For various reasons the last couple of weeks have been very tough. Despite that I’ve been lucky enough to have several life-affirming moments:

• Me and Tony (and his mate Tony) meeting up with Hubert for his birthday. Hubert went to our school and it was so, so lovely to see him again. We even got a chance to hear his new band play a few tunes.
• Spending more time walking around with Michele. The quack really thinks I need more exercise and so we’ve spent a lot of time walking around, just enjoying the pockets of wildlife, and chatting.
• Replacing my former employer’s aged OpenBSD/ipf firewall with a nice new OpenBSD/pf firewall. pf r0xx0rz.
• Bizarrely, two days after seeing Hubert, whom I haven’t seen for a few years, I bumped into Corine, whom I haven’t seen for over 11 years. We had a long chat in the pub and it turns out that not only has she has expanded her circle of friends to include world leaders, philosophers and Jeremy Hardy, but she’s also a rather cool documentary filmmaker. It was so nice to see her again…
• My friend Claire did the Marathon!
• Spending a lot of time talking to James

Apologies for being so crap with the blog recently. I’ll make it up…