I’ve realised that I’ve been holding back loads of stuff here, personal stuff, worky stuff, just general life stuff, certainly political stuff. On the one hand I feel the same risk that I hear from other people that stops them blogging at all and keeps them in walled gardens. On the other, I’m not even posting very much to the walled gardens. I’m hiding everything, because of the perceived need to hide something(s). And I’m not trying to tell anyone else what to do, but for me, I know that the risk of not sharing is greater than the risk of over-sharing. And while I’m kind of OK with insta and bluesky, I’m not posting much at all to FB and nothing to Substack – so it’s not even consistent (which might be ok?) and it all tends towards stuff staying on my hard drive or other places that only I can see.

So, if we met up for a coffee and you wanted to hear all my news, and all you’d got was my blogging and social media “output” then there’d be a lot of me talking and you probably being surprised. Because that’s the other effect of walled-garden-itis – the tendency to just share the good, shiny, positive stuff. And it’s not that I’ve got loads of bad, dull, negative stuff, just that life is life, y’know?

So what is there?

We’re living in Godalming now, did you know that? Yeah. Lovely. Very green and leafy. Our road only has houses on one side, the other side of the road is the back gardens of another street and the back gardens are all very long, and we’re higher up the hill than that other street and so our view consists of people’s garages, back hedges and then the trees that line the main road in the distance. At this time of year it’s gorgeous, so many greens. Even in the winter it’s heartwarming to look out over a bit of valley.

We have a baby. Yeah. Lovely. We had expected to do this earlier, like when we got married 11 years ago, but things didn’t work out until now. So I was thinking I’d be a dad again in my early fifties, rather than my early sixties, but it still works. in utero we called him Baby Nugget and we’re going to continue to do that online until he can express some other view. At home, he’s Nuggy, Nuggy-noo, Nugs, Nugmeister, Prince Nugbert, etc. And that’s how it will be here and everywhere else online. So if you have inside knowledge, please keep it to yourself and revel in being an insider. He is totally adorable, the best baby in town, smiley, and friendly all the time (except when he isn’t). He’s here in my office right now, in the moses basket, listening to Chopin Nocturnes while I write.

I’m finding that there’s a lot of muscle memory in child-rearing. If you didn’t know, the last time I did this was in the early nineties. There are some things that have changed, in terms of the advice that professionals give you, but there are also the hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that have changed much more slowly. Writing in June 2026, we’re getting ready to give him a first taste of solid foods. Back in the day, that meant a lot of puree-ing and/or buying ready-made gloop. Now we are to give them (within reason) what we’re eating, just in smaller non-chokeable pieces.

One of the choices we’ve made is for us to attempt equal responsibility in child care. One of my favourite bits is taking him to church every week (we alternate between the URC in Guildford and the Unitarians in Godalming. Both congregations are lovely and he’s a big hit with everyone.

Laura is being paid her full salary to do her bit. My paternity leave is less formal and less well paid (not paid). But I’ve had a great six months to not only spend time with him, but get my head better around the sort of work that I want to be doing in this next phase, work that can allow me to spend more time with him and Laura than I did in the olden days when I was commuting to London every day and beating my head against brick walls at the Audit Commission.

And then there’s where I am with the old ADHD. I’ve been diagnosed for five years now and I feel like I’m getting the hang of it. Although there’s still a lot of undoing to face up to – and as with any process of learning and unlearning, there are always new things lurking behind the last thing you feel you’ve conquered. Forty years of either holding my nose, sucking it up and battling on or else wondering why work just didn’t work for me, why there was so much promise and so little delivery. There’s also a lot of crossover with my addiction recovery, with me realising which bits of my inventory aren’t actually character defects but traits of a differently working brain. The end result is the same – letting go of trying to fix them by myself – but it’s good to let go of some of the judgement, that was only reinforcing the judgement I was getting from people who didn’t get what was going on either. The key phrase from my Upper Sixth year head’s report is “he frustrates us all, and in the end himself, by burying his talents”. And that was 43 years ago, I didn’t get much less frustrated in the meantime and I know it drove lots of other people mad too.

I’ve written about 1000 words here and I haven’t even got close to talking here about paid work and I think I’ll leave it until there are actual things to announce, but I think it’s enough to say that I’m not retired (!) and whatever I do needs to fit into the context of all the previous paragraphs.