Weeknote 1: Walking Before Thinking
05 December 2025
Hello Hello! I’m writing a weeknote.
I’m sitting in the lovely riverside café at BEAM Theatre in Hertford. Well worth the visit if you’re local.
The last three months have been a real roller-coaster. So much has changed, physically and mentally, and at such a pace that I’m struggling to process it with the tools I already have.
I do counselling once a week and had a couple of ‘aha moments’ in the last session alone, but one hour a week isn’t enough to understand my new reality or figure out how to live well in it.
So, I’m making this website. A home for my thoughts. A place to document my challenges, my wins, the things I love, the things I don’t. It’s for me. If others enjoy it or learn something, great! But this content is for me.
The part I didn’t want to write
I don’t want to dwell too much on the last two months. It would be a depressing start to something I want to build positive energy around. But it also feels wrong not to acknowledge it.
In the last 60 days I’ve had 2 A&E visits, an ambulance call-out, hundreds of panic attacks, constant chronic pain, almost no mobility, and 3 doctors who can’t agree on a diagnosis. (Almost certainly yet more arthritis.)
On Monday I counted how many people I’d spoken to in person during those 60 days who weren’t doctors or nurses. I didn’t need two hands. I’ve been incredibly isolated.
It’s been shit.
My first week back
One of the reasons I’m writing my first ever weeknote is that I went back to work this week. Thankfully, it turned out to be exactly what I needed.
The people I work with were so welcoming. Little things like messages saying they were glad I was back, or someone staying on a call for a few extra minutes to chat rather than hanging up straight away. Tiny acts of kindness, but a huge contrast to the isolation I’ve had recently. They mean a lot. GOV.UK Pay is full of good people, and I feel cared for.
I’ve also been given work to do that I care about and can achieve. The big change is that I’m not in a specific delivery team for the first time in nearly ten years. I’m a team of one. I need to find the right balance of working in the open so there are no surprise “ta-da” moments of work nobody needed, proper agile working scaled down to one person.
I’ve been writing a daily note on what I’m doing and getting the odd bit of feedback or at least an emoji showing engagement. I’ll keep that up. I miss seeing people at stand-ups and the energy committing to work gives me.
Over the next few weeks I’ll be keeping an eye on how to collaborate well, involve people at the right time, make my own decisions when I need to, and make sure nobody’s wondering “who’s that Rich and what on earth is he doing?”
Walking before thinking, not thinking before walking
Three examples this week. Two with lessons. One… probably not.
First, after my first day back at work, I went for a walk in the rain without my walking stick because my ego was too high after that first day back. When I reached a rain-sodden bridge in Hertford Castle Park, over I went onto my butt. OUCH.
I wasn’t thinking about what was underfoot. Obvious in hindsight. Wet leaves, wet autumn weather, my mind elsewhere.
The ducks learnt a few new swear words to say the least. Later I read a paper my friend Sam shared about how swearing is an effective painkiller. Can confirm. It helped me get the adrenaline going, get back on my feet, and recover from the shock of my knee twisting into positions it shouldn’t. A small cry helped too.
It set me back. My knee swelled and keeps giving out when I walk, especially on stairs. But I was determined not to log into work on Tuesday and fail by signing off because of yet more pain. Some new meds helped.
Lesson 1: check the ego, use the stick, and pay attention to where I’m walking.
On Wednesday I wrote in my daily note that I’d made two mistakes by reacting on instinct and a false memory instead of taking a minute to check facts. Owning mistakes openly is part of being a servant leader and sets the example I hope others can follow.
First, I misread a Splunk report and misdiagnosed a problem. No harm done once I was reminded that some TLS 1.2 ciphers are OK. Thanks Joe!
Next, I put 2+2 together and made 5, thought we’d missed an important task, and went straight to Slack to get it fixed. I spotted my mistake quickly — I was six months ahead of myself — but I was too late to have caused distraction within the team.
Even though my messages weren’t panicked, they didn’t meet the tone I aim for: calm under pressure with enough energy to move things quickly.
Slack messages stick around forever. I also have a lot of social and positional power in the team. If I say something needs doing, then people tend to react to that quickly. I’d caused a distraction from planned work, and I need to be careful to not derail people from their day.
Lesson 2: when I think something’s gone wrong, breathe first, check facts, then react. I know this.
The third instance was on my way here to write this post. I spent 20 minutes putting on shoes and socks (limited mobility makes it slow), stood up, and realised I hadn’t put trousers on. DOH!
There’s no lesson 3 — I’ve always been an idiot, arthritis or not.
OK OK! Things come in 3s, I know!
I returned to the bridge where I fell on the way, this time with my stick. I know I can attach anxiety to places where bad things happen to me, so facing it mattered.
Lesson 3: Putting up mental barriers to leaving the house won’t help my recovery.
The scene of the crime:
Igniting my spark
This week surprised me — I’ve found passion again, in and out of work, when I thought there was no light.
At work, I’m reminded how much I love it. The people, the service, the sense of purpose. I’m lucky to use “love” and “work” in the same sentence.
I’m planning to help our PCI assessments go even better and to improve the experience of working on Pay — especially for new starters, so they can feel confident and useful sooner. Proper DevEx/SORA stuff: improving the experience of work for everyone.
I’ve also been inspired by working with our designer Sally on making an accessibility testing initiative more self-organising. We’re using an Eco-cycle to plan with the group, which has been a brilliant metaphor to check we’re being the leaders we intend to be and focusing on what matters.
In retrospect it made me think of Emily Webber’s book on building communities of practice — and how the activities of the eco-cycle really match up with her description for setting communities up for success. So a good sign.
I’ve loved building this site. It’s a paid-for theme and I’ve used an LLM for most of the coding (I’m not an engineer!), so I take little credit, but I’m proud of some bits - for example a neat little open backlog that calls the JIRA API and puts my plans in the open.
Proud of myself. Dead chuffed.
What I’ve been into
- Florence and the Machine playlist on Amazon Music
- The Rest Is Science (A+ recommendation)
- Slow Gods, by Claire North (beautiful world-building)
- Civilisation VII (when my knees can handle sitting at the desk)
- Wake Up Dead Man — the new Knives Out mystery (it’s great!)
What, so what, now what?
The swearing-as-painkiller paper ends with a Liberating Structure summary. So I’m nabbing that idea to sign off.
What?
- I’m going through huge change
- I need more than an hour of counselling a week to grow
- I’m incredibly grateful for where I work
- It’s easy to make mistakes when I don’t think first
So what?
- I’m responsible for my own care
- This will be hard for a long time
- I can still find joy
- Humour is allowed
- I need ways to express and understand what’s bottled up
Now what?
- Keep expressing and try publishing to this site properly
- Publish more. Stop tinkering, ship value
- Use the stick — I have it for a reason
- Stay optimistic and enjoy the good
- Trousers on first, Rich!