It’s 2005 and a week before my nineteenth birthday. Mobile phones at the time were still primitive, but if you were creative and had enough time on your hands, you could edit your own ringtone on some Nokia devices, which I successfully used to program the main riff of my teenage band’s new song as my alarm sound. Once again, the primitive early years of now-dominant technology encouraged creativity, despite (or because of) the limitations.

But I digress. On the Saturday afternoon I’m thinking of, I was standing at the entrance to the Cornerhouse, a large cinema/shopping mall in the centre of Nottingham. I’d planned to meet my mum and sister there for lunch, and had forgotten to bring my phone. No matter; they’d be there by 1pm and I was five minutes early.

Time ticked past and soon it was half an hour past the meeting point. I agonised about what to do: if I left and tried to find them at the pub we were supposed to be meeting at, they might come to the Cornerhouse and miss me. The best thing to do was to stay where I was.

Everyone’s a little vain, really. If you’re on social media—and who isn’t—then you’re lying if you claim that you’ve never gleefully checked the Like count on a particularly good post you were proud of. We’ve all been trained, like the proverbial rat in a cage, to press the dopamine button and try to get the machine to love us.

A dozen years ago I was working at the Guardian and wrote a piece on the newly-launched Developer Blog about the first stage of a website redesign we’d been working on. I was a member of the team working on this, but certainly not the main contributor. I liked to write, though, so my teammates were fine with me being the “face” of the work, at least as far as the scope of the blogpost went.

Six months later I was on stage at my first tech conference as a speaker, doing a presentation version of the article to a paying audience. A year after the article, I was giving my second, similarly-themed talk. For a brief period, I was mildly on “the circuit” of tech conferences.

I sat down to write this week’s newsletter with the intention to discuss Trump’s victory. It’s the biggest news story all year and will materially affect the lives of most people reading this for years to come.

But you don’t want to hear about this from me (or anyone), I suspect. As I walked through the supermarket this lunchtime I passed the newspaper stand, which was filled with orange closeups of the new president-elect. I felt a sudden urge to give the finger to an inanimate object, frustrated that his victory had somehow followed me into “the real world” outside of screens.

There are some days at work when nothing gets done because of the news agenda. I remember the deaths of both David Bowie and Prince causing the downing of tools for most of those days while we talked about their legendary output and listened to their work. Trump’s first election victory was another day like this, but the novelty was still around then: what was this guy actually going to do in office? This time around, we already know.

So I don’t want to fill your inbox with more doomscrolling about how awful things are going to be. This sucks, it’s a terrible outcome even for the people who voted for him, and you already know all this. Instead I’ll leave the last word on this to my musical hero Ted Leo, who wrote an entire album about the awfulness of the Bush administration back in 2004 (god, how quaint and mild it now seems). The title track from that album, Shake The Sheets, runs thus:

Sorry for the delayed arrival of this week’s Man Feelings. I’ve just got back from a week in Portugal with the family (it’s half term) and I was in no fit state to write an email when we got home on Friday afternoon.

The theme of this week’s missive, then, is… going on holiday. Here are some Portuguese vignettes.

Why did we do this to ourselves?

I’ve written here before about me being a stressful traveller. It’s taken me a while to accept this label: when I’ve travelled abroad solo for work trips I’ve been prompt, organised, on time and well-prepared. The notion that I could be a “bad traveller” is one I bristled at when Maddy gently suggested it to me. But I’ve come to accept, after this recent trip, that perhaps in the context of transporting two kids from A to B, I’m not very good.

Parenting a school-age kid is a weird experience of confusion, bureaucracy and misinformation. You’re left at the mercy of multiple, non-interoperable IT “platforms” to do things as basic as pay for your kid’s milk, and unable to persuade the child in question to give you even the slightest insight about what they’ve been doing there all day.

It’s a black box of education: you drop them off in the morning, stuff happens for eight hours, then you collect them again, clothes stained with paint/food/bodily fluids, with a line drawing of a classmate doing a poo as the only thing to show for it.

This mystifying experience, perhaps, was what led me to wrongly accuse one of my five-year-old son’s teachers of poor support for his literary development, in the course of an otherwise-innocuous Parents’ Evening earlier this week.