Life

Things that have happened in my life

Springing into March

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A photo of some spring daffodils at East Riddlesden Hall near Keighley.

Spring is here – probably. A time for getting out and poisoning pigeons in the park. Or not.

Hopefully, the arrival of Spring means that the weather will be nicer, and we can get out and have some more days out. Last month, we only managed a visit to Magna. We’d hoped to go to Nostell, as their half term activities looked good, but we could have only gone last Sunday when the weather wasn’t really conducive to being outside. Now that it’s been saved from closure, we may pop in to the Abbey House Museum at some point as we haven’t been for a while.

The other big planned activity this month is going to Sci-Fi Weekender in a couple of weeks. Once again, we’re going with friends, and though there are a few changes this year, I’m hoping it’ll be another good weekend. It’s just a shame that it’s at the end of such a long and boring drive across the fields of Lincolnshire to get there. On the plus side, it won’t be me doing all the driving this time as Christine will be able to do some of it; she passed her driving test at the end of last year.

Mid-March will also be five years since the UK went into lockdown. I have vivid memories of a day out to St Ives Country Park on Mother’s Day, which happened to be our last full day of freedom. So much has changed since then – I still haven’t worked a full five day week in the office since.

Finally February, again

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Last year, my wife remarked that January 2024 was the Januariest January that had ever Januaried. I don’t think January 2025 was quite as bad, but it’s definitely dragged and I’m relieved to be in February again. Not at least because the days are starting to get noticeably longer.

We didn’t do much in January, hence the lack of blog posts about days out. Indeed the only post to the Days Out category was our trip to the Jorvik Viking Centre, and though I published it last month, our visit was in December. January isn’t a good month for going out to places as it’s cold and many attractions are shut for the winter.

As well as the cold, we’ve had the heavy snow to contend with. This resulted in me taking some short notice annual leave to home-school our nine-year-old when the school closed. Indeed, I only managed one full week at work this month, as I had to take a second instance of short-notice annual leave the following week. That was caused by a burst water main, knocking out the water supply both at the school and at home. There was also a funeral to attend.

So it’s been something of an eventful January, just not one that is full of things to write about on a blog. Oh well.

What’s happening in February?

This would be where I tell you about lots of exciting things that we’re planning for February. Alas, we don’t have any plans; it’s probable that February may end up being as uneventful as January. We’ll see; perhaps we’ll end up spending a nice weekend afternoon somewhere if we get lucky with the weather.

Neurodiversity

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Today, I’m writing about neurodiversity, as I’m reasonably confident that all three members of our household, including me, are neurodivergent.

Of the three of us, only our nine-year-old has a formal diagnosis of a neurodiverse condition, and is on the waiting list for assessment for another. But in recent years, it’s become quite clear to me that I probably have ADHD, and Christine is also likely to be neurodiverse too.

The term ‘neurodiversity’ is relatively new, having been coined in my lifetime (1998) and new enough not to be in the spellchecker dictionary that I’m using whilst writing this. Nor is ‘neurodiverse’ and ‘neurodivergence’; indeed ‘neurodivergent’ is the only one that doesn’t have a red wiggly line under it. It’s a broad term that encompasses various developmental conditions including (but not limited to) autism, ADHD and dyslexia. Many neurodivergent people prefer to talk about being ‘neurodivergent’ because it’s not a negative term; ADHD in particular features the words ‘deficit’ and ‘disorder’, whereas many ADHDers just see themselves as different. Someone who doesn’t identify as, or has not been diagnosed as neurodivergent could describe themselves as ‘neurotypical’ – again, it’s a relatively neutral term.

I’m going to respect Christine and our nine-year-old’s privacy by only focussing on my neurodiversity in this blog post.

ADHD

So, I’m reasonably sure that I have ADHD. If you were a reader of this blog over twenty years ago, you would’ve seen that I would post new entries multiple times a day. Now, this was in the age before micro-blogging – i.e. Twitter – was a thing, but clearly, I had lots of things to say and I needed to say them there and then. Most of these blog posts are long gone now, and probably won’t return as I don’t actually think anyone would want to read them now.

But there were also periods were blogging just wasn’t stimulating my reward pathways. If you go through the archives, I’ve tried to ensure that there are blog posts from every month going back to 2009. But there are also big gaps. Obviously the biggest is between 2018 and 2022, when I gave up blogging, but there was also a gap of several months earlier in 2018, and I apparently wrote nothing in November 2017 either.

Over 2024 I mostly managed to keep to my schedule of posting something every other day, but I managed to miss a week in June. I make no secret that I write blog posts in advance, and indeed this was written last Sunday just after the snow post. Partly that’s because I work full-time, and blogging isn’t my job, but also because I tend to write a series of posts in one go when I have my ‘hyperfocus’ periods. And for times when I lack inspiration, I have a fallback list of topics to write about saved in Simplenote. Indeed, this topic has been sat there for many months now, waiting for me to be in the headspace to write about it.

You can also tell when my interest in topics changes. I haven’t written a blog post about Home Assistant in two months. That doesn’t mean I’m not still using it, but it’s not the thing I’m hyper-focussed on right now.

Distraction and task avoidance

It’s probably fair to say I’m easily distracted. I empathise with Dug the talking dog from the Pixar film Up, who is regularly distracted by squirrels. Not least because I too am often distracted by squirrels in our garden at home. But it’s also things like email and chat notifications. I’m often the first one to respond to a message on Teams, for example. Which is good in some ways – I like being helpful – but not great when I need to focus on a task. I got a lot of tasks done on the 3rd January, as many other colleagues were on leave that day and so I had minimal distractions to manage.

Speaking of tasks – another way my ADHD manifests itself is task avoidance. For example, as I write this, I have a receipt for a pre-ordered item sat on my desk from two months ago. It’s there, because the item never arrived, and all I need to do is phone or email the company to follow it up. I have not done this.

And it’s also why I don’t have a formal ADHD diagnosis. Going about getting one means arranging an appointment with your GP to get a referral, and I’ve been meaning to do it for literally a couple of years now. But nope, no appointment, and therefore no further to getting a diagnosis. Which, in itself, could take years – demand for ADHD assessments has rocketed since the pandemic. I believe that part of the reason for this was that pandemic removed a lot of structure from peoples’ lives, but also because ADHD is massively under-diagnosed. There’s a line in one of the books I’ve read recently (I’ll talk about the book in a bit) where someone states that (paraphrasing) ‘ADHD is just used as a way of explaining away disruptive behaviour in middle-class young boys’. There’s a lot wrong with that statement, but indeed, lots of women, and especially people of colour with ADHD are only getting diagnoses in adulthood, because of attitudes like this one. I’d be willing to bet that there are sizeable numbers of people – and again, especially people of colour – in the criminal justice system with undiagnosed ADHD because they haven’t had the necessary support in life.

Other examples of task avoidance? We never managed to arrange an eighth birthday party for our nine-year-old last year. My passport is being renewed within a few weeks of its expiry, and beyond the point where I could travel with it if I had to. And I recently finished and sent out a report for a meeting about 90 seconds before the meeting was due to start.

Remembering and losing things

To date, I’ve only permanently lost one mobile phone, which was back in my first year of university. At the time, I described it as ‘stolen’, which it was, but I suspect I lost it and then someone stole it. I have, however, left a phone behind in a taxi – I had to ring my own phone and then pay the taxi driver to bring it to me. And I occasionally have to use Apple’s Find My device tool to get it to beep loudly if I’ve misplaced it at home.

With regards to my wallet and keys, I’ve managed not to lose these recently but only because I had to force myself into a habit of only leaving them in a particular place. Meanwhile, I’ve decided to give up on ‘true wireless’ headphones that sit in a charging box, because I’ve managed to lose two of the charging boxes. Big chonky over-head Bluetooth headphones are harder to lose.

On more than one occasion, I have caught the wrong train and ended up somewhere I didn’t want to be. The most recent time was only last summer, and meant we were late for a childcare pickup. I put these occasions down to being distracted by something which meant I hadn’t checked where the train was going before boarding.

Calendar apps are a lifesaver – any appointments go in there straight-away, with reminders set up. If you give me a piece of paper with a date and time of an appointment on it, that has to go in my phone immediately, as otherwise it’ll end up in a coat pocket to be seen again months later and probably after the event. Similarly, we’ve been in arrears on our nine-year-old’s school lunch payments because I’ve forgotten to pay that week, and only done it when I’ve been notified that we’re in arrears.

Oh, and when it comes to cleaning, we pay someone to clean our house once a week. We’re fortunate that we can afford this, but it makes such a difference. Being as we are two neurodivergent adults with full-time jobs, cleaning is something that we struggle to find the time and motivation for.

Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria

It’s not currently a medically recognised diagnosis, but I understand that many ADHDers have rejection sensitivity dysphoria as well. Whilst I tend to be okay at accepting rejection itself, with me it’s more a fear of potential rejection. This manifests as an irrational feeling that I’m constantly being judged, and that I’m going to get into trouble for not working hard enough.

There is overlap with Social Anxiety Disorder, and whilst I’ve historically had anxiety about public speaking (or even calling people on the phone) I’m mostly over this now.

Dirty Laundry and Small Talk

What prompted me to actually get on and write about my neurodiversity was listening to two books by Richard Pink and Roxanne Pink (née Roxanne Emery), a couple who are apparently big on ADHD Tiktok. Roxanne has ADHD, but didn’t get a diagnosis until her mid-thirties, and she talks candidly about her experiences both pre- and post-diagnosis. Suffice to say, my ADHD has thankfully not manifested itself to the same extent as hers, but I can relate to many of her experiences. Especially the bit about not feeling like you’ve been given a manual for how to be a grown-up. Let’s just say I use the word ‘adulting’ a lot when I actually get on top of doing admin at home.

Their first book, Dirty Laundy (sponsored link) was originally self-published, before later being picked up by Penguin. The follow-up is Small Talk (sponsored link), about the lies people with ADHD tell themselves and how to reframe them more positively. What I like about the books is that both Richard and Rox contribute, and talk both from the perspective of someone with ADHD, and someone who is in a relationship with an ADHDer. I found them both useful, both from the perspective of my own ADHD and also being a compassionate and caring parent to our nine-year-old. That being said, I recommended Dirty Laundry to a friend with an actual ADHD diagnosis, and she couldn’t get on with it, so your experience may vary.

To diagnose or not diagnose

So, I identify as someone with ADHD, in that I find that I have similar struggles to people who have been diagnosed with ADHD, and I find that many of the coping mechanisms that people with ADHD use also work for me. But I don’t have a formal diagnosis myself. As mentioned above, part of this is, ironically, because of task avoidance, but also the timelines. If I wanted a diagnosis on the NHS, I’m likely to have to wait years for it. As mentioned, there’s been a huge increase in referrals for adult ADHD assessments, and NHS services are struggling to cope. I could go private, but that would cost money – especially if I decided I wanted to go ahead with treating my ADHD with medication, as I would have to pay for private prescriptions.

A middle ground is seeking a referral from my GP to a private provider under Right to Choose, which friends have used – some have used Psychiatry UK and others ADHD360 with mixed results. Even then, as I write this, Psychiatry UK are stating that you may have to wait around 15 months for a diagnosis, and ADHD360 have an 18 week target. I may go down this route but I need to chat with others; a friend with ADHD set up a group chat with the intention of maybe starting a podcast, but, unsurprisingly, in a group of people with ADHD, we’ve yet to actually plan anything.

If you’ve read this far, then I hope being open about my experiences helps you. If nothing else, I hope it makes it clear that, whilst I might look like someone who has it all together, I’m ‘adulting’ by using a variety of coping mechanisms.

Snow longer welcome

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A photo of a snowy scene, taken from our house

I can’t remember a time that there’s been snow on the ground for eight days straight. It’s certainly not happened in my adult life; it may have happened when I was much younger, perhaps in the late 1980s or early 1990s. But the heavy snow that we had last Sunday has stuck around for over a week now, thanks to low temperatures that have prevented it all from melting.

I’m writing this yesterday (Sunday 11th January) and it’s probable that most of the snow will start to melt today (Monday). Yesterday (Sunday), the temperatures reached a ‘dizzying high’ of 4° C (39° F), which is the warmest it’s been all week. Meanwhile, night-time temperatures have apparently dropped as low as -10° C (14° F).

Suffice to say, it’s been an interesting week. The school that our nine-year-old attends announced it would be closed on Monday. As it’s the 21st century, thankfully this wasn’t a case of listening to local radio, but a message via the parents’ app just after 7am. Also, as it’s the 21st century and in the years following a pandemic, us parents were provided with the schoolwork that our kids would be doing if they were in school. I booked last minute annual leave with my (thankfully) understanding employer, and we got to work. Thankfully, most of it was Maths, and so not something I struggle with.

Tuesday was a return to relative normality as the school re-opened, but many other local schools remained closed throughout last week (some are still closed today, as in Monday). I even made it into the office on Tuesday, as the trains were running with almost no delays. However, many of my colleagues didn’t, and those of us that did were advised to head home mid-afternoon. We’ve then spent the rest of the week working remotely. I am very pleased that we have this option.

A photo of our In Home Display, showing £64.03 spent on gas this week.

Temperatures should continue to rise, and so whilst there will probably still be snow on the ground this morning, at least we won’t also have ice to contend with. And I’m hoping our heating bills will come down too; as per the photo above, we had spent over £64 on gas this week alone. Some of this is because we were home more, but also because of how cold it was outside.

So, here’s looking forward to some warmer weather. The snow has been fun for a while, but it has outstayed its welcome.

Welcome to 2025!

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Good grief, has it really been 25 years since the Millennium?

As per usual, we didn’t stay up to see in the new year – that’s a thing we would have done years ago, but Christine and I are both in our forties now. I’m back at work tomorrow, but Christine has the rest of the week off.

January will be my blogiversary month again, and this time it’ll be 23 years (minus the four year hiatus) since I started blogging. Over the Christmas break, I reinstated over a hundred old blog posts from the 2010s from the Web Archive, so at least it looks like I’ve been regularly blogging throughout most of those 23 years.

My plan for 2025 is to carry on posting new blog entries every other day, as this seems like a manageable amount. I kept it up throughout most of 2024.

Things that are currently in our calendar include Sci-Fi Weekender again in March, down in Great Yarmouth, and our summer holiday in July. We’re not currently planning to go abroad again this year – instead, we’re off to Wales for a week. The last time we went to Wales was in 2018, back when Sci-Fi Weekender was hosted near Pwlleli, so although all three of us have been, our nine-year-old was only two and probably doesn’t remember it.

At some point, we’ll probably also go to London again, but we haven’t planned or booked it yet.

I also have some big admin things, as my passport needs renewing – technically it’s in date, but was issued more than 10 years ago which means it’s not valid in many countries. Like I said, I’m not planning to travel abroad, but passport renewal turnarounds seem pretty quick at the moment, and then it’s done. I’ll be keeping my current passport safe though, as it has some interesting stamps in it from my 2015 work trip to the Middle East.

Also, August will be 10 years since I passed my driving test, and so I’ll need to renew my driving license too later in the year.

2024: a year in review

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As is traditional at the end of each year, I review what I’ve been up to over the past 12 months.

You can read my previous posts from 2023, 2022, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010 and 2009.

January

January started with a trip to the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, to have a look at their Operation Ouch exhibition about food and, um, poo. They have another exhibition about brains and bogeys in 2025 so I’m sure we’ll be back there soon. We also went to Eureka in Halifax; despite having an excellent children’s museum practically on our doorstep, we don’t go there that often. And there was also a brief trip to the Royal Armouries in Leeds.

On the blog, I wrote one of my perennially popular blog posts about installing Home Assistant Supervised on a Raspberry Pi and how I’d switched to using Simplenote for note-taking. I now take many more notes than I used to with Evernote. I also finally started regularly backing up my blog. January is my blogiversary month and 2024 marked 22 years.

February

After the Januariest January that ever Januaried, we made it to February. We had a bat in our cellar, which a kind volunteer rescued for us, and trips to the Trafford Centre and Beaumont Park in Huddersfield. Meanwhile, I cancelled Disney+ as we were no longer using it.

We ended February on our way down to London for a long weekend.

Houses of Parliament

March

Whilst in London, we went to the Bank of England Museum, the Cute exhibition at Somerset House, the Young V&A and the Cartoon Museum. We also had dinner in Chinatown one night, and Christine stayed an extra night to see Book of Mormon in the West End.

As usual in March, we went to Sci-Fi Weekender in Great Yarmouth, although this time we had friends in the car with us. This made the eight hour round trip much more enjoyable. And over the Easter Weekend, we went to East Riddlesden Hall, and went on the Snooks trail around York.

On the blog, I replaced Automattic’s Jetpack plugin with the much lighter Toolbelt.

April

In April, we went to see Unfortunate at the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford, and I moaned about our car needing more work on it again. I had the car serviced again earlier this month and needed four new tyres, new brake pads and brake discs, and some additional work which was another four figure sum. We probably could have bought a new car for the amount we’ve spent on keeping this one on the road over the past 18 months.

Christine and I had a child-free day out shopping in Manchester, which was nice.

Anteater

May

May is my birthday month, and I turned 40 this year. For my birthday, we went to Dudley, and visited Dudley Zoo and the Black Country Living Museum. We also had a day out at Jodrell Bank to use our annual passes before they expired, and another visit to the Tropical Butterfly House near Sheffield.

I added a newsletter to the blog in May, which is a weekly list of new blog posts. So far, a grand total of four people are fully subscribed, although two were in December so maybe it’s picking up momentum?

I also switched my bank account, but didn’t write about it until October.

June

In 2023, my dad had some health issues which persisted for some time into 2024, ultimately resulting in him going back into hospital again in June this year. Thankfully, this time the doctors treating him seemed to get on top of the issue, and so he’s now much better than he’s been in a while.

Our eight-year-old had an overnight residential school trip, giving Christine and I a rare chance to have a date night towards the end of the month. Meanwhile, we were in the run up to a General Election, and I wrote about the candidates that I could vote for in our constituency.

Seahouses

July

The General Election happened, and for once, the bad guys didn’t win, which was nice. I also made some predictions for 2029, when the next General Election is likely to be.

I fitted my Raspberry Pi with a new case and fan, and started using an SSD with it rather than an SD card.

As usual in July, we went on holiday with my parents. Though my Dad made a good recovery, we decided to have a holiday in the UK, and spent a week in Northumberland. Amongst the places we visited were Bamburgh Castle, The Alnwick Garden, a boat trip to The Farne Islands to see the puffins and seals, Warkworth Castle, Lindisfarne, Cragside, and Beamish on the way home.

August

Writing about our holiday took me well into August, and I also noted all the places we’d considered but didn’t visit. Storm Lillian visited us, cutting off our power for a few hours, and I wrote about our four most-used cookbooks. We also had a day out at the National Coal Mining Museum for England. At the end of the month, we went to Gawthorpe Hall and Mr Fitzpatrick’s Temperance Bar.

August is always my busiest month at work, and this year was no exception.

September

In September, I made Bluesky my primary social media presence and made my Twitter/X account private. Whilst I’ve logged in to X from time to time, I’ve not posted anything since.

Apple announced that its AirPods Pro could be used as hearing aids, and I wrote about how this could be a game-changer for people with mild or moderate hearing loss.

We didn’t have any days out in September (bar a trip to the cinema to see Inside Out 2), but I did write about travel more generally in a blog post about furthest compass points.

A photo of the Royal Iris ferry on the River Mersey in Liverpool

October

Christine and I went back to the cinema to watch Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, having watched the first film that morning – in my case for the first time. I also got my Covid-19 and Flu vaccines. We went to visit the new Eureka museum for older kids in Wirral, and then took a ferry across the Mersey and visited the Museum of Liverpool.

I had a grumble about parking apps, and why we can’t just have one app that works everywhere, and I summarised my adult life using the various railcards we’ve had over the years. For Halloween, we went to Lotherton Hall, which was full of dressed up skeletons.

November

Another cinema trip, this time to bawl our eyes out at The Wild Robot which is as good as everyone says it is. Our (now) nine-year-old got one of the follow-on books as a birthday present. We also went to Bolling Hall Museum with friends, and had a return visit to the Askham Bryan Wildlife & Conservation Park (which I wrote about in 2017 when it first opened).

America voted for the bad guy again (seriously guys?), and I successfully migrated this blog to a new hosting company, seemingly without anyone noticing. Considering my track record with losing data when doing this sort of thing, I consider this to be a massive win. We did our first Costco visit; we haven’t been back yet but planning a trip in the new year, probably with friends. I also wrote about my home working setup, and how it’s evolved over the past (almost) five years.

December

And so to this month. I wrote a long post about step-free access on the Waterloo & City Line, which pleasingly got picked up by a couple of London blogs and resulted in a few click-throughs. Which I knew about thanks to using Koko Analytics with WordPress.

Throughout the year, I mostly stuck with my target of publishing a new blog post every other day, which I’m really pleased about. I don’t have the time to contribute something every day – I’ve tried that in the past and I just end up writing waffle to fill up space. And, as we’re a family of two full-time working parents, our ability to have fun days out is mostly limited to weekends and holidays. But we did have the opportunity to do a few fun things this year, and have some new experiences. Whilst we didn’t go abroad this year, we squeezed a lot into our summer holiday to Northumberland, and seeing thousands of puffins on the Farne Islands will be something I hope to remember for a long time.

Merry Christmanoëlavidad!

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Photos of the two books that I bought Christine for Christmas: A Stroke of the Pen by Terry Pratchett, and Designing Terry Pratchett's Discworld by Paul Kidby

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas, a Joyeux Noël and a Feliz Navidad, should you be celebrating today.

Once again, we’re staying with my parents in York for Christmas, having arrived last night. Whilst I’ve been lucky enough to work somewhere that closed at 4pm last Friday, for Christine, Christmas Eve was a normal working day. We’re here in York for a few days.

As per usual, we’re not having turkey – it tends to fall to my mum to cook Christmas dinner and she’s not a fan of turkey. Instead, we’re having pork.

Pictured above are the gifts that I bought for Christine:

Yes, there’s a theme. My gift to her last year was Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch (sponsored link), written by Rhianna Pratchett about her father’s characters, and required a bit of a mad goose chase around the various bookshops of West Yorkshire to find a copy. Thankfully, the glorious Waterstones in Bradford came up trumps.

I’ll have probably opened my presents by the time you read this, but I’m writing this ahead of time.

Descending into December

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A photo of the Piece Hall in Halifax, taken in December 2022. There's a huge Christmas tree in the courtyard.

Good grief, we’re 92% done with 2024 now. Just the month of December to go.

December is always a busy month for us, what with preparing for Christmas, and with a couple of birthdays coming up as well – one of which is a round number birthday. We’ve started, but by no means finished our Christmas shopping.

I’m only working for the first three weeks of December, as my workplace is closing up on Friday 20th. I’ll be off work until the 2nd January, giving me a not-quite two week break. That gives me Monday 23rd to finish off any last-minute Christmas shopping, albeit with an eight-year-old in tow as school will be closed that day.

As usual, we’ll be spending Christmas with my parents in York. We’re meeting the rest of the family towards the middle of the month for a meal and to exchange presents.

Oh yes, and I’m already several weeks in to the Christmas drinks at Starbucks.

Sowerby Bridge blog posts

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A photo the Rochdale Canal at Sowerby Bridge, with some geese in the foreground and a church in the background.

It’s been a while since I last did a summary of old blog posts that I’ve made live again – January, to be precise. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t re-imported any old blog posts since then – I’ve probably brought back 20 or so in the past few months. They’ve tended to refer to events that I’ve wanted to refer back to in new blog posts, such as previous visits to places. Overall, I’ve re-instated over 100 old blog posts so far, so about 3% of the total.

The latest batch that I’ve brought back are about Sowerby Bridge, the town where we live. I’ve chosen these partly to document us moving here 14 years ago, but also because it’s niche content that’s probably not available elsewhere. Here’s an index:

  • Moving out of the City (October 2010). When I first announced that we were looking to move to Sowerby Bridge, as it was convenient for both my current job, and Christine’s (then) new job. Neither of us could drive back then.
  • A year out of the city (November 2011). A retrospective of our first year of living in Sowerby Bridge. The first flat that we rented didn’t work out, but we ended up in another flat in April 2011, that we stayed in until October 2015 when we moved into our current house.
  • Cinemas and Sowerby Bridge (May 2012). A little bit of local history research. Sowerby Bridge once had two cinemas – whilst both buildings are still standing, one is now a pub/venue and the other mostly vacant, having most recently been a shop.
  • Rushbearing in Sowerby Bridge (September 2012). Sowerby Bridge’s most well-known annual festival, which takes place over the first weekend in September. Imagine a cart, filled with rushes, being trailed by morris dancers and calling at every church and pub in the town. It’s still going strong, although we had other commitments this year.
  • Britain’s best high streets (November 2012). Sowerby Bridge was included in a list of Britain’s best high streets, and I suppose the main street is still pretty good. However, we’ve since lost the two banks mentioned in the article.
  • The Sowerby Bridge Geese (September 2013). For years, there was a large gaggle of geese in Sowerby Bridge, that would happily stop traffic to cross the road, or sit in parking spaces. Unfortunately they haven’t had any goslings for a few years now, and I think there’s only three of them left now.
  • My first BuzzFeed Listicle (April 2014). Oh wow, remember BuzzFeed? It still seems to be going, but my first listicle, 9 Surprising Facts About Sowerby Bridge, also turned out to be my last one.
  • Happy Valley (June 2014). The BBC’s gritty award-winning drama was partly set in Sowerby Bridge, and saw two further series.
  • The Brontë Garden at Sowerby Bridge station (September 2014). This is the small garden at the railway station, maintained by volunteers and still looking nice ten years on.

Since starting blogging again in 2022, my only new post of note about Sowerby Bridge was a brief one about ghost signs.

Welcome to October

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A photo of some trees turning yellow in Shelf Hall Park near Halifax in October 2018.

Well, it’s October now – which means three quarters of the year has gone. We’re past my busiest month at work, now that the university term has started again. It’s also Black History Month in the UK, for which this year’s theme is Reclaiming Narratives.

Also, it’s International Raccoon Appreciation Day today, according to some web sites that seem to only exist to tell you what is observed on each day of the year.

It’s definitely getting colder now. We relented and switched our heating back on last month, after what seems to have been a particularly cold September. The days where we can use less than £2 of grid electricity and gas are behind us now until May next year – not least because energy prices went up by 10% today.

Speaking of cold, our household is also starting the month with colds. Kids going back to school, and the dreaded Freshers’ Flu at universities mean that we’re all a little under the weather. At least I get my annual flu vaccine this week.

I’ve had my first (and second, and third) Pumpkin Spice Latte, and family plans for Christmas are starting to be drawn up. And I’m sure our eight-year-old will end up doing something for Halloween. I’m sure there’ll be days out (when we’re feeling better) but I’m not sure where and when yet.