There’s a nightmare. There’s a nightmare where you grip a hair and start pulling on it, and the hair keeps coming out. You can feel the follicle becoming ragged and bloody as more and more is pulled through it. It hurts, but you can’t stop. Surely there’s just a little more. Surely it can’t keep going. The nightmare goes from horrifying to boring as you pull and pull, your arms getting tired, the hair piling up in little hillocks around your feet.

And then – it snaps, right at the follicle. And you’re left with the certain knowledge that there’s more inside you, and it was the fact that you weren’t paying attention that means it’s trapped now.

What. Just me?

Anyway. Let’s talk about this week.

I’ve had a lot of meetings this week. A lot of meetings and a lot of combing through code, trying to discern meaning and purpose. I think a meeting is a really good test of what an organisation values, and finding out what people are meeting about is a lens on what it’s struggling with. People seem to talk to explain complexity, or at least to try to explain complexity. Every meeting I’ve been in this week has been a thorny, wicked problem.

Unfortunately for me many of them have ended up back at my door. The person I’m covering has built a number of brilliant services, and my job over the next six months is going to be to operationalise them. That means putting in guard rails, learning the system, and hiring other people to check over my work. Trying to do that at the same time as learning the systems is proving to be really challenging, and it feels like every meeting I go to someone says “Oh, Jonathan – the guy you’re covering said you could do this. You can do this, can’t you?”. And I have to say that I’ll do my best to learn quickly.

My reputation has preceded me and did a great hype job. But now I have to deliver.

Separately, I attended an event which amounted to a watch party, which wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t travelled four hours for the privilege. In future, if the event is remote, I’m going to be remote unless I know the in-person will be better. The worst part about four hours of travel on UK trains is that the Wi-Fi is consistently so bad that I might as well be flying, and if I were flying I’d get there faster and be able to do more work around it.

Oh trains. Why do you test my resolve to use more public transport?

In the extra-curricular work, I’m shuffling some things forward. The key supplier is slowly getting their act together, and I am suddenly and brutally aware of what it must be like to be a new minister trying to get your new department to do anything. It is a huge, ugly mess of a thing that has grown in shapes that at one time or another seemed like the best option. Indeed maybe they still are. Indeed maybe we all are.

But I tell you, it’s an absolute fucking pig to make move.