We are at 12 months since the first Coronavirus Lockdown in the UK. What an absolute joy. I have started reading Doomsday Book by Connie Willis on my Kindle. It is about pandemics. It is rattling along very nicely thank you (later addition: finished it! Really liked it). I have again been searching for a...

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I am still playing Lego Super Marvel Heroes 2. I’d like to save all the incarnations of Stan Lee and unlock all the characters. Since I bought the DLC Season Pass this means that there are 279 of the buggers to get, and loads of them are incredibly minor characters in the Marvel Universe, but also included are Blade and Spider-Ham. Both are a welcome break from the normal Iron-Man and Tho...

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The family went back to school this week and so my working days were once again quiet, which is very nice (although it does also mean I’m going to have to start buying petrol for the car again, in order to do the school run, which I haven’t had to do for months on end) I don’t care about cookies. Not any more. Or at least, I...

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Because it’s so much warmer, and the evenings are so much longer, I managed to get out of the house more than once during the week instead of just walking between a single-digit number of rooms. Novel! I even got out on my bike, which was a massive relief – more of this to come I hope. In a break from getting killed by Theseus and the Minotaur in Hades, I have picked up

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This has felt like a long week. I realised that I am having a day off work roughly every 7 weeks with a thundering headache, inability to focus and incredibly short temper – my wife is placing her bets on some kind of Zoom Fatigue, which sounds not totally implausible – Anadin Extra only takes the edge off it and it takes a day or two before I’m back to normal again. The...

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There is blossom on trees! There are primroses in the garden! At last, life! I am making very, very slow progress in getting my blog moved over to Zola. Maybe an hour a week is not enough? I hit 1000 continuous days of entries to Daylio. It has worked perfectly as a sort of daily personal blog, and I think I’ll have to explore t...

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For most of the last year I’ve been working with the UK’s Government Digital Service on the COVID-19 response, specifically the bit that helps people who have to shield get additional support. It’s been a treat to see how quickly and effectively a disparate...

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Once this post has been made, I will have posted 998 blog posts since 2002. That rounds to about 52 posts a year, which is extremely satisfying, even if some of those first posts are just meme reposts, or me talking directly to people I knew at the time (I don’t advise reading them). Many links are now broken, many images have disappeared along the way (most of the early ones were hotlink...

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Last weekend we had PIZZA and then a PARTY, it was great! Some very welcome relaxation very different to our normal merging of weekdays and weekends. On Sunday there was SNOW! We got out the sledges, and built snowmen, and frankly it was BLOODY BRILLIANT. More snow days please! Daylio tells me I unlocked a secret achievement last week: E...

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When I was about 5 I got my first ever “album”, which I saved up for by collecting tokens from boxes of Weetabix. I am delighted to see it is listed on discogs.com. I listened to it endlessly and it shaped my musical tastes for the rest of my life. I had to take a lot of time off work ...

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