Andrew Doran
Andrew Doran
I write here in order to work things out and understand myself better. I write here in order to put things down that I have been carrying around in my head, so I don’t need to carry them around anymore. I write here in order to capture a moment and have something that I can look back on, remembering what I thought and felt at the time.
August 2026
September 2026
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Top Words
- weeknotes
- year
- born
- work
- life
- song
- london
All posts (101)
Lining up at the start of the JPMorganChase Corporate Challenge A fully-packed week with plenty going on. Multiple days of back-to-back meetings coupled with things happening in the evenings. And when things weren’t happening, the football was on. The football is always on. This was a week in which I: Have been...
A swan and their cygnets on the bank of the River Bulbourne by The Old Mill, Berkhamsted. Boiling. In the UK we are not equipped to live through day after day of mid-30s°C heat, with the temperature only dropping into the mid-20s overnight with barely a breeze in the air. Sleeping was a tough gig, lying on top of...
My regular morning view from the hotel gym, looking out across the Rosebank suburb of Johannesburg. When last week’s Sun City-based conference was announced, I decided to extend my stay in South Africa so that I could spend some time with our team members who are based there. It wasn’t perfect timing; Tuesday was a...
Just randomly recalled that as a kid, we used to say ‘fainites’ when asking for mercy or a time out. I thought it was a weird word made up amongst some friends. It turns out that it was a real word used throughout southern England.
An intriguing, ill-fitting door in the wall at Lancaster Gate tube station. Who knows what is hidden behind it? Two days in the office followed by two conferences, one in London and another in Sun City, South Africa. The morning agenda for the Gartner UK & Ireland CIO Community Executive Summit, 10 June 2026 On...
Finished reading Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins. I’m a big fan of dissections of all things pop, and although the topic of this book isn’t quite the same as a music documentary or a look back at 1980s UK TV programmes, the backstory of PowerPoint is in the same wheelhouse for...
Last weekend’s sore throat and feeling parched after a very warm cycle ride turned into something else on Monday. It started as a head cold and then later in the week worked its way down into my chest. I didn’t have any kind of fever; it felt as though I was running at about 85%, enough to be a little frustrating...
This old Metropolitan Line train at Chesham is nearly ready to go, with its cargo of parched weeds. We’ve properly entered Phil Collins season, with extremely hot temperatures dominating the week. My morning walk from Euston to the City of London is now on hiatus until either (a) it cools down again, or (b) the Tube...
I was out the door early on Tuesday to head to Heathrow to pick up our eldest son, who has come back from university for the summer. It’s great to have him back; the house is a very different place with him in it. He arrived on a cold and drizzly day and had to listen to my insistence that this was an anomaly...
Springtime in full bloom. This week felt tough. I ended up in the office four days in a row. The end of each day arrived too quickly as I still had plenty of things left to tackle. It was great to get to Friday when I could get some exercise on my indoor bike trainer and then climb into my cave in order to catch up...
Bubbles looks like another useful website for surfacing interesting things to read from personal blogs. Users can log in with a Fediverse account and upvote items. You can subscribe to a thoughtful collection of algorithmic RSS feeds too.
Voting time for the local council elections in Holborn, London. I walk past this lovely London street on my commute to work. A four-day week due to the plainly named Early May bank holiday in the UK. Recovery from the big bike ride felt good; unlike the year before, I had no major after-effects apart from slightly...
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