The website of Alice Bartlett | Weaknotes

Week 395: Bird ladies

2026-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

Good day my beauties.
Sometimes you’re on top of things, and sometimes they are on top of you.
Friday night Lachie spent the night being violently sick. Seems like food poisoning, only we both ate the same thing all day, so hard to see why I’m fine. [Because my immune system is so tonks perhaps? All that kombucha maybe?]
My first brew of kombucha is done, bottled and ready to carbonate. Lachie says it smells of vinegar and he does not like it. All the more booch for me baby! And every person that comes to my house. You’re all going to be forced to try it.
Went to Ye Olde Mitre on Weds with a former colleague and it was very theraputic. Lots of deep laughs. Some very good advice which I executed the next day. Wednesday night was the night the temperature plummeted so we were shivering like frail little bird ladies by the end. Ye Olde Mitre is a funky little place isn’t it?
I’ve been collecting envelope privacy patterns for the last 5 years. Rarely find a new one these days but if you’re sat on any ancient envelopes, we here at alicebartlett.co.uk would love to take them off your hands! What is my plan for these many many pieces of patterned paper? your guess is as good as mine.
Last week I marbled a load of paper. One of the traditional uses for marbled paper is book binding. Separately I’ve been thinking about how to handle these (now eight) years of weaknotes, maybe take them off of the internet and put them somewhere else?
Anyway, these two ideas bumped into each other (to quote Matt Webb) and so now I think I’m going to print and then book bind my weaknotes. I’ve sent the first year to a printers for a trial (it cost me £13.43), and if it doesn’t suck then I’ll print them all.
“These people have not consented to be bit-players in my self indulgent psychodrama” - Stuart Lee talking about why he doesn’t talk about his family on stage/during press, but also a good thing to consider when writing weeknotes - although I will admit Stuart Lee has a slightly larger following than alicebartlett.co.uk.

Week 394: Beautiful schlopp

2026-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

Rise and shine.
I am still feeling a bit under the weather from the virus I caught 2 weeks ago. Sleeping a lot, continual sinus pressure, phlegm. Lachie was away in Switzerland this week so every night after the kids went to sleep at about 8:30 I took myself directly to bed too.
Today’s best drawing: Aristocrapts snake party. The snakes have top hats and monocles, and surround a multi-tiered birthday cake.
The good thing about this blog is that, OK yeah I did use some Cursor to create a sidebar, for science, the body text is always gonna be 100% meat-made. Is it going to be well written? Useful? Interesting? Absolutely not, but at least you know these anodyne thoughts are coming to you by me painstakingly typing them out.
Someone sent me an introduction meeting invite “Via Microsoft Co-pilot” this week. That’s one way to make a first impression I guess!
Can’t believe some people choose to spend their singular wild and precious life posting to LinkedIn.
Schlopp schlopp, beautiful schlopp, beautiful schlopp with a cherry on top.
This weekend is going to be a 10/10.
- I’ve spent the last month making the space under the window in out bedroom into a reading nook. This has mainly involved making a padded foam seat for the bench and some cushions. Now E has discovered it and I’ll often find her lying fully flat on her back reading her Tom Gates book in the sun.
- I’ve finished knitting Lachie’s storm sweater. It took me 2 months to knit - I had predicted 3, so not bad!
- I’ve started brewing kombucha after my brother-in-law gave me some a few weeks ago and I liked it.
- On Saturday the whole fam went for a bike ride into town and then along the sea front to a café for lunch. Cycling in the sunshine with the kids is absolutely the perfect way to spend time. Then I went on to a paper marbling class in Shoreham-by-sea, which was extremely relaxing, although I’d venture to say it would have been even more relaxing if the other people in the class hadn’t kept saying “oooh isn’t this relaxing” every 5 seconds.
- The peas and beetroots have germinated, today I will plant the tomatoes.

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.