It’s also a deeply frustrating game to play. It’s a team sport, but one where abject individual failure is almost guaranteed, particularly as a batter. The first scenario is you won’t actually be required to bat, because the batters ahead of you were good enough not to get out within the allotted number of overs. This is frustrating when you’ve spent the week practising or thinking about how you are going to play differently to the last game. The most common option is you get out to the middle, then get out, and have to trudge with a number of runs that you’re either content, or almost always, disappointed with. And in some very rare cases, you may still be in at the end of the innings, where you’ll likely be rue-ing not taking more risks and scoring more runs.

And yet, thousands of individuals put themselves through this pain each summery Saturday afternoon because there’s something addictive about bettering your score. It’s a sport that’s instinctively gamified, chock full of stats & averages.

Before Jacob was born, I was roped into playing for the local team. I was pretty terrible, but lucked one or two okay scores in the first season. The team weren’t too fussed as I was, and I quote, “another body on the pitch”. Despite a winter of practising and weekly summer net sessions, the second season was not any better.

After three years of absence, I was roped into another game on Saturday. I spent the week fretting, then preparing, then looking forward to it. I visualised exactly how I’d defend those first 10 or so balls to make sure I got my head back into the game. I went to the local nets with my wife and was very pleased with how solid my forward defense was, and even managed to showcase a few attacking shots with confidence and low risk.

And then the moment came where I strode out to bat. Expectations low, but with a real hunger to get off the mark and contribute something to the team. In came the first ball; a nice straight one. “Forward to it”, I thought; “head over the ball”. The bat came down to prod it back gently to the bowler, and all I heard was the rattle of the wooden bails behind me. To say I felt dejected would be an understatement. It wasn’t the game situation, nor the fact that family and friends were watching. It was the crushing realisation that cricket is not the game for me. A game I love to watch and dig into the nerdy details, and a game I so want to be good at. But it’s not happening.

I walked off and looked at my little family sitting on the boundary rope. My wife and I shrugged at each other and I headed back to get changed. I spent the rest of the innings in the park with Jacob, playing hide and seek and helping him up the climbing frame. It was wonderful.

I’m a much better Dad than I am cricketer, and that’s okay. I don’t need to spend my (and my family’s) Saturday afternoons getting mentally crushed by a game. Hobbies are good, particularly active ones, and I need to find a replacement. But I’ve got to the point of acceptance. Cricket’s not for me.

Spreadsheets are a passion of ours, so of course, we began tracking our visits, most importantly capturing how much it would have cost if we paid for each visit. Last week, after only 39 months, we broke even.

Breaking even is a little tenuous, as it’s pretty unlikely we’d have visited all these properties if we didn’t have membership, and even if we did, we’d have bought annual memberships (which takes about 12 years to pay off). But it’s a bit of fun to see how much we’ve saved.

A couple of months ago, I spotted a used one for a very reasonable cost and I just couldn’t resist. It arrived, and it was immediately clear why professionals used this—it’s an absolute tank of a unit. It’s 8KG and made of thick aluminium. The processor is removable and rackmountable. And it looks like a Christmas tree. I love it.

What’s super interesting is how it has clearly inspired the design of modern processors. Sure, there’s no touch screen and the LCD strip is dated, but there are also no buttons or switches to get broken on the road. You navigate the menu by twisting the footswitches themselves, which was way ahead of it’s time.

It doesn’t have any amp/cab modelling or drive effects, so amazingly, the sounds haven’t dated at all. Chorus hasn’t really changed since the 80’s, so they still sound great on a unit from the 00’s. It merrily fires out relay switches to change channels on my amp, has four powered effect loops for drive pedals, and is effortlessly controllable via MIDI, which I used in a gig at Christmas.

I’ve ended up selling my Strymon & Walrus Audio gear and have fully committed to this now historic (and in my opinion, timeless) piece of kit.

In doing so, I now realise that I’m very much getting old and nostalgic, not for things I had in my youth, but for things I couldn’t afford at the time. Next thing you know, I’ll be driving a Renault Avantime…

There have been some tremendous highs in amongst the lows, both personally, familially, and in my career; two wonderful holidays with Lauren & Jacob, delivering a meetup talk at long last, launching some exciting Utopia tools, watching Jacob take his first steps and say his first words (then pretty much not stopping talking!), being nominated and winning a Motorway award, organising a carol concert, and working with some incredibly smart folk at Motorway.

I’m so grateful for my friends, colleagues, and most importantly, family who’ve helped support us through the hospital trips, the sleepless nights, and the exhaustion. 2025 will be a year for saying ‘no’ more, and prioritising our family’s health and wellbeing over everything else. That’s the plan, anyway.

So long 2024 - it’s been a ride.

1. Dr's phonecalls
2. New teeth
3. A&E visits (strike that, it's 11 now)
4. Bottles of Calpol
5. Times sent home from nursery
6. Extreme fevers
7. Hand foot and mouth spots
8. 111 calls
9. Months of rashes
10. Sickness bugs
11. Positive COVID tests
    And...
12. Conjunctivitis infection

It’s fascinating how quickly Jacob picks up new words and concepts. He could easily identify these as ‘cups’, but then we went and confused things by adding attributes to the mix. It’s amazing to watch his brain re-map an item from a ‘cup’, to a ‘red cup’, to a ‘red cup with a dog on it’, to ‘a red cup with a dog on it, that’s number one in the stack of six’. He stumbles, of course, but so quickly his malleable sponge brain just accepts the colours, numbers and other attributes.

Anyway, I just remembered that shape-outside existed and thought I’d write something to use it.

Slack, or the channels I’m in, are silent overnight/on the weekend unless a server has caught fire or something. I can shut my laptop and move into the 5-9 knowing I won’t be badgered or pressured into working late/replying to managers outside of hours.

The once-a-week commute has been a godsend for Utopia progress, along with a couple of other side-projects. My colleagues are very smart, genuine, and spur me on to do better work.

I realise as I type that this just sounds like a paid ad, but I’m really just grateful. We made the decision to make this move as a family, for the family, and it’s really paid off. Sometimes it’s nice to celebrate that.

“I’m afraid it’s bad news”.

We didn’t know, but we already knew. Hands-held had turned to hands-grasped in the eternity between the scan commencing, and those fateful words. It was taking too long; there had to be a problem. And even though we knew, that phrase the poor sonographer must utter so many times a week closed the book that had barely been written.

A missed miscarriage is cruel. There was no indication of anything untoward, frankly the opposite. The morning sickness and the fatigue had plagued Lauren for the weeks leading up to the day. She’d been feeling rough. We’d had an earlier scan that seemed positive, and so we walked into the hospital blissfully ignorant of what was about to hit us. We’d parked at my sister’s and planned on walking back and celebrating with our scan photo in-hand. But instead, we staggered back to the car, texted that same phrase to her, and drove away in tears.

Our little one didn’t want to leave, so surgery was squeezed in before Christmas. The NHS staff were beyond compassionate throughout, giving us all the time and tea we needed, and treating the situation with tremendous dignity. It wasn’t the Christmas we expected, nor the 2022 we’d envisioned.

As friends gave birth around our due date, the grief and anger resurfaced. In therapy we tried to process what had happened. The grief of losing something or someone that never was. We mourned of the loss of our little one, and we mourned the abrupt ending of the dreams of who they’d become and what they’d achieve. It was confusing to separate the two.

Grief coalesced with guilt & fear during Jacob’s pregancy; how can we still feel sad when we have a baby on the way? What if it happens again? Bottling it up felt like the only solution. Every check-up was terrifying, convinced that phrase would rear it’s ugly head again. But thankfully it didn’t. Jacob arrived healthy, full of life & zeal this January. He’s turned our life around, whisked us off our feet, and brought such incredible joy.

And yet we still mourn. There are so many great analogies of grief and how it can blindside you from nowhere. The gaps will increase, but we know the waves will always hit. Distraction helps; last Christmas was such a blur in the run up to Jacob’s birth that we didn’t really have the time or headspace to stop and reflect on the day we found out. But this year, as we were putting up the decorations, we were both hit with another wave. It suddenly felt important to mark the day.

The precise date isn’t consequential. December 17th 2021 wasn’t the day our baby stopped growing, it was just the day we found out. But it’s as good a day as any. We lit a candle and took some time to sit, think, chat and cry. It was good, it was bad, but I’m so glad we did it.

They use fruit to help you visualise the size of your baby during gestation. Each week we referred to our little one as the fruit of the week. We made it to fig. Our fig never actually made it to be fig-sized, but they will always be our fig.

So here’s to you, little fig.

Presenting: Life of Lauren, a personal site for my fantastic wife! We designed it together and got it finished today. Like many personal sites (this one included), it’s a place to write, share and be creative; her own little corner of the internet. I can’t wait to see what she does with it!

Here are some of the lessons we learned along the way.

1. When looking for a house, work out your priorities for rooms/space, and try to imagine how long you plan on staying there. You can rank viewings more objectively this way.
2. That said, trust your gut. We went into some houses that on paper were perfect, but we got all the weird feels from them. We’re so glad we didn’t go for them.
3. View houses above and below your price range, it’ll help you spot a good deal and an overpriced house.
4. Some estate agents boast that they “sell their properties for £Xk more than the others in the area. That’s a big turn off for buyers. If the house is on with multiple agents, maybe look at one of the others.
5. Estate agents, particularly those showing you around properties, are almost exclusively awful, and know less about the propery/area than you do.
6. Use this as an opportunity to practise patience.
7. Everything is free till your offer is accepted, so make the most of it. There are a load of people wanting to make a nice profit out of you, so take their free advice, but know that they’re ultimately there to make money.
8. Go into mortgage meetings prepared. Do your sums beforehand. Have your payslips. Heck, we had a spreadsheet forecasting earnings for the next twelve months, ready to plot in their mortgage offer. It’ll speed things up and make you look trustworthy and professional.
9. Your parents/loved ones won’t always be behind you, and that sucks. So find some trusted friends to lean on too.
10. So much of the process is based on blind trust, it’s kinda scary how far you can go without proving you are able to afford it, and how easy it is to pull out at any stage before exchange. Which leads me on to:
11. The exchange process is a mess. You have to get home/life insurance to exchange. To get that you need to know what date you are exchanging. But to get the date for exchanging, you have to give you insurance details. Which you can’t set up because you don’t know the exchange date… and so on.
12. CHASE solicitors. Good grief, they are slow. And they don’t communicate with one another unless heavily chivvied.
13. When it feels like it’s all getting out of control, slow it down to your pace. You are more in control than you’re led to believe.
14. Neither of us have had credit cards, and our credit checks went through just fine, despite some of the warnings to ‘build up our rating’.
15. Mortgage advisors cost money, and don’t necessarily get you a better deal. The rates you and I can see are the same as the IFA’s, despite what they tell you. If you can go directly to a bank, you’ll save a £500 fee. It’s a bit more effort, but their advisors are free.
16. Exchange day felt like an eternity. Not really a lesson here, other than don’t expect to be productive on that day.
17. Utilities are easier to organise than you think: make a list, work through it in a morning.
18. On moving day, if you can, put aside 30 minutes in the empty house to appreciate the space before you bring in all of your clobber and things. It’s the last time it’ll look that neat.

And finally…

19. Try not to buy during a global pandemic.