The website of Alice Bartlett

Week 393: Aristocrapts

2026-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

I used cursor to give this blog a side-bar. It took about 20 minutes to get it how I liked which is definitely less time that it would have taken me to push the problem through my grey matter. I don’t know. It’s the future! Take it!
John Allsopp on AI and the paradigm shift.
Mark Ridley on a year of using agents
Matt Jones on clocks and AI
I was ill at the beginning of the week so I watched a whole 3ish hour Tony Blair documentary in one sitting. I guess this is what it’s like to be middle aged.
I turned 39 this week and to my great pleasure I have a birthday twin in the office, so we bought a massive cake for everyone 🐟
On Wednesday I went to Hackney Wick and enjoyed Russell’s birthday. Phil and I got there early and had a timely pizza and a good chat before the wait for pizzas stretched to an hour and the room got a bit too noisy for a good chat.
I took Thursday off so I could avoid the brutal home by midnight back out again at 7 that the double office day requires. I also took Friday off because I am really self-indulgent.
[SLEB SPOTTING] I’ve seen a lot of famous people in the last few months. Louis Theroux in thr dark on a bike with no lights, Maisie Adam strolling through Soho, Helena Bonham Carter in our office building, and this weekend, Katie Price outside my kids swimming lesson.
Wee man has been playing a lot of Mariokart and he keeps unlocking new outfits for his characters through picking up “smiley bags” as the kids call them. One of the themes for outfits is “Aristocrat”, although he pronounces it “Aristocrapt”. He doesn’t know what an aristocrat is so he keeps telling me facts about them that don’t make any sense:
- Aristocrapts like to have meetings(?)
- Aristocrapts like to look at you very closely through one eye [because they have monocles]
- Aristocrapts make me think of a word in my head and that word is… “important”

Week 392: Good naturedly

2026-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

I feel rancid. For about a month I’ve felt vaguely ill, like I might be about to be ill but then somehow never quite getting sick. That flirtation with sickness has now turned into an actual cold.
Last week I was on the train home from London after some drinks and a guy behind me offered me some crisps and they were Squares. And I said “no thanks” and he said “what? you don’t like squares?” and I said “no I think it’s undignified when grown-ups eat children’s foods. I made fun of my colleague today for eating Squares actually” and he said “well hold on a sec, sounds like you were yucking on his yum. You can’t yuck on someone’s yum”.
The next day I apologised to my colleague for yucking on his yum, and told him in the future he can enjoy his yums without me yucking on them. And now every time I see him at lunch eating his tesco meal-deal I ask him if he is enjoying his yums and he tells me (in one way or another) to leave him alone.
The square-eating-lads-on-the-train went on to good naturedly share with me their worst opinions (mostly about obesity), and I was left trying to recall what terrible opinions I held in my 20s.

Week 391: Proper tea

2026-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

So warm on Wednesday! 18 degrees! March is here!
The mugs at Rightmove all say “I’m a proper-tea expert” which is quite a good pun.
The frogs have spawned. I’m disappointed to have not caught the frog-fest on camera, as I did last year, but never mind, at least there has not been a repeat of 2023’s bucket of dead frogs situation. Though I note that happened a week later in the year. So, plenty of time for a froggy massacre.
Whenever my kids say “can you put my socks on?” without fail I say “I don’t think they’ll fit me”. They absolutely hate it!!!!
Did you know that the petite knit woman has 5 children. And the world’s most successful indie knitting pattern business.
Had a bunch of rellys down to either spectate or participate in the Brighton Half Marathon this weekend. It meant I was able to get out in the garden and hack away at the many Firethorn bushes that dominate the garden and block out the light for the plants I’m trying to grow. I completely despise this plant. No common garden plant should be this spiky or grow this fast.
Wee man told me a good joke the other day:

What did Jupiter say to Neptune? “Get any closer and I’ll kick you in the bum!!!”

(I think the punchline is probably meant to be “Get any closer and I’ll kick Uranus!”?)

Week 390: 🌷🥾

2026-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Week 390.
E came home from school and told me she had been annoying the boy she sits next to in class by saying “… as only a true poet could say” after everything he said. I love it when the shy guys find their inner troll.
She got this phrase from a book called “Children’s Miscellany - Useless information that’s essential to know”. It was under a section called something like “How to annoy people” which also included “stare at someone’s knees for a long time, and then quietly say ‘Cheese knees, hmm, interesting’” which has become a family favourite.
What is a Spring Boot. 🌷🥾
How does the python interpret the egg. Fifteen years since Joe bravely asked the question and we are still no closer to the answers we deserve.
I went to see Wuthering Heights this week at the cinema with Kirsty and Kyle. Being an artless dummy who knows nothing, I have not read wuthering heights, and so I wasn’t burdened with opinions about what it should be like. I thought it was good, if a bit silly, and I could have done without all of the close-ups and loud sounds of slimy things.
Would absolutely love for it to stop raining now tbqh. No worries if not! thx!

Week 389: Cool bean

2026-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Sometimes when I hug one of the kids I imagine a rip in time that connects every hug I’ve ever given them sequentially to every hug I will ever give them. And that hug is just in the middle of this long chain of hugs. The kids DO NOT find this interesting when I tell them about it. lol.
The winter olympics always remind me of the big one being born because she was just a few weeks old when they started so we watched a lot of them while gazing into the face of our strange new family member.
“Mam I never want to drink fizzy water because it feels like my mouth is being electroputed when I drink fizzy water”. I love the feeling of having my mouth electroputed, but it is not for everyone.
I don’t think I am a particularly spoilt baby but the way I feel about my new workplace not having a fizzy water tap…
“Mam, I’m a cool bean, E is a clever cookie, you’re a good egg, and daddy is a big cheese”. Personally, I think I am the big cheese but it’s nice to know Chaz simply views me as a good egg.
A poem about my children:

I’m not a toilet flusher, I’m a toilet flusher’s son
I’m not going to flush the toilet, I’ll just leave that to my mum,
I’m not a toilet flusher, I’m a toilet flusher’s daughter,
I’m not going to flush the toilet, I don’t want to waste the water

I do think there is a line of art for toilets in the above. Could go along with the other thing I often think about with is a little card that says “We don’t pee in your pool so please don’t swim in our toilet!”
Feeling a bit February this week. Fantasizing about being completely flat to the point of disappearing as I fall asleep.

Week 388: Future people

2026-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

I realised this week that in the future people won’t be writing code to make websites they’ll be managing agents to make websites and it was a very depressing realisation.
So, I downloaded cursor. I don’t do lot of coding in my free time, I have too much knitting to do. Knitting is the future of coding. Nobody knits because they want a quick or cheap jumper, they knit because they love the craft. This is the future of writing code by hand. You will do it because you find it satisfying but it will be neither the cheapest or quickest way to write software.
Anyway, I do have this silly little blog so I used cursor to do some advanced spell checking. The results were quite good. It found some very cringe spelling errors. It also introduced some very strange ones. Feel free to enjoy those here on Github. I’m sure I could have gotten it not to do these things and be more powerful and whatever. I’m not actually dunking on cursor here, it’s about as good as I expected and this is definitely not a very hard problem to solve and I’m sure it can do more.
Every morning this week Chaz has come into my room, and woken me up with the cheerful phrase “Good morning good old lady”
This week I went to a two day off-site. I can’t say much about it probably but it was very fun, in particular hanging out with one of the sales leads for the North of England, who couldn’t play one of the team building games because it required making facial expressions she couldn’t do because of all of her botox. I want to go on some sales calls with her. Absolute hun. Great craic.

Week 387: Very simple game

2026-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

Good evening. A lot of rain eh?
I don’t recommend being the only parent in a partnership with an intact pelvis and scapula, but the patient is slowly recovering.
Thanks to Denise I lost an embarrassing amount of time to this very simple game this week.
We’ve made it to February and on February 5th we will have a 5pm sunset in Brighton

Week 386: Inflammation

2026-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

You could tell things were going OK for me last week because I managed to publish my weeknotes on Saturday morning. “Surely nothing of note will happen in the next 36 hours” I thought.
Then, in keeping with many previous weeks in January, some bones got broken. This time it was Lachie, coming off his mountain bike, breaking his pelvis and shoulder.
The injuries can be summed up by the following Dr’s quotes: “The structural integrity of the pelvis is intact”, “you are young so it should heal fast”, “impressive inflammation - that is going to hurt a lot”.
One of our friends is a surgeon at the hospital and generously came over to give us a personalised tour of Lachie’s skeleton scans which was very cool and helpful in understanding what was hurting and why.
The house of cards that was my childcare plans has been annihilated, of course, but the local parent crew has come together to help us out.
Did you know the A&E in Brighton was built when the city was approximately 60,000 and now it’s 140,000.

Week 385: Storm man

2026-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

Only 15 weeks until my 400th weaknote. I’ll be 39 by then. And have had our 10th wedding anniversary. And E will have turned 8.
Running chat. I am slow. At park run I walk directly to the back of the pack and then I stay there, with all the other plodders. It’s reassuring that some of the plodders are younger than me, and some are older and some are women and some are men. The Park Run website gives you your age grading (ie - for your age, are you fast or slow as a percentage) At 45.74% I am definitely slow. But… if I keep going and never slow down, I don’t need to actually improve my speed to get a better age grading. Time is going to do that work for me. So with this in mind I did some maths to work out how old I have to be to be the same speed I am now, but have the same age grading as Lachie currently does. And it turns out if I maintain my current pace until I am 80 years old, I will be as good as him. So! Great! See you in 40 years!
On Thursday at 1am Chaz woke us up by barfing. Beginning 2 days off school with him flopping around looking rather peely-wally. So far nobody else has gotten sick and I remain optimistic. Half of his class seemed to be out with this bug. I’m sure it is nothing to do with the running water being broken at the school in the earlier part of the week.
I’ve cast on the Petite Knit Storm Man Sweater, the first thing I’ve ever knit for Lachie. I think it will take me at least 3 months to knit, but maybe 6. Ready right in time for summer. The reason I decided to finally knit Lachie a jumper is because I kept seeing men in nice jumpers and thinking - cor that jumper looks great - and then I realised I could significantly increase my chances of seeing a man in some nice knitwear if I knit a sweater for Lachie. You must be the change you want to see in the world. This sweater is also available as a woman’s pattern meaning the avenue of me and Lachie having matching jumpers is available should I want to pursue that aesthetic.

Yearnotes 2025

2026-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

Year twelve.

The Biggy-Smalls

The kids are doing well, small guy completed his first year of school and seems to grudgingly accept the concept. Today he read a dinosaur name out of an encyclopedia of dinosaurs which might be the first time he has ever decided for himself that reading is a useful skill.

Big guy is a voracious reader. We can’t seem to get enough books for her and now have a well practiced routine of going to the charity shops on London road and buying every Tom Gates, Wimpy Kid and Horrid Henry book we find.

This is very soppy but I do just love these two little pickles. I love looking at their beautiful faces and they make me laugh most days.

You Better Werk

In about April of 2025 I decided it was time for me to get a different job. It took quite a while to find one, starting with just getting up to a decent standard of job interview skill to be able to adequately explain what I’d been doing for the past 10 years.

In December I started a new job at Rightmove which is going well so far. Nice people, lots of things to do. It’s really unpleasant changing jobs tbh, I could have just marinated at the FT for another 5 years easily, but it was time to - forgive the linkedin speak - step out of my comfort zone and now, here I am, uncomfortable.

While I was in my job finding era I gave a talk on LDX3’s Director+ track about setting a technical strategy. I thoroughly enjoyed the exercise and the research phase - bringing me to Peter Senge’s panpipe garnished audiobook (The fifth discipline) was a particular highlight. This work also fed directly into helping the FT define it’s technical strategy - the resulting work being something I’m really proud of, despite leaving shortly after we launched it.

Everything I Made

I’ve stopped taking photos of things because I don’t enjoy doing it, and maybe this isn’t interesting without something to look at, but here is a list of all of the things I knitted or sewed in 2025.

M&M September coat - very nice, almost too nice, I find it hard to wear it because I don’t want to get it dirty or get kid mess on it.
A new M&M TN31 Parka - very nice and does not have the same problem as the September coat
M&M Winnie Pyjamas - too short in the body, quite a lot of work (uh, obviously). Trouser pattern could do with some side pockets.
A Curlew top, a lovely pattern but not made for someone with my proportions. I did enjoy making the pattern adjustments though.
A Bantam vest - A classic. My 5th probably.
M&M Saltmarsh skirt - Smash hit, very wearable, very nice in summer.
A Sophie knitted hood in alpaca, which is a bit itchy >:(
Two hats with ear flaps and bobbles for the kids
A Petit Knits Friday Knitted T-Shirt which I love
A Favourite Things T-shirt which is, very annoyingly, also a bit too itchy and I will make again with a less itchy yarn

Everything I Read

I am not good at media criticism, as you will see. I don’t think about things that deeply and I don’t enjoy thinking about the things I’ve read that deeply. I have to say this because you guestures at friends on the world wide web are so good at it and I enjoy reading your reckons.

Paper Books:

Crying in H-mart - Michelle Zauner. Fine. Learnt a lot about Korean food. ★★★☆☆
What I talk about when I talk about running - Haruki Murakami. A pleasant and easy before bed read. A different way of thinking about running. ★★★★☆
Yellowface - R F Kuang. Great holiday read. A bit too inside baseball sometimes (main protag is a novelist sooo….) ★★★★☆
Pirenesi - Susanna Clarke. Tore through this over chirstmas. I did have to google if it was important to remember all of the stuff about all of the rooms, but it wasn’t. ★★★★★

Audio Books:

Fiction:

One of us - Elizabeth Day. I really enjoyed the previous in this series - The Party. This was a bit less compelling, but it did get me through a lot of painting my office. ★★★☆☆
Caledonian Road - Andrew O’Hagan. Shovelled a lot of topsoil to this. Fine. ★★★☆☆
Fly wild swans: My mother, myself and China - Jung Chang. Not as good as the original but still a great listen ★★★★☆
Really Good, Actually - Moira Helsey. I can’t remember this. ★★☆☆☆
The First Bad Man - Miranda July. Grim, couldn’t finish it. ☆☆☆☆☆
Paradise City - Elizabeth Day. Bit boring. ★★☆☆☆
All Fours - Miranda July. This Miranda July is why I bought the other Miranda July. This was weird and interesting and a bit gross but mostly good. ★★★★☆
Galapagos - Kurt Vonnegut. Fantastic. Loved it.
Soldier Sailor - Clare Kilroy. A painful beautiful story about motherhood. Loved it. ★★★★☆

Non-Fiction

Careless people - Sarah Wynn Williams. An exposé on Facebook. Terrifying but also at times quite annoying. ★★★★☆
The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge. Lots of things I’m still thinking about. ★★★★☆
The five dysfunctions of a team - Patrick Lencioni. Good, easy to read. Useful ideas. ★★★★☆
Thinking in Systems - Donella H. Meadows. I cannot remember this at all although my Audible says I’ve read it… … ?????
Some kids I taught and what they taught me - Kate Clanchy. I liked the central thesis of the book (send your kids to public school) but the writing is (as has been discussed) at times problematic. ★★★☆☆

Other Events

Class Divide

At the end of last year I said some things about Class Divide, and the work I’d been doing with them. In March I gave a speech at a council meeting in support of the changes. It was extremely nerve-wracking, which is strange because I’ve spoken for longer about more complicated things in front of more people but this… this was a whole different thing.

The changes were voted through by a massive majority. The changes were then challenged very thoroughly by the local parents, and in September those challenges were forensically debunked by the adjudicator.

In the meantime I’ve been doing bits where I can for Class Divide, mostly around getting better transport links for children to whichever schools they end up at.

As a leaving gift I asked my colleagues to send some money over to the Crew Club, a youth club doing amazing work, in Whitehawk. They raised a frankly astonishing £800ish quid, which the FT then matched up to £500.

France 2025

Per my goals described in my last year round up, I did finally manage to get the family on a boat and into the great nation of France. We went to a eurocamp type place with several very good swimming pools. We had a good time, we will go back. Next time I’d like to plan a bit more before we go?

Running

Partly because I knew I was going to move jobs and I wanted to have the stress-outlet of running, and partly because its very obvi that you should exercise, I did couch to 5k again and was quite enjoying 3 5k runs a week until I realised my hamstring was just always sore and getting worse. So I’ve had to slow down on that while I work out why that is. My chatGPT physio says it’s because my glutes aren’t strong enough. I should probably see a real physio.

Some Pics as Proof of Life

Sorry about the broken toe images.

A Review of My 2025 Goals:

Get everybody passports and go to France. Eat a baguette! Enjoy a croissant! ✅
Continue with the exercise, following a foot-related pause. ✅
Keep driving. - ummmmm I mean, yeah but also not as much as I should have done. ✅

My 2026 aims:

Maybe none? Just the obvious ones. Work, happy family, don’t spontaneously give up on running (again).

The End

Here are the rest of my yearnotes: (2024,2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014).