Eleven years of yearnotes. Looks like we made it – look how far we’ve come, my baby.

2024 – good for the job, good for the family, bad for the garden, bad for global politics if you’re not an evil maniac.

The Biggy-Smalls

Who even remembers July 2021–July 2022 – the year of seizures? Not me, that’s for sure. Luckily, Google Photos does and sometimes “helpfully” shows me a video to remind me. Even though I have made it very clear that I never want to see those videos. Wee man has now made it to the two-year milestone of being seizure-free, and we are tapering the brain medications that he desperately needed two years ago. Please manifest another incident-free year. If we get to the end of 2025, I will begin to relax.

Wee man also started school this year, and now I am experiencing what I already knew from observing it in E’s year – school is rough for July/August-born boys. Complete inability to sit still aside, he is learning with his peers, and I’m very proud every time he tells me how to spell something.

C’s biggy-small sister becomes more like herself every day, and I love to see it. She’s very patient with her little brother and kind to her friends.

Both children are still primarily powered by peanut butter.

You Better Werk

This year will be my 10th year at the Financial Times. I had a great year at work – found my rhythm in the role, attracted/hired some great people to the leadership team to complement the already smashing Principal Engineers. The total team size will soon be 70+ engineers.

Some of the highlights:

• We replaced our access model (for consented users only) with AI this year, which is pretty wild when you think about it!
• Two high-profile elections! One with only six weeks’ notice! Thanks for that, Rishi!
• Weathered a lot of DDoS attacks. Keep trying, guys 😘!
• Massive improvements to article and homepage capabilities – lots more flexibility for the editorial team to tell stories in the way they want to.

House and Garden

We redecorated my daughter’s bedroom – fresh and beautifully sanded floors and lilac walls. Every time I go in, I feel like hard, boring jobs are worth the effort, even if they take a lot longer than I ever expect them to.

I also paid a man to rebuild our veg beds at the bottom of the garden.

And, of course, then a startled cat ran so hard into a panel of our greenhouse while trying to get out of it that the panel fell out and smashed into at least 100,000 pieces of glass. It took me several months to get all the glass out of the beds and the gravel.

The rebuilding of the rotting beds made it pretty impossible to grow anything except tomatoes, some runner beans, and five cucamelons, making an easy-to-improve-upon target for 2025.

Did get 3.5kg of grapes.

I Passed My Driving Test

In February, I passed my driving test. Unfortunately, I still absolutely hate driving and find it hard to find reasons to do it. However, I don’t want to be a 60-year-old who can’t drive. That has always been the goal. And I have 20 years to meet that goal. This must be achievable.

Class Divide

In September, I started thinking about how PTAs can magnify inequalities between schools in richer areas and poorer areas.
Which led me to a podcast called “Class Divide,” a podcast series about the closure of a secondary school in East Brighton and its lasting effects on the community. I listened to all of it on the sunny days of September while picking broken glass out of gravel.

Then in October, the council announced it would be consulting on some big changes to the secondary catchment areas. Changes that would mean, for me at least, that the kids might end up at different schools to the ones we expected, but also changes aimed at tackling the 40% attainment gap in Brighton and Hove’s secondary schools.

These proposals are really unpopular with parents like me, but I didn’t feel like I was hearing a very balanced view on them in the school WhatsApp messages, so I went to Class Divide and said, “What do you think about these proposals? Are they any good?” And they said, “We’re doing a podcast episode about them… would you like to be on it?” And I said, yeah, alright.

Then Class Divide put out a call for volunteers to help with their campaigning, and I thought, yeah, OK, I’ll do that too, actually. That would be interesting and fun.

So that’s a lot of what I got up to towards the end of the year – helping with comms, thinking about schools, watching council meetings, emailing councillors, and, of course, being on a podcast.

Some Pics as Proof of Life

Here ya go, pal.

A Review of My 2024 Goals:

1. ❌ Leave the country for a holiday. I haven’t been abroad since 2018, and I am super embarrassed about that. I think we’ll take a little family holiday to France if everyone’s annual leave will allow it.
2. ✅ I know I say this every year, but I do need to move my body more, somehow. Probably a class that I feel too much peer pressure to not do…?
3. ✅ Go to a dentist.
4. ✅ Pass my driving test.

This Year:

1. Get everybody passports and go to France. Eat a baguette! Enjoy a croissant!
2. Continue with the exercise, following a foot-related pause.
3. Keep driving.

Less is more.

The End

Here are the rest of my yearnotes: (2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014).