The first quarter
31 March 2025Last Christmas and New-Year I had just gone through a quarter filled with almosu universally short-notice changes and in summary was throughly exhausted. Since then I have been getting down to properly sorting out my life in Manchester and while there are plenty of unresolved issues that I much prefer to not think about, since there is not much that can be done about them anyway, the first quarter of this year compares favourably with pretty much everything in the last year or so. Things generally going right rather than wrong.
Rapid improvements
In the very last weekend before Christmas I was able to source a proper desk and when returning in the new-year bought up my main personal workstation, which together were big steps in going from transient living to something nearer a normality. The extra 10cm depth and 30cm width was barely a 4% increase in desktop space but it is just enough that it does not feel a squeeze compared to the battered table that came with the apartment; and using my main workstation which had most of my stuff on was a massive improvement over my under-powered portable one which was little more than a thin-client for servers back in London. This is where practically all the waking hours within the apartment will be spent so this whole setup would naturally be a major and early personal “investment”.
In the week back was the replacement of the broken and cold tile floor of the bathroom with something much nicer to stand on, so even this first week was about improving the place by doing all the stuff that before Christmas there was absolutely no energy to do or organise. This coincided with some wet and extremely cold weather that necessitated staying in so this was one of many things that made differences. Getting fit was firmly off the agenda as cold and dark mornings are not the time to get into any sort of regime and I had yet to bring up any gym kit, so energy was pretty much all into passing probation with me often as not dozing off the moment I got in after work. And on a few occasions even having a sly lunch-time nap.
However the true biggie was finally cracking a what turned out to be a kernel module bug that had dogged me practically since I joined the company and I put it down to a Christmas break of virtual hibernation that helped refresh myself — it is only in hindsight someone realises how shattered they are and the break followed by a fresh look helped enormously. Before Christmas I had felt personally disappointed with what was perceived by myself as lacklustre progress but over January things sped up a lot. February saw me dealing with build systems which was as the company admitted being thrown in in the deep end, so while I was just about on top of things it was mentally tiring.
The financials
The aftermath of both my Ph.D in 2010 and my return to Europe in 2013 was paying off a huge credit card bill, where the early squeeze on spending allowed reductions on the outstanding balance at the point where even the smallest payment mattered the most. Personal austerity at the most critical time to keep interest payments under control, where every little bit of extra repayment makes the biggest difference. While circumstances this year are very different and certainly a lot easier I had planned a similar squeeze, but then unexpectedly was the landing of a tax refund that I thought would not even be calculated until the end of the tax year. This saw my credit card balance not only wiped out in its entirety well ahead of schedule but also good progress in building up my personal sinking fund. Not having to be quite so tight about spending almost certainly helped my mental well-being.
The biggest ticket item was management company fees for my London apartment which had to be paid via some form of bank transfer and I was unsure what instalment options would be provided, since there had been a changeover of administrators and the new ones did things very differently. And in some ways far less conveniently and certainly less competently. However this turned out to be half-yearly rather than the annual that had been budgeted for, and the council tax bills that landed don't need payment until well into April. Was going to pay these both off all in one go but more likely will spread them out a bit instead.
The economy
There is much I do not know about the company and a large portion of what I do know is not for public consumption, but it caught my attention that at least in my team the clients are all overseas. This foreign client base was the same situation at the company I worked at in the early-2010s and the implication of this is how much of my career has not been dependent on the British economy, even after leaving aside the three jobs that were outright abroad. All the more pertinent since I was on the verge of going overseas again for work when I got the offer and the job market has worsened since then. Simply do not see the client base for a significant British-centric career.
What I have seen of automotive artificial intelligence tangentially with my last job was the British farting around with regulations which seem akin to the Red Flag Act of 1865, and it looks like they will only get their act together once technologies developed in kinder overseas environments are in production. Meanwhile I see development in the United States racing ahead. It is unclear whether the pledge for best growth in the G7 is official but either way the now not-so-new government needs such barn-storming growth but so far at best are letting ships sail and at worst are crippling businesses. My 2012 conclusion was the British economy being built on the sands of public sector life support and see little difference with today.
There is a definite sense of economic pessimism of a nature different from the past that is hard to pin down, and for now feel trying to evaluate it is something better left to future hind-sight. Maybe it is down to things being especially bad outside of London that previously passed me by. It is one of those things that is very speculative at the moment and I have my own stuff to sort out first.
Personal “investment”
Rather than making do with the bare essentials investing means buying in stuff that while not strictly or immediately required made the place feel more like a long-term home. In the first week of January this meant just going ahead and buying an oil-filled radiator during a bitterly cold snap, kitting out the second bedroom, and getting in a printer/scanner. A stark contrast is the time in temporary accommodation when the only item I bought was a clothes horse and even then it is something that should really have been provided. Most of the stuff bought were things that one way or another I had not expected to have in the flat until well into the second quarter.
Almost all the apartment is wood flooring with lot of covered areas for which an upright vacuum cleaner intended for carpets is nothing but a pain to use, so getting in my own cordless handheld vacuum meant that dust got removed as soon as it became visible rather than being ignored, which I am pretty sure also made me feel that bit more healthy. Chipping away at little annoyances is the name of the game and this in turn is mini-goals. Without these little improvements apathy takes root and the place becomes merely functional rather than pleasant — a place to just wash and sleep rather than somewhere desirable to spend spare time.
There are limits though. Restraint when furnishing my London flat was undeniably the right thing and since it takes time for items to finally find their ‘home’ I did not want a load of unsorted stuff. It is also simply not possible to kit the place out to the same extent as my London apartment and I may well have moved by this time next year, so a notable example is only getting in one set of thermal curtains and I may well swap back the original curtains for one of the windows come the summer. Things like that are rather specific to the property and hence may well have to be written-off upon moving out are very poor value for money.
Change of bedroom
Shortly after fully kitting out the spare bedroom I decided to try it instead of the main bedroom while the sheets from the latter were being laundered, and have preferentially used it ever since. Especially with the large sliding door with the main living area and the same hardwood floor but also having an en-suite, the main bedroom was uncertain whether it was trying to be an actual bedroom in a two-bed or part of a much larger living area more suited as a study. Given the choice I would turn it into an office or electronics workshop but have a sofa-bed in there for those rare occasions I have people staying around.
The ‘spare’ room actually felt like a proper bedroom, being carpeted and having the type of heater expected of such a room rather than the same model used in the hallway. Having a smaller window on a smaller wall also helped with keeping it warm and I reverted to my preference for a separate bathroom rather than an en-suite shower. Maybe with the general feeling of improvement just the change of scene was a step up but I suspect the much higher overall quality of the fresh and better fitted bedding paid a part, a good portion of which I bought up from down south rather than buying locally. It also motivated me to make the room feel less of a cupboard by clearing out all the dumped boxes and wrapping.
One weekend afternoon was finally set aside for the sort of mass clear-out and general tidy-up that happens every few months when I want to reclaim space, and this extended to bringing more order to where things were kept. This was modelled on the system I adopted in London of keeping things in boxes although I took the general attitude that things I had no foreseeable use for should be stored down south, although there were exceptions such as things that could not easily be transported such as the oil radiator.