“It’s called a devil crab”, the old man told us, plunging his hand into the cloudy bucket. He neatly plucked the crab from its plastic lair and raised it to head height. “Red eyes”, he pointed out helpfully, as the tiny crustacean struggled in his hairy palm. Ted, 5, looked on in fascination. “Dunno what this one is”, the man continued, aware of his rapt—and growing—audience. He pulled a pale-looking crab from the milky water. “Bottom feeder”, he added, as he flipped the shell-dweller upside down to show us its strangely-muscular undercarriage.

We were visiting the famous Cromer Pier, just days after the World Pier Crabbing Championship. From a distance, the pier looked like some kind of bizarre wooden jellyfish: dozens of wispy orange tendrils floated in the sea breeze below its wooden deck, which I realised were the crablines of hopeful fisherfolk. As we got closer, we saw that the entire structure was lined with families, individuals, couples, people old and young – all fervently dangling their lines over the side in the hope of landing a crab.

My five-year-old son has recently started doing things to grab people’s attention. I don’t mean showing off with daredevil feats of physical bravery, or wearing dress-up costumes to public places – he’s been doing that since he was a toddler. No, this is a more specific kind of attention-seeking: he’s trying to be perceived as cool.

It tends to happen around older kids: we’ll be walking past some 10 year olds, and as soon as Ted notices them, he’ll pretend not to look at them while raising his voice to ensure they hear him say “DAD, LET’S USE OUR ELECTRIC BIKE TO RIDE HOME, BECAUSE WE HAVE AN ELECTRIC BIKE AND IT’S REALLY FAST”. It’s equal parts hilarious and crushing to see the kids he’s trying to impress either ignore his efforts or just look at him with bafflement when he quickly glances over to see if they noticed.

This made me think about my own less-youthful efforts at the same thing: trying to be noticed, despite outward appearance. Usually these moments came at pivotal times of change, much like my son is experiencing.

As you read this email, I’ll be experiencing the first day of Green Man festival in Bannau Brycheiniog (the region formerly known as the Brecon Beacons) with my partner and two kids. We’ve been three times before, but only once with a child – doing a festival with two of them is going to be… an experience.

“Festival Matt” isn’t really that different from Regular Matt. I’ve tried wearing novelty hats, but my head is too large for most of them to fit. I’m not cool—or young—enough to stay up all night raving on illegal substances. I’ve walked past the yoga tent at Glastonbury a couple of times, but the bloke wandering around asking if I wanted to go to his “sexology” class tended to put me off.

The first time I went to Green Man, we wandered into a folk music workshop and I made the fatal error of assuming I was destined to become a banjo player. It’s an easy mistake to make: I could already play the guitar, and banjos are tuned to an open chord, meaning that when you strum it, it sounds just like a banjo. Soon you’re picking out the notes for Dueling Banjos and wondering where this five-stringed, drum-skin-bearing instrument has been all your life.

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.