Week 373: Two watches
October 25, 2025
- Our CEO wears two watches, one on each wrist. Smart move for a guy selling a lot of luxury watch ads. We call it #watchwatch.
- Lachie (massive running guy) doesn’t listen to anything when he runs. He just raw dogs it. Just the sounds of the street and his own breathing.
- My floors guy is back to sand some more of our floors. I love a guy who loves his job. I feel the same way about our plasterer. Our floor guy loves to show me the grain, and talk about the pinks tones running through the wood, and how they don’t board floors like they used to, and how his guy in Lewes has a lot of spare boards but his guy at the wood store in Brighton might also have a couple. Oh and he LOVES pointing out where someone has lifted up a board and then replaced it with the wrong kind of nails. His machines make barely any dust. He doesn’t even put a plastic covering over the doorframe.
- Because of the floor guy being back, several of the rooms in our house now contain too much furniture and it all feels a bit intense with the kids flying around.
- If you were to ask me “which of your kids is more likely to walk into a lamp-post” the answer is definitely Chaz, but the truth is that he has never done that and E has done it twice. She is also incapable of sitting still at the dinner table whereas Chaz will plop himself down and set about whatever meal we’ve given him.
- I went to Chelsea on Wednesday for drinks and snacks with my most recent work best friend. She stopped being my work best friend when she very rudely left the FT. I haven’t been betrayed so deeply since Edds left in 2021!
- I asked one of my colleagues if she knew anyone before joining the FT and she said in a very deadpan way that no, that she was a “dry hire”.
- Local news for local people: Back in February the local council voted through some changes to school catchments that would keep all of the city’s schools viable by rebalancing the catchments, and give more opportunity to some children to attend different schools if they lived in a catchment area where there was only one school. Following the successful council vote, local parents and some governors from local schools objected to every single change the council had made. The objections (a great many of them) went to the schools adjudicator who is able to either uphold the changes or revert them if they find them to be improper or have been made improperly. This Monday, to my delight, the adjudicator finally dropped a 150 page document containing a clinical dissection of every single objection, and upheld all but two of the council’s changes.
- My favourite objection was that the changes are sexist because if they resulted in longer travel times to schools it would be the objector’s wife who had to deal with that, and reduce her working hours, because she earns less than him. If you’d like to see a serious consideration by a serious person as to if these changes are in fact discriminatory against women, that is covered in section 433.