🪞Reflections

Good day my good friend.

Again, as I promised a couple of weeks ago, this newsletter is going to be one of personal reflection about 2025. So its a different flavour to the normal service you are used to. If that is not to your taste, I don’t mind if you give this a miss.

It is also my last newsletter of 2025. Thank you to all of you who have supported me throughout 2025, and for reading this newsletter. I love reading your comments, and your kind words of support are always appreciated. I hope that you have a lovely break for the festive period, and I wish you all the happiness that is possible. See you in 2026!

I do have a few small asks of you, if you don’t mind sparing a few moments of your time. Think of these as doing your good deeds before Christmas, so that you can get on Santa’s good list.

Professionally, I would probably best describe this last year as trundling along with no major fuss or bother.

Probably my biggest professional achievement this year was finally, after two years of work, getting Transport for the South East’s Transport Strategy over the line. This really was down to the hard work and great minds of a lot of excellent people, and seeing TfSE’s Partnership Board approve this strategy in November really made all of it worth it. I like it because, unlike most strategies, it provides focus and sets outcomes that can be measured. Now there is the hard part of delivering it, while Sub-national Transport Bodies everywhere are having their funding cut by the Department for Transport.

Mobility Camp is always a joy, and this year was no exception. It was an amazing day, as always, and the venue was amazing, as always. You can see a write-up of the day that I wrote on the Mobility Camp website. I look forward to doing it again next year in Sheffield.

Naturally I always get plenty out of writing this newsletter. This year has been far more erratic than I hoped it would be, and it has been hard migrating from Substack to Wordpress and now to Beehiiv. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that it is much easier to grow your audience organically on Substack compared to other platforms, and so when you migrate away from them, writing a newsletter and growing organically is much harder. I still get at least 3 or 4 notifications a week from Substack saying someone has signed up. That being said, I’m really liking Beehiiv and its functionality. And its analytics are about a BILLION times better than Wordpress.

Another project that I enjoyed much more than I thought I would is something I have been working on with the Scottish Rural and Islands Transport Communities on UK Ferries. It will report in the New Year (though some Interim Findings have been published), but what amazed me was quite how many ferry services there are in the UK. There are the obvious ones of the cross-Channel and cross-Irish Sea ferries, the ferries to the Scottish Islands, and you can probably name a few of the big river ferries. But what I learned is the sheer variety of ferry crossings there are. The Welsh ferry operated by a pub landlord, the ferries on the Manchester Ship Canal, and the ferry on a major strategic road in Northern Ireland are particular favourites.

My report on How To Make Friends and Influence Councillors was published this year, and seems to have been well received. I got to present on it four times this year, and I am always willing to present it more.

An unexpected project is one that I am currently working on with UK Unplugged to deliver a ‘Transport Box.’ This is a way to get children out and about, and learning about transport and how things work. Seeing some of the engineers and transport planners recruited from Mobility Camp willingly giving up their time and providing loads of inspiration for the box has been nothing short of amazing, and makes me want to do more creative work. A big thank you to the CIHT Foundation for funding the initial box. We have put in some funding bids to expand it further, but we are looking for sponsors of the box so we can do it in other cities. If this sounds of interest, let me know!

In something I did not expect, I actually got the most out of volunteering this year. Many of you know that I am a Board member of the Transport Planning Society, responsible for the work of the society in the regions and nations of the UK and nations overseas. Every year, these volunteers amaze me with the quality of their events and the things that they do. I was especially proud of their efforts for Transport Planning Day, where they put on a whole programme of events, which were really well received. I should know, I analysed the survey feedback!

I have also done some ad hoc volunteering to help out community groups in need of sustainable transport and transport planning advice. This has ranged from national campaign groups trying to promote growth, to local villages trying to get the best from new developments. There is little more inspiring than working with committed people who want to make a positive change, and I had that in abundance.

I also volunteer as a livestock checker for my local Wildlife Trust and am a Green Energy Champion. While these are ad hoc, I get a lot of joy from them. There is something weirdly relaxing about counting sheep…

To be honest with you, the last couple of years have been hard on a personal level. Some of you know that in 2024 I lost my father and probably my favourite dog I have ever had (no offence Rosie, Barney, Sandy, Ebbie, Tilly, Molly, Floyd, Leeroy, Harvey, Belle, and Ollie – I love you all). So at the start of the year I was still dealing with a lot of the fall out of that. Grief is a horrible thing to deal with, and while I have had my fair share, it never gets better.

Then, in the summer, something else hit hard, that until now I have kept from people. My wife’s brother-in-law was charged with something extremely serious, and he was convicted of it. In doing so, he effectively destroyed my sister-in-law’s life, which has had all kinds of impacts on my wife and my in-laws. For a good 4 or 5 months, life has been extremely difficult and emotional, with almost no respite from the grief and pain that this has caused.

Oh, and to top all that off, our roof developed a leak (and not a small one), and so we had to replace the whole roof. What was promised to take 3 days took a month to do. And just in the last few days, some rising damp has appeared in the kitchen.

So yeah, great year. People talk a lot about having resilience, and I know that I am far luckier than most people. But sometimes just keeping going is extremely hard to do. But it made me grateful for those who did provide support and a friendly ear at a needed time. I just hope next year is a bit quieter.

That being said, its not been entirely awful. I took up a new hobby this year – astronomy. Last Christmas I managed to get myself a Zhummel Dobsonian Reflector telescope on sale, and whenever the skies have been clear I have been outside in my back garden, usually freezing cold, looking up at the heavens. It has been nothing short of spectacular. I won’t forget the first time I spotted Jupiter and its four largest moons (Io, Europa, Ganymeade, and Callisto), Saturn and its rings, Venus, Mars, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Pinwheel Galaxy, and the Orion Nebula. It took a long time to learn about the different filters and different eye pieces, as well as how to focus the telescope. But it has been brilliant. I have now invested in a camera so I can start to take pictures of what I see. One thing I will say is that what you see through a telescope is not like the pictures you see in books, but that does not make what you see any less spectacular.

Another thing I have done is started on a memory bank. What I am doing is simple – take a picture every day of something, anything, to remember the day by. It could be something simple like my dogs sleeping, or a really special moment. Below are a few of my favourite pictures from the last year or so. These are my favourites due to a mix of great times, feelings of being relaxed and happy, or just because I thought they were a cool picture.

Many of you know I am a video game nut, and I finally completed some games I have been working on for years. At the start of the year I finished off The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom - a very worthy entry into my favourite video game franchise. The Outer Wilds is genuinely in the top 3 video games I have ever played, and its certainly the one with the best ending. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth was brilliant fun and a fantastic tribute to my second favourite video game. Untitled Goose Game is nothing but pure, mischievous fun to play. I tried Elden Ring, but really could not get into it, and to be honest I struggle with most Soulsborne games. I have downloaded Hollow Knight: Silksong, and plan to play it over Christmas.

A final thing I did at the end is start a social media sabbatical. Partly because I want to have some time away from my screen, but also because my social media feeds are becoming filled with AI-generated slop. I started to unfollow a lot of people because of it, some of whom I really respect, before I finally thought some time away would be good. I won’t be back on social media until at least April next year. So far, it has been blissful.

I don’t do New Years Resolutions. But I have learned a lot of lessons from this year, and so hopefully next year there will be the chance to do something about that.

The first thing is to continue something that I picked up late on in the year and am really enjoying: tinkering. So far, I have just been playing with some circuitry, and a bit of water works in the garden, as well as getting back into coding for the joy of it. I want to do that much more next year. Its not with any specific purpose in mind. Just to do something fun, see if it works, and maybe take it all further. Just to see where it goes. It has been quite fun.

A second thing is to go out and see more people. One of my bad habits overhanging from COVID has been having a Teams call rather than going to see people. Despite being naturally shy, I like talking to people and building those interpersonal bonds over time. I need to do more of that, and not just resort to Teams calls.

I want to continue writing, so the newsletter will not be going away. But I do sometimes wonder about the impact that it is having. I guess this is the natural instinct of a writer to ask if what they are saying is landing with anyone. I have some ideas for doing more long form and detailed writing throughout next year. Lets see if I have the chance to make it come to fruition.

This ties into something else that I have been feeling for a long time. I get a feeling from talking to others that right now, there is a great appetite for change in the UK. I get the sense that there is a feeling that the political environment has failed for the last 15 years, and people are willing to take a chance with new ideas and new ways of doing things. I have seen the murmurings of this in the likes of Vision-Led Transport Planning and pressures to relax planning controls in the UK. I’d like to explore how I can contribute to these kinds of things.

I do want to do more in the way of self-started projects, and I have a few ideas for projects in mind. But these are early stage at the moment, and require a fair amount more thought before I commit.

Finally, I need to work on my skills. I had grand plans this year to upskill myself on the likes of data science and systems thinking, none of which happened. That will be rectified.

So, that is it for 2025. The newsletter will return on 9th January. Thank you again for reading this newsletter, and subscribing when your Inbox is probably overflowing. See you again in the New Year!