2022-02-14
I think the time I spent on the Community team was interesting. Firstly it was the closest knit team I’ve ever been on, socially speaking. Partly there was a good social chemistry between team members and a sense that we had a fun part of the product to work on and we knew about it more than anybody else in the organisation. The pandemic baked in those personal relationships strongly, to the point that we became a sort of insufferable clique.
2021-12-20
The new pattern for living seems to go like this. Emerge from a lockdown and shake off the careful life you built inside the restrictions imposed on you. Take a few halting steps out to your friend’s house, to the pub garden, walk the streets more and more carelessly. Soon you can forget the bread baking cycle and the little routines you imposed on yourself so you didn’t bang your head off your own four walls. Live more energetically and spontaneously (while you still can). Soon, travel is back on. Head out of the city and see your parents. Dare to book a plane ticket.
2021-11-24
We were cycling to work together this morning and my girlfriend bumped into an acquaintance she hadn’t seen in a few weeks in the bike lane. I cycled a little ahead of them down from Ludgate Circus to Blackfriars Bridge and listened to them make smalltalk and catch up. Being in a busy but flowing bike lane on a morning commute usually makes me feel good in a tribal kind of way (us the cyclists vs. them the nasty cars). However, this felt nice because it made the city feel more like a town, and a sort of utopian European one at that. For a moment anyway.
2021-11-16
I’ve been away from home for just over a week now. I’ve been in France. When I’m not in the UK I feel a lot less claustrophobic; I feel like I have such a wider range of choices to choose for my life. An advantage of this trip has been spending time with people who actually live in not-the-UK. I believe to some extent that people are the same everywhere but it’s been nice to see the variations in the patterns of a life. To stereotype, in France I’m talking about long lunches, cheese, and drinking like a grown up rather than in destructive and socially enforced world record attempts.
The mountains and the beetroots
2021-11-03
When I cycled to work this morning the air felt like the mountains. Maybe once it gets cold and dry enough the smog drops out of the air or something (unlikely). Either way, the sky was blue, the sun was low and golden and blinding. The roads were full of cyclists breathing steam and I didn’t trust any patches of glittering moisture I saw not to be ice. I got to work early; I just didn’t want to squander those hours of sunlight when the night comes on so early. By 6pm it can feel like it’s always been dark and always will be.
2021-10-26
I can’t stop watching and listening to things again. I’m back in a cycle of cueing up a continuous stream of video content from dawn until dusk. I walk into the bathroom watching TikTok, I come out casting a podcast to the speakers in the living room, where I work from home. I get on my bike and put my headphones in, queue up another podcast episode while I ride through the streets. It’s getting dark in the evenings. If I don’t get out in the morning before work I don’t go outside. Today I went outside to drop off a letter, I can’t remember the journey. I was listening to something. I don’t know what. In the window behind this text editor is a YouTube video about to start, “I taught my mom how to compose her VERY FIRST piece of music!!”. In ten minutes I need to stop what I’m doing and get on my bike to meet some friends. We’ll talk about some stuff we’ve seen. Then we’re going to the cinema.
2021-10-18
I ran out of steam with cooking a little bit this weekend. A lot of that probably has to do with some gargantuan hangovers I inflicted on myself a few days in a row. It also has to do with the fact that I’ve been a victim of my own success in using what’s already in the cupboards. I used up those spices that have been sitting around. I used up those frozen sausages in the freezer. I used up the dregs of that short-grain rice. The upshot is that my cupboards and my fridge are more fundamentally empty than a quick shop could fix. That’s a deeper hole to set off from when you need to cook something.
2021-10-11
Running’s been difficult lately, but swimming in the ponds is getting better each week. It’s cold enough now that it burns your skin all over when you get in. It’s cold enough that when you feel the cold on your legs as you step down the ladder you think, “not everybody would do this”. Very self-satisfied of me. When the burning fades off, this sudden feeling of wellbeing washes over.
2021-10-08
It’s getting darker and colder, but so far I don’t mind. Like I said before, I’m cooking a lot of satisfying food. It’s still warm enough to get into the Hampstead Heath ponds every Saturday morning. The crowd there is thinning out and there’s now a pleasing corps of batty and rich ladies of a certain age who we’re starting to see on a regular basis.
I’m doing more in those dark evenings. After the office on Thursdays, we’ve been going to the pub in central London, which feels like behaviour from a previous life. I’m meeting up with friends to watch films in the cinema. The new James Bond movie was packed out.
2021-08-30
I like to cook a lot. Sometimes I cook all afternoon, one meal after another. I end up with a fridge full of boxed up meals that I can pile through in the week or give to loved ones. Dinner guests are relatively rare these days, in the wake of the pandemic year. Some people have been scattered away from the pestilent city centre. Some people are understandably still reluctant to dive into a full social calendar. Others, like me at the moment, are busy all the time because they’re making up for lost time.