I'm typing this week's email from a pub table, on my phone, with a roaring log fire while my partner relaxes opposite with a book. Our kids are miles away being entertained by their grandparents, and the only thing I have to worry about today is whether the fancy French cheeseboard we half-finished last night will still be good today.

All in all, it's been a good Christmas.

Last week was a big one for me: I wrote here about my unexpected redundancy, and posted something slightly less specific on LinkedIn. I got such an outpouring of support and recognition from people that I was hugely moved - I should lose my job more often, I thought. A couple of former colleagues (and even strangers) reached out with offers to recommend me for upcoming roles, and I ended the working year feeling positive and even excited about 2025, rather than filled with trepidation and doubt.

A few weeks ago at work, I got called into a short-notice meeting with my boss’s boss. When someone from HR joined the call, I knew something was afoot. Within minutes I was being told that I was “at risk of redundancy”.

It’s a funny word, isn’t it, redundant? Like an appendix, perhaps, or a no-smoking sign on a plane. It’s something we don’t need anymore, a hangover from an earlier period. It’s certainly not something you want to describe yourself as.

Business is business, though, and these things happen. I could quibble and complain about the strategies and decisions that led to this happening, but ultimately it’s a line on a spreadsheet that needs to be resolved, and who am I to argue with the might of Excel?

I’ve been pottering around cyberspace this week as I moved some old websites from one server to another. Midway through my list was a blog I started in 2010 after moving to the capital, which I called “Lessons Learned in London”.

It was mainly concerned with the perils and pitfalls of the London rental market and superficially aimed at fellow newbies navigating the seemingly-arbitrary demands of prospective landlords and letting agents. Reading back some of the entries fifteen years later, I’m struck by how small my problems seemed back then (not to mention the font size on my blog).

As you read this, I’m on my way to London for the weekend, seeing family for the run-up to Christmas. The five years I lived there are memorable for the bevy of new experiences I was exposed to, and I have no regrets: I moved there at 23 and left not long before turning 30. A misspent youth it wasn’t, but sometimes I find myself starting to calculate how much money I earned during the period without saving a single penny of it, and wince.

I apologise for the lateness of this week’s issue, normally scheduled for Friday mornings. I wracked my brain to think of a good excuse but wasn’t able to come up with anything convincing, so I asked an AI bot to write some instead:

1. "Sorry it’s late – email platform outage — but we’re back now!"

2. "Sorry it’s late – I held out for a last-minute update — and it’s here!"

3. "Sorry it’s late – quick 24-hour bug, but I’m back on track!"

Convincing.

This is relevant because I’ve been thinking a lot about AI this week. It’s the topic du jour and in the last few days I read this piece by Ed Zitron who argues that AI is “a technology that lacks any real purpose, sold as if it could do literally anything”.

My new album is out this week – a collection of songs I spent the past year or so writing and recording, then editing and tweaking until I hated each song and never wanted to hear them again. But ignore me, and go listen to it!

Choosing a name for something is hard, as I’ve written before. A child, a pet, a song, or a record: these names will stick around for a long time. In this instance, nobody really cares except me, but I wanted to choose something that symbolised the collection of ideas and feelings I was expressing, without sounding trite.

I settled on “Masks”, which also ended up being the name of the closing song on the album. A lesser writer would insert the dictionary definition of the word “Masks” at this point, but come on: this is Man Feelings. Let’s talk about emotions instead!