Simon Young

Another missed week where not a whole lot happened – but I’m keeping on and trying to build the habit.

• I spent most of this week back in Lausanne on the follow up week to my first trip there back in October finishing up what is called the Catalyst leadership course. Along with 60 colleagues I spent the week diving deep in to leadership and strategy with professors from IMD Business School, running business simulations and getting coached by trained actors in the art of presentation. Tiring but absolutely worth it.
• Back in Manchester things are moving at a slightly slower pace – we are still waiting for council approval to start renovations and most other jobs are either too big to take on right now or need the rain to finally stop.
• I’ve finalised plans for the upgrade of the basement workshop so next step is finding a damp proofing specialist to prep a couple of troublesome walls before they get clad and I somehow attempt to replace the basement ceiling piece by piece. In the meantime I’m building out various workbenches for existing and future tools. What could possibly go wrong?

As I exclusively predicted here, I failed to keep Week Notes going past week 9. Here we are 16 weeks later trying again. I’m going to define this as week 25 because it’s my blog, so I can.

A lot has happened since the last post. It can be boiled down to two life events:

• I eat meat now. After nearly 4 years I came to the conclusion that vegetables are great but boring eventually, that fake meat costs far too much (in every sense) and that actually I really like meat and life is too short. I started off strong back in November with a steak tartare and a ribeye – it went well so I have kept doing it. Still no fish or dairy though so I am still miserable to cook for or go out for dinner with.
• I own a Peloton now. This is essentially the logical progression of the mid-life event I continue to navigate (Land Rover, vegan, take up running, quit running, quit veganism, keep the Land Rover). It’s not unrelated to the first bullet point where I figure that I need to find some form of sensible yet warm and dry way to stay in some sort of shape. Six weeks in, I’ve done 30 rides, ridden 279km and consistently annoyed my friends with these type of updates.

And this week…

• I spent most of the week at the home of the (plastic) brick, which was a lot of fun. I had to prepare and co-host a workshop session for a roomful of colleagues from around the world – fortunately it seems to have gone well – unfortunately I have to deliver a similar session again now as a result.
• Back home the basement workshop continues to take shape, the allotment is in the middle of a spring refresh, M is increasingly becoming the boss of the entire household and we continue to wait for the council to approve renovation plans so we can get started.
• The Defender no longer smells like a wet dog thanks to some pre-Christmas repairs but it does still leak regularly which means that I am now starting the process of renovation on this too. Or should I just sell it?
• It’s three years to the day since we left London to return to the north.

Will I keep this up for more than one week? Tune in next Sunday to find out!

• Inevitably I managed to get sick on my flight back from LA so a pretty quiet start to the week of shaking off the jet lag and getting back to work (from home). As I sit looking out of my window at a wet Manchester afternoon it occurs to me that maybe living in Southern California wouldn’t be all that bad.
• The Defender continues to be a source of stress as it is smelling increasingly like a wet dog as it waits to go in to the garage for some work to find where it is leaking from this year. This leads to driving it less which leads to it’s new trick of not starting on a regular basis.
• M has decided to regress from sleeping all night to waking up some time in the middle of the night screaming and demanding a grown up goes and lies on his floor next to him. This is not a welcome development.

• Another week of travel but this time with a difference as I started Sunday morning with the short shuttle flight to London Euston followed by the very long flight (in Economy!) to Los Angeles for a week of meeting new people and visiting some of our stores.
• I forgot what an overwhelming experience it is landing at LAX and attempting to get to the car hire locations – truly an attack on the senses.
• The early part of the week was pretty intense and full of meetings but our location down in Orange County did mean some epic driving to and from the office and the opportunity to get dinner in Laguna Beach (I missed sunset by about 5 minutes).
• Mid-week meant travelling back up towards LA via several of our stores and an encounter with the legendary LA traffic – fortunately we got in to the city in time for a bucket list trip to watch the Los Angeles Lakers where they just pipped the LA Clippers in overtime thanks to a legendary performance by Lebron James.

• My penultimate trip of the year meant I was back in Copenhagen for a few days. The weather has truly turned in Denmark and from the moment I descended from the clouds on Monday morning until I flew back in to them on Wednesday afternoon, all I saw was grey and pretty much constant rainy conditions – still it’s a pretty city to be rained on.
• I finally went to POPL Burger – the burger restaurant spin-off of noma – in Christianshavn which absolutely did not disappoint. I had the vegan burger which was a really good reminder of what a vegan burger probably should be rather than the fake meat, fake cheese, fake mayo that has become the norm.
• Even though it was a great experience it kind of cemented the fact that I’m not actually enjoying being vegan anymore – so I should probably stop being vegan.
• Back in the UK, the Defender would not start again. This is becoming a common occurrence.

• A week where truly very little happened except for… it is finally done! The record cabinet is finished, polished and has taken pride of place in the living room.
• I feel like I have learned a lot in making this but probably number one on that list is that furniture making is HARD. I don’t think this is going to be replacing my day job as a main income source anytime soon.

• A very different week as I spent it at IMD Business School in Lausanne as part of a leadership training course I am doing through work with 60 of my colleagues.
• Winter is definitely on the way as evidenced on Sunday morning where I found the Defender windscreen was iced up not just on the outside but on the inside too…
• We decided to try something new with M and so on Sunday morning he went to his first rock climbing session at Rock Tots. He was a bit uncertain at first but by the end of it was quickly getting in to the swing of it and climbing up pretty high.
• Sunday afternoon was the big moment of the week – the big glue up of the record cabinet I have been making since August. After an incredibly tense 20 minutes of racing to align and clamp everything before the glue set it all worked out well – all that is left now is some final buffing and it is done. So now I am officially a furniture maker.

• M is really getting the hang of the potty training now and so far it’s been a lot less mess than maybe we expected to start with – and he’s really proud of himself 🤣
• Two weeks after saying I was nearly done with making the record cabinet I’ve managed to put the first coat of varnish on the remaining panels but will need to wait until next week to finish off because…
• I finished the week by travelling to Lausanne ready for a week-long training course but managed to squeeze in a Sunday afternoon trip to the Olympic Museum as well as an evening by Lake Geneva (Lac Léman) watching the sunset over the mountains. Not bad.

• I went to Denmark (again) on a very small plane (again).
• On this trip I actually had time to spend an hour inside the phenomenal LEGO^® House for the first time since before the pandemic. I had time to check out the latest additions to the city as well as take a walk through the basement vault looking at sets from my childhood. It is exactly what is says on the tin – the ultimate LEGO experience. OK, maybe I am a bit biased.
• We are at the start of fully renovating our Victorian terrace and this week our architect delivered the first proposals of what it might look like when finished. If we can get it looking anywhere near as good as the visuals it’s going to be amazing – it’s just going to take a very long time!
• We took M away for the weekend to the Lake District with some friends and their toddlers – we had a great time but came back feeling like I need a two week holiday. M got to go on a boat trip on Derwentwater which he very much enjoyed and topped it off by seeing his first ever waterfall which pretty much blew his little mind. Sadly practicality ruled the day and the Defender got left at home.
• Potty training continues…. 🚽

• M became a threenager this week. We celebrated by taking the train in to a very rainy Manchester to buy the only present he asked for – “a squeezy yoghurt from M&S” – and then we visited the library and got the tram home.
• We started potty training – so far not going well and he declared that when he has an accident it makes him feel “warm and cosy”.
• We had a big planning day at work for Q4 which I helped do the kick off for – people seemed to enjoy it and I think we’re going to build some really good stuff in the next few months.
• I’ve been making a custom record cabinet on and off since the summer – this weekend my Dad brought it up from his workshop ready for me to do the final varnishing and glue together. With a bit of luck it’ll be done in the next couple of weeks. In my infinite wisdom I thought this could be done inside a week when I was off in the summer but it turns out making custom furniture is tricky and time-consuming when you have things like a job and a family.