I spent some time in London, but otherwise it’s been a good week.

The more time I spend away from London the worse it gets. Absence makes my heart grow more realistic in how bloody awful the place is.

This week has been a pretty intense one for meetings. I think I’ve had a good impact in every meeting I’ve been in, more or less. I’ve had some really useful feedback from colleagues, and I spent a day with my new programme team where I presented on the history of cryptography. I opened with a joke that fell flat, but I think that’s because I should have used a visual aid. The joke is: “the Oxford English Dictionary defines cryptography as -” and then I squinted and looked at my computer – “oh, I can’t read that”.

And nobody got that the reason I couldn’t read it was because it was encrypyted.

So next time, I’m going to do this:

“The Oxford English Dictionary defines cryptography as”

“which makes the point effectively but isn’t actually that helpful.”

And that’s sort of been the vibe this week. I’ve been learning what works and what doesn’t work. Some things work okay, and can probably keep working ‘okay’ for now but need to go on my longer-term radar of ‘things that need fixed’. Some things are on fire today, and need me to go charging in with a wet tea towel. For example, we’ve got a custom built service that I’m desperately trying to find a reason to save. If I can’t find something by next week I’ll need to figure out how to retire it with kindness and finality.

On Tuesday I saw my friend and her daughter. We read stories. We read stories that I remember being read to me, and I felt such a strange feeling as I caught my father’s intonations in my voice. The daughter is two. She is precocious, cunning, temperamental, emotional. A storm and a puddle. Her mother is incredible. We are old friends, and it’s such an absolute pleasure to pick up with old friends after a while away. Things keep changing for us both. It’s nice. I showed her my self-authored blurb on Instagram, and she laughed.

Wednesday and Thursday were London office days. It grates on me, but being in the office and having serendipitous conversations really is a thing that happens. I benefit from these in-between chats, and I hope the people I chat to also benefit. I got a meeting with someone senior out of it, whom I hope will unblock something for me that needs unblocking.

At the beginning of the week I gave someone some bad news, and I think I did it well but there’s no way of knowing this close to the giving. I hope I did it right. How do doctors measure this? How do you know that you’ve told someone that they’re going to die, and that the telling was done well? I didn’t do anything that serious, you understand, but my mind goes to the worst kind of telling that there is. If yu are a doctor reading this then, well, welcome! Tell me how you know, if you know.

And then midweek two three different people told me about interesting jobs that they’d like me to be interested in, and I am interested in them, but they’ve come at the absolute worst time. One of them is the dream, and would be the promotion I’ve been banging on about here for far too long. But I’m literally only three weeks into a 6-month role and I want to do this, and I want to do it well.

The only person who can make this decision is me and it is a suck.