Traditionally May is my second favourite month*. Two bank holidays is always a blessing and in years gone by I’ve built amazing holidays around those days off. Timehop has been actively reminding me about those holidays – which is a bit of a mixed blessing truth be told. Last year though I caught Covid in May and have never quite recovered (the getting hit by a car didn’t help) and despite the country loosening the restrictions I’ve found it hard to free myself from a lockdown mindset so seeing all the pics of my trips has been…confusing for my moods.

I’m trying though. I’ve been out and met colleagues in person (thanks Sara and James) and got on a couple of buses. I’ve made plans to visit friends in other cities. I’ve had both jabs now so I feeling a bit more confident but I was hardly a social butterfly before all this and now I’ve kind of forgotten how to be out out.

Work is hectic. I’ve been significantly involved in four major projects for different clients in May and been lightly involved with a couple of other things – with my focus switching week to week, day to day, am to pm, hour to hour. It is hard. I don’t want to let clients or colleagues down but it takes its toll. Thankfully it looks like June might be a little less of a roller coaster with one (really interesting) project taking the majority of my focus but I’ll still have to keep an eye on a bunch of other things. The constant context switching means paracetamol is basically my main food group at the moment.

I did have a really good meeting with James – our CEO – about how my position in the company is evolving. I’ve often joked about the fact I’ve lacked a job title or description since I joined 45 months ago. In many ways it never really mattered – I did what was most helpful for the company and clients and as a business we were so flat in structure everybody had a voice – but the company is growing up since the mergers and emergence of Foundry4 and it is nice to have some clarity. The suggested role is one very much designed to play to my strengths and I’m excited about it…and about what the existence of the role means for the company.

The complication I threw in though is that I know I need a bit of a break to put myself back together fully before I can give myself fully to such an opportunity and everybody is being really supportive of working that out.

I also had to do the paperwork this month to arrange for the vesting of my first tranche of share options which should happen in July. I signed my options agreement just days before our Group went public back in 2018 and honestly I never really gave it much thought. I didn’t really understand the whole ‘City’ thing and given my career history the idea that I’d stay around for more than three years to collect anything seemed far-fetched! But here I am and so I’ve had to learn a bit about what I’d actually signed up for.

The fact that I might (might doing some heavy lifting here!) have a bit of money also just reiterated how out of step I am with most people I know when it comes to personal economics. I have next to zero interest in property. I live in a tiny flat that is far from luxurious and it really has never seriously occurred to me to move. Or really do more than the minimum to keep it up together. It is just a roof over my head, somewhere to store my trainers, comics and art, binge Netflix and get take-aways delivered! Yet everybody I have spoken to have gone immediately to assumptions about moving or extensions or other properties

I was thinking about new art, trainers, comics and travel. So much travel.

Oh I might buy a new armchair.

Maybe.

*December is best of course