now thankfully offline). When I moved to London in 2010, I launched a website called “Lessons Learned in London” to share my adventures in the capital. When I became a parent in 2019, I blogged about my experiences on Yawn Of The Dad. Writing things down is how I understand the world and my life.
But boundaries had blurred a little, it seemed. Writing a weekly newsletter/blog was forcing me into a place of having-opinions-on-a-schedule, eg. feeling the pressure of writing for an audience every week and mining current affairs and my own experiences for #content. Don’t get me wrong: this newsletter has a readership roughly equivalent to the customer base of any given branch of Greggs at midday, but I still wanted to make sure every sausage roll I emailed out was of a high standard.
My last edition in 2025 ended up inadvertently ruffling a few feathers with people I love, and I decided to take a step back from inhabiting this world of transparency for a while. I stopped writing about my life, I deleted my Instagram account, and went back and painstakinbly blurred the faces of every photo of my kids on my parenting blog (which, in hindsight, is how it should have been all along).
A year off
So what have I learned in a year of trying to avoid oversharing, or at least, trying to examine and understand my life experience with a degree of introspection? Well: I don’t miss any of the things I stepped away from, for starters.
Instagram is a cesspool: every time I end up back there (because a local coffee shop won’t post their opening times on something as arcane as a website, for example) I’m filled with anger at how broken the experience is when you don’t have an account and can’t even open a link without being hit with Meta begging for your data. I was already feeling cut off from friends by “The Algorithm” and removing the Feed of FOMO has improved my mental wellbeing.
I missed writing for an audience, but I haven’t missed experiencing something mentally filing it away as potential content for this newsletter. I don’t intend to get back to that place, either.
So why am I writing this newsletter again, a year after abandoning it?
Well: two folks I’ve known for a very long time have reminded me about the value of writing online, and why it’s still valuable:
Nat Guest is a friend I met online prior to starting university, and we ended up sharing classes together and blagging our way through seminars and creative writing elective modules. Nat’s a born writer and she has a sporadic newsletter which I greedily ingest whenever it lands in my inbox. She writes personal stories too, but they don’t have the slightly desperate tinge that I found myself creating, where I was pretending to be a media columnist. Instead she writes meaningfully and thoughtfully about her environment, culture, travel and wandering: it’s hard to describe, but it’s beautiful and poignant and you should just go and read her piece about finding Ilford Pet Cemetary.
Another inspiration for picking up this newsletter/blogpost again is Martin Belam. I worked with Martin at the Guardian more years ago than I suspect either of us would like to remember, and he was a huge inspiration to me then too: a slightly legendary figure with his OG blog “currybet”, and his ability to craft insightful, witty prose at the drop of a hat. He continues to write a weekly Friday Reading newsletter of things he’s discovered around the web: this is what the internet was built on, and we need more of this on the modern AI-degraded web than ever. Martin recently subscribed to this newsletter despite it being dormant for almost a year, and I felt shamed: why couldn’t I revive this thing, somehow?
And one more: Pete Ashton is a friend of mine who’s been dealing with post-Covid chronic fatigue for the last few years. Pete is another internet veteran who’s been writing and making stuff online since you had to send your kilobytes via fax or something, and he’s found a way to write a daily newsletter note about his newfound condition, learnings and obsessions and other life miscellany. It’s interesting, nerdy and powerful all at once. Once again, I found myself wonderiong why I stopped writing.
Bear witness
So here we are. Another Peep Show reference feels appropriate given how we began.
What will this thing be? I suspect it won’t be too much about my life and what I’ve been up to. But maybe something akin to Martin’s weekly roundup: there’s far too much good stuff out there on the internet for me to try to monopolise your attention. Similarly, I always find at least one interesting thing from the grab bag of stuff Pete assembles each day. But also, expect perhaps a little of what Nat is doing, too. When something captivates me enough that I have to express something about it… then maybe you’ll find that here, too. Man Feelings.