2023

I am now a respectably married man. That’s all that happened in 2023.

Yeah, OK, other things happened. The world continues to be on fire, possibly worse. I remain in the same job, and remain happy there. I have not moved house. I failed to LARP, but I have done some very rewarding tabletop gaming, and am looking to continue that in 2024.

Plans for 2024 include a honeymoon, and, if I am very lucky, a new kitchen. I continue to appreciate my immense and undeserved good fortune, and can only wish that everyone was so lucky.

2022

Well, given that I made exactly one post on this site this year, it’s not really hard to guess what the big news of the year was: I got engaged. Miranda continues to be the very best, and I remain astounded at my good fortune. Next year’s big news will, I hope, be kind of predicatable as a result, because if anything happens to knock “got married” off the top spot, something will have gone badly wrong.

Outside of that: did my first LARP and my first in-person gaming since pre-COVID toward the end of last year. I was delighted to do both, and look forward to more next year.

Other than that, I don’t really have any significant personal achievements or milestones to note, just another trip around the sun.

2022 felt like te year the world established a new normal. It’s a bit too willing to let people catch COVID and live with the poorly-understood long-term consequences for my liking, but we do seem to have kind of collectively decided to treat this disease (which is nothing like a cold) like a cold. It’s a little maddening, but I can’t deny that I am taking part in the “return to normality” myself.

My biggest risk factor is mitigated by the fact that I am still only in the office a handful of times in a year, and I’m certainly happy for it to remain that way. Work wise: very happy at my current employer, managing a small team of devs building internal tools. Steady, sensible work.

The world, is, of course absolutely on fire. Cost of living crisis, poltiical turmoil at home and abroad, but my little corner of it is, so far, lucky enough.

It’s hard to have much optimism for the world going in to 2023, but on a purely personal level I am looking forward to it. I hope it’s as good for all my friends, near and far, as it looks like it will be for me.

Old Enough To Know Better

In a week’s time this blog will be old enough to drink in the US. 21 years of my drivel is more than anyone needs, but I’ve been re-reading the stuff from my mid-to-late 20s (I needed to look something up and fell down a bit of a hole), and it’s simultaneously wince-inducingly egotistical (with the caveat that a lot of that period was written for Livejournal, which had it’s own set of content norms) and well, actually quite funny in parts, if I say so myself.

I’d try and write a bit more like that now, but I don’t think I can do it without also invoking the wince-inducing parts. Obviously, 40-something year old me is enjoying how much 20-something year old me thought he knew. My major sin appear to have been being far too impressed with my own cleverness, and when 60-something year old me reads this, I imagine he’ll think much the same. Still, if you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?

All credit to those of you who put up with me in my twenties and are still around – you obviously have the patience of saints. (Those of you who put up with me now will get thanked when I’m in my 60s, obviously. Stick around.)

But wow, the number of people I’ve more or less lost touch with from that era is both humbling and bit saddening. (In as much as they were lovely people I was hanging out with.) Obviously, that’s just life at work – there are only so many hours in the day, and people grow and change, and there really only so many relationships one can properly maintain.

I could fill this post with a list of names of people I’d love to catch up with in the manner of a school reunion, but there’s no real social construct for a 10/20 year reunion of a random set of friends that some group members have drifted apart from – the closest was the V-reunion we had the other year, but the other friend groups have nothing like it. (And in many cases are still going reasonably strong, I just don’t see the people involved in the flesh more than once in a blue moon.)

There’s a decent number of the obvious names that I’m connected to on Facebook, but it’s absolutely not the same – but then we’re all (I was about to write 10, but it’s closer to) 20 years older, and doing memes spelling out our usernames in the titles of albums we like is probably something we’ve outgrown. And there’s still more that I’m definitely not connected to any more. Casualties of my not being on Facebook at the time Livejournal died, as much as anything I imagine.

But those various social-network memes of “if you’re reading this, even if we don’t speak much, post a memory of me” make quite a lot of sense in that context. They’re a way to assert/check for a form of intimacy that social media robs us of, and the last year has particularly robbed us of.

I’m obviously not going to do one of those, but in the unlikely event that the people I’ve dropped out of regular contact with – those of the V I don’t see much any more, the varous semi-reformed-goths, the Saturday afternoon coffee-opposite-the-British-Museum people, the London actual goth crowd of Slimelight and various other clubs circa 2004-2007 are reading this: yes, I do still think about you with a smile. (And not just when I’ve been re-reading old blog entries.) If anyone is organising a reunion, do let me know.

Home Ownership!

Well, we’ve owned a house for slightly more than a month, and we’ve been living in it for exactly four weeks today. Somehow, it feels longer. That may be because the internet has yet to be installed, thanks to a series of fuckups by Openreach, and I’m still hotspotting off a phone, so most of the things I would normally do to pass the time are off the table. But it’s not like there hasn’t been plenty to do.

But still bit by bit, the place is starting to take shape. It’s got any number of little niggles – the cooker is too small, there’s a horrible cupboard in my office, and if we tear it out, the carpet will look dreadful – but we own a house.

I’ve been pleased to find that for almost every niggle, there’s been something I like more than I expected to (because, like I said last time, we bought it on the basis of 5 mins viewing). The carpets are better than I thought, the red in the bedroom is much more liveable with, most of the kitchen cupboards are pretty decent…

We’ve already had the first bit of work done – ripping out a hideous old 70s gas fireplace in the dining room – and we’re booking people to get new floors in downstairs, which will hopefully take care of the rather chilly draftiness we’re getting with the current exposed floorboards. (They look nice, and they’re characterful, but they’re not remotely insulated at all, and we like to be warm.)

Each week brings something new, or at least something booked to look forward to – this week, our dining room table and chairs get delivered. It’ll be nice to actually eat at a table again. And we have a list of ongoing stuff – painting and decorating, cabinetry, furniture and so on that’ll last us the next few years, in a one-step-at-a-time sort of way.

I am 100% sure that all this rubbish, and the fact that I have unquestionably become someone whose major topic of conversation is “their new house and what they’re going to do with it” makes me wildly tedious at the moment. In my defense, I’ve been renting for 20 years, living with a place that I liked living in, but could not change. Now, we live somewhere we really can make our own, and Covid means there really isn’t anything else going on in my life right now. But I am at least aware of how fortunate I am, even as I bore my friends rigid. That makes it better, right?

Housebuying, part 2

I won’t be publishing this until I get the news that contracts have been exchanged (because that’s the point everything is locked in, and I refuse to jinx it by saying we’re done in public until we are) but we’re a whisper away from that now. It was supposed to be today, but I just got the email telling me it’ll be tomorrow now.

And that’s been painfully characteristic of the last 3 months. A constant nagging sense of waiting for someone else to do something, that they’re nearly ready to do. Nearly, but not quite.

And now here we are at the end of the process. Or rather, the start of the next process. Frankly, the rather more daunting one: actually moving. Packing the accumulated detritus of 20 years in one place, and transferring it to somewhere it’ll spend the next couple of decades. I have a 30 item to-do list assembled, all of which is waiting on the final confirmed go date before I can do any of it. Some of it is mundae stuff like “cancel gym membership”. Some of is no less mundane, but is sufficiently new to me that it feels less mundane that I have to do it. (“Buy washing machine”.) And some of it is stuff I never thought I’d get to do in my life (“get quotes to re-do the double glazing”).

It still feels absolutely mad to me that we have shelled out close to seventy thousand pounds (and taken on more in debt obviously) to buy a house that we’ve been in for five minutes. I’ve spent longer deciding which pasta shape I want to buy in the supermarket before now.

But still: if all goes to plan, by the end of this week I’ll have life insurance, and a house. And I’m still not going to feel like a grown up.

Housebuying, Part 1

I’m sure I’ll want to add more to this in the future, hence the part 1.

So, at the start of the year, Miranda and I decided 2021 was going to be the year we bought somewhere to live. We thought we might just about have scraped together enough deposit money to get a toe-hold on the ladder, thanks to the latest round of freelancing I’ve been doing. (Thanks to a couple of surpises, and some fortutitous timing, we’re doing a bit better than that, but we didn’t know that when we started.)

So we went house hunting, and we’ve had an offer accepted, and mortgage approved. There’s a couple of survey-type hurdles to clear, and we’re very aware that nothing’s final until we’ve got the keys in our hands, but in the space of 4 weeks we’ve gone from “can we really do this?” to already being very much into the tedious part, where paperwork largely gets sorted out at one remove from us, and other people get their ducks in a row so that we eventually end up with a moving date.

The speed that this has gone from “a pipe dream” to “this is really happening” is little scary. And at the same time, it can’t possibly happen fast enough.

Tune in next time, when I’ll either be complaining about how the survey was terrible, and the house not fit for purchase, or about the sheer stress of moving after most of 20 years in one flat.

Maybe I Can Manage Monthly Updates

It’s not likely, though, is it? I remain lightly frustrated that the ongoing problem with pinboard’s RSS feed means my automated linkposts have gone the way of the dodo, so this place is getting nothing unless I remember it exists. Still, onwards…

So, COVID. Everything is halfway back to normal, and still deeply weird. Still full-time WFH, no serious prospect of that changing before the end of the year, I think. I went to pubs and restaurants last week, but I honestly felt guilty about doing it, and my plans for this week don’t involve leaving the house.

I’m back at the gym – I’m actually about to pause drafting this entry to go, because I have to book in advance for specific timeslots, to prevent overcrowding – and managing to go 5-6 days a week, which I’m pleased about.

That’s symptomatic of how the world feels at the moment – most things are open, but nothing’s the same as it was, and everything still feels like it’s a risk assessment to do anything, and everything could turn back into “don’t leave the house for any reason” at any moment. I suppose if there’s anything that I want to capture as an aide-memoire for this moment, it’s that – the oddity and precariousness of “normal life”.

Oh, and the awful sense that the worst is yet to come as the monsters running the country have clearly decided that they can hide the economic impact of their no-deal brexit in amidst the economic impact of COVID, and basically everything will be ruined forever.

And that sounds like a joke, but really it’s not. I don’t know how I can forgive the generation ahead of me, or apologise enough to the ones behind me. The gap between the lives of privilege that my parents enjoyed, and what I, and more importantly, my nieces, have to look forward to has never seemed starker. My parents got a free education, free healthcare all their lives, and then have been able to retire to a comfortable standard of living, and then their generation rolled the ladder back up after them to destroy their children and grandchildren’s future.

Well, that took a turn, didn’t it? I’ll stop now before I get really depressed.

Looking Back in Sorrow

So the comic writer Warren Ellis has been publically outed as a predatory individual. That’s both tremendously sad and, if I’m honest, not suprising. We all knew about it, in ways that seemed excusable at the time. We were wrong to think it was as excusable as we did.

I could write at length about it, but a) this isn’t about me, and b) someone else from that era has written at length about it, and done a better job that I might.

As Harris says in his article, it’s not about him, or me, or even (in some senses) really about Warren, but about a broader culture. But still, I, and many of my friends are reckoning with our small parts in that culture, and the things we did not say or do, and with hindsight, wish we might have, and how we can do better in future.

Mostly, of course, it starts with listening to, and believing, what women say about him, and men like him.

And selfishly, I just wish that was harder than it is.

Actual News

After weeks of feeling very “every day is the same”, it’s nice to have an actual change to report.

It’s been a marvellous couple of years with my current employer, but it’s time to move on – not least because the stress of working for a company that relies very heavily on airport travel for profitability was rather beginning to get to me. Ironically, now I’m moving on, they’ve probably got a better chance of getting through this, as it means their ongoing costs are down by my salary at least, and we’re parting amicably.

I’m off to work for a law firm, building internal systems for use by lawyers and clients, that I won’t name here just yet, because I haven’t seen any employee handbook for online conduct, and don’t want to accidentally screw things up before I even join the firm.

So, er, yeah, that’s the thing worth marking this week. I start in more or less exactly a month, and it’ll be interesting, trying to learn a new job while physically distanced from all my new colleagues, but I’m sure we’ll work it out. And it’ll be nice to be back on Laravel as my primary back-end development platform, and I’m going to need to learn Ember.js and get to grips with Tailwind rather better than I have to date, which is nice, because it’ll bring me a bit more up to date – at least on the CSS side.

Parsnip and Garlic Soup

Miranda has challenged me to cook 12 new (to me) vegetarian dishes this year. 6 of them must be vegan, and 6 of them must involve a fake meat of some kind. (Obviously, I could/almost certainly will do something that ticks both boxes.) . I thought I’d write them up as I go, for no particular reason.

Here’s the first. You will need:

  • About a kilo of parsnips.
  • 2-3 large onions.
  • One bulb of garlic.
  • Store cupboard ingredients.

Chop the parsnips into roughly one inch chunks. I didn’t bother peeling them. Peel the garlic cloves. Toss them all together in a roasting tin with olive oil, and any extra herbs/spices you fancy. (I used rosemary and thyme, because I had some fresh ones as leftovers, but I think you could vary the spicing on this wildly.) . Bung that in a 180-degree fan oven to roast.

While they’re roasting, finely slice the onions. Throw them in a stockpot/whatever large saucepan you’re making the soup in with olive oil, and a bit of sugar and salt. If you’re like me, throw a star anise in there, too. Cover, leave to sweat on a medium heat. Stir occasionally so they don’t stick.

It’ll take about 20-30 mins to roast the parsnips. Depending on how fast you sliced the onions, they’ll be done about the same time – you want the onions just to be colouring slightly. Fish out the star anise, then add roasted parsnips and garlic to the onions. Add 1.5 litres of hot veg stock. Leave to simmer for a bit, then blend them all up. If it’s too thick, let it down with more veg stock.

I finished this off with some oat cream, chilli flakes, and a tiny splash of liquid smoke.

Makes enough for 4-6 portions.