Weeknote 43/2025
I’m composing this on my laptop on the kitchen table with washing neatly arranged into piles around me. BBC 6 Music plays in the background. My daughter, who has just refereed a football match, has stolen my favourite place on one of the sofas in our ‘spare lounge’. It’s late morning but feels like early afternoon because the clocks went back last night.
There are not many reasons to celebrate chronic health conditions, but because my daughter and I have asthma, we get free flu vaccines quite early each year. We had ours a couple of weeks ago, meaning we had time to develop antibodies in time before flu wiped out my son, father, and wife (in that order). Weirdly, my mother, who is seemingly made of a combination of teflon and steel, didn’t have the vaccine, but was also fine.
I am feeling great. As I mentioned last week, I’m now on an SNRI which helps keep the appropriate amounts of serotonin and norepinephrine in my brain. A couple of days ago I was reminded that my maternal grandfather had struggled after a nervous breakdown from which he never really recovered. While I never met him, genetics is obviously something from which I can’t really escape, and I’ve come to believe that the time back in January when I thought I was having a heart attack was probably my first experience of a panic attack.
This week, I am proud to say, I have run twice. I went to the gym with the intention of walking quickly on the treadmill and, while doing so, realised that I could probably run. So I did. On that occasion, I ran 3km out of 5km, with 0.25km heart rate recovery breaks. Yesterday I ran 4km out of 5km. Ideally, I’d like to be able to run 5km straight off before the end of the year.
It would be easy to think that it’s all in my head, that my physical ailments are entirely caused by struggles I’ve had with my mental health. But I don’t think that’s the case. I thought I was having a tilt table test on Friday, but instead a new consultant asked me a barrage of questions and I had approximately my millionth ECG and blood test. A tilt table test, which I’ll get after I’ve worn a blood pressure monitor for 24 hours, tests for a range of things, including dysautonomia.
The mind and body are strange things. As I’ve been listening to a range of people say on The Adventure Podcast recently, it’s odd to be in a tough situation that you can’t influence through brute force and effort—either intellectually or physically. This is the first time in my adult life when something inside my body but outside of my control, namely my autonomic system, has derailed me.
So I’ve had a couple of CBT sessions. I’m on an SNRI. I’m trying to get back to running. I’m off social social media (i.e. Mastodon and Bluesky) but still on professional social media (i.e. LinkedIn). I’m enjoying curating things on Are.na and not thinking too much about the future. My brain remembers weird things, such as the King James translation of Matthew 6:34 which reads, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” So, yes, that.
On the work front, Laura and I have been working on the Amnesty International UK community platform project. There’s plenty still to do. Otherwise, I’ve been working on a proposal for CivTech Challenge 11.9 which has as the key question How can technology help people overcome barriers to accessing key online services? I think I’ve previously mentioned that I convened a consortium of people and organisations who, if successful, will work together on refining a proposition, and then, hopefully, a MVP.
A few of us who have kept meeting after collaborating on a UNESCO call around AI and the Future of Education had a chat earlier this week when we started to go even wider than usual. I think there’s the seeds of something there…
The Skills Development Scotland badges stuff is on hold for a bit until they sort things out their end. That suits me as I’m taking next week, which is half-term for my daughter, off work. Then, the week after that, I’m heading off to Barcelona for the Mozilla Festival and a pre-festival alumni gathering. I’m looking forward to that. This week, I missed ePIC in Paris, having made the decision not to go in late August when I wasn’t feeling great. It was probably still the right call.
Over at Thought Shrapnel, I published:
- A single point of failure for large swaths of critical services
- The quiet normalisation of insecurity as the price of ‘flexibility’
- Think of this as the early stages of a wartime economy
- The only exit to be found is in beating a path through the wildfires of postmodernity to new technicities.
- Everyone planting the same crops of “impact frameworks,” all aiming for growth, all tending the same metrics of success.
- This is coming from someone who’s allegedly running a company that’s building a tool that should usher in a new era where computers will replace most of human work
- What is still human in our lives lingers on in the interstices of a vast inhuman mechanism
- I love it; I hate it; I resent that I need it. I wouldn’t miss it if it vanished—but of course, I also would.
- A vehicle for self-understanding
- Without being Luddites, some of my dearest friends reject certain elements of modern technology in order to protect their innate abilities.
We don’t have great plans for this coming week. There was some talk of going away for a night or two, but the combination of my daughter’s football commitments and the aftermath of flu means that probably unlikely. That’s fine as far as I’m concerned: I haven’t completed Sniper Elite: Resistance on my Steam Deck yet and there’s plenty to be getting on with around the house.
Photo of trees in their autumnal glory next to Mafeking Roundabout in Morpeth, England.
