It’s a bizarre experience to return this blog and see the dates against the measly total of three posts I managed to turn out, the last one arriving in September 2021, over an entire year ago!

The delay isn’t entirely surprising. Not only do I have a history of starting projects like blogs and then abandoning them after they inevitably tail off, I started one of the most involved projects you can undertake in December 2021: I became a Dad!

Understandably, life is rather different and blogging doesn’t feature high on the list of priorities when it comes to necessities like nappy changing, feeding and bathing, nor when it comes to the absolute joys of playing, reading board-books, exploring the world, and generally taking the opportunity to be a silly weirdo in the name of entertaining a small human.

Still, I retain a bugging eagerness to write things, and I think this blog remains the right platform; it’s public and ‘published’ enough that there’s a degree of pressure to refine what I’m saying beyond a cryptic note-to-self, but it’s hidden-away and unofficial enough that I needn’t care too much about it. On that second point, I am keenly aware that publishing anything to the internet effectively means be that you can be held accountable for what you’ve said for eternity. But that in itself hits upon something I’d like to feel better about: being confident writing something down, or saying something, that you feel happy to commit yourself to being held accountable for the rest of your life.

That took an unexpectedly deep/dark turn, given that my purpose at the outset of this post was just to say this:

I’m resolving to write one blog post per month this calendar year. I’m not usually one for new-year’s resolutions, but turning 30 and now being father to an actual human one-year-old both seem to have squeezed something, and this is one direction the pressure is bursting out in. (This blog is also great for practising strange metaphors.) Call it a now-in-my-thirties-father-to-a-one-year-old sort of a resolution.

There are a few things I’m hoping to marshall some thoughts on, which may or may not include:

• More on ‘design’: overdesign and underdesign, design versus evolution.
• Being socially ‘atomised’ in the modern world.
• Why economics is so confusing.