I’m not expecting any other trips away, although we may be in London at some point. Christine is starting her studies for another qualification at one of the London universities, and whilst it’s primarily a distance learning course, there are some in-person teaching events. Depending on when they are, it may be that we can go down as a family. As it was, I didn’t get to visit London last year; Christine did, but only for work-related reasons.
New tech
As Christine will be starting a new course, we’re using it as an excuse to replace the laptop that we share at home. We currently have a Lenovo Ideapad 320S, which was bought in 2018 when Christine started a previous course, so it’s eight years old now and positively ancient in laptop terms. I upgraded the RAM to 16 GB in 2022 (previously it had just 4 GB), which goes some way to explain its longevity, but it can’t be (easily) upgraded to Windows 11. And as Windows 10 is literally on borrowed time, it’s about time for an update. I’ll write more once we’ve got it.
Home renovation
We’ve owned our house for 10 years (11 this summer). We bought it with the intention of renovating it, and before we moved in we renovated most of the downstairs. At the end of 2020, we had our (then) four-year-old’s bedroom renovated, followed by our kitchen in 2022.
The next big project is the bathroom. We’d planned to start looking at this in 2026-27, but for various reasons we’re probably going to bring this forward to the first half of 2026.
So that’s some of the things that I expect we’ll get up to this year. There will always be things that happen that I never expect – like last year’s work trip to Athens – but it looks to be a busy, and hopefully productive year.
It’s New Year’s Eve, and so, as per usual, I review the things I’ve done and written about over the course of the year just gone. You can read my previous posts from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010 and 2009.
January
2025 got off to a slow start, not least because of heavy snow that was around for over a week. Our nine-year-old had two days off due to the school being closed, which saw me take short-notice annual leave. January was also the start of Bradford’s year as UK City of Culture, and so I wrote about that.
January also had its goodbyes and hellos. We went to a funeral for a family member, but also re-connected with relatives who we haven’t been on speaking terms for some time, which was nice.
Whilst January was short of days out, in February we went to Magna near Rotherham, and also went to see the Dogman film at the cinema. I also wrote about a crowdfunder for the Bradford Playhouse – this was successful, and it now has a shiny new lift installed, making it fully accessible for the first time.
March
As per usual in March, we went to Sci-Fi Weekender in Great Yarmouth. It was another good event this year and we’ve already booked to go again next year. On the way down, we called at Thaymar Ice Cream, which has a lovely little café and is just off the A1. Sadly, it doesn’t have electric car charging facilities and so we probably won’t be able to stop there next time.
We also went to the cinema in April, this time as a family to see A Minecraft Movie. I stand by my review of it being basically fine – great if you’re a Minecraft fan but neither terrible nor a masterpiece.
More travel was to come in July, as we went on our holiday to North Wales. Whilst we were only there for a week, we squeezed a lot in, to the extent that I was still blogging about what we did in September. Our holiday was also a test run for our new electric car that we bought in July. We managed pretty well to say that we’d only had it a week when we set off. We still really like the car, and have no regrets about the switch to electric.
I bought myself a new iPad at Costco, making it my fourth overall and the first new iPad in seven years. Speaking of Costco, we let our membership lapse in November, as we’re pretty well stocked up at present. I imagine we’ll re-join some time in the new year, once we’ve finally used everything up.
At the theatre, we saw the Rude Science show – I’m hoping to finish the book before the end of today – and I met the Map Men in Leeds. My copy of the book went to my Dad as a birthday present but I’ve listened to the audiobook.
November
We received a big upgrade to our internet at home after we got fibre broadband installed. A couple of months on, and it seems better than what we had before on the whole. We also put up our Christmas tree super early.
Back to the cinema again, this time for the second instalment of Wicked. We also had another family celebration, this time for my cousin who had her 25th wedding anniversary. Dress code was black tie, so I hired a suit for the occasion.
I finished work for Christmas on Friday 19th, to coincide with school holidays, and so we went to Quarry Bank Mill last week – our fourth National Trust property of the year. Christmas itself was, as usual, spent with my parents in York.
All in all
Overall, 2025 has been a good year for me. Going to Athens was definitely a highlight, as was our holiday in Wales. Let’s hope 2026 is just as good.
By the power of a scheduled post that was written last Saturday, I would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas if you are celebrating today. As per usual, we’re staying with my parents in York for the Christmas period, having arrived last night.
As for our gifts to family, this year Christine has made most of them herself. She took up crochet in a big way earlier this year, and so our relatives will have opened a selection of blankets, hats and gloves this morning.
Christmas is also an opportunity for us to relax and recuperate. I’m off work for two full weeks, having finished last Friday. As our past two summer holidays have been a single week, this is actually the longest time I have had off work since our 2023 summer holiday. Thankfully, my workplace closed at lunchtime on the 23rd, and doesn’t open again until the 5th, so I shouldn’t have too much work to come back to.
This is the first year where our nine-year-old doesn’t believe in Santa. It means that they know their gifts were bought for them by people close to them, and not just provided by a mythical being.
Once again, I hope you all have a great Christmas.
It’s the 1st of December today, and so begins a busy month for us.
At work, we have our winter graduation ceremonies, and so I’ll be helping out with these, as well as meeting some colleagues visiting from another university. Due to school holidays, I’m only working the first three full weeks of December, and then I have a nice two week break over the Christmas period.
Next weekend, we’re celebrating a family member’s 25th wedding anniversary with a big meal and a party. I’ve hired a dinner suit for it – I own a couple of suits, but the dress code mandates a dinner suit – and Christine and our nine-year-old have treated themselves to new outfits. In fact, I’m probably spending more on hiring my suit, which I have to return, than they did combined on new outfits that they get to keep. Oh well.
We also need to fit in time to see Wicked: For Good. It’s been difficult finding a time when all three of are available to see it, especially as it’s over two hours long and so not really suitable for a weeknight. Christine and I both love the stage show, having seen it in London’s West End many years ago, and our nine-year-old really liked the first film.
In terms of blog posts that I’m expecting to write – I have a couple in mind to follow up our fibre broadband installation. One is about changing ISPs, and the second is about the new router hardware. These should be going live over the next week or so.
I quite like doing these round-ups of previously unblogged minor things at the end of each month. You can read what I wrote in October, and now here’s November:
Peter Pan-to time (oh no it isn’t)
We’re off to see Peter Pan at the Bradford Playhouse this weekend. It’s the annual pantomime from one of the local amateur dramatics societies, The Bradford Players. It also marks ten years since I helped backstage with Sleeping Beauty, a previous pantomime production. We don’t see a panto every year, but we know some of the cast and so we want to support them. Some tickets still available for the performances taking place today and tomorrow, but be quick.
The Bradford Playhouse is hosting another panto next month – Cinderella. By contrast, this is a professional production – several showings have already sold out but others have good availability. It’s cheaper than many mainstream theatres, and by booking to see it, you’re supporting smaller independent theatres.
I suck at soldering
In last month’s unblogged update, I mentioned how I was playing with a ESP development board to add Wi-Fi control to an existing non-smart device. In the end, I gave up, as my soldering skills just weren’t sufficient to keep the wires soldered to the contact points on the circuit board. If you’re interested, the device I was modifying was an Ikea Uppåtvind air purifier, and I was using this guide. To be fair, even if it had worked, I was using a much larger board than the D1 Mini recommended and so there’s no guarantee that I would have been able to re-assemble it anyway.
York Christmas Market
Whilst we were in York last weekend, alongside visiting York’s Chocolate Story, we also had a browse of York’s Christmas Market in Parliament Street. Even on a Sunday morning, it was very busy, and overall the city was the busiest I’ve seen it (remember, I grew up in York). Indeed, people have been complaining about how busy it is.
Christmas markets can be a bit hit-and-miss – I remember going to the Manchester Christmas market several years ago to find it was basically the same four stalls repeated across the whole city. York’s market is mostly local businesses, and it’s a good mix of food, drink and gifty things. We always buy a litre bottle of barbecue sauce from The Chilli Jam Man when we go.
Black Friday
I literally only bought two things on Black Friday this year, both from Amazon:
A 3 way plug with USB-A and USB-C(sponsored link). Christine has had one of these for a while and uses it daily; I’ve bought a second one because I want a charger for the bedroom that doesn’t have any LEDs on it.
The Actually Delicious One Pot Cookbook(sponsored link). This is the latest cookbook from Poppy O’Toole, aka Poppy Cooks, and it’s reduced to £10 (from £22) in their Black Friday sale. We already have her Potato Book and Slow Cooker books and use them both frequently.
Well, it’s the 25th November, and so Christmas Day is only a month away. We’ve already put our Christmas tree up – indeed, it’s been up since the Saturday before last. Now that is exceptionally early even by our standards, but we’re running out of free weekends between now and Christmas and we had the time. I sorted out the lights (and the smart plug running ESPHome) whilst our nine-year-old decorated it. At least with it being up early, we can appreciate it for longer.
When it comes to presents, we’re making good progress. Christine has a week off work this week, and so she’ll be doing the majority of the work. Which is fine, and what we agreed – our plan is for many of the gifts to be handmade this year.
As for my gift to her, I’ve already got something sorted – again, exceptionally early by my standards. I’m 99% sure it’s something that she’ll really like, too.
Due to the school holidays, I’m taking leave in the run-up to Christmas, and so after the end of this week I’ll just have three full weeks at work to go. Unfortunately, Christine is working Christmas Eve, and so it’ll be a late-ish start to the festivities. We’re planning to spend Christmas with my parents in York, as per usual.
Good grief, are we really almost at the end of 2025 already? I can’t believe it’s November now.
We had a quiet end to October, as both Christine and I had bad colds. Indeed, we had several days booked off work together, and the best that we could manage was a trip to Costco in Leeds.
For us, November promises to be a busy month. We have a couple of weekends already accounted for, including a trip to Thought Bubble in Harrogate. We went last year, for the first time since 2016, although I didn’t blog about it at the time. You can read about our first visit in 2014, if you like.
We’re also off to York, to visit my parents, on another weekend. As I hinted last week, we’re planning to see Matilda when it comes to Bradford, provided we can pick up some affordable tickets for the three of us.
At work, we’re starting to interview people hoping to enrol on courses for next September, and so I’ll be busy with those.
This November is also another anniversary of sorts, as it marks 15 years since Christine and I moved in together, and therefore 15 years of us living in Sowerby Bridge. That means that, in early 2029, I will have lived in Sowerby Bridge longer than I’d lived in York.
Every now and again, we have an ‘away day’ at work. This time, it was hosted at Fountains Church, located on Chester Street in Bradford, pictured above. I’ve been in the building before it was a church, as it used to be three separate nightclubs: Revolution (the national chain of vodka bars), Walkabout (the national chain of Australian-themed bars) and Dr Livingstone’s, a nightclub themed around Dr David Livingstone, a colonialist and explorer. I visited them all regularly back when I was a student.
It was weird seeing the building now used as a place of worship.
A blue postbox in Manchester
On the way back from seeing Brains, Bogies and You, we walked past a blue postbox on Liverpool Road in Manchester. Normally, British postboxes are painted red (or occasionally gold), so this one is unusual.
Fortunately, a plaque on the side explains all. Originally, blue postboxes were more common, as they were used for air mail post. Nowadays, air mail no longer needs to be sorted separately from domestic post, and so all but one of these have been removed. The only remaining genuine blue air mail post box is outside Windsor Castle. This one is actually just a regular post box, painted blue.
This specific post box was painted blue because it sits next to what was the Manchester Aerospace Museum. This later became the Air and Space Hall of the Museum of Science and Industry, but was permanently closed a few years ago.
Playing with an ESP development board
Back in July, I picked up an ESP development board(sponsored link) to use as a firmware flasher. I’ve been experimenting with it, to try to add Wi-Fi control to an existing non-smart device. Let’s just say that I need more soldering practice, but I’m hoping to write more about it should I succeed.
Danny Boyle in Sowerby Bridge
I didn’t spot the film crew myself, but Danny Boyle has been filming scenes for his new film Ink in Sowerby Bridge, near where we live. It’s a biographical film about the early life of Rupert Murdoch. It’ll be interesting to see if we can recognise the filming locations when the film comes out.
I’ve also re-instated a number of old blog posts written in October 2015 from the Web Archive. These include Losing the Language of Love, which I quite enjoyed reading again, and several posts from a trip to London that month:
We also went to Crossness Pumping Station on that trip, but unfortunately my post about it was never indexed by the Web Archive and so it’s probably lost forever. It’s a shame – it’s a very interesting place. It’s not often that a sewage pumping station would be Grade I listed, and it’s only open on selected days of the year.
Considering that I still haven’t written about everything we did in July and August (there’s one more blog post to follow on Thursday), then surely there’s lots more to come from what we did in September. Right?
I went to Manchester twice this month. The first was for a birthday meal for Christine, and also a shopping trip. We naturally went to Afflecks, which is an indoor market focussed on alternative lifestyles and has many small businesses selling clothes, jewellery and music. It’s in an old department store which closed in the 1970s after being taken over by Debenhams (who already had a larger store nearby). It’s operated in its current format since 1982, and is a very quirky place.
My second trip was for work, attending a training session about international qualifications delivered by UK ENIC. That was held at the University of Manchester.
Trip to Leeds
We also had a shopping trip to Leeds, which also doubled up as a second birthday meal for Christine, this time with my parents. This was at Bibi’s Italianissimo, which is a huge art deco restaurant near the station. Bibi’s has been in Leeds for years and retains a reasonably good reputation for food and hospitality – especially for families.
We also went into the Corn Exchange, which is similar in some respects to Afflecks in Manchester as it’s also home to many smaller shops – a couple of which are also in Afflecks. Architecturally, the Corn Exchange is far more interesting, being as it is circular with a huge glass domed roof over the central atrium inside. It’s unsurprisingly Grade I listed.
Back to school
Our nine-year-old is back at school, and started year five – their penultimate year at primary school. Next year, we’ll need to start looking at secondary schools.
Getting cold
This time of year is when we see how long we can hold out before turning the heating on. Which turned out to be Tuesday 16th September, after a run of cold days. It warmed up again afterwards, and so the thermostat didn’t come on until it turned cold again last weekend. Normally, the heating stays on until early May.
Speaking of heating, I’ve had major issues with my Nest thermostat recently with it refusing to work with either the Google Home app or Home Assistant. Ultimately, I had to completely remove it from both, and then re-add it, to get it working again. Which is a faff because the Nest integration in Home Assistant is one of the most difficult to set up, and it’s actually gotten worse since last time as you now have to create a Pub/Sub topic too. I’m pleased that it’s working again, but you can tell Google are phasing out their Nest thermostats in Europe. It will certainly get replaced with a different system, as and when we’re ready to replace our gas boiler with a heat pump.
When you start a serious relationship with someone, friends and family often start to ask when you’re planning to move in together. November 2010, in our case.
Then they want to know when you’re going to have a baby. December 2015, in our case.
Then they want to know when you’re going to have a second child. This is where Christine and I have been for almost 10 years now. And we’ve decided that this is where we’re going to stay, thank you very much, with just the one child.
The Three Milestones
When it came to deciding when to have another child, we agreed three milestones that must be passed:
We must be eligible for funded childcare for our first child.
We must have a tumble dryer, to handle the increased washing.
Both Christine and I needed to be able to drive.
We achieved milestone one when our (now) nine-year-old turned 3, and became eligible for 30 hours of funded childcare per week, during school term time. Nowadays, much younger children qualify for this, but this was the minimum age at the time. Milestone two came at the end of 2022, after we’d had our kitchen refitted. And milestone three came at the end of last year, when Christine passed her driving test. So, without wanting to go into lots of salacious details about our sex lives, we stopped not trying for a baby. My choice of words there was deliberate – we haven’t been actively trying for another baby. But we stopped using means by which to a prevent a pregnancy from happening. Suffice to say, no pregnancy happened.
Why stop now
So why are we now stopping, and accepting that we’ll only ever have one child? Well, there’s a few reasons:
We’re getting on a bit. We’re both older now than my parents were when I was born. And even if we somehow conceived this week, we would both be in our 60s by the time the resultant baby turned 18.
Related to this, as we’re older, there’s a greater risk of complications. A pregnancy is more likely to be unviable, and there’s a greater risk that the child could be born with disabilities.
Our nine-year-old already has additional needs. They’re not profoundly disabled – they attend a mainstream school and we don’t require significant social care for them. But they are likely to experience some challenges, especially when it comes to exams, and they probably won’t appreciate having a little brother or sister disrupting their exam revision. But also, as we already have one child with additional needs, I don’t think it would be fair on any of us to bring another child into the world who may have more profound additional needs.
We have boxes and bags full of old baby and toddler clothes and toys, and we really want to get rid of them. If we’re no longer holding onto them for a hypothetical second child, that’s a lot of space we can reclaim in our house.
Once our nine-year-old has ‘fled the nest’ and our mortgage is paid off (probably in 2037), we’ll be more free to move house if we don’t have a second child to tie us down.
So, we’re going to remain a family of three. And we’re happy about that.
