What I'm doing now

Updated 23 October 2025 from Liverpool

Running a business

Working part time on the treasure hunt company. We’re in 16 cities now and it’s interesting and challenging. Still love working with my business partner and great friend Ian. It pays the bills while giving lots of flexibility so I really can’t complain.

In August we were in The Guardian!

Cautiously experimenting with LLMs

I’m simultaneously excited and deeply sceptical about large language models.

Recently I’ve learned that Claude Code is great at non-coding stuff like boring life admin.

For example: I’ve made a directory with subdirectories house/ and bike/. Inside are text files containing scrappy model numbers of appliances, user manuals, notes about repairs, part numbers etc.

Now I can ask things like “What tyres does my bike need?”.

So far this works very well. CC is great at using tools like grep to find relevant notes. And LLMs aside, it’s extremely helpful for me to organise myself this way.

Dad daughter afternoons

Taking our daughter to school and spending three afternoons a week together.

At home we have plant club, robot club, gardening club and we get out a lot on the electric bike.

As it gets cold and dark, it’s trickier. I try to have us spend as much time in forests and nature as possible. We practise “slow parenting”, talking a lot, trying not to rush. It’s lovely. She’s growing up fast.

Organising a climate talk

I have the honour of organising a talk in Liverpool for Jonathon Porritt.

He’s promoting his fabulous new book, Love, Anger & Betrayal in which he tells the story of 26 young Just Stop Oil activists.

I’m doing the admin of liasing with the venue, promoting to local networks and hosting the evening itself. It’ll be great but it’s hard not to feel nervous!

Re-learning lost skills

I’m currently weaning myself off my dependency on Google Maps on my smartphone.

I’m memorising bus routes and landmarks for the semi-regular places I visit.

I’ve done two campervan journeys with an AA map and a scrap of paper pinned to my dashboard.

This is part wanting to be a more capable human and partly preparing for the next major storm, power cut, AWS outage etc.