How are we a third of the way through the year already? Mind you, the recent weather has seemed rather more summery than spring, so it’s not surprising that summer is fast approaching. And May should be quite a busy month for us.
Bank holiday celebrations
Our wedding anniversary, on the 4th, and my birthday, on the 25th, both fall on the two bank holidays respectively, which is nice. Neither is a particularly notable number – we’ll have been married 13 years, and I’ll be making further progress into my mid-forties. But at least we both get days of work. I suspect some of our wedding anniversary may end up being spent in Ikea, but we’ll see.
As for my birthday, we may plan a nice meal somewhere.
Travel
Christine has an overnight stay in London coming up in the middle of the month, related to a professional development course that she is doing alongside her work. Meanwhile, I’m planning to go the Everything Electric Show in Harrogate.
We have tentative plans to go to a gig around my birthday weekend. Tickets haven’t yet been booked, but we have provisional childcare in place. We’re also considering a trip to the UK Games Expo in Birmingham at the end of the month, but we’ll see. At least it happens just after we get paid, although that could prove dangerous.
Health
It turns out I should have had another hearing test last summer. Anyhow, instead, I’m having one this month, which may mean I get new hearing aids. Last year, I took one of mine in to be replaced, as it had stopped working, and was told that my particular model was no longer issued by my local NHS trust. As such, my replacement was a refurbished model from another patient. I assume that, following this new test, I’ll be due the newer model, but we’ll see. It would be great if these new ones work with Bluetooth, so that I can stream audio directly from my phone.
We’ve also got a couple of appointments for our ten-year-old, which we’ve been waiting almost three years for. Which will be a big relief.
I hop you are having a good Easter break, if you celebrate it. As mentioned on Wednesday, we’re staying with my parents in York, having arrived yesterday and heading home tomorrow. Which, to be fair, is pretty much what we do every year – Covid years excepted.
The Easter weekend is a full two weeks earlier than last year, when Easter was unusually late – I wrote about the dates for Easter last year. Next year, Easter is even earlier, with Easter Sunday falling on the 28th March.
I went down with a cold last weekend, which, bearing in mind our trip to London, commuting to work and an Easter church service for our ten-year-old’s school, isn’t surprising considering how many people I’ve interacted with recently. However, it means that this may be a more subdued Easter weekend. A bit of rest is probably welcome.
Something I learned back in secondary school was that the French call an April Fool’s joke ‘un poisson d’Avril’, which literally translates as ‘an April fish’. No April Fool’s Day jokes from me today though.
We’re part way though the Easter holidays here, with our ten-year-old having broken up from school last Friday. It would appear that not all schools are off this week, however; I had an email from Eureka about how they are running their Easter holiday activities over three weeks. Indeed, we would have loved to go to see Olaf Falafel’s Stupidest Super Stupid Show in Leeds on the 14th, but our ten-year-old will be back at school by then.
Christine is working on Good Friday, and so I’ll probably end up taking our ten-year-old to see the new Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Unless the weather ends up being especially good, and we end up doing something outdoors. We’ll then be spending the rest of the Easter weekend with my parents in York, as usual.
So far, my post about Kinky Boots is the only one about what we did in London that has gone live, but there are several more to come throughout this month. We packed quite a lot in to what was only a two-night trip; not having our ten-year-old in tow meant we could be a bit more agile. I also have plenty of other blog posts that I have already written to go live in the coming weeks.
What we don’t have to look forward to is Sci-Fi Weekender. Normally we head off to Great Yarmouth every March for a great weekend of geekery with friends, but it’s been cancelled this year. Over-running building work at the Vauxhall Holiday Park, where it’s hosted, mean that the event would have had to be scaled down, and it seems like a majority of other attendees decided to skip this year. We’re not out of pocket; we’ve asked for our booking to be rolled over to next year. And we would have been driving down, so we haven’t lost out on advance train tickets. We had word last week that it may be cancelled, and it so I’m hoping that some friends of ours who were planning to take the train managed have been able to claim on their travel insurance.
Still, we’re a bit gutted not to see people and have geeky fun there this year. We may still do something else with the weekend, as we have childcare in place, but we’ll see.
Easter break
Whilst the Easter weekend itself is in April, the school holidays start at the end of this month. That’s because Easter Sunday is two weeks earlier than last year. We usually arrange childcare for our ten-year-old, but we’ll see what they want to do nearer the time.
Depending on the weather, we may manage some more days out this month. Last month, we managed Cannon Hall Farm, but that was about it.
Back in February 2024, my wife Christine described the preceding January as ‘the Januariest January that ever Januaried’. And whilst January 2025 was also something of a slog, for us at least, this January hasn’t been so bad. I think it’s helped that I had a few days off work at the start, and so wasn’t back to work until the 6th. But also, we had some days out, including Hardwick Hall and the Thackray Museum.
And so to this February. Usually when I post something on the first of the month, it’s to tell you what we’re up to this month. Which, based on a glance at my calendar, is not a lot. Valentines Day is next Saturday, which means no hope of a nice but affordable meal out anywhere. Not that we’re big on Valentines Day – normally we just exchange cards. Our 2014 surprise jaunt to London was very much an exception. We may do a nice meal at home, although how romantic we can be with a ten-year-old in the house is questionable.
Speaking of the ten-year-old, they are overdue for a birthday party so we’ll be organising that this for this month. Even though their actual birthday was a few weeks ago. We haven’t done a birthday party for them since they turned seven, but turning 10 is a bigger deal.
I have a few blog posts already lined up, so there should be plenty to read about on the blog this month. We may even manage the occasional day trip, depending on the weather. We’ll see.
There seems to be some nostalgia for 2016 at the moment. It mostly seems to be about the music of 2016, but apparently it’s also because people have started putting filters on their TikTok videos like we used to with Instagram photos in 2016.
I did a review of 2016 at the time, so you can read that, I suppose. 10 years ago, our 10-year-old was, well, a newborn baby, and so whilst they were born in 2015, most of the first year of their life fell in 2016. So it was quite a memorable year for us in that sense.
2015 had been a big year – we’d bought a house, I passed my driving test and bought a car, and we became a family of three. So 2016 was more of a consolidation year, with Christine on maternity leave for the first half (and me having the whole of January off on paternity and annual leave). I changed jobs twice – securing a secondment doing timetabling in early February, and then moving to a new permanent role in August. I’m (essentially) still in that role now.
Our house that we bought in 2015 was (and to some extent still is) a work in progress, and so in 2016 we had a downstairs bathroom installed, along with a new boiler and a Nest thermostat – our first piece of smart home technology. And despite having a small child, we did manage some trips – I went to London twice, we had an overnight trip to Liverpool, we went to see two friends get married up near Durham and had a day out in Oxford.
The photo at the top is a then-and-now comparison; not having a newborn means I’m less tired, but I’m a little wider nowadays and need to wear glasses. Also, there’s quite the difference between the front facing camera on the iPhone 5S (2016) and the iPhone 13 Mini (2026).
So on the whole, at least for us, it was a good year. Although the Brexit referendum, Trump’s first election and all the celebrities who died that year were less good outcomes.
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.
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.
