Or, What a Ryanair journey map taught me about real UX.
There’s a type of interface that shows up on Dribbble every few months: flight check-ins, boarding passes, baggage-tracking dashboards. Always slick. Always serene. The UI equivalent of cucumber water.
Most of them start at Choose your seat and end at Enjoy your flight. Which is tidy. But also nonsense.
A few years ago, I worked on a project for Ryanair. I drew out a journey map (with pens, natch), not the polished, stakeholder-pleasing kind, but something closer to the real emotional terrain of travel. One that began well before the confirmation screen. One that started, in fact, with the cat.
Because booking a flight isn’t a clean beginning. By the time anyone taps “Book now,” they’ve already trawled five sites, tried to align half-term dates with the one cousin who replies to group chats, checked weather reports, and googled “Do I need a visa for Croatia?” even though they’re flying to Naples.
Life admin, not travel ambition, is what usually kicks things off. That’s where the journey begins.
The diagram traced everything from that fraught pre-booking stretch through to the post-trip hangover, highlighting the emotional and logistical clutter that most airline UX avoids. Not because it isn’t there, but because it’s messy. And mess doesn’t fit neatly into a product roadmap.
There’s the bit after you book, when nothing much happens, except everything might. The vague unease when no one’s confirmed your seats. The passive-aggressive alert that “something has changed” in your itinerary, but you’re left to figure out what. The nervous rechecking of emails. The slow panic over cabin bag dimensions.
Then comes the day itself. A spike in interaction. The printer runs out of ink. You’re stood at Departures at 6:30am trying to download Peppa Pig episodes with 4% battery and no signal. Your toddler’s hungry. Your partner’s tense. And you’re still wondering if you packed the Calpol.
And yet… this is the brand moment. Not the glossy UI, not the neat API integration. Just this: the knot in your stomach, the uncharged phone, the boarding pass you can’t pull up without a connection.
The map tried to capture that. Not to romanticise it, but to acknowledge it.
Even on the return leg, the friction isn’t over. Passport queues. Lost luggage. The existential despair of a train replacement service. You get home, open a week’s worth of mail, find a parking fine, trip over a stray shoe from the hasty departure packing, and realise you didn’t leave anything for the cat-sitter.
Most journey maps stop at wheels-up. Ours didn’t. Because experience doesn’t follow a clean arc. It loops, it stutters, it sags in the middle. Thoughtful UX understands that.
Of course, Ryanair won’t build an app that books your pet-sitter or packs plug adapters. But this kind of messy map reveals where the brand can quietly show up—not with a feature, but with timing, tone, and the rare dignity of being understood.
Maybe that’s a 6-sheet in the departure lounge that says “Still cheaper than therapy.” Maybe it’s an email that clears, not clouds. Maybe it’s an in-seat comm that drops the marketing voice for once and just says: “Made it. Welcome back.”
Even for Ryanair, in fact especially for Ryanair, those moments can build memory, trust, and repeat business. Because no one remembers the boarding pass. They remember how they felt when the wheels touched down, the keys were missing, and the cat looked at them with contempt.
You’re not designing for delight. You’re designing for 4% battery, no signal, and a queue that won’t move. That’s where memory lives. And maybe loyalty too.
AI disclosure: This piece was written with the assistance of AI, used strictly as an editorial and thinking partner. All ideas, edits, and final phrasing are mine. ALT text and tagging were also generated with AI support.
When I was around 15, I’d get into trouble for calling a girl I was ‘seeing’ after 9pm on the house phone. I remember the jeopardy when her dad answered. It wasn’t just awkward, it felt catastrophic in that very teenage sense. There was no texting, no soft-launching your feelings via Reels. If you wanted to reach someone, you reached their entire household. Privacy was negotiated in real time, and a cordless phone allowing you to slink off to a private corner was borderline futuristic.
I mention this not to romanticise a pre-digital age but to mark a boundary: I don’t truly understand what it’s like to grow up now. Not really.
We’ve been told, often with good reason, that today’s teenagers are in trouble. Jonathan Haidt calls them the “anxious generation”, a cohort rewired by phones and social media. Since around 2012, adolescent mental health (especially among girls) has deteriorated alarmingly. Haidt blames the smartphone: a device that didn’t just enter childhood but, frankly, annexed it. The evidence is worrying, declines in sleep, attention, face-to-face connection. An uptick in self-harm, anxiety, emotional exhaustion. The argument isn’t hysterical. It lands.
But Dean Burnett suggests we’ve misdiagnosed the patient. The panic, he argues, isn’t just in the teens, it’s in us. The parents, the teachers, the adults nervously refreshing headlines while peeking at their own screen time stats. According to Burnett, much of this alarm stems from a mix of generational disorientation (a kind of collective unease that what we grew up with is no longer relevant), recurring moral panic, and good old-fashioned ignorance. We didn’t grow up with these tools, so we assume they’re harmful. We project. We catastrophise. We fear what we don’t fluently use.
The result is a pervasive sense of being at a loss. Some parents clamp down, banning apps, enforcing rigid rules on screen-time that feel increasingly arbitrary. Others detach, paralysed by the sheer bloody complexity of it all. But the most common response that I pick up from parents around me is probably the most human: low-level dread wrapped in middle-class guilt. We don’t really understand what our kids are doing, but we feel complicit anyway.
And then, just as we start to piece together a measured response, “Right! phone-free supper time!”, delayed access, schools running digital literacy workshops, the next threat pops up. Welcome to Whack-a-Mole Parenting. Just as the cultural tide begins to turn on one device, another rises, this time more subtle, more embedded, more seductive.
Take me, for example. I ask ChatGPT more (personal) questions, now than I ever asked Google. Some are practical: how to structure an email, what to cook with these leftovers, when should I plant out these seeds. But others are… not. I’ve caught myself consulting it about health worries, internal dilemmas, parenting doubts, things I wouldn’t bring up at dinner, or even necessarily with my family, my friends. Because it remembers. Because it adapts. Because it flatters you by bending to your will.
And this is me: a reasonably grounded adult with (I hope) a steady compass and a mild allergy to digital hysteria. Yet even I find it maddeningly addictive. Not the technology itself, but the relation. The illusion of being known, helped, mirrored. I can only imagine how powerful this is for a 14-year-old who isn’t just seeking answers but identity.
So the question isn’t whether smartphones are making kids anxious. They are, in some ways. But the deeper story is that we’re all overwhelmed by the sheer pace of paradigm shifts. We can’t metabolise one tech wave before the next hits us in the face.
What Would Good Design Do?
This is where design comes in. Not as damage limitation, but hopefully as orientation. The best design doesn’t just solve problems. It asks better questions. Like: what rhythms support attention? What thresholds help people feel held, not hijacked? How can digital relationships exist without replacing the real ones?
The design problem is not abstract. It’s visible everywhere. Think of Snapstreaks – a design mechanism that rewards compulsive interaction with digital trophies. Or TikTok’s For You page – a personalised feed of videos that TikTok’s algorithm thinks you’ll be interested in, which notoriously appears to learn vulnerability faster than it learns taste. These aren’t neutral tools. They’re attention economies wired for compulsion, not care. If you’re a parent watching this unfold, it’s not just confusing, it’s existential.
A brief aside here: Earlier this year, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and LoveFrom’s Jony Ive announced a collaboration to create a physical device for the “AI age.” They talked about daily rhythms, calm interfaces, emotional connection. And while their vision sounds noble, it also confirms the underlying anxiety: that our tools are no longer just functional, they’re emotional infrastructure. If anything, their announcement makes this conversation more urgent. Because the question isn’t whether the tech will be beautifully built. It’s whether it will reflect what matters.
That means not just critiquing the addictiveness of AI companions, but imagining something better. Less extractive. More human. Here’s what that might look like (after an hour of making notes this morning):
Design for pause, not push. Platforms should default to stillness, not stimulation. Kill the endless scroll. e.g. “You’ve seen it all, for now” or opening to a prompt rather than a firehose of dopamine content, or making ‘like’ less of a tap and more of a hold, restricted to just a few per day. Default to a quiet mode after 20 mins. Ask a user “why are you sharing this?”
Design for self-awareness. Don’t just track engagement. Track how users feel when they leave. Make reflection part of the loop. e.g. “How did that make you feel?”, reporting this along with screen time weekly reports. An in-app emotion metric that algorithmically analyses your interaction cadence, scroll patterns, message tone.
Design for companionship, not substitution. If AI is going to listen, let it redirect. Let it nudge us toward real conversations, not just simulated ones. e.g. “This sounds important. Have you considered talk to [name]?” or helping the user plan social activities, remember dates or conversation starters.
The tools aren’t going away. But the way we design them can still reflect care, pace, and conscience. That’s not a nostalgic idea, it’s a classic UX problem and one worth solving.
Coda
When I was a teenager, the phone was something you had to ask permission to use. Now, it’s something we all struggle to put down. Maybe the answer isn’t more rules or fewer apps. Maybe it’s knowing what to do with ourselves in the quiet space that’s left when the screen goes dark.
That’s where design still has a role to play, instead of locking us out, it guides us home.
AI disclaimer: This piece was written by me, but I used ChatGPT to sub-edit, surface research, help shape the structure, and keep the tone aligned with my voice. The experiences, perspectives, and final edits are mine. AI also produced the tag list, excerpts and image that accompanies it.
London’s decline into low-level disorder hasn’t happened overnight, and it hasn’t happened through some grand cultural collapse. It’s been a slow demagnetising of civic expectation, one graffitied carriage, one dumped rental bike, one unchallenged fare-dodger at a time.
And for all the commentary, the plans, the posters, the social media pleas from Sadiq Khan gently asking us to be kind to TfL staff, the system continues to fray. Because it’s not just about policy. It’s about psychology. A city, like a child, becomes what you quietly tolerate.
Take a stroll through Camden. Or Putney. Or Vauxhall, or Shepherds Bush. It’s not just the spike in phone thefts or fare evasion. It’s the collective flinch away from even acknowledging it. Authority is outsourced, first to security guards who are contractually told not to intervene, then to CCTV operators watching with all the urgency of a screensaver. The presence of order exists only in post-event paperwork.
This isn’t a new problem. Every generation thinks it invented disorder. But what marks this moment is the collapse of presence. The people who once embodied low-stakes authority – ticket inspectors, bus conductors, even the occasional stern-faced commuter, have all retreated. And without those micro-moments of correction, the boundary dissolves.
Because there was a time, not utopia, not Victoriana, just the mid-2000s, when the Tube was cleaner, antisocial behaviour meant something, and fare dodgers looked over their shoulders. And crucially, someone would have said something if you left your bike in the middle of the pavement.
Now? Saying something feels like an act of madness.
Even a relatively fit man in his forties (ahem, let’s say one with the outline of muscle memory from rowing and once-upon a time lifting in the gym) thinks twice. Not because he’s afraid of being shouted at. Because he might get stabbed. Not metaphorically. Actually stabbed. By a 14-year-old with a 9-inch blade and nothing to lose.
So we look away. We (not I, reader) film instead of act. We turn up the headphones and pretend not to see. Because the calculus has changed. What used to be a moment of friction – “Oi, pack it in” – has become an existential risk assessment. Is this worth dying over?
Yes, austerity hollowed out visible staffing. But not every act of disrespect can be blamed on poverty. You can’t say the teenager in £100 sliders and a Balenciaga hoodie is evading the fare because the system failed him. Nor that the grad in Clapham dumping a Lime bike across the pavement is a victim of systemic neglect.
This isn’t all about deprivation. It’s about detachment. From consequence. From collective norms. From the sense that shared space has shared rules.
So what do we do? Because the answer isn’t doubling police numbers or shaming people on social media. Culture doesn’t change through crackdowns. And civic behaviour isn’t restored by a stronger PR campaign.
You don’t police culture. You design for it.
London’s problem isn’t just one of law or design, it’s one of contrast. As other towns and smaller cities have quietly levelled up, the capital has coasted on past prestige. Behavioural standards lag not because Londoners are worse, but because London is no longer best. The Tube is better, but the civic fabric? Worn thin. What once justified the stress (the vibrancy, the culture, the sheer aliveness) now feels out of balance. You dodge fare evaders and dumped e-bikes, but for what? A Pret subscription and an off-peak West End ticket? Meanwhile, Sheffield has sourdough, Manchester has swagger, and Kent has all the ex-London chefs who could no longer justify paying £3,500 a month to fry mushrooms near a bin store.
That’s where behavioural science (and, yes, some gentle psyops) comes in.
Behaviour is context-dependent. What people do in public space is shaped by cues, affordances, and social norms more than personal ethics. If the system is designed to look away, people will act accordingly. So design it to notice. Design it to remind. Design it to suggest.
What we need to rebuild is civic equivalent of a raised eyebrow.
Start small. Use nudges that aren’t insulting. Place messages where norms are breached, not in corporate safe zones. A sign at the Tube barrier isn’t for the person tapping in, it’s for the kid about to hop it. Use tone accordingly.
Bring back the sense of being noticed. Not punished. Not tracked. Just observed.
We could do worse than call in Rory Sutherland and a few behavioural strategists with teeth. The work they’ve done on transport psychology (understanding how we navigate space, status, and visibility) is ripe for civic deployment.
Imagine a pilot scheme on the Bakerloo Line that doesn’t install more barriers, but changes the posture of the space. Mirrors. Eye-level signage. Floor friction that makes hopping awkward. Subtle lighting changes that simulate visibility. Staff trained not to chase, but to notice.
We could run this for twenty years. Quietly. Iteratively. Without press releases.
The point isn’t to eliminate every act of disorder. It’s to rebuild a culture that expects better.
Because somewhere along the line, shame became taboo. Correction became aggression. We outsourced authority to laminated posters and video cameras and hoped it would be enough. It wasn’t.
Civilisation is not a vibe. It’s a ritual.
And it’s time we noticed what we’re no longer willing to defend.
AI disclosure: AI used to sub-edit the copy and perform factual research which was cross-referenced manually. AI generated the image (obviously), excerpt and tag list to enhance exposure.
Some couples go to B&Q. Others recalibrate their marriage on a B-road in June.
I recently got back from a couple of days away in Norfolk with a close friend who also loves his driving. We set out on a fantastic loop from Aylsham through Fakenham, Wells, and Cley – brilliant roads, good sightlines, measured effort, and our own playlists accompanying the sweat on the wheel and the red-hot calipers. It’s been seven years since we did something similar in Scotland on the North Coast 500, and while I’ve found a few roads round me in Surrey where I’ve had flashes of the same joy, doing it in perfect weather with a good friend is different. It’s memorable, visceral, and deeply satisfying.
That trip reminded me what modern driving risks forgetting: rhythm, concentration, the way a great road stretches you just enough to feel vividly, physically present. A truth utterly ignored by the automotive press, which seems fixated on a frictionless future. Autonomy. Electrification. Over-the-air updates. The car, once a machine, is now a platform. A node on a smart grid. Another screen to poke and personalise. And if the future is to be believed, it’ll be a contactless glide from A to B – your vehicle knowing where you’re going, what mood you’re in, and curating the ambient playlist accordingly. Comforting, perhaps. But is that the future we really want?
Because here’s what happens when you flatten a journey into data points and strip the human out. You lose the sweat, the skill, the subtle joy of being in tune. What the current automotive vision tends to forget is this: flow beats frictionless. Every time.
Driving at its best is not about arrival. It’s about engagement. If you’ve ever taken the long way home just because the road was dry, the light was low and the playlist was perfect, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
Let’s be fair: 95% of driving is perfunctory. School runs. Trips to the tip. Visiting family. Airport drop-offs. Just get me there, and do it efficiently. That’s what satnavs are for, and they’re brilliant at it.
But just as we crave a real meal after a week of cobbled-together dinners, we also need room for the drives that feel like something. That remind us we’re not just being carried – we’re in it. That’s what this is about: reserving space for the exceptional.
Because flow isn’t just a productivity state. It’s the embodied feeling of rightness. An experience that draws on physical skill, real-time interpretation, being attuned to your environment. Strip that away, and something vanishes.
You can bolt as many sensors to the bumper as you like – flow isn’t something a car detects. It’s something a driver feels. But here’s the thing: technology doesn’t have to kill flow. It can co-create it.
The current HMI (Human-Machine Interface) paradigm presents a false binary. Either the driver is in control, or the system is. But there’s a third, more human path: co-piloting. Not Microsoft Clippy with a steering wheel, but a system attuned to how you want to feel on this drive. A route with rhythm. Camber. Flow. Roads that reward precision and tempo. Effort that meets intent.
When ease becomes the only design goal, something essential gets lost. And we’ve already seen what that looks like: In one eerily prescient experiment, researchers gave households a free chauffeur for 60 hours a week1 – as if driverless tech had already arrived. Public transport use plummeted. Total miles driven rose by 60%. Among retirees, it more than doubled. Why? Because friction disappeared. People sent cars to pick up friends, ran errands just because they could, and stopped weighing up whether a trip was worth it.
When mobility becomes passive, we don’t do less. We just do less meaningfully. Journeys blur. Movement becomes background noise. The vehicle ceases to be a site of agency or expression – it’s just another box we sit in while life happens elsewhere.
And that’s before we reckon with de-skilling. Driving draws on real-time judgement and physical awareness most of us rarely use elsewhere. Spatial reasoning. Risk calibration. Micro-adjustment. Automate that, and we don’t just lose control. We lose fluency.
Despite this, the appetite for engaged driving hasn’t gone – it’s just become more selective. The very existence of niche markets for classic cars, track days, and driving experiences proves it. That’s why designing for joy matters even more.
But this sits awkwardly alongside a cultural drift towards a one-size-fits-all mobility model – where driving is seen as a problem to solve, not a pleasure to preserve. It’s become unfashionable in some circles to even admit you enjoy it. As if to love driving is to reveal something suspect. But not all movement is equal. The same road can be a chore or a joy. It depends who’s driving, and why.
This shift in perception also affects how we measure success. The metrics used to justify infrastructure (usually based on time saved) miss the point. The real value lies in access gained, experiences unlocked, the long way round.
As behavioural economists have shown, effort often creates meaning. In a world of ‘frictionless’ experiences, friction can signal intention, depth, care.
Technology and craft, when designed with that richer journey in mind, can support and amplify, rather than replace. Like a great chef or a sound designer, it should highlight what matters and let the rest recede.
Context-aware routes that change with the light, and the sky.
This emphasis on the physical and the intentional becomes even more crucial because the more we strip away, the more we’ll crave moments that remind us we still exist – bodily, skilfully, viscerally.
Especially in a world where younger generations increasingly see driving as a chore, or opt out altogether, the ones who do drive will be those who want to. That makes the case for joy-built design even stronger.
Because let’s be honest: the real enemy of joy on the road isn’t speed limits or EV ranges or even other drivers. It’s waste. Wasted road. Wasted time. Wasted potential for a moment of synchronicity between human, machine, and landscape.
If the future of automotive is to feel like anything at all – if it’s to be more than a Netflix-enabled transportation pod – we need to stop designing for the eradication of friction, and start designing for the restoration of rhythm.
Not just arrival. But aliveness.
AI Disclosure: This piece was written with the assistance of AI, used as an editorial and thinking partner. All ideas, edits, and final phrasing are mine. Image creation was by AI, natch – ALT text included. Excerpt and tag lists were also optimised for best practice
The study has its limitations of course. It took place in the US where driving is end-to-end whereas Europeans focus is on automation for the last-mile and the public transport is sufficiently better to expect more inertia in behaviour↩︎
We’ve just established that perfection is a bit of a con. That smoothness and polish can feel synthetic, that flaws, handled well, make things real. That was true of design. It’s true of parenting. And it’s true of conversation.
So let’s apply the same logic to how we talk to each other. Especially when we disagree.
Because somewhere along the way, we’ve forgotten how to argue.
Not the red-faced, festive episode of EastEnders kind. Not the long, finger-pointy online threads ending in a half-hearted “do better.” I mean real disagreement. The sort where two people actually try to figure something out, not just dig trenches and hold the line.
Everyone talks about “civil discourse” now, as if etiquette is the issue. But most of that still sounds performative. What I miss are arguments with friction and humility. Ones where both sides know they might walk away changed. Where doubt isn’t seen as a weakness but a sign you’re still listening.
We’re a long way from that now.
Many years ago, I was in the school debating society, travelling around Kent in numerous competitions, even appearing at Westminster School and later representing the University of York up at Durham, where, amusingly, my debating partner was supposed to be Jonathan Isaby, a well-known Conservative voice. However, he mysteriously never showed up until the competition was over. But the principle was simple: listen, engage, persuade. Not demolish. Not deflect. Just make your case, and be ready to refine it when someone made a better one.
Somewhere along the way, we swapped that for something else.
Now, we reward the ‘gotcha’ moment. Certainty is treated like strength. Doubt is weakness. If you admit you’re unsure (or worse, that you’ve changed your mind) it’s seen as a loss of face. We’re so busy performing our identities that we’ve lost the ability to revise our thinking. It’s tiring. And it’s stagnating us.
You see it in culture, in politics, in everyday conversations. People don’t talk to win understanding anymore, they talk to stay on brand.
I’ve done it too. I argued hard for Brexit. Believed in it. Spoke up for it. Framed it as independence, as a chance to reimagine things, to step away from bloated bureaucracy and do things differently. I meant it. I still think the instincts weren’t all wrong.
But the outcome? Messy. Fragmented. Slower than promised. And ultimately, let’s be honest, not the reset we sold ourselves. The deals didn’t arrive. The country didn’t come together. The optimism curdled into something else. That was hard to admit. Still is. But it’s true.
And what’s the alternative? Digging in forever? Pretending clarity is betrayal?
I’m not interested in performative U-turns. But I am interested in being the sort of person who can say, “I’ve reconsidered”. And hearing someone else say it, without pouncing.
You can blame social media for this shift if you want. The outrage economy. And yes, that’s part of it. But it goes deeper. We’ve built entire identities around never backing down but it’s not brave, it’s brittle.
Changing your mind is not a flaw. It’s a feature. Same as in design. Same as in writing. Same as in life. You revise because you care. You argue because you want to know more, not because you just want to be right.
We don’t need more hot takes. We need cooler heads. Conversations that can hold heat without boiling over.
So next time you’re mid-argument (online, in a pub, at home) ask yourself: Am I here to win? Or am I here to learn something?
Because only one of those has a destination and frankly, I’d like to get somewhere.
I used AI to assist with this post. Specifically to help generate the excerpt, tags, image prompt, and to refine the structure and rhythm of the piece in my own tone of voice.
This is the third in an accidental series of essays about design, constraint, and real life. The first explored ownership and editing, the second mapped those principles onto systems thinking. This one’s about the myth of the uninterrupted workspace, and what raising small humans has taught me about creative process, product integrity, and emotional design.
Last week I was catching up on some unplayed podcasts and heard Marina and Richard mention the Cyril Connolly line: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway.” It’s a tidy little number but, like a lot of pithy mid-century takes, it doesn’t hold up brilliantly under daylight. So, as I continue to navigate our Thule buggy at the foot of the stairs, I thought I’d take a 2025 view.
It’s not just the casual misogyny (though yes, there’s that). It’s the deeper implication: that creativity requires retreat. That meaningful work, especially in design, happens at hushed desks; free of crumbs, notifications, or anyone yelling “Shoooooesies.”
This idea still carries weight in design and UX culture. You see it in reverent desk photos on Instagram and podcast guests earnestly waffling on about ‘flow state’, as though uninterrupted focus were the only path to quality. But what if that’s backwards? What if the mess of real life (parenting, caregiving, the emotional admin of being human) doesn’t dilute our creativity, but sharpens it?
Parenting compresses time like nothing else. Afternoons vanish. Tasks bleed into one another. The illusion of ‘ideal working conditions’ gets quietly shelved between snack prep and bedtime logistics. And yet, in those gaps, between drop-offs and Teams pings, on walks to see the cows, while fishing blueberries out of cardigans, some of the sharpest thinking gets done. Not in spite of distraction, but because of it.
In UX, we talk a lot about constraint as a catalyst. Creativity thrives on boundaries. But we rarely apply that logic to ourselves. Parenthood doesn’t just add constraints, it shifts your perspective. You’re no longer thinking about the user. You’re living with one. Or two. One tantrumming in the hallway, the other arguing about their Prep.
Design culture still clings to the myth of the monastic workspace: noise-cancelling headphones, immaculate desk setups, flow-state rituals. As though life must be suspended for work to begin. But most of the things we design are for people whose lives don’t pause. Parents in mid-tantrum. Carers juggling logistics. People buying insurance, ordering groceries, trying to rebook a dentist while coaxing a child (back) into trousers.
We design for frictionless experience, yet fetishise workflows that rely on silence. On having both hands free and the truth is: proximity to real life doesn’t dilute our design work. It deepens it.
You stop wasting time on polish and start noticing what actually matters. You develop an emotional radar: spotting friction, pre-empting dead ends, sensing what might quietly delight (or indeed quietly break) someone. And as I wrote recently, perfection has become a tell. In a world of generative smoothness, what we trust is the textured, the slightly improvised, the things made while someone was also making lunch.
Most importantly, you stop designing for personas. You start designing for real humans, chaotic, distracted, interrupted. The same kind of people we talked about when designing for enough. The kind who don’t need more features. They need clarity. Mercy. A digital space that behaves well under pressure.
Creativity and caregiving aren’t in conflict. In fact, it’s often caregiving that teaches us how to notice. To prioritise. To mean it.
This piece was edited with the help of AI, to shape rhythm, reference tone, and trim the fat. The excerpt, tagging and image were the result of carefully considered AI prompts. The words and arguments are mine. The tempo is deliberate. The polish is, therefore, human.
When everything is falling apart around you, but you’ve accepted that Bing is just… Bing.
It’s 5:47 AM. You’ve been wrenched from sleep by a tiny, sticky hand slapping your face. Your crime? Not waking up before the toddler. Bleary-eyed, you stumble downstairs, pop on Bing in a desperate bid for ten minutes of peace, and – congratulations! – you’ve made a terrible mistake.
Because Bing is not a break. It’s emotional guerrilla warfare disguised as children’s television. A relentless cycle of mild disasters, narrated by pure, undiluted toddler whinge. And parents, trapped in its slow, syrupy clutches, are left questioning their life choices.
At first, Bing seems like a sweet, low-stakes show about a rabbit child navigating the small traumas of everyday life. And that’s true, if by “navigating,” we mean “flailing headlong into catastrophe over incidents as minor as a dropped ice cream.”
Developmental psychologists call this emotional mirroring: a way for toddlers to see their own feelings validated on screen. Lovely in theory. In practice, it means you, the long-suffering adult, are subjected to twenty full minutes of Bing catastrophising about a balloon. Or yoghurt. Or the unbearable injustice of having to share.
Toddlers see themselves. Parents see a replay of their actual Tuesday morning. We don’t need Bing to remind us how excruciating it is when a small, irrational dictator loses their mind over the wrong-coloured spoon. We were there. We lived it. We cleaned up the spoon-related carnage. We need a break.
Enter Flop, Patron Saint of Impossible Patience
Then there’s Flop, Bing’s eternal, unnervingly calm carer. If you’ve ever thought, I should be more like Flop, congratulations. You are now burdened with a brand-new source of parental guilt.
Because Flop never sighs. Flop never raises his voice. Flop watches Bing make the same godforsaken mistake for the seventeenth time that week and responds only with gentle understanding.
If I reacted to my child smearing peanut butter into their hair with a serene “Ah, peanut butter. It’s no big thing,” I would be swiftly clubbed to death by my fellow parents.
Flop isn’t a role model. He’s a fantasy construct of saintly patience. And he is the reason so many of us sit, seething in the glow of CBeebies, knowing in our hearts that we will never achieve his level of Zen.
Meanwhile, Bing makes a mess. Bing refuses to listen. And yet, nothing happens. No time-outs. No firm words. No hint of consequence beyond a gentle discussion of feelings.
The Cult of Gentle Parenting
This is intentional. Bing is built on a constructivist approach to learning, where children explore mistakes safely, absorbing the lesson without fear of punishment.
Lovely, right?
Sure. Except in real life, when a toddler empties an entire box of cereal onto the floor while maintaining furious eye contact, they need more than a kind discussion about oats. They need to help clean it up. They need to understand that some mistakes have consequences beyond personal emotional growth.
At the very least, they need to stop f-ing smirking.
The Bing Paradox: Well-Made, Deeply Infuriating
To be fair, Bing isn’t some half-baked accident of children’s television. It’s an Emmy-winning, heavily researched, beautifully animated show, based on books by Ted Dewan and shaped by years of child psychology expertise.
Mikael Shields, the guy who helped bring us Teletubbies and Wallace & Gromit, says Bing is meant to teach emotional resilience. And model conflict resolution. For parents.
Which is all very admirable.
But here’s the problem. We don’t particularly want a lecture in emotional resilience when we’re one rabbit crisis away from pouring a large Waitrose red.
That’s what Bluey gets right. It respects both the toddler and the exhausted adult watching alongside them. It gives us light and shade. It offers moments of humour and self-awareness, winking at the reality of parenting while still making space for childhood wonder.
Bing, on the other hand, commits so fully to the toddler experience that it leaves parents stranded, silent, passive witnesses to yet another yoghurt-related meltdown. And while that’s certainly realistic, it’s not exactly soothing.
Just The One Episode, Yeah?
So no, parents aren’t wrong to loathe Bing. It’s not just the whining, or the flailing, or the slow, excruciating dissection of minor toddler crises.
It’s that Bing asks us to relive our own parenting nightmares without offering us an ounce of relief.
Another Bing-induced crisis and I’m invoicing CBeebies for psychological distress.
AI disclosure: This post used AI to help generate the image, select blog tags, craft the excerpt, and sub-edit the text to match my tone of voice.
There’s a jacket hanging by the door in my house that I haven’t cleaned in two winters. A Stutterheim. Patina-stained cotton lining, scuffed hems, smells faintly of trains home. It’s not there for effect. It’s there because it does the job, and does it well. Keeps me dry, holds its own in a cold wind, and feels like continuity. Like something I’d pass on.
I think about that jacket sometimes when I work on digital products.
Because that jacket belongs in the doughnut. Not the jam-filled kind, the one drawn up by economist Kate Raworth. A model for living that rejects the old story of perpetual growth. (Aside: I came across Kate after listening to her talking with Wendell Berry on an old Start The Week. I’d gone on a recommendation from a friend to listen to Wendell Berry but it was Kate’s words which stood out).
In her diagram, the inner ring marks the essentials everyone should have access to: housing, education, dignity. The outer ring is the ecological ceiling: carbon, biodiversity, planetary boundaries. The goal is to stay in the middle. A safe and just space for humanity. Not too little. Not too much.
If that sounds like the Swedish concept of lagom, it is, except Raworth turns the cultural instinct into an economic framework. Lagom is what you feel in a table spread done right. The doughnut is how you design a city, or a system, to honour that logic at scale.
I like that the analogy might be in the Scandi larder: leftovers, carefully labelled. No waste, no lack. Just enough. The doughnut was already there, sitting quietly behind the knäckebröd.
And it maps cleanly onto UX.
The inner ring is what users genuinely need: clarity, trust, human-scale interaction. The outer ring is where the harm begins: deceptive patterns, compulsive loops, the kind of design that counts your seconds, not your needs. The good space, the space between, is where most digital products ought to live. Few do.
I’ve sat in rooms where product success was measured in taps and minutes. “More engagement,” someone would say, as the design team quietly recalibrated the interface to make it just sticky enough. I once worked on a platform where the proudest achievement was a spike in repeat logins. But when you zoomed out, those logins weren’t signs of confidence, they were symptoms of anxiety. People checking their accounts too often, not because the experience was smooth, but because the world wasn’t.
The real win would’ve been a design so clear, so calmly informative, so self-contained that users didn’t feel the need to check at all. But that wouldn’t have shown up on the dashboard. So we built noise instead. Goodhart’s Law anyone?
Doughnut thinking asks: what if we stopped designing for addiction and started designing for enough?
That principle runs through how I live. I’m not a minimalist, but I edit constantly. I favour things with integrity, materials that soften over time, ceramics that stack properly, garden tools that can be sharpened and passed on. When I write, I do so in iA Writer not because it’s clever, but because it clears the room. No distractions. Just text, gently weighted. A space with boundaries. A space that respects my focus. The writing comes better that way, less like performance, more like sorting the drawers in your head.
Same goes for the shelves at home. They hold only what earns its place. Books we’ve read. Things we actually use. Jackets that walk. Nothing there for the feed. Just our curated, persistent things.
Raworth talks about moving from extractive to regenerative economies. I think homes can be regenerative too, giving back emotionally, energetically, even ecologically, if you can. They absorb chaos. Offer rhythm. Ask less from you over time.
What does that actually look like?
There are just enough chairs for the family and the odd visitor. You can find a corkscrew without rummaging. There’s PIR lighting that flicks on as you walk from the landing to the bathroom at night. The house soaks up the mess. Fewer decisions when you’re tired. You can sit down without having to clear a pile of crap off the sofa. You can find your bloody keys.
It offers rhythm because your day moves more smoothly. And it asks less of you because it doesn’t make you work just to function.
My old boss used to moan that he couldn’t do a simple task at home because, to do that, he first had to find the tool. To find the tool, he had to get into the garage. He couldn’t get into the garage because the door was jammed. And on it went. That’s the opposite of regenerative. That’s a house that’s extracting energy from you just to stand still.
I wrote recently about the psychology of our stuff—the emotional residue it carries, the complexity it adds, the space it quietly swallows. The art of owning lessisn’t about minimalism. It’s about clarity. About asking not ‘is this useful?’ but ‘is this mine to carry?’ That same lens applies here. Whether it’s a shelf, a digital feature, or a mental habit, we need to ask: is this giving something back? Or is it just squatting in the system?
And if that principle holds for homes, it can hold for digital spaces too. Interfaces, when well-designed, have the same potential, not just to serve, but to settle. To restore a little order. To give back time, attention, clarity. The question in both cases is not just what they contain – but how they behave when no one’s watching. Do they hold their shape under pressure? Or do they reveal they were only ever designed for the demo?
That’s what I try to bring into my UX work. Not scale for its own sake, but structure. Not novelty, but fidelity. In one recent project, we reduced a sprawling mass of order summary calculations by half. It had grown lopsided: multiple totals, stacked qualifiers, contradictory line logic. It looked thorough but made people pause. Double-check. Drop off.
We didn’t cut because someone asked us to. We cut because the excess wasn’t helping anyone. The business didn’t love it at first, there was concern we’d sacrificed transparency. But the users did. Completion held. Conversion held. No one missed the clutter.
You don’t need to call it Doughnut Economics. You don’t even need the diagram. Just ask: is this too much, or just enough? Is it serving someone, or keeping them circling?
I’m learning the same rules apply emotionally. The inner ring is what I need to function: rhythm, ritual, some quiet between the noisy pulses of family life. The outer ring is burnout, distraction, the endless need to ‘improve’. If I stay within those boundaries, wake early, behave deliberately, write when the coffee’s still hot – I do better work. I’m a steadier father. Less reactive. More intact.
We’ve built systems that confuse excess for success. But maybe the most humane thing we can do now is not build something. Or build something simpler. Or design the thing so well it doesn’t need us anymore.
Like the coat. You don’t notice it most days. But when the rain starts, you’re glad it’s there. And when you finally pass it on, it still fits someone else.
This piece was refined using AI. I used it to generate the image prompt, the tags, the excerpt, and to help sub-edit the copy while keeping my tone intact. The ideas, references, and rhythm are mine. The tools just cleared the room.
We are drowning in stuff. Not because we need it, or even want it, but because we’re conditioned to accept that accumulation equals progress. The shelf groaning under unread books. The kitchen drawers overflowing with gadgets of single, niche utility. The wardrobe packed with ‘just in case’ items for situations that will never arise. We are not only possessed by our possessions, we’re buried under them.
Minimalism, at its best, is not about an aesthetic. It is not an Instagram-perfect arrangement of neutral-toned objects, nor the breathless fervour of bin-bagging everything you own because an influencer told you to. It is, simply, about knowing what you have and choosing to have less of it.
The Great Clothing Cull
I have watched every episode of Sort Your Life Out. Stacey Solomon and Dilly are the nation’s best mates, empathetic therapists disguised as decluttering gurus. They don’t arrive, Kondo-like, with mystical pronouncements about joy. Instead, they open up a warehouse, making you confront your past in a clinically lit aircraft hangar, and then gently shame you into ditching 99 odd socks, 2,000 greetings cards, and a spoon collection that could fill the drawers at Blenheim Palace.
It is the perfect decluttering show because it understands the British psyche. Where American organisation porn offers up pristine linen-clad perfection (hello Duchess Sussex), SYLI makes people sort their stuff in hoodies and leggings, exhausted and occasionally tearful, before finally seeing it all artfully categorised in a set of MDF storage solutions. But the key is this: it works. When Stacey’s crew is on your side, urging you to let go, you listen. She is not just helping people tidy up, she is their therapist, helping them face their own histories, attachments, and deeply ingrained anxieties about waste, memory, and identity.
I have recently paid someone (not Stacey) to come and help me sift through the detritus of my past: the things my parents couldn’t bring themselves to throw out when they cleared their loft, the remnants of a flat fire where possessions had already been forcibly edited down to a fragile minimum. And yet, still, there is more. So much more. Three house moves later, I’ve used each relocation as an excuse to cut back even further, paring things down to the essentials. But I needed this lady’s detachment from all that past, a task none of my family could have done with the necessary emotional distance required.
The wardrobe, a microcosm of the wider problem, is a particularly cruel landscape of regret. The clobber that fit a different physical version of me, a me that went out more. The memory-laden jumper you will never wear again but feel unable to part with. The shoes bought for a life you simply do not live. We keep these things not because they serve us, but because they whisper to our guilt, our shame, our aspirations. A curated wardrobe isn’t (just) about looking good, it’s about dressing with clarity, wearing only things that make you feel yourself, and being free from the burden of choice paralysis.
Let’s be frank: no one needs more than two tea towels, two sets of bed linen, and five pens. And yet, the natural order of modern life is to acquire. But if we follow the principles of good curation (the ruthless discernment of museum conservators) we begin to ask the right questions. Not ‘is this useful?’, because almost everything is potentially useful. But: Does this belong in my collection? Does it contribute meaningfully to my life? If I were choosing afresh, would I buy it again?
The Swedish Death Cleaning Perspective
There is a rather beautiful, if slightly morbid, Scandinavian tradition called döstädning – Swedish Death Cleaning. The principle is simple: do not leave your clutter for others to deal with when you are gone. Live lightly so as not to burden those left behind. It is a concept I think about often as the people around me age and I see what I’d be burdening my kids with. The weight of inheritance, not in money or property, but in boxes of ‘important’ things that, in reality, were just never thrown away.
Glenn Adamson, in How to Curate (Just About) Anything, argues that past the tidying stage, a more capacious process awaits when we curate. To curate is to care for, to actively maintain rather than merely accumulate. It’s a conscious approach to ownership that applies as much to possessions as it does to the books we choose to keep, the tools we use, the spaces we inhabit. The museum metaphor is useful: a curator doesn’t ask if an object is interesting in isolation but whether it adds something valuable to the collection as a whole. This is the mindset that makes for a lived-in, personalised home, rather than just a sterile, thoughtless minimalist, emptier one.
Melissa Norberg, in How to Have Less Stuff, touches on the psychology behind our attachment to things. She agrees that possessions often carry emotional weight, representing past selves, aspirations, or anxieties about the future. If you’ve ever held onto a stack of unread magazines (hello my pile of the stunning Road Rat), convinced that one day you’ll work through them, you know the feeling. But as Adamson reminds us, keeping something present in your awareness doesn’t mean keeping it physically, it means keeping it alive in your mental space.
The Digital Declutter: A Different Kind of Clutter
Of course, physical clutter is just one part of the problem. If my wardrobe has been whittled down to a sharp, functional selection, my Mac is the opposite: a sprawling archive of files, downloads, half-finished projects and forgotten PDFs, all strewn across the digital ether.
Here, though, the challenge isn’t one of tripping over stuff, which is why Stacey never gets involved, it’s the sheer complexity of filtering through it all and making the right judgments. Does it even matter, when storage is effectively infinite? Unlike a teetering stack of books or an overstuffed wardrobe, a bloated hard drive won’t physically intrude on my space. But the real problem in the digital world isn’t just what to delete, it’s what to retrieve, and how to retrieve it when I actually need it.
My Google inbox, for example, is a graveyard of correspondence stretching back over 20 years. And yet, every so often, a search dredges up an email that provides some vital context, a forgotten thread of a past conversation suddenly relevant again. Last week I called up the hotel I stayed at in Stockholm in 2016 for a friend of mine. The digital hoarder in me justifies keeping everything, because what if? But what if the problem isn’t too much data, but too little clarity? What if I’ve reached the point where I don’t even know what I have?
The real digital tidy-up isn’t about mass deletion, but smarter organisation. Tagging instead of mindless foldering. Search over structure. Curating a system where the past is accessible, but not overwhelming. After all, what use is owning less if I can’t actually find what matters? It goes without saying almost that AI and machine learning will be game-changing here.
Conclusion: The Art of Living With Less
This is why I now own fewer clothes than I ever have. It is why I keep only the books I truly covet. It is why my kitchen is free of pointless single-use utensils that promise efficiency but deliver only clutter. Living with less is a conscious act, not a sacrifice. It is an escape from the tyranny of choice, the stress of mess, and the dull headache of ownership.
Marie Kondo asked us if our things ‘spark joy’. I think a better question is: Does this deserve space in my life? And if the answer is no, we must learn to let it go.
Let us stop hoarding for the past, or stockpiling for an imagined future. Let us live in the space we have, unburdened. The art of owning less is, in the end, the art of living more.
AI disclosure:This piece was written by me, but I used AI to help refine the copy, generate the image, and nudge the tone into shape. Think of it as a sub-editor with better memory and no ego.
I’ve been on a career break since November. For the first time in years, I’ve moved at the same speed as my own community. I’ve dropped off at Scouts and nursery, sat in waiting rooms for doctors and dentists, queued at the post office. I’ve watched the builders’ vans come and go, the Micras pull up with cleaners, the conversations in cafés and allotments and playgroups unfold in a hundred different tongues and tempos. And yes, I’ve got older. My parents are reflecting. And I’ve started to reflect too.
It starts with something you didn’t realise you’d miss. A sandwich from my old Fitzrovia café favourite, The Daley Bread, warm, under a fiver. The musty tang of a church hall where the windows rarely get opened. A pub that had been quietly open for 140 years, now covered in armoured window shutters and graffiti, but still with the chalkboard ‘What’s On’ by the front door, clinging on like it remembers something.
None of these moments ever asked to be remembered. That’s why they lasted.
When Queen Elizabeth II died, something snapped. Not just a reign, but a rhythm. Not of empire or deference, but of expectation, that the fabric of everyday life, the England of hedges and hymn books and heat-damaged laminated menus on brittle café tables, would hold. That continuity, once taken for granted, would continue.
Now, I’m not sure it has.
At the end of winter, I felt it most clearly in the waiting room of Teddington Memorial Hospital. A red-brick Edwardian building with high ceilings and cloudy glass, whose entrance still hums with a kind of institutional memory. But the waiting room felt… unfamiliar. Around me, a few families who might have stepped out of my childhood. And many more who hadn’t. Different languages, cadences, faiths, mannerisms. No hostility. Just a disconnection. Like arriving late to a meeting and realising everyone else has a different perspective.
And yet, a month or so later I sat in my old school hall at BGS surrounded by seventy mostly grey-haired Old Boys in suits and sang Auld Lang Syne, said grace, and reminisced about our headmaster’s pipe smoke, the tuck shop, and flinging cheese triangles at the walls. Despite our best intentions, I doubt this traditional dinner will be remotely the same in ten years’ time.
That isn’t about race, or even nationality. It’s about rhythm. What felt legible once, now feels opaque. I know that what felt predictable to me may have felt excluding or limited to others. But predictability, even flawed, creates cultural ballast.
I grew up in Wormshill and went to school in Rodmersham, a Kentish village with fewer than 40 pupils. The building was Victorian, the sort that smelt faintly of floor polish and instant, milky coffee. It had a scullery where knees would be patched and cabbage boiled. Thursday nights meant karate club in an old church in Sittingbourne; Sundays were Sunday school. Tuesdays were cubs at the village hall. At camps, we drank weak squash and sang around the fire with an eccentric leader belting out “Ging Gang Gooley”. We had birthday parties at the Beefeater. You got a balloon and a home-made cake and it was all unremarkable. It was meant to be. That was the point.
The pub on the high street smelled of cigarettes and damp bar towels when you walked past on a Saturday morning aged eight. It was still there with the same name when you went in at sixteen. Still there when you came back from uni at twenty-one.
Now, nothing sticks. Even that sandwich shop I loved in the 2010s, The Daley Bread in Fitzrovia, staffed by a lovely working-class London couple, is long gone. Probably turned into something pop-up and forgettable. I don’t so much miss the sandwich. I miss the assumption that it would be there tomorrow.
We’ve replaced endurance with churn. A coffee shop lasts two years if it’s lucky. Pubs close, reopen as “The Lemongrass Thai”, then vanish. Housing estates arrive with names that pretend something was saved, The Pines, Mill Way, The Courtyard. Everything designed to sound like memory without having any.
Some of the erasures feel personal. A genial old neighbour in a 1930s local authority house who clipped his borders with quiet pride and watered the pavement in summer won’t be replaced. There are almshouses in Thames Ditton still holding a kind of timewarp grace – wind chimes, bird feeders, Zimmer frames at the door. But these are remnants, not structures. Continuity lives there, but only in hospice.
It’s why I comment frequently on planning applications now. Not because I think nothing should change. But because the way, and velocity, with which things change feels so incurious. The Café Rouge in Esher (formerly the Orleans Arms) will inevitably be demolished and replaced with another brushed-steel block with clip-on balconies and a vape shop at the bottom. The building was tired, of course it was, ‘nothing special’, unless you happened to have met your spouse there, or cried into a pint after the races at Sandown, or, as I recall, sat with Jo and picked over a difficult argument. Soon its memory will be preserved only in the awkward bend of the pavement.
Polyapes Scout Camp, still rich with woodsmoke and wild scrub, is next. Hemmed in by housing developments that promise a “landscape-led vision” and end with a private driveway named after a tree that never grew there.
Even when reuse is done well, it’s never quite secure. The gym I (should) go to in Long Ditton occupies an old waterworks. You can still feel the ghosts of its past—the workers crossing the cobbles (still visible on the pavement entrance) with rolled-up sleeves. But places like this feel like a reprieve, not a precedent.
Some say it was always thus. That even in 1982, people mourned the loss of the corner shop. Maybe. But they mourned loss. We’re mourning speed. Things didn’t use to disappear before you’d had a chance to learn the barista’s name. A shop might close. But it didn’t become a poke bowl kiosk, then a dog-groomer, then a boarded-up shell all in one electoral cycle.
We don’t inherit places anymore. We iterate them.
Even our rituals have thinned. Colleagues don’t go to the pub after work; they go to the gym. They don’t marry in church with tailcoats and hymns; they book a morning at the registry office, then host a party at a hotel. No criticism. But it means that when the pub closes, or the Scout hut is converted into flats, nothing stands in its place. The cultural function simply vanishes.
Even COVID didn’t give us a unifying story when we thought it would be our 39–45. It could have bound us. It didn’t. We emerged resentful, atomised, and uncommemorated. There are no statues. No ceremonies. Just a sense that it happened, we handled it badly, the pan-banging was cringeworthy, and we’d all rather not mention it. A shared trauma, now quietly redacted.
And yes, there’s the harder part to say. The part you can’t raise without sounding like a closed curtain twitching. I walk through Sittingbourne, Surbiton, or Kingston, or Esher and I don’t recognise what I hear. The shouting of Eastern European builders. The clipped conversations of families I don’t know how to read and who aren’t there for post-office queue small talk. Not hostile. Not impolite. But sharp-edged. Voices I can’t quite tune into—not the words, but the mood beneath them. What feels like cultural drift to me may well feel like arrival to someone else. But it’s the lack of overlap I notice most.
I’ve worked with plenty of diverse people who are diligent and decent and warm. But I still feel unmoored. Because the culture I knew wasn’t defined by skin or origin, it was defined by shared grammar. The knowledge they grew up listening to the same music, eating the same crisps, watching the same Saturday night TV and playing the same games in the park. A tempo. A way of being in public. That’s gone.
And with it, something unspoken: the idea that England could remember itself.
And anyway, it’s not just the voices, it’s the way people move through the world. The delivery riders who weave between cars in summer heat, knees flapping under handlebar skirts, bundled in puffer jackets like it’s February. The SUV parents who inch through the school run with all the urgency of an urban tank convoy, it boils my piss that not one of them waves a bloody thank-you when you let them through. And the vape-sucking driver in the pickup, lunging up onto the kerb to grab six cans of Monster from the Co-Op, to hell with the sight-lines, the pushchair, or the old fella on his walking frame.
There are still traces. Churches with rusted gates and ageing choirs. Pubs with Monday quiz nights and hand pumps. Allotments. Scout groups. Carol services. Street parties with bunting and that weak squash. But they feel more like re-enactments than institutions. More like memory theatre than civic rhythm.
We thought we’d miss the buildings. It turns out we miss the punctuation. The pauses, the greetings, the knowing what came next. When that goes, it’s not just a different place, it’s no place at all.
If your pub still has a snug, go. If the Scout group needs a hand, turn up. If your church still lights candles, show your face. Wave a thank-you if the car waits for you in a gap. If there’s a planning notice on the thing you loved, write the objection. Even if it’s ignored.
Because otherwise, the last trace of it all will be a street name. Something vaguely commemorative. Almshouse Mews. The Glebe. The Old Vicarage Place.
John Gibbard 