• Spent the past couple of weeks back and forth to the peak district, London twice, and home. It’s been a lot of moving around on trains.
  • Emma and I went to London for the week, travelling from Stockport early in the morning to get into London around 8:30. The trains were actually excellent and not crowded at all. I hear a lot of bad things about Avanti on that route, but I reckon it was 50% less crowded the GWR Cardiff to London and over a £100 cheaper for a peak return ticket.
  • But, the Pendolino trains felt way smaller than the GWR trains I’m used to. I don’t know if it’s something to do with the design of the tilting mechanism, but there is a real feeling of being hemmed in. The GWR trains, by comparison, though, are pretty spacious and comfy.
  • I went riding in the peaks. Hills everywhere. All over 10% which meant a challenging 90 minutes blast around them. It’s funny, the distance between towns where grew up are so much smaller than down where I live now. In 90 minutes I went about 40km and rode through many little towns and villages I used to think were miles and miles away from where I grew up. Here I have to cycle for ages to get to the nearest town.
  • We trialed a new thing at work; a design team swap. It goes like this. We invite a design team to come to our town hall and do an AMA style fireside chat after a quick 10 minute presentation each of what we do and how we do it. Then, we go for a social afterwards. As I had easy access to the Waitrose design team through Emma, we had them come along. Then, in a few weeks, we’ll be heading to their offices to do the same. It was really great to hear how other teams go about their work, the challenges they face, and to pick their brains.
  • One thing is clear to me – conferences and meet ups have been dwindling for years as their core audiences outgrew the need of social connection in the early days of the web community. The impact of covid, of course, continues to be felt. I think like many people, I miss my tribe. We no longer have a place since Twitter died, since conferences died, since meet-ups died. And since we got old. But, maybe… just maybe… we can come the other side of it. This last week where we created a small, intimate occasion to talk about work, shared struggles and values, with people who just get it, was fantastic. But also a little sad. We’ve lost so much and, for a brief day or two, I was mourning that.
  • Taking advantage of some time in London together, Emma and I went to the Jazz Cafe in Camden to watch G Love and Special Sauce. I’ve been a fan forever and seen them a few times over the years. But, turns out, the last time they came to the UK, Emma and I were living in London and went to see them together. This was in 2000! 25 years later, we had the pleasure of them playing their first album - every track, back to back. It was great.
  • Then, on the Friday, Emma had bought tickets for Meatopia - a festival of fire, smoke, and… erm… meat. And lots of it. It was in Tobacco Dock in the London’s east end, filling the vaulted brick catacombs with dense wood smoke, the smell of slow cooked joints of beef, pork, and mutton. Initial impressions were great - we had some lovely little plates of food and some Mexican or food from the Deep South US was top of the list for me. But, then, around 4pm, things got very, very beery. All of a sudden it seemed that the place was 95% men and lots and lots of pints. Less meat, more beer. We decided to leave at that point.
  • So, ex-hurricane Erin finally put a stop to the long British summer and our usual mix of mild, windy, damp weather has returned. The plants are relieved. I was just about getting used to the boring monotony of endless sunny days, but I’m actually pretty happy returning to the ‘I’ve no idea what the weather will be today’ British norm. Four seasons in one day and all that.
  • Next week in work will be a busy one. We have a hackathon and our Product summit. I’ll be giving a talk on resilience. About cycling. I have mixed feelings about it. Sure, there will be lots of people who would like to be entertained during 15 minutes of pictures of mountain passes. My team, however, has had enough of me wanging on about cycling. I can see the collective eye-rolling and almost instant boredom. I’ll just have to give them a warning that they can step out if they’d like.
  • It’s funny, I used to do a lot of conference talks back in the day and, for the most part, I enjoyed the process of writing and giving a new talk. But, the shorter the talk, the harder it was. In 15 minutes, I probably only get to make one point, but I’m going to try and cram in three lessons that cycling has given me.