I acquired a cargo bike recently for transporting my children. I don’t specifically think of them as baggage, to be clear, but it helps with managing expectations.

I was riding on this—large, heavy—bike to collect the five-year-old from summer holiday club earlier this week. The road was narrow and bent around a corner, and I could already feel the tell-tale hum of a vehicle behind me, unable to pass and stalking my rear wheel.

As soon as it became physically possible, the driver accelerated and narrowly passed me on the stretch of road pictured below, just as another cyclist came in the opposite direction. My biking brother looked surprised at the sight of a large van speeding towards him, and I raised my arm in the air in the universal language of “what the fuck, mate?” as the van squeezed past both of us.

I was an early Twitter user, joining the site in March 2008 and using it as a platform to spout my half-baked opinions, weak attempts at humour and efforts at self-promotion. These days I do that stuff via newsletters.

Twitter back then still had something of the “early internet” to it – for one thing, it had an SMS integration where it would literally text you tweets from people you followed. Explaining this now feels like telling Gen-Z kids what Blockbuster Video’s business model was.

It built on the early “blogosphere” (another term that feels faintly embarrassing to define in 2024) and the tangible sense of community, especially in the areas of web design/development, news, technology and arts where lots of my interests lay. I’d grown up using internet message boards to chat to fans of the music I liked as a teenager, but now I was in my twenties, social media was here. In 2011 I deleted my Facebook account permanently – everything I needed from social media was right there on Twitter.

Content warning: this post talks about child loss.

Last weekend we celebrated the start of the summer holidays by taking the kids to Center Parcs. If you’re somehow unfamiliar, this is basically middle-class Butlins: overpriced forest cabins with swimming pools, chain restaurants and woodland activities (archery, cycling and basket-weaving, probably). It’s Maddy’s favourite place, so we go fairly often.

We’d set ourselves a fairly challenging afternoon on Saturday: mini-golf with the kids, followed by ten-pin bowling, followed by a trip to a restaurant staffed partly by robots. We were outside the bowling place while the kids ran around when we bumped into another family.

Yesterday was the last day of school for my five year old son. I dropped him off that morning along with a couple of his favourite toys, which he was excited to get to take with him for his final day in Reception. My excitement was muted, though: today marks the beginning of our first encounter with the six-week school holidays. What are we going to do with a kid at home all day for the next month and a half?

We also just booked our annual family holiday for this October, hoping for a bit of sunshine in the cold and rainy arse-end of the year to cheer us up. It costs an astronomical sum of money to fly four of us to Portugal for a week, and this is while we still don’t have to pay for one of the kids.

This is topical because every other family is in the same boat if they want to leave the country this year – the age-old debate about taking kids out of school in order to save money on holidays is rearing its head once again.

I have a complicated relationship with football.

It’s the early 90s and I’m in junior school. We’ve just moved halfway across the country from Merseyside to rural Nottinghamshire and I’m something of a novelty with my Scouse-tinged accent and—crucially—lack of interest in football.

Each of the school day’s three break times is spent playing football; at least, for boys. There are one or two outsiders who are exempt from this, kids who I’ll eventually discover and become friends with, but for now, I dutifully follow everybody else from my class and we spread into a long line while the two team captains pick their squad. I’m always last to be picked unless I catch the eye of one of the captains and silently beseech him to pick me; try to will him to recall how I helped him with his spelling yesterday afternoon. Sometimes it works.